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Avant-Garde Theater

Page history last edited by cdaniels@... 13 years, 6 months ago

What Sort of Environment Gave Rise to the Avant-Garde Theater Scene? 

 

 

Political Unrest in Late 1950's, early 1960's Japan

 

  • The renewal of the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty 
    • Renunciation of the Yoshida Doctrine
    • Relationship of subordinate independence
    • loss of National Sovereignty and political neutrality
  • Failure to block renewal
    • despite massive protests
    • caused eventual dissolution of overt political protest

 

Rise of Artistic Vanguard

 

  • Period of extraordinary freedom
  • Japanese "New Wave" of cinema
  • Buhto dance troups
  • The first truly modern (or even postmodern) Japanese theater or Performance Center

 

 

Economic Rise of the 1960's

 

  • Income doubling plan
  • Aftereffects of Korean War
  • Cold War infusions of cash from US
  • Industrial revolution (of sorts)
  • Caused a labor shortage
    • Plenty of part-time jobs for actors
    • Plenty of discretionary  income for play-goers

 

What Was it About?

 

Alternative Postmodern Theater in Japan

 

  • Reaction to the overregimented, rationalized, and de-eroticized society that had come out of WWII
    • return to the pre-modern
    • reaction to Western influence: Vietnam war, Japan occupation, Cold War
    • U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty
    • Western-style modern theater
  • Alternative Performance Spaces
  • Rejected Representational dramaturgy of the modern tragedy
    • replaced with multidimensional theatricality
  • Reasserted cultural particularity
    • reject universal humanism
    • juxtaposed animistic and grotesque from Japan's past with modern images from the West

 

Shuji Terayama

 

 

  • born in Aomori (1936-1983)
  • Father died in Pacific at the end of the war (1945)
  • Mother moved to Kyushu and "worked" for an American base
  • Dropped out Waseda U. due to illness (nephrotic syndrome) and worked at bars in Shinjuku
  • Wrote many essays stating that horse racing and boxing teach more than school
  • 1967 Formed Tenjo Sajiki (Children of Heaven, The Peanut Gallery)
  • Married and started a strange triangle between his wife and his mother
  • He was more or less apolitical - most of his stances were in favor of rebellion, regardless of the pro- or antagonist
  • He was also extremely contradictory
    • those contradictions were a part of his natural state
      • followers were losers / followers were abandoned by society
      • work was political, yet he was not
      • Post-modern and yet pre-modern
      • Love/Hate relationship with his mother.
  • He started by investigating his own personal memories
    • Mother/Oedipal issues
    • Leaving home
  • But moved outward to investigate the larger connection to society
    • Alternative staging techniques
  • His first success was the radio play Adult Hunting (1960)
    • akin to Orson Welles' War of the Worlds
  • His first play was Blood is Standing Asleep (1961)
  • He also became famous for a series of college lectures and essays more or less encouraging young people to leave home
  • Died on May 4, 1983 from hepto-cirrhosis
  • Very little is written about him in English due to his mother's reluctance to approve projects based on his life

 

 

Why Did it End?

 

  • 1973: beginning of a theater-building boom organized by department stores and other mainstream businesses - coopts the Avant-Garde idea
  • Increasing availability of offset printing helped kill the silk-screened poster boom
  • Terayama's creativity waned in the last years of his life
  • The rise of bloody protest weakens the public taste for being unsettled
    • Japanese Red Army Faction
    • Yukio Mishima's suicide

 

Timeline

 

Year Society Theater Design
1960
  • US-Japan treaty renewed despite massive protests
  • "Income Doubling" plan announced
  • JFK elected president
  • Conference of Modern Theater Artists formed by 48 troupes to protest renewal of treaty
  • World Design Conference held in Tokyo
  • "Good Design" Committee established
1961
  • Yuri Gagarin becomes 1st man to orbit Earth
 Free Stage (nee Waseda Little Theater) founded
  • First poster for the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo
1962
  • Tokyo becomes the first city with a population over 10 million
  • Art Theater Guild established to promote theater and art films
  • Hi Red CEnter perform "happening" on Tokyo commuter train
 1963 JFK Assassinated
  • The Art Theater cinema in Shinjuku presents plays after hours
  • Situation Theater debuts with Sartre's The Respectful Prostitute
 Yomiuri Independent exhibition attempts unsuccessfully to control artistic iconoclasts, leading to the cancellation of the exhibit the following year and weakening centralized control of the art world. 
 1964
  • 'Bullet" train begins operations between Tokyo and Osaka

Sartre refuses the nobel prize
  • Actors' Theater performs modern version of Edo-period play Yotsuya Kaidan
  • West Side Story performed in Tokyo by fifty member American cast and crew
 Art work for Olympics marks pinnacle of success for modernist school of design. 
 1965

US commences bombing of North Vietnam

Soviet cosmonaut walks in space

Ten Thousand demonstrate in Washington against the Vietnam War  

 Situation Theater performs street theater production in Ginza, the heart of Tokyo  Persona Exhibit at the Matsuya Department Store in Ginza
1966

Japanese population exceeds 100 million

Cultural Revolution begins in China 

Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir               

Waseda Little Theater established

June Theater

Underground Theater

Situation Theater

First Japan Art Fair in New York

Yokoo Tadanori starts designing posters for the Situation Theater    
1967

Race Riots in Detroit

Former Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru dies

Japan's GNP third after the US and West Germany

 Tenjo Sajiki founded

Posters for Japan World Exhibition in Osaka unveiled

Yokoo Tadanori joins Tenjo Sajiki
1968

MLK Assassinated

Student protests begin at Nihon and Tokyo Universities

RFK assassinated

Riots in Shinjuku

Kawabata Yasunari becomes the first Japanese to receive Nobel for Lit.

    
1969

152 Univ. on strike; 10,000 students arrested.

Japanese GNP for 1966 officially world's second largest

Apollo 11

Woodstock

 

3 arrested when Situation Theater performs without a permit.

Tenjo Sajiki performs overseas for first time.

Protestors led by Yokoo Tadanori disrupt deliberations at teh Japan Advertising Artists Club - no prizes awarded

Yokoo Tadanori wins grand prix at the Sixth Youth Biennale in Paris
1970
  • First Japanese satellite launched
  • Japan Air Lines attacked by members of the Japan Red Army
  • Demonstrations by 770.000 against renewal of US Japan Security Treaty
  • Treaty automatically renewed.
    
1971
  • US agrees to return  Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty
  • Emperor makes first visit to Hiroshima atomic bomb memorial

 

Out With the Books, Into the Streets completed

Tenjo Sajiki performs in France

American photog Eugene Smith photographs the victims of mercury poisoning in Minamata

Boom in the demand for art as Japan's economy expands
1972
  • Winter Olympics in Sapporo
  • Standoff between police and Red Army Faction in mountain resort outside Tokyo results in 2 police killed - it is revealed that 14 members were murdered for ideological deviation leading to widespread disillusionment with the left
  • Members of Red Army attack tourists at Lod airport in Israel, killing 24
    
       
       
       

 

 

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