Current Issue
Image Caption: Yuriko Doi, founder of San Francisco's Theatre of Yugen, demonstrating movement from a kyōgen play, Uri Nusubito [The Melon Thief]. Photo credit: Robert Isaacs/Theatre of Yugen (used by permission).
Issue Editors: Gretchen Jude and Lynette Hunter
This special issue traces the profound shifts in “Western” performance practices that occur when engagement with works from “the East” breaks down previous distinctions and generates new priorities and frameworks for understanding. In their focus on transcultural and intermodal ways of knowing, the scholar-practitioners contributing to the issue actively engage with Japanese performance traditions. Their articles offer critical perspectives on performance theory informed by ethnographic, anthropological, and historical methodologies, using approaches that open up the body as a site of profound importance for enacting transcultural understanding.