THE Tadashi Suzuki Company of Toga and its "Electra" Part II

From his writings, it is obvious that Tadashi Suzuki is very much influenced by traditional Japanese Noh Theatre. Thus, to understand and appreciate his form of theatre, one must begin with and appreciation of Noh performances.

Noh Theatre

First, have a look at this video I plucked from YouTube:



Performance Elements

Stage:
- Fully exposed stage with no set and no technical aid like modern lighting and sound equipment.
- Main actors enter the stage from a bridge on the right of the stage.
- Wooden floor which is highly polished to allow actors to move with sliding movements.
- Giant pots or urns are placed below the stage so that the sound created when the actors stomp heavily on stage will resonate.

Costumes:
- Adorned richly and highly symbolic e.g. thunder gods will have hexagons on their clothes while serpents have triangles to convey scales
- Costumes worn by the main character is the most elaborate and extravagant, with shimmering silk brocade. Less important characters, accordingly, have more less grand costumes.
- In the beginnings of Noh Theatre, costumes are realistic and only developing to highly symbolic and stylistic ones in the late 16th century.
- Musicians and chorus are dressed alike in formal montsuki kimono (black and adorned with five family crests) accompanied by either hakama (a skirt-like garment) or kami-shimo, a combination of hakama and a waist-coat with exaggerated shoulders.
- Stage attendants wear plain black garments, like stagehands in contemporary Western theater.

Masks:
- The Mask is a key feature in Noh performances and is only worn by the lead actor.
- However, there are instances when other actors put on a mask. This might happen when the roles played are that of females or non-human characters as a Noh troupe is exclusively male.
- An interesting thing to note about Noh masks, especially those of female roles, is that they are designed so that slight adjustments in the position of the head can express a number emotions such as fear or sadness. Use of lighting can assist in creating the "change of facial expression" of the masks.

Music and Chanting:
- The Chorus is another key feature in Noh Theatre.
- Noh is a chanted drama and is termed "Japanese opera." by some.
- Melody is not important in Noh singing though the poetry is definitely beautiful.
- The chant is not always performed "in character"; that is, sometimes the actor will speak lines or describe events from the perspective of another character or even a disinterested narrator.
- The Noh hayashi ensemble (musicians) consists of three drummers, which play the shime-daiko, ōtsuzumi (hip drum), and kotsuzumi (shoulder drum) respectively, and a shinobue flautist.

Jo-ha-kyū (序破急)
- This is a concept of modulation and movement applied in a wide variety of traditional Japanese arts. Roughly translated to "beginning, break, rapid", it essentially means that all actions or efforts should begin slowly, speed up, and then end swiftly.
- It is also a very important performance element of Noh and is present in every aspect: the play, the acting, the dances, the songs and the music.
- In our terms, it can be thought of as the performance's structure and pacing.

DISCLAIMER BEFORE YOU GO ON TO THE NEXT SECTION: The conclusions drawn are what this teacher observed and made. This teacher might well be mistaken about them so by no means take them as the RULE but a means to gain access into the art of Tadashi Suzuki and your experience of his play.

The Theatre of Tadashi Suzuki and Noh Theatre
I am sure by now you can definitely see similarities between theatrical elements in Electra and Noh performances. Like Noh theatre, the form that Suzuki advocates is not REALIST. It is a heightened experience which departs from the realities of life. In fact, realism is a 19th century western theatre concept (think Stanislavski). Asian theatre Arts forms have always been presentational and non-realist so attempts by any good Drama student to apply the Stanislavki method to understanding traditional Asian theatre will be futile.
One might be better off appreciating Electra as Art then to try to make total psychological sense of what is taking place on stage. DO NOT, however, mistake this statement to mean that all dramatists have the license to create and put up self-indulgent pieces of works which no one understands in the name of art. Suzuki, at the end of the day, does have a traditional theatre form which has developed over several centuries as his foundation.

Elements in Suzuki's Electra influenced by Noh Theatre
- Use of chorus (Greek plays use them as well!)
- Use of 'live' music and musician fully seen by the audience
- Stomping by the chorus
- The chorus spoke for Electra
- Chanting by chorus
- Guttural sounds uttered by chorus and the characters
- Costume choices: Clytemnestra (the wicked mother and husband murderer), Electra, Chrysothemis (Electra's sister) and Orestes (Electra's brother) are the only ones with differentiated costumes with Clytemnestra's being the most striking, vaguely resembling a kimono. Clytemnestra also spots a hairdo that resembles the non-human spirits or monsters in Noh Theatre. On the other hand, the madmen chorus are shirtless with shorts and hat while the nurses are in stark white, well, nurse uniforms.
- Set design: Simple open stage which someone cleverly pointed out resembles a cage at the end of the performance when lights shines from behind it.
- Lighting design: Extremely uncomplicated but highly effective design. Only one colour (likely to be cool Special Lavender) and no gobos are used to create effects and mood. Suzuki skillfully used the angle and intensity of lights instead of fancy pyrotechnics to illuminate the actors and musician.
- Pace: The pace of the performance is slow, building up to some kind of frenzy. This repeats itself a few times in the performance and can be perhaps compared to Jo-ha-kyū (序破急) in Noh.

To Conclude...
Tadashi Suzuki has appropriated the key elements of Noh Theatre to create his unique form reflecting his roots and environment. He has also developed an actor training technique to equip his actors with skills they need to perform his plays. This teacher now dreams about enrolling for the training that takes place every summer at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs.


adapted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noh

THE Tadashi Suzuki Company of Toga and its "Electra" Part I

What luck to catch Electra by the famed SCOT at the Singapore Arts Festival 2009! It was an intense yet sublime experience. 

This is an attempt to unpack the experience for the dear young people who also attended the performance. Here is some background information for you to make sense of what you watched:

Greek Mythology: Essentially, Greek mythology is one big collection of stories belonging to the ancient Greeks. These stories concern Greek gods and heroes and are filled with drama and scandals.
For further reading on Greek Mythology, visit: http://www.greekmythology.com/

The stories behind Electra the play: The story of Electra can be said to be a branch of that of the House of Atreus.

King Atreus is father to Agammemnon who in turn is Electra's father. To cut a long and convoluted story short, Agammemnon married Clytemnestra after he killed her husband, Tantalus. Together, Agammemnon and Clytemnestra bore four children, two of whom are Electra and her brother Orestes.  

To perhaps avenge her husband, Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus (who is really Atreus' nephew and Agammenon's uncle) killed Agammemnon after he returned from war. Furious that her mother and her mother's lover murdered her father, Electra plotted for her brother Orestes to get rid of her mother. 

Adaptations for the stage: Greek tragedians mined the vaults of Greek Mythology for the grand tragedies they wrote for their theatre festivals. Their interpretations are in turn re-interpreted by modern and current playwrights whose objective is to make classical texts relevant for their audience.

The Electra that SCOT presented is Suzuki's adaptation of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_von_Hofmannsthal) interpretation of the Greek story. When adapting any text, even if it is a play text, the adaptors enjoy a certain artistic license to re-imagine the world of the story.

This is exactly what Suzuki had done when he chose to set the play in a mental asylum.

What has Greek tragedy got to do with mental asylums? This is what Tadashi Suzuki says: “The world is a hospital and all men and women are inmates of that hospital.”

Thought for the day: Do you agree with Suzuki's choice of setting? Where would you have set the play so that it remains relevant to YOUR audience?

Do leave me a note at zentam@yahoo.co.uk or the thread that I started on the Anderson Forum.

[More about Mr Tadashi Suzuki's view of the theatre, influences and his method of acting in Part II.]

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