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内容記述 |
In this fourth paper of my ongoing research project, I try to set up the basic design for a detailed analysis/interpretation of a theatre performance held in 1999, Tokyo : the theatre company Ku' Nauka's Princess Medea, a contemporary rendition of the Euripidean tragedy. In chapter 1, I represent my own review on the performance. Now I re-examine this review in the light of the question : Is this performance pertinent as an object of the research project? The result is positive, because the mise en scene is structured with three-layered frameworks, of which the outer framework, seemingly the contemporary Japan, tends to break into the middle framework that suggests the Japanese Colonization of Korea from the late Meiji era to the end of the Second World War, thus symbolizing the theme of historical remembering. In this middle framework, a dozen of Japanese men, all jurists, entertain themselves performing Medea as a kind of amateur Bunraku puppet theatre at the riverside of Sumida, where all kinds of performing arts had prospered since the feudalistic Edo Japan. But in stead of puppets, living women are forced to move as theatrical characters according to the lines that are spoken aloud by the jurists, and the very woman who should "act" as Medea is seemingly a Korean person. The inner framework presents the tragedy of Medea itself with "slight" difference from the Greek original. In such a pilot analysis like this, however, there remain as many unsolved problems as further investigations are surely needed. In chapter 2, I argue that a methodologically more precise analysis should be the right way to know the true meaning of the performance, although such a methodology has been rather neglected by theatre scholars in Japan. As a preparation for my own undertaking the analysis which should appear in the subsequent paper of my project, I introduce here a guidance into this methodology on the basis of certain studies by mainly German theorists as Erika Fischer=Lichte, Franz Wille, Guido HiB and Christopher Balme. The core of the argumentation is that we should "read" a performance as a theatrical "text" consisting of various signs. Then, an analysis of a performance means an interpretation of this "text", analogical to that of a work of literature. Thus the structuralistic literature theory of Yuri Lotmann as well as the literature hermeneutics influenced by Hans=Georg Gadamer are available for our discussion. Furthermore, an intertextual approach should be useful, too, because our performance reminds us of another performance in the Japanese theatre scene in the early 1970's. Also, some considerations on the treatment of video as specific material of theatre research are included. |
KJ00004684418.pdf (1.5 MB)
