New York’s Japan Society continues to present some of the most interesting stagework in the city. It recently presented Japan’s Yamamoto Kyogen Company.
Kyogen is a tradition Japanese form associated with the noh. They were often performed together, collectively known as nogaku. The noh was a serious form, and the kyogen contrasted, addressing human foibles and scenes from daily life.
Kyogen’s costumes are simpler than the noh’s elaborate designs, but its nobles still wear those wonderful overlong pants. Its backdrop, the only element of set, is a painting of a pine and, as the noh, actors enter UR.
Kyogen actors (they’re always men) speak with a sound like growling, like throat singing. Their speech is so stylized that I’m told young Japanese find it difficult to understand. Their singing, while identifiable, is only marginally different.
The stage conventions are important, as they offer us an alternative, non-representational stage language. The acting is stilted, almost somnambulistic. Actors face each other at the beginning of a conversation, then face us, then turn back at the last line. Turning to us is sometimes indicative of stress.
They use fans as cups and vocalize the sound of pouring. They may be non-mimetic, but an actor coughs when necessary in an isolated bit of verisimilitude. I was surprised to see that when the occasion demands, two characters talk at once; one is talking to us.
To indicate a horse walking and a man beside him, both may be still – we’ve been told they’re traveling – or the human may be still while the horse walks. The man playing the horse horse walks on feet and hands without putting his knees on the floor.
The kyogen has some laughs, but it’s comedy more in the sense that we associate with Chekhov – ie, trivial. And like Chekhov, it can be moving through its triviality. In the second piece, Moon-Viewing Blind Man, a fellow plays a mean trick on a blind man he’s befriended. The blind man has just sung “Take pity on this blind man”, and we’re told “Sanity moves out of reach”.
Let’s hope that he Japan Society keeps importing this wonderful sort of work.
March 2010
