Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the shift in paradigms in visual media depicting kabuki theatre by examining woodblock prints and photos of Ichikawa Sadanji II that also reflect the actor’s drifting between modern Western and traditional Eastern trends on stage during the first decades of the 20th century.

Paper long abstract:

This paper deals with the shift in paradigms in visual media depicting kabuki theatre as a local narration embedded in the global development of theatre photography. The shift from woodblock print to photography and their mutual influence reflect developments in kabuki against a modernizing and westernizing society as a result of the Meiji restauration. These changes will be traced by examining woodblock prints and photos of Ichikawa Sadanji II, an actor drifting between modern Western and traditional Eastern trends on stage during the first decades of the 20th century.

The actor had not only been keen on modernizing kabuki production structures but also its contents by staging newly written shin kabuki as well as Shakespeare plays in his Meijiza in 1908. He also engaged himself in the revival of kabuki classics of the Kabuki jūhachiban (Eighteen Best Kabuki Plays) compilated during the Edo period, like Kenuki (Tweezers) in 1909, and played the title role John Gabriel Borkman in the first performance by the Jiyū Gekijō company that experimented in adapting western drama to the Japanese stage.

Focusing on the pictorial visualization of Sadanji II starring in experimental and innovative plays in shin kabuki, traditional aragoto as well as in western plays by Ibsen and others, the paper elucidates the potential of these material to trace changes in theatre as well as to show the relationship between the global effect and the local result of theatre photography. Furthermore, it shows the mutual influence of theatre photography and actors prints, especially in the new prints (shin hanga) in terms of rendering the subjects, their framing and perspective and concludes that iconic prints of star actors lived on well into the 1920s alongside star photography, when traditional ukiyoe had long been declared dead, a fact that once again illustrates the close connection between theatre and woodblock prints reflecting the kabuki trends of its time.