Performance Training in Japanese Nô and Kyôgen at the University of Hawai'i

Performance Training in Japanese No and Kyôgen at the University of Hawai'i James R. Brandon Between August 1988 and May 1989, thirty-two students at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa enrolled in classes that were part of a special year-long "Acting Training and Performance Program in No and Kyôgen." Master kyôgen actor Nomura Mansaku and Master nô actor Nomura Shirô, assisted by Dr. Junko Sakaba, taught students over a two-semester period the acting, dance, music, and song-speech forms of these two symbiotic theatre genres. The training culminated in the spring of 1989 with student performances of three plays from the standard repertory: the nô play Pining Wind (Matsukaze) and the kyôgen plays Buaku the Bold (Buaku) and Tricked by a Rhythm (Yobikoe). Productions were performed in traditional style and in English. Pining Wind is a nô play of difficult rank (kurai): it is a "spirit" (mugen) play in which the major character is the spirit or ghost of a deceased human, and of the "third group," that is a "woman" (kazura) play, in which a female is the major character, or shite role. Both Buaku and Tricked by a Rhythm are challenging plays for actors and are seen in Japan less often than the simpler kyôgen farces. The three plays were staged on campus in John Fitzgerald Kennedy Theatre in April and May, and immediately following, toured on the islands of Maui and Hawaii; Buaku and Tricked by a Rhythm were also performed on the main stage of the National No Theatre of Japan, Tokyo, that December. This article describes the rationale for the program , some of the social and educational history behind it, and suggests some significant values that can flow from this kind of acting training. The extensive (and expensive)1 year-long program was built on some sixty-five years of student productions of Asian plays at the University of Hawai'i. Beginning in 1924, students of Hawai'ian, Japanese, and Chinese descent at Hawai'i College of the Territory of Hawai'i (as the University was then known) banded together into cultural associations to learn about and perform, in English, dramas that expressed their cultural, literary, and artistic heritages.2Through the 1930s, the University Theatre Guild staged four plays a year: an original Hawai'ian music and dance performance, a Chinese opera, a Japanese drama (usually a kabuki play), and a "haole"(Hawai'ian for "foreigner" and hence "white") drama of Broadway or the West End. Today, we see these productions as products of social segregation: each cast was made up solely of 101 102 James R. Brandon students of one particular racial group. But at that time "separate but equal" treatment was an unusually progressive attitude, for it meant that rather than ignoring non-white arts, the University was directly supporting the theatrical expression of its major ethnic populations. For each of these ethnic communities , these dramas expressed the values of their cultures. Following the end of the Second World War, racial segregation was made illegal in Hawai'i, and in the early 1950s, casting in University Theatre productions became "color blind." Students of all ethnic backgrounds were encouraged to participate in productions of plays of all types—United States Congresswoman Patsy Mink starred as an undergraduate student in Molnar's Swan; James Grant Benton, who is of mixed Hawai'ian, Japanese, and Caucasian ancestry, played leads in both kabuki and in Shakespeare; and students of Korean, Japanese, Caucasian, Indonesian, and Chinese descent have performed in Chinese operas. When, growing from this historical and social background, a formalized Asian Theatre Program was identified within the Department of Theatre and Dance in the 1960s, the development was viewed as a natural expression of Hawai'i's unique geographic and cultural circumstance.3 Because of Hawai'i's diverse ethnic makeup, it was understood that Asian theatre training would serve two distinct but complementary purposes. It would provide Hawai'ian students of Asian-Pacific descent an opportunity to study their own culture directly and intensively through the theatre, and it would allow students outside these cultures to gain appreciation and respect for non-Western arts and...