BARD COLLEGE TO HOST JAPANESE CLASSICAL THEATER LECTURE SERIES DURING SPRING SEMESTER
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—On Tuesday, February 24, Bard College's Asian Studies Program, Theater Program, and Bard in China will present "Japanese Noh Drama in Performance," a lecture and demonstration by New York University professor Carol Martin. The lecture is the second in the Japanese Classical Theater Lectures Series, sponsored by Bard this spring. Martin's lecture takes place at 1:30 p.m. in Theater Studio of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. The lecture and series, supported by the Freeman Undergraduate Asian Studies Initiative, are free and open to the public.
The dramatic and performative structures of Japanese noh are markedly different from those of conventional western plays and performance. Using examples from the plays Kiyotsune by Zeami and Sumidagawa by Juro Motomasa, professor Martin will discuss some of Zeami's key aesthetic ideas—beauty, imitation, hana, yugen and perfect fluency—and compare them to Aristotle's notion of beauty, imitation, catharsis, and reversal and recognition.
Martin is the author of Brecht Sourcebook; A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre: On and Beyond the Stage; and Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture of the 1920s and 1930s. Her essays and interviews have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including the New York Times, and have been translated into French, Polish, Chinese, and Italian. She has lectured in Singapore, Shanghai, Japan, and Germany, and has been a
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participant at Eugenio Barba’s International School of Theatre Anthropology. Martin has served as an academic specialist on the American History channel and BBC radio. She has received fellowships and awards from the Fulbright Program, National Endowment for the Humanities, Mellon Foundation, Cornell University; and the New York University Humanities Council.
The lecture series will continue March 2 with "Finding Inspiration in the Beauty of Bunraku Puppet Theater," by puppet artist Basil Twist; March 9 with "Kyogen: Classical Comedy and Contemporary Creativity," by Jonah Salz of Ryukoku University; and March 16 with "Bringing the Subject to the Stage in Medieval Japan," by Princeton University professor Thomas Hare. All lectures take place at 1:30 p.m. in Studio North of the Richard B. Fisher Center of the Performing Arts on the Bard College campus.
For more information, please call professor Chiori Miyagawa at 845-758-7938.
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(2.11.04)