Kazuo Ohno's World


Book Description

Photographs and words illuminate Butoh dance.




Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo


Book Description

Part of the "Routledge Performance Practitioners" series, this book deals with the contribution of two of modern theatre's most charismatic innovators. Including a glossary of English and Japanese terms, it presents an account of the founding of Japanese butoh through the partnership of Hijikata and Ohno.




The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance


Book Description

The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance provides a comprehensive introduction to and analysis of the global art form butoh. Originating in Japan in the 1960s, butoh was a major innovation in twentieth century dance and performance, and it continues to shape-shift around the world. Taking inspiration from the Japanese avant-garde, Surrealism, Happenings, and authors such as Genet and Artaud, its influence can be seen throughout contemporary performing arts, music, and visual art practices. This Companion places the form in historical context, documents its development in Japan and its spread around the world, and brings together the theory and the practice of this compelling dance. The interdisciplinarity evident in the volume reflects the depth and the breadth of butoh, and the editors bring specially commissioned essays by leading scholars and dancers together with translations of important early texts.




Flowers Cracking Concrete


Book Description

Winner of the Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research (2018) Flowers Cracking Concrete is the first in-depth study of the forty-year career of Eiko & Koma—two artists from Japan who have lived and worked in New York City since the mid-1970s, establishing themselves as innovative and influential modern and postmodern dancers. They continue to choreograph, perform, and give workshops across the United States and around the world. Rosemary Candelario argues that what is remarkable about Eiko & Koma's dances is not what they signify but rather what they do in the world. Each chapter of the book is a close reading of a specific dance that reveals a choreographic theme or concern. Drawing on interviews, live performance, videos, and reviews, Candelario demonstrates how ideas have kinesthetically and choreographically cycled through Eiko & Koma's body of work, creating dances deeply engaged with the wider world through an active process of mourning, transforming, and connecting. Hardcover is un-jacketed.




Forest of Eyes


Book Description

One of Japan’s most important modern poets, Tada Chimako (1930–2003) gained prominence in her native country for her sensual, frequently surreal poetry and fantastic imagery. Although Tada’s writing is an essential part of postwar Japanese poetry, her use of themes and motifs from European, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean history, mythology, and literature, as well as her sensitive explorations of women’s inner lives make her very much a poet of the world. Forest of Eyes offers English-language readers their first opportunity to read a wide selection from Tada’s extraordinary oeuvre, including nontraditional free verse, poems in the traditional forms of tanka and haiku, and prose poems. Translator Jeffrey Angles introduces this collection with an incisive essay that situates Tada as a poet, explores her unique style, and analyzes her contribution to the representation of women in postwar Japanese literature.




Tanaka Kinuyo


Book Description

Explores the experiences spectators have when they watch a film collectively in a cinema.




The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Wellbeing


Book Description

In recent years, a growth in dance and wellbeing scholarship has resulted in new ways of thinking that place the body, movement, and dance in a central place with renewed significance for wellbeing. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Wellbeing examines dance and related movement practices fromthe perspectives of neuroscience and health, community and education, and psychology and sociology to contribute towards an understanding of wellbeing, offer new insights into existing practices, and create a space where sufficient exchange is enabled. The handbook's research components includequantitative, qualitative, and arts-based research, covering diverse discourses, methodologies, and perspectives that add to the development of a complete picture of the topic. Throughout the handbook's wide-ranging chapters, the objective observations, felt experiences, and artistic explorations ofpractitioners interact with and are printed alongside academic chapters to establish an egalitarian and impactful exchange of ideas.




Mishima


Book Description

On November 25, 1970, Japan's most renowned postwar novelist, Yukio Mishima, stunned the world by committing ritual suicide. Here, Marguerite Yourcenar, a brilliant reader of Mishima and a scholar with an eye for the cultural roles of fiction, unravels the author's life and politics: his affection for Western culture, his family and his homosexuality, his brilliant writings, and his carefully premeditated death.




Dramaturgies of Interweaving


Book Description

Dramaturgies of Interweaving explores present-day dramaturgies that interweave performance cultures in the fields of theater, performance, dance, and other arts. Merging strategies of audience engagement originating in different cultures, dramaturgies of interweaving are creative methods of theater and art-making that seek to address audiences across cultures, making them uniquely suitable for shaping people’s experiences of our entangled world. Presenting in-depth case studies from across the globe, spanning Australia, China, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, the US, and the UK, this book investigates how dramaturgies of interweaving are conceived, applied, and received today. Featuring critical analyses by scholars—as well as workshop reports and artworks by renowned artists—this book examines dramaturgies of interweaving from multiple locations and perspectives, thus revealing their distinct complexities and immense potential. Ideal for scholars, students, and practitioners of theater, performance, dramaturgy, and devising, Dramaturgies of Interweaving opens up an innovative perspective on today’s breathtaking plurality of dramaturgical practices of interweaving in theater, performance, dance, and other arts, such as curation and landscape design.




Butoh


Book Description

"Both a refraction of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a protest against Western values, butoh is a form of Japanese dance theater that emerged in the aftermath of World War II. Sondra Fraleigh chronicles the growth of this provocative art form from its midcentury founding under a sign of darkness to its assimilation in the twenty-first century as a poignant performance medium with philosophical and political implications. Employing intellectual and aesthetic perspectives to reveal the origins, major figures, and international development of the dance, Fraleigh documents the range and variety of butoh artists around the world with first-hand knowledge of butoh performances from 1973 to 2008. Her definitions of butoh's morphology, alchemy, and philosophy set a theoretical framework for poetic and engaging articulations of twenty butoh performances in Japan, Europe, India, and the West. With a blend of scholarly research and direct experience, she also signifies the unfinished nature of butoh and emphasizes its capacity to effect spiritual transformation and bridge cultural differences."--Publisher.