Asian and African Theatre

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Asian and African Theatre

• Ch 10

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Theatre in Japan

• At about the time religious cycles were
  flourishing in Europe, a very different kind of
  theatrical experience was being offered halfway
  round the world in Japan.
• There, Noh theatre was perfected and codified so
  thoroughly that it is still performed today much
  as it was five hundred years ago.

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Theatre in Japan

• To understand Noh theatre we need to look at the
  political and cultural context out of which it
  developed.
• During the sixth century A.D. the Buddhist
  religion arrived in Japan from India and China.
• In the seventeenth century an emperor gained
  power over Japan and took ownership of all land.

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Theatre in Japan

• In 1192 emperor ceded his secular authority to a
  shogun (military dictator), although he retained
  his status as a near-god in the religious realm.
• The shogunate became hereditary, although new
  families won possession of the title from time to
  time.

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Theatre in Japan

• Japan was ruled in this manner until 1867, when
  American intervention led to the downfall of the
  shogunate and the return of power to the emperor.
• Under shogunate Japan had strict social hierarchy

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Theatre in Japan

• In 1338 the Ashikaga family gained control of the
  shogunate and retained it for the next two
  hundred fifty years.
• One of its goals was to eliminate foreign
  cultural influences and develop native art forms.

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Noh Theatre

• The most significant developments in Noh theatre
  began around 1375. At that time it was taken
  under the patronage of shogun.
• The major influence on Nohs view of the world
  was Zen Buddhism, which reaches that ultimate
  peace comes through union with all being, the
  individual desire must be overcome, and that
  nothing in earthly life is permanent.

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Noh Theatre

• Noh dramas are classified into five types,
  according to the principal character god plays,
  warrior plays, women plays, madness plays, and
  demon plays.
• Each Noh script is short and doesnt emphasize
  storytelling.

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Noh Theatre

• The performers can be divided into three groups
  actors, chorus, and musicians.
• The actors are trained from childhood and expect
  to devote twenty or more years to perfecting
  their craft.

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Noh Theatre

• The chorus is composed of from six to ten
  members. They sit at one side of the stage
  throughout and sing or recite many of the shites
  (main character and his or her followers) lines
  or narrate events.

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Noh Theatre

• Each play requires two or three drummers and one
  flute player. No other instruments are ever used.
• The shite and his companion wear masks of painted
  wood, many of them passed down for generations.

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Noh Theatre

• The Noh stage, standardized for almost four
  hundred years, is raised about three feet.
• The stage is divided into three areas, although
  none is separated architecturally except for the
  pillars.
• The largest area, the main stage, is enclosed by
  the four pillars and is about eighteen feet
  square.
• Back of the upstage pillars is the rear stage
  (atoza), where the musicians and attendants sit.
• To stage left of the main stage is the waki-za,
  where the chorus kneels on the floor in two rows.

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Noh Theatre

• There are two entrances to the stage. The
  principal one, the bridge, is a railed gangway
  about six feet wide and forty feet long leading
  from the mirror room, where the actors prepare
  for their entrances.

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Noh Theatre

• The audience views the performance from two
  sides in front of the main stage and facing the
  stage from alongside the bridge. The theatres
  used today hold three hundred to five hundred
  people.
• Every element of performance is strictly
  controlled by conventions that have been
  established for centuries. Rather than
  encouraging innovation, Noh seeks to perfect and
  preserve an art form.

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The Shrine in the Fields (Nonomiya)

• The Shrine in the Fields is usually attributed to
  Zeami. It belongs to the third category (woman
  play) and is based on episodes from one of the
  most famous of Japanese novels, The Tale of Genji.

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The Shrine in the Fields (Nonomiya)

• Each Noh play is set in a specific season of the
  year, named early in the drama, and the mood and
  imagery of the entire play must be in keeping
  with that season.
• In The Shrine in the Fields the time is late
  autumn, the seventh day of the ninth month, the
  day in which Lord Genji visited Lady Rokujo at
  Nonomiya.

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The Shrine in the Fields (Nonomiya)

• As is typical in Noh drama, the introductory
  scene compresses time and place An itinerant
  priest ( the waki or secondary character) travels
  almost instantaneously from the capital to
  Nonomiya, where his curiosity is aroused by the
  seemingly perfect preservation of the shrine
  although it has long been abandoned.

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The Shrine in the Fields (Nonomiya)

• When the ghost of Miyasudokoro (the shite)
  appears in the guise of a village girl, he
  questions her about the shrine and herself, and
  gradually it becomes apparent that there is
  something mysterious about both her and the
  place.

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The Shrine in the Fields (Nonomiya)

• As in all Noh plays, the climactic moment is
  expressed in dance.
• In Noh, a number of devices distance the
  spectator from the play.
• For The Shrine in the Fields the basic appearance
  of the stage is altered only by the addition of a
  stylized gate and brushwood fence, and the only
  property of any significance is the sprig of
  sakaki that Miyasudokoro places at the shrine
  gate.

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The Shrine in the Fields (Nonomiya)

• The Shrine in the Fields does not seek to tell a
  story or to develop character so much as to
  capture a mood, to distill a powerful emotion,
  and to express an attitude about the physical
  world and human existence.

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Other Japanese Theatre Forms

• Japan developed two other traditional theatre
  forms doll theatre and Kabuki.
• The doll theatre, in which large puppets
  represent the characters, came to prominence in
  the seventeenth century.

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Other Japanese Theatre Forms

• Three handlers, who are visible to the audience
  operate each puppet. One handler manipulates the
  head and right arm, a second the left arm, and a
  third the feet.
• A narrator is accompanied by a samisen ( a
  three-stringed instrument with a skin-covered
  base that can be both struck and plucked) and
  other instruments of lesser importance.

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Other Japanese Theatre Forms

• The major writer of plays for doll theatre was
  Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724), Japans
  greatest playwright.

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Other Japanese Theatre Forms

• He wrote many kinds of plays but is best known
  for his five-act history plays and his three-act
  plays on contemporary life.
• He was admired above all for his plays about the
  double suicides of lovers, his sensitive
  characterizations, and beautiful language.

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Other Japanese Theatre Forms

• Kabuki, long the most popular of the traditional
  forms, also first appeared in the seventeenth
  century.
• More open to change than the other forms, it has
  borrowed many of its plays and conventions from
  Noh and Bunraku but has adapted them to its own
  needs.

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Other Japanese Theatre Forms

• Unlike Noh, Kabuki uses a great deal of scenery,
  although the settings are not meant to be fully
  illusionistic. White floor mats are used to
  represent snow, blue mats to indicate water, and
  gray mats the ground.

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Other Japanese Theatre Forms

• Most Kabuki plays are divided into several acts
  made up of loosely connected episodes that
  emphasize highly emotional incidents.
• The climactic moment in many scenes is reached in
  a highly stylized pose (the mie) struck and held
  by the principal character.

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Other Japanese Theatre Forms

• Song and narration are important to Kabuki.
• The orchestra often includes flutes, drums,
  bells, gongs, cymbals, and strings, although the
  most essential instrument is the samisen.

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Other Japanese Theatre Forms

• Kabuki acting is a combination of stylized
  speaking and dancing.
• Kabuki actors do not wear masks, but some roles
  use boldly patterned makeup to exaggerate the
  musculature of face or body.

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Other Japanese Theatre Forms

• Although Kabuki is highly conventionalized, it
  includes many elements that resemble, though in
  exaggerated form, Western usages, perhaps most
  notably in scenery and lighting, melodramatic
  stories, and emotional acting.
• Of all Japanese forms, Noh remains the least
  understood in the West.

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Theatre in Africa

• Europeans and Americans remained largely ignorant
  of African performance traditions until the end
  of the nineteenth century.
• Nevertheless, African performance activities had
  through the centuries been numerous religious
  rituals, festivals, ceremonies, storytelling, and
  various kinds of celebrations and had been
  woven into daily life.

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Theatre in Africa

• The combination of the colonialist heritage and
  indigenous forms created a wide spectrum of
  performance in Africa.
• There are more than eight hundred local languages
  in use, and many local traditions do not
  necessarily travel well from one part of Africa
  to another.

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Theatre in Africa

• During the late nineteenth century, European
  countries divided up most of Africa among
  themselves and thereafter sought to impose their
  languages and ideas of theatre, including
  proscenium-arch structures, on the territories
  they controlled.

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Theatre in Africa

• In indigenous performance, words are often the
  least important element. Other languages,
  especially drumming and dance, often communicate
  more to African audiences than words do.
• Direct audience participation is expected.
• Dancing and music are important in most
  performances.

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Theatre in Africa

• It would be impossible to treat theatrical
  performance in every country on the African
  continent, since there are close to fifty
  separate states.
• Whereas Arab languages and customs dominate the
  states in North Africa, those south of the Sahara
  desert are highly diverse.

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Theatre in Africa

• Most countries have been unable to rid themselves
  of their colonial past and, consequently, their
  theatrical customs include both European and
  African conventions.

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Performance in Nigeria

• Nigeria includes more than two hundred fifty
  different ethnic groups, of which the most
  populous are the Hausa, Yoruba, Ibo, and Fulani.
• One of the major Yoruba festivals was the
  egungen, in which sacrifices were offered and
  petitions for blessing and prosperity were
  addressed to the dead.

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Performance in Nigeria

• The most popular contemporary theatrical form in
  Nigeria is Yoruba opera (now usually called
  Yoruba Travelling Theatre). It was developed
  primarily by Hubert Ogunde, who in 1946
  established a professional company with which he
  toured thereafter.

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Performance in Nigeria

• English-language plays also became popular from
  around 1900, and drama was intoduced into schools
  founded by the English colonial government or by
  religious organizations that were seeking to
  convert Nigerians to Christianity.

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Performance in Nigeria

• But the dominant playwright has been Wole Soyinka
  (1934-), especially since 1986, when he won the
  Noble Prize for Literature, the first African to
  be so honored.
• That has not kept him from being punished by a
  government that has imprisoned him and threatened
  him with death for his opposition to certain
  government policies.

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The Strong Breed

• The staging conventions used in The Strong Breed
  are much the same as those found in European and
  American theatres.
• The difference from European and American drama
  lies primarily in the subject matter and its
  treatment, which strongly reflects the egungen
  traditions, but placed in a modern context.

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The Strong Breed

• In The Strong Breed, the dramatic action focuses
  on a ritual that can be traced all the way back
  to the Greeks the selection and expulsion of a
  scapegoat who will take all the problems of the
  village on himself and carry them away.

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The Strong Breed

• It is never made clear why Summa, who seems to be
  in love with Eman, does not tell him of the
  difference in customs here, not even when a girl
  dragging an effigy appears and lures him into the
  bush, where he can be captured and prepared for
  the ritual.

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The Strong Breed

• In the action that follows, through a series of
  flashbacks, we learn that Eman is a descendant of
  a long line of carriers and that he has left his
  own village because he has been devastated when
  his wife died in childbirth.
• As in Greek tragedy, Eman finds that he cannot
  escape his destiny to be a carrier.

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The Strong Breed

• The Strong Breed develops a number of themes
  common in Soyinkas plays the conflict between
  the traditional and the modern the ongoing need
  to save society from its tendency to follow
  custom and mistaken beliefs unquestioningly the
  special individual, who through dedication and
  vision awakens the people and leads them toward
  better ways, even though he may become a victim
  of the society he seeks to benefit.

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The Strong Breed

• Soyinka may also be suggesting that one cannot
  escape tradition and therefore must come to grips
  with it.
• Soyinkas plays form a bridge between traditional
  and contemporary performance.

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Theatre Elsewhere in Africa

• Other African countries with extensively
  developed performance traditions include Ghana,
  Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Senegal, and Ivory
  Coast.
• But the county whose theatre is vest known in
  Europe and America is South Africa, probably
  because so many of its inhabitants are
  descendants of white Europeans.

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Theatre Elsewhere in Africa

• South Africa also attracted much attention and
  controversy over apartheid, under which the black
  and white populations were kept apart from each
  other as much as possible and under which blacks
  were denied most of the rights granted to whites.
• These conditions continued from the 1950s until
  about 1990, when the restrictions were removed.

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Theatre Elsewhere in Africa

• The best-known South African playwright is Athol
  Fugard, whose plays have been produced throughout
  the world and have been especially popular in the
  US.
• His Master Harold and the Boys (1982) is grounded
  in apartheid.

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Theatre Elsewhere in Africa

• A number of black playwrights have gained
  international recognition, among them Mbogeni
  Negema and Percy Mtwa.
• Their play Woza Albert enacts what might happen
  if Jesus were to come back to South Africa.

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Theatre Elsewhere in Africa

• It is clear that African theatre is handicapped
  by colonialist heritage. Rather than comparing it
  to European and American practices, it would be
  best to admire its broad range of theatrical
  activities, most of which, considering the
  enormous number of ethnic and linguistic
  divisions within Africa, are appropriately
  directed to limited and local audiences.

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Epilogue

• The theatre is always in flux. It seems likely
  that the versions with which we are now familiar
  will change as conditions alter.
• Changes are not always welcome, but they are
  necessary, because theatre can remain vital only
  by reflecting the dynamics of the culture within
  which it exists.