Kabuki, Noh, Bunraku ... while stoned
Oct. 12th, 2022 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eerietomKabuki, Noh, and Bunraku are all forms of Japanese classical theater.
Kabuki is known for its heavily-stylized performances and the elaborate costumes and makeup worn by some of its performers. I saw a Kabuki performance in Tokyo in 2006.
Noh uses masks, costumes and various props in a dance-based performance consisting of mannered gestures. I saw a Noh play, Sumidagawa (Sumida River), in Nagoya in 2005.
Bunraku is a form of puppet theatre, usually featuring three kinds of performers: puppeteers, chanters, and shamisen musicians. I saw Bunraku in Los Angeles, sometime in the early 2000s.
I was curious what it might be like to watch Kabuki while stoned. The Kabuki performance I saw in Tokyo was good, but I was disappointed that the play was about everyday people (merchants, I think) with everyday problems. Nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to see the spectacle often associated with the genre! So I chose a video at random online, not realizing it was one of the most famous plays, “Shibaraku”.
I don’t think I’ve ever had such an amazing artistic experience before! How can I possibly describe it? The voices of the actors, as well as their gestures, body movements, and facial expressions, not to mention the opulent costumes, were about as alien as anything could be. I felt like Alice sucked into Wonderland, or that I had been transported to the planet Kabuki to meet the inhabitants. The performers seemed like marionettes, or hinamatsuri dolls come to life. The makeup made them seem like German Expressionist film actors, or Fellini’s grotesques.
I’ve heard Ella Fitzgerald’s voice described as a saxophone, and Karen Carpenter’s as an oboe, but the voices of the Kabukians were like flutes, bagpipes, and even guitars and cats. I could only imagine how tough these sounds must be on the voice: shouts, growls, yelps, cries, and utterances made with such tremendous control, expression, range, and timbres. The rhythms and accents made the Japanese a barely recognizable language, as if the Kabukians knew only a few Japanese words and were doing their best to communicate.
I closed my eyes now and then, just to listen—the sound was quite hypnotic. I was so distracted by it, in fact, that I totally missed the climactic moment where the hero beheads several of the villain’s warriors with a single swipe of his sword.
I was afraid, after watching Kabuki, that giving Noh a try would be disappointing. Everything in Noh moves in slow motion, and the singing is often very droning. And unfortunately, when I saw it in Nagoya, I kept nodding off, though so did many Japanese people in the audience! But quite the opposite happened this time. Again, I chose a vid at random, a play called “Matsukaze”.
Well, if seeing Kabuki while stoned was like meeting space aliens, seeing Noh while stoned was like meeting the gods. The story revolved around a courtier who encounters the ghosts of two sisters. One of them mistakes a lone pine tree for her lost love. In the play, the stage is completely bare apart from the performers and a stand holding a single pine tree.
These “gods” were mysterious and inscrutable: if one imagined they were not wearing masks but that those were their actual faces, which looked too small compared to the size of the bodies, it meant it was impossible to read their expressions, and perhaps comprehending the gods is not meant for we mere humans. While the onstage pine did only represent a single pine, it seemed to me like a kind of “meta-pine”—humans may require hundreds of trees to constitute a forest, but for the gods, one would suffice. In my imagination, this meta-pine neither represented a single tree or many trees, but somehow was every pine tree in a singular form.
One of the percussionists, otsuzumi player Hirokazu Kakihara, kept a tempo of sorts by frequently chanting “Yo!” but as time passed, I realized he was making a much wider variety of sounds. I don’t know if this was the intent, but it seemed he was providing the atmosphere by imitating sounds of the wind, water, animals, and birds, all in a highly distorted way. I actually found it kinda sexy, the way he made those sounds!
Kakihara was accompanied by at least two other singers, singing in a way not unlike western opera, in very rich baritone voices. I don’t know if it was the way they sang or just my crappy ear buds, but the voices sounded like they were run through a chorus or flanging effects box, or that I was hearing some overtones. I don’t suppose multiple Noh singers can vary their vibrato or pitch in relation to each other with enough precision to create such effects, but maybe they can. (I looked it up; yes, overtones can occur in vocal music) There were a few moments where the music had a steady rhythm, and so sounded vaguely like dreamlike techno music (with really cool samples).
The performance overall made me think of something you’d see in the Vatican ... slow reverent movements, chanting, and costumes of great splendor.
So if Kabuki featured space aliens and Noh featured gods, what did Bunraku feature? Nothing, unfortunately; perhaps after seeing Noh my expectations were too high, and I didn’t see Bunraku for anything except what it was: a highly artistic puppet performance, in a play called Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees (Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura). What really stood out for me, however, was the tayuu, or singer.
The tayuu, Miwa Tayu Takemoto, could have just as easily made a career as a rock star. Again, I spent a good deal of the time with my eyes closed, just listening to him sing, chant, cry out, and emote. He often sang in a deep growl, but sometimes his voice would climb to a rich, bell-like golden tenor, and then even higher into the falsetto range. It was hypnotic and spellbinding, and I could picture him as an enigmatic god of rock vocalists, right up there with Freddie Mercury, Chris Cornell, or Jim Morrison. I was also reminded a little of the Chinese fortune teller from Return of the Bastard Swordsman.
The shamisen player, Nozawa Katsuhei, seemed to hit several notes out of key; it was sometimes quite atonal or dissonant, even for Japanese music. I found this intriguing; the play was written in 1747, but the music sounded very 20th century. Is it any wonder the combination of “modern music” and a charismatic singer sounded like a really good (unplugged) rock concert?
I’ve downloaded more performances of all three types of theater and look forward to seeing them!
Kabuki is known for its heavily-stylized performances and the elaborate costumes and makeup worn by some of its performers. I saw a Kabuki performance in Tokyo in 2006.
Noh uses masks, costumes and various props in a dance-based performance consisting of mannered gestures. I saw a Noh play, Sumidagawa (Sumida River), in Nagoya in 2005.
Bunraku is a form of puppet theatre, usually featuring three kinds of performers: puppeteers, chanters, and shamisen musicians. I saw Bunraku in Los Angeles, sometime in the early 2000s.
I was curious what it might be like to watch Kabuki while stoned. The Kabuki performance I saw in Tokyo was good, but I was disappointed that the play was about everyday people (merchants, I think) with everyday problems. Nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to see the spectacle often associated with the genre! So I chose a video at random online, not realizing it was one of the most famous plays, “Shibaraku”.
I don’t think I’ve ever had such an amazing artistic experience before! How can I possibly describe it? The voices of the actors, as well as their gestures, body movements, and facial expressions, not to mention the opulent costumes, were about as alien as anything could be. I felt like Alice sucked into Wonderland, or that I had been transported to the planet Kabuki to meet the inhabitants. The performers seemed like marionettes, or hinamatsuri dolls come to life. The makeup made them seem like German Expressionist film actors, or Fellini’s grotesques.
I’ve heard Ella Fitzgerald’s voice described as a saxophone, and Karen Carpenter’s as an oboe, but the voices of the Kabukians were like flutes, bagpipes, and even guitars and cats. I could only imagine how tough these sounds must be on the voice: shouts, growls, yelps, cries, and utterances made with such tremendous control, expression, range, and timbres. The rhythms and accents made the Japanese a barely recognizable language, as if the Kabukians knew only a few Japanese words and were doing their best to communicate.
I closed my eyes now and then, just to listen—the sound was quite hypnotic. I was so distracted by it, in fact, that I totally missed the climactic moment where the hero beheads several of the villain’s warriors with a single swipe of his sword.
I was afraid, after watching Kabuki, that giving Noh a try would be disappointing. Everything in Noh moves in slow motion, and the singing is often very droning. And unfortunately, when I saw it in Nagoya, I kept nodding off, though so did many Japanese people in the audience! But quite the opposite happened this time. Again, I chose a vid at random, a play called “Matsukaze”.
Well, if seeing Kabuki while stoned was like meeting space aliens, seeing Noh while stoned was like meeting the gods. The story revolved around a courtier who encounters the ghosts of two sisters. One of them mistakes a lone pine tree for her lost love. In the play, the stage is completely bare apart from the performers and a stand holding a single pine tree.
These “gods” were mysterious and inscrutable: if one imagined they were not wearing masks but that those were their actual faces, which looked too small compared to the size of the bodies, it meant it was impossible to read their expressions, and perhaps comprehending the gods is not meant for we mere humans. While the onstage pine did only represent a single pine, it seemed to me like a kind of “meta-pine”—humans may require hundreds of trees to constitute a forest, but for the gods, one would suffice. In my imagination, this meta-pine neither represented a single tree or many trees, but somehow was every pine tree in a singular form.
One of the percussionists, otsuzumi player Hirokazu Kakihara, kept a tempo of sorts by frequently chanting “Yo!” but as time passed, I realized he was making a much wider variety of sounds. I don’t know if this was the intent, but it seemed he was providing the atmosphere by imitating sounds of the wind, water, animals, and birds, all in a highly distorted way. I actually found it kinda sexy, the way he made those sounds!
Kakihara was accompanied by at least two other singers, singing in a way not unlike western opera, in very rich baritone voices. I don’t know if it was the way they sang or just my crappy ear buds, but the voices sounded like they were run through a chorus or flanging effects box, or that I was hearing some overtones. I don’t suppose multiple Noh singers can vary their vibrato or pitch in relation to each other with enough precision to create such effects, but maybe they can. (I looked it up; yes, overtones can occur in vocal music) There were a few moments where the music had a steady rhythm, and so sounded vaguely like dreamlike techno music (with really cool samples).
The performance overall made me think of something you’d see in the Vatican ... slow reverent movements, chanting, and costumes of great splendor.
So if Kabuki featured space aliens and Noh featured gods, what did Bunraku feature? Nothing, unfortunately; perhaps after seeing Noh my expectations were too high, and I didn’t see Bunraku for anything except what it was: a highly artistic puppet performance, in a play called Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees (Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura). What really stood out for me, however, was the tayuu, or singer.
The tayuu, Miwa Tayu Takemoto, could have just as easily made a career as a rock star. Again, I spent a good deal of the time with my eyes closed, just listening to him sing, chant, cry out, and emote. He often sang in a deep growl, but sometimes his voice would climb to a rich, bell-like golden tenor, and then even higher into the falsetto range. It was hypnotic and spellbinding, and I could picture him as an enigmatic god of rock vocalists, right up there with Freddie Mercury, Chris Cornell, or Jim Morrison. I was also reminded a little of the Chinese fortune teller from Return of the Bastard Swordsman.
The shamisen player, Nozawa Katsuhei, seemed to hit several notes out of key; it was sometimes quite atonal or dissonant, even for Japanese music. I found this intriguing; the play was written in 1747, but the music sounded very 20th century. Is it any wonder the combination of “modern music” and a charismatic singer sounded like a really good (unplugged) rock concert?
I’ve downloaded more performances of all three types of theater and look forward to seeing them!
