Somatic attunement/self-cultivation: Japanese immigration and the performing arts

Abstract

Contemporary theorists, Schechner, Fisher-Lichte, Bharucha, Holledge and Tompkins and others, have written extensively on the global discourse of intercultural performance and its attempt to intermingle such cultural traditions as the textual borrowing of Peter Brook’s Mahabharata or Tadashi Suzuki’s Trojan Women, the integration of physical styles of Ariane Mnouchkine and the conscious cultural negotiations of such productions as Ong Seng’s Masterkey, a collaboration between Japanese and Australian performers. While these theorists acknowledge that the performer’s body is an integral part of intercultural performance, the majority of their discussion has centered on materialist readings of colonialism, race, gender, authenticity, cultural ownership, and the political empowerment of post-colonial subjects. At the margins of their discussion has been the subjective knowledge or phenomenological experience of the ethnic communities, in some cases immigrant communities, whose expertise, directly or indirectly, contributes to the style of performance. This essay examines the role of Japanese Americans, as immigrants and citizens, in the evolution of cultural life and performance training in the United States.