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Artist and Audience in Japan's Classic Theater
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15195 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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4 / 1989 |
6,431 Words |
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Thomas Blenman Hare
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In 1916, in the hope that it might help him "explain a certain possibility of the Irish dramatic movement," William Butler Yeasts wrote the preface for a slim volume of No plays roughly translated by connoisseur of Japanese art Ernest Fenollosa and "finished" by Ezra Pound. "I have invented a form of drama," said Yeats, "distinguished, indirect and symbolic, and having no need of mob or press to pay its way--an aristocratic form." He claimed as one antecedent for this aristocratic form the fifteenth-century No drama of Japan.
Those adjectives he uses, "distinguished," "indirect," "symbolic," and above all, "aristocratic," seem in many ways uncannily well chosen. Western visitors and scholars often remark on the elevated and symbolic nature of No, and the Japanese themselves are quick to point to No as a repository of their classic civilization in all its elegance and profundity. But Yeasts would have been surprised to learn that some of the earliest records of No speak of the shenanigans of a low-ranking bureaucrat fishing for prawns, or of a pregnant nun out shopping for diapers-- hardly aristocratic fare.
It is not surprising that No should have changed so completely in its six-or seven-century-long history, but one of its claims to aristocratic pedigree is rooted in the notion that it faithfully represents the nobility of a bygone age. The fact that it is the oldest continuous dramatic form on earth has spawned the illusion that No remained unchanged during its long history, and this misconception has gone hand in hand with the view that No has been uninfluenced by the demands of audiences, unsullied, as it were, by what Yeasts calls "the mob."
But a continuous tradition of acting, musical performance, and aesthetic interpretation does not necessarily imply perfectly static conventions of acting, musical performance, and aesthetic interpretation. It means instead that change in No drama has occurred more gradually and left more palpable clues about how things used to be done than would be the case with, say, Greek tragedy or Elizabethan drama. It also means that we can put together a much clearer picture of the interaction of art and audience over the centuries than might otherwise be possible. That interaction has been enormously influential in defining the aesthetic goals of No and in molding its expressive conventions.
The mythology of No identifies two referred ancestors for the art. One is a dance that was done on the high plain of heaven, not long after the beginning of time, to entice the sun goddess out of a cave in which she had hidden herself in a fit of anger. The other is a skit that was done by one of the Buddha's disciples to quiet a rowdy crowd so that Gautama's preaching might continue undisturbed.
More historically reliable sources suggest that No had its origins in agricultural fertility rites and the circuslike entertainments that accompanied the celebration of major festivals at Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The early popular appeal of No seems to have been largely rural; particularly fertile ground for the fledgling dramatic form was the countryside around the rather sleepy and disused town of Nara. The area supported several troupes, four of which survive to the present day, and it is in the records of their performance that we get the first detailed glimpse of what No must have been like near its
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