My dissertation explores the concept of midare (“tangle,” “disruption,” “disarray,” “cadenza”) and its performative significance in pre-modern Japanese literature, drama, and calligraphy. On paper and onstage, the midare moments of a work are temporal, linguistic, and spatial junctures wherein ink tones warp, tempos mount, and gendered bodies collapse and merge. Through investigation of these “disruptions,” I argue that midare gestures resonate with decompositional rhythms that are always arrestingly corporeal and virtuosic.

The main texts and performances I examine here are the examples of midare-gaki, or “tangled script” calligraphy in the Illustrated Handscrolls of the Tale of Genji (ca. 1140); the Noh play Dôjôji (early 16^th cent.), distinct for its ranbyôshi (“aberrant rhythm”) dance; and the plays Shôjô (late 15^th cent.) and Sagi (early 16^th cent.).

“Choreographing Shadows,” sets the stage for the later chapters by introducing the texts and concepts motivating the project. Part One, “Scripting the Moribund: The Genji Scrolls' Aesthetics of Decomposition,” pivots on the axial, multivalent term “yami,” which signifies as “illness” in the Genji Scrolls. Here I consider both the engrossing narrative “interruptions” these scenes of ailing represent and the resonant “darkness” by which these scenes are cued and saturated. Progressing from an examination of midare as a multifaceted mode of performance in pre-modern calligraphy and narrative handscrolls, I then move to consider the heavily shadowed frames—corporeal and architectural—in which that disarray assumes its postures in Part Two, “Configuring Noh Bodies: ‘Aberrant Rhythms,’ Virtuosic Extensions, and Delimitations of the (Fugal) Subject.” Here, I extend the preceding discussion of the moribund body to theorize what I term “spectacular impairment,” whereby the performing body concentrates its intensities to display a constrained capacity for action. I argue that this constraint becomes a means of effecting a virtuosic range of movement, securing attention to the extent that it brandishes a body's stylized debility. Finally, in the Conclusion, “Adumbrating Midare’s Praxis” I employ this concept to examine the ideological, corporeal, and pedagogical limits and stakes of midare as a multidimensional mode of performance.