In conjunction with the Carleton College winter arts festival Visualizing Japanese Theater, Sarah Thompson, assistant curator of Japanese prints at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, will speak Thursday, Feb. 3 at 5 p.m. in Carleton's Boliou Hall Auditorium. Her lecture, titled Actors, Artists, and Censors: Political Aspects of Kabuki Prints, will center on the highly stylized classical form of Japanese dance-drama called Kabuki, and its suppression by the Japanese government. Thompson's presentation is free and open to the public.
The Golden Age of Kabuki theater took place during the Tokugawa Regime in Japan from 1603-1868, when its actors were considered too lowly to belong to a social class. The ruling class were forbidden to attend Kabuki theater, but did so anyway because of its enormous popularity. Due to its subversive roots, Kabuki was under governmental surveillance and control, and periodically suppressed. Theaters in the capital city were closed, and prints of actors were strictly banned. Many artists managed to beat the prohibition by creating disguised works, such as the woodblock print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi entitled Turtle Fun: Wonderful Wonderful (1848), thus creating a rich array of artwork from a period of Japanese social reform in which theater was stifled.
Thompson earned her BA from Harvard University, before pursuing a PhD from Columbia University. She currently works as the assistant curator for Japanese prints at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and also supervises the Japanese Print Access and Documentation Project (JPADP), whose goal is to produce digital images and basic cataloguing of the MFA's entire collection of 50,000 Japanese prints. Over the past two decades, Thompson has curated several exhibitions of Japanese prints that depict Japanese theater culture. In 1991, she co-curated Undercurrents in the Floating World: Censorship and Japanese Prints at the Asia Society in New York. The exhibition explored print censorship imposed by Tokugawa sumptuary regulations and publishing restrictions and targeted at, among others, erotica and Kabuki. Thompson addressed the politics of Japanese prints more recently in the 2006 exhibition On Stage in Osaka: Actor Prints from the MFA Collection. This exhibit focused on the Osaka print tradition that is defined by exquisite printing, vibrant colors, and its devotion to the subject of Kabuki theater.
Thompson's appearance at Carleton follows a two-week workshop given by Kabuki artist David Furumoto, from which eight Carleton students will participate in the Carleton Players upcoming world-premiere performance of The Last Firefly, a new commission by award-winning playwright Naomi Iizuka, and being presented at Carleton in collaboration with Minneapolis-based Children's Theater Company in late February.
This lecture is made possible by an Edwin L. Weisl Jr. Lectureship in Art History, made possible by the Robert Lehman Foundation. For more information on Carleton College's winter arts festival, Visualizing Japanese Theater, visit go.carleton.edu/japan.
Boliou Hall is located on the Carleton College Campus in Northfield, Minnesota, and is accessible via Highway 3.