Since 2010 the world of Japanese puppet theatre, long considered “traditional,” has been experimenting with integrating new technologies, such as vocaloids, projections, and holograms, alongside the wooden puppets and the bodies of the puppeteers, vocalists, and musicians in live performance and in film. While the surge of technological experimentation may seem surprising, the performance conventions of the puppet theatre create openings for integrating new technologies. Unlike performance forms based in a singular human body, such as kabuki, the puppet theatre disperses the “self” of the characters represented in performance across the puppet, the puppeteers, and the voice of the chanter. The form already hosts the co-presence of different materialities, including human and non-human. In this talk, we investigate Sugimoto Hiroshi’s production of Love Suicides at Sonazaki (2011), the film Opera Aoi (2014), and the collaboration with vocaloid Hatsune Miku, Bunraku Beyond (2022). We will explore how these performances interweave new, immaterial technologies of performance to generate shifting modes of liveness and corporeality.
Jyana S. Browne (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Premodern Japanese Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Maryland. Her areas of research include early modern Japanese performance; Japanese puppetry; the integration of new technology into traditional theatre; and the intersections of performance, sexuality, and embodiment on stage and in everyday life. Her current book project examines performances of love suicide in eighteenth-century Osaka. Her writing appears in Journal of Japanese Language and Literature, Theatre Research International, Puppetry International, and the edited volumes Troubling Traditions: Canonicity, Theatre, and Performance in the US and Realisms in East Asian Performance.
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This event is free and open to faculty, staff, and students