March 6, 2024/ 4:00 PM

UCLA Royce Hall, 243

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.

Okada Toshiki (born 1972) won the 49th Kishida Kunio Award in 2005 for Five Days in March and, in 2021, the 72nd Yomiuri Literature Prize for Unrequited Ghosts and Monsters: Zaha, Tsuruga. A poet of Japan’s precariat, the so-called “lost generation” left over from the burst of Japan’s economic bubble in the early 1990s, since the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11, 2011, Okada’s work has explored a world haunted by spirits of the dead, of entities that are not even human, in an environmental theatre that is increasingly influenced by the dramaturgy of noh. Poulton will focus on his Unrequited Ghosts and Monsters, which features two politically inspired plays, Zaha, featuring the ghost of the dead Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid, and Tsuruga, about the specter of Japan’s nuclear energy policy. What draws contemporary artists like Okada to this classical form?

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