Volume 10, Number 1, 2024 (Re)sounding Bodies East and West: Embodied Engagements with Japanese Traditions Guest-edited by Gretchen Jude and Lynette Hunter

EN:

Yuriko Doi founded the Theatre of Yugen in San Francisco and taught American students noh and kyōgen for more than thirty years. Noh theatre, in living practice in Japan for more than six hundred years, incorporates music, dance, acting, and singing. While noh is serious and sombre, kyōgen is a comedic form traditionally performed within or between noh plays. Starting in the late 1970s, Doi’s Theatre of Yugen performed new works inspired and informed by noh as well as kyōgen in English around the US and also in Japan. Noh training ideally begins in childhood as one-on-one study with a teacher and continues into adulthood. The transmission of noh is considered to be from body (teacher) to body (student) without verbal explication. To teach students in an ensemble theatre company in California, Doi adapted aspects of the transmission process as well as aspects of the form. Doi taught the exterior qualities of movement and vocal technique and, at the same time, tried to instill a sense of noh’s interior qualities, which include time, aesthetic intensity, and art practice as a life path. While teaching noh and kyōgen, Doi wants her students to draw from all of their training and influences. She explains that trying to hide other performance traditions held in the body, such as Western acting technique, will deflate the energy of a performance. She argues that if an actor can develop a complex sense of noh they can integrate it with all of the other knowledge structures in the body, which will lead to a masterful performance. Based on a series of interviews with Doi, the treatises of noh founder Zeami Motokiyo, and recent scholarship on noh, this essay examines the practice and transmission of noh and how the art is continued and revised through Doi’s work.

EN:

This essay engages descriptive, experiential methods of phenomenology, prompts from butoh, and insights of Zen Buddhism. Butoh is the dance and theatre form that arose from the ashes of Japan in the shadow of ecological and social crisis after the Second Word War. It is interpreted widely in current forms that extend well beyond the borders of Japan. The everyday is articulated in the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, particularly through concepts of “worlding,” how our works ripple out to create a world, as phenomenology and Zen both hold, each in their own way. I write about butoh through a prism of Zen and phenomenology because they share similar philosophical outlooks on performance, and they explain everyday things. In articulating performance of the everyday, this essay takes an ecosomatic turn inward toward matters of consciousness and perception. The writing stems from my participation in butoh as a student, performer, and scholar since 1985, my university teaching of dance and somatics, and my philosophical and lived investigations of phenomenology and Buddhism. Through phenomenology, the essay is descriptive, performative, and concerned with “lived experience,” including how features of experience appear and transform in consciousness.

EN:

This essay explores physicality in the context of intercultural theatre and the conflicts, challenges, and questions that arise in bringing my Japanese self into the Western classroom. My inquiry revolves around the internal process of rethinking the physicality of actors through various lenses: space and body, emotion and body, logic vs. ambiguity, and Western horizontality vs. Japanese verticality. Special attention is given to the relationship between body and space, with reference to the work of a Japanese director and playwright Ōta Shōgo. Through an excavation of my roots and reflections on my past experiences, juxtaposed with discoveries in my current classroom, the essay tracks a gradual shift in my soma (body) as I entangle my Japanese/Western construct, move toward a reintegration of the two, and embrace the question of whether a universal approach to potentiality in performance is possible.

EN:

This essay thinks through the journey of being and becoming a character, as it is repeated over decades, focusing on the experience of the author performing his monologue Los Nueve Monstruos (itself based on a poem by Cesar Vallejo). The repeated performance of this monologue over three decades becomes a way of feeling and registering the change of the body and self through the iterative taking-form of a character. The essay reflects upon the changes produced in both the character and the performer during those many encounters over the years, first in Putumayo with the Kamentsa Indigenous peoples, then over the Andes to Colombia’s capital city of Bogotá, and across both the Atlantic and Pacific to Europe and Asia. Embodied encounters of the performer/author with the Noh tradition of Japan and Zeami’s philosophical approach to performance transforms Los Nueve Monstruos—moving from the approximation of the idea of a character to the notion of no-character, a concept of transition that focuses on the vibratory quality and sounding experience of “in-provisation.”

EN:

“]MA[ – The Space between the Interval” is the fourth movement of ]MA[, a multidisciplinary performance created in 2013 by Thingamajigs Performance Group (TPG) and performed at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In 2019, group member Dylan Bolles conducted and recomposed a series of interviews in which TPG reflected on the process of making and performing ]MA[. We asked questions such as: How does embodiment create particular amalgamations of influence and technique that trouble distinctions between thoughts of East and West? How do cultural artifacts change when passed through different bodies and contexts? What are the underlying principles which allow for sometimes effortless musical communication between seemingly distant cultural representatives? Our conversations, disjointed as they are, intermingle both shared and previously unshared experiences from many years working together and apart on intercultural performance projects. What emerges is a glimpse into a process of intercultural integration in motion.

EN:

This essay examines the experimental vocal and electronic work of Yoshida Ami in the context of the Japanese onkyō movement of the turn of the millennium, developing the concept of “plasmatic voice” that addresses the assemblage of embodied vocal performance through audio technology. Understanding vocal performance as it circulates globally through digital media networks must be perforce include transcultural analysis of race, culture, and gender, as well as other salient identity categories dependent on context. The essay also closely examines common metaphors for audio devices (such as microphones) as part of a programmatic attempt to listen deeply to human and nonhuman sounding without relying on the normative human body as the centre of analysis. Instead, a process-based approach following Jasbir Puar’s combining of intersectionality alongside assemblage theory is undertaken.

EN:

At the intersection of embodiment, education, and anime, this essay describes how transcultural classroom encounters with anime can pollinate changes in ecological self-conceptions and thus embodiment. Using examples from teaching with anime in Russia and the United States, I describe how interpretive encounters shifted students’ ecological self-sense and conceptualization of embodiment. In the classroom, anime acted as an interpretive device for teaching contemporary thought about ecology, technology, microbes, animal-human figures, interconnection, and interdependence. I present evidence of oddly successful encounters between local Japanese cultural/embodied contexts of anime and its partial connections to globally shared human ecological and technological situations. In these transcultural encounters, the Japanese anime pollinate and germinate material and conceptual possibilities that are incipient for the students but not easily possibly with outside pollination.

EN:

This essay attempts to understand humanistic performances through STEM fields, specifically engaging with Terayama Shūji’s 1970s avant-garde theatre and film through the study of topology. The mathematical transformation called eversion is posited as frame for Terayama’s multiple radical reversals, moving toward residual effects, a process that holds the potential for radically other performance to alter the experience of time and space. Performances of bodily intervention evert the form of theatre and elicit frustration and other affective states that generate a “transformation of theatricalized space.” The essay studies Terayama Shūji’s interest in mathematical models of eversion, or turning the inside out, and how these have influenced his work in avant-garde theatre and film, positioning the audience beyond the mere notion of “revolution” into something more complex and evocative, in which the highly scripted expectation of normative everyday life comes into question. Bodily and spatial interventions bring together viewers and performers with the purpose of transforming social life through the affects—the everting—of the particular feelings generated by the experience of the artwork.

EN:

Peter Lichtenfels and Ōta Shōgo co-worked on the play Plastic Rose (1994) and had an understanding that there was no “pure” way of “doing Japanese theatre.” Ōta presented Lichtenfels with scripts of many of his plays and asked him to continue directing them. Through a study of two of Lichtenfels’ productions of Ōta’s play Elements—one produced in Davis, California (2017) and the other in Bogotà, Colombia (2018)—this essay explores insights arising from different theatre practices, some of the resonances, and three key issues of theatre directing that Ōta explores at a meta level in the play. With Elements, producing something on stage in the spirit of a different culture became a confidence that theatre bodies can work, within their contemporary possibilities or constraints, with the verbal, visual, and sound records of other embodied cultures. The scripts, those bodies, their voices, and their movements are resources on which transcultural theatre needs to draw before it happens into meaning.