29/07/2015
Rare moments of pure Grace happen when in the right place, at the right time & with the right people. This past week-end, at the HELLENIC FESTIVAL OF ATHENS & EPIDAURUS such moments repeated themselves to encompass an unexpectedly magical life experience spanning a two hours plus music & dance performance based on a long recited & sung poem, following sunset, and a sunrise Sun Salutation ceremony the next morning. With a somewhat rare professionalism, the usual modesty perspiring from great Eastern masters, and generous concern for Greece and its people, ROKURO GENSHO UMEWAKA AND HIS IMPRESSIVE 20 STRONG NOH COMPANY landed in Greece straight « from the Land of the Rising Sun » to give a unique performance, the European creation of Nekyia, a contemporary Noh piece based on the Book 11 of Homer's Odyssey. This mere fact constitutes an event by itself, as, with funding and help from the Arts Council Tokyo, the Hellenic Festival & Rokuro brought to Greece the best of what Japan has to offer in terms of arts, that is the most aristocratic & dense traditional art form of Japan, with acclaimed performers. Rokuro, as well as the narrators, drummers and flute player are justifiably renown as stars in their home country and appreciated as such. Six hundred years ago, two of Japan's greatest poets codified and wrote the main corpus of masterpieces of this ancient liturgical art form which originated in the Heian period ( VIIIth to XIIth cent. ), considered as the cultural Golden Age of Court Japanese culture & refinement. Kan'ami ( the father ), and especially Zeami, his son, theorized that art in surviving essays and composed nearly 120 Noh pieces handed down to us, and forming the skilled core of the existing 3000 so ancient Noh texts. Noh, under the Nogaku naming ( it includes Noh art and Kyogen, intermediate pieces of a more comic character traditionally played together in a full day of performances ) is listed as Unesco World Intangible Heritage. Intended as a music & dance entertainment form for the ruling military class, Noh performances, texts and material implements were long kept in Buddhist temples and are still indeed today, performed seasonally as part of the religious calendar festivities, often in awe inspiring open-air Noh stages built in monastic complexes, but also by villagers during some of their yearly celebrations and obviously in modern public and private theatres of all sizes throughout Japan, by foreigners since as late as 1879 and abroad since the second half of the XXth cent. only. Western fascination for Noh isn't a new phenomenon, and as early as 1588, Portuguese Jesuit priests started to compose Noh pieces in their desperate attempt to propagate Christianity in Japan. At the end of the XIXth century, western theatre, sterilized by over realism, drew fresh inspiration from the dream-like atmosphere & psychological implications of Noh, as well as Kabuki ( another major Japanese stage art form closer to western lyrical drama canons ), which cast a significant influence on Brecht's theatre. However, when Marguerite Yourcenar herself attended a Noh performance in Kyoto in the autumn of 1982, she wasn't particularly impressed by the stiff and mechanical impersonation of the performers, and confesses, like many Japanese still do today, to have had to fight back in order to resist from falling asleep. But since the 1930's Yourcenar was well aware of the high universal value of Noh in the string of human productions and achievements. Additionally, things have changed today, and the Epidaurus performances beautifully exemplify what genius and skill can bring to any lifeless canvas. One such difference lied in the fact that fifteen impersonators were present on stage - a rarity for most Noh pieces usually singularly uncrowded on stage -, another sprung from the multiplicity of warrior and spirit dances performed, usually unique to each Noh piece, and reserved for its dramatic climax, rather coming before the end. These wise modern adaptations created a singularly vivid, yet powerful performance, perfectly adapted to the vast background of the Argolid valley and rocky hills silhouetted beyond the magnificent IVth cent. BC masonry masterpiece of Polycletes the Younger of Argos – also a Unesco listed World Heritage asset - where we all sat in expectation: a hugely majoritarily Western public unused to Japanese ways and Noh. Right from the beginning, when the first solo flute accents tear the thick silence of the valley as appearing from deep underneath the pine groves, grows the sense of a ceremony much older than the ancient civilisations of Greece and Japan, drawing its roots from the deepest shamanic & animist cults of Shintoism, in the worshipping ceremonies to honor the God of Dance. In order to make this clear for the audience, and to pay homage to eternal Greece, the remarkable prologue in the shape of an exhortation expressed respect for the "land of the ancient Gods" & "the Muse", while emphasising the performance as being the meeting place for the Spirits of the Dead with those that are still living. Noh, as indeed are all productions truly Japanese, is a celebration of the beauty of all that has come to pass, but without unnecessary grieving, as Zeami puts it: "Noh brings peace and prolongs life". Wandering spirits or demons always meet the Buddhist priest or land divinity that will appease them and send them back to the realm where they should belong. There is no tragedy at play in Noh, only a very creative, and pragmatic, although poetic, approach to life, an appeasing liturgy that aims at propitiating the manes of the ancestors and the Divinity, in order to allow the living to heal and rejoice in the beauty of life, then continue to fight their everyday plight with renewed clarity and courage. Warrior's spirit undoubtedly! In this probably lied the utmost interest of the Epidaurus performance: the deep resonance with the contemporary situation of Greece, both clearly expressed by the Noh features chosen for the play, as well as by the stone cut words of Tiresias and Odysseus's mother, Homer's eternal wisdom legacy, urging the wanderer to responsibly get back on track by leaving the tantalizing & paralysing trap of Circe's arms, follow his quest, finally reach back his wonderful homeland, and in spite of the horrors & difficulties, the losses & grievings, defend what is his from the rapacity & greed of unscrupulous men, recover his well earned pride & dignity, and sit happily for many years to come on the throne that is rightfully his, as a "deft and tactful" - Noh is interestingly derived form a word meaning « skill » or « talent » -, albeit fair king. The perfectly circular arena of the ancient theatre covered in white gravel not unlike the sea of a Zen garden, glowed under the projectors, and combining with the perfectly built stilted customary Noh stage - an almost black wooden square lodged in its centre, formed the Sino-Japanese ancient symbol for Supreme Harmony, the coming together of square Earth and circular Sky. To Mother Earth the heavy and powerful dance steps connected us each time more strongly, following the hypnotic scansion and cadence, whilst the reflection of precious gold brocades used for the performers' costumes and the dramatic sleeves' movements and body rotations plunged us in a rare alternative reality of pure delight, in awe at the fast disappearing skill of the craftsmen and craftswomen who are still able to produce such marvels entirely by hand, often at home, in ancient suburbs around Kyoto, the gift and trade of which secrets remain within the family. After a short night in a sleeping bag under the nearby olive grove canopy trying to count falling stars but disturbed by the Milky Way's strong glow, the 6 o'clock sharp Japanese start of the morning Sun Salutation Noh ritual that Rokuro felt good to add to the previous night's performance, as a complementary gift, felt like a totally surreal beginning for a saturday morning, amid the greyness of dawn and the silent sleepy crowds, not dissimilar to the previous night's army of spirits crowding around Odysseus in Hades, but definitely more cheerful. The Sun cult is perhaps, and has been since time immemorial, the most widespread form of human cult to the divinity around the globe, understandably transcending civilisations and more complex belief systems. The date itself on which Christians celebrate the birth of Christ had been chosen to coincide with the immensely popular ancient festival of the Sun God, "Dies Solis Invictus" - the "Day of the Unconquered Sun"- celebrated all around the Mediterranean during Roman times and beyond, on December 25th, and impossible to dethrone otherwise. The Sun cult boasts at least a double importance in Japan ( as it does in most Asian countries ) up to now. The supreme Goddess of the Japanese Shinto pantheon being the Queen Mother Amaterasu, Goddess of the Sun, Mother of Japan, the Japanese people and the ancestors of the Japanese Emperors. Her cult, of supreme importance in the Japanese lands, is associated with the cockerels, who announce her rising, and with crows, her messengers. Everybody present that morning could notice the flight of a couple of crows above the stage, one of them loudly expressing itself during the first measures of the solo flute, but immediately flying away as if not to disturb the peaceful beginnings of such an important ceremony, a highly auspicious synchronicity. In Buddhist temples at dawn, a daily propitiatory ceremony is still performed, as in Haeinsa, in the forested mountains of South Korea. In the darkness that precedes dawn, a young priest, with a proud training of years behind him, in an impeccable style of harmonious gestures and timely precision, usually strokes a wooden fish, a metal board and a bronze gong alternatively to announce to all Creation in all realms and universes that the sun is about to rise, beginning of a new day for all, the powerful sound vibrations sending away good wishes of peace, light and happiness for all sentient beings, animals, humans and gods. Venerable Rokuro, unmasked, as a link between men, creatures of the visible world, and the invisible realms, slowly, deeply, respectfully kneels down in Noh fashion at the feet of the theatre's audience. No speech, nor subtitles. Only the cadence of ritual picking up progressively, and all gets ready for the chosen combat scenes and their respective dances to unfold under thousands of eyes gaining alertness and sharpness with the rising light. Dexterity and grace command the protagonists' combats against evil, its ultimate defeat in a swift departure in which even the floor is cleansed of all weapon's remnants by the gliding feet. When the last calls die out all performers orderly regain their dressing rooms without concern for the applause. All is done. In this ancient healing centre once world renown and active for around a thousand years, all is clean and propitiated. Greeks, foreigners and Japanese alike leave the terraces wondering what this new day may bring, and perhaps which steps they could take in life.
