Bunraku

Chikamatsu Monzaemon 近松門左衛門  è un grande drammaturgo del teatro giapponese. È stato definito dai giapponesi come Lo Shakespeare del Giappone , nome attribuitogli in seguito all’introduzione della letteratura occidentale nel paese del Sol levante. Definizione non condivisa dal traduttore Donald Keene che osserva: “Una sfortunata identificazione per la reputazione di Chikamatsu in Occidente. I lettori occidentali […] non vivranno mai un secondo Shakespeare” .Tuttavia Chikamatsu riesce a dar vita e parola a semplici marionette , attraverso le quali è in grado di mostrare compassione e angoscia per le passioni della classe mercantile dell’epoca, a ritrarre la natura umana come mai nessuno prima. Il suo teatro ha successo anche per la minuziosa attenzione ai testi: si avvale di molti riferimenti ai classici e ai testi confuciani, buddisti e shintoisti; il suo stile è perfetto nel linguaggio, armonioso ed equilibrato, ricco di figure retoriche, poetico e dotato anche di umorismo . Non a caso Chikamatsu (almeno per i giapponesi) è l’unico in grado di poter sorreggere un tale confronto con il genio shakespeariano.

Vocaloids are virtual Japanese pop stars who exist as computer-generated voices and three-dimensional projections. Their animé aesthetic involves exaggerated and sexualised notions of childhood, girlhood and female sexuality. The digitisation of the female voice and the holographic representation of girls by men for the consumption of men is examined within the wider contexts of the infantilisation of society, the Japanification of global culture, and discourses of power, and control.

Producers using vocaloid software upload their songs to a hub which then become the vocaloid’s repertoire. Hatsune Miku is the genre’s biggest star. To her creator, she is ‘a symbolic event’ which allows users ‘to create any number of productions through her’. She is also depicted as an infantilised 16 year-old Japanese school girl who ‘dies’ onstage. Vocaloid singing voices have a deliberately artificial feel in which studio manipulation, autotuning, timbral adjustments and other synthesised effects are foregrounded. As holograms, young women are depicted as transparent, alien, distant and ‘other’. The programmable nature of vocaloid software and the robotisation of women perpetuates notions of infantilisation. Vocaloid culture, animé and manga are informed by a hetero-normative adolescent male aesthetic. Foucault points to ‘an ascending analysis of power’ which manifests in ‘infinitesimal mechanisms’ at the capillary edges of modern culture. I discuss Foucault’s ‘panopticon’ concept of power, and how it is normalised through conditioned, everyday experiences, and the cultural expression of vocaloids.

Meanwhile, many Japanese women choose to dress and act like young girls, ‘performing’ childhood in a ‘cute’ culture known as kawaii, of which vocaloids are symptomatic. I argue that while kawaii has its roots in societal oppression, it is in many ways subversive. Women are turning away from the harshness of Japanese schooling, the high expectations of middle class elders and uncertainty futures, towards a playful and spontaneous eternal present in which they are, to a large extent, productive as consumers. Their performance of vulnerability and helplessness renders them incapable of participating in adult life. In an infantilised world, children are simultaneously fetishised for their authentic child-like traits, whilst being rendered socially invisible by a society that no longer aspires to adult values that rely on generational differentiation. As such, childhood as a discrete and identifiable category is effaced. Vocaloids are just one notable manifestation of ‘Kidult’ culture and the infantilisation of Japanese, and increasingly global society.

The cinema of Takeshi Kitano happens somewhere between formality and improvisation, elegy and absurdity, distance and familiarity. If continuities exist in his films, they rarely do so in stable, reliable forms: a shot can suddenly linger until it seems to belong elsewhere; matching and shot-reverse-shot conventions seldom matter; vivid, primary colours will refuse to disperse; dialogue is minimal and silence, profuse. Shooting tends to be sequential, done to a schedule that promises few certainties – time is short and re-shoots are rare. Screenplays are scribbled and sketched out on bits of paper, ‘constructed around a few central ideas that may or may not drive the plot along’. Editing is a game, a puzzle to be solved once the film has revealed itself and not before: ‘The shooting process is like moulding and colouring the plastic parts for a model … building the model is the fun part’. Genre conventions – particularly those associated with the Yakuza genre – are readily distorted; occasions of random and ritual violence are not simply interrupted, they often transcend their own seriousness. Actors (most notably, the ‘Beat’ Kitano himself) can act by not acting; characters – like the loosely woven fabulae they inhabit – remain enigmatic and psychologically insubstantial. A restless, impulsive imagination presides over the entire production process: responding to spontaneity rather than conforming to propriety seems to be the aesthetic keystone of Kitano’s method.
This article examines Dolls/Dooruzu (2002), focussing on how Kitano applied his seemingly anarchic sensibility to the task of rendering the ornate, literary theatre of Bunraku puppetry into the forms and structures of a contemporary cinema. The film itself is comprised of three loosely interwoven Chikamatsu variations: two tragic lovers embarking on a journey to their death (the bound beggars); a retired Yakuza boss trying to make amends for abandoning his sweetheart years before (the remorseful ‘warrior’); and a young man who blinds himself rather than see the scarred face of his idol, a reclusive former pop star who survived an accident (the infatuated servant). Each story presents characters and situations that correspond obliquely to archetypes and motifs from the Bunraku/Kabuki repertoire, and others that correspond more exactly to those from Kitano’s own film oeuvre: angels, shorelines, surfboards, flowers, bridges, fireworks, daft teenagers, and Yakuza gangsters. However, in maintaining his confidence in strategies of openness, informality, and play, Kitano’s film emerges as much more than a stylish cinematic allegory of contemporary Japanese society and its fraught cultural formations. Nothing if not contradictory, Kitano’s imagination carries Dolls in a different direction, towards the possibility of reconciling theatre and cinema, artifice and truth, love and death.

I went to see the political-satire-bunraku-puppet-show “Manufacturing Mischief” on 24th of May 2018 at the Berkeley Street Upstairs Theatre (Canadian Stage) without really knowing what to expect from the show. “Manufacturing Mischief’s” online information gave a crazy sense of what the play might be: “American linguist Noam Chomsky is headed to Silicon Valley to judge a competition of new Artificial Intelligence devices hosted by South African inventor, Elon Musk. Chomsky’s prized student, Millie, has entered a device, called the Print-A-Friend, in the competition. It materializes the author of any book inserted into it. Chaos ensues as Ayn Rand, Tiny Trump, Karl Marx, and others are reanimated - and the Print-A-Friend is stolen! Chomsky, Millie and Marx must fend off the forces of capitalistic evil and the damage they might do with this new AI machine.” After I watched the show I was pleasantly surprised by the intellectual charm of the show and how it dealt with so many difficult ideas through the material world of puppets and objects. Show’s maker, Pedro Reyes, has a long and profoundly interesting artistic career where he has used a variety of theatrical mediums, including performance-exhibitions like “Doomocracy” (2016), and other political puppetry pieces like “The Permanent Revolution” (2014), to broaden the political and ethical imaginations of adult participants and audiences through the Americas. The show consciously made the choice of casting women puppeteers for male puppets and the only male puppeteer for the central female puppet (Millie), which not only successfully bended the expectation of gender roles but also very smartly used bunraku’s potential of making characters through superposed elements (such as the material reality of the puppet, its animation and its voice). In this paper I will analyze the show’s technicality, how it merged digital and analog mediums, its allegorical approach to political reality, and its pedagogical approach towards the intellectual accessibility of philosophical and ethical debates that correspond to substantial means in many people’s lives.

The Anime Paradox: Patterns and Practices through the Lens of Traditional Japanese Theater is an examination of the form of Anime—the repeated visual, aural, and narrative conventions performed in Anime texts—exposed through a comparison with the viewing modes and formal conventions of Asian theaters, primarily Noh, Bunraku, and Kabuki. This is not to push for a “cultural” reading of Anime, to construct a “Japanese” lineage between Anime and Japanese traditional theater. Rather, it is an attempt to consider different means of approaching Anime, providing ways yet unexplored of how Anime create meaning in their texts, and how they (consciously and unconsciously) distance themselves from other types of animation, even in Japan (e.g. Sazae-san versus Evangelion), through the repeated performance of Anime’s established conventions. Instead of looking to Manga or film or other mass-produced texts, this project looks to the theater, often overlooked multi-media productions that possess viewing modes and reading styles that can provide alternative methods for readings of Anime. Anime has become a site of various significant discourses (locally and globally), but before we determine what this performance is saying, we need to consider, on a very basic level, how it is saying it and explore various means of examining it; we need to reflect on the means of expression in the performance of the Anime form, often a crucial point of aesthetic attraction itself: Anime sells locally and globally because it exhibits itself as distinctly “Anime.” The Anime Paradox is thus an effort to provide an accessible discussion on Anime form and the mechanics of the type beauty represented through it from the standpoint of a critic and long-time viewer of Anime. This examination through comparison also works in the other direction, further endeavoring to enrich our understanding of theater through Anime.

In 1999, I staged a performance of a strange cultural artifact: a feature length shadow-puppet play in a mixed tradition, part Greek karaghiozis, part Bunraku, part Wayang Kulit, part old American musical. Its subject made this mix much stranger: the life of painter Jackson Pollock. But it gets curiouser. The play was not supposed to be written by me, nor was I the director. It was purportedly the work of two fictional characters, Alfred Hoos and Yannis Philaretos, heroes of a novel-in-progress called The Republic. Ironies abound: the play that those two people were supposed to have written and directed in the novel--but hadn't really, this being a novel--was not supposed to exist. Yet it does, so much so that you can see it online https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJMyQ4Bkiow The novel, on the contrary, was meant to exist. But it doesn't. Now, in "Paralipomena" I make available a large collection of material created by Hoos and Philaretos, as also by an un-named scholar studying their lives and work. Biographical stuff, chronologies, snippets of their works, interviews, poems, paintings, they are all there, giving a rationale of the creation of the "The Tragical History of Jackson Pollock, Abstract Expressionist."

"VOCALOID Opera AOI with Bunraku Puppets" is a 30 minute-length opera film in which real Bunraku puppets and puppeteers perform with the songs of VOCALOID (the singing voice synthesis software developed by Yamaha Corporation) created under the official authorization of the Japan Bunraku Association. I am in charge of the global promotion of this film, and gave an introductory presentation at its world premiere screening in London Hyper Japan (Japanese culture convention) at July 2014.

Sagamigawa is a unique ballad which embodies the kōwaka’s many seventeenth-century transformations, and here I will show how it performs the genre’s role as a central substratum in the nascent puppet theatre. As Fujii Natsuko has shown, Sagamigawa may never have been a ‘real’ kōwaka: a retrospective medley, it quotes the kōwaka of the sixteenth century as they never do among themselves; no texts with musical notation survive; there are no performance records. Nevertheless, I read Sagamigawa as an icon of the genre’s seventeenth-century evolutions: latter-day demand for books with kōwaka-like texts was met with texts that had never been kōwaka—in this case, an ersatz kōwaka about kōwaka. Moreover, Sagamigawa, endowed by the century’s end with an iconography and a textual tradition, flowed on into another stream of the kōwaka’s afterlife even though it perhaps never had a kōwaka ‘life’ to begin with: an illustrated puppet-theatre libretto in the Bibliothèque nationale de France reincarnates Sagamigawa in that new tradition. The ghostly Yoshitsune is replaced by his living lover Shizuka and her mother, who are now Pure Land nuns and make long journeys to the tune of michiyuki road poems; the woodblock illustrations make full use of puppet-theatre conventions of space, time, and embodiment. Sagamigawa’s strata are melted down and recast to please its new urban commoner audience, men and women newly mobilized within a remapped landscape. In Sagamigawa, the kōwaka survives by overcoming itself, here by taking on wooden bodies and townsman garb.