About

Tara Rodman is an associate professor of drama at the University of California, Irvine, with a specialization in performance studies. Her research focuses on the circulation of performers and performance forms among Japan, Europe, and the United States in the early 20th century. She examines how the performer’s body contributes to the construction of racial, ethnic, and national meanings, both onstage and offstage. Her current book project, Fantasies of Itō Michio, highlights the overlooked ties between the Japanese modern dancer and choreographer and contemporaneous Japanese modernist artists such as Yamada Kosaku and Ishii Baku. The book positions “fantasy” as both a survival tactic and a scholarly tool for rethinking artistic legacy. Rodman has received notable fellowships, including a 2018 Fellowship for Advanced Social Science Research on Japan from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize. Her scholarship has been published in various academic journals and encyclopedias, and she contributes reviews and entries to prominent publications. At UC Irvine, she also serves on the UCI Esports Faculty Advisory Board, guiding the program to align with the university’s mission of research and education.

Research topics

• Art
• Art history
• History
• Visual arts
• Media studies

Selected publications

• A History of Butō by Bruce Baird (review)

  Asian Theatre Journal · 2023-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: A History of Butō by Bruce Baird Tara Rodman A HISTORY OF BUTŌ. By Bruce Baird. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 288 pp. Paperback, $39.95; hardcover, $125.00. In A History of Butō, Bruce Baird traces the contingencies of timing, economics, personality, reception, and others that shaped the trajectory of some of the most significant artists in butō’s first two generations, producing a history of how this dance form’s wide-ranging aesthetics, psycho-physical methodologies, and international appeal developed. Baird’s approach to this history is not simply to relay information about a set of artists, but to provide deep, historical contextualization for their work. As he notes, such an approach might be unfashionable amongst streams of cultural criticism that assert the primacy of the performer’s body as either a site of unknowability, or of the affective encounter between performer and spectator. As Baird acknowledges, many of the artists he studies resisted being pinned down by assigned meanings, as they aimed to give expression to new artistic and political possibilities. The problem is, butō’s context has already been over-determined: audiences at the 1978 performance with which Baird opens the book, and indeed, every class of students I have ever introduced to butō, all assume that the experience of the atomic bomb is the defining event out of which this dance form developed. Baird resoundingly dislodges this abiding narrative, and in its place, offers us a rigorously historicized account of how each dancer’s individual practice and preoccupations produced a set of intersecting threads that together have come to be understood as butō, and have inspired subsequent generations of dancers to participate in this form. [End Page 443] A History of Butō’s contributions involve not only this richly-mapped history, but also Baird’s numerous, concrete examples of the highly technical and deeply theorized ways in which butō artists worked. These detailed accounts of butō methods are paired with evocative descriptions of specific performance pieces. The abundance of these two kinds of examples enables Baird to highlight commonalities across different practitioners: “databases of movement, minute sensation, and granularity of movement” (p. 229)—characteristics that help to articulate what makes something butō, even while allowing for the range and non-conformism of the genre. Theorizing from these characteristics, Baird also offers some refreshing ways of thinking about butō in relation to contemporary phenomena in media culture: the cyborg, the video game speedrunner, and the otaku. Baird proposes that, like these figures, butō artists might be understood as “body-mind hackers” (p. 231) continually re-writing code, finding new ways of thinking, moving, and connecting the body to the world around it. This is an intriguing concept that I hope other scholars will take up and further develop. As this idea suggests, Baird not only offers a new way of thinking about butō, but more generally demonstrates that butō can help us to theorize far broader ways of understanding contemporary culture. The book is organized into fourteen chapters, each devoted to an individual artist. But across the chapters and in the conclusion, Baird draws connecting threads that help us think about how each artist relates to the genre and other practitioners. Baird begins with Hijikata Tatsumi, mapping the major stages and works of his career, and explaining the dancer’s imaginative mind-body approach, what Baird calls his “generative butō method.” This is the set of transformative exercises by which different mental prompts produce a nearly-infinite range of bodily motions, poses, characterizations, and qualities. In his contextualizing approach, Baird also complicates the narrative of Hijikata as belonging to the 1960s trend of nostalgic nativism, that valorized an atavistic vision of rural Japan, against a putatively degenerate, Westernized modern life. Instead, Baird argues that Hijikata was quite critical of Japan, and that there is even a way to understand his experiments as offering a kind of decolonial dance practice—albeit, Baird cautions, one that must proceed via the same radical questioning of categories and origins as those for which Hijikata aimed. The next chapter addresses Hijikata’s longtime collaborator, Ashikawa Yōko, considering her status as a choreographer/collaborator with Hijikata, as well...

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• Japan Black: Japanning, Minstrelsy, and “Japanese Tommy's” Yellowface Precursor

  Theatre Survey · 2021-04-06

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  On the Fourth of July, 1860, the New York Times introduced readers to a new persona treading the minstrel boards: Matinées are the order of the day, two at both the Bowerys, at George Christy's, at Bryant's, and at the Palace Gardens. Here “versatile performers” and “talented danseuses ” will diversify the hours of patriotic emotion with comic pantomime and grand “Japanese ballets,” led by “Little Tommy.” Japan has dropped a little into the sere and yellow leaf, perhaps, for the natives, but for the “strangers from the provinces” the land of blacking may still have charms, and we desire that “all such” may understand that the Japan of their dreams will be on exhibition to-night at Miss Laura Keene's Theatre.

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• Drumming Asian America: Taiko, Performance, and Cultural Politics By Angela K. Ahlgren. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; pp. xviii + 177, 22 illustrations. $105 cloth, $36.95 paper, $35.99 e-book.

  Theatre Survey · 2020-04-08

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  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

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• Itō, Michio (1893–1961)

  2018-09-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Michio Itō was a modern dancer and choreographer who worked in Europe, the United States, and Japan. After training at the Dalcroze Institute in Hellerau, Itō collaborated with Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats on the 1916 dance drama, At the Hawk’s Well. In New York City, Itō performed at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Greenwich Village Theatre, and taught and worked with U.S. modern dancers, including Martha Graham, Charles Weidman, Pauline Koner, Ruth St. Denis, and Lester Horton. Itō moved to Los Angeles in 1929, where he worked in film and choreographed dance symphonies for the Hollywood and Pasadena Rose Bowls. Following the events at Pearl Harbor Itō was interned, and repatriated to Tokyo in 1943. When the war ended he became head choreographer of the Ernie Pyle Theatre in Tokyo, creating productions for the occupying troops. Itō developed his own modern dance technique, the Itō Method, which adapted Dalcroze movement exercises into a style that he described as a fusion of ‘‘East’’ and ‘‘West.’’ Itō’s intercultural approach and ability to move between elite and commercial projects allowed him to cross different streams of modernism—German eurhythmics, British poetic drama, U.S. modern dance, and the Americanization of postwar culture in Japan.

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• What we Know and what we Want to Know

  2018-09-03 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  The connection of butoh with early twentieth century German modern dance or neuer Tanz feels both known and unknown at the same time. There is the acknowledgement of particular German teachers and Japanese students that has grown over the past few decades to almost-requisite in the majority of texts on butoh. “Transnational Stories During and After World War II" frames these concerns of direct and indirect genealogies within a global political context, including the historical alliance of Germany and Japan. The purpose is to bring multiple perspectives into conversation in order to provide a series of anchor points as well as some provocations regarding what we know and what we want to know about the intertwined histories of butoh and neuer Tanz. After World War II, Eguchi began the initiative for Japanese modern dance, and many modern dancers became members of the Japanese Art Dance Association.

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• A More Humane Mikado: Re-envisioning the Nation through Occupation-Era Productions of <i>The Mikado</i> in Japan

  Theatre Research International · 2015-09-09 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The first authorized productions in Japan of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado took place in the early years of the post-war American occupation. A group of Japanese theatre-makers whose international engagement had been circumscribed by the war were involved in these productions – first a 1946 American-led version for occupation personnel, and then an ‘all-Japanese’ version in 1947 and 1948. For these artists, The Mikado , a foreign operetta that was simultaneously ‘about Japan’ and not, offered a way of rebuilding post-war Japanese theatre, and, in doing so, imagining new possibilities for the nation. Through The Mikado they performed a ‘cosmopolitanism at home’, a mode of engagement with the international from within the borders of one's own nation.

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• America’s Japan and Japan’s Performing Arts: Cultural Mobility and Exchange in New York, 1952–2011

  Theatre Research International · 2015-02-06

  article1st authorCorresponding

  America's Japan and Japan's Performing Arts: Cultural Mobility and Exchange in New York, 1952–2011. By Barbara E. Thornbury. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Pp. 280 +15 illus. $70 Hb. - Volume 40 Issue 1

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• A Modernist Audience: The Kawakami Troupe, Matsuki Bunkio, and Boston Japonisme

  Theatre Journal · 2013-12-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Kawakami troupe, which helped to pioneer Japan’s modern theatre, toured across the United states during 1899–1900 en route to the 1900 Paris exposition. Although they were viewed as exotic orientalia in much of the country, they enjoyed a two-month run of commercial and critical success in boston. This essay examines the Kawakami troupe’s boston run with respect to the city’s preexisting status as a center of Japonisme, as well as the troupe’s semi-realist style and alliance with the boston-based Japanese merchant Matsuki Bunkio, suggesting that these factors together allowed for the formation of a modernist audience that received the Kawakamis as examples of modernist theatre.

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• Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde (review)

  Theatre Journal · 2011-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde Tara Rodman Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde. By James M. Harding. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010; pp. 244. Cutting Performances demonstrates that feminist performances can, and should, play a crucial role in our understanding of the American avant-garde. James Harding's aims here are twofold. First, to the extent that he endeavors to rescue the feminist artists in his case studies from historical disregard, he does so not merely to reinsert their works into the canon, but to prove that there is, in fact, a lineage of feminist avant-garde performance of which more recent female artists remain ignorant. And second, and perhaps more important, is the prescriptive aspect of the book: Harding proposes a feminist historiography of the avant-garde, in which the avant-garde itself is redefined in relation to feminist performances. [End Page 672] Harding's project focuses primarily on collage. Seen as an aesthetic, rather than strictly a graphic-art medium, collage is a juxtaposition of texts, bodies, voices, and objects that asserts a multiplicity of meaning. For Harding, these juxtapositions call "attention to that which remains unaccounted for in conventional representation and logic" (25), and thus offer a model for feminist historiography, where feminist performance neither replaces male innovation nor constitutes a separate artistic sphere, but is instead inherent to a history of the avant-garde that this book aims to tell. Harding's five case studies feature artists from throughout the twentieth century whose iconoclasm resisted the patriarchal assumptions of the mainstream and went further than their supposedly more challenging male peers. One of the strengths of the book is the way in which Harding not only positions these performances as historically important, but grounds his feminist historiography in concrete details that show that these women were explicitly responding to both the work and the behavior of the male artists surrounding them, in addition to broader patriarchal social institutions. In the first chapter, Harding analyzes Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's skin-baring costumes of detritus as a rejoinder to the timid gender blurring of her contemporaries, such as Marcel Duchamp's female alter-ego Rrose Sélavy. While Duchamp dressed up within the safety of Man Ray's studio (and, Harding speculates, only from the waist up), the baroness paraded through New York City streets, inviting and enduring repeated instances of police repression. Harding argues for von Freytag-Loringhoven's status as the "mother" of American Dada, as both her body and apartment—two "female" realms—became canvasses for a living collage of sexual and artistic transgression. The second chapter, which lays out much of Harding's theory of collage, examines Gertrude Stein's 1946 The Mother of Us All as an example of how performance undermines the authority of texts. According to Harding, the opera's layering of history and fiction destabilizes both forms of narrative, thereby escaping constrictive, unified meaning in favor of nonlinear, heterogeneous representations of experience. Harding next analyzes Yoko Ono's Cut Piece as a violent "unmaking of collage" that challenged the rhetoric of immediacy and authenticity of contemporaneous happenings artists like Allan Kaprow and Claus Oldenburg. Cut Piece (performed five times between 1964 and 1966) makes clear that such immediacy was still governed by patriarchal practices, because the activities audience members chose to carry out reiterated norms of sexual and racial dominance. Further, Harding's analysis of Cut Piece highlights the fact that collage is part of an artistic tradition that is implicated in the institutions of patriarchy, but it also foregrounds the historicity of collage, opening up the possibility for its recovery as a feminist aesthetic. In his fourth chapter, Harding again takes up performance's challenge to textual authority through Carolee Schneemann's participation in the 1967 Dialectics of Liberation Congress in London. Her physical performance of "found behaviors" and fragments read aloud from the keynote addresses, paired with a screening of her erotic film Fuses, contested the conference organizers' plan for decorous academic papers on the topic of liberation. Harding argues that, while the emerging academic practice of...

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Frequent coauthors

• Miyagawa Mariko

  1 shared

• Eiko Otake

  1 shared

• Kate Elswit

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2018 Fellowship for Advanced Social Science Research on Japa…
• Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize