A Lateral View by Donald Richie

Author:Donald Richie [Richie, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Japanese Disneyland, Tokyo, gaijin, Japanese films, Japanese language, Japanese shapes, Japanese culture, Japanese style, Japanese customs, Japan, pachinko, expatriate, Japanese arts, manga, Richie
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
Published: 2015-10-10T19:32:08+00:00

Japan’s Avant-garde Theater

ANY AVANT-GARDE art is predicated upon its newness and its novelty. When these qualities become sufficiently absorbed the art ceases to be avant-garde and becomes establishment. This is the pattern in all countries and Japan is consequently no exception. In fact, Japan—particularly in its drama—offers a clearer view of this phenomenon than many other countries.

In the late nineteenth century, for example, Shimpa, that naturalistic theatrical form created in direct opposition to the stylization of the Kabuki, was avant-garde. Likewise the Shingeki, which in the early twentieth century was created in opposition to the by then codified and generally accepted Shimpa.

After World War II, Shingeki itself had ceased being a realistic theater—which is to say that realism had turned into mere technique and had become an accepted and unexceptional theatrical mode. Again a new drama rose in opposition to it and it is this which we now still call the avant-garde theater of Japan.

Or, theaters—since one of the attributes of the avant-garde is that it has not yet settled into a single mode which goes by a single name. There is thus as yet no generic term—Kabuki, Shimpa, Shingeki—for these various theaters. They do, however, share both aims and results.

In describing these, perhaps it is best to look at the chronology and to try to indicate where the various common elements among these theaters came from.

First to be noticed is the Japaneseness of the Japanese avantgarde theaters. This is in direct opposition to early Shingekiwhich was thoroughly Western in inspiration—and is consequently closer to the Shimpa, one of the aims of which was to be Japanese within a naturalistic setting. The postwar avant-garde from the first insisted upon its peculiar Japaneseness.

(In this it is quite different from other forms of modern Japanese drama. The plays of Kobo Abe or Minoru Betsuyaku, to name but two well-established modern playwrights, are about Japan but the mode is that of the experimental theater of the West. This is as true of Abe’s Friends as it is of his more avant-garde seeming happenings and “image theaters.” Neither Abe nor Betsuyaku are considered avant-garde. Rather, they are considered variants of Shingeki.)

To identify this Japaneseness one should examine the “look” of the avant-garde theaters. They share much in common and this appearance may be traced back, I think, to a single source. This is the graphic work of Tadanori Yoko, a body of illustration which had an enormous influence upon the avant-garde theaters in Japan. The “look” of a Terayama or a Kara production even now reflects Yoko’s influence.

One of the ploys of any avant-garde manifestation is to take the resolutely unfashionable and make it fashionable. Yoko’s early work used an iconography which was startling in the “bad taste” involved. He deliberately used an idiom which “art” had not heretofore used.

Specifically, the inspiration was late—Meiji, Taisho, and early Showa period popular art—that is, the mass art of, roughly, 1910 to 1930. Bright, innocent colors, hard-line cartoon-like drawings; compositions reminiscent of old theatrical bills, menus, newspapers

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