March 5, 2024/ 4:00 PM

UCLA Faculty Club, Morrison Room

Staging Japan Lecture Series

Staging Japan: A Lecture Series is funded by a new endowment for Japanese Theatre and Related Arts and Culture, created by Emerita Professor of Theatre Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei.

Ichihara Satoko burst on the Japanese theatre scene in 2011, winning the Aichi Arts Foundation Drama Award for her play Insects (Mushi). In 2019, she won the Kishida Kunio Prize, Japan’s top award for a playwright, for The Bacchae: Holstein Milk Cows, a delirious revisioning of Euripides’ play, featuring artificial insemination, bestiality, threesomes in a “happening bar” (sex club), and a half-human, half-cow “Centaur” that is a stand-in for Dionysus. Ichihara’s plays are relentless, and often very funny, excavations of the Japanese family, gender, sexual and species relations. My illustrated presentation will review a few of her most recent plays, focusing on The Bacchae, Madama Butterfly (2021), and Yorobōshi: The Weakling (2023).

Cody Poulton is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, Canada, specializing in Japanese performance, and currently serves as Director of the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies. He is author of Spirits of Another Sort: The Plays of Izumi Kyōka (2001) and A Beggar's Art: Scripting Modernity in Japan, 1900-1930 (2010). He is also chief editor and translator of Citizens of Tokyo: Six Plays by Oriza Hirata (2018), co-editor of The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama (2014) and Okada Toshiki and Japanese Theatre (2021), and contributing editor to The Cambridge History of Japanese Theatre (2016).

Sponsor(s): UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, Asian Languages & Cultures