This dissertation, “Altered Belonging: The Transnational Modern Dance of Itō Michio,” argues that Itō forged an artistic and social identity out of the very categories of racial and national difference typically used to exclude Japanese from Euro-American society. The strategies he employed provide a paradigm for how performing bodies marked as foreign claim freedom of mobility and a sense of belonging in their adopted communities. Addressing the full span of his career across five decades of performance in Europe, the U.S., and Japan, this dissertation restores the historic and analytic relationships among geographically distinct archives. By uncovering the linkages between his eurythmics training in Hellerau, Germany, his modernist collaborations in London, his nearly three decades dancing in New York and Los Angeles, and his Pan-Asianist activities under Japan’s wartime empire, I recover, for instance, how Itō’s experience of New York stage Orientalism later shadows his Pan-Asianist planned performances for Imperial Japan, and how the universalist ideals of his Hellerau training resurfaced as an ideology of community dance in Los Angeles. The trans-oceanic linkages thus rendered legible are relevant for understanding not only Itō’s career but also the integrated nature of twentieth-century modernism and the strategies by which modern artists refashioned alterity into a basis for creative freedom and freedom of movement.

Last modified

• 03/30/2018

Creator

• Tara Rodman

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2QH53

Subject

• Theatre and Drama

Keyword

• modernism
• Asian American
• transnationalism
• performance
• cosmpolitanism
• Japan

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright