'When I Was a Wolf': Western fairy tales reinterpreted, for better or for worse
Shuji Terayama's "When I Was a Wolf" is a collection of essays that reappraise Western fairy tales, fables and literature and flips them head over heels.
Androids and the avant-garde: The best Japanese films screening at TIFF
The Tokyo International Film Festival offers a once-a-year chance to see Japanese movies, both new and classic, with English subtitles. Getting tickets, however, especially for the films in the Competition and Special Screenings sections, may not be easy. With that caveat, here are my ...
Noda's 'Egg' scrambles understanding
After his acclaimed French debut last year with "The Bee," news of Hideki Noda's return to the Theatre National de Chaillot in central Paris with his pop-war-and-Olympian extravaganza "Egg" created quite a buzz of anticipation. Premiered in 2012 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre where Noda ...
The Crimson Thread of Abandon: Stories
It's a wonder "The Crimson Thread of Abandon" was never translated into English before. Shuji Terayama (1935-83) was a provocative artist and outlaw author, and his 20 stories fall nothing short of this reputation. Each borrows and mocks the conventions of a classic fairy ...
Shuji Terayama's underground public stage
Thirty years on from the death of Shuji Terayama, Japanese theater's most avant-garde provocateur continues his renaissance with a show of his films, photography and, most importantly, theater works at the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, which follows on from the recent showing of ...
Commemorating 30 years since the passing of avant-garde writer and artist Shuji Terayama, this exhibition brings together artifacts from his 30-hour street play, "Knock." In 1975, Terayama and his theater troupe used Tokyo's Asagaya neighborhood in Suginami Ward as the stage for this work, which ...
Tadanori Yokoo: An artist by design
In conversation, Tadanori Yokoo jumps nimbly between the past and the present. One moment he's watching the sky glow red as bombs rain down on Kobe during World War II. The next he's riding in a taxi with Yukio Mishima. And then he's back ...
