Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

68 INTERMINGLING OF CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITYdown old woman, cruelly cast out into a void. However,in the second half she is transformed. We see past thebroken exterior to the story within and magically we seethe young woman within the old frame.In the performance, we see the apparition of the spiritof the old woman. She is dead but, as with all nohcharacters, she is not dead but merely transformed.Time is not linear but circular. Death does not come asthe end. Instead, she is assimilated with the moonshine,showing a transparent, innocent, dancing figure as aresult.What we see is what Zeami calls senu hima—a void/rapture of time and space in which the actor standsdoing nothing but shows his way of being, completelyuninhibited. In the body of Ohno, in the gutturalearthy chanting of Kanze, in the otherworldly sound ofthe Japanese flute and in the emptiness of the noh-likestage, time and space are transcended: time slows, spaceexpands and the stage contains the universal.By contrast, in Beckett’s Rockaby, aging is theprelude to death. Death will come as an abrupt andempty conclusion. Confined to her rocking chairmanipulated by an unseen hand an old woman,played by a contemporary Japanese actress, babbles.Okamoto (2007) describes aging in modern times as“complete loneliness and is the meaninglessness andempty conclusion of modern times revealing the depthsof vanity.” Both are part of the tradition of modernJapan.Traditional theater: Restoring the deadLike their traditional theater forebears, contemporaryJapanese plays often feature ghosts or the dead. In someway the Angura movement precipitated not so much areturn of the gods but a return of the dead to primacyon the stage. Sam Shepard, the American playwrightwhose works are peppered with ghosts, finds his workmore easily accepted by Japanese audiences thancontemporary American ones who are discomfited bythe dead cohabiting so readily on stage with the living.Traditional theater in Asia and indeed elsewhere is oftenabout conjuring the dead and it is this negotiation withthe dead that is the heart of the shamanic tradition. Ibelieve it is this tradition where the border between thetraditional and contemporary artist will be transgressedand transformed many times over in a multitude of waysallowing release, recognition and joy. Contemporarytheatre too prides itself on providing a voice for thosemade voiceless by contemporary society and politics.ConclusionIn exploring truths as they are revealed to us from anolder belief system, perhaps we can travel some wayfrom the depths of our current vanity which holds fastto its belief in the self-evident. Traditional theater hasmuch to offer, not in the way of form but in a way ofseeing, perceiving and understanding: it seeks to see theinvisible as much as the visible: it is a way of seeingthat is at once humanist and universalist, not nationalistand essentialist. It has a relationship with the past thatgoes beyond the historical. It must, therefore, be leftto evolve and meet the challenges of modernity. In thewords of Indonesian poet and theater maker GoenawanMohamed, “Start with tradition but don’t end there.”Or, like Chihiro, we may be apt to disappear in ashimmer of light or, worse still, find ourselves inhabitingan abandoned theme park filled with the detritus ofcultural scenarios (Napier 2007).NOTES1MacDonald’s.2It is said that modern Japanese audiences are somewhatembarrassed by the strangeness of noh or kyogen in themodern world. But they sense in these theaters a link,however tenuous, connecting them with a part of theircultural heritage, and in the end they feel rather lonelywithout them. Sabaka Junko makes this analogy: acontemporary audience is like the husband in the kyogenplay The Sickle (Kamabara) who cannot get along with hiswife but, having failed to kill himself and the relationship,he returns home distressed and upset but relieved athaving the comforts of a familiar home and marriage.3See 10 th century Genji Monogatari.4Japanese proverb.5 Globalization is, moreover, not simply a western export.Thus, a whole-hearted embrace of Arab culture inIndonesia, for example, with its claims that this constitutesa more authentic (more Muslim) identity can similarlylead to a false sense of identity with onion-shaped mosquesreplacing more diverse structures and the ubiquitousjilbab replacing a larger variety of head coverings. It isa movement towards what Goenawan Mohamed (2001)terms “Al Identity.”6The problem, of course, lies with issues of what constitutesauthenticity and the “real.” Traditional culture isoften feminized. The feminized country is valued forAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows