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Teatrul de Papusi in Japonia
Teatrul de Papusi in Japonia
7 BUNRAKU
Perucile din Bunraku sunt numite kazura, exista intr-un numar de stiluri
fundamentale, depinzand de tipul de personaj care se vrea caracterizat. Este
datoria mestrilor in peruci numiti tokoyama sa coasa si sa creeze o
coafura potrivita keppatsu pentru fiecare rol, bazandu-se pe acele stiluri
fundamentale. De asemenea, tokoyama nu numai creaza perucile; el le si
definitiveaza atasand parul unor placute de cupru. Tipul de par folosit este in
general par uman, dar cateodata, pentru a crea iluzia de volum, mai este
folosit si par de yak. Peruca finisat este apoi pus i ataat cu cea mai mare
grija capului. Cnd se creeaz o coafura deosebit nu se folosete ulei pentru
a nu strica/altera faa, astfel nct stylingul se face numai cu ap i cear de
albine bintsuke.
Costumele ppuilor
Decoruri
Micile decoruri ale Bunraku includ lucruri care sunt purtate n mn sau sunt
ataate de corp, cum ar fi sbii sau un fel de batiste numite tenugui, precum
i obiecte mai mari cum ar fi dulapuri sau echipamente de iluminat. Exist i
un numr deelemente de recuzit consumabil, cum ar fi scrisori care sunt
rupte i apoi aruncate. Toate decorurile de mn sunt foarte mici, pentru a se
potrivi cu marimea ppuilor. Tipurile de evantaie folosite sunt ns de
aceeai mrime ca i cele folosite de oameni, dar aceasta n mod ciudat nu
pare s aib un efect vizual grotesc. Maetrii de decoruri pregtesc toate
micile decoruri care sunt necasare fiecrei piese, le repar pe acelea care
sunt foarte degradate i de asemenea fac altele noi. Cnd ncepe spectacolul
decorurile sunt aduse din camerele de mbrcat ctre scena de ppuari
tineri, care apoi le ofer ppuarilor care manipuleaz ppuile n timpul
piesei.
ANIMAREA
Spaiul de joc este divizat n trei segmente care permit animarea, plasarea
decorurilor i a fundalului, dup reguli bine stabilite. Intre extrema scenei de
sus si extrema scenei de jos exista trei partiii scenice, cunoscute ca
balustrade (tesuri). Aria din spatele celei de a doua partiii este numita
groapa (funazoko, tradus literal ca fund de corabie) i aici stau
manipulatorii. Este cu o treapta mai jos decat scena principala. Cnd
ppuile se mic, picioarele lor se mic de-a lungul balustradelor, crend
iluzia faptului c ele ntr-adevar merg pe jos. Cldirea (yatai) sau fundalul
(kakiwari) sunt ataate partiiei cele mai indeprtate de audien.
Uitndu-te la scen din audien partea dreapta este numita kamite (scena
stnga), iar partea stanga este numita shimote (scena dreapta). Ppuile i
fac apariia i apoi ieirea prin perdelele mici i negre (komaku) i prin
partea stnga, dar i prin cea dreapta a scenei. Camerele ascunse sunt exact
desupra perdelelor mici, avnd jaluzele de bambus instalate, astfel inct
audiena nu poate vedea inauntrul lor.
La sfritul celui de-al doilea razboi mondial, dintre toate teatrele care
trebuiau reconstruite dup ce fuseser tranformate n cenu n raidurile
aeriene primul a fost Yotsubashi Bunraku-za. Aceasta s-a intamplat pentru ca
se considera ca Bunraku nu este numai un produs faimos al Osakai, dar si o
arta traditionala cu prestigiu mondial care trebuie pastrata. In 1955 guvernul
a recunoscut arta Bunraku ca fiind o Proprietate Culturala Importanta
Intangibila - juyo mukei bunkazai. In 1963 Bunraku s-a desprit de
controlul Shochiku i a nceput sa functioneze sub auspiciul Asociaiei
Bunraku. In 1966 primul Teatru National a fost construit in aria Miyake-zaka
din Tokyo. Din acel moment piesele Bunraku din Tokyo erau planuite si
regizate de Teatrul National. Politica de baza a Teatrului National de a pune
in scena piese complexe a invitat interesul tineretului, ceea ce a fost crucial
in dezvoltarea unei noi audiente. Mai mult, datorita eforturilor Asociatiei
Bunraku, a orasului si a prefecturii Osaka, precum si a Asociatiei Economice
Kansai, s-a planuit a se construi un Teatru National de Bunraku in Osaka.
Astfel, in 1984, Teatrul National de Bunraku a fost inaugurat. In istoria sa
indelungata Bunraku a infruntat multe pericole care i-au amenintat existenta,
dar de fiecare data a reusit sa depaseasca obstacolele cu ajutorul oamenilor
care il iubeau.
We are still in Kyoto, where Japanese literature has been from its
beginnings a thousand years earlier, but now in a much more stable
environment than Chomei's, as we enter "The Floating World" of Tokugawa
Japan (1600-1868). I choose Chikamatsu because he is the greatest
dramatist of this Tokugawa Period, probably of Japanese literature--and
that's where the literary action is in this period. Chikamatsu is even
sometimes called the "Japanese Shakespeare," though he is certainly not
that. He has nothing of the range through comedy, tragedy, and history of
Shakespeare, or of Shakespeare's language complexity (but, then, neither
does anyone else in world literature). No, once the Japanese discovered
Shakespeare in the late 19th century, Shakespeare himself became the
Japanese Shakespeare, so that you can no doubt see as much Shakespeare in
Tokyo as in London or New York any given year (certainly more
Shakespeare than Chikamatsu). But, Chikamatsu did write 130 plays (to
Shakespeare's 37), and, as Shakespeare is the quintessential Elizabethan,
Chikamatsu may be seen as the quintessential representative of the Genroku
period (1688-1703), the Japanese Renaissance period which comes about
100 years later than the Elizabethan period in England, and has much the
same character, as Tokugawa Ieyasu, after his victory at the Battle of
Sekigahara in 1600, established the Tokugawa bakufu, absolute political
control, much as Henry Tudor did in England after his victory at Bosworth
Field in 1485. In each case, the period of civil war was over and a strong
royal (shoganate) family was clearly in control, so that, after this period of
stability had been in place about a hundred years, it generated, in each case,
a middle-class urban environment in which the arts, particularly literature,
and particularly dramatic literature, began to flourish.
And flourish they did. Chikamatsu's contemporaries include Ihara
Saikaku (1642-1693), an important writer of middle-class fiction, and
Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) the great haiku poet (judged by most to be
Japan's greatest poet), and, since the Tokugawa bakufu endured longer than
the Tudor monarchy did, lasted for 268 years, it finally included such writers
as the great comic novelist, Jippensha Ikku (1766-1831),
whose Hizakurige has been called the Japanese Huckleberry Finn-- with its
rascally Edoites traveling down, not the Mississippi River, but the Tokaido
Road from Edo to Kyoto, living by their wits--and it culminates in the high
Edo period, just before Perry arrives in the "black ships" and opens up
Japan, which some lovers of things Japanese see as the period of high
vitality and values in the life in Tokyo (Edo), particularly in the pleasure
quarters, the world that Kafu gives such a realistic picture of in his largely
autobiographical fiction, the most charming Japanese "world" of them all--
Japan just before it is transformed by the West.
But Chikamatsu himself did not live to see any of that--just its
beginnings in Kyoto--for he was a dramatist in the early Tokugawa, or
Genroku, period, when Japanese theatre, mature in the Edo period, was first
being revolutionized. The three great classical forms of Japanese drama are
the Noh, the Kabuki, and the Bunraku. The Noh had been developed as
largely aristocratic theatre, with Buddhist themes, in good part by one family
of actors and playwrights--primarily Kaname, the father, and Zeame, the
son--contemporary with Chomei in the medieval period, and offers an
almost religious theatre experience. But the other two developed as part of
this middle-class, secular Renaissance--this floating world with the geisha
activity, and hedonism, at the center. Chikamatsu wrote plays about middle-
class characters with domestic love problems--a merchant falling in love
with a geisha and ruining his life, until the only way out seems to be a
double suicide--after which the lovers expect to spend eternity on the same
lotus leaf, a strange kind of religious hold-over in this distinctly secular
world. Two of his most famous plays follow this plot, as if coming out of
the daily newspaper--the early The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (1703), and
the late The Love Suicides at Amijima(1721), which are sometimes
compared with Shakespeare's early and late love- suicide playsRomeo and
Juliet (1596) and Antony and Cleopatra (1608), (I did it myself when I took
my first course in Japanese literature in 1973), but the style in Chikamatu is
middle-class realism--in which he and his contemporaries are about a
hundred years ahead of developments of realism in the West, as if the stories
are copied from contemporary domestic experience.
Chikamatsu wrote many of his plays for the kabuki theatre, which had
developed into a substantial enterprise much as the London professional
theatre had in Shakespeare's time, and, as Shakespeare's company built the
Globe theatre based on their success in drawing a paying audience that
would justify the investment, so the kabuki, with its revolving stage,
hanamichi, and highly stylized costume, make-up, and acting conventions
developed a popular base that supported building theatres and training acting
companies in a tradition that still exists today, often in the same places in
those great cities of the period, Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo. It, too, was
popular theatre, catering to the groundlings, and, again as Shakespeare's
theatre was, was primarily an actors' theatre (Chikamatsu worked with the
famous kabuki actor, Sakata Tojuro, much as Shakespeare must have worked
with Richard Burbage). But then the last twenty years of his career
Chikamatsu wrote almost entirely for the bunraku, or puppet, theatre, which,
though it had a somewhat longer historical development, now became a
popular theatre in these cities, particularly Osaka, competing with the kabuki
for the same audience and some of the same resources. Chikamatsu's reason
for prefering bunraku was probably that, while the maker of the puppets, and
the trained puppeteers are certainly also important artists involved in the
production of a puppet play, when it comes to the dynamics of performance,
all is in the service of the playwright's script, which is most highly honored.
Though each has its own traditions in music and dance, the plays the two
theatres were doing were often the same plays, but, as Chikamatsu came to
write for the most part for the puppet theatre, he developed a critical theory
for the special qualities of the experience, and has a famous essay setting out
the aesthetic advantages of that theatre. Perhaps nowhere else in the world
has puppet theatre been more important, in fact, as adult theatre, nor, in its
modern variations, more highly developed.
If we take as perhaps his most representative play, at least among those
available in English translation, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, it is typical
in being a contemporary domestic tragedy. Tokubei, the young hero, is in
love with the prostitute, Ohatsu, and, still single, but in rejecting a wife-to-be
his family has picked, is sacrificing his middle-class, domestic future for
her. In the later play, The Love Suicides at Amijima, on much the same
plot, Jihei is betraying his wife, Osan (who is the most interesting character
in the play--one reason it is seen as a more mature play than The Love
Suicides at Sonezaki). Both heroes promise to reform, but are obviously too
weak--hardly heroes in any sense except their devotion to their love. Death
is the only way out--double suicide with Ohatsu for Tokubei, or, in Jihei's
case, with Koharu--leaving Osan to pick up the pieces. These double-
suicide plays came out of actual double-suicides, but were so popular that
they provoked others, until the Tokugawa government forbid the use
of shinju (double suicide) in the title, for the death itself was romanticized in
highly sentimental terms, the poetry of that passage known as
themichiyuki (lovers' journey). The most famous one is the one in The Love
Suicides at Sonezaki, which Donald Keene calls "one of the loveliest
passages in Japanese literature," a hundred line lyric in a largely prose
drama, as performed by the puppet theatre narrated in good part by a skilled
reader. I will give Ohatsu's closing lines, shortly before the double suicide:
The art only came to be known as "Bunraku" around the end of the
Meiji era (1868-1912); up until that time, the art was known
as ayatsuri joruri shibai ("puppet joruri plays") or ningyo joruri, or
"puppet narrative drama." Now, joruri is a type of shamisen music,
and the name reflects that the puppet plays were performed to
a joruri accompaniment. Bunraku's world renown stems not only
from its high-quality artistic technique, but also from the high level
of its joruri music and the unique nature of manipulating the
puppetseach puppet requires three puppeteers to bring it to life.
Throughout the world there are a number of types of puppet theatre,
and they all treat with simple stories such as myths and legends.
There is no other art that requires a whole day for its long, serious
drama to unfold. Furthermore, in most of the world's puppet
theatres, great pains have been taken to hide the manipulation of the
puppeteers from the audience. There are several methods of
achieving this: suspending the puppet from strings attached to the
ceiling, as with marionettes; placing a hand within the puppet and
moving it with the fingers, as with guignol puppets; and casting
shadows upon a screen, as with the wayan kulit shadow puppets. But
in Bunraku, the manipulators appear openly, in full view of the
audience. These two characteristics, which make it completely
different from the other puppet theatre traditions around the world,
can be said to be the reason that Bunraku is called the most highly
developed puppet theatre art in the world.