bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Mori, ōgai (1862–1922)
Authors: Wetmore Kevin
Published: September 2018

Mori ōgai served as a surgeon in the Japanese Imperial Army, and was a translator, novelist, dramatist, and literary theorist during the Meiji and Taisho periods. While a dramatist in his own right, he is also important for his translations (especially of Ibsen) and his critical writings.

Mori ōgai was born Mori Rintarō to an aristocratic family in Iwami Province in southwestern Japan. Following the Meiji Restoration, his family moved to Tokyo and he began to study German. Graduating from medical college in 1881 at the age of nineteen years, he enlisted in the Japanese Imperial Army, which sent him to Germany to study, returning in 1885. During his time in Europe Mori became interested in Western literature and began translating German works into Japanese.

His critical assertions in both the popular press and the intellectual press resulted in drama being considered equal to other forms of literature, and in the idea that well-respected individuals could read drama, attend the theater and engage in serious discussions about both. His debates in print with Tsubouchi Shōyō, his intellectual rival, focused on the nature and purpose of drama. Tsubouchi advocated for Realism, while Mori sensed a universal ideal behind literature. Collectively they staked out important principles behind modern Japanese dramatic literature.
Asakusa Opera
Authors: Fukushima Yoshiko
Published: September 2018

Asakusa Opera is a form of modern Japanese popular entertainment which combines elements of musical theater, namely opera, operetta, US musicals, and sketch comedy such as variety shows and vaudeville. It achieved popularity in Asakusa, the major entertainment district of Tokyo during the Taisho period (1912–1926). The Japanese theater critic Ōzasa Yoshio regards the advent Asakusa Opera as the first sign that Japanese theater was being Americanized (1986: 98).

Takagi Tokuko’s successful performances in 1916, featuring songs and dances inspired by US American variety shows marked the birth of Asakusa Opera. Takagi had studied dance in New York City and performed in US and European cabarets before returning to Japan. Takagi played the role of a French officer in Female Troops Go to the Frontline (1917), a US-style musical comedy written and directed by Iba Takashi at Tokiwaza for Negishi Productions. The term "opera" was used by the Japan Opera Society for the first time when a "mixed-gender" girls’ opera was produced by Nishimoto Asaharu, choreographer of Evening in Venice (1916) at Takarazuka Girls Opera, and Suzuki Yasuyoshi, orchestra master in Takagi’s troupe. Meanwhile, Sassa Koka, the Nipponophone Company’s music producer formed the Tokyo Opera Theater and staged A Night at a Café (1917), an operetta he wrote at Nipponkan, the first opera theater in Asakusa. The play produced the hit "The Song of Croquette," originally composed by Masuda Tarōkaja for his comic opera Which Way? which van at the Imperial Theater in 1917.
Berezil’ Theater (БЕРЕЗІЛЬ)
Authors: Fowler Mayhill C.
Published: September 2018

The Berezil’ Theater was an innovative theater company founded by director and actor Oleksandr "Les" Kurbas in 1922. Active for just over a decade, the Berezil’ shaped the theatrical landscape of Soviet Ukraine and theater in Ukrainian. Kurbas organized the Mystets’ke obiednannia Berezil’ [Artistic Organization Berezil’] in 1922 in Kiev based on two previous companies. Patronized by the Red Army, as well as by local Party and state institutions, the Berezil’ expanded to include not only a theater company, but also several affiliated studios, a museum, a directors’ laboratory, a studio school, and a theater journal. The state acknowledged this success and moved the company to Kharkiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine, in 1926. The theater produced a wide variety of works, from expressionist propaganda pieces like Georg Kaiser’s Haz [Gas] (1922), to Ukrainian translations of world classics such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1924), to new Soviet classics, like Mykola Kulish’s Narodnyi Malakhii [The People’s Malakhii] (1927). The Berezil’ became known for its close collaboration with Soviet Ukrainian playwright Mykola Kulish, and it was after Kulish’s last play, Maklena Grasa (1933), that the Commissariat of Enlightenment sent Kurbas into exile and changed the theater’s name to the Teatr imeni T. H. Shevchenka [The Taras Shevchenko Theater].
Bungei Kyōkai
Authors: Zheng Guohe
Published: September 2018

Launched in February 1906 out of a drama club of Waseda University students, Bungei Kyōkai was one of the two pioneering organizations of the modernist movement in Japanese theater, the other being Jiyū Gekijō. Bungei Kyōkai, particularly its second period, is considered the beginning of shingeki for its contributions to Modernism in establishing professional actors and actresses in modern Japanese theater, in its impact on society, and in its having elite intellectuals as its leaders.

During its early period Bungei Kyōkai was more reformative in nature; while it produced selected acts of The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet, it also produced Tsubouchi Shōyō’s modern kabuki Kiri hitoha (A Paulownia Leaf), and the role of Portia in Merchant was played by an onnagata (male performer of female roles in kabuki). This led to these resignation of disappointed members and the beginning of its financial difficulties. To overcome these challenges, Shimamura Hōgetsu, Tsubouchi Shōyō’s disciple and the de facto manager of the organization, persuaded his teacher to take direct charge from February 1909. Shōyō started Bungei Kyōkai’s later period by building, on the site of his own residence, a theater academy, intended for both training and research. The two-year co-educational academy program was quite rigorous, with Hōgetsu and Shōyō among the instructors and using as textbooks the original script of The Merchant of Venice and the English translation of A Doll’s House. Later, however, elements of traditional Japanese performing arts, including kyōgen and stage fighting, were added to the curriculum, reflecting Shōyō’s vision of a national theater as the ultimate goal of Bungei Kyōkai.
Circus
Authors: Arrighi Gillian
Published: September 2018

The modern circus emerged and developed during the period when Western industrializing societies were undergoing transformation as a result of socioeconomic modernization. Philip Astley’s popular demonstrations of trick horse-riding at Astley’s Riding School in London in 1768 constitute the origins of the modern circus. Astley interspersed his novel equestrian displays with an eclectic variety of performances such as singing, dancing, acrobatics, and juggling. Other producers soon emulated this new style of entertainment, which became known as circus. It spread swiftly to France, Russia, North America, and eventually to Britain’s settler colonies. By the 1860s the key components of the institutionalized circus were well established. These included performances within the equestrian’s circular ring, a diverse range of acts on horseback, clowns, trained animals, and skilled physical displays such as rope- or wire-walking, acrobatics, juggling, aerial acts, and aerial flight with trapeze apparatus. Circuses expanded in size and experienced mass popularity with all classes of people in the Western industrialized world during the period 1880–1920. Impressionist and early modernist artists, notably Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, Roualt, Picasso, and Chagall found inspiration in the circus environment and the novel bodies of the circus’s human and animal performers.
Craig, Edith (1869–1947)
Authors: Cockin Katharine M.
Published: September 2018

Edith ("Edy") Craig, lesbian theater director and women’s suffrage activist, directed numerous plays and historical pageants, making significant contributions to the Little Theatre Movement in interwar Britain. After an unofficial apprenticeship as an actor and costumier with her mother Ellen Terry (1847–1928) and Henry Irving (1838–1905) at the Lyceum Theatre, she found her niche as a director. From 1908 she directed many women’s suffrage plays and several mass processions before founding the Pioneer Players theater society in London in 1911. Her productions were always staged in a visually striking manner, and made judicious use of costume and lighting.

Craig was born in Hertfordshire in 1869 to actress Ellen Terry and architect and designer Edward Godwin. Her brother Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1960) achieved international acclaim for his innovative ideas about scene design and the art of the theater. From 1899, Craig lived with Christabel Marshall (c. 1878–1966), known as Christopher St. John, the author and music critic. In 1916 Clare Atwood (1866–1962), known as Tony, joined Craig and St. John in a lifelong ménage à trois at 31 Bedford Street, Covent Garden, London, and at Priest’s House near Ellen Terry’s farm, Smallhythe Place, Tenterden, Kent.
Engeki Kairyō Kai
Authors: Zheng Guohe
Published: September 2018

Engeki Kairyō Kai [Theater Reform Society] was a quasi-government agency and a forerunner of the modernist movement in Japanese theater. From its early days, the Meiji government adopted an ambivalent and self-contradictory policy toward theater. On the one hand, it continued the Tokugawa period censorship which deemed theater to be subversive or otherwise "injurious to public morals"; on the other hand, it wanted theatre to help to promote its nation-building programs to make Japan an equal of the Western powers. The latter aspect of the policy was prompted in part by the surprising discovery of Meiji leaders during their tour of the West that theater was part of the high culture in the West and was suitable entertainment for the upper classes and visiting foreign dignitaries. Kabuki caught the attention of Meiji leaders as a potential Japanese counterpart to Western drama. The desire of Meiji leaders coincided with the indigenous modernist efforts to reform this traditional performing art to suit the needs of the times, particularly those of Morita Kan’ya XII (1846–1897), actor and manager of an important kabuki family line who had connections with government officials. It is this coincidence that led to the creation of Engeki Kairyō Kai, launched in August 1886 following the proposal of Suematsu Norizumi (1855–1920), journalist-turned-politician and son-in-law of Itō Hirobumi, Japan’s first prime minister, who offered his own endorsement. Its founders included Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru, Education Minister Mori Arinori, business leader Shibusawa Eiichi, and the influential scholars Yoda Gakkai and Fukuchi Ōchi.
Ichikawa, Sadanji II (1880–1940)
Authors: Zheng Guohe
Published: September 2018

Ichikawa, Sadanji was Japan’s most popular actor from the 1910s to the 1930s, and is unique in having contributed to the modernist movement in both kabuki and shingeki, Japan’s traditional and modern styles of theater.

Born Takahashii Eijirō, son of Ichikawa Sadanji I, he first appeared on stage at the age of four and, by the age of eighteen, had assumed the stage names of Botan, Koyone, and Enshō, in tura. When Sadanji I died in 1904, he inherited not only Meiji-za, his father’s company and theater, but an enormous debt. Sadanji I was the last of the Meiji kabuki superstars who died in a two-year period, leaving his son without his fame and skills, and experiencing the coldness of the kabuki establishment. With the support of Kawakami Otojirō (1864–1911) and particularly Matsui Shōyō (1870–1933), however, he led Meiji-za through its difficulties and became Ichikawa Sadanji II in 1906.

This period witnessed not only the decline of kabuki, but also the rise of shinpa. This, along with his experience of the kabuki establishment, whetted his interest for modern theater as well. In 1906–1907 he spent eight months traveling in Europe watching Western masterpieces, taking courses, and observing Western theater management. Inspired by the discoveries of this trip, upon his return he attempted a modernist reform at Meiji-za. The reform, which included allowing actresses to perform in kabuki and the elimination of the age-old tradition of providing catering services for spectators in the theater, proved to be too radical to be acceptable. This setback caused his modernist enthusiasm to be directed toward a different platform.
Jiyū-gekijō [Free Theater]
Authors: Swain John D.
Published: September 2018

Jiyū-gekijō [Free Theater], founded in 1909 by the director Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928) and kabuki actor Ichikawa Sadanji II (1880–1940), was established to produce contemporary realist plays using kabuki actors. The company aimed to produce works modeled on the naturalistic stagings of André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre. The theater’s first offering was a translation of Henrik Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman in November 1909. There quickly followed productions of plays by Groky, Maeterlinck, and Chekhov, among others.

Sadanji had been to Europe in 1907 and came back to Japan enamored of all theater things Western. Osanai’s project was a perfect fit, and the Jiyū-gekijō was pivotal for developing Japanese interest in naturalist plays and the use of theater to spread new ideas. One problem was that all the company members were kabuki actors from Sadanji’s troupe. Although Osanai initially insisted on doing only translations of Western plays, Japanese playwrights had some opportunities. Although there was great intellectual and artisitic interest in the company, unfortunately the theatrical kabuki style did not match the naturalism of the plays produced. The company could not survive, and closed in 1919. Nonetheless, the theater, along with Tsubouchi Shōyō’s Bungei Kyōkai [Literary Arts Society], helped to establish the shingeki [new theater] movement.
Kinoshita, Junji (1914–2006)
Authors: Jortner David
Published: September 2018

Kinoshita Junji was one of Japan’s foremost modern playwrights. His work consists of several plays based on Japanese folk tales and history, and often interrogates the interactions between war, guilt, and responsibility.

Kinoshita Junji was born in Tokyo on August 2, 1914. He remained in Tokyo until 1923, when his family moved to Kumamoto. After graduating from Kumamoto Fifth High School with the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in 1936, Kinoshita attended the Tokyo University to study English literature, eventually graduating with a master’s degree in 1939 with a specialization in Elizabethan drama. Kinoshita also founded the theater company Grape Society [Budō no kai] in 1947 and taught for many years at Meiji University. Kinoshita died from pneumonia in 2006 at the age of ninety-two.

He began to write soon after graduation, with his first play, Wind and Waves (Fūrō) produced in 1939. Partially as a result of the increase in militarism and censorship during the war years, he began to write plays based on Japanese folklore and mythology. Based on both the ethnographic writings of Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) as well as the influence of the Kotoba no Benkyōkai [Language Study Group] (1967) Kinoshita wanted to create a theater that merged both modern and premodern modes of performance. The result was what became known as his "folklore plays" [minwageki], including The Story of Hirokichi [Hirokichi banashi] (1946), Requiem on the Great Meridian [Shigosen no matsuri] (1979) and perhaps his best-known play, Twilight Crane [Yūzuru] (1949).
Cordero, Roque Jacinto (1917–2008)
Authors: Labonville Marie Elizabeth
Published: September 2018

Roque Cordero was a Panamanian composer, conductor, and educator, and the only twentieth-century Panamanian composer to gain international recognition. During the 1940s he studied composition and conducting in the United States, returning in 1950 to Panama. In 1966, difficult professional circumstances motivated his return to the United States where he completed his career and died at the age of ninety-one. His lifelong devotion to Panamanian culture is reflected in the music he composed. Most of his works are based on the twelve-tone technique, which he frequently modified for artistic reasons or to impart a subtle Panamanian musical flavor. His prizewinning Symphony No. 2 (1956) provoked controversy at its Caracas premiere because its advanced musical language offended those who believed that Latin American composers should avoid European avant-garde techniques and conform to a more obvious nationalist style. Cordero’s mature output includes pieces for piano, orchestra, string orchestra, soloist with orchestra, chamber ensemble, chorus, ballet, and film, as well as three pedagogical works and at least sixty articles and lectures. His creativity brought him numerous national and international commissions and honors. Although his output has not been studied in a comprehensive fashion, selected compositions have been analyzed in postgraduate theses and dissertations.
Kulish, Mykola Hurovych [КУЛІШ МИКОЛА ГУРОВИЧ] (1892–1937)
Authors: Fowler Mayhill C.
Published: September 2018

Mykola Hurovych Kulish was born on December 5, 1892 (Old Style; December 18 New Style) in Chaplinka, Tavricheskaia gubernia in the Russian Empire (today Ukraine’s Kherson oblast) to a peasant family. After his mother’s death, he left home to attend school in nearby Oleshky, where he met his future wife, Antonina, and his lifelong friend, Ivan Shevchenko (literary pseudonym, Dniprovskii). He started university in Odessa in 1914, but was soon conscripted into the Russian Imperial Army, and fought on the Smolensk front. After the February Revolution he served in the frontline soldiers’ committees, and he continued to fight with the Red Army during the Civil War. He joined the Communist Party in 1919. In 1922 Kulish was decommissioned to the post of school inspector in the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkomos) in Odessa, where he began to write seriously. He joined the Odessa branch of the organization Hart [Tempering], headed the Zinovievsk (Russian imperial Ekaterinoslav, today’s Kirovohrad) branch of the Party’s literary journal Chervonyishliakh [Red Path], and in 1925 the Soviet Ukrainian party-state promoted Kulish to Kharkiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine.
Izumi, Kyōka (1873–1939)
Authors: Wetmore Kevin
Published: September 2018

Izumi Kyōka was a novelist and shinpa playwright whose plays provided the heart of the shinpa repertory and demonstrated a new model for dramatic literature. Izumi’s work tended toward anti-Naturalism, with supernatural elements, Romanticism, and a yearning for the premodern past. His plays represent a transitional form from traditional to modern Japanese theater.

Izumi emerged in the 1890s as a novelist and short story author. Other writers adapted Izumi’s novels for the shinpa stage, evoking the Tokugawa era while also embracing the mood and modes of Meiji and Taisho Japan. Most notably, Kawakami Otojiro adapted Izumi’s 1894 novel Giketsu kyōketsu [Loyal Blood, Valiant Blood] as Taki no shiraito, the first full-fledged shinpa adaptation of a popular novel. It remains shinpa and Izumi’s most successful drama. The floodgates opened on a series of stage adaptations of popular literature. A dozen plays adapted from Izumi’s fiction, including Tatsumi kōdan [A Tale of the Southwest Quarter] (1900), Tsuya monogatari [The Virgin’s Tale] (1906), Shirasagi [The White Heron] (1910) and Keiko ōgi [The Practice Fan] (1912). Izumi’s novels tended toward stories of young men in tragic relationships with female entertainers. Strong maternal figures in these stories can be traced back to his mother dying when he was ten years old. Izumi received no royalties from these adaptations, but they brought him fame and public interest, which revived his career.
Takarazuka Revue Company (1913--)
Authors: Nakano Masaaki
Published: September 2018

The popular Takarazuka Revue Company, based in Takarazuka, Hyogo Prefecture, is the oldest established musical theater company in Japan. The performers are unmarried women; if a dancer marries, she must retire from the company. The Takarazuka Revue Company—actually five separate troupes—is managed by the Hankyu Railway Corporation. It has a training school with a dormitory system and exclusive theaters, publishes magazines, broadcasts television programs, and owns the Communication satellite channel. The Takarazuka Revue Company can be viewed as an example of the modernization and Westernization of Japanese theater and the industrialization of its business during the early 20th century by rejecting the traditional kabuki style as well as introducing female performers to the Japanese stage and adopting Western subject matter and theatrical practices by establishing multiple performance groups to meet audience demands.
Miller, Arthur (1915–2005)
Authors: Abbotson Susan C. W.
Published: September 2018

With a writing career stretching over six decades, including fiction, memoirs, and journals, as well as over two dozen plays, Arthur Miller’s contributions to American and world literature are significant. However, they are nowhere so strongly felt as in the field of drama, where his groundbreaking, now seminal play Death of a Salesman (1949) had a profound impact, both stylistically and philosophically, on the future of American modernist theatre.

Born in New York into a recently immigrant Jewish family who were beginning to live the American dream of success, Miller soon tasted the bitterness of loss as the Great Depression hit and destroyed his father’s prosperous clothing business. This event, later followed by the atrocities of the Holocaust, would strongly influence Miller’s modernist outlook on humanity as deeply flawed, though not without the possibility of redemption if attitudes could be changed. He spent his life trying to change those attitudes through his art.

Enthusiastically embracing socialist principles that in the late 1930s seemed to offer a kinder future, he attended the University of Michigan as an undergraduate, winning several prizes for playwriting. After graduation, he joined the Federal Theater Project to work on radio drama shortly before it was closed down. He continued to write radio plays that ran from conventional patriotic war sagas to the more quirky The Pussycat and the Plumber Who Was a Man (1940)—a comic exposé of political corruption. In 1940 he married his college girlfriend, Mary Slattery, with whom he would have two children, Jane and Robert.
Kawatake Mokuami (1816–1893)
Authors: Wetmore Kevin
Published: September 2018

A playwright at the end of the Edo period and throughout much of the Meiji period, Kawatake Mokuami wrote over 360 plays during his fifty-year career which saw the advent of modernized kabuki and new dramaturgies to reflect changing Japanese culture at the end of the 19th century.

Born Yoshimura Shinshichi, Mokuami (as he was commonly called after his retirement in the 1880s) was kicked out of the family home for associating with geishas. He began to study dance, which led him to kabuki. He became a student of the Edo era playwright Tsuruya Nanboku V and rapidly began writing shiranami mono [robber plays] that were popular in the mid-19th century.

Following the Meiji Restoration, Mokuami began to innovate and develop new techniques in kabuki dramaturgy, finding source material in contemporary novels, newspapers, and Western literature in translation. Kabuki actor Ichikawa Danjūrō IX (1838–1903) announced in 1872 at the opening of the Shintomi-za that he would "clean away the decay" that had infected kabuki, and reform and modernize it. He subsequently asked Mokuami to develop dramas that would reflect the new modern Japan to be performed by the kabuki. Mokuami began to write katsureki mono , "living history" plays. One of the first was Kōmon-ki osana kōshaku [The Story of Komon, a Lecture for Youth] (1877), which caused a scandal because of accusations of libel.
O’Casey, Sean (1880–1964)
Authors: Pine Emilie
Published: September 2018

Born into Dublin tenement life in 1880, Sean O’Casey (originally John O’Casey) went on to become one of Ireland’s most important playwrights, best known for his realist Dublin Trilogy, which premiered at the Abbey Theatre and included The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926). The four-act Plough and the Stars provoked riots on its second night as protestors objected to the play’s critique of Irish nationalism. O’Casey’s close association with the Abbey ended in 1928 when W. B. Yeats rejected his play about World War I, The Silver Tassie, which combined Realism and Expressionism. O’Casey moved to England in 1926, where he married the actress Eileen Carey, and he continued to write politically focused plays for English and American stages. He also wrote political essays and six volumes of autobiography.

O’Casey’s family were working-class Dubliners who struggled financially after his father was seriously injured, and O’Casey started work at the age of fourteen. This first-hand understanding of gruelling poverty informed his life-long Socialism and his involvement in the 1913 Dublin Lockout strike. In The Plough and the Stars, his critique of nationalism centered on the disparity between the rhetoric of freedom through blood sacrifice and the hardships of working-class life.
Osanai, Kaoru (1881–1928)
Authors: Jortner David
Published: September 2018

Osanai Kaoru was a Japanese director, playwright, critic, teacher, theater manager, and translator. A key figure in the shingeki movement, Osanai is credited with moving the Japanese stage toward modernist Realism and Naturalism. The founder of several key shingeki companies, Osanai was heavily involved in actor training and the move toward a Stanislavskian-based realistic form of theater.

Osanai was born in Hiroshima in 1881. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1909 with a degree in English Literature. After graduation, he assisted Tanizaki Jun’ichirō in laughing and producing the literary journal Shinshicho [New Trends of Thought]; he also translated Western drama for the journal. In 1909 he formed the Jiyū Gekijō [Free Theater] with kabuki actor Ichikawa Sadanji II. Rejecting both kabuki and shimpa conventions, the Free Theater’s first production was Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman. From that point onward the Free Theater staged productions of modern realist plays, including works by Wedekind, Gorki, and Chekhov. Osanai and Ichikawa also made the decision to use professional kabuki actors in Free Theater productions; this did, however, result in a confusion of acting and performance styles, especially as Osanai pushed for an end to declamatory forms of kabuki performance in favor of more naturalistic modes of speech and action.
Furukawa, Roppa (1903–1961)
Authors: Fukushima Yoshiko
Published: September 2018

Furukawa Roppa was a Japanese comedian, film actor, and essayist, who was known for his round face with Lloyd’s glasses. He was active before and after World War II, and successfully transferred his stage performances into a film career.

Furukawa Roppa, born the sixth son of Baron Katō Terumaro, was adopted by the Furukawa family, following his family custom. While attending Waseda University he became a film critic and editor and published his own magazine The Age of Film (1926–1931). In 1926 Furukawa participated in the variety show group Troubled Society established by former benshi (performers providing live narration for silent film). Roppa’s speciality was voice impersonation. Recommended by Kikuchi Kan, the novelist, and Kobayashi Ichizō, the founder of Hankyū Railway and Takarazuka Girls Opera, Furukawa became a professional comedian and made his stage debut at Tokyo Takarazuka Theater in 1932. In 1933 Shōchiku’s Tokiwa Productions contracted Furukawa to form the comedy troupe Kingdom of Laughter with the former members of Troubled Society, comedians popular in Asakusa, Asakusa Opera singers, and Nichigeki Theater’s dancers. Each production consisted of several short plays, accompanied by variety shows, which were immediatlly successful. Their repertoire included comedies such as The Bumpy Broadcasting Station (1933) and adaptations and dramatizations of famous plays and masterpieces from Japan and the West such as Chūshingura (1933), Carmen (1933), and Treasure Island (1935). The future director of Tōhō Kikuta Kazuo was one of the main playwrights for the troupe.
Kawakami, Sadayakko (1871–1946)
Authors: Wetmore Kevin
Published: September 2018

Sadayakko (also sometimes transliterated Sada Yakko or Sada Yacco) was Japan’s first modern actress, a pioneer of Western drama in Japan and one of the first Japanese to perform in the West. Together with her husband she was an innovator of intercultural theater.

Born Sada Koyama in Tokyo to a large merchant family, she was sent to train as a geisha from the age of four years, debuting at the age of twelve. In addition to training in the geisha arts, she learned to read and write, ride a horse, and other skills usually reserved for men, which was progressive and unusual for the time. She rapidly rose through the ranks to find patrons from the highest levels of society, including Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi. In 1893 she married impresario and shinpa pioneer Kawakami Otojirō, a shrewd self-promoter who transformed his wife into the first professional actress in Japan.

With the Kawakami Company, Sada Yakko undertook three tours of the West in 1899 to 1901, 1901 to 1902 and 1907 to 1908, performing in numerous venues throughout the United States and Europe, including Honolulu, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, New York, and Washington, DC, including a performance for President McKinley. In Europe she performed in London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Moscow, Rome, and many other cities. They performed at the World’s Fair and for Queen Victoria and Tsar Nicholas II.
Shimamura, Hōgetsu (1871–1918)
Authors: Zheng Guohe
Published: September 2018

Shimamura, Hōgetsu was a shingeki theater director, playwright, translator, critic, and one of the faremost leaders of the modernist movement in Japanese theater in the 1910s.

Born Sasayama Takitarō, he was adopted and became Shimamura Hōgetsu at the age of eighteen years. In 1890, with the support of his adoptive father, he became Tsubouchi Shōyō’s student in the newly created Department of Literature at Waseda University. Upon his graduation in 1894, as Shōyō’s most promising disciple, he was hired as a journalist for Waseda Bungaku, a literary magazine. From 1899 to 1901 he was first the local news director for the Yomiuri Shimbun [Yomiuri News], and then an instructor of rhetoric, art history, and Chinese literature at Waseda University. In 1902 he was selected to study in Europe as a Waseda visiting scholar, determined to gain a thorough understanding of Western theater. While studying drama, literature, and aesthetics at Oxford and in Berlin, he continued to publish in Japan as an established critic, including a thesis on Tolstoy. In addition to these activities he paid frequent visits to the theaters to watch Western plays including more than one production of Tolstoy’s Resurrection. Returning to Japan in late 1905, he became the manager of Bungei kyōkai, a theatre company launched in February 1906 out of a drama club. From 1909, when Shōyō took direct charge of the company, he became an instructor at the newly completed Bungei Kyōkai Academy, as well as serving as translator and director.
Gandini, Gerardo (1936–2013)
Authors: Fessel Pablo
Published: September 2018

Gerardo Gandini was an Argentinean composer and pianist. Disciple and assistant of Alberto Ginastera in the late 1950s and 1960s, he obtained international recognition for his musical work, which comprised more than 120 works for orchestra, small ensembles, musical theatre, opera, and solo instruments. As a pianist, he took part in the last sextet founded and led by Astor Piazzolla. From then on he interpreted and recorded a number of tango arrangements, called ‘‘Postangos.’’ Gandini was also active as a disseminator of contemporary music in Argentina.
Shingeki
Authors: Swain John D.
Published: September 2018

Shingeki (literally "new theater") is a word coined in late Meiji period Japan (1868–1912) referring to dramatic works and theater performance styles imported and adapted from late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe. Almost every Japanese theatre form created in the 20th and 21st centuries is influenced by shingeki, but after the 1960s it was no longer a term associated with the avant-garde. Shingeki existed as a distinct theatrical genre for just over a decade in the late Meiji and early Taisho (1912–1926) periods; however, its legacy remains in Japanese theater.

During the Meiji period’s rapid modernization and Westernization kabuki and nō presentational forms were criticized; naturalist and realist staging by playwrights such as Ibsen, Chekhov, and Hauptmann were promoted; and the view of dramatic texts as literature rather than as a springboard for an actor’s virtuosity became dominant. During the first decades of the 20th century writers such as Tsubouchi Shōyō (1858–1935) and Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928) sought to create a sharp distinction between premodern and modern forms of performance. The result was shingeki.
Shinkokugeki [New National Theater]
Authors: Wetmore Kevin
Published: September 2018

In response to the growth of shingeki, the actor Sawada Shōjirō developed a form of theater designed to appeal to the urban masses, especially in Tokyo, that blended elements of shingeki and kabuki with an overlay of patriotism, which he called shinkokugeki [new national theater], based on the principle of hanpozenshinshugi "half-step" forward. Shinkokugeki refers to both the style of performance and the company that performed it.

Waseda University student Sawada Shōjirō (1892–1929) became a shingeki actor in Tsubouchi Shōyō’s Bungei Kyōkai [Literary Arts Society], later achieving popularity in performances with the Geijutsu-za [Art Theater], appearing opposite Matsui Sumako, and with the Kindaigeki Kyōkai [Modern Drama Society]. He believed that shingeki was too elitist and other forms theaters too commercial and lowbrow. Sawada wanted to create theater that would appeal to the urban masses but that was also not crassly commercialized.
Shinpa
Authors: Jortner David
Published: September 2018

Shinpa, the shortened version of the Japanese word shinpageki, or new school drama, was an early Japanese attempt at reforming the theater along modernist lines. The plays featured flamboyant kabuki performance styles and modern realistic dialog; they were a mélange of plays from domestic dramas, to documentary theater to the early Japanese adaptations of Shakespeare.

Shinpa dramas were generally based on stories of contemporary domestic life instead of historical dramas. Its plays often exploited the traditional kabuki devices of social obligations conflicting with love or other emotions (giri vs. ninjō). Initially, plays were composed by company actors and modified during performance runs. Many shinpa playwrights were essentially adapters who took serialized fiction novels and rewrote them for the stage. Shinpa also staged adaptations of Western drama including works of Shakespeare, Maeterlinck, and Sardou. These plays were often heavily adapted attempts at interweaving classical Japanese performance forms with Western texts. Other authors focused on the creation of gendaigeki [contemporary plays], which were about domestic problems among Japan’s growing middle class.
Soganoya, Gorō (1877–1948)
Authors: Fukushima Yoshiko
Published: September 2018

Soganoya, Gorō was a Japanese actor, director and playwright who created of a new genre of modern comedy called kigeki (also shinkigeki). He wrote around 1,000 short comedies under the pen name Ikkai Gyojin. His comedy style was inspired by humor as well as the satirical and ironical laughter of Western comedy such as that of Moliére. Many of his works are still performed by the comedy troupe, Shōchiku Shinkigeki. His signature pieces include The Flower of the Luffa (1917) and Cherry Trees in Leaf (1933).

Soganoya became a student of the kabuki actor Nakamura Sangorō in 1892 and made his stage debut as the utility actor Nakamura Sannosuke at Osaka’s Naniwaza in 1893. In 1902 he met Nakamura Tokizo’s student, Nakamura Jidai (1869–1925) at the traveling kabuki troupe Osaka’s Fukuiza. In 1903, using their new names, Sannosuke as Gorō and Jidai as Jūrō, they formed Soganoya Brothers Troupe in order to create new comedy to replace the old style of comedy called niwaka which had been established by Tsuruya Danjurō in Osaka. Their debut in 1904 at Yūokaza in Itami near Osaka was a failure, but their first success came with Funny Kanjinchō acted for the traveling kabuki troupe, Nakamura Fukuen Ichiza in Wakayama, in which Gorō acted the role of Benkei and Jūrō Togashi.
Williams, Tennessee (1911–1983)
Authors: Hooper Michael S. D.
Published: September 2018

At the height of his powers, in the 1940s and 1950s, Tennessee Williams not only courted the commercial success afforded by Broadway, but also sought to develop his own modernist aesthetic: an approach to all aspects of dramatic staging that strived to capture the truth of experience more faithfully than naturalism alone. He termed this his "plastic theater," embodying as it did the creative malleability normally afforded art and architecture.

Born in Columbus, Mississippi, Thomas Lanier Williams attended the University of Missouri and Washington University in St. Louis before being forced to work briefly in the shoe factory where his father had become a manager during the Depression. This humbling experience helped to shape a social vision—championing the individual against the might of capitalist oppression—and to intensify the romantic appeal of the bohemian artist. In part, it was this appeal that prompted Williams to adopt the name "Tennessee" in 1938.
Anand, Mulk Raj (1905–2004)
Authors: Pillai Sharon
Published: September 2018

Mulk Raj Anand, together with Raja Rao and R. K. Narayan, made up a distinguished trio in the vanguard of twentieth-century Indian writing in English. His roles as essayist, short story writer, playwright, art critic, food critic, editor, activist, and social commentator over a near century-long life attest to his versatile genius and varied interests. Today, however, Anand is most famous for his talent as a novelist whose commitment to artistic verisimilitude and social justice compellingly redrew the ambit of literary representation in India to include marginalized subjectivities and subaltern realities.

Mulk Raj Anand was born to a provincial Kshatriya Punjabi family in Peshawar. Anand’s formative years were spent in the cantonments of Nowshera and Mian Mir because his father, Lal Chand, was a subordinate functionary in the colonial army. During his years at Khalsa College in Amritsar, Anand became acquainted with the poet Mohammad Iqbal. He was also briefly involved in anti-colonial activities. Faced with familial strife and emotional tangles, Anand — with Iqbal’s encouragement — set sail to do his Ph.D. in England in 1925. He won a scholarship to University College, London, where he worked on a dissertation on British philosophy, and was awarded a doctorate in 1929.
Gould, Glenn (1932–1982)
Authors: Beard Phillip
Published: September 2018

Glenn Gould was a twentieth-century pianist born in Toronto in 1932. Among his major influences were the recordings of Artur Schnabel (1882–1951), who specialized in Beethoven’s sonatas, and Gould’s Toronto Conservatory teacher Alberto Guerrero (1886–1959). From Schnabel, Gould learned idiosyncratic rubato (rhythmic flexibility, to the point of taking liberties with scored tempi) and from Guerrero he learned an uncanny percussive control of his fingers at the piano keyboard. Gould’s playing had a subtle and impressive dynamic range. His playing became famous for its quirky willfulness, but as central to his style is a delicate technique that at times seemed to strike piano keys with little subjective coloration.
Mishima, Yukio (1925–1970)
Authors: Jortner David
Published: September 2018

Mishima Yukio is the pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka. He was an acclaimed novelist, playwright, poet, and essayist. He was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature during the post-war era. His work explores issues of sexuality, power, love, and death through a combination of classical and modern Japanese aesthetics and ideas.

Mishima was born in Tokyo in 1925 to a well-off family; his grandmother was a descendant of Japanese royalty and spent much time with Mishima, going as far as to raise him herself until the age of twelve years. Upon his return to his family he began to read both Western and Japanese authors voraciously, and to write short stories and waka poetry. Mishima was mistakenly declared unfit for military service during World War II and graduated from Tokyo University in 1947. Through his father’s connections he got a job in the finance industry but soon left it to concentrate on writing.

Mishima had several relationships with both men and women; he married Sugiyama Yoko in 1958 and fathered two children with her. In 1955 Mishima took up private weight training; he was to remain an avid bodybuilder for the remainder of his life. In 1968 Mishima formed the Tate-no-kai [Shield Society], a paramilitary group of young men who studied martial arts and military tactics with him.
Auteur Theory, The
Authors: Hartzheim Bryan Hikari
Published: September 2018

The auteur theory is a way of critically analyzing a film or corpus of films through viewing its director as the film’s author and principal creative influence. First articulated in post-war France by film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, it viewed the director as the primary individual responsible for creating a valuable film. Auteurs, in the view of the Cahiers writers, could influence multiple aspects of the filmmaking process through the force of their personalities. The theory was expanded upon by British film critics at Movie magazine, as well as by the American film critic Andrew Sarris, who first used the term "auteur theory" to describe a system of categorizing the films of great authors versus the films of craftsmen or scenarists. The auteur theory was further developed by structural film criticism and feminist film theory, but was challenged in several ways, particularly by a new wave of post-structural film critics at Cahiers du cinéma. Though it has met with much controversy since its initial formulation, it reverberates to the present day as a method of analyzing films and their value through their directors.
The Birth of a Nation
Authors: Harley Jeremy
Published: September 2018

One of the most watched and debated American films in history, The Birth of a Nation is a 1915 silent film by D. W. Griffith known equally for its cinematic innovation and the controversy it caused. The story is based on written works by Thomas Dixon Jr., which aimed to refute the preeminent narrative on race at the time: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Opening in the pre-Civil War era and continuing through Reconstruction, The Birth of a Nation depicts the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic group indispensible in protecting white society from black infiltration. Over three hours long and with a budget of $100,000, its length and budget significantly exceeded any previous American film. Groundbreaking not only in scope and visual technique, it was the first film to be distributed with a uniquely compiled score. Modernist filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin cited Griffith as having influenced their montage technique (Baldwin 2002: 65), although Eisenstein decried the idea of forgiving the film’s racism in light of its cinematic value (Platt 1992: 81).
Clair, René (1898–1981)
Authors: Leskosky Richard J.
Published: September 2018

Filmmaker, novelist, and critic René Clair (original name René-Lucien Chomette) was one of the foremost French film directors of the 1920s and 1930s. His first film, Paris qui dort [The Crazy Ray] (1923) combined Surrealism and science fiction and generated images of a Paris frozen in time. His second, Entr’acte (1924), created to be shown between the acts of Francis Picabia’s dadaist ballet Relache, became the epitome of dadaist film with its innovative comedy and random images. His lyrical Eiffel Tower documentary, La Tour [The Tower] (1928), presents an impressionistic montage of the structure’s details. Clair’s silent features, such as Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie [An Italian Straw Hat] (1927), achieved international renown, and he dominated the early sound period with Sous les toits de Paris [Under the Roofs of Paris] (1930) and A nous la liberté (1931). The latter’s sophisticated use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound demonstrated a profound mastery of the new technology. Its Surrealism-tinged take on capitalism arguably influenced sections of Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). A recurring Clair theme concerns his protagonist achieving wealth and then losing it but nonetheless (re)gaining happiness. Clair’s career continued with comedies and fantasies in England and America and a postwar return to France, but his critical standing never regained its 1930s’ heights, partly due to the biases of Nouvelle vague [French New Wave] critics.
Daney, Serge (1944–1992)
Authors: Anderson Joel Neville
Published: September 2018

Serge Daney was regarded as one of the greatest film critics in French intellectual culture. For Jean-Luc Godard, his untimely demise signalled the end of criticism as Godard knew it (Godard and Ishaghpour 2005: 9). Popularly hailed as heir to André Bazin, Daney began writing for the influential film magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 1964, observing a transition from auteurism to a structuralist examination of the ideological functions of cinema, semiotics, and psychoanalysis. Daney served as editor-in-chief of Cahiers with Serge Toubiana from 1974, ushering in a return to cinephilia, before moving to the leftist daily newspaper Libération in 1981. Daney’s popularity in North America grew as he wrote about televised feature films, commercials, and news coverage of the Gulf War. In regular intellectual exchanges with Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Roland Barthes, Daney wrote about cinema autobiographically, gay life, and his world travels, while lyrically analyzing a transition from modern cinema to postmodern media. Daney’s ethic of the image described a mode of seeing that was resistant to a dominant visuality, which encouraged reading procedures of technological, political, or military power close to Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle. He founded the interdisciplinary quarterly Trafic in 1991, and died of AIDS-related causes the following year.
Fantômas
Authors: Harley Jeremy
Published: September 2018

The first and most famous of many films based on the eponymous villain created by writers Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, the silent crime serial Fantômas (1913) is considered to be one of the greatest and most influential works of French film director Louis Feuillade. In Fantômas, Feuillade first experimented on a large scale with techniques that would become staples of various film genres, particularly the thriller, and in a foreshadowing of modern studio wars, both Pathe and Gaumont fought for the rights to develop Fantômas into a movie (Abel 1998: 373). The character of Fantômas served as an inspiration for writer Norbert Jacques’ master criminal, Dr. Mabuse. Furthermore, modernist director Fritz Lang’s films, including his adaptations of Jacques’ work, seem to bear the mark of Feuillade’s realist fantasies (for example the striking similarity between the opening sequence of Lang’s 1922 Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler [Dr. Mabuse the Gambler] and that of Fantômas), although there is no definitive evidence that Lang himself acknowledged such a debt. Surrealists too were fascinated by the character, in particular René Magritte, who made direct studies of Feuillade’s film (Walz 2000: 71).