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| Leisurely Breakfast @ hotel in Tokyo |
One of the highlights of our two-day stay in Tokyo was to attend a Kabuki theater performance - a traditional Japanese drama with male actors playing both male and female roles. We saw three separate plays with two 30-minute breaks in between during which the audience wolfed down some pre-packaged dinners and hastily returned to their seats for the next play. We rented audio guides for the performance so that we could follow along what was happening on stage, and during the intermissions we were also briefed about the Kabuki theater traditions and story lines. We were impressed by the seemingly spontaneous shouting out of appreciation during the performance, something like bravos, of the names of their favorite actors from the audience and mentioned it to our friend, Shin. He told us that these interjections are actually staged, with people paid by actors to shout out their names, and considered part of the performance (the audience is in the know). The interjections are, however, not like the taped laughter from old comedy shows; they are staged at proper moments so that they won't interrupt the stylized flow of the performance.
Of the three plays, we liked the last one the most. I felt sorry for the few "foreigners" sitting on the balcony seats close to where we were, who did not stick it out and left after the second play. The play was called "Kasane" - a gruesome ghost story too complicated for me to attempt to describe in a few words here. It was staged uncannily like a Greek tragedy, with minimum props consisting of a symbolic willow tree over a pond. On one side of the stage sat a three-person chorus and a musician, the former narrating-singing the story, the latter playing a string instrument. On the opposite side some more musicians were concealed behind a bamboo screen. The two principal actors performed in dance-like movements with sustained poses throughout creating, as it were, vivid "tableaux". The actor who played the unfortunate damsel was a 50 some year old man whose nimble and graceful movements were incomparable!
2 comments:
The audience was clearly full of the cognoscenti. At famous scenes when the actors would freeze in a stylized display the audience would applaud appreciatively. Very much an art form whose conventions inform appreciation.
Shin sent me some clarification regarding the practice of "paid applause" I described in the post -
"About those interjections in Kabuki, I should correct myself a bit. Technically, they are not paid to do it and not all of the interjections are planned. But many of those interject are semi-professional in the sense that they get free tickets, and may even get gratuities from actors. And some story lines actually presuppose interjections, and there are many strict rules on how and when they can do it."
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