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Crucible Bodies

Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the Ne

Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium is a collection of essays covering a wide range of historical and theoretical topics, from Brecht in Japan to ’children’s’ bodies in postmodern Japanese performances, from the notion of beauty in contemporary cultural theory to practical and theoretical readings of more recent intercultural performances, involving not only Japanese but also other Asian theatre practitioners.  It is one of the first full-length studies of Japanese performance culture written in English by a Japanese native.  This work is an important contribution to the developing academic arena of Performance Studies.

224 pages | 25 color plates | © 2009

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
 
Chapter 1
Political Displacements: Towards Historicizing Brecht in Japan, 1932-98
 
Chapter 2
Images of Armageddon: Japan’s 1980s’ Theatre Culture
 
Interlude 1
From ’Beautiful’ to ’Cute’: A Note on Beauty in Modern and Postmodern Japan
 
Chapter 3
Deconstructing ’Japaneseness’: Towards Articulating Locality and Hybridity in Contemporary Japanese Performance
 
Chapter 4
Playing Betwixt and Between: Intercultural Performance in the Age of Globalization
 
Interlude 2
Fictional Body versus Junk Body: Thinking Through the Performing Body in Contemporary Japan, or Why is ancient Greek Drama Still Produced?
 
Chapter 5
Pop, Postmodernism and Junk: Murakami Takashi and ’J’ Theatre
 
Chapter 6
Globality’s Children: The ’Child’s’ Body as a Strategy of Flatness in Performance
 
Interlude 3
Nationalism, Intra-nationalism: Re-imagining the Boundary
 
Chapter 7
Mapping/Zapping ’J’ Theatre at the Moment
 
Chapter 8
Miyazawa Akio After 9/11: Physical Dementia and Undoing History in the ’J’ Locality
 
Epilogue: Interculturalism Revisited After 9/11
 
Bibliography
Index

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