By Sarah Phan
When scholars and patrons of the arts think of Japan and Japanese theater, it is major cities such as Tokyo or even Kyoto that come to mind. But recently, UC Santa Barbara Theater and Dance Department professor Jessica Nakamura, who is also affiliated faculty in the Asian American Studies department, took steps to change that.
Nakamura and UCSB hosted the Critical Intervention Lab III Conference: “Decentering Japanese Performance” last summer. During this scholarly conference, writers presented academic papers on research topics discussing the theme of decentering Japanese performance.
In a recent interview, Nakamura broke down the challenge of decentralization that Japanese theater faces and the outcome of her lab event.
UCSB Theater and Dance professor Jessica Nakamura recently gave an interview about an event she hosted, “The Critical Intervention Lab III Conference: ‘Decentering Japanese Performance.’
Q: How did you contribute to the Critical Intervention Lab III Conference?
A: I was the organizer for the lab. It was also part of a larger grant from the Japan Foundation. For the lab itself, I decided on the theme [decentering Japanese performance] and invited all of the scholars. I did a schedule of putting different topics and different papers together and putting them in different conversations with each other. I also organized some discussion sections in which we discussed some questions of decentering and Japanese performance, where we might see it in different places. This was part of a three-year institutional project support grant from the Japanese Foundation. The principal investigator, Sabine Frühstück, [a professor in East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies] and I were the co-principal investigators on that grant.
Q: How did decentralization emerge as the focus for this conference?
A: We tend to think about Japan’s urban centers in particular Tokyo and Kyoto when we study Japanese theater. I study contemporary Japanese performance and I just tend to go to the city [Tokyo] and do my research there. I wanted to think about where other theaters and dances are happening in Japan. But then beyond Japan, like when we had the Japanese diaspora. What does that mean to think about Japanese performance that takes place outside Japan? Those types of questions of decentering allowed the scholars to think about where Japanese performance might spread to. For instance, we had a scholar looking at a Japanese dancer inspired by Japanese performance forms. We had a scholar thinking about theater festivals in Europe and all of the Japanese directors. Thinking about Japanese performance in different locations.
Q: You research representations of Japanese theater in the 20th and 21st centuries, including Western realism from the early 1900s till now. Do you plan to pursue future research that relates to this lab, and expand the topic of decentralization?
A: Since this lab, I have done some work on a Japanese artist who works more transnationally. He was Japanese and was born in Peru. His family moved him back to Japan when he was six months old. He would go back and forth to visit his family who was still in Peru as well as Argentina. He’s done these shows in which he talks about his family history, he talks about reconnecting with his family members. I did research on him so I think having these conversations in this lab has been very helpful in thinking about this artist, thinking about what his work is doing.
Sarah Phan is a third-year communication major at UC Santa Barbara. She conducted this interview for her class, Digital Journalism.