Invisible Indigeneity: First Nations and Aboriginal Theatre in Japanese Translation and Performance.

This paper will investigate the politics of theatre translation and translation theatre at work in the recent Rakutendan productions of The Rez Sisters and Up the Ladder, in order to suggest how indigenous theatre travels and is transformed by different bodies, languages, and audiences. The essay begins with a brief historical overview of the myth of Japan's racial/cultural homogeneity and the particular issue of visibility in somatic and semantic terms. It then focuses on the two productions and considers telling aspects of their textual translations, as well as the ways in which they negotiated the fine line between translation theatre performance and cultural appropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]