Meeting the Dead on Stage:
Noh Theatre and its Solution.
By John Davies
Theatre Studies University of Waikato
As I take soft steps to place myself upon the stage I become the final stroke of colour in a brilliant painting. Mental paintings prompted by the atmospheric lights, the dim shadows, the emptiness of the stage, the silence. Then the shrill flute as it summons the presence, calls the spirit to come be with us. The eerie cry of the drummers punctuating the stillness, ending the silence, and beginning it again. Mental pictures built by the mercurial writing of Katherine Mansfield, images and feelings conjured into the mind of the reader, brought to the theatre, associated with the name, living in the mind’s eye of the audience. I step onto the hashigakari, the bridgeway from the spirit world to the quick. Guided by the flute and the urgency of spiritual need, the elaborately robed and masked figure hovers before the audience.
“Who are you?” Asks the waki, Sir Harold Beauchamp, Katherine’s father.
“I am Katherine”, the shite sings in reply.
I am Katherine.
In the Noh Drama the two principal characters are the shite and the waki. The waki is the audiences representitive on stage. He tells us who he is, where he is, why he is there and whom he is going to meet. The shite is the character the waki has come to meet. The above exchange takes place in Rachel McAlpine’s Noh play The Dazzling Night. The play concerns an encounter between Sir Harold and the ghost of his daughter, Katherine Mansfield.
It is said that in the Noh drama it is not an event that happens, but a person that happens. That person is the shite. Yet Katherine died 72 years ago, and anyway how can I portray Katherine? I am a 50 year old man, reasonably robust in health with only an anecdotal knowledge of the world that Katherine inhabited. I have read her stories, that is true, but once read and appreciated they are put aside. How can I bring any real truth to portraying on stage a 33 year old woman, struggling to come to terms with her own death, dying of an hemorrhage to her lung. Where do I fit into that?
One technique would be to research the state and atmosphere of her life and set myself as director, find a woman of appropriate age and stature and have her imitate, or re-present.
This is the ‘naturalistic’ style of theatre, to make an as close as possible equivalent of the person we are to represent. But now it is no longer my experience: but that of the woman found to play the role. How then can I play this role and be authentic and respectful of her, in no way cheapening the essence of Katherine?
In order to confront this possibility I must ask then what is the essence of the human. How can it be caught, presented on stage? When imitation and the expectation of the audience to enter into the “as if” game no longer provides the intensity of true encounter, when I as an actor reach that point of wanting to present my audience with more than an imitation or approximation I go searching. I go on a journey into myself to confront the only inevitable fate of each of us: I begin my journey into finding a truth for performance by contemplating my own death.
In 1984 I was living and working in New York. I had gone there as a member of the avant garde traveling cabaret circus troupe Red Mole and had spent the previous 10 years traveling and performing. One evening I attended a presentation of traditional Japanese theatre out doors at the Lincoln Center. At the conclusion of the Noh play Semimaru I realized I had seen a play that moved 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 asked 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 life, yet this Noh Theatre asked me to directly use and be inside my own life, to take the image and feeling deep inside myself, not only to my intellect, but to my heart, to my soul.
I returned to my Hells Kitchen apartment in turmoil. 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 had I 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 embraces the ancient city of Kyoto. In late July 1984 I walked the short distance from my one 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 traveling an entire day to an ancient site to witness Takiginoh: Noh performed outdoors. I was in 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 in order to understand. I baulked, I strained with effort, and then one day in response to my question about and how I should think about the audience Sensei told me “the audience are stones. Do not think about them”. I understood at last. I was not to take care of their experience, but simply my own. I was the vessel, filled by the feeling and thought of those who choose to be present with me. I was free.
Noh Theatre is highly stylized and through its unique internal and external design elements is able to manipulate space and time in the mind of the observer. It has its origins in the field ceremonies of traditional culture, combined with the storytelling techniques of the Buddhist priests who brought that religion from main land China to Japan in the 9th and 10th centuries. The costumes are vivid and elaborate, the masks pale and sublime in expression. Many of the characters who appear do so as spirits. In both the Buddhist and Shinto thought of the time this is in fact the true form of a person. The trappings of the body are a distraction , a superficial surface to the ‘true’, the spirit.
My encounter with Noh began as I have described in 1984. I have since returned twice to Kyoto to continue study and in 1992 formed The New Zealand Noh Theatre Company. Under my direction this company has since staged two New Zealand Noh plays written in English. The first is titled Rakiura by Eileen Phillipp. The second grew out of a meeting between myself and Rachel McAlpine. We were both in Kyoto in 1993. She was under teaching contract at Kyoto Woman’s University and together we attended Noh plays. She attended my recital at the Kongoh Theatre and after some discussion about the possibility of presenting an original Noh play in New Zealand she began work on the text for The Dazzling Night. The first performance was staged at Le Mata Theatre in Auckland in 1998. This was the first time I was to contemplate the theatrical presentation of the encounter between Sir Harold Beauchamp and the ghost of his daughter Katherine Mansfield, and have since had to return to this on subsequent recitals, usually only sections of the entire play, but always this particular moment of encounter.
So now I am at this moment once again. A 50 year old man portraying Katherine Mansfield: ill, dying, 33 years old. How can I be authentic and true to her?
The answer lies in the particular form of Noh, and my willingness to confront my own mortality.
In the Noh play The Dazzling Night Sir Harold Beauchamp travels to Fontainebleau distraught and troubled. His son Leslie died in France, killed in the 1914-18 war, and now his daughter also has died so far from their New Zealand home. His relationship with his daughter was undoubtedly complicated. Although he respected her intelligence and abilities, her lifestyle and bohemian pursuits would have perplexed and possibly irritated him. He would have regarded her lifestyle as self destructive. So when he learns of her death in such humble surroundings, his grief and perhaps even guilt is compounded. He goes to the Gurdjieff Institute.
“It is bitter when a daughter dies before her father.
It is bitter to stand beside a daughter’s grave.
It is sad to think my daughter died
So far from home, in such a strange and simple place”.1
The people of the community welcome him and he is given a bed in the stable. As he sits in contemplation of these humble surroundings a woman comes to milk the cow. The figure is masked and prompted by Sir Harold tells him of the things that Katherine had said before she died.
“I wish it were not so cold.
The taste of blood in my mouth is strange.
Last night I felt my body breaking up like glass.
How easy it is to die.
I’m a dead woman even now.
Can I walk? I can only creep.
I am a parasite, a cripple.”
He responds
“My daughter! My poor daughter!
Such a dreadful way to die!”
In the Noh convention this woman is a spiritual reincarnation of Katherine, hence her intimate knowledge of Katherine’s thoughts.
The next actor onto the stage is the traditional Kyogen. The Kyogen is an unmasked rustic figure who tells us the story in everyday language. He to is able to supply answers to Sir Harold’s questions.
In the second half of the play another woman appears, also masked. Sir Harold asks
“Are you my daughter whom I loved?”
The figure replies
“I am your daughter Katherine”
The rest of the play is the discussion between the two and the growing understanding of Sir Harold, as the spirit of Katherine reveals itself to him.
What was Katherine searching for when she, lonely and sick went to the rustic portals of Gurdjieff’s commune at Fontainebleau? She was a woman seeking rest.
“I was tired of my poor little stories
bred like birds in a cage.”
Her marriage was no longer one of companionship and nurture but
“For years I lived alone
with a paper husband in a book.
I stopped growing”
She herself was seeking for this other life that was not built on carbon copies or approximations. She had traveled and experienced much. She had taken on many roles, tried her hand in many of life’s games. Now with her well marked score card she contemplates her own premature death
“The leaves move in the garden.
The sky is pale”.
It was not an interest in exotica that she now pursued. It was truth. She desperately sought a truth to sustain and support her in her dying.
She must have been lonely,
“It is hard, oh it is hard
to make a good death”
We can only admire her courage and defiance to do things her way. What was the nature of the truth she sought, and how does such a truth ease the passage from life to death? As I don the mask that will symbolise the face of Katherine, and I place the bright and shimmering robes of the Noh actor about my shoulders, as I put the clean white tabi slippers on my feet and bind into place the long black strands of the flax wig, I become what she sought to become herself: a manifestation of the spirit in the quick.
“With Gurdjieff the holy man
I lost my fear of the void,”
What is the void? It is the realm of spirits and the end of this corporeal existence. So how could she lose her fear? It must be through understanding, through acceptance. She lived her life as a player, as a woman who never denied herself experience and then in turn used this experience to shape words on the anvil of her own heart. A heart beat that was so delicate, so powerful, we still are drawn to the shapes, to the hum of images, the delicacy of her conjuring. She understood her own magic, but all of this she had to leave.
“But still I love the earth so much
it’s hard to trust, and let it go”
So who am I when I emerge into the ghostly blue light of the theatrical space, the wooden mask bound onto my head? I am not Katherine Mansfield. I am a symbol of her spirit. I do not attempt to be her or understand her emotions or the intellectual process and physical journey that took her to these final days at Fontainebleau. I simply stand in her stead. You the observer fill the cup. You understand and empathize with what happened to this fierce delicate creature 72 years ago. You have your own perception of a confrontation with death. I am a symbol that is brightly coloured, exotic, vibrant, dreamlike and other worldly, and into this you place your own experience of Katherine, your own response to mortality. So the act is yours. I make the shapes and you have the experience. My movements are slow, time is suspended, stretched, we are in a world away from the world. My voice is at times forceful, at times light and seemingly disembodied from behind the carved mask. This physical presence, along with the music of flute and drums, builds the aesthetic foundation of our perception, and upon this we perceive ghosts, spirits, the image of someone’s other than physical presence.
I sing,
“Dead leaves shuffle over bare soil.
But winter does not last forever.
Like little girls who turn a skipping rope,
joy and sorrow, fear and hope
must take their turns”
Her life is diminishing but she is aware of the eternal rhythm of existence and this blazes like a beacon, a penultimate understanding and acceptance that hearts do stop beating.
“Let us be tender, let us be loyal,
let us be kind and rejoice in each other,
for everything has its shadow.”
She has learned from the taste of the sweet playthings of life that there is bitterness too. There is darkness and a shadow over her lung that will eclipse her own light. This shadow has forced her to accept this. But the spirit tells us, let us be tender… for in the tenderness there is love, and we must make that our purpose.
At this moment we meet Katherine Mansfield and we understand and feel so deeply for her because we encounter herself within our self.
I share this life with Katherine Mansfield, and I share death as she and we all must. I also understand that she and I and all living matter are deeply and fundamentally connected, living parts of one organism.
This is the gift of Noh Theatre.
In the structure of the Noh play the waki, played in The Dazzling Night by Sir Harold, achieves an understanding that satisfies his curiosity, puts an anxiety to rest. And so it is with the waki in The Dazzling Night.
“This makes me feel much calmer.
I think I understand”.
The purpose of his journey has been fulfilled. His grief lingers, but his own heart can be settled because he has seen his daughter once more. His presence in the place of her death, his anxiety was a call loud enough to cause her spirit to become manifest.
Much of this philosophy is wrought from the wisdom and compassion of Buddhism.
In my own journey to the heart of myself and my artistic practice I understand and accept this extraordinary life as a human being, and I dance and sing in celebration, a symbol of Katherine, of myself, always here, never leaving.
“The moment we leave home
we start upon a journey
that leads us home again.
The night is solemn no more.
It is dazzling and golden and bright.
It is dazzling and golden and bright.”
1 Rachel McAlpine “The Dazzling Night” Type script 1995.
All other quotations from this work.