Chikamatsu's play The
Love Suicides of Sonezaki is considered to be a classic of the Japanese
theatre, so I was very excited to see a production of the play last night as a part
of Lincoln Center's White Light Festival.
The production was done in cooperation with Japan's National
Bunraku Theatre, Bunraku Kyokai. The theatre was founded in 1963 to bring
together narrators, shamisen players, and puppeteers who are all necessary for
the creation of Bunraku, a traditional performing art in Japan with deep roots.
In Chikamatsu's time, the puppet theatre he wrote for was
called joruri, though the form evolved over subsequent centuries and became
known as Bunraku. It involves a chanter who narrates the performance and voices
the characters, a shamisen player who provides musical accompaniment, and multiple
puppeteers. For the main characters, three puppeteers at once operate a single
puppet.
The production I saw added a new element: video projections
created by the artist Tabaimo and Hiroshi Sugimoto, who is also listed as
artistic director for the piece. Sugimoto clearly wanted to blend together the
traditional with the 21st century. The video helped to create the world of the
play, supplementing rather than replacing the puppets and set pieces.
Occasionally, the audience got to see close-ups of the puppets on the
projections, but those moments were rare, as the production kept the focus on
the performers (human and inanimate) in front of us.
The
Love Suicides of Sonezaki originally premiered in 1703, less
than a month after the infamous double suicide depicted in the play actually occurred.
The basic idea, two lovers deciding to join each other in death since they
cannot be together in life, is both inspiring and disturbing. In 1717,
Chikamatsu added some scenes to satisfy demands that the villain of the play be
punished, but these additions failed to resolve controversies around the piece.
Couples reportedly committed suicide together in imitation of the lovers in the
play, and in 1723 the government officially banned the work from being performed.
It was not until 1955 that the play was performed again. By
then, any performance tradition specific to the piece had been lost, so modern
interpreters of the work have a bit more of a free rein than they might have
with other Chikamatsu plays. In that spirit, the video projections seemed to
fit right in with the piece.
