Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan considers the artists and events in 1960s Japan. In response to the social upheavals of the 1960s, it shows how art interacted with society in unique and transformational ways, nterweaving arguments about the critical role of performance as an artistic medium and as a social dramaturgy.

"Beginning in 1993 with Artaud: Blows and Bombs, Stephen Barber has quietly, independently forged one of the most singular and enriching bodies of work in contemporary writing." -David Peace Over the three decades since 1990, Stephen Barber has written many essays and experimental writings around film and digital arts. For the first time, this collection in two parts assembles all of those writings, many otherwise unavailable, over seventy in all. Many of those writings explore unknown elements of vital bodies of work that remain inspirational for contemporary art, writing and film. Others interrogate the transmutations of cities - especially those of Europe and of Japan - across those three decades, anatomizing their urban futures. These writings are often residues from, or accompaniments to, Stephen Barber’s thirty books, short writings which possess their own distinctive and accumulating presence, and can display the interrogative resilience to explore preoccupations with greater intensity and pointedness than an entire book. THE RESIDUES, PART TWO collects 30 writings on subjects including JG Ballard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Donald Richie, and much more.

This book investigates the practices of reconstructing and representing performance art and their power to shape this art form and our understanding of it. Performance art emerged internationally between the 1960s and 1970s crossing disciplinary boundaries between performing arts and visual arts. Because of the challenge it posed to the ontologies and paradigms of these fields, performance art has since stimulated an ongoing debate on the most appropriate means to document, preserve and display it. Tancredi Gusman brings together international scholars from different disciplinary fields to examine methods, media, and approaches by which this art form has been represented and (re)activated over time and its transnational history reconstructed. Through contributions and case studies spanning various countries, regions and artistic fields, the authors outline an innovative theoretical-methodological framework for capturing the processes and strategies for transmitting the tangible and intangible heritage of performance art. This book will be of great appeal to students, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies as well as Visual Arts and Art History, who have an interest in performance art, its history and presence in the contemporary artistic and cultural landscape.

The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance provides a comprehensive introduction to and analysis of the global art form butoh. Originating in Japan in the 1960s, butoh was a major innovation in twentieth century dance and performance, and it continues to shape-shift around the world. Taking inspiration from the Japanese avant-garde, Surrealism, Happenings, and authors such as Genet and Artaud, its influence can be seen throughout contemporary performing arts, music, and visual art practices. This Companion places the form in historical context, documents its development in Japan and its spread around the world, and brings together the theory and the practice of this compelling dance. The interdisciplinarity evident in the volume reflects the depth and the breadth of butoh, and the editors bring specially commissioned essays by leading scholars and dancers together with translations of important early texts.

This book explores the politics of anti-nuclear activism in Tokyo after the Fukushima nuclear disaster of March 2011. Analyzing the protests in the context of a longer history of citizen activism in Tokyo, it also situates the movement within the framework of a global struggle for democracy, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. By examining the anti-nuclear movement at both urban and transnational scales, the book also reveals the complex geography of today’s globally connected social movements. It emphasizes the contestation of urban space by anti-nuclear activists in Tokyo and the weaving together of urban and cyber space in their praxis. By focusing on the cultural life of the movement—from its characteristic demonstration style to its blogs, zines and pamphlets—this book communicates activists’ voices in their own words. Based on excellent ethnographic research, it concludes that the anti-nuclear protests in Tokyo after the Fukushima disaster have redefined social movement politics for a new era. Providing an analysis of a unique period in Japan’s contemporary urban history from the perspective of eyewitness observations, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese Politics, Sociology and Japanese Studies in general.

The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art offers a comprehensive guide to the major issues and interdisciplinary debates concerning performance in art contexts that have developed over the last decade. It understands performance art as an institutional, cultural, and economic phenomenon rather than as a label or object. Following the ever-increasing institutionalization and mainstreaming of performance, the book's chapters identify a marked change in the economies and labor practices surrounding performance art, and explore how this development is reflective of capitalist approaches to art and event production. Embracing what we perceive to be the 'oxymoronic status' of performance art-where it is simultaneously precarious and highly profitable-the essays in this book map the myriad gestures and radical possibilities of this extreme contradiction. This Companion adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to present performance art's legacies and its current practices. It brings together specially commissioned essays from leading innovative scholars from a wide range of approaches including art history, visual and performance studies, dance and theatre scholarship in order to provide a comprehensive and multifocal overview of the emerging research trends and methodologies devoted to performance art.

Japanese Robot Culture examines social robots in Japan, those in public, domestic, and artistic contexts. Unlike other studies, this book sees the robot in relation to Japanese popular culture, and argues that the Japanese ‘affinity’ for robots is the outcome of a complex loop of representation and social expectation in the context of Japan’s continuing struggle with modernity. Considering Japanese robot culture from the critical perspectives afforded by theatre and performance studies, this book is concerned with representations of robots and their inclusion in social and cultural contexts, which science and engineering studies do not address. The robot as a performing object generates meaning in staged events and situations that make sense for its Japanese observers and participants. This book examines how specific modes of encounter with robots in carefully constructed mises en scène can trigger reflexive, culturally specific, and often ideologically-inflected responses.