Paper short abstract:

I propose to examine female magician Shōkyokusai Tenkatsu's career and the importance of the travelling magic show to the formation of mass culture in early 20th century Japan.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the unique and specific contribution of travelling magic shows to the formation of mass culture in early 20th century Japan. The transnational performance history of 'the goddess of magic' Shōkyokusai Tenkatsu (1886-1944) speaks to the dynamic circulation of performers and skills within Japan and as far as America and Europe. Her electric presence onstage turned Tenkatsu into an idol and media sensation, and her multimedia programs introduced spectators to magic, music, and variety acts that were as innovative as they were modern. Finally, Tenkatsu's important relationship to film (such as Taki no shiraito, 1933) and to literature (from Izumi Kyoka to Mishima Yukio) suggest some of the ways in which she has been commemorated in Japan. Tenkatsu's visionary performances, thus, can be contextualized among the diverse and active contributions by women across Japan and Asia as innovators of cross-cultural practice, as negotiators of competing national norms, and as popularizers of modern attractions in the twentieth century.

Paper short abstract:

大阪を拠点に1971年から2017年まで活動した劇団「維新派」の仕事を、人物像のアイデンティティの変化に焦点をあてて考察する。同団は1990年代以降、移民背景を持つ住人の多い地域の特性を、パフォーマンスで繰り返し取り上げてきた。海外ツアーを経た後の「20世紀三部作」には、移民の主人公の越境と変容、統語法からの解放されたコロスのシュプレヒコールと舞踏に、共同体の同一性を支える言語と行為の統合性を解体する戦略が析出される。三部作に前後する変化を作品の間テクスト性に照らして読むことで、維新派の探求を明らかにし、国家と地域の間で文化の資源化が促がされる今日、その仕事をどう伝えてゆくか問題を提起したい。

Paper long abstract:

This paper studies the change in character's identities explored by the local and global performance company Ishinha and its director Yukichi Matsumoto. Starting with body and action oriented communal art experiment alongside Butoh and Gutai, Ishinha had been active from 1971 to 2017 consistently in Osaka and established its unique style and a core of local underground scene over decades. Ishinha is best known with its site-specific open-air theater, built and scrapped every year since the 1990s only for one-month performances, with transregional participation of avant-garde artists and supporters beyond generations.

This study focuses on transformation of characters which is considered to be correlated with several changes in organization of the company and its international tour or travel and encountering inspiring site for each performance. Since the 1990s they had struggled with multi-layered localities of Osaka which had developed into a modern metropole in rivalry with the Capital City with highly populated immigrants from Okinawa and the Korean Peninsula. Among others, the trilogy called "20th-century traveling with him" showed some clear strategies of deconstructing identities coined by social categories: the integrity of language and acting body which support identities of the imagined community is alienated through the transgression of borders by immigrant protagonists and the decomposition of speaking song and choreographic movements by chorus liberated from the syntax.

By focusing on the changes in character's identities before and after the trilogy, and interpreting their construction and deconstruction in the light of the intertextuality of the work, I would like to outline the range of quest of Ishinha, which has been crossing every border on the earth and suggesting travel beyond humanities. In the end, I would like to raise the question of how their work can be researched, reenacted and transmitted for the next generation in the time where the transient and ephemeral performance arts are also expected to serve as cultural assets for national and regional branding economies.