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 of the period; much use of old photographs, particularly children; abundant picturizations of extreme emo tions rendered purposely naive—tears, laughter; much use of the commercial artifact such as the Victor dog; a general childlike but actually quite sophisticated picture of better, or at least more innocent days. The style was, at the same time, the Japanese version of American pop-art (which made its instant acceptance the more understandable) but it lacked both the irony and the cynicism of an Andy Warhol. Rather, it consisted of a new, usable, and—to the postwar generation—completely novel vocabulary.
Yoko’s style was rapidly accepted. All of his iconography had been, if not despised, ignored. It was hence invisible until Yoko reinvented it. It had been found banal and embarrassing; now it was found (true to the principles involved) avant-garde. Yoko created a minor revolution in graphics and even now, nearly twenty years later, and after the artist himself has gone onto other styles, one sees its remains.
This is particularly true in the avant-garde theaters. We are also, in discussing this style, involved in describing a zeitgeist, since manifestations appeared on a number of fronts almost simultaneously. There remains a large question as to who influenced whom—whether one may describe Yoko as the founder or whether he was in tum influenced by one of the dramatists. The case is a bit like the beginnings of cubism in France: it occurred simultaneously in many places, yet a non-painter, Apollinaire, is often given credit for formulating the style.
Certainly Yoko enjoyed a mutual influence with the first major avant-garde figure in postwar Japan. This was Tatsumi Hijikata, the modem dancer, whose theater—the Asubesutokan—may be regarded as the cradle of the contemporary avant-garde dance movement. During the fifties and into the sixties, Hijikata presented a series of dramatic presentations which were unlike anything Japan had seen. Though nominally dance, they were at the same time silent plays, and they were distinguished by their length, their apparent irrationality, their intended boredom, and their surprising juxtapositions.
It was, and remains, a theater of poverty: dancers are in rags, or in strange combinations of Japanese dress. Finery from the Taisho period—large picture hats, for example—were used, as were Meiji-style bat-wing umbrellas. Hijikata’s picture was not only the end of the world but, specifically, the end of Japan. The stage resembled a flea-market and the effect was, purposely, poignant. Here is the postwar wasteland, filled with spastic cripples holding aloft these pathetic emblems of a vanished civilization.
What was held aloft, however, were not the art objects of Japan but, specifically, those objects which once had a use, which were once a part of popular culture. The theatrical influence on Hijikata, to the extent that there was one, was the side-show, the yose theater, the vaudeville review—the mundane and common and vulgar entertainments of prewar Japan. This world is still on view, since it is still a part of the avant-garde and one sees it in Hijikata’s works, as well as those of his pupil, Yoko Ashikawa, and those who broke away from him.
Dance and drama originally almost identical in the postwar Japanese avant-garde later separated—the former become a dance-theater known as Buto, a neologism coined in contrast to Budo, classical Japanese dance. Though Hijikata was the best known exponent of this form, his teacher, Kazuo Ono (himself
influenced by the expressionist dance of Mary Wigman and Harald Kreutzberg) had other pupils as well, such as Akira Kasai.
The pupils of Ono (as well as those of Kasai and Hijikata, including the many former students who broke away from their teachers) later formed their own Buto troupes, and there are now a great many of them including the Dairakudakan Group, the all-male Sebi Troupe, the all-female Ariadone, and a large number of solo dancers, the best known of whom is probably Min Tanaka.
The contemporary Buto style retains the basic Ono-Hijikata vocabulary but its scenic representation has now refined itself into a kind of primitivism (body paint, nudity, rope, twine, wood, etc.) in which a new shamanism seems often the theme. The Taisho-look as seen in the earliest Buto performances, and as exemplified by the Yoko stage designs, has now disappeared from this form.
Yoko knew Hijikata and his work and also designed posters for him in his early days. In the matter of style and iconography I would imagine, however, that these two artists influenced each other. Among those writers and directors who came later, however, I think that the influence of Yoko is paramount.
Certainly there is no doubt about this influence on Shuji Terayama, whose Tenjo Sajiki Theater during the early sixties became the single most important avant-garde group. Terayama himself, also known as one of Japan’s best modern poets, created in his plays a world which shares something with that of Hijikata (for whom he also wrote) and which fully absorbed the iconography of Yoko (who did all of his early posters and some of his early stage designs) complete.
His world is the ruined but still genteel era of Taisho and early Showa. The Victor dog is there, and advertisements for prewar cigarettes; the Japanese traveling circus is in evidence; pathetic efforts at Western finery, feather boas, ormolu-framed mirrors; and equally pathetic remnants from a Japanese past: striped country kimono, Meiji-period overcoats, Sherlock Holmes hats, etc.
These illustrate an invariable theme: a boy is menaced by an older woman, often his mother. He is saved, if he is to be saved, by a girl his own age or slightly older—who often sexually initiates him. He is also sometimes befriended by an older man but one whose sexuality remains indeterminate. This is the “story” of both the early Kegawa no Mari (Mink Marie), and most of his later adaptations (Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin) and some of his films.
The story is obviously and purposely melodrama. Whatever personal significance it had to Terayama (and it must have been considerable to appear so regularly), Wt are not invited to take it seriously. We are invited to see through it. Just as Yoko invites us to view his iconography from a distance, so Terayama asks us to see his theater dispassionately. Just as the artist purposely uses popular cliches in his designs, so the dramatist purposely uses the crudest excesses of prewar popular melodrama. The result has ironic intentions, is deliberately child-like, is often purposely comic and suggests a kind of genial anarchy.
Anarchy, genial or otherwise, is often the expressed aim of Japanese avant-garde theater. The most extreme is the Zero Jikken Group of Yoshihiro Kato. This troupe of young men and women gives only occasional and usually spontaneous performances, often involving complete nudity—a rarity in Japan and mostly consisting of orgiastic dances and an amount of implied sado-masochism. Here something of a “primitive” Japan is perhaps suggested, but at the same time (as in their use of combinations of Western and Japanese dress) the days of early Showa are also there, as is also the “wasteland” implication common to all of these theaters.
Frankly anarchical—and for a time the most important of the avant-garde theaters in Japan—is the Jokyo (Situation) Gekijo of Juro Kara. Here the influence is popular early-Show a melodrama, the yose variety theater, comic books, old trashy movies, country Kabuki—all molded into an often powerful theatrical experience. We are still in the wasteland and the Yoko look is still in evidence (the artist did posters for the Jokyo Gekijo as well) but the sometimes autobiographical preoccupations of Terayama are missing. Kara’s preoccupations, though often hidden behind a façade of playful dialogue and outrageous stage effects, are usually at least covertly political.
His is the single one of the avant-garde theaters which is satirical and his targets are a part of contemporary Japan. From his earliest play, the prodigal Long John Silver, through such successes as Shojo Kamen, Kara has consistently criticized postwar Japan, particularly the ruling classes. He had indeed become a spokesman for the dissident.
This was acknowledged a number of years ago when the police got after him and several of his productions were banned. Such is Japanese law that he evaded it by holding the performances in a large red tent pitched at locations only announced just before the play was to begin. And such was his following that young people all over Tokyo found out the location and attended the event. He rarely returned to a theater and his plays were still held in the red tent, often at the most unlikely places. The underground still found out where these were and every seat (or most often cushion) was taken. If not only the avant-garde, but all Japanese theater had one vital, living drama it was the Jokyo Gekijo.
If it is the nature of the avant-garde to scandalize society, it is the nature of society to “civilize” the avant-garde. Mainly this is accomplished, in Japan as elsewhere, through commercialization. When a large department-store combine discovered that the avant-garde sold and that a number of the young would buy, one of the results was a Juro Kara spectacle called The ShitayaMannen-cho Story, a kind of latter-day Dreigroschenoper set in downtown Tokyo. Here criticism turned to fun and dissidence to entertainment. The entire expensive production was very slickly directed (not by Kara) and was a sell-out success. It was also the end of Kara as an avant-garde dramatist.
Kara himself shows the influence of Hijikata and was originally with Yoshiyuki Fukuda (since gone into commercial theater) and his Seigei Troupe. Another affiliate of Fukuda, and friend of Kara, was Makoto Sato, who showed the Yoko look in its most elegant form in productions such as Sada Abe’s Dog and—one of the most perfect of Japan’s postwar productions—the Brecht Weill Mahagonny Singspiele.
There is indeed something of a parallel between the avant-garde of the Weimar Republic and that of postwar Japan. Both are not “serious” in the manner of the theaters which proceeded them, both are full of “prewar” materials, and in both you are intended to “see through” the ostensible and glimpse an attitude which is at once critical and/or ironic. Finally, there is a strong nationalist unity—the “Germanness” of Brecht and Toller, the ‘’Japaneseness’’ of Kara and Terayama. This attitude is often a put-on, its intentions are commonly satirical, but the fact that it is there indicates some kind of search for an identity, even a national one, in a world which is fragmented.
This search is often the theme of one of the most talented of the avant-garde directors, Tadashi Suzuki, who was originally with the Waseda Sho-gekijo and is now, mainly, independent. His extremely successful Trojan Women, based loosely on the Euripides, is an example. Within the framework of the whole lost Trojan War, he reconstructs a parallel drama in which all the Japanese theatrical styles are suggested in their chronological order—from early Sarugaku right up to the Shimpa. At the same time the costumes and properties change during the course of drama and we end up in the tawdry glitter of postwar Japan. As the women of Troy search for some kind of meaning in the ruins, Suzuki presents a cavalcade—often highly ironic—of a similar Japanese search.
The same is true of Suzuki’s later productions, particularly his dramatization of another Euripides tragedy, The Bacchae, the structure of which is that it can be performed in various languages simultaneously (as it was—English/Japanese—with the Milwaukee Theater). Here the resulting Babel reflected the search for unity that is the theme of the play. His House of Atreus (a collage from the Greek tragedians) is about a unity lost and its style is correspondingly diverse—Greek tunics, Noh robes, Meiji overcoats. The stage is filled with vain searching. Orestes and Elektra stand under a small cloud which rains only on them.
The search is everything. It is both moving and meaningful. When the goal is achieved the Japanese avant-garde theaters at once lose their immediacy—and their standing as avant-garde. An example is Yutaka Higashi and his Tokyo Kid Brothers Group, a breakaway section of Terayama’s Tenjo Sajiki. Higashi’s Golden Bat started off as dissident theater and, as such, was seen abroad. When he embraced the international brotherhood of hippyism and the easy solution, however, his productions lost their Japanese immediacy as well as their integrity. Something of the same kind happened to Tetsu Yamazaki and his Tsumbo Sajiki, a breakoff group from Kara and the Jokyo Gekijo. Here the director found an answer to his problems in the old-fashioned style of the chambara or sword-fight plays. But his productions turned into pastiche, and then into pure nonsense. Though still interesting and representing nothing approaching the sell-out of Higashi, Yamazaki’s offerings now too often resemble the light-hearted and meaningless entertainment he was originally parodying to gain some insight into the disordered and chaotic postwar world.
These theaters share a number of similarities. All are almost excessively concerned with the past (in itself, to be sure, a Japanese preoccupation), yet all see this past not in Japan’s long history but in that small segment known to the fathers of the directors but not to the directors themselves—since all, except Hijikata, grew up during or after the war.
All see this period (late Taisho, early Showa) as either an idyllic age of innocence or as a kind of junk yard from which bits and pieces may be scavenged to decorate an otherwise featureless postwar world. At the same time there is a definite aversion to “art” as such and, indeed, being anti-art is one of the stances of the Japanese avant-garde. (This is carried to extremely interesting extremes in the work of Kohei Tsuka, who has shown the fragility and sometimes pathetic pretensions of popular theater in works such as his Sutorippa Monogatari (The Story of a Stripper). Finally, there is a purposeful frivolity (even, or particularly, in the work of Kara) which seeks serious solutions in laughter, an earnest use of the fausse-naif (the Yoko look), and, consequently—except in the work of Kara and Hijikata—a kind of sentimentality, upside down though it is.
These avant-garde theaters are purposely slight: they are intended to be. Consequently they lend themselves all too readily to commercial exploitation. No one was surprised when Terayama, by then already half-establishment, used a name commercial designer for his costumes. No one is alarmed at the commercialism of Yutaka Higashi. At the same time there are signs that these avant-garde theaters are evolving into something further.
One of the more recent groups is that called the Tenkei Gekijo, where the often wordless plays of Shogo Ota are performed. In Water Station a water faucet slowly drops. During the next two hours, slowly, very slowly, tattered folk with bundles and piled baby-carriages cross the stage, pausing at the dripping faucet.
We are recognizably in the wasteland of postwar Japanese theater, but it has now been ratified into a single prop (the faucet) and a single action (stopping for water). This minimal theater, slow as a Noh play and almost as spare, is theater reduced to its essentials.
The wordplay and topical political references of Juro Kara have been pushed even further by the machine-gun-like delivery of Hideki Noda and his Yume-no-Yuminsha group, a troupe which has now been accorded something of the popularity of the Jokyo Gekijo. In addition, the new dramatist-director Eriko Watanabe has been called the “female Kara,” and the same line is being followed by another woman, Koharu Kisaragi, both of whom specialize in the amusing outrage which is one of the attributes of the Japanese theatrical avant-garde.
An indication of further developments is Y oshio Oida and his Yoshi et Cie. This Shingeki actor has been working completely independently of the Japanese avant-garde: he has in fact not even been working in Japan, he has been mainly with Peter Brook in Europe. Yet in his way he shares many of the same assumptions. Fully grounded in traditional Japanese dramatic forms—the Noh, the Kyogen, the gidayu and joruri of Bunraku and Kabuki—in addition to having been a very successful Shingeki actor, he has created a theater which quite seriously seeks its roots in the past and at the same time displays a concern for the present which is neither frivolous nor cynical.
His best work, the collection of “ritual games” called AmeTsuchi, has never been seen in Japan, though it has been widely viewed in Europe and America. Here he uses the Kojiki, Japan’s most ancient record, to create a theatrical experience which aims at isolating, precisely, the Japaneseness of the elements he has put together. (No one in Japan’s avant-garde theater is, in this sense, more “Japanese” than aida.) The medium through which it is shown, however, is completely separate—it is the rituals and bouts of that most Japanese of sports, kendo. This creates a double parallel—aided but not explained by the language, which is archaic Japanese and no more understandable to a Japanese audience than, say, middle-English would be to a British or American audience. There is no evidence of any Yoko influence but it, like other Yoko-influenced works, is plainly collagetheater. aida’s concern, however, is the opposite of that of many of Japan’s avant-garde directors. He is not trying to show the seams, and not attempting to indicate the many ill-fitting parts of Japanese life. Rather (and in this sense he is close to Hijikata) he is attempting to present a whole. Here he is close to the Buto troupes in Japan whose work he has not in all probability seen and who have in turn never seen any of aida’s work. Both Buto and aida are very much of the earth. As in all Japanese dance, the dancers are not only heavily placed, pelvis low, feet flat, they also seem to derive their vitality from the earth: in Oida the gliding of the Noh-like steps, the sudden Judo-like leaps and returns, in Buto the dancers themselves who, clay-colored, grope upward, as though toward light. It might seem strange to compare aida’s elegant and inventive constructions with the simplistic and repetitive structures of Buto yet they have much in common. Both are striving for a unity, in the very face of an avant-garde which is attempting to display only disparity and incongruity.
In works such as these one sees indications of a further avantgarde, a theatrical form which is new, original and novel, and one which creates a new iconography, a new set of images, and a new reflection of the times.
It is the nature of the avant-garde to move rapidly into new, and often opposite, forms. Now that the Yoko look has taken over even TV advertising, now that Terayama is given official recognition, now that even Kara has his own commercial sponsors, now that all of this is occurring, one may expect a new avant-garde.
—1979