Passage III

HUMANITIES: Passage A is adapted from the article “The Tension of Modern Bunraku” by Theodora Skipitares (©2004 by Performing Arts Journal, Inc.). Passage B is adapted from the article “Lifelike” by Joan Acocella (©2009 by Condé Nast).

Passage A by Theodora Skipitares

Even before I began using puppets in my performances in 1982, I had always felt connected to the Japanese Bunraku theatre. The structure of the Bunraku theatre as a series of three splits or fragments of the conventions of Western theatre (text, music, and puppet) seemed to me a new way to organize a performance. The puppet, along with the manipulator, was a separate entity, and so was the narrator, as was the musician (the latter two on a platform to one side). Bunraku presented a total, though divided, spectacle. One’s focus could go back and forth between the manipulator or the puppet, the manipulation or the resulting gesture.

Japanese puppet drama developed at a rapid pace in the 1700s. Male puppeteers were hidden from the public by a curtain while they held (one-man) puppets, about two feet tall, above their heads. The narrator and musician were also hidden. In 1703, a group of puppeteers created a sensation when they appeared in full view of the audience, separated only by a translucent curtain. The curtain itself was eliminated two years later. In 1728, the narrator and musician were given their own auxiliary stage, the yuka. Since then, one unusual feature of the Japanese puppet theatre is that the manipulator makes no attempt to conceal the fact that he is manipulating the puppets. Unlike puppet performances from other countries, this Japanese form does not require the illusion that the puppets are moving and talking on their own.

In 1983, I began to use a modified Bunraku performance style for certain life-size human figures. I spent plenty of time trying to make them super-realistic, so that their skin looked lifelike, their eyes blinked “naturally,” and their hands could actually grab objects. What I didn’t understand then about Bunraku theatre was that its greatness lay in the constant tension, and the attempt to strike a balance between realism and nonrealism. Bunraku was not trying to persuade the audience it was watching reality, rather than a play. And I was very much interested in creating a flat surface of reality. Looking back, I feel that I was barely exploring the full potential of the Japanese form.

Passage B by Joan Acocella

Japanese puppetry takes its great power from the fact that it is very realistic and very artificial at the same time. As was proved again by the Awaji Puppet Theatre Company’s recent season at Japan Society, what strikes you first is the realism. The puppeteers seem to have spent five centuries (that is the genre’s estimated age, at minimum) working out the precise rhythm with which a weeping woman would dab her eyes with her sleeve. The lifelikeness is indeed a thrill. But the reason that we can enjoy the realism is that in other respects, most respects, these figures are not at all like us. The Awaji puppets are about three feet tall, to start with. Furthermore, to get around, they need three men, with rods and springs, manipulating them. The puppeteers are clothed and masked in black, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t see them.

All this, maybe, we could shut out, and enter fully into the illusion, but there is another thing stopping us: the fixity of the puppets’ faces. Awaji dramas, like their Bunraku counterparts, often concern the furthest out-districts of human emotion. In one of the offerings at Japan Society, “Hidakagawa Iriai Zakura” (1759), a woman becomes so jealous that she turns into a green sea monster. Such dramatic events are preceded by long, histrionic speeches, but, as the characters deliver their orations, their faces, eerily, do not move. The emotion is displaced from the face and thereby gains in subtlety and force.

As for the characters’ words, those, too, are displaced—to a chanter. This person, considered the star of the puppetry team, sits to the side of the stage, where he tells the story and, when necessary, speaks the dialogue. The crux, however, is not the words but the singing. The chanter sobs; he gasps; he calls on Heaven to witness his grief. (And he does so in male and female, old and young, high-status and low-status voices.) When the woman in “Hidakagawa” describes her jealousy, the chanter runs the gamut of vocal expressiveness: head notes and belly notes, squeals and grunts, trills and runs without end. Meanwhile, the lady for whom he is speaking stands there with an unmoving face, white and lustrous, like a pearl. We seem, here, to get everything that art can give: the abstemious and the unleashed, the Gothic and the Baroque. The logic is not logical; it is lyrical, musical.