The Audience Are Stones

This paper is delivered as a personal anecdote of my own journey into the world of the oriental dance drama, the Noh theatre of Japan. As a theatre practitioner trained and experienced in the conventions and principles of Western theatre practice, my encounter and engagement with Noh theatre and oriental performance training procedures have led to a transformation of my previous understandings of the ability and function of theatre. It has also led to the formation of The New Zealand Noh Theatre Co. and the presentation of a unique, specific form, the New Zealand Noh play.

In 1984, I was living and working in New York. I was there as a member of the avant-garde travelling cabaret circus troupe Red Mole and had spent the previous 10 years travelling and performing. One evening, I attended a presentation of traditional Japanese theatre outdoors at the Lincoln Centre. At the conclusion of the evening, I realised that Noh play Semimaru I had just seen affected me in a way that no other ever had. The play had required of me more than an evaluation of the thrill and wonder, more than the intrigue of a story well told: it had prompted me to consider the nature of my existence. In my life at this time, I made serious demands of the world: to stimulate and inspire me, to distract me from boredom, to provide a refuge from my own interior life, yet this Noh Theatre challenged me to consider the experience from deep inside, not only to my intellect, but to my heart, to my soul.

I returned to my Hell’s Kitchen apartment in turmoil. Within the company I had been part of for 10 years, I had become tired of the effort that performance required. In order for our company to succeed, and for us to make a semblance of a living, we had to be more outrageous, more controversial, more confrontational. The sheer effort of maintaining this ethic was causing me to question how I had arrived at this place. The work was seldom inspiring, always under pressure and always necessitating maximum performance energy. The style was to thrust yourself across the space into the consciousness of the audience, to somehow bust your way in. It was the theatrical equivalent of rock’n’roll. Equivalent in volume, lifestyle, and ethos. I was 33 years old, and I wondered how much longer I could keep doing this. The Noh play revealed a doorway through the white noise to a place of quietness, of contemplation. What I had seen was a strikingly beautiful physical construction of image and sound, the foundation stones of a temple of thought and feeling, a physical platform upon which to experience the metaphysical.

Like a man dying of thirst, I went searching for the well of origin and with the guidance of Dr Jonah Salz of New York University and the financial support of The America Japan Foundation, I made my way to Japan.

Iwakura is a district that sits at the head of a valley that cradles the ancient city of Kyoto. In late July 1984, I walked the short distance from my two-and-a-half-tatami-mat room in Iwakura to the studio of Udaka Sensei for my first experience as a pupil of Nohgaku, the classical theatre of Japan. For six weeks, I studied 12 hours a day, learning the dancing, singing and mask carving of this time-honoured art. I read plays and attended performances, often travelling an entire day to an ancient site to witness Takiginoh: Noh performed outdoors. I was, by turns, inspired, bored, overwhelmed, uplifted, frustrated and humbled. My journey to the heart of my own art was accelerated. I was forced to look deeper and deeper into my own life to understand. I baulked, I strained with effort, and then one day in response to my question about how I should think about the audience, Sensei told me, “Do not think about them, the audience are stones.”

This statement confronted all my perceptions of how to interact with the audience. In my theatre training and the acting profession I had entered, we often spoke of ‘our’ audience or ‘your’ audience, ‘my’ audience use of the possessive pronoun revealing the desired intimacy. Was I now to think how will ‘my’ stones react? I could hear myself asking, ‘How many stones did you get on your opening night?’ In my confusion, glibness was my rickety refuge. Yet Udaka Sensei’s comment also really excited me. What if I did think of them as stones? No longer would I need to pander to certain tastes or worry, did they like me?? Ah, the freedom of such a possibility. This paper is the story of how I glimpsed and eventually felt within me this freedom.  

After 10 years of performance and training in Western techniques and styles, the encounter with Noh was nothing less than startling. For example, when training as a student in the use of Commedia del'Arte masks and the European performance mask tradition, we were always told that the use of the mirror must be very circumspect. The character must emerge to the outer form through a process of inner development; understanding, articulation of feeling is followed by the appearance of form. When I walked into Udaka Sensei’s studio at Iwakura that July morning in 1984, there was a mirror all along one wall, and we were continually encouraged to use the mirror as a tool. The form will arouse and provide structure for feeling and meaning.

 After years of training and performance in the Western mode, we were always encouraged to make the character our own. It is the Stanislavski model of performance creation that encourages the actor to bring their own imagination to the role, to utilize your own experience as a basis for what the character feels, in the Noh we were told in no uncertain terms that our own ego or interpretation would only serve to hinder the performance and in no way should we even attempt at a personal interpretation.

 After years of investigating by questioning, by using questions as an implement with which to search for meaning, at the studio in Iwakura it was clear that our questions were an irritation, to the extent that one morning before lessons began Udaka Sensei addressed us all and said, “please do not ask questions to me because I will give you My answer and you must find Your answer. Watch quietly the other students taking class, learn from listening, it's about more than your intellect.”  Other mysterious little hints were laid that continued to intrigue me as to the Noh Theatre's articulation of reality and perception.

Early one afternoon, I found myself alone in the studio. It was hot, and having just had lunch, I lay down for a nap. I dreamt that I saw a woman practising her dance, and in the dream I watched her graceful movements. She was dressed in black western clothes and was possessed of a quiet, serene beauty. When I woke, I was still alone, but the image and presence of the woman remained. Some days later, I told Udaka Sensei of this, and he thought it most amusing. He asked, ‘Was she beautiful? I replied that she seemed to be, although she had kept her face turned away from me. He then replied to me ‘Ah, she must have been very beautiful”. The inference of this perhaps flippant remark was that true beauty was not quite seen; beauty in the aesthetic of Noh does not confront the observer or participant but rather manifests as atmosphere and presence.  Meaning and substantiality are found in what is alluded to. How unobtrusive yet profound was this ‘invisible atmosphere’. 

As I sat in the temple rooms where we carved masks, chanted the texts of the plays and slavishly copied the dance steps perfected centuries before, I was forced to reconsider my own position on what was important in a theatre experience.  I began to reconsider the previous findings of a diligent and aggressive quest for theatrical truth. Under the influence of Antonin Artaud, I, as a young actor, was desperate to profoundly affect my audience.  I had sought so ardently to shock, to galvanise and electrify. Artaud maintained that only in theatre could we liberate ourselves from the recognisable forms in which we lived our daily lives; therefore, in my desire to liberate my audience, I must occupy new forms. I craved an experience beyond the humdrum, and Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty served as a beacon light in this search. I had experimented with concepts of the theatre being a scourge, a plague that cleansed through violent confrontation which was at once thrilling and alienating: but suddenly in the intense humidity of that Kyoto temple room where I retraced the ancient steps of the Noh masters, I wondered was this Artaudian howl, this cry with which I strove to break through the walls of prejudice reaching into the guts of an audience, was it in any way revealing? This contact with my own repressed yearning, was it creative? Was it even therapeutic? Was it holy? Was it taking me into the light or away from the light? Was it anti-intelligent, a denial of the mind? Was it unreasonable, even fascist?

Watching Noh plays, my classes, the discussions with my teachers and fellow students were like water on a landscape where I had employed burn and raise. Athletic energy and obliteration of structure and form were being replaced. A fog had descended, and I suddenly realised I was lost.

The beauty of Noh is often associated with the beauty of masks, stage properties and costumes, but these objects are only the external indicators of an internal aesthetic fulfilment.

This internal effectuation and recognition ultimately achieve an aesthetic experience that exists only in internal drama. Internal in the sense that the appreciation of beauty is a subjective experience, and beauty is at the heart of the Noh.

A man named Kan’ami and his son Zeami refined and transformed the Noh of the 13th century from a form of religious entertainment into a stage art with elements of drama woven around gods, mortal humans, demons, and lunatics. This ritual became dramatic art was based on an essential encounter, the encounter between performer and audience.

These concepts and articulations of degrees of beauty date from this time and the conceptual framework that Zeami put in place. The attainment of an aesthetic fulfilment relied on them.

It begins as an attraction to the performer’s art, an appreciation of the ability and technique of an individual, but also an appreciation of the depth and mystery that lies beneath the external alluring presence of the artistic objects, masks and costumes. This appreciation and hint of deeper mysteries is known as hana.

Literally, hana means flower or blossom, yet Zeami sought depth beneath the exterior artistry. It is intrinsically connected to the Buddhist concept of impermanence and transience, that a flower is beautiful because it dies; therefore, it is more than a simplistic recognition of the beauty of a flower, it is rather a diligent investigation of the true nature of beauty.

 In his treatise on the aesthetics and form of Noh, Zeami writes of hana that it is thus: “After you master the secrets of all things and exhaust the possibility of every devise, the hana that never vanishes remains”. (endquote) It is a beauty that is perceived through an appreciation of technique and artistry, and more deeply through an appreciation of the beauty of the transience of life and nature. It is beauty that is humbling and perceived through our sensual appreciation.

To contrast and be in relief to this concept of hana, Zeami used a term that had been employed in many ways over the centuries. Noh is spoken of as the art of yugen. It is an invisible, profound, sublime, mysterious beauty. Yugen is the beauty that happens to the perceiver. Zeami maintained that all characters, whatever their status or life state may be, should be imbued with yugen. Two Chinese characters make up the word. Yu means dim, hazy, quiet or otherworldly; gen means subtle, profound or dark.  Yugen, the combination of these two characters, is not something that can be apprehended intellectually, but indicates a mystical state in which beauty is but a premise, something of an unknowable nature.

The beauty in Noh that goes beyond yugen is the state of rojaku, the quiet beauty of old age. It lives in contrast to the warm elegance of yugen as a symbolic beauty of cold, clear, lonely aging and is of a high poetic order. Zeami says, “personification of an old person is the true mystery of the way” Plays in the Noh repertoire concerning the old and refined state of solitude are considered the most challenging in the Noh repertoire.  Rojaku could be symbolised by a flower blossoming on a withered bough, an essence of the symbolic beauty of Noh.

In 1984, I had spent 10 years performing on the street corner, in the concert hall, in the public bar, the theatre. I had grappled with the challenge of making vital theatre. In this quest, I had been accompanied by others also seeking a new and vibrant path. We called ourselves avant-garde, we dressed like rock stars we toured continually. Satisfaction came with the exhaustion shared by all in grimy backstage dressing rooms at 11 pm, after a night’s work.

And then the 10 years were over, and I stood in the temple garden in Iwakura district, Kyoto city and tried to make sense of all the contradictions. The audience are Stones Sensei had said to me, I had always thought that they were my next meal ticket, I had best please them and thrill them to ensure a further round would come my way. Was it not arrogance, a kind of dispassionate oriental detachment, that enabled them to be thought of as stones? I would practice the dances I was learning out on the road late at night and wander through the quiet streets beside rice paddy and bamboo grove, humming the strange melodies that I had chanted all morning. I felt dislocated. What did I hope to learn? What was I doing in this exotic place, feeling out of place, I couldn’t even speak Japanese! Who was I trying to fool?

One evening, I made my way to Nara, the Ancient Japanese capital, just north of Kyoto and the end of the famed Silk Road. There I saw a series of Noh plays, the final one of which was Yuki. Yuki is basically a conversation between a Buddhist priest and a mound of fresh snow. Their discussion concerns the intransience of life and the tragedy of faded beauty. The play has been performed on this site, on this day, at this time of day for over 300 years, and as the shite stood to execute the shimai, or the final dance, it seemed all the world was in harmony. I don’t mean to sound sentimental or maudlin but it was as if the universe in its turning was connected to the actor who opened the robe at the moment the setting sun came from behind the temple roof and shafted across the dusty courtyard to light the robe with a golden ambience that made the entire scene take on an ethereal floating quality, and hinted of a strange mystery dwelling beneath the external form. As the crowd dispersed, I remained seated, determined not to lose this atmosphere that had drifted like a spectre through my mind. Harmony, mystery, languid connection to internal forces that propel external forms, all at once, I felt a belonging. Not to Japan, but to the knowledge that my humanity and art affiliated me with all the actors who had over the centuries danced the role of Yuki there in the temple garden at Nara. To them, I may well have been a stone, but to this stone they were a gateway to the explication of my dilemma.

Western art and Western philosophy are essentially concerned with what is ‘real’. Whether this be ‘real’ in the sense of ‘everyday reality’ or real in the sense that a work of art is a created world, an ‘imagined reality’. The particular form of presence obtained in a Noh play, a presence that affected me so that evening in Nara at the performance of Yuki, necessitates extreme formalism and an opposition to realism.

The formalism is an extreme stylisation, yet it gives the impression of something real and natural. It could be called a spiritual concreteness. This spiritual concreteness can only be realised through tradition, training and rules that have been well practised and defined by preceding generations. The reality of artistic presentation remains a strict and formal one. In eastern traditions, there is a difference between ‘being’ and ‘reality’. Reality is not seen as being, but as nothingness. Nothingness here is understood as the immaterial ground of reality; hence, the nothingness of what the Western mind perceives as reality is simply a façade for what is ‘real’, and through art, nothingness can project itself into the visible world.

As I gazed out the window of the speeding train taking me back to Iwakura, the flashing by of the impermanent real world of houses, roads and machinery was already working to erase the memory of what I glimpsed through the flashing robe as the shite danced his shimai in the final rays of the dying sun. How could I hold this feeling, this new understanding I was groping towards in the huggle muggle and urban agitation all about me? Sensei was right; I was beginning to understand through my own discoveries, by watching and listening rather than probing trowel-like, with questions.

My six-week workshop flashed by. I learnt to dance YuYa and Kokaji, I carved a mask, Saru the monkey and I have since returned twice to Kyoto to continue my study of Noh. I am a founding member of The International Noh Institute and director of The New Zealand Noh Theatre. My fascination with and gratitude to Noh and my teachers who share this world with me is boundless. I have performed in Kyoto on ancient Noh stages. On my 3rd return trip in 1993, a group of us hired a café and presented the J.M. Synge play Riders to the Sea, as a Noh play. I have carved Ko-Omote, the mask that is known as the Mona Lisa of Japan, from New Zealand Kauri wood, and I have danced with a paddle and a carved mask, presenting a tattooed pakeha ancestor of mine, basing the patterns and sounds of the dance in techniques of the Noh.

I have sought to infiltrate my own theatre heritage with the realisations and discoveries I have made. Have I achieved an understanding of the art of Noh? Is it valid that I, as a Westerner, should mine for these treasures and use them to adorn my own creations?

In 1978, a Japanese woman went and lived on Stewart Island. Living as she was in rough conditions in a cave on the southwest corner of the island, her health was compromised and when she visited a doctor and it was ascertained that she was in no condition to survive a winter in an open cave and it was also evident she had overstayed the length of time allowed for a visitor to New Zealand,  the authorities took action. Her brother came from Japan, travelled to Stewart Island with the secretary of the Japanese consulate, and they went to the island to apprehend the woman. She was taken to the magistrate’s court in Invercargill, where she was dismissed without charge except that she would not be permitted to enter New Zealand territory ever again. This event has entered New Zealand mythology. It has provided an inspiration for a short story by Peter Wells called Of Memory and Desire, which in turn inspired a film by Nikki Caro called Memory and Desire. It also touched Eileen Phillipp, a writer living in Auckland, who in 1981 expressed her response to the tenacity and vision of Keiko Agatsuma by writing a Noh Play in English called Rakiura, the original Māori name for Stewart Island. In 1993, I presented the first-ever stage performance of this first New Zealand Noh play, Rakiura. Our production was noted by Tara Werner writing in the New Zealand Herald as being ‘an intriguing and fascinating insight into an ageless and beautiful art form’. Michelle Hewitson, writing in the New Zealand Listener, named the production ‘outstanding’, noting that ‘the traditional themes of the Noh were cleverly linked to the incident. In the play Rakiura, the waki, who, within the structure of Noh, is thought of as the audience’s representative on stage, is the elder brother of the woman who has chosen this bleak, desolate place as her exile. He travels to Stewart Island with the secretary of the Japanese Consulate, who, within the structure, is the waki-tsure. They confront the shite or protagonist, the woman and she, after some initial explanation, she expresses her shame and retreats to her cave. The Kyogen, who is there to enliven the play with rustic humour and a more colloquial version of the story, then appears. This character is the local police constable. At the conclusion of his version, he retreats, and the shite, now transformed into the figure of a previous existence, once again enters, this time to relate the reasons for her being there. The reasons are thus: in a former life, she was a fisher girl in Kobe who was betrothed to a fisherman. One day, whilst whaling offshore from Kobe, he is shipwrecked and is plucked from the sea some days later by an American whaling ship. This vessel makes its way to the rich fishing grounds off Stewart Island. In fact, the name of the bay near where Keiko Agatsuma took her exile is named Doughboy Bay, an old American term for a foot soldier and was named thus by the Americans in the early 19th century. So the American Whaler with the young Japanese fisherman on board is off the coast of Doughboy Bay when the harpoon line tangles around his leg and the lunging, diving whale pulls him into the water, and he drowns. And now, the shite explains, she has come to say prayers to release the spirit from its lonely entrapment on the stony beach. At this point, the elder brother and secretary express their commiseration and understanding of why she has come to this place and what she must do. They withdraw to wait as she builds a shrine and says prayers. Then she leaves, and the final words of the chorus simply state the outcome.

No spirit rooms these distant shores

Holy prayers have led to paradise.

Let me, at this point, return to the temple grounds of Nara some seven years before this first performance of Rakiura. At that time in Nara, I saw, felt a glimmer of understanding of the quality known as yugen. In that play Yuki, and that particular performance of it which so affected me,  I experienced a kind of dream consciousness which at the same time was intensely self-aware. To say yugen is dreamlike is much too simplistic because the dream atmosphere I had experienced was accompanied by intense awareness of the place, the people, and my own vibrant aliveness and serenity. I saw a world within, a world that is beneath the artifice of art, through the distraction and bustle of the everyday world, and as I became aware of this deeper reality, I was also inspired by my own potential for beauty, for serenity, for connection. Then, 7 years later, as I made my entrance onto the stage wearing the full robes, the wig and mask of the shite in Rakiura, this understanding that I had achieved in Nara suddenly returned. Onstage waiting, sitting in deep quiet concentration, were 12 musicians and singers, quietly observing was our audience of 80 people. All the play had built to this point when the Shite enters to relate the aspiration and sacred duty of the character. I felt I was the final stroke of brilliant colour about to be added to this vibrant impressionistic painting. I was in a dream, yet I was an actor, being sure I did the correct choreography and remembered the text I was to sing, so there again was this intense self-awareness, but also the sense of moving through a landscape of suspended time. My feet seemed to move through the earth and mind through the sky. Udaka Sensei had spoken to me of Noh being a dance of the heart. As I turned to face the audience and they saw the robes and trappings of artistic objects and allowed their senses to appreciate this artifice, I released myself and was free, free to let the heart of the matter be plain to all who wished to understand. This state of Yugen is something non-material, yet it is evoked by a material theatrical style. The style is intensely formal yet it reveals a doorway, a doorway to an understanding of the true nature of my existence.

Plato taught that what is perceived is a concrete expression of a more fundamental idea. A particular thing is what it is by the virtue of the idea forming it. So when we fall in love, it is falling for Aphrodite, love itself, not a particular person. This most venerable idea that has a very close relation to Zeamis’ world of Yugen, and the reality of things being beneath rather than perceived by the senses, has unfortunately suffered distortion. Our modern world is diluted and distorted by projections of images that are both fictitious and factual. How do we distinguish between the press footage of an army invading desert installations of the enemy and a fictional film that we saw on television the night before, of an army invading a desert installation of enemy? The ability or even the need to distinguish leads to its own kind of disconnection and chaos. Adding to this imperception of the real or true picture comes the muddied waters of emotion and psychology. When Konstantin Stanislavski and his troupe of truth seekers evolved what has become known as ‘western acting technique’, it was based on their own perceptions of what is real. Personal experience was the comparative model that they used to create their performances, and an audience excited by the emerging understandings and challenges of psychology took it to be the truth, and they, in turn, would measure the validity and enjoyment factor based upon their own experiences and depth of catharsis. The Noh experience does not become trapped in such an ego. It refuses to build empathy with an audience; it insists that the audience is free to enter and create their own experience. To the actor, the audience is stone, and if the stone wishes to become human, it can do so, but not at the insistence of the actor.

Delivered at Waikato University. 21st November 2005.