Bunraku pop

[imomus]

Osaka has the world's last active Bunraku theatre. Bunraku is puppetry as a fine art, a vocation. It's not theatre on the cheap, or theatre for childen, but a kind of purified, refined expression of all that's most theatrical about theatre, a demonstration of how art is better when all the manipulation and simulation are visible rather than hidden behind the scenes. Bunraku is very Japanese in the way it mixes spontaneity with skill and custom -- kikkoshibari, the art of bondage, Japanese calligraphy, or the way Nature is both respected and ostentatiously controlled here, all show the same balance between the splashy and the tight, the chaotic and the controlled, the spontaneous and the trained.

Bunraku puppetry controls the expression of emotion with a typology of what Brecht called 'quotable gestures' (the kind you're supposed to recognize and applaud in Japanese theatres by calling out the actor's name in the middle of the performance, 'marking' the gesture with your cry and shattering the illusion of fourth-wall realism or the tendency to identify). You could even see the puppets themselves as 'air quotes', quotation made visible, human sensibility given its most poignant expression in non-human, but completely physical, form. Whereas the question of what an actor may or may not feel about his role has always cluttered western acting (becoming the central question in the Method and Stanislavskian schools), here it's completely absent. The puppet, free of any feeling itself, becomes an empty repository for the feeling of others. The paradoxes are fascinating to watch; now you focus on the puppet, now the three men in black running around with it, ventriloquists of the body, 'mumbling' and miming the physical gestures of the vacant creature they're controlling and giving a compelling yet stylised impression of life. As in Mishima's 'Confessions of a Mask', 'sincerity' and 'spontaneity' and 'the natural' are only visible in bunraku when articulated by their opposites.

You can see some splendid RealPlayer video clips of the Osaka Bunraku Theatre here, courtesy of UNESCO. The fact that the music in the first clip sounds, incredibly, rather like Captain Beefheart underlines the fact that, to me (and I feel the same way about Harry Partch) there's no reason to think that this couldn't be the sound of pop music being made right now, or in the near future. The music is dramatic, it has a good ratio of figure to ground, sound to silence, it's decisive and constantly interesting, balancing voice against music in a way pop music also does, telling stories the way a pop song can. Why shouldn't there be Bunraku-pop? A pop of artifice, emotion, and quotable gestures? And why shouldn't there be pop music in other scales, slithery, Partchian, Grecian scales? Aren't bold and beautiful gestures like these exactly what pop music needs to break out of its vicious circles and sloppy, crappy habits?

We have the traditions, we have the tools. Now all we need is the audience. That shouldn't be a problem. Rows and rows of human beings are easy to make*. Easier than bunraku puppets, anyway.


* See me after class if you need more details.

Comments

[starofpersia.livejournal.com]

There's a fabulous modern bunraku artist/dollmaker named Hori Hiroshi. I saw an exhibit of his dolls a few years back and wanted to weep- amazingly beautiful, almost life-sized, and creepy as hell.