America's Japan and Japan's Performing Arts

America's Japan and Japan's Performing Arts
Author: Barbara Thornbury
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0472029282

America’s Japan and Japan’s Performing Arts studies the images and myths that have shaped the reception of Japan-related theater, music, and dance in the United States since the 1950s. Soon after World War II, visits by Japanese performing artists to the United States emerged as a significant category of American cultural-exchange initiatives aimed at helping establish and build friendly ties with Japan. Barbara E. Thornbury explores how “Japan” and “Japanese culture” have been constructed, reconstructed, and transformed in response to the hundreds of productions that have taken place over the past sixty years in New York, the main entry point and defining cultural nexus in the United States for the global touring market in the performing arts. The author’s transdisciplinary approach makes the book appealing to those in the performing arts studies, Japanese studies, and cultural studies.

How to Reach Japan by Subway

How to Reach Japan by Subway
Author: Meghan Warner Mettler
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2018-06
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 149620686X

Japan's official surrender to the United States in 1945 brought to an end one of the most bitter and brutal military conflicts of the twentieth century. U.S. government officials then faced the task of transforming Japan from enemy to ally, not only in top-level diplomatic relations but also in the minds of the American public. Only ten years after World War II, this transformation became a success as middle-class American consumers across the country were embracing Japanese architecture, films, hobbies, philosophy, and religion. Cultural institutions on both sides of the Pacific along with American tastemakers promoted a new image of Japan in keeping with State Department goals. Focusing on traditions instead of modern realities, Americans came to view Japan as a nation that was sophisticated and beautiful yet locked harmlessly in a timeless "Oriental" past. What ultimately led many Americans to embrace Japanese culture was a desire to appear affluent and properly "tasteful" in the status-conscious suburbs of the 1950s. In How to Reach Japan by Subway, Meghan Warner Mettler studies the shibui phenomenon, in which middle-class American consumers embraced Japanese culture while still exoticizing this new aesthetic. By examining shibui through the popularity of samurai movies, ikebana flower arrangement, bonsai cultivation, home and garden design, and Zen Buddhism, Mettler provides a new context and perspective for understanding how Americans encountered a foreign nation in their everyday lives.

Flowers Cracking Concrete

Flowers Cracking Concrete
Author: Rosemary Candelario
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2016-07-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0819576492

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.

Who's Who in Research: Performing Arts

Who's Who in Research: Performing Arts
Author: Intellect Books
Publisher: Intellect Books
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2013-01-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1783201584

Increasingly, academic communities transcend national boundaries. “Collaboration between researchers across space is clearly increasing, as well as being increasingly sought after,” noted the online magazine Inside Higher Ed in a recent article about research in the social sciences and humanities. Even for those scholars who don’t work directly with international colleagues, staying up-to-date and relevant requires keeping up with international currents of thought in one’s field. But when one’s colleagues span the globe, it’s not always easy to keep track of who’s who—or what kind of research they’re conducting. That’s where Intellect’s new series comes in. A set of worldwide guides to leading academics—and their work—across the arts and humanities, Who’s Who in Research features comprehensive profiles of scholars in the areas of cultural studies, film studies, media studies, performing arts, and visual arts. Who's Who in Research: Performing Arts includes concise yet detailed listings include each academic’s name, institution, biography, and current research interests, as well as bibliographic information and a list of articles published in Intellect journals. The volumes in the Who’s Who in Research series will be updated each year, providing the most current information on the foremost thinkers in academia and making them an invaluable resource for scholars, hiring committees, academic libraries, and would-be collaborators across the arts and humanities.

Extreme Exoticism

Extreme Exoticism
Author: W. Anthony Sheppard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 641
Release: 2019-09-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190072725

To what extent can music be employed to shape one culture's understanding of another? In the American imagination, Japan has represented the "most alien" nation for over 150 years. This perceived difference has inspired fantasies--of both desire and repulsion--through which Japanese culture has profoundly impacted the arts and industry of the U.S. While the influence of Japan on American and European painting, architecture, design, theater, and literature has been celebrated in numerous books and exhibitions, the role of music has been virtually ignored until now. W. Anthony Sheppard's Extreme Exoticism offers a detailed documentation and wide-ranging investigation of music's role in shaping American perceptions of the Japanese, the influence of Japanese music on American composers, and the place of Japanese Americans in American musical life. Presenting numerous American encounters with and representations of Japanese music and Japan, this book reveals how music functions in exotic representation across a variety of genres and media, and how Japanese music has at various times served as a sign of modernist experimentation, a sounding board for defining American music, and a tool for reshaping conceptions of race and gender. From the Tin Pan Alley songs of the Russo-Japanese war period to Weezer's Pinkerton album, music has continued to inscribe Japan as the land of extreme exoticism.

Professor Risley and the Imperial Japanese Troupe

Professor Risley and the Imperial Japanese Troupe
Author: Frederik L. Schodt
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2012-12-04
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1611720095

Looks at Professor Risley's introduction of the Western-style circus to Japan in 1864 and his subsequent tours of the country with the Imperial Japanese Troupe of acrobats, an encounter that opened both cultures to one another.

The Folk Performing Arts

The Folk Performing Arts
Author: Barbara E. Thornbury
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 1997-03-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438422083

CHOICE 1997 Outstanding Academic Books This is the first full-length study in English of Japan's folk performing arts covering such topics as the different categories of presentations, public policies affecting the folk performing arts, performance events within and without communities, and the folk performing arts in literature. Throughout, it addresses issues concerning the survival and preservation of traditional culture in contemporary Japan. Once largely unknown outside of their local community settings, Japan's folk performing arts have today captured universal attention. In Japan, almost every municipality is home to one or more of the diverse dramatic, dance, narrative, and musical presentations that make up the folk performing arts. They can be seen at events that range from long-established festivals to newly created folk-culture and tourist programs. Since the 1920s, a growing body of work by folklorists, theater historians, and other academic specialists, together with literary treatment by well-known authors, brought the folk performing arts into the national cultural spotlight. The postwar Cultural Properties Protection Law conferred on them the status of legally designated cultural assets.

Asian American Culture [2 volumes]

Asian American Culture [2 volumes]
Author: Lan Dong
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 862
Release: 2016-03-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1440829217

Providing comprehensive coverage of a variety of Asian American cultural forms, including folk tradition, literature, religion, education, politics, sports, and popular culture, this two-volume work is an ideal resource for students and general readers that reveals the historical, regional, and ethnic diversity within specific traditions. An invaluable reference for school and public libraries as well as academic libraries at colleges and universities, this two-volume encyclopedia provides comprehensive coverage of a variety of Asian American cultural forms that enables readers to understand the history, complexity, and contemporary practices in Asian American culture. The contributed entries address the diversity of a group comprising people with geographically discrete origins in the Far East, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, identifying the rich variations across the category of Asian American culture that are key to understanding specific cultural expressions while also pointing out some commonalities. Entries are organized alphabetically and cover topics in the arts; education and politics; family and community; gender and sexuality; history and immigration; holidays, festivals, and folk tradition; literature and culture; media, sports, and popular culture; and religion, belief, and spirituality. Entries also broadly cover Asian American origins and history, regional practices and traditions, contemporary culture, and art and other forms of shared expression. Accompanying sidebars throughout serve to highlight key individuals, major events, and significant artifacts and allow readers to better appreciate the Asian American experience.

Fantasies of Ito Michio

Fantasies of Ito Michio
Author: Tara Rodman
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2024-10-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0472904485

Born in Japan and trained in Germany, dancer and choreographer Ito Michio (1893–1961) achieved prominence in London before moving to the U.S. in 1916 and building a career as an internationally acclaimed artist. During World War II, Ito was interned for two years, and then repatriated to Japan, where he contributed to imperial war efforts by creating propaganda performances and performing revues for the occupying Allied Forces in Tokyo. Throughout, Ito continually invented stories of voyages made, artists befriended, performances seen, and political activities carried out—stories later dismissed as false. Fantasies of Ito Michio argues that these invented stories, unrealized projects, and questionable political affiliations are as fundamental to Ito’s career as his ‘real’ activities, helping us understand how he sustained himself across experiences of racialization, imperialism, war, and internment. Tara Rodman reveals a narrative of Ito’s life that foregrounds the fabricated and overlooked to highlight his involvement with Japanese artists, such as Yamada Kosaku and Ishii Baku, and global modernist movements. Rodman offers “fantasy” as a rubric for understanding how individuals such as Ito sustain themselves in periods of violent disruption and as a scholarly methodology for engaging the past.