Paper given online at the International Federation for Theatre Research Conference, Galway, July 16 2021. Abstract Kyoto’s annual international performing arts festival, Kyoto Experiment (KEX), marked its tenth anniversary in October 2019 and with it the end of a decade-long run for festival founder and director Yusuke Hashimoto. The 2020 edition of the festival, led…
Category: Conference Papers
Learning to linger: on memory & migration in Eiko Otake’s movement art
Paper given at the Contemporary Japanese Theatre Workshop, Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien, in Tokyo, July 27, 2019. This paper is part of a larger research project, co-conducted with Mika Eglinton, called “Japanese Women on the Move: Migration, Memory and Gender in Contemporary Performance.” The project draws on in-depth interviews with internationally renowned practitioners from Japan…
Learner autonomy and applied theatre in the ESL classroom
Paper given at the ILA Conference on Learner Autonomy at Konan Women’s University, September 5th — September 8th, 2018. Abstract In their analysis of autonomy in the educational philosophy of Paulo Freire, Nicolaides and Fernandes (2008) outline two broad strands in the theory and practice of learner autonomy in education. The first follows Henri Holec’s…
Dwelling on the Documentary Body in Takuya Murakawa’s “Independent Living”
Paper given at the International Federation for Theatre Research Conference (IFTR) in Belgrade, July 12, 2018, as part of the Choreography and Corporeality Working Group. The premise behind Takuya Murakawa’s “Independent Living” 2017, is deceptively simple. An audience member is invited to play the role of a patient. S/he is instructed to lie in silence…
Mourning in, as and for the Theatre: the case of Ishinha’s Amahara
Paper given at the 15th International European Association of Japanese Studies Conference, at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal. 31 August 2017. Abstract Performing on deserted beaches, and in villages, temples, dockland warehouses and urban railyards, few theatre companies have traversed the range of landscapes and settings that inspired the Osaka-based Ishinha. Yet though journeys…
Is all the World Still a Stage? Shakespeare and ESL in Higher Education in Japan
Roundtable panel discussion, part of the Japanese Society for Theatre Research Conference held at Kyoto Sangyo University, December 3-4 2016. Panel rationale Student-led productions of Shakespeare were a common feature in post-war Japanese universities. Shakespeare was still widely seen as the centre of the western literary canon, and English literature departments took pride in…
In Search of Direction: Mapping, Materiality and Theatre Ecology in Rural Japan
Paper given at the IFTR 2016 Conference at the University of Stockholm, Sweden. Abstract For the past forty-five years, Yukichi Matsumoto and the Osaka-based Ishinha theatre company have been creating site-specific performances that explore the intersection of urban and rural life in Japan. The company’s most recent work, “Twilight” (2015), was devised in Soni Village,…
Debris from the ‘dispersal zone’: digital documents, diegesis and the documentary theatre
An analysis of digital document formations in the wake of the August 2011 riots in London through a reading of the Tricycle Theatre’s verbatim play, The Riots.
Andrew Eglinton 