Kyoko Iwaki (Antwerpen)

Activating Abject in a Super-Sanitized Society

After thousands of remounted performances and cascades of critiques, many preceding scholarships have demonstrated a development in understanding Madama Butterfly as a story epitomizing the imagined orient formulated within the framework of the so-called “Spaghetti Eastern” Italian operas. By situating the Orientalist view of Madama Butterfly as a historical counterpoint, I will discuss in this talk how Japanese playwright-director Ichihara Satoko challenges the political violence of Puccini’s opera through the scope of women of color dramaturgy. In doing so, I will demonstrate how, through the deliberate ‘activation of the abject’, Ichihara aims to override the automated racialized assumptions and epistemic systems that stipulate the codified repository of imaginations cast from the other and far from the real. 

Kyoko Iwaki is an Assistant Professor at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. After her career as a theatre journalist, she became a scholar specializing in Japanese and European contemporary performance conducting research at the intersection of post-visual dramaturgies, Japanese philosophies, and theatres of catastrophes. She has published articles in various journals such as Performance Research, Studies in Theatre and Performance, and Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. She is the co-founder of Performing Ends: Collaborative Performance Research, the Associate Editor of Performance Research and has contributed a chapter to the edited collection Japan after Precarity: The Theatre of Okada Toshiki (2020). Her books include Japanese Theatre Today: Theatrical Imaginations of Eight Contemporary Practitioners (2018).

Friedrich-Hölderlin Vortrag der Professur für Theaterwissenschaft

www.uni-frankfurt.de/159650522/Flyer_H%C3%B6lderlin_24_25_final.pdf