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L'Oeil Ecoute: The Impact of Traditional Japanese Theatre on Postwar Western Performance
- Modern Drama
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 35, Number 1, Spring 1992
- pp. 137-148
- 10.1353/mdr.1992.0007
- Article
- Additional Information
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L'Oeil Ecoute: The Impact of Traditional Japanese .Theatre on Postwar Western Performance JOHN K. GILLESPIE There are three ways to success, by the eyes, by the ears and by the heart. (Zeami) We take from the worJd. You're as vibrant as the influences that cross your path. (Martha Graham) When the Portuguese Jesuit Francis Xavier arrived in Japan in '549 and made for Europeans the startling discovery that the Japanese were civilized and intelligent, he planted the seed of Western interest in things Japanese. Indeed, the ensuing trade between Japan and Europe gradually pried Europeans away from an unctuous attachment to their own aesthetic standards as superior, and opened the way to an appreciation of Japanese art which at times has reached passionate proportions. In the postwar era, that appreciation has come to full flower. Artistic Japan appears ubiquitous and has become a significant determinant of many Western aesthetic directions - in fashion, architecture, design, poetry, music, film, dance, and, of course, theatre. When figures such as Jean-Louis Barrault, Maurice Bejart, Lee Breuer, Benjamin Britten, Jerzy Grotowski, Ariane Mnouchkine, Theodora Skipitares, and Robert Wilson, among many others consummate artists all - borrow from Japanese theatre, so strange and different from their own traditions, it clearly is no idle fancy. My purpose in this essay is to look briefly at how and why this impact first took hold and to consider. with selected examples, its lineage in the postwar era. The burgeoning Western interest in Japanese theatre in recent years did not emerge ex Ilihilo. It rode the swelling tide of Western interest in Japan at the end of the nineteenth century, after Commodore Perry had forced Japan to end two and a half centuries of strict isolation. From the 1870S on, principally at world's fairs and expositions, North Americans and Europeans were inundated with a barrage of Japanese performers of all types. But early Modern Drama, 35 (1992) 137 138 JOHN K. GILLESPIE Western efforts to express onstage the appeal of Japanese performance merely took Japan as subject, making scant effort to appropriate Japanese stage techniques. Such plays achieved their effects either, like Gilbert and Sullivan 's The Mikado (1885) or Judith Gautier's La Marchallde de sourires (The Vendor of Smiles, 1888), by transcending stock stage conceptions of Japan, or, like Puccini's Madame Butterfly (1904), by avoiding them for the most part. When deeper interest in the classical theatres of Japan - Noh, Bunraku, and Kabuki - finally took hold, in the 1920S, the key figure was Paul Claudel, French ambassador to Japan at the time. Claudel's writings on Noh and adaptation in his own plays, notably Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (The Book of Christopher Columbus, 1927), of several aspects of Noh dramaturgy, provided the greatest impetus to the appreciation of Noh in France and in the West at large. Other Europeans during Claudel's time also were captivated by Noh. William Butler Yeats's use of the form in several plays, including Four Plays for Dallcers and The Dreaming of the Balles, is well known. Bertolt Brecht was so drawn by the similarity of Noh's presentational style to his own idea of the Verfremdullgseffekt that he adapted two pieces, Del' Jasager (The Yea Sayer) and Del' Neillsager (The Nay Sayer), from the Noh play Tanik6 (The Valley Hurling).' Claudel also discovered the charm of Bunraku. He noted how the puppets "come alive with the narrative," intuitively grasping the essence of Bunraku as storytelling: "[I]t is not an actor speaking, it is a word acting.'" Although he wove this storytelling quality into several of his plays, it was only in the postwar period that Western theatre figures began to see possibilities for their own work in the Bunraku puppets themselves. With respect to Kabuki, Paul Anthelme completed L'Honneur japollais (Japanese Honor), a popular reworking of the enduring Kabuki classic ChUshingura (The Treasury of Loyal Retainers), for the Odeon Theatre de France in 1912. Like many other Western efforts of the time, this play ineptly took something Japanese as subject; curiously, though Anthelme had been to Japan, nothing about the play's structure calls Kabuki to mind. Fifteen years later, however, French interest in...