May 8, 2025/ Time to be announced

UCLA Faculty Club, Morrison Room

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.

Fantasy is a strategy—of individual survival, but also of historiography, especially when the archive holds silences, mis-directions, and fabrication. Fantasies of Ito Michio narrates the transnational career of Japanese modern dancer Ito Michio as a story of fantasy-making, a strategy by which Ito made himself into an international success and maintained a sense of self-continuity across experiences of war, racialization, and imperialism. This talk provides an overview of the book, and offers a discussion of what performance research might look like when a scholar is faced not with archival paucity or erasure, but rather, an abundance—of fiction, if not fact.

Tara Rodman is an assistant professor in the Drama department at UC Irvine. A recipient of fellowships from the NEH-JUSFC, the Fulbright, and the Nippon Foundation, her research appears in Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (eds. Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario), and Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia (U Mich; eds. Katherine Mezur and Emily Wilcox). Her book, Fantasies of Ito Michio (University of Michigan Press, 2024), works at the intersection of dance and performance studies, and of Japanese and Asian American studies, to examine the career of the modern dancer and choreographer Itō Michio.

Sponsor(s): Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, Asian Languages & Cultures