Baby-Q and the Bio-Politics of Japanese Choreography in the Wake of Butoh

Baby-Q and the Bio-Politics of Japanese Choreography in the Wake of Butoh

Lecture by Reginald Jackson, Associate Professor, University of Chicago; Response by Paige McGinley, Assistant Professor of Theater Studies and American Studies, Yale University

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm
Room 208, Whitney Humanities Center See map
53 Wall Street
New Haven, CT 6510

Professor Jackson will consider the work of Baby-Q in relation to broader choreographic trends in Japanese dance since the advent of Butoh in the 1960s. How should we understand the work of Japanese dance in the 21st century, particularly with regard to the range of postures and political investments it displays? What are the stakes of Japanese dance today? And finally: How might Baby-Q’s embodied engagement with the technological debris and stimuli of the current moment extend or interrupt the critiques of capitalist values advanced by Butoh’s politics of movement? Reginald Jackson is an Assistant Professor of Theater Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Having earned his Ph.D. from the department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University in 2007, he is currently completing revisions for his book manuscript, “Midare Performance and the Ethics of Decomposition,” which examines tropes of degenerescence in relation to conceptions of virtuosity and the ethics of representation in medieval Japanese dance-drama and calligraphy. Jackson has interpreted for professional Noh actors as part of the Kyoto Art Center’s Traditional Theater Training Program, and from 2005-2006 served as a Fulbright Research Fellow at the Nogami Memorial Institute for Noh Drama Research in Tokyo. He teaches courses on Japanese theater, literature, performance analysis, and critical theory.

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Co-sponsored by Yale Theater Studies Program and the Whitney Humanities Center
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Japan