Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

INTERMINGLING OF CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY67Epitaph for a Whale, has been commented on for itsnoh-like elements and Sakate’s bare minimalist staginghas more in common with the noh stage than with thewestern proscenium.Others drew not on the stories but the metaphysics.Director Ota Shogo turned more deeply to the formand spirit of noh in his “silent plays,” Water Station,Earth Station, and Wind Station. A stalwart of theangura movement, Ota created pieces of non-verbaltheater that startled audiences everywhere. In WaterStation, a single pipe in the middle of the stage providesa focal point for transients who move slowly acrossthe stage. The slow movements of the actors allow usto see the tiny movements of their soul as they stop torefresh themselves, playing out their huge dilemmas ofgrief, hopelessness, joy and despair in small series ofmovements or kata. Using ordinary actors, Ota usedthe form of noh to explore human desires and storiesbut told the complex stories not through words butthrough the use of space and time.In the early 1980s, playwright-director Hirata Oriza,reacting against both the Western shingeki playscriptsas well as the noisiness of the kabuki-inspiredangura “tradition,” made a new kind of theater whichcritics dubbed Quiet Theater. Hirata prefers the termcolloquial theater as his characters, again played by nontraditionalactors, speak a natural, everyday, colloquialJapanese. He acknowledges the direct influence of nohin his work. By making his action and conversationminimalist, he hoped audiences would go beyond whatis being said on stage to what is hidden.Through dramatic construction, theater gives form tothe minute oscillations within the individual who doesnot notice or does not want to notice what is happeningaround him. Traditionally as a medium, theater hasserved the function of providing the illusion of seeingreality. However, today, from the far end of the universeto the inner workings of the human body, there isnothing that we cannot observe anymore as long as ithas tangible shape. Yes there is still one thing that wecannot but desire to see. That is the movement of thehuman soul (Poulton 2006).Returning to Point Zero: Okamoto AkiraFinally, the work of Okamoto Akira and his companyRen’niku Kobo has been profound. Central to hiswork has been his concern with the place of noh incontemporary theater. His Contemporary Noh Series isa return to the metaphysics of traditional theater. Hislong relationship with such artists as the late noh mastersKanze Hisao and Kanze Hideo and the buto dancerKazuo Ohno and his own belief in the importance ofseeking new forms of theatrical expression has led himto cross a multiplicity of borders.Pushing the borders of experimental, avant garde andessential theater, he crossed the borders separatingcontemporary theater, noh, buto and dance. Centralto the work is that they “never assume the theatricalframework or structure as given or established.” Rather,they begin at “Point Zero” by “radically questioning”their work and “treat the whole production process asproblematic from a bottoms up perspective” (Okamoto2007).While acknowledging that theater has an amusementand entertainment aspect, Okamoto feels that “thelack of questioning of the principle of entertainmentas a goal inevitably leads to theater experienced as arigidified habit.” More significantly, he says, it alienatestheater from both its past and its future and removes itfrom its external environment, thus turning theater intolittle more than a present experience. “Theater centeredupon the entertainment principle ends in circular selfrepetition and eventually declines” (Okamoto 2007).Acknowledging this problem led Ren’niku Kobo torealize that while they had to remain focused on noh,they had to constantly demand of themselves how torelate and combine their work with pre-modern theaterand traditional culture. It also led them to collaboratewith both traditional and contemporary artists froma variety of disciplines, including sound, light andmultimedia, adhering firmly to the belief that theater isessentially a pluralistic art form and one that “developsbetween audience and actors” (Grotowski 1997).Okamoto’s company sees tradition, not as a dead form,but one that continues to evolve in the bodies of actors,theater makers and audience members.His deep relationship with various traditional performershas allowed experimentation of a very profound order.In his contemporary noh play Mu (Void), he workedwith two masters of their art—butoh dancer Ohno andnoh master Kanze Hideo. He used texts from threesources, the noh play of the secret old woman NohObasute, Beckett’s drama Rockaby and contemporarypoet Naka Taro.The Noh Obasute deals with the topic of taking oldpeople to the mountain and throwing them away.For Japan’s rapidly aging population, this is a storyrich in cruel metaphor. In the first half, following thedramaturgy of the noh performance, we see a brokenAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows