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- Englisch (3) (entfernen)
Schlagworte
- Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1)
- Japan (1)
- Japanology (1)
- Liminalität (1)
- Lyrik (1)
- Modernity (1)
- Muromachi (1)
- Revue (1)
- Revuetheater (1)
- Sasaki Dōyo (1)
This thesis discusses revue as a significantly inter-cultural genre in the history of global theatre. During the ‘modernisation’ period in Europe, America and Japan, most major urban cities experienced a boom in revue venues and performances. Few studies about revue have yet been done in theatre studies or in urban cultural studies. My thesis will attempt to reevaluate and redefine revue as a highly intercultural theatre genre by using the concept of liminality. In other words, the aim is to examine revue as a genre built on ‘modern composition of betweenness’, bridging seemingly opposing elements, such as the foreign and the domestic, the classic and the innovative, the traditional and the modern, the professional and the amateur, high and low culture, and the feminine and the masculine. The goal is to regard revue as a liminal genre constructed amidst the negotiations between these binaries, existing in a state of constant flux.
The purpose of this approach is to capture revue as a transitory phenomena in five dimensions: conceptual, spatial, temporal, categorical and physical. Over the course of six chapters, this
inter-disciplinary discussion will reveal the reasons why and the ways by which revue came to establish its prominent position in the Japanese theatre industry. The whole structure is also an attempt to provide plausible ways to apply sociological considerations to theatre studies.
This dissertation details how Zeami (ca. 1363 - ca.1443) understood his adoption of the heavenly woman dance within the historical conditions of the Muromachi period. He adopted the dance based on performances by the Ōmi troupe player Inuō in order to expand his own troupe’s repertoire to include a divinely powerful, feminine character. In the first chapter, I show how Zeami, informed by his success as a sexualized child in the service of the political elite (chigo), understood the relationship between performer and audience in gendered terms. In his treatises, he describes how a player must create a complementary relationship between patron and performer (feminine/masculine or yin/yang) that escalates to an ecstasy of successful communication between the two poles, resembling sexual union. Next, I look at how Zeami perceived Inuō’s relationships with patrons, the daimyo Sasaki Dōyo in chapter two and shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu in chapter three. Inuō was influenced by Dōyo’s masculine penchant for powerful, awe-inspiring art, but Zeami also recognized that Inuō was able to complement Dōyo’s masculinity with feminine elegance (kakari and yūgen). In his relationship with Yoshimitsu, Inuō used the performance of subversion, both in his public persona and in the aesthetic of his performances, to maintain a rebellious reputation appropriate within the climate of conflict among the martial elite. His play “Aoi no ue” draws on the aristocratic literary tradition of the Genji monogatari, giving Yoshimitsu the role of Prince Genji and confronting him with the consequences of betrayal in the form of a demonic, because jilted, Lady Rokujō. This performance challenged Zeami’s early notion that the extreme masculinity of demons and elegant femininity as exemplified by the aristocracy must be kept separate in character creation. In the fourth chapter, I show how Zeami also combined dominance (masculinity) and submission (femininity) in the corporal capacity of a single player when he adopted the heavenly woman dance. The heavenly woman dance thus complemented not only the masculinity of his male patrons with femininity but also the political power of his patrons with another dominant power, which plays featuring the heavenly woman dance label divine rather than masculine.
In her poems, Tawada constructs liminal speaking subjects – voices from the in-between – which disrupt entrenched binary thought processes. Synthesising relevant concepts from theories of such diverse fields as lyricology, performance studies, border studies, cultural and postcolonial studies, I develop ‘voice’ and ‘in-between space’ as the frameworks to approach Tawada’s multifaceted poetic output, from which I have chosen 29 poems and two verse novels for analysis. Based on the body speaking/writing, sensuality is central to Tawada’s use of voice, whereas the in-between space of cultures and languages serves as the basis for the liminal ‘exophonic’ voices in her work. In the context of cultural alterity, Tawada focuses on the function of language, both its effect on the body and its role in subject construction, while her feminist poetry follows the general development of feminist academia from emancipation to embodiment to queer representation. Her response to and transformation of écriture féminine in her verse novels transcends the concept of the body as the basis of identity, moving to literary and linguistic, plural self-construction instead. While few poems are overtly political, the speaker’s personal and contextual involvement in issues of social conflict reveal the poems’ potential to speak of, and to, the multiply identified citizens of a globalised world, who constantly negotiate physical as well as psychological borders.