Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 1:00pm CDT
A Kota Yamazaki Workshop
The Body & The Native Land: Butoh and African Dance
Streamed LIVE from Japan Society, New York City
Krannert Center for the Performing Arts
500 Goodwin Avenue, Dance Rehearsal Krannert, Level 2
Urbana, IL 61801
Live webcast available here
Contemporary Butoh-trained choreographer Kota Yamazaki (a 2007 Bessie Award winner) will present a live internet workshop on the fundamentals of Butoh to students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from the Japan Society in New York City. All students, educators, and fans of dance are invited to attend in-person or via the live webstream.
For more information on Kota Yamazaki and
the Japan Society please visit: http://www.japansociety.org/event/the-body-the-native-land-butoh-african-dance-workshops-with-kota-yamazaki.
This event is free, open to the public, and will be broadcast live on April 24. All those interested in viewing these events online are requested to register via e-mail to A. Colin Raymond at araymon2@illinois.edu. Please include “Kota Yamazaki" in the subject line and your name and contact information in the body.
Image: Kota Yamazaki
© Hideo Tanaka
IJPAN is funded by the Japan Foundation’s Center for Global Partnership (www.cgp.org).
LADY MACBETH: A KABUKI PLAY
By Karen Sunde and Conceived by Shozo Sato
Shozo Sato, Guest Director
Web Rebroadcast Coming Soon!
Department of Theatre Series | Presented in the style of kabuki theatre, Lady Macbeth retells the Scottish Play from the power-driven perspective of the would-be queen. The highly theatrical Japanese style complements the eloquence of Shakespeare’s drama in a production that paints with the visual poetry of kabuki. University of Illinois professor emeritus and internationally heralded theatre director Shozo Sato returns to campus for a final presentation of one of his most successful adaptations of a Western classic, which was also recently produced at Chicago’s Shakespeare Theatre. Sato’s immense contributions to this community have included the staging of traditional kabuki plays and kabuki-Western hybrids, performing the tea ceremony, flower arranging, and founding Japan House. With this evocative production, the Department of Theatre joins the National Theatre Conference’s Initiative to Celebrate American Women Playwrights.
On the Passing of David G. Goodman
David G. Goodman, our good friend and colleague and a leader in the field of Japanese theatre and cultural criticism, died on Monday, July 25, 2011, in Urbana, Illinois. Professor Goodman was born and raised in Racine, Wisconsin, going on to receive a B.A. from Yale University (cum laude, 1969) and an M.A. and Ph.D. (1982) from Cornell University. He leaves behind his wife Kazuko, his daughter Yael, and his son Kai. He was 65 years of age.
David Goodman was a pioneering scholar in the study of modern Japanese theatre, especially of avant-garde theater in post-war Japan, and lived in Japan for more than ten years (1960s-70s). David was a towering figure in his field, not only translating major works of modern Japanese literature, drama, and poetry and authoring several scholarly monographs in English, but also writing multiple original works in Japanese. His first book was a translation of plays about experiences of the atomic bombs in Japan, After Apocalypse: Four Japanese Plays of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1986), which was followed soon after by Japanese Drama and Culture in the 1960s: The Return of the Gods (1988), in which he explored a series of avant-garde plays to outline the re-appropriation of traditional cultural symbols in Japanese theatre. The latter work has had a lasting contribution on our understanding of the recovery of tradition and ongoing explorations of possibilities for renewal in performance modes and other dynamic aspects of Japanese culture today. In all, David Goodman published seven books in English.
Anyone who knew Professor Goodman understood that he had an extremely vibrant mind and attempted, in both his research and the classroom, to bridge between the theatre, audience, and the larger population, on the one hand, and to bring multiple cultures into mutual conversation on the other. Thus he not only wrote seminal cultural critiques such as Jews in the Japanese Mind: The History and Uses of a Cultural Stereotype (1995, 2000), but also taught courses in which he and his students examined the inter-cultural relationship between Japanese, Jewish, and American culture. Indeed, his colleagues recognized that David Goodman was a master pedagogue, and graduate students and undergraduates regularly spoke of their remarkable impressions of his courses. David also established, together with his brother, the Rita & Arnold Goodman Fellowship for Improvement of Women's Lives & Gender Equality in the Developing World, which has annually helped graduate students at the University of Illinois studying issues related to women, gender, and development.
His four major books written in Japanese flowed out of his great fascination with theses developing cultures. These included works such as including Israel: Voices and Faces (1979) and Hashiru (Running, 1989. Among many honors, he received the Translation Center Award (from Columbia University), for his Long, Long Autumn Nights: Selected Poems of Oguma Hideo, 1901-1940. He has also received NEH and Fulbright research grants. He is known to the Japanese public, being listed in the two major Japanese dictionaries of prominent public figures (Asahi jinbutsu jiten, Gendai jinbutsu jiten). At the time of his death, David was also working on a book entitled Death-Defying Acts: Essays Toward a History of Modern Japanese Drama.
David's broad vision led him recently to establish IJPAN (the Illinois Japan Performing Arts Network), which brings together leading technologies and the Japanese arts to provide for live-streaming performances. He received a major grant from the Japan Foundation's Center for Global Partnership for this project, which has just completed its first year. David had great success bringing together audiences in Japan, NY (Japan Society), and the University of Illinois (in both classrooms and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts), to watch and interact with actors and playwrights in genres ranging from the noh theatre to contemporary Japanese drama. His energy and creativity will be sorely missed by all of us in his Department (EALC) and in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, as well as all of those blessed by his knowledge, friendship and scholarly collaboration.
David's legacy in his field and at the University of Illinois will live on, and those who knew him personally will always feel the impact of his friendship and intellect. David Goodman was a gentleman. All of us who knew him will recall his warmth, sense of humor, breadth of knowledge, intensity when he felt strongly about something, and his wise counsel.