Angura

Angura has been called the most effective fusion of art and politics from Japan’s turbulent years of social protest in the 1960s and 1970s. Angura is the Japanese contraction for the term ‘andaaguraundo engeki,’ or ‘underground theatre.’ Although Japan borrowed the term ‘underground’ from the counterculture movement in the U.S. and England in the 1960s and applied the word to many different aspects of evolving youth culture, the contraction angura refers only to the theatre form. Some scholars conflate ‘angura’ with ‘shōgekijō-undō’ (‘the little theatre movement’), while others argue the two are separate movements within the same stream of counterculture theatre beginning in 1960. The aesthetic genesis of angura was the growing dissatisfaction of Japan’s first post-WWII generation with shingeki. The generation that came of age in the late 1950s and 1960s was hungry for alternate forms of theatrical expression. In the political arena, that same generation was mobilized by opposition to renewals of the Japan/U.S. Security Treaty in 1960 and 1970. Although angura gave highly effective artistic voice to the politics opposing treaty renewal, the fusion of art and politics in angura covers a wide spectrum that includes apolitical authors and directors such as Betsuyaku Minoru (b. 1937) and Terayama Shūji (1935–83). Others at the heart of the angura phenomenon are Kara Jūrō (b. 1940), Suzuki Tadashi (b. 1939), Ōta Shōgo (1939–2007), and Satoh Makoto (b. 1943).

Alluring Ambiguity: Gender and Cultural Politics in Modern Japanese Performance

In contrast to most studies of cultural nationalism, which tend to focus on literary style, narrative devices, or the static visual arts, in this article Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei analyzes the ways that Japanese actors deploy physical and vocal techniques in portraying gender and ethnic ambiguity. Expanding on her recent work on actor-dancer Itō Michio (1893–1961), she uses the concept of J-centrism (Japancentrism) to demonstrate how modern Japanese performing bodies (in both traditional and contemporary genres) imply political meaning – her title being a riff on Susan Sontag's famous essay ‘Fascinating Fascism’. While not suggesting that the artists under consideration promulgate fascism, Sorgenfrei maintains that the Japanese aesthetic preference for gender and ethnic ambiguity fuels the politics of Japanese cultural nationalism, even when the performers or directors adamantly disavow rightist, nationalistic ideologies. Through a focus on analysis of selected performances by Bando Tamasaburō and theoretical writings by Suzuki Tadashi, Sorgenfrei suggests that the performance of ambiguity by a single actor implies the ‘universality’ and cultural superiority of the Japanese body. Professor Emerita of Theatre at UCLA, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is a specialist in Japanese theatre and intercultural performance, and was recently a Research Fellow at the International Research Institute in Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Free University, Berlin, where she researched the work of Japanese dancer Itō Michio. She is the author of Unspeakable Acts: the Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan (University of Hawaii, 2005) and co-author of Theatre Histories: an Introduction (Routledge, third edition 2015).

The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi

Suzuki Tadashi is arguably Japan's best known and most influential contemporary director, and this long-awaited comprehensive study presents a complete picture of his work to date. An eleven-page detailed production chronology at the beginning of the book lists everything from Suzuki's first production at the Waseda Free Stage (Jiyū Butai) Drama Society in 1959, through his opera Vision of Lear for the Third International Theatre Olympics in Moscow in 2001. This who-what-when-where chronological reference allows one to map quickly the arc of Suzuki's career, from his work as a director in Japan and his rise to international recognition in the 1970s, through his roles as International Festival coordinator and actor trainer, to his artistic directorships at the Acting Company Mito (ACM) and later Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) in the 1990s.