Essay

Connecting with the contemporary

By Aya Ogawa

In the Performing Arts program at the Japan Society, we present an artist or company from Japan at the rate of roughly one program per month for the fall-to-spring season. These performances range from traditional theater to electronic music, and part of our task is to identify our audiences, get them into our theater, and then encourage them to expand their interests so that they'll come back for something different

Among the many disciplines of performing arts, contemporary music and dance are easiest to present because they are more readily grasped in a cross-cultural setting. Japanese theater is perhaps the most difficult because so much of it depends on language

In the last four years, the Japan Society has presented five traditional noh and kyogen programs. These art forms have been preserved as they were 600 years ago, which means linguistically they are as obscure to contemporary Japanese people as they are to non-Japanese people. So, the accompanying translation is kept very simple (like Western operas, we use a synopsis in the playbill and minimal subtitling) because the poetic texts, which are delivered very slowly and often with much repetition, need only to be communicated broadly. With so much to be absorbed beyond the plot — the movements, the music, the song — we leave it to the audiences to find their way.

It's a different story with contemporary theater. The issue of translation is always a tenuous balance of providing as much line-by-line information as possible without distracting too much from what is happening on stage picture. What's more, delivering that translation is no easy task: theater is live and often fast-paced and one performance can differ from the next.

Beyond the obvious language barriers, there is also the question of perception. In the case of noh and kyogen, its standing as a "high art" makes it rather easy to fill seats. Not so with modern theater. I think this lies in the largely Eurocentric education system in the United States. You could assume a liberal arts major to have studied Ionesco, Brecht and Beckett (or at least to have heard of them), but probably not any Kara Juro or Yukio Mishima.

In my view, contemporary theater has the greatest potential to connect audiences and communities around the globe. Modern dramatists have used theater to respond immediately to their environments and to current world events. Take for example the series of plays about 9/11 that have taken the stage since the Twin Towers fell. Or Japanese playwright/director Yoji Sakate who referenced the 1999 Tokaimura nuclear power plant accident in a play that premiered a month later. It's this immediacy that makes contemporary theater so important and so compelling.

Shukan ST: Dec. 14 2007

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