Text Creation and Performance: A Kabuki Perspective

Text Creation and Performance: A Kabuki Perspective JAMES R. BRANDON All artistic expression via the living stage, which in English we imprecisely call theater, or drama, or both, is created through interaction between performance and text. In this brief essay, I would like to suggest some special ways in which newly written dramatic text in Japanese kabuki is structured, channelled , preformed, determined, influenced by theatric and extra-theatric performance "codes." By theatric performance codes I mean those systems of perform.tive, artistic expression used by the actor primarily and also by the musician and dancer - voice, bodily movement and dance. rhythm, music, song, color. The resulting forms or patterns (kata) of performance form, on the one hand, the interpretive means for staging anyone play, and, on the ' other hand, constitute the artistic structure of the genre itself. For example, the no performer's sliding step (suri ashi) is one of the distinguishing elements of no movement "code," while the high-pitched nagauta singing accompanied by shamisen chords constitutes one part of the musical "code" found only in kabuki. By extra-theatric performance codes I mean structures and performantive sequences which lie outside either the dramatic text or the artistic form of the genre. It is an extra-theatric event in kabuki when the audience responds to the actor's persona rather than to the character he is portraying - when a spectator perceives it is the actor who, after a long speech, is accepting the cup of tea from the stage assistant, when cries of "how adorable" (kawaii nee) greet a star's infant son in his first st.ge "role," when an actor steps out of his role to ask the audience for their support at the time of accession to a higher acting name. By text I mean the total dramatic content of the performance: story, characters and their emotions, thoughts, and desires, and themes expressed through the plot events portrayed. Usually a written record is made of the text (a script), but originally performers of all genres of Japanese theatre created and extemporized new text orally in performance and memorized existing text aurally. Whether the dramatic text Modern Drama, 35 (1992) 159 160 JAMES R. BRANDON was written or oral, over some T.500 years in Japan. it developed in unison with strong theatrical and extra-theatrical "codes" that carned their own weight in any new creation. (Of course, "codes" of text making also exist and can be profitably examined). The historical privileging of text (script. synopsis, story) over performance in Western theory is well known and requires no elaboration here (I will return to the subject briefly at the end). But it is useful to recall that practical as well as philosophic reasons undergird our attitudes. Within our economic and cultural circumstances, most texts are created separate from, and prior to, perfonnance. Commonly those who write, act, and direct operate in selfcontained circles, coming together for production. More often than not the author of a dramatic text has no idea when, where, or how that text will be performed. This is true in theory as well as practice. To single out one contemporary theory, in the Western deconstructionist view the text maker is required to be wholly separated from a work's interpretation. We find other circumstances in traditional Japanese theatre. Historically, in no, kabuki, or bunraku, playwriting has been considered one, and not necessarily the first, step in a unified process of creating a performance. Strong codes of performance existed prior to a playwright composing a new text. These existing codes of performance had, and still have, several characteristics of significance for our analysis. First, they were the "propertY" of the performer - knowledge of the artistic and emotional patterning (kala) resides in the body and mind of the actor, the dancer, or the musician. Thus, they were almost wholly within his control. The specific pattern, or kala, was chosen or created by the performer, not by the text creator (nor by an outside authority such as the modem director). The performer was strongly empowered by this circumstance. As 1 have written elsewhere in greater detail, locus of performance in the actor's physical skills is a...