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Editor's Note

Editor's Note From the Editor As we move into a new millennium, this issue of ATJ allows us, like Janus, to look both backwards and forwards at the same time. Each play and essay comes to grips with questions of tradition and change, continuity and disruption, the past and the future. Mayama Seika's Yoritomo's Death, translated and introduced by Brian Powell, represents one way in which Japan's four-century-old kabuki theatre grappled with issues of modernity by attempting to bring psychological and historical realism into kabuki's highly conventionalized dramaturgy. The play epitomizes the best of what came to be called "new" or shin kabuki, but arguments continue as to whether such plays--whatever their artistic quality--should properly be called kabuki at all. Where, some have asked, does the kabuki end and the shin begin? Chinese dramatists too have struggled in the past century with finding a "modern"-- even critical--voice to place alongside their venerable classical traditions, especially when faced by repressive political administrations. Recent economic developments have led to some opening up. But as Yang Qian notes in the introduction to Hope, his satire about the economic boom in Shenzen, artists must be extremely clever about getting their work produced, especially when http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Asian Theatre Journal University of Hawai'I Press

Editor's Note

Leiter, Samuel L.
Asian Theatre Journal , Volume 17 (1) – Mar 1, 2000
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Publisher
University of Hawai'I Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 The University of Hawai'i Press.
ISSN
1527-2109
Publisher site
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Abstract

From the Editor As we move into a new millennium, this issue of ATJ allows us, like Janus, to look both backwards and forwards at the same time. Each play and essay comes to grips with questions of tradition and change, continuity and disruption, the past and the future. Mayama Seika's Yoritomo's Death, translated and introduced by Brian Powell, represents one way in which Japan's four-century-old kabuki theatre grappled with issues of modernity by attempting to bring psychological and historical realism into kabuki's highly conventionalized dramaturgy. The play epitomizes the best of what came to be called "new" or shin kabuki, but arguments continue as to whether such plays--whatever their artistic quality--should properly be called kabuki at all. Where, some have asked, does the kabuki end and the shin begin? Chinese dramatists too have struggled in the past century with finding a "modern"-- even critical--voice to place alongside their venerable classical traditions, especially when faced by repressive political administrations. Recent economic developments have led to some opening up. But as Yang Qian notes in the introduction to Hope, his satire about the economic boom in Shenzen, artists must be extremely clever about getting their work produced, especially when

Journal

Asian Theatre Journal – University of Hawai'I Press

Published: Mar 1, 2000

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