Monthly Regular Meeting November 2022 (The 206th Meeting of Opera Research Group)
Waseda Institute for Research in Opera and Music Theatre (WIROM), Comprehensive Research Organization, Waseda University
- Time and Date: November 5th (Sat.) 2022, 16:30 – 18:00 (JST)
- Format: Online meeting (Zoom)
– Registration is required by November 2nd (Wed.). Please fill out the following Google-Form:
-The invitation e-mail via zoom will be sent to the registrants on November 4th. (Currently closed.) - Presenter : ONISHI, Yuki
- Affiliation, Position : Daito Bunka University, Lecturer
- Title : “Grand Finale at the Opera: A Plot Repeatedly Used by Japanese Early Adopters of Western Music Theatre”
- Language : Japanese
- Abstract :
Among the history of Western musical theatre reception in Japan, three domestically written musical plays that are frequently mentioned by researchers strangely share the same plot: a group of Japanese people travel around the world; on their travels, one or more of the characters find themselves in trouble, mainly because they do not know the Western culture nor languages; eventually they get separated, but luckily meet again in front of an opera house or a music hall in a European metropolis, and attend a show together.This paper closely reads the three plays Hyōryū Kitan Seiyō Kabuki(The Miraculous Story of the Castaways: A Play in the Western Style, 1879), a kabuki play which inserted Western touring company’s comic opera scenes as a play-within-a-play; Oshi Ryokō (A Mute’s Travels, 1908), a musical farce written for Japan’s first modern actress and her company; and Mon Pari (Mon Paris, 1927), the first revue in Japan staged by today’s Takarazuka Revue Company. By investigating remaining scripts, illustrations, photos, sheet music, shellac recordings, artists’ interviews, critical reviews, and other media coverage, the study attempts to explain why this plot template was used repeatedly, and how the playwrights in later years added their own twists to the prototype. - Profile of Presenter :
ONISHI Yuki is a lecturer of comparative literature and culture at Daito Bunka University in Saitama, Japan. Her research explores various forms of Western-influenced music theatre in Japan which emerged around and after 1910, focusing on how libretti in Western languages were translated and/or adapted for a Japanese audience. She is a proud co-editor of Opera and Music Theatre Studies Today: Dynamism of Creation and Spread (Tokyo: Suiseisha, 2021, in Japanese) together with SATO Suguru and OKAMOTO Yoshiko. Her first monograph, The Birth of Japanese-Language Opera, 1902–1923 (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2018, in Japanese) won awards from the Japanese Society for Theatre Research and the Japan Comparative Literature Association. She received her Ph.D. in 2017 at the University of Tokyo, Komaba. - Moderator : KASAI, Amane
Next meeting
Next meeting will be held on December 3rd (Sat.) 2022
Presenter : OYA, Miku
Moderator : KUGIMIYA, Takako
- Waseda Institute for Research in Opera and Music Theatre (WIROM), Comprehensive Research Organization, Waseda University
- e-mail address: operaken-uketsuke[at]list.waseda.jp ( [at] = @)
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