2003 Soshitsu Sen XV Distinguished Lecture on Japanese Culture: Bunraku: Japan’s Traditional Puppet Theater
April 1, 2003
2003 Soshitsu Sen XV Distinguished Lecture on Japanese Culture: Bunraku: Japan’s Traditional Puppet Theater
Bunzo TORIGOE (Professor Emeritus, Waseda University, and Former Director, Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University)
Low Rotunda, Low Memorial Library, Columbia University (116th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenues)
Lecture to be given in Japanese with English translation
RSVP EQRUIRED
PLEASE E-MAIL the Donald Keene Center at donald-keene-center@columbia.edu or call 212-854-5036 by Monday, March 17th
Professor Bunzo Torigoe has devoted his career to the study and preservation of Bunraku and Kabuki, the two distinctive forms of Japanese theater that emerged in the Edo period and continue as living performance traditions today. He has spent most of his academic career at Waseda University, from which he graduated in the department of theater in 1956, and where he began teaching as a lecturer in 1965 following a period of teaching and research at Cambridge University in 1962-64. He became Professor of Japanese Literature at Waseda in 1974, and currently holds the title of Professor Emeritus.
In addition to numerous scholarly journal articles, a number of which were collected in book form in 1991 as Genroku kabuki kô, Professor Torigoe has written a book on the playwright Chikamatsu (Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 1989), and has edited and annotated numerous editions of Chikamatsu’s plays. He has also played a major role in editing and co-editing basic source materials for Japanese theater of the Edo period. In English, he joined with Charles Dunn of Cambridge University to translate and annotate The Actors’ Analects (Yakusha Rongo) (Columbia University Press, 1969), a collection of Genroku-period writings about Kabuki acting.
Professor Torigoe has also contributed broadly to the study and preservation of Japanese theater as the director from 1988 until 1999 of the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum on the Waseda campus, the single most important collection of theater material in Japan. He has recently been active in the preservation and promotion of the Bunraku puppet theater as chairman of the Ningyô Jôruri Bunrakuza, a non-profit organization founded in 2002.
