Japanese Contemporary Objects, Manipulators, and Actors in Performanceby Mari Boyd (review)

In Japanese Contemporary Objects, Manipulators, and Actors in Performance, the theatre scholar and translator Mari Boyd reconsiders the current discourses on Japanese puppetry. Existing scholarship has often focused on histories, techniques, and repertoires of mainly classical puppetry traditions, such as ningyō jōruri (also known as bunraku), in mainstage city contexts. Regional puppetry traditions, of which there are many extantin Japan, are also studied. Even so, there are many gaps in the documentation and analysis of Japanese puppetry in contemporary Japan and it is these gaps that Boyd’s volume goes a long way to filling.

As the title of her book shows, Boyd’s work responds to the widespread recent attention given to theories of new materialism and object ontology in the performing arts as seen in a slate of publications about performance and new media, performance and ecology, and performance and stage properties. As a result of these studies, that have grown in the shadow of Jane Bennett’s publication of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2009), interest in puppetry studies has substantially increased. The field has moved in new theoretical directions and deals with a wide variety of object-based works that, in many cases, far exceed the aesthetic range and dramaturgy of traditional puppetry. One of the harbingers of this change was the publication, in 2014, of The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, edited by Dassia Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and John Bell. Their broad-spectrum methodology of applying interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives drawn from history, performance studies, psychology, affect studies, new materialism, and media and technology studies, underscores the notion of puppetry as an expanded form of media and a defining aspect of material performance. Scholars working on national and regional puppetry forms have been challenged to rethink and expand their methodologies and the scope of their work. In fact, writing in the Companion’s introduction, one of its co-editors, the puppeteer and puppetry scholar, Claudia Orenstein, pithily wonders: “In the world of material performance, why use the term puppet at all?” (2014: 4). Boyd positively responds to this provocation by naming a book about Japanese puppetry without using the cardinal term; the name of “puppet” is strategically elided in the book’s title.

Boyd’s focus in the book is two-fold. There are six chapters on developments in contemporary object performance that highlight trends and innovations and there are three of her own translations of notable object theatre play texts by contemporary artists. The whole is bookended (at least in my PDF review copy) by a choice selection for color images at the beginning of the book and an appendix and select biography at the end.

The first two chapters introduce theories and practices of puppetry in Japan. Boyd gives a succinct history and offers a comparative discussion of cultural and aesthetic developments that include reference to animism and Shinto. The first chapter draws attention to how object performances show “relations between old and new animisms” (p. xv), pointing to a discussion of technologies in later chapters, and includes a section detailing the variety and number of puppetry performances in Japan. Boyd’s analysis shows the rapid increase of the performances made for adult audiences. Chapter 2 deals with the rise of object theatre as a paradigm shift that closes the gap between theatre, performance, and puppetry. Anthropocenic perspectives are explored in which the object and human find a new equilibrium and are decentered. The chapter has a discussion of innovative theatre maker Kuro Tanino and his play Avidya—The Dark Inn (that is also translated, with a commentary, in chapter 9). Boyd shows how, in the hands of visionary artists such as Tanino, object theatre creates entertainingly complex performance worlds that investigate dark themes. Chapter 3 explores how the materiality of objects signals the turn to the real in contemporary performance. The chapter explores the paradoxical notion of the real as a source of rupture that, in turn, can...