Just like the many native English-speakers who have difficulty understanding the language and classical references in the works of William Shakespeare, so Japanese people generally feel a sense of distance from kabuki, as though it were a foreign language. However, Ennosuke Ichikawa III, who is currently known as En-ou Ichikawa ...
Observing rehearsals by the physical-theater company Taihen for their upcoming “Over the Rainbow” show at ABC Hall in Osaka was ...
Thanks to Louis XIV’s love of dance, French is the language of ballet and Paris has remained the center of ...
“Whenever I am creating a new play here at Setagaya Public Theatre, I aim for something that’s as universal as all those kyōgen (traditional comic theater) or noh classics that are as vivid now as when they were first staged 600 years ago. If ...
Bringing together the codified and traditional worlds of Japanese noh theater and European opera seems impossible. Such ostensibly different histories, sounds and visuals: How could it work? It’s a challenge that Vienna-based Japanese opera director Shugo Ikoh has been playing around with for some ...
I have vivid childhood memories of two circuses: Ringling Brothers and Shrine. The latter was a delightfully shabby affair held in an old auditorium where audiences sat on concrete bleachers that were occasionally adorned with tacky plastic chairs. There were lots of animals, and ...
Art Complex 1928, a contemporary performing-arts venue in central Kyoto, used to be a regional office of the Mainichi Shimbun national newspaper.
Last August, with summer sweltering the city, I met Yuriko Kajiya and Jared Matthews, two soloists from the New York-based American Ballet Theatre, one of the word’s top-four classical companies along with the Royal Ballet in London, Paris Opera Ballet and the Bolshoi in ...
The splendid news about two Japanese high school students’ outstanding achievement swept around the world this month. Not only did 17-year-old Haruo Niyama from Nagano Prefecture win first prize at the super-prestigious annual Prix de Lausanne competition for young amateur classical ballet dancers, but ...
Until Japan was opened to the West in the mid-19th century, its theater culture mainly comprised traditional forms such as kabuki, comic kyōgen, bunraku (puppet theater) and noh. Afterward, once European acting styles were thrown into the mix, there emerged a theater genre known ...
Life is hard for Marcello Magni. Not only is he directing a production separately starring famed actress Tomoko Mariya and upcoming talent Kae Okumura, but the work, in Japanese, is also his brand-new version of an early play by his great friend — and ...
“Young people these days won’t be too familiar with the term the Roaring Twenties, but the 1920s still hold interest as a period. It was a time of changing values, not only in the United States, but in Europe: Dadaism, Cubism, Expressionism and other ...
Whatever springs to mind when you think of Kobe, it’s unlikely to be dance. Yet, from the fourth floor of a nondescript building in the port city’s multiethnic district of Shin-Nagata there shines forth a veritable beacon called Dance Box. Founded in Osaka in ...
This year marks the 50th anniversary of The Tokyo Ballet, and the company plans to celebrate every step of the way. To launch a full year’s commemoration of its ethos — creative exchanges in dance on a national and global stage — the company’s ...
Kyoto is going global in the world of dance this month, as the city’s Monochrome Circus teams up with the Norwegian company Wee on “The Surprised Body Project.” Begun in 2005 as a workshop in Oslo led by Italian dancer, choreographer and cofounder of ...
