Kabuki Heroes on the Osaka Stage, 1780-1830

Kabuki Heroes on the Osaka Stage, 1780-1830 PDF Author: C. Andrew Gerstle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Review: "Kabuki Heroes is about collective participation in urban culture - on the stage, in poetry salons, in art studios and in fan clubs. Focusing on the culture of Kabuki theatre in Osaka and Kyoto, it illustrates the passionate hero worship of actors by all levels of society. Fans vigorously engaged in the creation of celebrity and fame for their idols, and thereby won their own moments of glory and glamour in the spotlight. Many of these participants are represented here - most of them ordinary townsmen, but also a few samurai and courtiers. This interactive nature of Kabuki culture is particularly intriguing: the actors themselves not only appeared on stage, but involved themselves in other cultural circles such as poetry salons. Kabuki fan clubs, on the other hand, performed formal rituals at the theatre, individual fans became amateur performers, while others created lavish colour prints and books to support favourite actors and spread their fame." "This catalogue illustrates that our obsession with celebrity is not just a modern phenomenon: in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Osaka we can rediscover many elements in common with our own times. Most importantly, after the spread of new colour-woodblock printing technology in the late 1760s, a golden age of popular Kabuki culture was promoted far and wide with beautifully coloured prints and books. The fine examples brought together here from leading public and private collections in Europe and Japan evoke a fascinating period when theatre, art and poetry were essential elements of social and cultural life."--BOOK JACKET

Kabuki Heroes on the Osaka Stage, 1780-1830

Kabuki Heroes on the Osaka Stage, 1780-1830 PDF Author: C. Andrew Gerstle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
Review: "Kabuki Heroes is about collective participation in urban culture - on the stage, in poetry salons, in art studios and in fan clubs. Focusing on the culture of Kabuki theatre in Osaka and Kyoto, it illustrates the passionate hero worship of actors by all levels of society. Fans vigorously engaged in the creation of celebrity and fame for their idols, and thereby won their own moments of glory and glamour in the spotlight. Many of these participants are represented here - most of them ordinary townsmen, but also a few samurai and courtiers. This interactive nature of Kabuki culture is particularly intriguing: the actors themselves not only appeared on stage, but involved themselves in other cultural circles such as poetry salons. Kabuki fan clubs, on the other hand, performed formal rituals at the theatre, individual fans became amateur performers, while others created lavish colour prints and books to support favourite actors and spread their fame." "This catalogue illustrates that our obsession with celebrity is not just a modern phenomenon: in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Osaka we can rediscover many elements in common with our own times. Most importantly, after the spread of new colour-woodblock printing technology in the late 1760s, a golden age of popular Kabuki culture was promoted far and wide with beautifully coloured prints and books. The fine examples brought together here from leading public and private collections in Europe and Japan evoke a fascinating period when theatre, art and poetry were essential elements of social and cultural life."--BOOK JACKET

Kabuki Heroes on the Osaka Stage, 1780-1830

Kabuki Heroes on the Osaka Stage, 1780-1830 PDF Author: C. Andrew Gerstle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
The creation of celebrity and fame is a topic easily understandable in today's world of pop idol competitions and reality TV shows. This exhibition and catalogue will focus on a similar phenomenon of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when urban Osaka and Tokyo created superstar actors, and will show how this was a stimulus for the creation of theatre, visual arts and poetry. Visitors to the exhibition will be struck by a colourful and varied visual display through which actors were portrayed as legendary urban heroes. The dates of items included will range from about 1780 until the 1830s; but the core of the exhibition will cover the period 1800-1821, and focus on the fierce rivalry between the two Osaka Kabuki superstars, Arashi Kichisaburo II (Rikan I, 1769-1821) and Nakamura Utaemon III (Shikan I, 1778-1838). Books, surimono, single sheet actor prints and albums will highlight the different ways in which actors and performances were represented, and show how this was part of a complex strategy to create celebrity for the actors, poets and artists involved.

Kabuki's Nineteenth Century

Kabuki's Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Jonathan Zwicker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192890972
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Kabuki's Nineteenth Century examines the theater culture of nineteenth-century Japan from the perspective of the history and materiality of the book, the nature of reception, and the making and making use of images. The aim of this book is to rediscover the kabuki theater of nineteenth-century Japan by shifting our critical focus from performance to print and the public sphere, and thus embedding theater history within the larger world of printed matter by means of which theatricality circulated beyond the stage and through which performance was most often consumed. Fundamental to Kabuki's Nineteenth Century is a reconsideration of the nature of the printed archive itself. The book argues that the archive of printed material related to the theater in nineteenth-century Japan (playbills, actor critiques, theater guides, maps, actor prints, calendars, and broadsheets) is something more than—and more complicated than—a set of materials out of which we might reconstitute the always transient event of performance. Rather, the archive constitutes an object of inquiry unto itself, an object that reveals as much about the interrelations between and among various printed media and genres circulating beyond the confines of the theater as it does about what happened on stage. Even as we use these materials to examine the history of performance, a series of different questions might be asked: what can the production, consumption, and collecting of this enormous body of printed matter tell us about such problems as the role of print in everyday life, the construction of specialized knowledges, and the manner in which a culture archives itself?

Kabuki

Kabuki PDF Author: Rosina Buckland
Publisher: National Museums of Scotland
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Exhibition catalog giving highlights of National Museum Scotland's collection of nineteenth century Japanese woodblock prints featuring kabuki performances - a combination of drama, dance, music, and acrobatics.

Historical Dictionary of Japanese Traditional Theatre

Historical Dictionary of Japanese Traditional Theatre PDF Author: Samuel L. Leiter
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442239115
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 816

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Book Description
Historical Dictionary of Japanese Traditional Theatre is the only dictionary that offers detailed comprehensive coverage of the most important terms, people, and plays in the four principal traditional Japanese theatrical forms—nō, kyōgen, bunraku, and kabuki—supplemented with individual historical essays on each form. This updated edition adds well over 200 plot summaries representing each theatrical form in addition to: a chronology; introductory essay; appendixes; an extensive bibliography; over 1500 cross-referenced entries on important terms; brief biographies of the leading artists and writers; and plot summaries of significant plays. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Japanese theatre.

A Kamigata Anthology

A Kamigata Anthology PDF Author: Sumie Jones
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824881761
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
This is the first of a three-volume anthology of Edo- and Meiji-era urban literature that includes An Edo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Mega-City, 1750–1850 and A Tokyo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Modern Metropolis, 1850–1920. The present work focuses on the years in which bourgeois culture first emerged in Japan, telling the story of the rising commoner arts of Kamigata, or the “Upper Regions” of Kyoto and Osaka, which harkened back to Japan’s middle ages even as they rebelled against and competed with that earlier era. Both cities prided themselves on being models and trendsetters in all cultural matters, whether arts, crafts, books, or food. The volume also shows how elements of popular arts that germinated during this period ripened into the full-blown consumer culture of the late-Edo period. The tendency to imagine Japan’s modernity as a creation of Western influence since the mid-nineteenth century is still strong, particularly outside Japan studies. A Kamigata Anthology challenges such assumptions by illustrating the flourishing phenomenon of Japan’s movement into its own modernity through a selection of the best examples from the period, including popular genres such as haikai poetry, handmade picture scrolls, travel guidebooks, kabuki and joruri plays, prose narratives of contemporary life, and jokes told by professional entertainers. Well illustrated with prints from popular books of the time and hand scrolls and standing screens containing poems and commentaries, the entertaining and vibrant translations put a spotlight on texts currently unavailable in English.

Dramatic Impressions

Dramatic Impressions PDF Author: Dilys Pegler Winegrad
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812219852
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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Book Description
Produced in conjunction with an exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania's Arthur Ross Gallery, this catalogue highlights 71 masterworks from Gilbert Luber's stellar collection of nineteenth-century actor prints and images by the master Osaka artist Natori Shunsen (1886-1960).

Network of Knowledge

Network of Knowledge PDF Author: Terrence Jackson
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824853598
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Nagasaki during the Tokugawa (1603–1868) was truly Japan's window on the world with its Chinese residences and Deshima island, where Western foreigners, including representatives of the Dutch East India Company, were confined. In 1785 Ōtsuki Gentaku (1757–1827) journeyed from the capital to Nagasaki to meet Dutch physicians and the Japanese who acted as their interpreters. Gentaku was himself a physician, but he was also a Dutch studies (rangaku) scholar who passionately believed that European science and medicine were critical to Japan's progress. Network of Knowledge examines the development of Dutch studies during the crucial years 1770–1830 as Gentaku, with the help of likeminded colleagues, worked to facilitate its growth, creating a school, participating in and hosting scholarly and social gatherings, and circulating books. In time the modest, informal gatherings of Dutch studies devotees (rangakusha), mostly in Edo and Nagasaki, would grow into a pan-national society. Applying ideas from social network theory and Bourdieu's conceptions of habitus, field, and capital, this volume shows how Dutch studies scholars used networks to grow their numbers and overcome government indifference to create a dynamic community. The social significance of rangakusha, as much as the knowledge they pursued in medicine, astronomy, cartography, and military science, was integral to the creation of a Tokugawa information revolution—one that saw an increase in information gathering among all classes and innovative methods for collecting and storing that information. Although their salons were not as politically charged as those of their European counterparts, rangakusha were subversive in their decision to include scholars from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds. They created a cultural society of civility and play in which members worked toward a common cultural goal. This insightful study reveals the strength of the community's ties as it follows rangakusha into the Meiji era (1868–1912), when a new generation championed values and ambitions similar to those of Gentaku and his peers. Network of Knowledge offers a fresh look at the cultural and intellectual environment of the late Tokugawa that will be welcomed by scholars and students of Japanese intellectual and social history.

A History of Japanese Theatre

A History of Japanese Theatre PDF Author: Jonah Salz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316395324
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 1066

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Book Description
Japan boasts one of the world's oldest, most vibrant and most influential performance traditions. This accessible and complete history provides a comprehensive overview of Japanese theatre and its continuing global influence. Written by eminent international scholars, it spans the full range of dance-theatre genres over the past fifteen hundred years, including noh theatre, bunraku puppet theatre, kabuki theatre, shingeki modern theatre, rakugo storytelling, vanguard butoh dance and media experimentation. The first part addresses traditional genres, their historical trajectories and performance conventions. Part II covers the spectrum of new genres since Meiji (1868–), and Parts III to VI provide discussions of playwriting, architecture, Shakespeare, and interculturalism, situating Japanese elements within their global theatrical context. Beautifully illustrated with photographs and prints, this history features interviews with key modern directors, an overview of historical scholarship in English and Japanese, and a timeline. A further reading list covers a range of multimedia resources to encourage further explorations.

Painting the Floating World

Painting the Floating World PDF Author: Janice Katz
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300236913
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
From the 17th through the 19th century, artists in Kyoto and Edo (now Tokyo) captured the metropolitan amusements of the floating world (ukiyo in Japanese) through depictions of subjects such as the beautiful women of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters and performers of the kabuki theater. In contrast to ukiyo-e prints by artists such as Katsushika Hokusai, which were widely circulated, ukiyo-e paintings were specially commissioned, unique objects that displayed the maker’s technical skill and individual artistic sensibility. Featuring more than 150 works from the celebrated Weston Collection, the most comprehensive of its kind in private hands and published here for the first time in English, this lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched volume addresses the genre of ukiyo-e painting in all its complexity. Individual essays explore topics such as shunga (erotica), mitate-e (images that parody or transform a well-known story or legend), and poetic inscriptions, revealing the crucial role that ukiyo-e painting played in a sophisticated urban culture.