The Tension of Modern Bunraku

Even before I began using puppets in my performances in 1982, I had always felt connected to the Japanese Bunraku theatre. In my early solo perform ances with articles of clothing and other objects, I referred to myself as a Japanese stagehand or puppeteer. When I began to use puppetry in my work, the idea of a small human figure surrounded and accompanied by three visible men fascinated me. The structure of the Bunraku ¹ theatre as a series of three splits or fragments of the conventions of Western theatre (text, music, and puppet) seemed to me a new way to organize a performance. The puppet, along with the manipulator, was a separate entity, and so was the narrator, as was the musician (the latter two on a platform to one side). Bunraku presented a total, though divided, spectacle in which each element retained a distance from the other and recalled Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt. What I loved about this spectacle was that the puppeteers were both visible and neutral. One's focus could go back and forth between the manipulator or the puppet, the manipulation or the resulting gesture.

Japanese puppet drama developed at a rapid pace in the seventeenth century at the start of the Edo Period (1603-1868). Male puppeteers were hidden from the public by a curtain while they held (one-man) puppets, about two feet tall, above their heads. The narrator and musician were also hidden (see the backstage drawing). In 1703, a group of puppeteers created a sensation when they appeared in full view of the audience, separated only by a translucent curtain. The curtain itself was eliminated in two years later. In 1728, the narrator and musician were given their own auxiliary stage, the yuka, on stage left, and in 1734, puppeteer Yoshida Bunzaburo devised the three-man system of manipulating puppets (see the drawing). Since then, one unusual feature of the Japanese puppet theatre is that the manipulator makes no attempt to conceal the fact that he is manipulating the puppets. Unlike puppet performances from other countries, this Japanese form does not require the illusion that the puppets are moving and talking on their own.

In 1983, when I began to create large-scale historical works such as The Age of Invention,I began to use a modified Bunraku performance style for certain life-size American superheroes, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison. These characters, as I was using them, were explorations of façade, and by using their own words, and a Bunraku style, I was hoping to both bring them to life as well as comment on and critique their complex lives. The Bunraku influence was not orthodox: my large puppets never walked, so they seemed to need only two operators, one for the head and right hand, and the other for the left hand. Mostly, they stood or sat, and talked a lot. I spent plenty of time with my assistant trying to make them super-realistic, so that their skin looked likelike, their eyes blinked "naturally," and their hands could actually grab objects. It was a period of time when I was absolutely fascinated by the hyperealism of the Disney animatrons. What I didn't understand then about Bunraku theatre was that its greatness lay in the constant tension, and the attempt to strike a balance between realism and non-realism. Bunraku was not trying to persuade the audience it was watching reality, rather than a play. And I was very much interested in creating a flat surface of reality, which in this case was a combination of Brecht and Bunraku. Looking back, I feel that I was barely exploring the full potential of the Japanese form. A master puppeteer, Tamao, speaks about realism: "A puppeteer doesn't imitate life, but the way the puppet moves must reflect life, not merely be lifelike . . . It is the artistry of revealing the "hara"—the inner center of...