the importance of keeping your mouth shut

I insist I am not biased, just because I worked on the translation.
Dan Safer is one of those people I'm really glad I met. Despite his rockstar persona, over a tall cup of tea I learned he was extremely thoughtful, generous and perceptive.
To tell the truth I wasn't sure I fully embraced his production of Mikuni Yanaihara's The Blue Bird, because it seemed like the non-stop ADD break-neck game-show-like antics of catchy dances, song/screaming and theatrical nonsequitors were more gimmick than could be held together by the structure and actual meat of the play. And I'm not sure if I was convinced otherwise -- however in the last 15 minutes of the play, with a surprisingly simple but beautiful transformation of the space with the music and the video and the images, and the sequence that followed, he caught that bird and made it fully, unapologetically, poignantly his own. Not sure how Yanaihara felt since she went to see it 2 weeks ago, but I felt fully tricked and not half-way indignant about it.

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...

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.

The honor of ritual suicide

Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 B/W film Harakiri (Seppuku) has a gorgeous new print -- it played last weekend at the IFC, but it will be back again at the Film Forum over Labor Day Weekend. Check it out -- a powerful for a humanist approach to life over the hypocrisy of the honor codes of the samurai. Tatsuya Nakadai, delivers an unforgettable performance and the narrative unfolds in a particularly satisfying (albeit at times langorous) way, culminating in an amazing swordfighting sequence.

My Neighbor

I've been flakey. Not wanting to see shows or write about them -- since some recent shows made me kinda pessimistic. Also was in Cali last week. And now in rehearsals for YJ's show in Vienna though I'm not credited on the website b/c i'm replacing someone else.



Irwin & I watched Tonari no Totoro a few nights ago, and I was in tears practically throughout the whole movie. Dakota Fanning and her sister doing the English voiceovers -- that was pretty funny/creepy/amazing -- and Lea Salonga voicing the Mom character. See it with your best friend or your mom or your child.

Crazy Women and the Men They Ensnare

The first play I saw by Takeshi Kawamura was back in 2000. Hamlet Clone played in the Asahi Square A in Tokyo. I found this piece disorienting and incomprehensible -- like Hamlet Machine on acid. High school girls writhing around, a guy on a bicycle spouting off an unending monologue, and the director himself, perched on a high throne (I kid you not) in the middle of the audience, speaking text into a mic, like the voice of God. I had never seen such an explicit (blatant and shameless) display of artist ego weaved into the structure of a play. So when I watched his most recent offering AOI/KOMACHI on DVD I was surprised to find how accessible it was - and yet it retained the fascination, eroticism and grotesqueness of his aesthetic.

He had taken two classic noh plays and adapted them for contemporary theater. The original Aoi no Ue is a revenge story; Hikaru's lover Lady Aoi has fallen ill with a mysterious sickness. Turns out, the spirit of Hikaru's former (spurned) lover Rokujo has made Aoi sick. Kawamura sets his AOI in the salon of a karisuma biyoshi [charisma beautician] - apparently a real trend in Japan where coiffures themselves are elevated to the status of celebrity. Hikaru, the hairstylist (who has made hair not only his profession but his sexual obsession), has a young long-haired lover, Aoi, who, of late, has been prone to "seizures" and the like, and consequently has been in and out of a hospital. He suspects that the hair of his ex-lover Rokujo (who happens to be the wife of his primary patron, who also used him as a boy-toy) is at the root of this curse. Rokujo shows up and tries to implicate inextricable linked through sordid past - he helped her murder her husband and destroy the evidence (with sulfuric acid). Somehow, through re-living this event, Hikaru is able to release Aoi from the vengeful curse of Rokujo, though not without a price -- Aoi's jet-black hair (Hikaru's treasure) is completely shorn off. [Tamaki Kemmotsu, who played Aoi, told me she shaved her head just for this tour, FYI, you know who I'm talking to]. Each character seems to have his own version of reality which don't quite intersect with each other, leaving the audience in a strange space between fantasies, past and present. The story and acting style are extremely heightened and melodramatic, bordering on camp, but never quite taking the plunge.

KOMACHI is essentially a monologue; a down-and-out film director's mysterious journey through a strange dilapidated town where he discovers an abandoned movie house that screens forgotten films from the WWII era (many of them war propaganda, pro-Nazi), all starring the legendary actress Komachi, who has since disappeared from the film industry, some 40 years ago. The movie theater turns out to be inhabited (or haunted) by an aged couple, the woman (played by the butoh legend Akira Kasai) claiming to be Komachi. The film director, despite his fervent efforts to extricate himself, is sucked into the cycle of destructive love: any man who falls in love with the ageless beauty of Komachi is destined to die. In this case, the film maker seems doomed to wander endlessly in search of that "sweet primeval darkness," a precious essence of Japan that was lost in the war and through the process of forced democratization.

I feel weird writing about these plays when I am completely unbiased, having translated both of them into English and obsessively refining the subtitles for its tour here. But having had the privilege of seeing the show four times, I just wanted to express (mainly for myself to remember later) how thrilling and satisfying it is when theater works. There is nothing else like it, truly. Not that the production was totally mind-blowing or life-changing -- but they were both surprising and exciting, and the cumulative experience of watching them back to back, was a meditation on the ineffable nature of reality and the course of history. This is where Kawamura pulled strongly on noh theater: themes pertaining to the collapse of linear time, the co-existence of the flesh and spirit (and in many cases the spirit, brimming with earthly desire/attachment, living beyond the life of the body), and transformation of space all evoked the kind of excruciating mystique of noh, but presented in a much more palatable way (for a pop-audience). The film-maker's journey in KOMACHI held a magnetic fascination for me, all the way through to the last few scenes in which the aging Komachi exploded in a fiery dance that ended in her strangling the film-maker to death with unraveled film reels. I do wonder if the plays worked on the American audience on more than just a novelty entertainment level -- particularly AOI, which didn't quite land for me, either. But Kawamura insisted that these two pieces have to be performed back-to-back, with AOI first.

** On a side note: I feel like prominent modes and contemporary traditions of story-telling are making me more and more misogynist. I am much more compelled by male writers, and male protagonists. The female characters in AOI/KOMACHI are extreme antagonists with (self-)destructive traits/flaws. Which are fine and fun and all, but these days I feel more and more disturbed that there are no adult female characters that resonate with me -- if there is a play/film with an adult female protagonist, they always inevitably seem to revolve around romance (lack of, search for, loss of). Or they're totally crazy. I can't think of a story with an adult female protagonist that has really compelled me. I mean I loved Spirited Away and Pan's Labyrinth, but both of those were prepubescent girls --- It's like some kind of universally agreement that the only adventure a woman can have must take place prior to sexual awakening. I think about my favorite films and novels: all male protagonists. Is this my problem with my choices in books/films? Why do I feel this is such a void -- or rather, is this feeling justified, or have I become so misogynistic that I cannot relate to adult female protagonists? And do not cite Bridget Jones' Diary or I will smack you.

Lost in Translation

Growing up immersed (and simultaneously alienated from) both Japanese and American culture, I tend to forget sometimes just how difficult it is to bridge the gap between the two. Beyond linguistic obstacles, there are many things that are extremely difficult to convey and explain cross-culturally; the epitome of Japanese beauty lies in the subtle, the ambiguous, that which cannot be articulated whereas the American ideal is direct honesty and resounding open clarity. This fundamental discrepancy creeps into different aspects of the culture, like the sense of aesthetics, for example, or feeling, or HUMOR. Here's an example - my brother sent this youtube link to me this week. I circulated among the Japanese staff at my job, and people were literally unable to control their laughter. It's a dumb monologue of what Commodore Matthew Perry might have said to the Japanese to convince them to open up their country to foreigners after several hundred years of national seclusion.



The humor is not just in what he’s saying (which is pretty fucking hysterical) but in the timing, the tone, the negative spaces. Even if I were to translate his text faithfully, I seriously doubt a non-Japanese would find this amusing at all! (Actually I would be interested to hear what you thought of it)

Translation is the process of communicating an idea that is manifest in one system/language into another system/language. The systems are not necessarily compatible, but there is an assumption that we (the human race) have enough commonality to be able to understand one another. But what do you do when you’re trying to convey a concept that doesn’t exist in the other culture? To be more specific, in the case of theater – do you try to find an equivalent analogous relationship that the local audience can identify with, or leave it as is, faithful to the original concept, but risking alienating the local audience? Of course it’s never that black-and-white, it is a precarious balance of the two, upon which the success of cross-cultural communication rests.

On Tuesday I went to see The Play Company’s English-language premiere of The Attic, translated by Leon Ingulsrud and Keiko Tsuneda, originally written in Japanese by Yoji Sakate. Based on my prior conversations with Sakate, who happened to be in town and took part in rehearsals/production, he seemed concerned with the size of the set and the cast, which led me to have very low expectations for the American production – especially being so attached to the original Japanese production which toured the U.S. in 2005. But I was pleasantly surprised to find the show resonant and engaging, a rendition of the original that has a life of its own. The Attic is an exploration of a current Japanese phenomenon, a societal affliction called hikikomori (which literally means ‘withdrawn’), referring to a subculture of people who live their lives in total seclusion, holed up in their room without any direct contact with the outside world and stewing in their fanatic obsessions (for anime, for porn, for instant noodles, whatever). It’s not such a surprising symptom of a social disease, considering it is a reaction to a.) extremely rigid societal structures and expectations, and b.) limited physical space. I mean, we complain about the sizes of our New York apartments, but think about the land of capsule hotels. The conceit behind the play is that these isolationist have paved the way for a high demand new product called The Attic – a pre-fab, cabin-like, tent-sized structure you can stick anywhere (your bedroom, on the street) for added privacy. Buy it on-line, lock yourself in, block the rest of the world out and call yourself the king of infinite space (as long as you’ve got your wireless connection!). Multiple storylines collide through the course of 20+ vignettes: a college student is found having committed suicide in an Attic in his dorm room, and his older brother vows to get to the bottom of it by tracking down the mysterious manufacturers of the Attic; a pair of bumbling detectives/samurai/soldiers (played by the same two actors over three different scenes) find refuge in an abandoned Attic during a stakeout or on a battlefield; a mentally unstable OCD woman convinced that she is pregnant finds solace in the womb-like Attic; and a mother discovers that her violent son has been keeping a young girl locked up in an Attic – for the last 10 years (based on a true incident) – and many many more. The Attic itself becomes a metaphor, a microcosm, a macrocosm, a container that limits its contents to the darkest, most intimate secrets of the human psyche, and holds the entirety of the universe, boundless and timeless.

Sakate originally developed and wrote these 23 characters for 17 members of his company Rinko-gun. The American production featured 8 actors in multiple roles; and though the actors were up to this feat of extreme versatility, they seemed forced to make broad, and often stereotyped/caricatured character choices that resulted in less nuanced performances. Nonetheless, the strength of the original script shone through unquestionably. Perhaps the one thing that fell into the category of what could not survive the translation process was metaphysics, or sense of spirituality. The Japanese, though far from fervently religious, acknowledge the spiritual world in the day-to-day (the animist influences of Shinto): the dead, the living, the souls of animals and plants all co-exist. On the other hand, from the Western perspective, the living are living, and the dead are, well, dead, and if the dead make visitation upon the living, something is definitely awry. This difference in attitude towards the spiritual realm plays a significant role in The Attic. So what happens when a fluid concept built on ambiguity is forced into clarity? You lose the beauty of mystery.

On Wednesday, I attended a performance of they say the men are over in the Steel Tower by Hideo Tsuchida (translated by M. Cody Poulton) which was an unfortunate example of failed translation. What should have been a light-hearted yet grippingly poignant comedy about a rollicking band of schlocky vaudevillian clowns caught in a war zone on enemy territory while entertaining the troops – turned out to be an painful exercise in patience. First, the English script was in terrible shape; stuck in an academic limbo of word-for-word translation, the dialogue was stiff and clumsy. For a comic work (in which the rhythm of text is paramount in communicating playful levity) to be so stunted by strange phrasings and word choices was a shame. They kept the character names in Japanese, which is fine except for the fact that the actors could not wrap their mouths around them, let alone embrace them. The actors were also unfortunately miscast; though each actor had his own charm, they all seemed out of sync with their characters. For example, the character of Yoshimura, who from the script seems to be the most naïve, exuberant, zippy one of the bunch, is played by an actor whose strength seemed to be in playing a lumbering doofus. But truly the greatest tragedy of this comedy was that it was not funny. Not one iota. The jokes weren’t funny, the bits weren’t funny, the song & dance number, the physical schticks, nothing. Without the humor, the And the blame lay not only in the script, but in the lack of love and verve of the ensemble, and, bad direction. It was as if the director had decided she was working on Someone Who'll Watch Over Me (the Frank McGuiness play an Irishman, an Englishman and an American who are kidnapped by Arabs and held hostage in Lebanon – sound like a set-up for a joke? It’s not) or something; actually it was more like she had her humor center in her brain removed. Is this completely unfair? (as this is the third time I’m having to write this, I am quickly losing my patience.) The truth is, both Sakate and Tsuchida are writer/directors, who, like many writer/directors in the Japanese theater, are founder/artistic directors of their own small theater companies – and they write FOR their company members, who work and sweat together. Work generated from years of hard work and commitment and relationships forged over time cannot be emulated by casting the 5 best comic actors who show up to an open-call audition and rehearsing for 4 weeks. Don’t need much of a sense of humor to figure that out. They say comedy is the most difficult thing to translate, which I believe, and comdey also seems so contingent on the MOMENT -- who is in the audience, how tired they are, the mood of the day and the room, etc. No amount of intangible circumstances of the day could truly affect the accumulation of bad choices, though.

I didn’t want to end on such a down note, so I will quote Dawn who said to me after the show, “Bad theater is better than no theater.” Hey, it’s Dawn’s quote, not mine. onwards.

Where is The Other Here, if there is no there there?

What is a human's life worth, in the end? What do we work for? Who do we work for? Do our achievements, our wealth, our accomplishments accumulate in any truly quantifiable, or rather, truly meaningful way? Or is there really only silence, nothing within nothing, nothing to hold in our cupped hands, nothing to show for after we pass? Is there something in the negative space? Are our sentiments communicated to another -- or do they outgrow their tiny containers and become unwieldy, or reticent? What if our gifts to each other only reveal themselves to be burdens? What do we owe each other in life, in death?


These are the questions that strike me thinking about the show I saw last night (and will see another 4 times) The Other Here is an intriguing piece from Big Dance Theater, and surprisingly (almost to a fault) linear and easy to follow in terms of a narrative, I found myself craving more of a sense of mystery and the painful hollowness that Ibuse's writings suggest. The company wove together (rather too comfortably for my taste) two Ibuse short stories (The Carp and Life at Mr. Tange's) and found texts from a life insurance convention. The resulting tale about an aging insurance salesman, his servant, and a carp given to him by a now-deceased friend really begins nowhere and ends nowhere -- and i don't mean that in a bad way at all. Scenes from an insurance conference (complete with sporadic questions from the convention audience) and terse, often-incomplete dialogue between characters are interspersed with heartfelt Okinawan pop songs in quotes and dances that emerge and dissipate like the wind.


The ensemble of actor-dancers held the audience with sure, playful and trustworthy hands. Though there were many people in the audience who were perplexed by the piece's seeming to never land here or there, or anywhere at all -- I thought that that was where I could find magic and resonance the most: in the liminal spaces between between form and content, story and dance.

YUBIWA Hotel: CANDIES girlish hardcore

I'll start with a kind of self-serving one... I work at Japan Society in the Performing Arts program. I do a shitload of stuff there, from contracting artists, booking/selling tours, organizing publicity, writing the playbill and brochures, writing grants, translating scripts, translating events, organizing programs/events, etc. and on and on.

This week we kicked off the season with YUBIWA Hotel's CANDIES: girlish hardcore.
Shirotama is a friend of mine. I helped her with a lot of stuff when she was in NY for 6 months on the ACC grant. She put on this crazy show that happened simultaneously in NYC and Tokyo, and the actresses connected with their scene partners via the internet. Some kind of video-conferencing program that had a deadly 8 second delay. She worked with 4 NY-based actors here and directed her 4 Japanese actors via internet too. insanity.

I feel like she is trying to express/explore the same subject matter in all of her work. Essentially - the experience of growing up as a girl. Or how a woman (a Japanese woman) is taught how to interface with the world. Though her work always has images and ideas that are engaging and striking, I always felt on some level that she fed into the objectification and fetishism of cute japanese girls, rather than opposed such phenomena or offered an alternative to them.

But CANDIES was somehow different for me. There was something very bare about this one, very vulnerable. It wouldn't make much sense for me to describe what happens here; it was essentially a series of vignettes and montages that were not really linear or narrative, many scenes accompanied by a voiceover of an older woman reciting a pensive poetic text about all the things she's lost in her life. We follow 5 girls from childhood into old age, at times wearing animal masks, moving through what should be prominent events in one's life: marriage, going to school, playing basketball, death, and making pancakes out of another woman's secretions and eating them with your best friend. always a highlight for me.

But something happened in this piece, the cumulative affect of these quizzical interactions, and the lovely finale where the 5 women discard their animal masks, frilly skirts, and dance a kind of repetitive, frenetic strip tease that ended with them putting out their cigarettes on the soles of their high-heeled shoes -- it was extremely moving. This is why I think Shirotama is pretty great, despite her idiosyncracies. She can capture these moments, and create a visceral, emotional experience out of scraps and pieces. I was left really wondering what a human being's life, a woman's life, ultimately consists of. "So, walk alone, like a rhonoceros' horn." The strength and the loneliness of abandoning one's family, friends, lovers, community. What are you without your community? What are you without your culture? Can you really shed your cultural identity? Your gender identity?

Oh Shirotama. Once she came from Japan to stay at my house, and she brought 2 other people with her -- without telling me she was bringing more people. But she's a sweetheart. She's got this big fat old orange cat she's in love with. http://www.yubiwahotel.com/