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Not I transl.
and dir. by Kimura Yusuke at the Theatre Lumen, Kyoto
May 30 2019
Samuel Beckett’s Not I is a surreal horror of a
one-woman show. A Woman’s mouth only is seen, high above the stage, absurdly higher
than if she were standing, framed in spotlight. As the light fades in, the
sounds of her gasping, whispering, urgent voice is heard before the lights fade
up on the mouth, lips painted brightly, teeth, tongue; even her throat is
visible in a kind of red-grey chiaroscuro. She is speaking to herself, a stung
creature, like the ox-sister Io in Euripides’ Prometheus. Words spill from her unwanted, a verbal diarrhea,
before she thinks them, allowing us to see her forming the words and reacting
to them in real time, reversing normal order. Each impulse, each fragment,
amended or doubled-back upon, rejected or extended—returns her to a continuous loop,
recurring inside her brain but vocalized for us. A silent, lonely woman
suddenly released to talk, she spurts and sputters all of her memories, hopes,
and conceptions of her present predicament. We, like her, are caught in our Selves,
unable to move, unable to look away—but listening. In Billie Whitelaw’s famed
version (which nearly sent her to the hospital), the mouth, tongue, teeth, and even
spittle were hauntingly larger-than-life on the screen, the various angles shot
seemingly in real time, with a single spot on the gaping hole/mouth/vagina. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFQH7hhDTSE
Kyoto was the culmination
of a peripatetic 3-year project begun in Germany, Kimura Yusuke presented his
multi-media Not I, refined over the
years. A graduate of the IAMAS program in Gifu, and HZT in Berlin, he has
worked in Germany and Tokyo (Scool June 20-24 developing a “boxless camera obscura” lens technique. A large
magnifying lens carefully positioned in front of the seated Woman refracts the
lights to project her blurry image onto screen. Instead of the clear, sharp
image of a video projection, we see a shadowy, deep, grainy image occasionally
coming into focus on her mouth. Further distracting the relationship of subject
and object is the pinhole’s directness: her face is inverted. This low-tech
media is therefore “unmediated”, raw image shows us in 30-inch wide oblong, a
blown up and blurred image of the actress. Seated on the opposite side of the
small gallery, hooded and in dark clothes, she sat straight in front of a
microphone. Although we could watch her during the performance, for most of the
time she was looking at the image, adjusting her position and angle to gain the
best contrast and clarity of the image. Spectators, who had to swivel to see
both, predominantly settled on the screen, the mediated Voice coming through
front speakers along with the live one to our side. The effect was to see the
Mouth as a separate character, “She,” from the Woman that is telling the tale,
rather than the objective “Me?” of the original.
The actress was one of four, each
giving their own version for separate programs, performed for a few days in
Tokyo and Kyoto; Tomo Kohjima, a seemingly bilingual actress, was one the sole
one in English. According to Uchino Tadashi’s FB post, he sat through all four
and learned to his surprise much about acting and liveness. For me, my
question, as for many of these “boys with toys” multi-media experiments was:
what is gained from the extensions or deconstructions of the liveness of the
performer by the complicated mechanisms of media deformation? And if little: is
that a successful experiment, drawing viewers back to appreciate the “pure
theatre” of unmediated live performance? This seems to be one of the themes of
Kimura’s practice/research: http://yusuke-kimura.net/biography_en/
In this case, I too felt it was a
stimulating production, maximalizing Beckett’s carefully honed minimalism.
There were many things to look at, and paralleling the instability of the words
and Woman’s mental state, the image was not a static one, but constantly
changed with each sound, tilt of the head, natural trembling of especially
troubling locutions, etc… Midway, Kohjima seemed to turn her head to the side,
actually appealing to the spectators from her prison-like self, the image
suddenly unreadably fuzzy, before returning to her central position. Was I
supposed to see this to my right? Or merely watch the screen and hear the words
through the speakers. I felt like I was sneaking a backstage peek at the creation of
the piece, but one that was fully visible, confusing the simplicity of the
pinhole camera/straight spiel of a text.
* * *
At the talkback session afterwards, Kimura spoke about being inspired to
create the production. Having seen the TV version, he couldn’t imagine an
entire theatre spellbound by the tiny mouth. Wanting to create a larger mouth,
feeling it would look too small as the sole object in the theatre (most
productions follow Beckett’s later productions and ignore the Auditor in the
downstage right--back to audience, standing, tall, male-as unnecessesary and
undramatic). Yet when I attended Alan Schneider/Billie Whitelaw’s revival at the small Beckett
theatre in NYC in the 1980s, it strangely floated in space, larger-than-life, at
least in my imagination. However the projection gave two focal points for
spectators, positioned in V-formation with narrow end towards screen. This
required turning one’s head to see the actress, who mostly was blank-faced
while speaking. So if Kimura’s intent was to create a larger, more readable “Mouth”
he sabotaged his own idea by leaving the Mouth visible and occasionally
gesturing, drawing from its ghostly power. Yet he also wrote in program notes
of distinguishing the “who” and the “what” of normal narrative, to create the
special space for Beckett’s abstract playlet, and in this I think he was
successful. Despite the contraptions, at a glance and a shiver of anticipation,
one can know it is Beckettland you have entered.
I saw only one of the four actors (I had seen an earlier, Japanese
version at Theatre Gekken 3 years earlier, and don’t remember the visibility of
the actress), but in this English version, the actress was assuredly more than
mere Mouth. The words were spoken slowly, simply, with little affect but
occasional bursts of emotions. Yet there was none of the harried spilling out
of self-revelation of the Whitelaw/Beckett version. More unfortunate, the
looping narrative, which repeated certain segments like prayers or ruts or
grooves, polished in his later Rockaby,
were here just stepping stones along the way, seeking to make sense of a
narrative rather than bring consolation. Despite its experimental technology,
the interpretation of the “Not I” had not of the sound and the fury of a lonely
and confused older Woman trying to entangle her life that to me seems the
point.
More distracting was the movement. Kohjim opened and clenched her hands,
looked from side to side, and even seemed to be pleading with ME during the
show. Kimura noted that until one week before the performance, he had the
actresses moving while speaking, unfettered. Although she had been “strapped in”
after that, it sees some of these physical expressions were evident as remnants
of her embodied interpretation. Kimura found it fascinating; I found it
confusing. In addition to trying to bring into focus the blurry and dark
on-screen image to one side, her suddenly becoming “on” as an actress was an
unnecessarily distracting element.
This was an intriguing experiment,
rich with potential, and I’m sure even more so for those who attended all four
versions by different actresses. For me, the pent-up then spilling out fury of
a Woman locked inside her body, only her Mouth her active muscles and sentient, was lost
when the strapped-in, helmeted young, healthy female presence was also in the
frame. This intriguingly low-tech Not I, stimulating as it was as a meditation on Selfhood and actorly presence, was Not for Me.
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