Luca Proietti

While working in theatre for eight years, I developed an interest in Japanese media and art forms thanks to the originality shown in any artistic field, from cinema to literature, up to music and video games. By enjoying many artists like Murakami Haruki, Tsukamoto Shinya, and Akita Masami, I decided to start deepening my studies on Japanese culture to understand how a transnational reworking would be used to bind with traditional past roots rather than entirely clear up a whole historical culture.

Member of the British Association for Japanese Studies, I achieved my BA in East Asian Languages and Civilisations at Sapienza University of Rome with a dissertation about the graphic signs used in manga to represent the incommunicability between a Japanese and a Western speaker, referring to manga of the slice of life genre such as "Azumanga Daioh" and "Kin-iro Mosaic", and others of the biographical genre such as "Isabella Bird in Wonderland: Unbeaten Tracks in Japan". Then, I completed my MA in Japanese Studies at SOAS University of London by working on a dissertation about the role of rock culture in Japanese theatre reworking, including as a reference angura subculture, the kabuki influence in David Bowie, and a punk transposition of Monzaemon Chikamatsu’s “Drum of the Waves of Horikawa.