Dangers of repeat informants: recycling what we know about noh
(This is the beginning of a publication perhaps; I welcome feedback).
I have been ruminating on the dangers of going to the well too often when it comes to Japanese theatre research on noh performance in particular. Those "tried and true" actors who are able/willing to be interviewed, teach, and tour overseas for conferences or workshops are few and far between. Significantly, just three of them--Kongo school Udaka Michishige, Kita school Takabayashi Kouji, and Kita school Matsui Akira have been responsible for many of the articles, and dissertations, interviews, and international collaborations for over four decades. Why are these three Kansai-based performers (2 outside where iemoto and most performances take place, Tokyo), 2 first-generation actors who are relative outsiders to the main line of tradition, taken as "the gospel" of noh performance practice over multiple generations of scholars? Their persistent role as informants generating quotations and invitations are self-fulfilling prophecies about their authority.
Despite there being around 1000 noh professionals, with many who are more popular, prize-winning, respected by their peers, active domestically, with far more disciples, these three are the go-to performers for international tours and collaborations. As scholars (and journalists) we are told to verify sources by cross-referencing with others, engaging in a critical triangulation of multiple perspectives to arrive at our original analyses. As ethnographers, we are taught that, while embedding ourselves as participant-observers (especially with embodied traditions) that we must rely not only on our own teacher/family/school/genre, but gain objectivity through multiple informants and contexts. And yet still today, noh researchers, often performance scholars with limited Japanese language knowledge (guilty, at least until 1986!) rely on the established, much-quoted "authorities" to construct their models and theories, sometimes on the basis of a narrow, sometimes single, informant, often mediated by an interpreter, omitting whatever was lost in translation. These accessible, reliable, interesting, and eminently quotable outsiders, their authority already established by prior scholarship on them, are frequently, ironically, outsiders--physically, in their practice and thinking, to the tradition that they, de facto, become representatives of. Perhaps this is why they think out of the box; also the reason they need foreign students/tours to raise their profiles/status in Japan. The result is an endless recycling of a few privileged performers, by and large atypical ones, as the face and voice of the multifaceted art of 600 year-old noh.
Encountering histories: Beyond Kata project
Dance dramaturge Nanako Nakajima held an open research meeting on Encountering Histories: Beyond Kata as a finale to a three-year project (and continuation of her fertile on "Aging Dance Bodies") involving young modern dancers and the great 87 year-old noh master Takabayashi Kouji of the Kita school. There were many fascinating episodes during the 2 hour session:
- Takabayashi Kouji and ballet-trained performers demonstrating their "warm-up" movement (ballet) and breathing (noh) techniques, including Peking-based dancer-choreographer Mengfan Wang
- Koujisensei showing how he danced Oimatsu as a child, and now as a mature performer.
- Hearing about the start of this multi-faced project from Nakajimasan: told by her buyo teacher in her twenties that she must wait till she's in her 50s or older to perform certain pieces, then going to NY where she met dancers her age who felt they were too old to grow as dancers any more
- watching dancers improvise with Kojisensei with the noh stance and sashihiraki kata as a base
- a moving final words form Kojisensei that in his eighties he felt he had been gifted with this opportunity to renew himself through this interaction with young researchers and performers
I will leave to Nakajimasensei et.al. to publish the project findings, as we only had a "taster's plate" of their ten-day workshop, that will find fruition in a future performance. Here I would like to reflect on three popular noh performers as teachers, informants, and intercultural theatre collaborators. Non-coincidentally, I have had long relationships with all three.
Three noh performers dominating English discourse
It struck me as oddly coincidental that Takabayashi Kouji (1935-) ,who had my first encounter with noh in 1980(!), was still active in such international collaborations. My college friend Linda Weiner (Hoffman, Matisse) studied for a year on a Watson felllowship under him. She learned a dozen shimai, and created her own dances (the seagull), introduced by Monica Bethe. When I moved to Kyoto I watched her practice with him, and attended her showing. Later I invited his son Shinjisensei to teach at T.T.T., which he did in his dark-wood keikoba for a decade, before the Kyoto Art Center took over the program and installed Kanze School teachers. Shinji once told me that, although he had never taught foreigners before, his father had encouraged it, saying it would be good for development of his own art. And he moved from hesitant and somewhat shy teacher to guru-like confident master in that decade. TTT students like Kinneret Noy (Israel) and others continued to train with him over the decades.
Kojisensei was invited to a ritual and performance symposium in NY in 1982 that became the basis of articles in the NYU Performance Studies' founder Richard Schechner book, introduced by Karen Brazell of Cornell University.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/by-means-of-performance/B1D68C7CDC08699D0DCD7C3A137C0498
In Kyoto, Kouji was interviewed by Rebecca Ogamo (Noh/Kyogen Masks and Performance),
Israeli Kinneret Noy (for her dissertation on Greek theatre and noh)
https://www.proquest.com/docview/194888021
and American ex-pat in London Margaret (Jiggs) Coldiron for her dissertation/book on Balinese and Noh masks,
among others. And I invited both Koji and son Shinji as a father-son team to a seminar on Kata sponsored by Ryukoku University in 2000, Beyond Tradition: Transmission, Reconstruction, Innovation.
As a member of the Osaka branch of the noh association, Kojisensei was responsible for training young actors in the government-supported Yoseikai program. It happened that Wakayama-based Matsui Akira's son Shunsuke (my zemi student at the time) studied under this very different Kita teacher. Matsui is perhaps the most well-known noh performer overseas, although domestically he is a considered a fine regional performer in the small Kita school. Ye has been teaching and collaborating in the U.S. and Europe primarily since the 1980s. Farley Richmond's 1968 video made at Michigan State
https://www.worldcat.org/title/asian-theatre-noh-classical-theatre-of-japan/oclc/48790162
https://www.worldcat.org/title/asian-theatre-noh-classical-theatre-of-japan/oclc/48790162
(Akira complains often that he never saw a cent of distribution sales) is now widely distributed on Alexanderstreet (formerly Insight media), offering many in American universities their first practical understanding of the art. He has been the subject and informant for numerous articles, dissertations, and books, including flutist Mariko Anno's.
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781939161079/piercing-the-structure-of-tradition/
The ubiquitous now senior Japanese scholar-artist Richard Emmert and others early in their Tokyo Japanese research careers, including Peter Eckersall, Carol Sorgenfrei, Ashley Thorpe, the Polish Noh Theatre Study Group, and a whole host of other international scholars and artists have studied under him at his Tokyo or Wakayama keikoba. Eugenio Barba tapped him for three of his ISTA seminars, and in his Theatre Mundum collaborative Ur-Hamlet productions in Italy, Denmark, and Poland (aware of the "foreign taint" of Japanese artists who frequently tour abroad, Eugenio has also worked with Kanze Hideo and Hisao, Kawamura Nobushige, and numerous other nihonbuyo masters as well).
Emmert tours regularly with him, collaborating with Korean, Indian, and American fusionists, new noh in Sydney by Allan Maratt, including my favorite, Oppenheimer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqfdoPAxiVk
Matsui has a long-running affiliation with Munich's Meta Theatre, my own Noho Theatre Group, where he starred as the Hawk in Yeats' At the Hawk's Well in 1985, and has been performing Beckett's Rockabye for three decades in many language versions. And he a founding member and frequent teacher for TheatreNohgaku in Tokyo, London, Pennsylvania.
https://www.theatrenohgaku.org
Central to Ogamo's Mime Journal special on noh was her interview with her late teacher Udaka Michishige (1947-2020) trained the first two licensed foreign masters, John McAteer and Ogamo.
https://internationalnohinstitute.com/about-us/master-actor-udaka-michishige/
With his command of English and solid sense of noh's universality as a means of spiritual and physical training, Michishige has always been open to teaching foreign students. He taught at TTT for its initial three years and then INI for four decades, cultivating loyal international students, some of whom went on to introduce THEIR students to noh (Monique Arnaud taught Diego Pellecchia, who is now a licensed professional as well). As a rare mask carving performer and one who can speak English he has been interviewed frequently, including for Coldiron's book, documentaries, articles, and Mime Journal publications, including the latest issue, a downloadable issue on Ataka (commonly known as The Subscription List in its Kabuki retelling).
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/mimejournal/
Having listed just some of the accomplishments and influence of these three masters, each very distinct from each other, I want to proclaim my deep respect for their devotion and adventurous spirit, while calling into question their near-monopolistic (triopolistic) role in scholarly and artistic collaborations.
Outsiders as spokespersons, templates, and representative
These three noh actors have, since 1980 at least, been responsible for perhaps 90% of the foreign-language articles, documentaries, and books on contemporary noh theatre (Komparu Kunio and Kanze Hideo were also exceptionally open-minded about non-Japanese introductions of noh). Why? All three are certainly masters, offering superb performances and excellent teaching, singing, and dancing at the highest level. But so are many of the thousand noh professionals over the decades. These 3 are accessible and willing to host foreign researchers and artists. They have disciples like Emmert, Ogamo, or myself who introduce others to them. Matsui tours regularly (currently working with Emmert and Theatre Nohgaku on an opera collaboration in Washington of Monteverdi's Orpheo). And so they (or their children, Tatsushige Udaka) become the ones to turn to for new projects, experiments, tours, or teaching. Kyoto Art University (formerly Zokei, long story) introduced Nakajimasan to Koujisensei, knowing he was relatively free (having retired from dancing noh at 80, he writes his musings (in hiragana), and sings entire noh plays at their family's bi-annual performances.
And yet. Koji's father, one of the few Kita school actors in Kyoto, far from Tokyo headquarters of the stylistic school, insisted that he had inherited the true teachings of the iemoto, so stubborn in his belief that he was basically excommunicated from the school. Udakasensei is a first-generation noh actor from a samurai clan on Shikoku Island, with a particular spiritual perspective on noh practice not shared by many today. Matsui is also a first generation actor, from the smallest of the five noh schools, a lone Kita school actor in Wakayama, a small city far from the Tokyo HQ of the troupe. Each of them are outsiders to the tradition, having to forged their own paths from childhood towards professional status. And yet these are the three, sometime outcasts, loners, unique, first-generation performers, who now embody "noh" to hundreds of non-Japanese through personal contact, and thousands through scholarly writings about them.
Challenges and inconclusion
Is it natural? Certainly. Artistic practice? Inevitable (you play the cards you were dealt). Is it a responsible scholarship? Questionable. (I have heard the kyogen actor Akira Shigeyama, his father and son, repeat the same explanation when teaching kata, with only slight variation. Yet when I interpreted for Nomura Kosuke (Manzo VI), he approached it from a completely different direction. Had I not been fortunate enough to have mediated these actors from rival schools, I would have known less about kyogen, and written less). Actors accustomed to similar questions about their art develop answers as repeatable Kata, just as they do the art itself. "Why are there no women in noh." "What do you see when you are wearing the mask onstage." "How do you maintain energy and flow on stage" are the natural questions that performance scholars might ask, and these three popular and accessible masters have learned how to respond with practiced, polished formulae. Their children or disciples, hearing these explanations, are apt to repeat them verbatim, without bothering to consider these issues themselves.
Is there a solution? Make the harder challenge of hiring interpreters and going to masters who have NOT yet been interviewed, or collaborated, with modern/foreign artist. But one then risks a long road before receiving deeper answers and commentary on practice, as conservative performers tend to protect their own turf, resisting dissection of the mystery of noh, or (the majority) not having the educational background or interest to situate themselves within global performance history, practice, or theory.
Is this true in other genres (I will consider Kyogen another time)? Is it true of all Japanese arts, where masters and especially their gatekeepers (myself included) are necessarily chosen for their accessibility, openness, flexibility, and relative outsider status (unlike mainstream performers embedded in the iemoto system, they can somewhat set their own schedules). And Asian? And beyond. To be continued...
Comments