National Arts Centre Research Articles

Community-based music making and music-based community making: The case of the We Are All Musicians (waam) project

In this essay, percussionist and community arts worker Jesse Stewart discusses his work in the field of participatory creative music through We Are All Musicians ( waam ), an organization and ongoing research-creation project he started in 2012. waam is dedicated to making music as broadly accessible as possible, particularly among communities that have experienced barriers to making music, notably children and adults living in low-income situations, individuals with disabilities of various kinds, and the elderly. Stewart discusses several participatory creative projects that have resulted from partnerships between waam and community organizations including Regina Street Alternative School (formerly Regina Street Public School) in Ottawa; Being Studio (formerly H’Art of Ottawa); the Alzheimer’s Society of Ottawa, Artswell, the Bruyère Continuing Care Centre in Ottawa, and the National Arts Centre. He goes on to discuss several interactive music/sound installations that he has set up in public spaces to facilitate interactive improvisatory musical interaction across various forms of difference. The essay concludes with a discussion of some waam initiatives that took place online during the covid-19 pandemic, using networked improvisation to facilitate musical interaction and community formation across both difference and distance.

Connecting Climate Change and Canadian Theatre: Reflecting on the Impact of the NAC’s Climate Cycle

The arts have a unique way of affecting the way that people feel about environmental issues in ways that other forms of communication cannot. The National Arts Centre (NAC) Climate Cycle was a program that the NAC English Theatre developed as a response to the escalating climate crisis to engage artists deeply in discussions on climate change and to grapple with how the performing arts can respond. It took place over two meetings: the Summit in Banff in 2019, which was in person, and the Green Rooms in 2020, which was online. To answer our main question of how participating in these events impacted artists’ behaviour and professional practices, we engaged with the participants through a series of surveys and in-depth interviews. Based on the results, we found that artists were impacted in three main ways: (1) instilling a sense of community among the participants; (2) encouraging the participants to continue their learning; and (3) enacting strategies to ‘green’ their practices, such as reducing touring and using alternative materials in set design. This project was helpful in understanding how the Cycle impacted artists, but it also contributed to our overall understanding of what meaningful engagement with artists on environmental topics looks like. This project was first completed as part of an undergraduate thesis in May 2021. In this most recent article, we reflect on what this research means a year later.

HEADLESS MUSICAL SEEDS AND GESTURES WITH ADJECTIVES: AN INTERVIEW WITH KEIKO DEVAUX

AbstractKeiko Devaux (b. 1982) is a Canadian composer, originally from British Columbia, who now lives in Montréal. She began her musical career in piano-performance studies as well as composing, touring and recording several albums in independent rock bands. Her concert music is widely performed throughout Canada and Europe. From 2016–18, Keiko was the composer in residence of Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne. She joined Salvatore Sciarrino's masterclasses at L'Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy, between the years 2017 and 2019. Keiko was commissioned by music@villaromana festival, Florence, to create Echoic Memories. She is the inaugural winner of the Azrieli Commission for Canadian Music (2020) and is also engaged in a two-year residency as a Carrefour composer with the National Arts Centre Orchestra (2020–22). This interview was conducted over Zoom in late spring 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

#CanadaPerforms

Kevin Chan is Director of Public Policy, Canada for Facebook. In this piece, he describes the origins of the #CanadaPerforms series, a partnership between Facebook Canada and the National Arts Centre that presented over seven hundred livestreamed musical performances by Canadian musicians during the pandemic.

A Sonic Journey with Alex Bulmer

Alex Bulmer is a blind multidisciplinary artist who has worked extensively in Canada and the United Kingdom. Aside from her work as an actor, musician, video artist, and playwright, Alex is known for her work in disability arts and advocacy. Recently, she has been involved in curating formative disability arts events, including The Republic of Inclusion (2015) with the National Arts Centre and Cripping the Arts (2019) at Harbourfront Centre. In the following conversation, we explore the genesis of her connection to sound and trace the trajectory of her sound-based performance work in music, film, theatre, and experimental performance. We also discuss Alex’s unique perspective on the intimate nature of listening, her distinction between noise and sound, and her connection to the human voice.

Ohaka Mairi

Ohaka Mairi Jonathan Levi (bio) Merton was looking through the restaurant window facing onto Icho Namiki-dori, when the woman in the backless blouse walked by. Everyone inside the Shake Shack, and of course those sitting outside at picnic tables under the heat lamps, was dressed in something that respected the sudden drop in temperature. Overnight, the giant ginkgo trees that drew the crowds to the avenue had lost the last of their leaves. The crowds who had photographed their babies during the month of November, or had propped their miniature schnauzers and dachshunds on the tops of park benches or overturned picnic baskets to capture the perfect golden filter of sun and falling leaves, had disappeared for other seasonal obsessions. It was odd to look out the window on the first day of December and see a woman with a backless blouse, a woman of another season. She was walking across a tennis court—one of the dozen that stretched from the restaurant along Icho Namiki-dori all the way to the baseball stadium. The courts were empty except for a worker riding a power roller, pressing down the clay or the grass or [End Page 491] whatever they used—Merton wasn't one of those tennis-obsessed violinists like Nathan Milstein or Isaac Stern who believed that hitting a ball strengthened his bow hand. He was a pessimist, born in a time of comfort, who believed that he only had a few good years of concerts left in him. The woman was walking slowly, in the opposite direction from the power roller. She was slim, dressed in woolen slacks, tweed maybe, more appropriate to the season than her blouse. She wore sensible heels. Her hair was short, in a straight bowl haircut, but lightened in a way that approximated the gold of the leaves, although maybe it was the reflection of the ginkgo that confused him. From the back, or more exactly three-quarter view that Merton had through the window of the Shake Shack, he couldn't be sure if she was Japanese or more European. He'd just come from The National Art Center. A German artist was exhibiting portraits made from the cremated ashes—the cremains—of her dead clients who had commissioned the work when mortality had only been an intimation. It was an unusual subject for a museum exhibition. But over a thirty-year career, playing concertos with orchestras, recitals with pianists, and odd performances with dancers, actors, poets, and visual artists, Merton had seen odder. He had learned that collaboration meant coexistence, not intersection, and not always understanding. Merton had been asked to perform at the opening of AshArt. German music, of course, two Bach violin sonatas. The venue was the twisted cavern of the museum, where the echoes were sufficiently baroque. And so he had stood from ten to twelve that morning in the center of the hall, crafting a screen of harmony, separating himself from the ashes, and playing to the light. The director of the museum had offered Merton a ride back to the apartment on Maisen-dori he always rented when he came to Tokyo, a concrete block that felt as [End Page 492] anonymous as the grave. But after two hours surrounded by dust, Merton wanted air. His violin case was well insulated. He decided to walk back through Aoyama Cemetery. Merton had never thought about his own endgame. Although his kids were grown and he was into the phase of his life where he was teaching as much as performing, his parents were both still above ground. Discussions of cremation versus burial involved the bodies of other people, not his own. His father was gung ho for burning and had instructed Merton to pour his ashes into the empty Swedish cannon cartridge he'd received on the occasion of one of his dozen honorary degrees. His mother had avoided the subject until she fell and broke her leg. Now, every other email included a link to a green cemetery up the Hudson, or the phone number of the forsaken corner of Brooklyn where her own mother had lain unvisited for the past fifty years. Walking through...

Performance, Climate, and Critical Art

Performance, Climate, and Critical Art VK Preston (bio) My essay for the print edition of Theatre Journal (72.2, June 2020), "Queer and Indigenous Art: Performing Ice Times in Climate Crisis," engages with performance and video work from the Arctic that addresses climate warming. It began with my experience as an audience member at Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools during its opening run in the heart of Toronto's queer neighborhood in 2017. The production at Buddies in Bad Times installed itself in my reflection on contemporary and cultural life as an urgent and necessary performance. Its dramaturgy makes often uneasy contributions to engagement with epistemic gaps and rifts between Indigenous and settler communities, decolonization movements, histories, and experiences of climate crises. The work is part of a new wave of performance by Inuit artists and settler artistic collaborators that bring renewed attention to colonization and history, climate change, and sovereignty activism. For me, Kiinalik opened up a new sense of artists working in coalitional, dramaturgical conversation. This philosophy of approach animates videos by the Isuma Collective, who created new work for the 2019 Venice Biennale on climate change and extractivism in the north. So too collaborations, such as those among dance and interdisciplinary artist Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Evalyn Parry, Cris Derksen, Jamie Griffiths, Christine Tootoo, and renowned singer and novelist Tanya Tagaq, foregrounding cultural resurgence as well as ongoing extraction and colonization in the north. The artists' sharp contemporary relevance is amplified in these works' engagements with asymmetries of the north and south (here in reference to the far north and Arctic circle) with contemporary realization that global warming is happening far more quickly in the far north than in the south below the 60th parallel. This journey took me to performances in both my home neighborhood in Toronto and in the northernmost capital city in the world, Iqaluit, Nunavut (fig. 1). Created by Parry, Laakkuluk, Erin Brubacher, and Elysha Poirier, with Derksen, Kiinalik continues to tour at the time of writing, most recently appearing in the inaugural season of the National Arts Centre's Indigenous Theatre (2019–20), which identifies itself [End Page E-7] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Poster at the Nunatta Sunakkutaangit Museum advertising Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools. Pictured: Evalyn Parry and Laakuluk Williamson Bathory. A Buddies in Bad Times Theatre production hosted by the Qaaggiavuut Society at the Frobisher Inn in Iqaluit, Nunavut. Text in Inuktituk. (Photo: VK Preston.) [End Page E-8] as the first national Indigenous theatre department globally. Among Kiinalik's powerful contributions are its self-reflective moves to dismantle the structural and institutional silos put in place among practices of story, dance, theatre, media, and music in settler epistemologies. The interweaving of practices takes spectators on a remarkable voyage with the artists, who met during a residency on climate change in the Artic. As the work unfolds, the artists move across hierarchies of knowledge and the sensorium, entering into personal, cultural, and intergenerational questions that cross histories as well as institutionalized settler distinctions and dramaturgies of nationhood (fig. 2). With support from my university in 2018, I was able to travel to Iqaluit to see a rehearsal and performance of the "northern" version of Kiinalik in the subarctic capital city of Iqaluit, Nunavut. There for the first time I met Qaggiavuut Society personnel, as well as students and artists with the Qaggiq School of Performing Arts. Through the Qaggiavuut society, these artists are creating an arts and training center, shaping what they term an "Arctic-specific pedagogy" in a region where colonization's prohibitions on practices have had ongoing, violent impact. My visit followed on the heels of the company's expanded push to develop a performing arts center and hub of creative practice and research oriented to the circum-polar north. The initiative to create this space and venue called the Qaggiq Hub has been gaining considerable momentum. As a settler scholar working within the university system in the "south," at the center of a long history of material as well as cultural extraction, the works I spent time with while writing this piece have honed a sense of critical reexamination of my own and my...

A study on public space design strategies in Japanese National Museums - focusing on The National Museum of Western Art and The National Art Center in Tokyo

ABSTRACT This study examines the prototypes, characteristics, and perspectives of public space in museums whose existential values and concepts have continuously changed based on their historical contexts. Based on an understanding of museum architecture and its cultural and social context in Japan, this research focuses on two national museums that represent Japanese modern and contemporary eras. In particular, this research examines The National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo – designed by Le Corbusier, an internationally known French architect, in the 20th century – and the public space of The National Art Centre – the fifth national museum in Japan which was designed in the environment of Japanese museums by a Japanese representative architect, Kisho Kurokawa. This research concentrates on the public space within museums that reflects the flows and social demands of the era, rather than focusing on the architects’ design concepts or architectural analysis. A thorough analysis will be conducted, focusing on the museums’ floor plans, sections, images, and diagrams to showcase the characteristics and perspectives of public space in 21st century museums

From Velázquez to Picasso: Proposal of Artistic Mediation Activities for People with Dementia

This paper describes the design of a program of activities of arts education for people with dementia based on visits to the Prado Museum and the Reina Sofia National Art Center Museum (Spanish anagram, MNCARS) of Madrid, and carried out by a team of researchers and artist-teachers. The program, called “Tenemos cita con el arte” (We have a date with art), in addition to the visits, included workshops of artistic activities. The basic aspects taken into account by the team of artist-teachers for the design of the itineraries in the two above-mentioned museums and the design of the artistic activities are specified. The museum itineraries, which included works of Velázquez and Goya (Prado Museum), and of Dalí, Juan Gris, Miró, Lipchitz, and Picasso (MNCARS) are described, as well as the artistic activities carried out by the participants, based on these itineraries. The considerations set out in this work can be extended to other are centers, so that they can be used as contexts for the promotion of the well-being and social inclusion of people with dementia by artist-teachers working in multidisciplinary teams.

Esther Ferrer. Espacios Entrelazados

Two complementary exhibitions by the Artist Esther Ferrer give us the opportunity to see her work in perspective. The first of them took place at the beginning of this year at the Palacio de Velázquez in Madrid with the title "All variations are valid, including this one" and was organized by the Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum. The second one is currently taking place in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao with the title "Interlaced Spaces".

Multiculturalism, (Im)Migration, Theatre: The National Arts Centre, Ottawa, a Case of Staging Canadian Nationalism

AbstractOn October 22, 2015, two days after the Liberal Party of Canada came to power,The Globe and Mailpublished an editorial entitled “Canada to the World: Xenophobia Doesn’t Play Here.” The article suggested that, in these times of migration crises, a rising xenophobic discourse and neo-nationalism, it is essential for the European countries to start taking lessons in navigating cultural diversity from Canada, the first country in the world that institutionalized principles of multiculturalism. This view is clearly reflected in the repertoire politics of Canadian theatre institutions, specifically the National Arts Centre (NAC) Ottawa, the only theatre company in Canada directly subsidized by its government. Mandated to support artistic excellence through arts, the NAC acts as a pulpit of official ideology. It presents diversity on stage as the leading Canadian value, and thus fulfills its symbolic function to serve as a mirror to its nation.However, this paper argues that, by offering an image of Canada, constructed by our government and tourist agencies, as an idyllic place to negotiate our similarities and differences, the NAC fosters what Loren Kruger calls atheatrical nationhood(4–16). A closer look at the 2014 NAC English theatre co-production ofKim’s Conveniencewill help illustrate how the politics of mimicry can become a leading device in the aesthetics ofnational mimesis– a cultural activity of “representing the nation as well as the result of it (an image of the nation)” (Hurley 24); and how the artistry of a multicultural kitchen-sink can turn a subject of diversity into that of affirmation and sentimentalism.

Homage to Joy Coghill

Joy Coghill was the Artistic Director of the Vancouver Playhouse when it produced The Ecstasy of Rita Joe in November 1967. And Joy was still the AD for a little while longer when Rita Joe opened the National Arts Centre in June 1969. Everything about those statements is revolutionary. Coghill was the first woman to be in charge of a major Canadian theatre. The new AD made a very brave decision by producing such a “problem” play. Further, Ryga’s play is recognized now as the script that proved “Canadian theatre” was not an oxymoron. Plus, Rita Joe spoke of hitherto unspoken, unrecognized themes by the dominant cultures: the Canada that systematically kills/steals the bodies and souls of Aboriginal peoples, women in particular. Many controversies followed when the actors exited the Playhouse stage in 1967: was the play no good because of its strange structure? Did non-Aboriginal Ryga have the right to tell this story? Was it wrong for white Frances Hyland to play the lead character? Rather, this article deals with the question Joy Coghill attributes to young actor, but not-yet Chief Leonard George, son of Chief Dan, after the 1969 National Arts Centre opening: “Is it going to work?”

The architectural rejuvenation of Canada’s National Arts Centre: The function of pre-function

When Canada’s National Arts Centre opened in 1967, the Brutalist architecture style of its era yielded a fortress for the arts. As Canada celebrates its sesquicentennial, a $110M (Canadian) architectural rejuvenation process is transforming the inward facing fortress into alluring beacon at the heart of the capital. Expanded public spaces enveloped in transparent facades form multiple pre-function spaces that visually spill into one another to convey the constant activity of Canada’s incubator for the performing arts to the patrons within and the surrounding city. The desire for visual transparency, the building’s designation as a National Historic Site of Canada, and need for simultaneous programming of the performance and pre-functions spaces provided no shortage of acoustic challenges.

Introduction: Performance and Disability

On April 30, 2016, Cripping the Stage: A Disability Arts Cabaret presented “cutting-edge disabled artists from Canada and the United Kingdom.” The event, co-hosted by Alex Bulmer and Mat Fraser, aimed to put “disabled performers centre stage to celebrate Cripping the Arts Symposium presented by Tangled Art + Disability, a three-day event seeking to advance Deaf and Disability Arts in Canada, and enliven the vibrancy of Canadian culture” (“Cripping”). As demonstrated in the present issue, this exciting international event was one of many important disability theatre initiatives offered during the 2015 and 2016 seasons, a period that also saw disability theatre artists working with the National Arts Centre, Stratford Festival, Banff Fine Arts Centre, Playwrights Theatre Centre, Playwright’s Workshop Montreal, and Luminato Festival. This issue, then, appears in a remarkably generative period of disability theatre activity in Canada. In the past five years, national institutions and granting councils have sought to respond to, catch up with, and foster new conversations among disability theatre and performance practitioners. In 2012, for example, the Canada Council for the Arts released an access and equality strategy targeting Deaf and disability arts. While on one level this signaled a desire to “expand the arts” according to the council’s equity strategy, it also built from a recognition “that Deaf and disability arts are important evolving sectors and art practices in the Canadian arts ecology, to be supported, promoted and advanced” (Canada Council, “Executive”).

Changing the Shape of Things: A Reflection on Power, Privilege, and the Benefits of Institutional Transformation

I have spent my life in privilege. I am white. I come from a very comfortable middle-class family. I was born in Canada. I was given access to the best schools and have had a life filled with wonderful work opportunities. I came out as queer in my twenties, was Artistic Director of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in my thirties, and in my forties I brought it all to a head with both the creation of The Failure Show: A 13-point manifesto for the consideration of failure, and the completion of an MA in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University.1Now in my fifties I find myself at Canada’s National Arts Centre (NAC), working in English Theatre with Jillian Keiley and the rest of the team. Of all the things that have changed since I was born, my privilege has remained the same but my sense of it has changed completely.

Indigenous Declarations: ARTICLE 11 at the National Arts Centre

“Indigenous Declarations” is a report on Declaration, ARTICLE 11’s installation as part of Ontario Scene at the National Arts Centre in April–May 2015. For a few days in spring, a powerful group of senior Indigenous artists working collaboratively across cultures and disciplines staged a “a successful disruption” in the belly of the beast.

Indigenizing the Role of Ally

This article promotes best practices for engaging in cross-cultural collaboration with Indigenous performance on Turtle Island (North America). It uses personal examples from Executive Director Cole Alvis (Métis-Irish heritage from the Turtle Mountains in Manitobah) of the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance’s collaboration with the National Arts Centre English Theatre and Debajehmujig Theatre, called The Study/Repast. This large-scale immersive exploration of Indigenous performance saw over forty Indigenous artists gather on Manitoulin Island in Ontario. The outcome of this work was seen by national artistic leaders and is available for videostreaming on the National Arts Centre’s website. This article contextualizes reactions from the Indigenous performance community to the lack of Indigenous actors playing Indigenous roles in a Toronto production of The Unplugging by Yvette Nolan, a co-production between Factory Theatre and Native Earth Performing Arts. Using first-hand observations, this article aims to inspire allies, for while the path may not always be easy it is necessary for everyone on this land to acknowledge we are all treaty people and support Indigenous performing arts.

Principles of Interaction between Historic and Contemporary Architecture during the Modernization of Museums: Strategies of the 20th–21st Centuries

The article analyzes the key principles of interaction between various architectural style trends during modernization of museum complexes. The first (“nuance”) principle represents the consonance of various architectural styles that do not break the uniformity of an architectural image of the museum. This principle of modernization does not mean a duplication of the historic building; it is about using the same stylistic frame. The second (“contrasting”) principle is the most outstanding one because it represents the artistic spirit of contemporaneity. Architecture of a new building or museum site represents the style contrastively juxtaposed to historic premises. The modernization principles are reviewed using examples of international experience (Prado National Museum and Reina Sofia National Art Center). The author analyzes the spaceplanning, design, and technical solutions of museum facilities, their functional value and artistic character.

Freshmen! Don't Be Afraid of Hip Hop

Freshmen! Don’t be Afraid of Hip Hop If you want to increase your artistic creativity and stay current in contemporary dance, you’ll want to expand your artistic horizons by Megumi Iwama At UC Irvine, during Week Zero of freshman year, you walk through the Anteater Involvement Fair shoveling your way past what feels like millions of flyers thrown in your face. You look up at the tall stage set up for the occasion, and you see the intimidating, powerhouse hip-hop dancers lined up waiting to perform. You wish you could be as cool and impressive as they are, but you say to yourself, “Nah, I am a concert contemporary dancer and hip-hop isn’t really artistic. I could never pursue that as an artistic career so I’m not gonna try…” Well I am here to tell you that hip-hop and contemporary are not that much different from each other. GASP, yes, I mean to tell you that contemporary dance and hip-hop are very stylistically similar in approach. Definition-wise, according to the National Arts Centre, contemporary “specifically means dance that developed from the roots of modern dance, but that it is no longer aligned with the modernist art movement of the 1930s” (artsalive.ca). On the other side of the spectrum, Christopher Gorney, the author of Hip Hop Dance: Performance, Style, and Competition, says, “hip hop dance is hip which the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines as ‘keenly aware of or interested in the newest developments or styles,’ so in a way it is always changing with time. Because it is hip, there are always new styles developing, but there are four that are generally accepted as the traditional styles of hip hop dance—locking, popping, b- boying/b-girling, and up-rocking” (Gorney). Both definitions state that these two kind of dance are evolving and always focused on developing new and modern ways of movement, so why is there such a disconnect between the hip-hop community and the concert contemporary dance community? Perhaps it has to do with concert dancers believing that hip-hop is inferior in artistic value. Contemporary stems from modern dance, which evolved from ballet, which was initially only performed for royalty and higher class audiences; whereas hip-hop grew from the streets, expressing frustrations of the African American community facing poverty and injustice. Dennis Dang, a fourth year bio major at UCI is involved in Common Ground, one of the most advanced competitive hip-hop teams on campus. Although he is not a dance major, he recently participated in two pieces in the undergraduate dance concert, Physical Graffiti, and was fully a part of the creative and rehearsal process. Since he can now compare, I asked him whether he believed hip hop has its own artistic elements and why. His first reaction was, “Of course! Hip hop is VERY artistic.” He further explained that, “Hip hop at its core is art because it combines intention with form. People use dance, especially hip hop, as a form of expression, and even so much as a survival tool in some communities.” So, yes, although Common Ground is a competitive dance team and art is something that goes beyond technique and winning, hip hop teams can also be artistic. The teams, Dang explains, “don’t really care about winning really—the competitions are just a stage space that allows the hip-hop community to come together and share their different ways of expression, movement, and stories, and the winning placements just come with.” He elaborates, saying, “We see more ‘technical’ movements integrated into hip hop sets now, and I want to say hip hop today is only different from contemporary and other similar styles in its spatial and temporal

Roppongi Crossing: The Demise of a Tokyo Nightclub District and the Reshaping of a Global City (review)

Reviewed by: Roppongi Crossing: The Demise of a Tokyo Nightclub District and the Reshaping of a Global City Yasushi Matsumoto (bio) Roppongi Crossing: The Demise of a Tokyo Nightclub District and the Reshaping of a Global City. By Roman Adrian Cybriwsky. University of Georgia Press, Athens, Ga., 2011. xviii, 302 pages. $69.95, cloth; $24.95, paper; $24.95, E-book. Roppongi is one of the best-known commercial areas in Tokyo. It is especially popular among foreigners from Western countries due to its distinctive “international” or Western character. Minato ward in which Roppongi is located has attracted more than 20,000 residents from overseas since 2007. About ten per cent of the residents in Minato ward are non-Japanese, whereas about three per cent of the total population within the jurisdiction of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government is foreign. More striking is the fact that U.S. citizens are disproportionately concentrated in Minato ward, where two per cent of the residents were Americans while only 0.14 per cent of Tokyoites were U.S. citizens at the beginning of 2010. Roman Cybriwsky’s book, Roppongi Crossing, is not demography but an ethnography on a neighborhood surrounding the intersection called Roppongi Crossing. The author happened to move to the area in 2001 and has become familiar with the nightlife district located around the intersection. He also witnessed three famous redevelopment projects adjacent to the district: Roppongi Hills by the Mori Building Company, completed in 2003, and Tokyo Midtown by Mitsui Fudōsan and the National Art Center, both completed in 2007. Thus, Roppongi Crossing focuses on the entertainment district on the one hand and the redevelopment projects, particularly Roppongi Hills, on the other and discusses the relationship between the two. The book is composed of a preface and seven chapters. After describing in the preface how he has gotten to know the neighborhood, the author briefly introduces in chapter 1 his study area and how he conducted his field-work. Chapter 2, “Roppongi Contexts,” deals with the social and ecological contexts in which Roppongi is situated and with other topics including Roppongi as a prestigious “high city” neighborhood, its nearness to Japan’s political and economic centers, the place in the context of Japan’s “construction state” character, its tradition of nighttime entertainment districts, and foreigners in Japan (p. 42). In chapter 3, “Roppongi Rises,” Cybriwsky outlines the history of Roppongi, tracing its origin back to the residences of feudal lords in the Tokugawa era, which were later taken over by Japan’s Imperial Army in the Meiji era. The presence of the army is very important in understanding the local development and ecology. The barracks were occupied by U.S. forces after 1945 and attracted bars, restaurants, prostitutes, [End Page 176] and gangsters during the 1950s, forming a nightlife district with an international flavor during what is described by Cybriwsky as “the American era.” This chapter goes through the subsequent development of Roppongi from the 1960s to the 1980s, “Roppongi’s Heyday,” by citing various episodes of nightclub scenes. The chapter closes with “Beyond the Bubble,” the passing of the good old days of the entertainment district in the 1990s, though the author gives a vivid description of his own experience watching the World Cup 2002 in a sports bar in Roppongi. In chapter 4, “Roppongi Rhythms, Recently,” Cybriwsky delves into personal encounters in the neighborhood. He takes readers around Roppongi’s nightlife district, visiting several spots and telling stories about interesting places as well as the life and work of service workers of various nationalities whom he observed, got to know, and listened to directly or indirectly. Then, chapter 5, “Roppongi Troubles,” focuses on the dark side of Roppongi by illustrating crime, drug abuse, gang activities, and its bad reputation among many Japanese as well as local policing and anticrime campaigns in the area. The entertainment district, he argues, is declining; the old Roppongi is displaced by a new one. The author’s description is filled with interesting episodes, but the reasoning is ambiguous and dubious, as I discuss later. Chapter 6, “Roppongi Remade,” deals with the trend of redevelopment in and around Roppongi and focuses on three big...