Noda Manabu    Department   Undergraduate School  , School of Arts and Letters    Position   Professor
Date	2008/05/03
Presentation Theme	Mirror Images and the Dislocation of Culture in Ninagawa's Shakespeare
Conference	Shakespeare Today: Seminar on Shakespeare (Craiova City Hall, Craiova, Romania, 3-4 May 2008)
Promoters	International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC)
Conference Type	International
Presentation Type	Speech (General)
Contribution Type	Individual
Details	Yukio Ninagawa (b. 1935) is the most internationally renowned Japanese theatre director for the productions of Western classics. He has directed numerous Greek tragedies and Shakespeare productions, and has achieved a worldwide stature through a string of international tours, beginning with his Medea (1983) and Macbeth of the samurai Macbeth fame (1985). The starting point of my paper is that Ninagawa's Japanization of Shakespeare reflects the cultural dislocation of Japan which took place as a result of its turning to the West as its aspired-to mirror image to model itself on in the process of modernization/westernization. Just as in Lacan's mirror stage, constructing Japan's unified self on a mirror image which is the Other resulted in the disparity and dislocation of its self-image. In Japan today, this cultural dislocation took a form of double remoteness from the West and from its own past. Ninagawa's Shakespeare has been constructed in the political milieu of Japan since the 1960s, and his productions stage the populace as Japan's (alter)ego, as can be seen in his Coriolanus (2006) and exclusively kabuki cast Twelfth Night (2005).