Kabuki in Print | The Center for East Asian Studies

KABUKI in PRINT: Actor, Fans, Image, and Medium in Early Modern Japan and Beyond

November 4-5, 2022
In-person conference at multiple locations (registration requested for Saturday program; click here to register)
Livestreaming Zoom option (click here to register) for keynote lecture

Sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies in conjunction with the Smart Museum of Art, Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the Center for the Art of East Asia.

Click here to download the event poster.

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Few early modern theater traditions boast a body of surviving ephemera as large, varied, and multi-faceted as Japanese kabuki. From the seventeenth through twentieth centuries, the woodblock print medium played a pivotal role in connecting kabuki actors and fans and engendering play between actor and role, vision and voice, and between the stage and the imagination. In 2015, the Smart Museum of Art received a transformative gift of over 1,000 Japanese prints from the collection of the late Brooks McCormick Jr. The majority of these works are theater prints of the late Edo (1600-1868) and Meiji (1868-1912) eras, and of these, a sizable number relate to kabuki in the kamigata or Osaka region rather than in Edo. This intimate symposium seeks to bring together experts from theater, literature, and art history in order to study the collection and contribute their own insights on the relation between page and stage in the case of kabuki. The resulting insights will have implications for all who are interested in the relation between print technology, narrative, visual art, fan cultures, and the stage.

SCHEDULE (tentative)

Friday, November 4, 2022

1:00 - 4:00 pm	Viewing of prints at the Smart Museum of Art Study Room, 5550 S Greenwood Ave. (for presenters only)
4:30 pm	Keynote Lecture John T. Carpenter Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art "A Poetics of Inscribed Kabuki Actor Portraits" IN-PERSON at Cochrane Woods Art Center 157, 5540 S. Greenwood Ave LIVESTREAM on Zoom (register here) Read the lecture abstract here.
6:00 pm	Reception
7:00 pm	Dinner for participants

Saturday, November 5, 2022

IN-PERSON at Franke Institute for the Humanities 1100 E. 57th St
REGISTER here to be provided lunch.

9:00 am	Welcome and Opening remarks Chelsea Foxwell University of Chicago
9:30 - 11:00 am	Morning Session (part 1) Moderator: Hilary Snow University of Wisconsin Milwaukee 9:30-10:15 Maki Isaka University of Minnesota "A Biblio-Medium or Two-Dimensional Kabuki in Its Own Right: Publications in the Kabuki Culture" 10:15-11:00 Satoko Shimazaki University of California, Los Angeles “Recording Liveness: Theater Prints and Books in the Age of Nanboku and Mokuami”
11:00 am	Break
11:15 am - 12:00 pm	Morning Session (part 2) Moderator: Hilary Snow Univerity of Wisconsin Milwaukee 11:15-12:00 Ryoko Matsuba University of East Anglia/Sainsbury Institute “The Impact of Kabuki on Visual Culture”
12:00 pm	Lunch
1:30 - 3:00 pm	Afternoon Session (part 1) Moderator: John Carpenter Metropolitan Museum of Art 1:30-2:15 Jiayi Chen University of Chicago “What Can a Game Board Stage? The Worlds of Toyohara Kunichika’s Sugoroku Prints and Beyond” 2:15-3:00 Melissa Van Wyk University of Chicago “Trains, Games, and Print: Transportation Technologies in 19th-century Kabuki Playbills”
3:00 pm	Break
3:15 - 4:45 pm	Afternoon Session (part 2) Moderator: Janice Katz Art Institute of Chicago 3:15-4:00 Rhiannon Paget Ringling Museum of Art “Kabuki in Perspective: The Theatre and Floating Pictures” 4:00-4:45 Jonathan Zwicker University of California, Berkeley "The Three Bodies of Horigkoshi Hideshi: Performance and Medium in Meiji Kabuki"
4:45 pm	Wrap-up Discussion Moderators: Judith Zeitlin and Chelsea Foxwell University of Chicago
7:00 pm	Dinner for participants

SYMPOSIUM PRESENTERS

Jiayi Chen
Ph.D Candidate, University of Chicago
"What Can a Game Board Stage?: The Worlds of Toyohara Kunichika's Sugoroku Prints and Beyond"

Maki Isaka
Professor in Asian Languages & Literatures, University of Minnesota
"A Biblio-Medium or Two-Dimensional Kabuki in Its Own Right: Publications in the Kabuki Culture"

Ryoko Matsuba
Lecturer in Japanese Digital Arts and Humanities, Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures and University of East Anglia
"The Impact of Kabuki on Visual Culture"

Rhiannon Paget
Curator of Asian Art, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art
"Kabuki in Perspective: The Theatre and Floating Pictures"

Satoko Shimazaki
Associate Professor of Early Modern Japanese Theater and Literature, UCLA
"Recording Liveness: Theater Prints and Books in Age of Nanboku and Mokuami"

Melissa Van Wyk
Assistant Professor in Japanese Literature, University of Chicago
"Trains, Games, and Print: Transportation Technologies in 19th-century Kabuki Playbills"

Jonathan Zwicker
Agassiz Professor of Japanese, University of California, Berkeley
"The Three Bodies of Horigkoshi Hideshi: Performance and Medium in Meiji Kabuki"

Read all abstracts here.