Theatre in Asia II: Japan

One of the richest theatrical traditions in the East is that of Japan. 

We’ll focus on three major forms of traditional Japanese theatre, Noh, Bunraku, and Kabuki.  Even before the first of these forms was created, however, and before records carefully notated the history of Japanese performance, rituals called Kagura were danced in honor of various gods. And as early as the ninth and tenth centuries, a form called Bugaku, masked dances presented to the imperial court, began to be performed.  These dances were very important to the development of our first major form, the Noh drama. 

     

During the time that we call the Middle Ages, Japan was in the era of the first shoguns, or military dictators, who ruled the nation through most of the nineteenth century.  Early in this era, dramas were played at Temples to instruct people in the Buddhist faith.  By the late fourteenth century, the shoguns, who thought of themselves as lovers and patrons of the arts, looked for ways to demonstrate their cultural sophistication.  In 1374 a performer named Kan’ami performed before the shogun, who was so pleased that he took both Kan’ami and his son Zeami into his protection and made them some of his highest officials.  This father and son created and developed a highly dignified, subtle drama for the shogun and his court, called Noh. 

One of the most important Noh dramas is Kan’ami’s Sotoba Komachi, in which a woman forces the man who loves her to visit 

her for 100 nights in a row before she will accept him. After visit number 99, the man dies. The story is narrated by the woman, old now, and haunted by the spirit of her lover.  This and other plays are heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism, which emphasizes suggestion, subtlety, simplicity, and restraint, and are highly stylized. Women characters, as in many Asian forms, were portrayed by carefully trained male actors.

The plays of the Noh theatre are divided into 5 types:  plays that 

praise the gods, plays about warriors, plays about women (such as Sotoba Komachi), miscellaneous plays (often about mad people) and plays about demons and other supernatural entities. In an evening of traditional Noh performance, one of EACH of these types would be played, and between each one there would be a comic interlude, called a kyogen. 

The plays feature highly choreographed movement, from the stately entrance to the final exit.  A chorus of 6 to 10 men sits on 

the side and sings the actor’s lines as he (and it’s always a he) dances the action.  The chorus also provides an on-going narration.  Occasionally the actor will sing or chant lines solo.  The Noh play always culminates in a final dance, which is rather complicated, and perhaps the most active part of a Noh performance.  The actors are often masked and generally wear elaborate costumes.  The orchestra and chorus are all dressed identically, in the traditional dress of the samurai.

Props are few, but as in Beijing Opera, are highly symbolic.  The most important prop is the fan.  Depending on how it is used, a fan can indicate wind blowing or a mere ripple of wind, a rising moon,

 falling rain, and so on.  The only scenery is a painted pine tree on the back wall of the stage.  The stage itself is approximately 18 feet square, and four pillars hold up its roof.  The major entranceway to the stage is the bridge, or hashigakara, six feet wide and 30 to 50 feet long, on one side of the stage.  All of the actors, musicians and chorus enter the stage from the hashigakara.

In modern performance three Noh plays are usually presented, separated by two kyogen.  I saw my first and so far only Noh drama outdoors, at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. 

This presentation included only one kyogen, followed by one Noh drama.  During this performance many in this predominantly western audience slipped out. Perhaps the U.S. audience was expecting something more active, like the Beijing Opera, but for those who left, it was their great loss. I, on the other hand, was riveted by its uniqueness and was sad when the evening ended. 

  

The Noh has survived, at times by the skin of its teeth, into the modern era.  Since World War II it has been recognized as a national treasure, and is subsidized. In this way a unique, unusual, and beautiful form of theatre may continue.  Very occasionally we are honored by a visit from a Noh troupe, thanks largely to the Japan Society in New York City, which offers a wide assortment of performance.

      

While Noh theatre entertained the aristocracy, a variety of more popular entertainments were enjoyed by the people of Japan.  Two of the most important emerged during the Tokugawa shogunate (1603 -1867).  The first is known by a number of names, but for our purposes we’ll keep it simple and call it Bunraku – a form of puppet theatre.  It was perfected by a company in Osaka after 

1685.  Part of the reason for the brilliance of this Osaka company were the scripts written for them by Chikematsu Monzaemon (1653 - 1724), who is often called the Japanese Shakespeare.  Perhaps his most famous play deals with the deaths of two star-crossed lovers. You can guess what happens from the title: The Double Suicide at Sonezaki (1703).  So, no, this isn’t the Muppets. This is very serious theatre, which happens to use puppets.  We have little tradition of this in the US, but throughout Asia the puppet theatre is a important genre. For that matter it’s much more apparent and respected in Europe too, and in Europe as well as in Asia it includes many kinds of dramas, sometimes comic, but often very serious. 

      

The puppets are approximately 3-4 feet tall, and each is handled

by three puppeteers dressed in black (to signify that they are not there).  These handlers are highly trained, taking as long as 20 to 30 years before appearing on stage.  Their relation to the puppets is amazing to witness.  The story is chanted by a narrator, a virtuoso performer who sits off to the side, accompanied by one or more samisen players.  The samisen is a 3-stringed instrument similar to a lute.  I had the good luck to see a Bunraku troupe in the early 1990s in NYC, and was tremendously moved by the performance, not just the virtuosity of the handlers and of the chanter, but the story itself, even though I don’t speak the language and had only a synopsis to read.  Highly conventionalized, non-realistic theatre is more universal than most theatre in that it is less dependent on language and more on movement, and the quality of a tone, so that if one has a little patience, one can understand it no matter what language is being spoken.

      

Kabuki, the final major form we’ll examine, is said to have begun in Kyoto in 1603, when a woman named Okuni began to give 

public performances on the banks of the river.  She danced with her company, which was made up mostly of women.  These performances included openly erotic sections, and as one thing so often leads to another, the theatre became associated with prostitution. In 1629 the shogun banned women from performing.  The form was still in popular demand, however, and the women 

were replaced by young teenage boys.  These boys apparently became equally appealing to the audiences, for in 1652 the boys’ kabuki was suppressed, again because of prostitution.  You’d think that someone would have come up with the common denominator – the audience!  Yes?  The men in the audience bought the women or the boys for their pleasure, but as usual, it was the performers who were blamed, and after 1652 only adult males were allowed to perform in Kabuki, a tradition which continues today.  Actually, that’s not strictly true, women can perform, but in all- female troupes, and they are not subsidized by the government.

      

Kabuki developed rapidly between 1675 and 1750.  After 1750 it became more popular than Bunraku, and it utilized the great plays of the Bunraku theatre, including those of Chikematsu and his 

successor at the Osaka puppet theatre, Takedo Izumo II (1691 - 1756).  Isumo’s masterpiece, Chushingura, is the story of 47 faithful samurai who avenge the wrongs done to their dead master.  More than 50 subsequent Kabuki and Bunraku plays were based on this story, and the great film of Akira Kurosawa, The Seven Samurai, is also based on it. By the way, this film was made into a pretty fine American western called The Magnificent Seven, and the recent film Ronin, with Robert De Niro, was based very loosely on Izumo’s work.

      

As in other forms of Asian drama, the acting in Kabuki theatre is highly stylized and requires years of intense study.  The stage, 

Note the revolve (the semicircular cut in the stage)
and the beginning on the bottom left of the
hanamichi

however, is not nearly as austere as in most Asian forms.  Like the others, it is a wooden square, but unlike the others it can feature a considerable amount of scenery. It utilizes machinery for special effects, including one of the earliest revolve stages in theatre history, and it has a trap door.  Remember the bridge from the dressing rooms to the stage in the Noh theatre, the hashigakara? Kabuki uses a variation on this theme, but it locates its bridge right through the middle of the audience.  This 

you can get a better look at the hanamichi and the
performer on it, in this picture

bridge, called the hanamichi, or “flower way,” is the entrance path for performers, who will often freeze into a mie, or tableau, on their way through the audience to demonstrate their characters, and perhaps to heighten suspense.  Sometimes short scenes are enacted on the hanamichi as well.  An orchestra seated on stage accompanies the action, and the principal instrument, as in Bunraku, is the samisen.  Recent Kabuki has been influenced somewhat by the west, but traditional practices still dominate.

   

In the early twentieth century western drama was introduced to Japan.  Similar to and probably inspired by the Independent Theatre movement in Europe, which we’ll look at later in the course, a group called the Free Theatre Society was formed in 1909.  Here Shakespeare and the great moderns, including Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw and Strindberg, were performed. More recently, several fine Japanese writers, including Kobo Abe (1924 - 1993) and Yukio Mishima (1925 - 1970) began to write in a style that exploited and mixed western forms with traditional Japanese playwriting styles. Today in Tokyo serious western-style drama, big musicals, as well as Noh, Bunraku and Kabuki, all co-exist and can be seen on the stages of that city, along with other forms of entertainment.  Tokyo theatre is not all that different from NYC’s scene, except perhaps in its variety; certainly it’s a popular stop for international tours of American musicals.  Arthur Miller was present for an acclaimed Japanese production of Death of a Salesman there recently. If you think for a moment of the impact of a Willy Loman style failure on a Japanese salesman, you can bet the Miller play resonated strongly with its Japanese audiences.  Takeshi Kata, an alum who went on to Yale for his MFA in design, wrote me a paper about a titillating all female Japanese musical form, Takarazuka. In this genre the women play both male and female roles, and many of the productions are American musicals. Recently, for example, The Scarlet Pimpernel was, one might say “Takarazuka-ed!”

     

The most important recent “name” in Japanese theatre is Tadashi Suzuki, who works often in Europe and America, and who has bridged the gap between Eastern an

d Western theatre in his productions of classics, most notably Greek myths like The Trojan Women and The Bacchae.  His book, 

The Way of the Actor, details his technique.  Most recently he and avant-garde American director Anne Bogart have worked together on new methods of actor training, centered at their Saratoga, NY Institute.  One of our former students, Aki Sato-Johnson, is a member of the Suzuki company and travels the world with it.

 

Yukio Ninegawa is another Japanese director who brings
Shakespeare to the West

Ninagawa is invited to bring plays by other than Shakespeare to the
West,as he offers a unique directorial vision

One favorite western playwright in Japan is Shakespeare, some of whose plays have been made into Japanese films, including two by the great director I’ve already mentioned, Akira Kurosawa.  Macbeth became Throne of Blood, and King Lear became the brilliant Ran.  And thanks in part to Suzuki, American audiences have recently seen plays like the Kabuki Macbeth, which seeks to blend the styles of East and West.

This concludes our look at Asian drama, covering very important forms but woefully lacking in other styles, and in the work of other Asian countries. A full semester could easily be devoted to the important theatre of the Far East, but in this outline study of theatre history, we’ll have to leave it.

Next up: the theatre in eighteenth century Europe!