Keynote: A Poetics of Inscribed Kabuki Actor Portraits
Symposium
KABUKI in PRINT: Actor, Fans, Image, and Medium in Early Modern Japan and Beyond
Few early modern theater traditions boast a body of surviving ephemera as large, varied, and multi-faceted as Japanese kabuki. From the seventeenth through twentieth centuries, the woodblock print medium played a pivotal role in connecting kabuki actors and fans and engendering play between actor and role, vision and voice, and between the stage and the imagination.
In 2015, the Smart Museum of Art received a transformative gift of over 1,000 Japanese prints from the collection of the late Brooks McCormick, Jr. The majority of these works are theater prints of the late Edo (1600–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) eras, and of these, a sizable number relate to kabuki in the kamigata or Osaka region rather than in Edo. This intimate symposium seeks to bring together experts from theater, literature, and art history in order to study the collection and contribute their own insights on the relation between page and stage in the case of kabuki. The resulting insights will have implications for all who are interested in the relation between print technology, narrative, visual art, fan cultures, and the stage.
Sponsored by the University of Chicago's Center for East Asian Studies in conjunction with the Smart Museum of Art, Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the Center for the Art of East Asia.
Full schedule
Keynote Lecture
Friday, November 4, 2022
4:30 pm
Hybrid event; register for the Zoom livestream
Cochrane-Woods Art Center, 5540 S. Greenwood Avenue, Room 157
John T. Carpenter
Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
"A Poetics of Inscribed Kabuki Actor Portraits"
Read the keynote abstract (PDF)
Symposium
Saturday, November 5, 2022
9 am–5 pm
In-person event
Franke Institute for the Humanities, 1100 E. 57th Street
Jiayi Chen
Ph.D Candidate, University of Chicago
"What Can a Game Board Stage?: The Worlds of Toyohara Kunichika's Sugoroku Prints and Beyond"
Maki Isaka
Professor in Asian Languages & Literatures, University of Minnesota
"A Biblio-Medium or Two-Dimensional Kabuki in Its Own Right: Publications in the Kabuki Culture"
Ryoko Matsuba
Lecturer in Japanese Digital Arts and Humanities, Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures and University of East Anglia
"The Impact of Kabuki on Visual Culture"
Rhiannon Paget
Curator of Asian Art, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art
"Kabuki in Perspective: The Theatre and Floating Pictures"
Satoko Shimazaki
Associate Professor of Early Modern Japanese Theater and Literature, UCLA
"Recording Liveness: Theater Prints and Books in Age of Nanboku and Mokuami"
Melissa Van Wyk
Assistant Professor in Japanese Literature, University of Chicago
"Trains, Games, and Print: Transportation Technologies in 19th-century Kabuki Playbills"
Jonathan Zwicker
Agassiz Professor of Japanese, University of California, Berkeley
"The Three Bodies of Horigkoshi Hideshi: Performance and Medium in Meiji Kabuki"
Image: Ichiyōsai Yoshitaki, detail of Eight Actors from Seinen Yume Monogatari, ‘Tale of the Southwestern Dream,’ 1878, Woodblock print. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, The Brooks McCormick Jr. Collection of Japanese Prints, 2015.1009b.