ABOUT THIS WEBSITE
This website recounts my encounters with contemporary Japanese theatre during my PhD fieldwork from August to November 2022. The fieldwork involves attending performances, festivals and theatre rehearsals as well as archive research and connecting with Japanese theatre makers and scholars.
The website name Kire Tsuzuki comes from Japanese aesthetics, meaning cut and continuity. You can read a more detailed description of this term in International Lexicon of Aesthetics (Ghilardi, 2019)
My PhD project has been supported by UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council through North-West Doctoral Training Partnership. The fieldwork has been additionally supported by The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. I am also grateful to Kansai University for hosting me during my fieldwork in Japan and Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts for supporting me in my research.
MY PHD PROJECT AND FIELDWORK
My PhD project concerns the aesthetics of crossing borders in the work of Japanese theatre director and playwright Yudai Kamisato who was born in Peru. Through a comparative approach, the aim is to contextualise Kamisato's work within contemporary Japanese theatre landscape and elsewhere, especially within the changing paradigm of postdramatic theatre and outside Euro-American contexts. Some would describe Kamisato's work as intercultural or transcultural. However, if we think about the prefix 'inter', it implies an opposition between A and B. The prefix 'trans' (lat. on the other side of, across) seems problematic, as it equally implies that the there are two opposites, the need to get from A to B. These terms while useful in some contexts are perhaps no longer interesting in the ever-changing local and global performance landscape. Therefore, over the course of my PhD project, I am developing a new way to think about the Other in theatrical terms.
Over the course of my fieldwork trip, I'm specifically looking for two things: the layering of postdramatic with traditional (or perhaps not) and the idea of Japaneseness/engagement with Otherness in contemporary Japanese theatre.
During my fieldwork, I'm hoping to experience the 'thrilling of meaning' and become a sort of tourist of 'postal multitude'. *
ABOUT ME
I'm a PhD student in Theatre Studies at the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University. I hold an MA in Japanese Studies (Distinction) from SOAS, University of London. My research interests concern post-war and contemporary Japanese theatre and performance, postdramatic theatre and theatre and language. Previously, I also worked as a theatre producer, specialising in postdramatic and international theatre, and as a festival programmer in the UK and abroad.
See my research profile for more information.
*Dalila Colucci (2017) uses the term 'thrilling of meaning' to describes Roland Barthes' experience in Japan. In his publication 'Philosophy of the Tourist' Hiroki Azuma (2017) uses the term postal multitude to philosopically re-think tourists in contemporary world.
