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August 20 |
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Bunraku & Hatsune Miku |
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Presence and Composition: Bunraku Puppet Theatre and Virtual Diva Hatsune Miku |
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Yuji Sone |
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What does Japan’s traditional Bunraku puppet theatre have in common with the recent pop-culture phenomenon of virtual diva Hatsune Miku?
Hatsune Miku is a commercially produced software product that generates a synthesised singing voice. Users create desktop performances with an animated character (Hatsune Miku) as the singer, and post them onto a popular video-sharing site. It is her very artificiality that Hatsune Miku fans enjoy.
Bunraku performance consists of narration, music and puppetry. Each element is performed by a separate master (the chanter, the musician and the puppeteer), and the performance functions as a synthesis of these three separate artistic mediums.
This talk shows how these two seemingly disparate performance genres, developed centuries apart, are much more similar than we might think. |
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| About Yuji Sone |
Dr Yuji Sone is a lecturer and performance researcher at Macquarie University. Having trained with experimental theatre company Banyu-Inryoku in Japan, Dr. Sone came to Australia in the late 1980s and has since performed at numerous domestic and international festivals including Experimenta, Sound Watch (NZ), San Francisco Sound Culture and Rootless UK. His performances work in tandem with his academic research, which focuses on contemporary Japanese performance in relation to technology. |
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| Photo: Hatsune Miku © Crypton Future Media, inc. 2007 |
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