Tôzai !... Corps Et Cris Des Marionnettes D'osaka
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Books Tôzai !... Corps et cris des marionnettes d’Osaka. By François Bizet. Paris: Les Belles Lettres/Collection Japon, 2013; 192 pp. 25€ paper. It would seem contradictory to speak of the screams and cries of marionettes, who — with the exception of some recent elec- tronic versions — are all body and no voice. Their charm, mys- tery, and disquieting strangeness are in great part attributable to their muteness, and their ventriloquated voices are in themselves an art form. The Japanese bunraku theatre raises the art of the marionette to great heights of complexity, with the marionette controlled by three puppeteers, the narration and sound effects effected by the narrator-chanter (tayuˉ), and music by shamisen players. The ontological complexity and existential paradoxes of such puppetry are brilliantly investigated by François Bizet, who explains, “The character in bunraku escapes definition, both in an optical sense and in speculative terms. Its real life is else- where: dispersed and dissipated, in perpetual recreation of the self [...] multiplying epiphanies, places, and signs, rather than holding to a univocal revelation of presence”1 (53). Hence the per- tinence of the book’s epigraph, the famed question from Hamlet: “Who is there?” The “who” is decentered, dehierarchized, destabilized, deracinated — with the marionette “subject” reborn at each moment in different configurations — suggesting the radical contemporaneity of bunraku. But the pleasure of Tozai!... stems in great part from the beauty of Bizet’s prose, which, while articulating art and theory, makes us see and hear these subtle effects, as when he describes how the puppet becomes “[...] an energumen, namely a depressional, decentered place, without grav- ity, traversed by gusts, an open tomb, undermined, dislocated, foundering from rhythmic phe- nomena, raised from the earth by a sound, floored by the intensification of sound, broken in the air, rattled again, crescendo, staccato, accelerando: all these conditions reunited, with the excep- tion of flesh and blood, for the trance” (71). What is enlightened by contemporary theory is also nourished by the most ancient and mysterious procedures of ventriloquism, where the subject in trance doesn’t speak, but is spoken, whether by muse or ghost, demon or god. In bunraku this marionette speech takes a special form, gidayuˉ, a type of recitation to shamisen accompaniment named after Takemoto Gidayuˉ (1651–1724), the inventor of the major style of chanted narration in bunraku theatre used to this day. Bizet attempts to explain its complexity: “It is impossible to respond to the oft-posed question: ‘What is gidayuˉ?’ If I say that it is a technique of singing, the declamatory part is evacuated; if I suggest that it is the art of presenting an epic or a tale, I forget the theatrical dimension; if I pretend that it is the- atre, the tale is lost; but, if the tayuˉ is only a storyteller, where is the song?” (134). Just as gidayuˉ, like the manipulation of the marionettes, is taught through oral transmission, Bizet’s descrip- tions give us a sense of this extraordinary exclamatory style, perhaps most closely paralleled by 1. All translations are my own. Books 175 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_r_00380 by guest on 24 September 2021 Artaud’s call for a new form of theatrical incantation, an affective athleticism, in The Theater and Its Double ([1938] 1958). Writing of the vocalizations of the tayuˉ, Bizet informs us, “[...] an enormous part of the character’s existence is henceforth displaced and accumulates in this new, extremely mobile and effervescent matter that is the frenzied, ecstatic voice: growls, clicks, creaks, shrill whistles” (43). Not only is such a virtuosic voice (in relation to occidental song we would speak of extended vocal techniques) in itself an extraordinary phenomenon, but it also affects the very ontology of bunraku puppetry: “The voice as an outgrowth of gesture. Voice doesn’t accompany gesture, but swells and germinates and overflows in an autonomous manner. Voice doesn’t illustrate gesture, having itself become gesture and recounting its very own tale” (44). Or, in a claim that would have us reread those passages of Maurice Merleau- Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception ([1945] 1962) dealing with speech as gesture, Bizet cites Paul Claudel, who said it so succinctly: “It is not an actor that speaks, it is speech that acts” (44). But there is a fascinating derivation of gidayuˉ, the true center of Bizet’s study. Barred from appearing onstage in mid-17th-century Japan, female performers perfected a form of gidayuˉ that continues to this day, where the entire bunraku play is staged without marionettes. The chanter, accompanied by a single shamisen, recites all parts, both male and female, as well as all sound effects, in a sort of expanded vocal performance at the very limits of voice and represen- tation. This effects a sonic materialization of the absent stage, a hyperbolic instance of hypo- typosis (the trope that describes vivid visual description), creating what theatre critic Georges Banu, cited by Bizet, refers to as, “veritable phonic masks” (107). There have been count- less studies of bunraku, though few in the West have centered on the vocal aspects of this the- atre, and fewer still have discussed the transformation of gidayuˉ into a uniquely female art form. Bizet’s analysis of the sonic complexity and convoluted subjectivity of bunraku puppets is made all the more profound when he rethinks these issues in regard to the all-too-human female chanters of gidayuˉ. But he goes much further than that, insofar as not only was Bizet struck with a passion for bunraku and its particular modes of enunciation, and not only did he develop a serious engagement with contemporary female gidayuˉ, but he undertook studies of this art form under the tutelage of Takemoto Koshikoˉ and has become a practitioner of this art. Whence the precision of his descriptions of vocal technique, his digressions on the ambiguities of particu- larly Western techniques of musical declamation such as Sprechgesang and Sprechstimme, and his praise of the specific values of oral transmission, which permit techniques and effects far beyond those made possible by visual scores. (We might be reminded of those lost sounds of the cas- trati, whose extraordinary improvised fioratura were made possible not only by their mutilated bodies but through the most intensive oral education imaginable.) Tozai! — literally, “From East to West!” or “East and West!” — is the cry that signals the beginning of a bunraku play. It also describes the narrative arc of this book, in which French theorist François Bizet finds himself in Japan, on a stage without decor or actors, only himself and a shamisen player, declaiming the words of a great warrior long gone, as well as the sounds of battle, the rush of the wind, the sobs of mourning, in a voice taught by a woman practitio- ner of a uniquely female contemporary art form based on ancient dramatic traditions. Indeed, who’s there? — Allen S. Weiss References Artaud, Antonin. (1938) 1958. The Theater and its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Books 176 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_r_00380 by guest on 24 September 2021 Allen S. Weiss teaches in the Departments of Performance Studies and Cinema Studies at New York University. His most recent books are Le Gou¥t de Kyoto (Mercure de France, 2013), Métaphysique de la miette (Éditions Argol, 2013), and Zen Landscapes (Reaktion Books, 2013). [email protected] TDR: The Drama Review 58:3 (T223) Fall 2014. ©2014 Allen S. Weiss The Unwritten Grotowski: Theory and Practice of the Encounter. By Kris Salata. London: Routledge, 2013; 220 pp. $125.00 cloth. Polish American scholar Kris Salata’s The Unwritten Grotowski is insightful and welcome. As a native Pole who has translated texts by Grotowski previously unknown to non-Polish speak- ers, Salata’s contribution to Grotowski scholarship is invalu- able. His methodology in this book is thoughtful, and is brought to bear on both the wider reception of Grotowski’s work and to a lesser extent its legacy. Salata has done primary research into the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards since 2004; his experiences with them provide the book’s main mate- rial. Analyzing the terms “encounter” and “aliveness” across Grotowski’s oeuvre but especially during the period called Art as vehicle based on his time with the Workcenter, he brings together many new ideas to inform broader debates about how we write about the kinds of intimate, personal interactions that Grotowski developed. There are many lessons here for those interested in immersive perfor- mance for example, the kind of theatre where an audience is brought directly into the event with one-to-one interactions or through physical contact and active participation. But there is also a selectivity about this book that troubled me. Salata’s text has a slightly repetitive structure, which he justifies in a note to the reader that precedes the preface. The subsequent prologue attempts a more episodic diary-like register. The pleasure of the six chapters that follow is thereby deferred, but the spirit of experimenta- tion and enquiry carries on throughout the book, which becomes more theoretical. Salata uses Martin Heidegger predominantly but also Martin Buber and Jacques Derrida to understand the kind of human encounter Grotowski was seeking throughout his multiple phases. In the pro- logue and in the chapter on Adam Mickiewicz and Polish Romanticism the book is enlighten- ing, presenting complex issues accessibly. In his final chapter Salata focuses on the United States and the Workcenter’s recent activities there, bringing the research back home for Thomas Richards as well as the author.