Bunraku Backstage

Today, I was able to catch the very last day of the exhibition "Bunraku Backstage" at the Japan Society.

Bunraku is a traditional form of puppetry that goes back to Edo-era Japan. A chanter sits to the side of the stage with a musician playing a stringed instrument called a shamisen. The chanter provides both narration and the voices of all of the puppets.

During the feudal period, there were many forms of puppetry in Japan. These various puppet techniques were generally referred to as joruri. During the 19th century a theatre known as Bunraku-za achieved a level of professionalism that set a new standard for the art. Today the National Bunraku Theatre in Osaka preserves the crafts of making and performing these amazing puppets.

A few years ago, I saw the National Bunraku Theatre on tour, performing Chikamatsu's classic play The Love Suicides of Sonezaki. The puppets are surprisingly realistic. Their heads are carved out of a single block of wood by a master craftsmen. The puppeteers then construct the rest of the puppets themselves.

Three puppeteers work together in operating a lead puppet. Only the main puppeteer shows his face, while the other two wear black hoods.  The main puppeteer will wear wooden platform shoes known as butai geta in order to easily operate the head and right hand while the others control the left hand and feet.

It was great to see what all of these puppets look like behind the scenes!

Love Suicides of Sonezaki

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.

It isn't every day that Bunraku is performed in New York City, so I'm glad I was there to see it.

Thoughts on Chikamatsu

Most cultures have some tradition of puppetry, and puppet plays in Japan can be traced back at least to the twelfth century. For much of Japan's history, puppeteers wandered about the country performing at festivals and displaying their skills for any audiences they might find. Originally, these makeshift puppet plays were called joruri. They featured not only skillfully manipulated puppets, but also chanters who would narrate the story and provide all of the voices. One famous chanter, Takemoto Gidayu, opened a theatre dedicated to joruri in Osaka in 1684. Its first production was a new play called The Soga Successors by a playwright named Chikamatsu Monzaemon.

At first, Chikamatsu wrote mainly for the kabuki theatre, providing plays for the star actor Sakata Tojuro. Even before the great actor's death in 1709, however, Chikamatsu began drifting away from kabuki and writing exclusively for puppet theatres. Most kabuki actors were notorious for changing scripts in order to suit themselves, and the style of kabuki lent itself to histrionic performances. Perhaps ironically, puppets were better suited for conveying subtle emotion than the exaggerated and stylized acting in kabuki. More importantly, writers for joruri could count on their words actually being said, rather than having lines cut or completely changed to suit star performers.

Chikamatsu became famous for his love-suicide plays, known as shinju mono. His 1703 play The Love Suicides at Sonezaki was hugely successful and helped to set the standard for the genre. Inspired by true events, the play tells the story of a courtesan named Ohatsu who falls in love with a poor merchant clerk named Tokubei. After Tokubei is swindled and beaten, it appears the unfortunate man will be forced into exile. Rather than live without each other, the couple resolves to commit suicide together.

The most popular of Chikamatsu's plays is The Battles of Coxinga, which originally ran for seventeen months straight. The historical epic tells a story from the twilight of the Ming Dynasty in China. Since Japan was shut off from the outside world during Chikamatsu's day, the Chinese setting would have seemed exotic to audiences. The many spectacles in the play (including a fight with a tiger) seem particularly suited to performance by puppets. Chikamatsu reached back even further into history with his play Fair Ladies at a Game of Poem Cards, which takes place in Japan during the twelfth century.

Many of Chikamatsu's plays dealt with current events, such as The Uprooted Pine, about a recent scandal involving a woman from Japan's highest class of courtesans. He frequently returned to the shinju mono genre as he did with his 1720 play The Love Suicides at Amijima. Though Chikamatsu died in 1725, his friend Hozumi Ikan recalled many of the playwright's ideas in the critical work Naniwa Miyage. According to Hozumi, Chikamatsu wished to "impart to the lifeless wooden puppet a variety of emotions, and attempt in this way to capture the interest of the audience." He succeeded not just for puppets, but for human actors as well, as many of Chikamatsu's plays were later adapted for kabuki as well as for the Western stage.