This Land Was Their Land

When European settlers arrived on the North American content, they encountered indigenous inhabitants, whom we now call Native Americans, with cultures as diverse as might be expected given the breadth of the continent and the range of ecological conditions.  Of these Native American cultures, Mystical Abyss especially celebrates the Iroquois, who are, despite the common appellation, not a single tribe but a League of distinct nations.  This League, which has also been known as the Iroquois Confederacy, is generally thought to have been formed between 1450 and 1600 AD, for the purpose of creating a lasting alliance among the previously contentious Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca nations.   As Canasatego, leader of the Onondaga nation, commented in 1744 in an address to British colonists at the Treaty of Lancaster:

“. . . We heartily recommend Union and a Good Agreement between you our Brethren. Our wise Forefathers established Union and Amity between the Five Nations; this has made us formidable, this has given us great weight and Authority with our Neighboring Nations. We are a Powerfull confederacy, and by your observing the same Methods our wise Forefathers have taken, you will acquire fresh Strength and Power.”

Land sale contract with Iroquois clan symbols, 1769

A sixth nation, the Tuscarora, joined the League during the 18^th century. 

Of particular interest, in the context of Mystical Abyss, is the fact that Iroquois clans were matrilineal.  Women also had significant power within the society.  For example, if a chief died, his successor was selected by the most senior woman of his lineage, in consultation with other women of the same clan.

Like the European settlers who came to dominate North America, the ancestors of most modern Japanese were relative latecomers to the territory they came to dominate.  From 14,000 to 300 BC the Japanese archipelago was inhabited by hunter-gatherers known as the Jomon people, of whom genetic traces are most prominent in the Ainu and Okinawan populations, which continue to occupy the cultural and geographic margins of Japan.  The ancestors of most modern Japanese arrived during the subsequent Yayoi period, when agriculture, most notably rice farming, superseded the previous hunter-gatherer society.  The emergence of Shinto—not the state Shinto of the modern period but a less codified reverence for spirits in nature—is also associated with the Yayoi period. 

Japanese figurative dogu of the late Jomon period, with insect eyes

Archaeological evidence suggests that the Jomon people practiced ancestor worship and that clans were matrilineal.  In the earliest accounts of Japan, written by travelers of the Chinese Wei dynasty in the 3^rd century AD, Japan appears even to have been matriarchal:  chronicles refer to Japan as the Queen Country, consisting of thirty tribal groups under the dominion of a Queen. 

The Japanese origin myths retold in Mystical Abyss made their first literary appearance in the early eighth century (712 AD), but even in the Chinese chronicles of five hundred years earlier, the Queen was said to have been named Pimiko  (Japanese “Himeko”), or “Sun Child.”  Some scholars conjecture that the Jomon people also practiced an astronomical religion, although an Ainu legend claims that the ancestors of the Ainu “lived in this place a hundred thousand years before the Children of the Sun came.”

It is Director Yuriko Doi’s contention that the worship of Izanami and Izanagi very likely predates the solar cult and included a lunar element.  This idea will be discussed in greater detail in a future article.

Flame style vase of the middle Jomon period

Many of the animated images you will see in Mystical Abyss are 21^st century interpretations of designs found on Jomon pots, which are among the oldest ceramic artifacts in the world .  In fact, the Jomon period is named for its pottery:  the word Jomon means “cord marks” and refers to surface designs presumably created by wrapping cord around a stick and impressing the cord pattern onto wet clay.  Over time, the designs on Jomon pottery became extremely ornate: Middle Jomon jars have fantastical coiled collars, and Late Jomon vessels often feature patterns of spirals or snakes.  In addition to pots used for storage, the Jomon people produced figurative statuettes called dogu, many with huge insect eyes; such statuettes are presumed to have served some ritual purpose.  Jomon-era masks, some with holes for the eyes and some without, have also been uncovered. 

Clay model for a mask inspired by a Jomon dogu

In later articles, I hope to be able to share images of the Jomon-inspired masks that Hideta Kitazawa is creating for the production.  As a preview, here is a clay model for a mask, along with a photograph of the Jomon dogu that inspired the design.

For more information about Mystical Abyss, including ticketing information and a video snippet from a performance workshop, see the Mystical Abyss web page at http://www.theatreofyugen.org/?spec=41.

Invitation to the Abyss

Masashi Nomura as Izanami

Theatre of Yugen is excited to present Mystical Abyss, the culminating production of a career in which Japanese-born director Yuriko Doi has brought to the West a distinctive fusion of traditional Japanese dramatic arts and cutting-edge world theater.   In this production, she returns to origins, plumbing both Japanese and American prehistory.

Izanagi and Izanami, husband and wife, create the Japanese islands and an assortment of deities.  After Izanami dies in childbirth, the distraught Izanagi follows her to the Underworld, where he witnesses her frightening transfiguration, recoils, and thus invokes her rage.  The Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu retreats into a cave in fear and indignation at the raucous antics of her brother, only to be lured back into the world by the redemptive power of Art.  Interwoven with these Japanese stories is the Iroquois creation myth in which Sky Woman, hurled by her husband into an abyss in the glowing Sky Country, plunges through the dark where, with the assistance of animals anxious to curb her fall, she lands on a turtle to create the earth. 

To help her tell and interpret these stories, Yuriko Doi has assembled a team of collaborators who are luminaries in their respective fields.  John O’Keefe, celebrated American playwright, developed the script.  Masashi Nomura, of the Kanze school of Noh, portrays the goddesses Izanami and Amaterasu, supported by Noh musicians Narumi Takizawa (flute) and Yoshio Ueno (drums).    Mohawk dancers and singers Kenny and Roger Perkins are joined by Aztec mitote performance artist Cuauhtemoc Peranda and  Mexican folkloric dancers Jesus Jacoh Cortes and Janelle Ayon.  Catalan-American actor Lluis Valls narrates the story and personifies the turtle.   Japanese CG animators Taketo Kobayashi and Koya Takahashi deploy thrilling images  inspired by prehistoric Japanese Jomon art to complement Renta Kouchi’s set.  And traditional Noh mask carver Hideta Kitazawa (nominee for the Bay Area Critics’ Circle award in 2011) is carving five masks for the production; so far one design is evocative of ancient Japanese Jomon-period artifacts, and another is an abstract tour-de-force based on the animators’ vision.

Director Yuriko Doi

Mystical Abyss may evoke the past, but as the striking choreography, sound experiments, animation, and avant-garde storytelling emphasize, it is no exercise in nostalgia.  Director Doi crowns her career with a moving exploration of the circumstances conducive to creation.  We are living, Doi believes, at a crux in time demanding that we no longer turn rigidly away from what we dread or, worse, accuse others of the vices we deny in ourselves.  Try as we might, as individuals and as societies, to “put the past behind us”—even to suppress those aspects of ourselves and our histories that we would rather not confront—it is only by embracing the whole experience of life, including our inner darkness, the relatedness of man and nature, and the inevitability of death, that we can create a healthier world as a legacy to our children.   

Please join us at ODC Theater on September 27-30 for what promises to be an unforgettable show.  Enter and explore the Mystical Abyss.  Be inspired.  Emerge reborn.     

To buy tickets, call the ODC Theater Box Office at (415) 863-9834.

Antic Beauty: The Art of Greg Giovanni

“I don’t want a slice of life.  I see life all the time.” –Greg Giovanni

Iga no Tsubone and the Tengu, by Yoshitoshi

If you want to see kitchen sink drama, there are places to go for that experience–maybe even Thanksgiving at the home of relatives who air their grievances at family events.  If your taste runs to productions in which some character is identifiably “the conscience of the play,” there are many places to indulge that preference.  And if you need reassurance that the improvisational practices of 1960s Open Theater have persisted into the 21^stcentury, again you should not have to search very far.   If, however, you would prefer to enter a labyrinth populated by human and hybrid creatures, lovers and scoundrels, fun-house grotesques, and figures of camp all speaking poetry, you will want to discover playwright Greg Giovanni.

The Jersey Devil (1909)

My first experience of Greg’s work was a film of his play Pine Barrens, as performed in 2006 by Theatre Nohgaku at the North Carolina School of the Arts.  Pine Barrens is a Noh play in English in the category of demon plays and focuses on the Jersey Devil, a cryptid–like the Loch Ness monster or the Yeti–of which there have been hundreds of supposed sightings in the Pine Barrens of South New Jersey and surrounding areas since 1909.  In the play, Greg gives this infamous creature a back story: unwanted by a mother who already had twelve children, a boy was consigned to the Devil.  The fabled monster is an avatar of that disillusioned child.  In Greg’s work, I have since discovered, one can never stop at one’s first reaction, whether to a comic character or to a tragic one.  There is always an unexpected dimension.

St. Matthew’s Fair, one of the plays presented at the NOHspace last fall as part of A Minor Miracle Part 1, is also a Noh play, this time in the third category—a woman play—but despite having been a practitioner of Noh for more than a dozen years, Greg is far from limited to Noh, whether as a performer or as a playwright.   His play The Ixionidae, derived from “The Battle of the Lapiths and the Centaurs” from Ovid (but also featuring the character of Titania from A Midsummer Night’s Dream),  is in the form of a Jacobean Masque, and Naked Cocktail is a cabaret show with elements of horror and noir detective fiction.

“I love theatrical conventions.  They’re curtains we can hide behind.”—Greg Giovanni

Greg has been called unconventional, even iconoclastic—he refers to himself as “an old punk” and has been prominent in the Philadelphia underground theater scene for several decades–but he might be more appropriately described as poly-conventional.  He refers jovially to the “Greg Giovanni Book of Theater Cliches” and excels at manipulating and combining conventions to achieve diverse effects.  His lighter work can bring to mind the visual jokes of the Japanese Edo period, like this mitate print in which the raid of the 47 samurai from the play Chushingura is enacted by an unlikely set of characters:

Act Eleven of Chushingura Parodied by Famous Beauties, by Utamaro, The Art Institute of Chicago

Indeed, Greg’s work is often comic but always with an edge of pathos.   In The Dwarfs Are for the Dwarfs, the kyogen play within A Minor Miracle Part 1, the dwarves have comic characteristics but one also feels sorry them, and similarly, audience members who join us at the NOHspace for A Minor Miracle Part 2 will find in Lady Jingly, a kabuki-inspired drama based on Edward Lear’s “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo,” as much cause to pity as to laugh.  This is one of the particular pleasures of Greg Giovanni’s work, his leaving so much room for the audience:  a Giovanni play is like a fun house in which each visitor can see something different in the mirrors.

Blemmye, from Cotton Tiberius B v, British Library

“Even in the campiest stuff, there should be some beauty.”—Greg Giovanni

Sexual ambiguity and gender bending have their part in many of Greg’s plays.  The main character in The Ixionidae is a young man compelled to fight to the death with a centaur who was once his lover, and the depleted starlets in Naked Cocktail are intended to be portrayed by men.  Greg himself hosts cabarets in drag and performs Noh in nightclubs in Philadelphia.  (In Noh and in Kabuki, female roles have been played exclusively by men for centuries.)

Hercules Killing the Centaur Nessus, by Giambologna

“Is there room for beauty in art?” I ask Greg, and he replies, “I should hope so…I love beauty that makes me gasp!”  In some of Greg’s plays there is violence, but even there beauty is underscored.  The centaur in The Ixionidae is behaving vilely, carrying off the bride at a wedding, and must be stopped, but first we see through the young man’s eyes how magnificent the centaur is.  And beauty is not just physical:  Greg’s first theatrical love, he says, was Genet’s Our Lady of Flowers, because “The poetry was gorgeous,” and the music of words, even when Greg works with nonsense rhymes, figures heavily into his work.

After beauty our conversation turns to glamour and the fact that “glamour” originally referred to an enchantment cast by fairies.  (Think, if you will, of “pixie dust.”)  A Noh actor impersonating a woman cannot be mistaken for a woman—one can see the actor’s beard, if he has one, below the mask—and a modern performer in drag does not disguise his male voice.  Drag works, Greg tells me, “Because you have the glamour on,” and in Naked Cocktail the predicament of the faded women is precisely that “They are putting the glamour on, and it’s not working anymore.”  Many Noh plays, Greg reminds me, also portray a beauty or vigor that has faded.  But, of course, in the Japanese aesthetic there is beauty in the fading itself.

Sorya!  A Minor Miracle Part 2

A Minor Miracle Part 2 features three works by Greg Giovanni:

Steadfast Memory is based on the story of “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” by Hans Christian Andersen.  The play utilizes various elements of Japanese bunraku performance.  There will be puppets, although not of the traditional bunraku variety, and the puppeteers will be visible to the audience.  Greg himself will be the chanter, or tayu, who performs the narration, and ensemble member Sheila Berotti will be the musician.

The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, from Project Gutenberg

Lady Jingly is based on “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo,” by Edward Lear, and will be informed by the kabuki style, with ensemble member Sheila Devitt in the role of Lady Jingly and apprentice Nick Ishimaru as the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

The Darling Song Cycle is a series of songs based on characters from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, with lyrics by Greg Giovanni and music by Edward Schocker.  Ensemble member Karen Marek and apprentice Melanie Schauwecker will perform the songs.

Artistic Director Jubilith Moore and Ensemble Member Sara Matsui-Colby will also appear in the production.

Like A Minor Miracle Part 1, this show will be suitable for children, even little ones.  There is no need to have attended Part 1 in order to understand Part 2.

December 2012 update:  In A Minor Cycle, the role of Lady Jingly will be performed by Sheila Berotti.  Sara Matsui-Colby will be the musician in Steadfast Memory.  Sheila Berotti and Lluis Valls will sing in The Darling Song Cycle.

Observing Creation: The Making of Mystical Abyss

On Saturday I attended the first rehearsal for the January 28 Worklights presentation of Mystical Abyss.  The Worklights show will be staged but will not be a full production.  Director Yuriko Doi will select highlights of the play to share with those of us too curious to wait until fall to learn more about the project.

Director Yuriko Doi

I have known Yuriko for several years but never saw her direct until yesterday.  I had heard she had a knee injury, and indeed there she was with her left leg propped on a cushion and a crutch lying beside her, yet she was full of energy, gesticulating as she described the intent of each scene, the graphics to be projected on scrim to complement the live performance, and the style and symbolism of the costumes, which will be ready in May. 

Almost all members of the cast were present.  Notable exceptions were Yugen ensemble member Lluis Valls, who will be the giant turtle, and Noh shite actor Masashi Nomura, of the Kanze school, who will personify both the dark goddess Izanami and the sun goddess Amaterasu.  Masashi Nomura and his father Shiro Nomura are both involved in the production; Masashi will perform on January 28 but had not yet arrived from Japan on Saturday.

The rehearsal began with a read-through of John O’Keefe’s text.  It is rare for verbal elements to be prominent in a Yugen production, but Mystical Abyss is a symphony of words.  As a writer, I especially relished the narrator’s slides between colloquial and more elevated diction, the juxtaposition of ancient, medieval, and modern Japanese, the verbal duets in which English and Mohawk are spoken simultaneously, and the climactic moment in which the same meaning is conveyed in English, Mohawk, Japanese, and Spanish all at once.  Have you ever heard Mohawk spoken?  I had not, and the sound is marvelous, a seductive music.   Another highlight for me was hearing John O’Keefe, as the narrator, voice the transformation of the goddess Izanami from Izanagi’s loving wife to a threatening chthonic deity.  John will appear in the final production of Mystical Abyss but not in the January 28 Worklights show.

Tree of Peace, from a US Forest Service publication

After the read-through, work began in earnest on the dance elements of the production.  Mexican folkloric dancer Jesus Alberto Cortes Hernandez, who will dance the roles of several male gods, choreographed a modern dance before our eyes with his partner Janelle Ayon, who will be Sky Woman.  They then deftly incorporated elements of traditional Iroquois dance proposed by Native American musicians Kenny and Roger Perkins.  The Perkins brothers will sing and play percussion in the production.  Noh flute player Narumi Takizawa and hip drum player Yoshio Ueno will also perform.

During dinner break, I had a chance to interview Yuriko Doi about what she anticipates will be the last major project of her dramatic career. 

OTB (On the Bridgeway):  Yuriko, I can’t help wondering, when I reflect on your distinguished career—as a performer, a teacher, an ambassador for Japanese traditional arts in America, and not least, as a crafter of new world theater that combines classical, traditional, and modern influences—what new regions did you feel you still needed to explore when you conceived the idea of Mystical Abyss?

YD (Yuriko Doi):  In Mystical Abyss, I wanted to express cosmic power very directly, using mythology.  In my Antigone, in the relationship between Antigone and Creon, I already had an image of waves, but in Mystical Abyss, the stories of Izanami and Izanagi, Amaterasu and Susanoo, and Sky Woman and the turtle, there is a more literal concern with the cosmic power of Nature.

OTB:  So you wanted to make a statement on this theme.  How about artistic elements?

YD:  Well, CG animation.  In Crazy Horse and Moon of the Scarlet Plums, I used some images—projections—but I wasn’t satisfied.  They seemed as if they were just extra…

OTB:  Extraneous?

YD:  Yes.  In Mystical Abyss, the animation will be fully integrated with the other ways of storytelling.  Japanese animators Taketo Kobayashi and Koya Takahashi will work with me on this project. (Pause) You know, in Noh, the stage is almost empty, and the audience members create the setting and fill in the story in their imaginations.  This is part of the beauty of Noh, but in this generation people want to see the images in front of them.

OTB:  From your descriptions, Mystical Abyss will be visually complex and exciting for audience members who are highly visual in their orientation–most young people, for example.

YD:  Yes.

Masashi Nomura as Crazy Horse (2001)

OTB:  Yuriko, this isn’t your first production that combines Japanese and Native American elements.  You created Crazy Horse and Moon of the Scarlet Plums before this.  How will Mystical Abyss be like those productions, and how will it be different?

YD:  Some of the same principal actors and musicians are involved–Masashi Nomura, for example.  But both Crazy Horse and Moon of the Scarlet Plums were really Noh plays telling Native American stories.  In this case, of course there will be echoes of Noh, because Masashi and the other Noh performers will bring those with them, but really Mystical Abyss will be a fusion of Japanese, Native American, and modern elements into a work of contemporary dance theater. 

JB (Jubilith Moore):  As soon as people see the first dance, they will know we are doing something different this time.

Stories behind the Story

Mystical Abyss portrays encounters among characters from ancient Japanese and Iroquois mythologies. Even audience members with no prior exposure to the stories behind Mystical Abyss will easily follow John O’Keefe’s engaging narrative as it unfolds not only in words but also in music, dance, and dazzling computer-graphic animation. This being said, both in the world of Japanese Noh theater and in sacred performance traditions across diverse cultures, it is typical for spectators to know the foundation stories in advance. In that spirit, I will tell them here—giving no hints as to how you will hear them transformed and see them intertwined in the production itself.

Native American storyteller, from Smithsonian

Sky Woman and the Turtle
In Iroquois mythology, the earth is borne on the back of a giant turtle. Originally, there was no North American continent. The turtle and other sea creatures lived in the ocean. Birds lived in the space below the clouds. Above the clouds was a sky world illuminated not by the sun, which did not yet exist, but by a great tree. In this heavenly domain lived the sky people, one of whom was Sky Woman.

Sky Woman married a powerful chief in the sky country and eventually became pregnant. In some versions of the story, the chief became enraged; in other versions, the chief had a dream, which he interpreted as a sign. He tore the great tree from its place to create an abyss in the sky country, and into the abyss he pushed his wife, who plunged through the clouds and toward the sea.

Sky Woman, by Ernie Smith

Birds and water animals saw the Sky Woman falling and knew she needed a solid place to land. Several tried to help but most failed until finally, one of them—a toad in some versions, a muskrat in another—brought up some mud from the sea and spread it on the back of a giant turtle, where it became a great continent. Fire Dragon (comet), who sometimes passed between the sky world and the space below the clouds, helped Sky Woman by providing the corn seeds and dried meat she would need in the world below.

Sky Woman created the sun, moon, and stars to cast light on the earth. In some tellings of the story, she also gave birth to a pair of gods, one responsible for those aspects of nature people find good and useful, the other for those aspects people consider troublesome or destructive.

Izanagi and Izanami
In Japanese mythology, Izanagi and Izanami were the male and female gods responsible for creating the land, specifically the Japanese islands. They married and begot not only islands but many gods representing natural phenomena. The last of these, the god of fire, scorched Izanami, causing her to die in childbirth.

Izanami and Izanagi

Izanagi was inconsolable after the death of his wife and journeyed to the underworld to try to retrieve her, but alas, he was too late. She had already eaten some soup in that world and was therefore unable to return. (Those conversant in Greek mythology will remember a similar incident in the story of Persephone, who cannot return permanently from the underworld because she has eaten six pomegranate seeds.) Nonetheless, Izanami asked Izanagi to wait and, above all, not to try to gaze upon her, but he lit a torch and beheld her in a hideous state of decomposition. In terror he fled, while his irate wife pursued him, attended by a troupe of female demons dubbed in one of my books “the ugly-girls-from-Hell.” Claiming humiliation, Izanami threatened to retaliate by killing one thousand people a day. Izanagi replied that then he would bring one thousand five hundred people per day to life.

Amaterasu and Susanoo
Izanagi wasted no time in putting his creative intentions into practice. While purifying himself after his visit to the underworld, he created Amaterasu, the sun goddess, from his right eye and the moon goddess from his left eye. From his nose, he created Susanoo, the storm god.

Izanagi entrusted the heavens to Amaterasu and the night to her sister, the moon goddess. He entrusted the seas to their brother Susanoo, but Susanoo claimed that what he really wished was to join his mother in the underworld. First, however, he wanted to take leave of Amaterasu, and on that occasion, the two of them engaged in a childbearing contest. (The importance of contests in classical Japanese culture would be difficult to overstate.) Susanoo won the contest. Exuberant and, according to the seminal Japanese text called the Kojiki, also literally drunk with victory, Susanoo lost all his decorum. He destroyed Amaterasu’s rice paddies and irrigation ditches and defecated in the halls where the first fruits of the harvest were celebrated. Finally, he dropped a skinned horse into Amaterasu’s sacred weaving hall, causing the death of one of her maidens. While initially inclined to excuse her brother’s indecencies, Amaterasu was shocked at her brother’s desecration of the weaving hall and retreated into a cave, causing all the earth and the heavens to fall into darkness.

Ama no Uzume dances on a drum

Night reigned, and of course the gods became increasingly impatient. They convened an assembly to discuss how to lure Amaterasu out of her hiding place. Ultimately they decided to mount an elaborate ritual entertainment. They uprooted a flowering tree, which they festooned with beads, and in the branches they hung a mirror and white and blue cloth. Then Ama no Uzume, the goddess of mirth, adorned with vines and leaves, began to sing, dance, and stamp on an overturned bucket. In her enthusiasm, she bared her breasts and pulled down her skirt, while all the gods—hundreds of them—laughed with delight.

Amaterasu, in her cave, wondered at the hilarity–how could hundreds of gods be laughing there in the gloom?–and the gods replied that they were rejoicing because they had found a deity superior to her! Catching a glimpse of her own image in the mirror and thinking this must be the other deity, Amaterasu emerged from the cave, and the other gods blocked the opening behind her. Sunlight returned, and Susanoo was fined and expelled for his transgressions.

The conflict between Amaterasu and Susanoo was considered, for hundreds of years, to explain the rivalry between the contending Yamato and Izumo clans and justify the preeminence of the Yamato. Amaterasu was believed to be not only the tutelary divinity but the direct ancestor of the Japanese imperial line. In addition, the story was considered to depict the origin of Japanese traditional dramatic arts and taiko drumming, which began with a goddess’ sacred antics on an overturned bucket.

Sleeping Beauty

Beneath drifts of snow
The future lies in hiding,
But in the branches
The wind stirs.  Might it whisper
Some secret of spring?

That spring and even the autumn harvest lie in potential under winter snow is a theme in Japanese poetry from the earliest times.  The paradigmatic Naniwazu poem, dating from the eighth century and identified in the Kokinshu as one of the “parents” of all subsequent Japanese poetry, alludes to this phenomenon:

In Naniwa Harbor
The flowers have come to the trees;
They slept through the winter,
But now it is spring–
See how the blossoms have opened!
(translated in Twenty Plays of the Noh Theater, edited by Donald Keene)

And the Manyoshu includes a poem of the same vintage, “composed at a snow-viewing banquet” at what was then the capital city of Nara:

On this New Year’s Day,
The beginning of the year,
It promises a fruitful autumn,
This snow that lies so deep.
–Fujii Moroai (translated in 1000 Poems from the Manyoshu, Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai)

Tree peony in bloom

In San Francisco, where the lemon tree in my backyard bears fruit even in early January, the idea that spring flowers might depend on a period of rest under frozen earth can come as a surprise.  It was surely news to me when, some years ago, I decided to plant a tree peony alongside my house.  Flipping through the pages of my favorite nursery catalogue, I admired one stunning cultivar after another but in each case found a notation indicating that the plant was hardy only in zones 2 through 8.  According to my garden book, San Francisco was in zone 10.

What could it mean for a flowering plant not to be “hardy” in the mild climate of the San Francisco Bay Area?  The riddle was answered by a patient lady at the nursery, who explained to me that, while California has enviable growing conditions for many plants, peonies produce their lavish blooms only where winter affords them several weeks of hibernation in pronounced cold weather.  She suggested that I create a trough around the plant and pour ice into it on a regular basis.  Every evening, was it?  I no longer remember.  I tried but did not succeed in fooling the peony into flower.

Amaterasu looks out from her cave (print by Yoshitoshi)

In parallel with nature, the Yugen ensemble is in a state of covert preparation—our regular season does not resume until spring, with Sorya! A Minor Miracle 2—but in the interval, we invite all those interested in the innovative work we have in progress to come to the NOHspace on Saturday evening, January 28, at 8 pm for a tantalizing glimpse at the growth taking place under the proverbial snow.  As part of our free Worklights series (and so close to Groundhog Day as to make metaphorical comparisons difficult to resist), Theatre of Yugen will present a preview of Mystical Abyss, an original production conceived and directed by founder Yuriko Doi and written by playwright John O’Keefe.   Members of the ensemble will be joined by traditional performers from Japan, as well as by musicians and dancers representing the Blackfeet tribe and the Mohawk tribe of the Iroquois, in a multimedia performance event that explores commonalities between Japanese and Iroquois myths of creation and renewal.  Watch this blog for more detailed posts about various aspects of this international collaboration.  Participate in a multicultural discourse that will extend through this spring and summer, culminating in the world premiere of Mystical Abyss this fall as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival.   But most importantly, come to the NOHspace on January 28 and help us charm the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, who figures prominently in the play, out of her hiding place; if we make enough noise, perhaps spring will arrive early!

Flowers in December: The Treasure of the Himawari Shrine

Mr. YooWho and his sunflower

The winter holidays are nearly upon us, and for the fourth year in a row, Mr. YooWho is packing his weathered valise for a trip to somewhere bright and warm.  This year he and his perennial sunflower companion will find themselves at the Himawari (sunflower) Shrine where, he has heard, a treasure is to be found.

What can it be?

Mr.  YooWho is not only a traveler but also a clown, and his valise is literally a bag of tricks.  The two shrine maidens, aka “Sunflower Sprouts,” pretend not to notice but ultimately cannot resist being distracted as Mr. YooWho juggles, balances towers of small objects on his head, performs sleight of hand, plays the ukulele and sings, produces clouds of confetti, and engages the assembled children–who have made their own annual holiday pilgrimage to the NOHspace–in the exploits of a tiny wind-up penguin.  Eager or unsuspecting audience members are called as assistants onto the stage, where Mr. YooWho delivers instructions either in gibberish or in French–also, fortunately, in gesture, for the benefit of volunteers not conversant in gibberish or French.  And the dark of December is brightened by delighted or occasionally embarrassed laughter.  

Sheila Devitt, Larissa Garcia, and Moshe Cohen (photo Charline Formenty)

As always, the role of Mr. YooWho is realized by local favorite and internationally beloved clown Moshe Cohen.  Theatre of Yugen artistic director Jubilith Moore plays the shrine goddess and comical caretaker, and Yugen apprentices Sheila Devitt and Larissa Garcia play (fittingly) two apprentices at the Himawari shrine.  This is Larissa Garcia’s mainstage debut with the Theatre of Yugen; Sheila Devitt made her debut earlier this season as the Master in the classic kyogen farce Boshibari.  Ensemble member Sheila Berotti directs what she describes as the fullest development yet of the idea Moshe Cohen and ensemble member Lluis Valls first entertained four years ago–the idea that, if laughter is a universal language, practitioners of Japanese kyogen and European clowning should be able to evoke it in a felicitous collaboration on our stage.

For more information about the show, including a video snippet from last year’s Mr. YooWho production and a whimsical interview with Moshe Cohen, see the Mr. YooWho page on the Theatre of Yugen website at www.theatreofyugen.org.

To learn about the many hats Moshe Cohen has worn, not only on his head but throughout his travels as an artist and a human being, see his professional website at www.yoowho.org and explore his “sacred mischief” blog at www.yoowho.wordpress.com, where the verbiage is neither in gibberish nor in French.

And to read about the use of sunflowers in Japan to absorb radiation from the soil in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, see this article from the Reuters news service:      http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/19/us-japan-disaster-sunflowers-idUSTRE77I0PG20110819

We hope to see you at the show.

What are two grumpy dwarves doing in a God play?

What are two grumpy dwarves doing in a God play?

Staring at a barn door in the middle of nowhere.

Barn doors

Of course, Bodhidharma—founder of Zen Buddhism–spent nine years in a cave, staring at a wall.

Bodhidharma

Perhaps more to the point, the idea that a comic element is inherent in the divine is suggested by the classic God play, Okina, in which a Noh actor dons the Hakushikijo mask to assume the character of the god:

Hakushikijo mask

And a Kyogen actor, Sambaso, dons the Kokushikijo mask to assume the character of…well…a man, a being not as felicitous in the abstract as the god, but having the crucial power to dispel demons and protect the harvest:

Kokushikijo (from NohMask.com)

People do tend to laugh at ill-tempered characters who do not represent a threat. As a person who has been preternaturally grave since childhood, I sometimes wonder why people laugh when they do, and whether the delight that they experience arises from a feeling of intimacy with funny characters or distance from them. Maybe people watch comedies and feel that they have made friends, or at least the kind of casual acquaintance one is glad to have met but not to have married. Friends have foibles. Maybe we laugh with relief that their eccentricities are benign.

Stop smiling, I say! (from CakeCentral.com)

I have written in another post here that Noh is a ritual for the cultivation of empathy. The theater is a safe place to practice for the kind of intense confrontation that we dread when we experience it elsewhere because it demands so much of us. How can I placate the soul who suffers before me, and of what use am I if I fail? In comedy, the stakes are simply not so high. Characters fall and pick themselves up, sometimes again and again. Life brings surprises, many of them pleasant. The role of the audience is, for a time, merely to relax, to be entertained.

Come to Sorya! and be entertained. Taro, Jiro, the Master, the Red Dwarf, the Black Dwarf, and Lucy are waiting for you.

Eyeless in Narnia?

To play’s the thing.

Love’s Lonely Vigil

I never saw her, yet I travelled;
Faithful as the cock who marks each day the dawn,
I carved my marks on the bench.
I was to come a hundred times;
There lacked but one…
(from Sotoba Komachi, trans. Arthur Waley)

In the Irish ballad “She Moved Through the Fair,” on which St. Matthews Fair is based, a young woman promises to marry her admirer, then disappears.  Here is one version of the lyrics:

Botticelli, Venus and the Graces (detail)

My young love said to me,
My mother won’t mind
And my father won’t slight you
For your lack of kind.
And she laid her hand on me
And this she did say:
It will not be long, love,
Till our wedding day.

As she stepped away from me
And she moved through the fair
And fondly I watched her
Move here and move there.
And then she turned homeward,
With one star awake,
Like the swan in the evening
Moves over the lake.

The people were saying,
No two e’er were wed
But one had a sorrow
That never was said.
And I smiled as she passed
With her goods and her gear,
And that was the last
That I saw of my dear.

Last night she came to me,
My dead love came in.
So softly she came
That her feet made no din.
As she laid her hand on me,
And this she did say:
It will not be long, love,
‘Til our wedding day.

Steadfast devotion to a woman only once seen, or for some other reason utterly unavailable, is a trope of Western medieval literature, pervasive in the songs of the troubadours and enshrined in Western consciousness by Dante and Petrarch.  The troubadour Jaufre Rudel was so fervent in regard to a woman whom he had never met that she finally took pity and allowed him to die in her arms.  Thus the dreamer in “She Moved Through the Fair” might be said to have literary antecedents.

In classical Japanese literature, it is almost always the woman who waits.  Even during the Heian period, when for hundreds of years female authors dominated literary culture, the social order was such that a man could essentially take a woman by force (perhaps while uttering fashionable protestations of fidelity), then leave her to wait behind her screen, in anxiety and hope, for him to come the next night, or on any future night.  For a woman to decline a man’s attentions after receiving his perfumed letter of intent was reckoned by a Heian courtier an act of the most uncommon cruelty.  The Heian poetess and legendary beauty Ono no Komachi wrote verses like these, which appeared in the first and most revered of the imperial poetry anthologies, the Kokinshu :

Kano Tanyu, Ono no Komachi

Did you come to me
because I dropped off to sleep
tormented by love?
If I had known I dreamed
I would not have awakened
(Kokinshu 552, trans. HelenCraig McCullough

and

Since encountering
My beloved as I dozed
I have come to feel
that it is dreams, not real life,
on which I can pin my hopes.
(Kokinshu 553, trans. Helen Craig McCullough)

There are many Noh plays–notably Matsukaze (The Wind in the Pines), Izutsu (The Well Curb), Kinuta (The Fulling Block), and Nonomiya (The Shrine in the Fields)–in which a woman is afflicted forever by recollections of a man she has loved and lost.  However, Komachi herself is associated with a story in which a man dies while waiting for the promised favors of a woman.  In the Noh play Sotoba Komachi, an aged Komachi is haunted by the ghost of her former suitor, Major General Fukakusa, whom she had forced to demonstrate his love by spending one hundred nights in succession outside her gate.  He died after the ninety-ninth night.  In Kayoi Komachi, the ghost of Komachi appears before a Buddhist priest, seeking salvation.  As the priest begins to pray for her, there emerges a second ghost, that of ShoSho (Fukakusa), who demands that the priest desist!  By the time he and Komachi confront each other in the liminal world, he has waited a very long time for his ardor to be satisfied.

Tsukioka Kogyo, Kayoi Komachi

Kayoi Komachi is one of the few phantasmal Noh plays in which there is dramatic conflict between two main characters on the stage, in story time.  ShoSho seizes Komachi by the sleeve and refuses to let her pass into eternity until the two of them—together–have told the story of how she tested his love.  And suddenly, in what is another unusual turn of events in a Noh play, there is a moment of enlightenment inspired not by the recitation of a Buddhist sutra, but by Komachi’s confession (delivered by the chorus but attributable to Komachi) that she, too, had yearned for him during those long, dreary nights.  Liberated from anger and doubt by his beloved herself, ShoSho is carried at once back in time and forward to a moment in which his depleted soul is restored:

The longed-for day has come! (from Kara Kabuki no Miryouku, 1974)

Thus did I waste
And exhaust my heart.
When I tallied up
The notches on the shaft bench,
There were ninety-nine nights.
Only one more now–
How happy I am!
The longed-for-day has come!
…
I’m sure she must be waiting!
(from Kayoi Komachi, trans. Donald Keene)

Komachi and ShoSho receive absolution and dissolve into Buddhahood together.

A modern play about Komachi, Komachi Fuden (Komachi Told by the Wind) by Shogo Ota, was performed by the Theatre of Yugen in 1986, with founder Yuriko Doi in the role of Komachi.

Yuriko Doi as Komachi, in Shogo Ota’s Komachi Fuden

Taro and Jiro, Frisky and Wry

Jubilith Moore, Juriko Doi, and Lluis Valls in Kazumo (Sumo Wresting with a Mosquito) Photo Amitava Sarkar

Kyogen comedy is arguably even older than Noh drama, but the two forms have been performed together for hundreds of years, with short Kyogen farces providing comic relief from the seriousness of Noh.  The two forms have stylistic similarities but also noteworthy differences that even novices will readily recognize:

• Both Noh and Kyogen use stylized speech, but in Kyogen the speech is colloquial, while in Noh it is highly elevated.
• Noh involves both chanting and instrumental music, in addition to speech, whereas neither singing nor instrumental music is necessary to Kyogen.
• The main characters in Noh are ghosts, gods, heroes, and other figures of refinement.  In Kyogen, they are merchants or daimyos (lords) of relatively low rank, servants, and other characters having modest social status.  Both Noh and Kyogen can also feature gods, demons, and animal characters, but the gods and demons in Kyogen tend to be endearing, even clumsy, and whereas a Noh play might include a butterfly as a character, a Kyogen is more likely to include a monkey, a fox, or even a burgeoning crop of mushrooms!
• Both Noh and Kyogen potentially employ masks, but in Noh it is usually only the main character who wears a mask.  In Kyogen the main characters usually do not wear masks.  However, masks are used for certain stock characters, human and animal.
• In Noh, even a character who does not wear a mask maintains a mask-like expression, whereas characters in Kyogen use natural facial expressions to convey emotion.
• Both Noh and Kyogen use stylized movement and gestures, but in Kyogen the movements are broader, and the gestures are representational, demanding little guesswork from the audience.
• Both Noh and Kyogen use fans and other props, but whereas in Noh a fan often has an abstract  or expressive function, making a gesture of the arm more dramatic or lyrical, in Kyogen a fan is most likely to represent some utilitarian object, for example a sake bowl. 

Lluis Valls in Shimizu (Spring Water)

Largely as a function of these differences, Noh tends to demand an initiated adult audience, whereas Kyogen is readily comprehensible even to children.  Thus, the Theatre of Yugen is frequently booked to perform and teach Kyogen classes in schools throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

Boshibari and the Phenomenon of Master-Servant Farce

Boshibari is a play from the large repertoire of master-servant comedies in Kyogen and features the canonical character Taro-kaja, along with his usual sidekick, Jiro-Kaja.  Taro cannot be called industrious, but he is certainly intelligent and is a resourceful and imaginative schemer.  Jiro is more serious and fretful but is inevitably dragged into Taro’s pranks.  The master is pompous and, following convention,  wears trousers so long that he walks on the fabric in ostentatious demonstration of his material prosperity.

Although master-servant comedy exists in many cultures—for example, it is a stock theme in Italian commedia dell’arte, in the plays of Moliere and Shakespeare, and in the operas of Mozart—there is no tradition of master-servant comedy in the United States, possibly because of a culture that in theory embraces social equality.  (Jack Benny and Rochester are a master-servant pair but have no memorable ancestors or descendants in American theater.)  And certainly, a play depicting servants as essentially lazy, applying their cunning to the project of getting drunk on the job, would not play well in an American historical or contemporary setting.  

I have read essays in which the antics of Taro and Jiro are described as subversive but am not entirely convinced, in the same way that it would be difficult for me to understand as subversive characters from American popular culture, such as Alice in The Honeymooners or Marge in The Simpsons, who are represented as far more intelligent than their husbands but who evince no interest in challenging gender roles in any sustained way. Taro and Jiro, similarly, do not covet their master’s responsibilities–they are more like children helping each other to reach the cookie jar–and although they might briefly turn the tables on their master, plays such as Boshibari almost always end with the servants’ being caught and punished.  A typical exit will involve Taro and Jiro running off the stage, pursued by their master brandishing a stick. 

Lluis Valls and Jubilith Moore in Shimizu (Spring Water) Photo Amitava Sarkar

I suspect that the great daimyos chuckled at the pretention of the masters in Kyogen farce, in the same way that aristocrats of an earlier era in Japan scoffed at the provincial upstarts who eventually became the great daimyos.

For More Information

The following website is (in my own opinion) the best online resource for speakers of English to learn about Noh and Kyogen.  The link provided here is to the page introducing Kyogen:

http://www.the-noh.com/en/world/kyogen.html

For the academically inclined, the following thought-provoking article, by Svika Serper of Tel Aviv University, argues that Noh and Kyogen explore dichotomies prevalent in Japanese culture during the period when both genres came to cultural prominence.  It will probably be of most interest to readers with either some prior background or more than a passing interest in Noh and Kyogen.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Japanese+Noh+and+Kyogen+plays%3a+staging+dichotomy.-a0153361499