Why can’t Western instruments and noh work together? Why do Western-trained actors have trouble sharing the stage with Japanese noh-kyogen actors? And why oh why do producers seeking publicity, frisson, and doling civic funds equitably seek to marry the two in under-rehearsed, one-time experiments?
Three reasons spring to mind:
1/ On a basic level of dramaturgy, the two are self-contained and other-rejecting. Noh’s frontal declamation style and stylized expression of emotion demands focus; Western “cheating” diagonals and detailed facial expression pulls focus from the stage picture to the individual portrait. Vocal energy and melodic chant, coiled taut and loosened strategically through MA pauses and accents in conjunction with drum/flute accompaniment are potently precise; Western vocal energy is emotionally, not musically based. It follows the flow of breath swept up in the surge of passion and concrete logic of debate. The trained actor’s voice itself is the instrument, needing no musical “accompaniment” unless it be a versatile sax or clarinet of equal color. By bringing emotive acting with its stylized cousin, you achieve an impotent stand-off in stand-offishness: most actors lack the dual training to know HOW to bend correctly.so neither can bend to the other without breaking. Instead they stand, resolute and looking good in their own context, one unshared by other performers (and, needless to say, anyone in the audience). Sterility, confusion of stepping on invisible toes, and acceding to a low common denominator of stage aural and physical space are the unhappy results.
2/Producers hire noh-kyogen actors who are capable of performing competently; rarely do they demand them to move away from their comfort zones. Rehearsal times are limited, finding a common rehearsal style itself is challenging, and actors from both Western and Eastern traditions, afraid to look weak in front of each other, fall back on the tried and true, wearing their traditions on their sleeves. The results are a mixed salad/chessboard of intergenre mixing: great for publicity, photographs, and grants, but only annoying on stage. Matsui Akira, the Kita school actor, discusses how difficult it was to perform an Indian/Chinese/Korean fusion play a decade ago: each traditional performer, masters of their own genres, set restrictions on what they would wear or how they would move, afraid to look weak on the pan-Asian platform. Young players don’t know enough about their OWN traditions, much less the world, to reach beyond orthodox style. Seasoned professionals unconsciously rest on their slightly-tweaked laurels, even from their own perspective they are experimenting wildly.
3/ Pride and respect, while normally proper for the six hundred year-old noh-kyogen tradition, are traitors to intercultural experiment. Producers and directors afraid to venture beyond their own limited knowledge entrust the general directing to the actors themselves, who draw on their deep noh base and limited knowledge of Western dramaturgy to barely budge from orthodoxy. (Kanze Hideo, Umewaka Rokuro, Matsui Akira, and a few others are the exception, literally a handful among thousands, capable of truly moving from their base; Tessenkai entrusts Kasai Kenichi, a superb eye and ear for operatic stagings with traditional players; Masaru Sekine has recently proved himself capable of looking with a bicultural (noh, Shakespeare) at stage expression qua expression. Until more traditional actors open up to the world in humility, and more (Japanese) Western-trained performers follow Western avant-garde’s curiosity with Eastern form, the marriages are likely to continue to produce stale, sterile marriages (that nevertheless gather funding, publicity, audiences, and even misdirected applause (dog on a bicycle variety: anyone can ride a bicycle; the dog rides it poorly; but by the mere fact that a dog CAN ride the bi-wheeler, we are meant to applaud widely).
So what is to be done? How does one generate an atmosphere of mutual respect yet capable of challenging authority? By moving performers from their comfort zones: placing the Western musicians, conductorless, in unaccustomed rows. Or putting different masks or costumes on actors, placing them on thrust or proscenium or arena stages. Take away their masks! Only when these he literal and figural structures and properties that provide comfort away from home are abandoned can these performers mature on the intercultural vanguard. Failures will be expected, but failures of ambition, not tentative and stubbornly orthodox execution. Embrace potential defeat, then fight like a doomed soldier into the breech!
Three reasons spring to mind:
1/ On a basic level of dramaturgy, the two are self-contained and other-rejecting. Noh’s frontal declamation style and stylized expression of emotion demands focus; Western “cheating” diagonals and detailed facial expression pulls focus from the stage picture to the individual portrait. Vocal energy and melodic chant, coiled taut and loosened strategically through MA pauses and accents in conjunction with drum/flute accompaniment are potently precise; Western vocal energy is emotionally, not musically based. It follows the flow of breath swept up in the surge of passion and concrete logic of debate. The trained actor’s voice itself is the instrument, needing no musical “accompaniment” unless it be a versatile sax or clarinet of equal color. By bringing emotive acting with its stylized cousin, you achieve an impotent stand-off in stand-offishness: most actors lack the dual training to know HOW to bend correctly.so neither can bend to the other without breaking. Instead they stand, resolute and looking good in their own context, one unshared by other performers (and, needless to say, anyone in the audience). Sterility, confusion of stepping on invisible toes, and acceding to a low common denominator of stage aural and physical space are the unhappy results.
2/Producers hire noh-kyogen actors who are capable of performing competently; rarely do they demand them to move away from their comfort zones. Rehearsal times are limited, finding a common rehearsal style itself is challenging, and actors from both Western and Eastern traditions, afraid to look weak in front of each other, fall back on the tried and true, wearing their traditions on their sleeves. The results are a mixed salad/chessboard of intergenre mixing: great for publicity, photographs, and grants, but only annoying on stage. Matsui Akira, the Kita school actor, discusses how difficult it was to perform an Indian/Chinese/Korean fusion play a decade ago: each traditional performer, masters of their own genres, set restrictions on what they would wear or how they would move, afraid to look weak on the pan-Asian platform. Young players don’t know enough about their OWN traditions, much less the world, to reach beyond orthodox style. Seasoned professionals unconsciously rest on their slightly-tweaked laurels, even from their own perspective they are experimenting wildly.
3/ Pride and respect, while normally proper for the six hundred year-old noh-kyogen tradition, are traitors to intercultural experiment. Producers and directors afraid to venture beyond their own limited knowledge entrust the general directing to the actors themselves, who draw on their deep noh base and limited knowledge of Western dramaturgy to barely budge from orthodoxy. (Kanze Hideo, Umewaka Rokuro, Matsui Akira, and a few others are the exception, literally a handful among thousands, capable of truly moving from their base; Tessenkai entrusts Kasai Kenichi, a superb eye and ear for operatic stagings with traditional players; Masaru Sekine has recently proved himself capable of looking with a bicultural (noh, Shakespeare) at stage expression qua expression. Until more traditional actors open up to the world in humility, and more (Japanese) Western-trained performers follow Western avant-garde’s curiosity with Eastern form, the marriages are likely to continue to produce stale, sterile marriages (that nevertheless gather funding, publicity, audiences, and even misdirected applause (dog on a bicycle variety: anyone can ride a bicycle; the dog rides it poorly; but by the mere fact that a dog CAN ride the bi-wheeler, we are meant to applaud widely).
So what is to be done? How does one generate an atmosphere of mutual respect yet capable of challenging authority? By moving performers from their comfort zones: placing the Western musicians, conductorless, in unaccustomed rows. Or putting different masks or costumes on actors, placing them on thrust or proscenium or arena stages. Take away their masks! Only when these he literal and figural structures and properties that provide comfort away from home are abandoned can these performers mature on the intercultural vanguard. Failures will be expected, but failures of ambition, not tentative and stubbornly orthodox execution. Embrace potential defeat, then fight like a doomed soldier into the breech!
Comments
Perhaps the key to successful inter-cultural collaboration lies in finding a way to delve deep into the purpose of the expression? The particular culture is irrelevant to this issue. Within a story on stage, what deeper meaning does a combination of precise sound and exact movement evoke? How is this combination able to chill us to the bone, warm our hearts, or ignite our passions? There are a million different ways to express the same thing- Sadness, joy, pain, loss, love and hate- these are all universal- but the way each culture chooses to express them musically and, moreover, theatrically, that is quite different.
Perhaps the artists involved need to begin by discussing with each other what, in each moment, they are trying to achieve on stage. They must stop defending WHAT THEY DO and instead focus on WHY THEY DO IT. Above all, they must start communicating with each other through their art's intentions rather than through the external forms which convey said messages. If this can be done, a conversation based on creating a collaborative piece which houses these universal emotions can occur.
Then, inter-cultural theater will have it's common ground from which to work. Artists will see the beauty of each other's forms. They will rise to their respective challenges of attempting to understand the other's form and meet it while simultaneously marveling with humility during the times when the other's form captures the moment better than theirs.
When this ground is finally tread upon, the combining forms will bend, twist, tangle, and meld. They will marry in a celebration of deep understanding, quarreling occasionally as those emotionally bound do, but never never breaking.
That's just my thought anyways.