| My dissertation examines representations of commoner performance in early medieval (ninth through thirteenth centuries) textual and visual works. I argue that elites often viewed commoners as socially peripheral yet symbolically central: though politically and economically marginalized, commoners maintained a nondis cursive culture that both fascinated and troubled elites. Commoner performance--including field music and dance (dengaku); juggling, acrobatics, and illusion (sarugaku); and popular songs (imayo) performed by female entertainers ( asobi) and nomadic puppeteers (kugutsu)--was transgressive and volatile, as demonstrated by representations of street carnivals and mass performances. I show how these forms subverted dualisms like high and low, culture and politics, and writing and orality, setting the stage for later commoner-led cultural developments such as noh theater.;Seeking to deconstruct the opposition between history's "real spaces" and literary studies' critical approach to language, I attend to the fullness of performance--those transient, nondiscursive acts that frequently become objects of discourse. In order to better understand how embodied practices were transposed into texts, I consider the ways in which the medium is not necessarily the message. Pursuing a more sensitive kind of reading, I examine how texts both mediate and are mediated by the external world. Traces of vanished performances do not simply inform; they suggest entire worlds of sound, gesture, and movement, evoking the presence of everyday experience.;I explore commoner performance through five broad and interlocking topics: crowds, the strange, sound, bodies, and space. These topics emerged from my reading of primary sources, so they are in the first place relevant to the way commoner performance was viewed at the time. Furthermore, because these are broad topics that resonate beyond early medieval Japan, it is my hope that students of other cultures and time periods will also find materials and ideas of interest to them in this study. |
