worlds collide

awe-struck by the choreography and costuming of king henry iv part ii production by the oregon shakespeare festival, it occurred to me that there is much in common with kabuki.

then saw this article from wsj in 2009 indicating that kabuki & shakespeare developed at the same time.

Shakespeare Meets Kabuki


Yukio Ninagawa's London Production of 'Twelfth Night' Blends Western Theater With Traditional Japanese Style.
By PAUL SHARMA

Shakespeare productions in London by Japanese classical director Yukio Ninagawa are scarce enough. This time, the rarity is compounded, as the new work is a one-off collaboration between the director and one of Japan's leading Kabuki theater groups.

Until now, Mr. Ninagawa's productions mixed Western conventions with Kabuki styles and imagery, but in this production he has worked directly with Kabuki actors for the first time. While maintaining the genre's strict conventions, he has added new features such as Western-style perspective staging and new sound effects.

Theatre until March 28: a production of Shakespeare's darkly comedic "Twelfth Night," performed by the Shochiku Grand Kabuki Theatre.

The lead performers are the Kabuki stars Onoe Kikugoro VII and his son Onoe Kikunosuke V, who grew up within Kabuki's hereditary system, joining the troupe and beginning their training at an early age. The production is also a departure for the Kabuki theater group, which normally performs a traditional repertoire of plays that were written mainly in the Edo (1603-1868) and Meiji (1868-1912) periods.

The result of this collaboration is being performed in London's Barbican "Coriolanus," the last Ninagawa production seen in London, used multiple fast-sliding Japanese screens to catch and reflect that society's mercurial moods and changing power dynamics. The production before that, "Pericles," depicted a neo-classical world, with water slowly dripping out of bamboo pipes into pools, adding to a sonic backdrop of resonating wooden flutes. The look and feel of the productions is so distinctive that in Japan the rich visual style and its dynamic group work is known as the "Ninagawa aesthetic."

While Kabuki uses flat panels to create a horizontal backdrop -- which Mr. Ninagawa believes has parallels with reading a Japanese scroll -- this "Twelfth Night" uses modern visual devices such as backing the entire stage with mirrors, depicting cherry tress in full bloom and a series of arched bridges. A production that brings Kabuki's narrow staging and the stylized physical presence of its actors together with modern theater Western-style perspective and sound effects shows why Mr. Ninagawa has been called by one critic "nature's great synthesizer."

Kabuki is an all-male theater where men, known as onnagata, play the female roles. In this production, Kikunosuke plays the three roles of Sebastian, Viola and Cesario using the hayagawari (quick-change) technique to move between roles.

A quick plot refresher: Cesario is actually Viola, who has disguised herself as a man -- Sebastian is her brother. Further on in the play, Viola/Cesario gets mistaken for Sebastian. This cross-dressing follows the Elizabethan era practice of boy actors playing the female roles which allowed gender ambiguity. Normally, Sebastian and Viola/Cesario are played by two actors, but the use of hayagawari enables roles to become even more blurred than usual, emphasizing even more the play's use of mirroring and twinning.

Mr. Ninagawa was an actor for 10 years before making his debut as a director in 1969. In 1972, he founded the theater company Sakura-sha, which led the small-theater movement in Japan. He started working in the commercial theater in 1974 and his first overseas production was "Medea" in Greece in 1983. Mr. Ninagawa worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1999 directing "King Lear" in London and Stratford-upon-Avon.

We caught up with Mr. Ninagawa at the Barbican Theatre during final rehearsals for "Twelfth Night," while a small crowd was waiting at the stage door for the stars to arrive. (Translation was provided by Yuriko Akishima.)

Q: This will be the only time you will work with a Kabuki theater. Why did you choose "Twelfth Night"?

Kabuki and Shakespeare developed, more or less, at the same time. The basic structure of the stage and the theater is very similar. So I wanted to work with a good play, with universal themes. The play also needed to allow for a man playing the woman, which is a major Kabuki characteristic, which of course is present in "Twelfth Night."

Also, in Kabuki and in Shakespeare's time, an actor would play many roles. There would also have to be a large element of entertainment, which you get from hayagawari -- and like Shakespeare, the plays were aimed both at high society and the groundlings.

Q: What do you think we can learn from this high level of artifice?

My generation studied European theater and Greek plays. By contrast, Kabuki doesn't need a director -- there is a troupe leader, but no director -- that would be very anachronistic. We have denied that kind of theater for a long time while we looked overseas, but now we can look again at our own Japanese theater forms. We can have nourishment from Kabuki, we can learn from the history of the hundreds of years of this theater. But we can't change the mixture of wonderful and unchangeable things within Kabuki. For me it was like studying in a foreign country -- where the core can never be reached. I think that for young people in Japan, they see Kabuki in the same way as tourists.

Q: While you can't change Kabuki, you have added new elements to it, such as sound design. You kept it all, but added more.

You could say that I took advantage of Kabuki.

Q: Normally you improvise with the actors -- that isn't a usual Kabuki practice. How did they react when you started that process?

They responded very well and really tried hard to work with my suggestions. In Kabuki, there are many, many forms -- you could call it a toolbox -- and it was a matter of choosing the right ones and putting them together. Because they know the forms so well -- some of which I didn't understand -- they normally rehearse and put on a play in three days. So, I had plenty of brilliant toys to choose from.

Q: "Twelfth Night" was first performed in 1602 -- what was happening in Kabuki at that time?

Kabuki started around one hundred years earlier, by the river in Kyoto. Kabuki very much went on to perfect its own form, but the mixture of political statement and sexual jokes has its clear parallels to the theater of Shakespeare's time. Kabuki has a flat perspective, whereas the Barbican is a deep stage and I try to mix the two views. For that, I use mirrors to blend the two worlds together.

Q: In this production, Sebastian and Viola are played by the same actor, but have scenes where they speak to each other. The same applies to Malvolio and Feste. How do you stage that?

Part of the enjoyment of Kabuki is the quick change, which is particular to this form, and seeing the actors change character in the blink of an eye -- but some techniques are secret! A big element is entertaining the audience with the speed of technique, to trick the eye. The physical element is very important, Kabuki is not just about the text. It mixes high and low, literature and jokes.

Q: How do you feel about working in films?

I have made four films; what I liked was that you can show small details such as a running stream -- the imagery can be very delicate. This is harder to show in a theater. Pure love story films are very popular, and in one of my films I wanted to do a love story that was gritty, but the crowds didn't come.

Q: So, what is next for you?

Next year, I would like to bring [to London] a production called "Musashi," which is running in Tokyo now. It is about a samurai swordsman; it is a revenge story, about where the cycle of revenge can stop. But it is a comedy too -- with ghosts.