“A Japanese Take on Antigone: Comparing Noh and Greek Tragedy”

17 Feb 2011 - 17:00 / 17 Feb 2011 - 19:00

Graduate Centre for Study of Drama
214 College Street
U of T

 Public lecture by Prof. Mae Smethurst (University of Pittsburgh)

Prof. Smethurst is an internationally recognized expert on Noh theatre, especially from a comparatist perspective. Since she is also a trained classicist, Prof. Smethurst brings a unique perspective to the analysis of Japanese theatre. The fruits of this unusual combination of expertise are, among other things, evident in her monograph The Artistry of Aeschylus and

Zeami: A Comparative Study of Greek Tragedy and Noh (Princeton 1989) and two articles (published in 2000 and 2002) on Yukio Ninagawa’s Japanese rendering of Euripides’ Medea. In addition, Prof. Smethurst has published translations of Noh plays, and she continues to be very much connected with Japanese culture, spending as much time as she can every year in Tokyo and elsewhere in Japan.

 In her talk Prof. Smethurst will present, for a general audience, the 2004-production of Sophocles’ Antigone by the internationally successful Japanese Kuna’uka troupe (http://www.kunauka.org.jp). The troupe is well-known not only for its use of traditional Japanese theatre, but also for its unique approach to creating character in theatrical performance by splitting one character into two performers (“two actors play one role”). In her lecture Prof.

Smethurst will analyse how the Kuna’uka troupe combines traditional Japanese theatre with another very old theatre tradition, that of ancient Greece, to create an entirely novel and fresh contemporary theatrical experience: distinctly Japanese with a universal international appeal.

Organized by the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, with additional support from the Centre for Comparative Literature. Convener: Prof. Martin Revermann (m.revermann@utoronto.ca).

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