[ebooks] Never Far from Dancing: Ballet artists in new roles by From Routledge at Arts-Photography

Description

Satoko Shimazaki revisits three centuries of kabuki theater and its dynamic representations of medieval Japanese tales and tradition; boldly reframing Edo kabuki as a key player in the formation of an early modern urban identity. Challenging the common understanding of kabuki as a subversive entertainment and a threat to shogunal authority; Shimazaki argues that kabuki actually instilled a sense of shared history in Edorsquo;s inhabitants; regardless of their class. It did this; she shows; by constantly invoking “worlds;rdquo; or sekai; largely derived from medieval military chronicles; and overlaying them onto the present. Shimazaki explores the process by which; as the early modern period drew to a close; nineteenth-century playwrights began dismantling the Edo tradition of “presenting the pastrdquo; by abandoning their long-standing reliance on the sekai. She then reveals how; in the 1920s; a new generation of kabuki playwrights; critics; and scholars reinvented the form yet again; “textualizingrdquo; kabuki so that it could be pressed into service as a guarantor of national identity; in keeping with the role that the West assigned to theater. Shimazakirsquo;s vivid and engaging reinterpretation of kabuki history centers on the popular and widely celebrated ghost play Tokaido Yotsuya kaidan (Ghost Stories at Yotsuya; 1825) by Tsuruya Nanboku. Along the way; she sheds fresh light on the emergence and development of the ubiquitous trope of the vengeful female ghost; linking it to the need to explore new themes at a time when the old samurai worlds were rapidly losing their relevance.