The REAL popular theater

I saw something a few weeks ago which amazed me to such an extent that even after 2 weeks I'm still not sure I can convey the complexity of the event.

My co-worker and longtime friend Nyan-nyan-chan took a few (well-deserved) days off of work. I assumed that he was just going to be holing up at home with some pornos, as is his habit, but in fact he was working on a show from Japan. He kept referring to it as 大衆演劇 "popular theater" of the worst kind, and coming from him, who most of the time LOVES the razzle-dazzle simple pleasures of spectacle in entertainment for the masses, that was saying a lot.

Let me backtrack a little bit and say that in my academic studies of theater, in the early to mid-1990s, we meticulously followed the course of popular theater across culture and throughout human history. Theater has historically been a dirty low-class business, hardly a step away from prostitution. Certain rulers, patrons and artists were able to elevate theater and promote it as an intellectual and artistic endeavor, but its populist roots were deep. And so it was in Japan. The first appearance of the seeds of traditional theater were in sarugaku, a form of song and dance. Originally women performed by the riverbanks in the outskirts of town -- but because this entertainment was so deeply tied to prostitution, women were banned from performing. Out of sarugaku arose what has come to be known as noh theater (the solemn, serious, mystical heavy slow drama, performed with droning chants and jolting percussion-heavy music, and masks) and kyogen, noh's comic cousin, much akin in form and content to commedia dell'arte. Now, after several hundred years of codification of the physical training and staging, both noh and kyogen are treated with great reverence as an irreplaceable relic and living cultural treasure. But when you think about it, hundreds of years ago, the Lords of feudal society were paying for noh and kyogen actors to entertain them.

So if noh & kyogen (and kabuki) as we know them today have tracked the trajectory of the "high" art in terms of fidelity of principal and construction, custom and systemic rituals of the form, then where has the spirit of popular theater gone?

Well not to fret, it is alive today, tottering on shaky legs, in Sawa Ryuji, The Return. Sawa Ryuji is an old school populist actor. He and his "school" of theater is precisely that of popular theater. It is about entertaining the masses, it's about spectacle and drama (laugh and cry, and catharsis). So for its value as a cultural phenomenon alone his show was worth seeing.

As for the show itself... There is no way for me to aptly describe what it was, but let me try. Imagine a showcase/revue, a sequence of vignettes, scenes, dances and songs, featuring a variety of performers playing a variety of different roles. The main actor is a middle-aged (50s?) man who's like a cross between Tammy Fae Baker and Bruce Willis. He performs ridiculously choreographed stylized sword fights in which he defeats legions of enemy without ever getting within 3 feet of them. Every time he makes an entrance, an MC on mic announces his name over the blown-out PA system, and the audience is supposed to shout his name and cheer him on. He appears in vignette after vignette, with minimal dialogue and maximum maudlin melodrama and cheap spectacle, and there is a perpetual spotlight on him, no matter where he is on stage. In the finale, he comes out in an emerald green sequined Japanese gown, and sings a song about how there's only the actor's life for him. He is sweaty, wobbling into the house (full of Americans who haven't understood a word he has said throughout the evening, and probably think this is "great exotic Japanese performance"), and full of pride. At the curtain call, he attempts to introduce some of the long-time actors in his company, but he can't remember their names. Ah, the irony, the poignancy, the heartbreak...

about a girl...

...who finds her true self in deceipt

me: I saw lust caution by the way

1:11 PM alannalanners: oooh, what did you think?

me: i thought it was a pretty great movie,

i didn't feel the same way you did about the first half being hollywood war movie

also, so many pp had talked to me about the sex, that it didn't seem so intense to me

but i enjoyed it...

1:12 PM i liked how it was about this young girl learning how to engage with the world and find an identity through "performance"

but that in the face of the guy, in the bedroom, the rules were different

alannalanners: yeah, it's interesting. i think the way it ends is pretty great

1:13 PM me: i felt like it was about her journey to grasp what is REAL in life

i also liked how she went from being so naive

1:14 PM god,

it was so painful to watch her set the standard for loyalty

when she didn't really know ANYTHING

alannalanners: yeah, it was painful

1:15 PM i thought at the end you'd just hear she'd been killed, so it was surprising and pretty cool to see her lined up with the whole gang at the end....she took them all down in a way

1:16 PM i was a little confused by the whole diamond thing though...did you feel like the gesture of him giving her the diamond really signified some kind of true love for her?

1:17 PM me: no not love

but yeah the diamond was weird

but i think irwin put it in a really great way

that she had been able to connect with this monster

in his deepest surviving HUMAN part,

and that that connection was a REAL thing,

1:18 PM and that the diamond symbolized like in actual physical terms

the realness of that connection

and that was when she realized she could not betray the one thing she felt as real

alannalanners: yes, that's eloquent

that makes sense

1:19 PM cause at the time part of me was like "come on girl that's just a big ole cheesy diamond"

me: right right

that's what i thought too

because "ring" just implicates all this other stuff about love & marriage

1:20 PM alannalanners: yeah

1:22 PM me: hey can i rip off this chat session and post it on my blog?

alannalanners: sure dollface

the grotesque

The two Dairakudakan Kochuten shows at work got great notices in the press, but frankly I wasn't thrilled. Maybe because I remembered their previous visits to New York so vividly. Back in 2002, they dropped into a sweltering New York summer for a series of shows that were totally fascinating, fun and exciting. There was a parade of men with sausages sticking out of their thongs -- and a hag-demon who cut off their "phalli" and weighed them on a scale, cackling; there was an underground society of creatures who sawed off their the crown of their victim's skull and ate his still-living brain; a strange slo-mo wedding procession complete with accompanying horses and stolen kisses to Andrea Bocelli's Time to Say Goodbye. Deliciously kitschy stuff.

Their latest pieces, Tiger's Cave and Yupiters did not captivate the way the other pieces did. The all-male Tiger's Cave, created by Kumotaro Mukai, was a comic imagining of a training camp for butoh dancer. An air of austerity, discipline, and asceticism is disrupted when one of their fellow trainees (or is it a teacher?) returns from a journey abroad sipping a cup of espresso and bearing gifts: a flag of France, a baguette, a pair of salt and pepper shakers, and a whip. His sauntering in to the theme song from The Triplets of Belleville infects the group and soon they've all given up the rigid butoh life for the Parisian one. At the height of this joyous revelry, the phone rings. With trepidation one of them answers. Whatever he hears on the receiver is enough to render him paralyzed and speechless. He hands the phone off to another trainee and the same thing happens to him. The third guy is finally able to spit out the words in terror: "CLEAN UP!" The pupils scamper around to destroy any evidence of their moment of fun to greet the return of their next teacher: a man/horse whose limbs are balanced precariously on the traditional Japanese laquerware. He clomps about noisily and wears a bizarre bit-like brace in his mouth that keeps his teeth perpetually bared. And so it goes on for a while. The concept is not uninteresting, but it was the indulgence and pacing that killed it for me. A reminder that what makes for a stunning picture cannot hold its own without a smart sense of time and timing.


Yupiters, the all-female companion piece by Yuko Kobayashi, proved to be much more esoteric. An ethereal trance-like landscape of ever-shifting images. The ensemble of women transformed themselves time and again, with elaborate costume changes and with extraordinary contortions. Gigantic fishbowls (with live fish) dangled from the sky. Mirrored panels surrounded the gathering, undulating wildly, creating an overload of visual information. The climax of the piece in which Kobayashi, painted entirely in silver, is surrounded by a throng of village women who prod and provoke her (without ever really touching her) and she is left to spasmodically churn and convulse, much like a fish out of water. For all its intensity and spectacle, this piece, too, left me feeling rather unmoved. Like eating at a super-fancy restaurant -- each dish looks so gorgeous, but does little to actually satisfy your hunger.

In the middle of the run I went to see the Red Bastard at the Brick Theater's NY Clown Festival. It was the 3rd time I'd seen him. While he certainly hit the mark I couldn't help but feel like he was under the weather, because he didn't wrangle his audience with the nonchalant ease with which I've seen him do so in the past. Nonetheless, he remains one of my favorite performers of that ilk -- if you've never seen him, you must, you must, you must.

Gangsters, Cattle-thieves, Cyborgs & Poo

Last year I think I saw most of the films in the New York Asian Film Festival -- which screened Anthology and Imaginasian. This year, with fancier venues (IFC & JS) the selection of films seem a bit less titillating. Nevertheless, I've gone out to support my brothers and represent and enjoy some serious air-conditioning and blood-splattering, feces-flinging violence. From the Korean-heavy assortment of films, we chose a handful that ranged from ganster-thriller-martial arts-mystery to animated masterpiece about shit. Here's a brief rundown:

City of Violence (Jjakpae): a rather confusing mishmash of genres spanning the cheesy 80's coming-of-age, kung-fu action and detective-buddy flick. There was always a wink to the audience as five childhood friends are wracked by the sudden and violent murder of one of the group. Two of them (one of them a cop from Seoul) track down the murderer -- who turns out to be one of their gang. It was hard to know whether to laugh or cry (we mostly laughed) but the fight sequences, including battles against break-dancing hipsters, baseball teams, a hundred Korean BBQ chefs armed with machetes, and four taikwando fighters dressed all in white were pretty thrilling and cringe-inducing.


Dynamite Warrior (Kon Fai Bin) from the producers and stunt coordinator of the famed Ong Bak, promised to be a goofy, over-the-top action comedy, and it did not disappoint. An entirely ridiculous padthai western set in the age of the industrial revolution, a wealthy greedy nincompoop lord with a scarred upper lip is trying to sell outrageously priced tractors to the farmers of Siam. This is of course facilitated by his secret band of thieves (led by a very hungry brute who stoops to cannibalism) who terrorize the land, stealing cattle from unsuspecting herders. Jone Bang Fai, the fireball bandit, also terrorizes the cattle herders with crazy huge phallic rockets, but his two-fold mission is to return the cattle to the farmers, and to hunt down the powerful wizard and cattle herder Sing who he believes to have murdered his parents. The story twists and turns from there -- there's an evil boil-ridden Black Wizard whose virgin daughter's menstrual blood is the key to disarm Sing, there are relentless fight sequences where Jone Bang Fai twirls in the air kneeing his opponents in every possible variation you can imagine and then some, there are murders, fires, monks, spirit possessions, sacrifice, and young love. Totally fun and unabashedly cheesy.

Saturday, we almost didn't make it out alive from the evening's Korean double-bill. I'm a Cyborg but that's OK which turned out to be one of the most charming, sweet, palatable love stories in recent cinema history. Featuring the mega-popstar Rain, the story is set in a sanatorium chock-full of endearing psychos and mentally disturbed patients. Our protagonist is a girl who discovers in late adolescence that she is actually a man-killing cyborg whose mission is to kill the hospital staff in order to escape and return her grandmother's dentures to her (who had also been carted away years ago, for believing herself to be a mouse and only eating radishes). Rain is a fellow-patient hospitalized for kleptomania (triggered by having been abandoned by his mother as a child) who falls in love with our adorable killer-cyborg and musters all his creative powers in order to save her from starvation (cyborgs do not eat human food). Though the story meandered at times, and should have ended soon after the reunion with Grandma and successful rice-megatron implant, the polished aesthetic and unbearable cuteness of the film never veered into the nose-bleed saccharine. I'd highly recommend this movie for all urban hipsters-couple/dates.

And finally: Ryo had convinced me that I had to see Aachi & Ssipak, an animated film 8 years in the making, set in the future when the earth has exhausted all of its natural resources, and had turned to human feces as an energy source. She knows me well -- indeed, on paper, this sounded right up my (scatalogically obsessed) alley. The government rewards its most prolific poopers with addictive Juicybars, which have caused a mutant race of orphaned Juicybar-addicts to emerge. Against this landscape, this entirely ridiculous film follows the story of two brainless hoodlums and one hoochie-mama and how they make it big with shit. Kind of. Honestly, story mattered very little in this non-stop action movie -- the violence was so over the top and incessant, it hardly gave pause for anything to land. A blatant satire of contemporary culture and neck-deep in references to American movies (Robocop, Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom, Armageddon, Easy Rider) and American idiocy (Paris Hilton), this exhausting movie couldn't quite maintain its levity despite the inane subject matter and extreme velocity. Tmonkey & I fell asleep periodically throughout the movie, and felt totally spent afterwards.

Still it was a fun week for the movie addict in me. Props to the Subway guys esp Grady who introduces each film with such joyful effervescence you can't help but get excited. You rock the fuchsia suit!

An Unfulfilling Banquet and a Pregnant Respite

I admit that I was enchanted when I first saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and I also thought Zhang Ziyi was super hot. Now, I feel murderous at the thought of watching another teardrop roll down Zhang's snow-white cheek to a Tan Dun score. The Banquet, which kicked off this year's New York Asian Film Festival (this year taking place at the IFC and Japan Society!!), was an epic Chinese period film gone terribly awry. The plot was loosely based on a permutation of Hamlet: an ousted Prince ( who had spent his years in exile at some performing arts center honing his dance, mask and poetry skillz, as all ousted nobles should!) is called upon to return to his kingdom upon the death of his father-emperor, but in the time it take for him to escape the arrows of his assassins, his former lover/stepmother (the ambition-driven conniving Zhang) has re-married his now-emperor uncle (her brother-in-law) and assumed the throne as Empress once again. Through predictable fluid fight choreography sequences (rife with splattering blood, people running through the air, fabrics swooshing and swooping) saccharine slo-mo close-ups of the emoting actors spouting off histrionic maudlin dialogue, the already limp story is mired in utterly meaningless gorgeousness; by the end, it was difficult to stifle laughter or retain a shred of care for the characters. We would have left if it weren't for the free booze at the post-screening party, for sure... Though I am keeping my hope up for the rest of the festival line-up.

My weekend cinema experiences were somewhat redeemed by Judd Apatow's Knocked Up, which for all its raves in the NYT and TONY, was essentially a sweet but highly unbelievable film about two people who should never have hooked up hooking up, getting pregnant, and then (for unexplained reasons) deciding to keep the baby and simultaneously attempting to develop their romantic relationship. WTF? Despite its implausible premise, the film is endearing and heart-warming without venturing too far into sentimental Hollywood cheeseland. It was a feel-good movie that bridged chick flick and dumb-guy-comedy (of the Will Ferrell variety) with plenty of stoner jokes, and a very realistic shot of a baby coming out of a lady's pochi.