West Meets East

After decades of fascination with all things Japanese, in September 2012 I went to Tokyo on a Fulbright Fellowship. My teaching responsibilities left plenty of time to see theatre and dance, as well as visual art and architecture, both classic and contemporary. The formality, measured pace, and discipline of much of the traditional work led to some nap-taking on the part of spectators — Japanese salarymen and women, who work long hours and commute long distances, sleep wherever they can, even standing on the subway. The audiences for new work were somewhat younger, but since tickets to theatre and dance are expensive in Japan, they tended to be older than in downtown NYC. I’d anticipated seeing radical new performance work, yet the most exciting events were an exhibition by visual artist Aida Makoto at the Mori Museum that included performance on video, and a concert by Noh flute player Yukihiro Isso, who innovatively incorporates contemporary experimentation into his compositions and improvisations. Makoto’s work referenced and transformed classic and traditional forms in an ironic way that critiqued contemporary Japanese culture and society. For example, he painted a monumental silver screen, in the tradition of rimpa style, but instead of delicate songbirds and tendrils and vines, there were big black crows and telephone wires — the contemporary natural landscape. He also constructed pagoda-like structures from cardboard in a subway station as housing for homeless people; the buildings were carted off by cleaners before anyone could move in. Isso, an extraordinary flute player from a traditional Noh musician family (since the sixteenth century), has performed Noh music since childhood but incorporates elements of Western and world music into his compositions — melodies, improvisation, minimalism — and casts a hypnotic, compelling, absorbing spell when he plays flute in traditional Noh performances.

Since I was most enthused by Japanese artists who mixed the traditional with contemporary experiment and innovation, I was curious to see Japanese performers in New York who promised to do so. New York Live Arts presented two Japanese artists in Spring 2013: New York-based, Japanese-born choreographer Yasuko Yokoshi, NYLA’s first resident commissioned artist, and performance artist Hiroaki Umeda. The perspectives in the two works exemplify two ends of the spectrum of contemporary Japanese performing arts: an appreciation for classical tradition mingled with the desire to disrupt its constraints and exclusivity (Yokoshi), and the embrace of technology as an expansive extension of the creative imagination and the body (Umeda). In the work of both dance artists, as well as the two playwright/directors I also discuss below, there is intercultural influence and fusion, with the wilder, more individually expressive styles of the West affecting or modifying the Japanese emphasis on physical control and emotional restraint.

Yokoshi, who has choreographed and performed downtown since the nineties, began studying traditional Japanese dance in the past decade or so. Her project in BELL, as in previous recent dances, is to juxtapose Western and Eastern forms and dancers and see what this association suggests and evokes. For BELL, she incorporated two classical narratives that involve a jilted woman going mad with grief or rage: the Japanese dance, Kyoganoko Musume-Dojoji (A Maiden and a Bell at the Dojoji Temple) and the ballet, Giselle. Both involve passionate transformation. In Giselle, a woman dies of grief, but forgives the contrite lover who spurned her and saves his life by dancing for him through the night, until a church bell signals the dawn. By contrast, the scorned woman in Dojoji shows no such forgiveness; she becomes enraged when the man she loves chooses to be a Buddhist priest rather than be with her. She enters his...