Restaging the Spectacular: Misemono and Kabuki Theater 1700-1900

“Restaging the Spectacular: Misemono and Kabuki Theater 1700-1900,” traces the intersections among stage spectacle, knowledge, and the body in early modern Japan through an examination of the longstanding relationship between spectacle shows and kabuki. I argue that recovering and attending to the spectacular elements of kabuki—mechanical devices, acrobatics, extraordinary bodies, and so forth—both calls into question existing narratives about kabuki and also reveals the theatrical nature of public discourses of knowledge, medicine, and spectacle in early modern Japan. While primarily focused on the stage, this project both has broader implications that acknowledge the ways in which spectacle can – and historically has – critiqued regimes of knowledge or authority but also interrogates how spectacle was often simultaneously complicit in the production and reinforcement of constructions of the normal by sensationalizing the strange or unusual through exhibition and display. In Chapter 1, I examine how eighteenth-century playwrights like Namiki Shōza drew inspiration from karakuri (mechanical) spectacle shows to develop an aesthetics of hiddenness and wonder in kabuki in the Ōsaka region by fundamentally altering the relationship between front and backstage. I then turn to the career of Hasegawa Kanbei XI in Edo and his large-scale immersive set designs to show how these spectacles document a shift toward the revelation of previously hidden technologies of the stage as the profile of specialized set designers and stage technology rose in the early nineteenth century. Chapter 2 looks at portrayals of the materiality of the stage and theatrical objects in print in the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries and the use of illustrative techniques such as decontextualization, cataloguing, dissection, and disarticulation drawn from the natural sciences and illustrated encyclopedias of the eighteenth century. These new ways of looking at the world and its objects inspired a reevaluation of the theater and its techniques of representation and generated a visual language of the stage that would appear in a wide variety of publications throughout the nineteenth century. In Chapter 3, I address the history of acrobatics and aerial lifts in kabuki in relationship to trends in acrobatic spectacle shows and circuses and argue that the ambivalent reception of the acrobatic tricks of late nineteenth-century actor Ichikawa Kodanji IV, one of the last actors to be known for the use of acrobatics and aerial lifts, was in fact a continuation of criticisms of spectacle that had existed since the late seventeenth century. Considering both more conventional forms of acrobatics in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century performance by onnagata (male actors of female roles), and less often considered forms of spectacular embodiment such as ningyōburi puppet mimicry, I recontextualize the enormously influential career and writing of the onnagata Yoshizawa Ayame within this history of the body and argue that scholarship on gender performativity has overemphasized Ayame’s conceptions of performativity of onnagata at the expense of attention to these lineages of the spectacular body. “Restaging the Spectacular” concludes with an examination of the career of the onnagata Sawamura Tanosuke III (1845-1878) and his experimentation with various stage tricks after undergoing multiple amputations of his legs and hands. The medical spectacle which surrounded his body at the time of his surgeries and the sentimental spectacle which characterized the reception of his performances would reemerge in the form of sensationalized depictions of his life and body in early Meiji illustrated newspapers and fiction such as Okamoto Kisen’s Sawamura Tanosuke akebono sōshi (1880).

Advisor: Zwicker, Jonathan