CULTUREIS THE BODY

THE THEATRE WRITINGS OF

TADASHI SUZUKI

Translated by Kameron H. Steele

THEATRE COMMUNICATIONS GROUPNEW YORK2015

Translation copyright © 2015 by Kamcron H. Steele

the essa)^ were originally published in Japan and copyright © by Tadashi Suzuki

Culture h the Body: The Theatre Writings of Tadashi Suzuki is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 520 Eighdi Avenue, 24th Floor,New'^rk, NY 10018-4156

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Excerpts from Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, copyright © 1954 by Grave Press, Inc., copyright © renewed 1982 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Excerpts from Electra by Sophocles translated by Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton, copyright © 2004. Used by permission of Nick Hern Books, Ltd.

This publication is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

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Library op Congress Cataloging-in-Pubucation Data

Suzuki, Tadashi, 1939-Culture is the body: the theatre writings ofTadashi Suzuki / translated by Kameron H. Steele, pages cmISBN 978-1-55936-496-6 (paperback)-SBN 978-1-55936-807-0 (ebook)1. Theater-PhUosophy. 2. Acting. 3. Drama-History and criticism.1. Steele, Kameron H., translator. II. Tide.PN2039.S93 2015792.01-dc23 2015016793

Frontis: Tadashi Suzuki writing on the second floor of the original SCOT house.

Cover, text design and composition by Lisa Govan, Eliad Design

First TCG Edition, June 2015

r

In memory of

Ikuko Saito

(1941-2012)

TADASHI SUZUKI

internal world that modern realism portrays. However, the impulse and desire to perform—to display ones body, project ones voice and sense the fictional self—gets stronger the more we come into contact with the unknown and the forgotten. When we do this, a fantastic transcendence takes place, and we feel the original, timeless ecstasy of performance. There is no doubt that such desires lie in the core of the actor’s heart and body, which I believe legitimizes the classical presence of Greek tragedy on the contemporary st^e.

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THE THEATRE’S ESSENTIAL ELEMENT

Defining Theatre

Though many people have addressed the question of “What is theatre?” I find Polish director Jerzy Grotowski’s response to be one of the most attractive. For him, defining the theatre requires isolating and identifying its requisite element, that feature which distinguishes it, exemplifies it, without which it wouldn’t exist. Grotowski’s approach shares something with Merleau-Ponty’s theory on the intrinsic, essential nature of things. He posits that an essence can be described as that aspect of a subject which remains uninfluenced, no matter how severely its environment may change. This constant can be thought of as the subject’s indispensable element. In Towards a Poor Theatre, Grotowski formulated a similar theory, which he referred to as via negativa:

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The number of definitions of theatre are practically unlimited.To escape from this vicious circle one must without doubt eliminate, not add. That is, one must ask oneself what is indispensable to the theatre.^

So then, what is it that makes the theatre what it is? Whenever we go to the theatre to see a performance today, the script, direction, lights and music all seize our attention. We have even come to regard these as the theatre’s crucial, indispensable elements ... but arc they? Grotowski claims that, even in the absence of a text and director, lights and music, theatre can still be created.

Grotowski also points out that, over the course of its history, written dramatic texts were one of the last elements added to the theatre; before this, in the manner of Commedia Dell Arte, actors would improvise on nothing more than a simple storyline—not unlike the early stages of Noh and Kabuki. We can therefore deduce that, since theatre has been created without scripts in the past, it is still possible to do so today. Lighting and music also follow this pattern of logic. Artificial lighting was not necessary for ancient Greek or Noh performances, which took place at night in outdoor theatres under firelight; nor in Shakespeare’s time, when the open roof of indoor theatres like the Globe allowed performances to take place in daylight. Thus, through a process of elimination, or via negativa, what Grotowski is left with—the thing without which theatre can no longer be called theatre—is the actor.

Between Spectator and Actor

To quote from Grotowski’s conclusion:

Can the theatre exist without actors? I know of no example of this. One could mention the puppet-show. Even here, however, an actor is to be found behind the scenes, although of another kind. Can the theatre exist without an audience? At

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least one spectator is needed to make it a performance. So we are left with the actor and the spectator. We can thus define the theatre as “what takes place between spectator and actor.”All the other things are supplementary—perhaps necessary, but nevertheless supplementary.^

In response to the question “What is theatre?” I find “that which takes place between the spectator and actor” a most persuasive answer. Since theatre is an instantaneous art form experienced on the spot, in the flesh, scholars and critics, who rely on the ability to research and examine, rarely suggest this kind of reply. I would wager, however, that if you ask people actually working in the theatre, their answer would be closer to Grotowski’s very insightful observation.

Peter Brook starts his book The Empty Space with the following:

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged. Yet when we talk about theatre this is not quite what we mean. Red curtains, spotlights, blank verse, laughter, darkness, these are all confusedly superimposed in a messy image covered by one all-purpose word.^

This philosophy is congruent with Grotowski’s. Theatre takes place today in a multitude of contexts, and requires an endless amount of explication. Yet, the more explanations we pile on, the more vague it becomes, leaving us feeling not more intimate with the theatre, but rather ironically estranged. Theatre, like life, is most effectively apprehended not through intellectual interpretation, but through experience. While it does not resist verbal analysis altogether, the theatre’s boundless, ever-changing nature cannot be revealed by words alone. The wisest stance strives to unveil its guiding principle, its core—that salient element which abides, regardless of time or place.

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A Space of Encounter

Whenever I am asked “What is theatre?” and have to respond quickly, my approach resembles Brooks and Grotowskis, though I modify my answer. I believe theatre is not only what takes place between the spectator and the actor, but what occurs in the specific place where spectator and actor coexist. Theatre does not come into existence simply through an abstract encounter between the so-called actor and the so-called audience, but through a unique space, a mediator that unifies all those present. The contents of this encounter, Grotowski’s “what takes place between spectator and actor,” is dictated by the quality of this space and context in which it occurs. All of these theories make one thing clear: The social act known as theatre does not come into being solely through the work of the actor, but also through the active presence of the spectator.

This requisite condition is the same for the novelist, whose work doesn’t exist until someone reads it. As a novelist conceives a work based on his own designs and aspirations, a performance is generated from the actors ideas and passions. His presence is the crucial element in the theatrical endeavor. In fact, it is the actors live human energy, what I like to call “animal energy,” that has sustained the social and cultural survival of theatre for thousands of years.

By the way, when I use the word “actor,” I mean the stage actor, as opposed to the actor who works primarily in film and television. Not only is the work of the stage actor absolutely different, but their significance within their respective art forms also differs; Film and television can still exist without aaors. It is simply folse to claim that the actor is as crucial to film and television as he or she is to the theatre.

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ON THE STANISLAVSKI METHOD

An Actor Prepares

Next, rd like to explore this notion of the s^e actor—^what he does, how he becomes one. More specifically. I’d like to analyze the work of stage acting and examine what sort of training and rehearsal it requires. For me, the theatre figure who has left the most concrete analysis of the various aspects of the actor’s job is Constantin Stanislavski.

Stanislavski, who vrds also an actor and one of the founding members of the Moscow Art Theatre, is widely known for inventing the actor-training system known as the Stanislavski Method. Even today, his essays on acting have a tremendous influence in Russia as well as in the United States. Marlon Brando and many other actors who later become famous studied at the Actors Studio in New York City, where the Stanislavski Method is taught. The modern Japanese Shingeki also felt the influence of the Stanislavski Method and made great efforts to study it. Reading his An Actor Prepares,I too appreciated his take on the unique nature of the actor’s work. I would single it out as one of the most illuminating books ever written on acting. Still, I can’t help but feel that it is also one of the most widely misunderstood. After all, it was this Stanislavski Method which proselytized the notion of acting as a reproduction of daily life, or rather an imitation of human beings in everyday life—^what modern realism is often interpreted to be.

According to Stanislavski’s Method, the first thing an actor must do when preparing a given scene is to imagine the character’s everyday reality, and then respond to the events of the scene as if he were living it himself. In other words, the actor must investigate what emotions he would feel, what psychological experiences he would have and what movement he would choose if found in his character’s circumstances. This is largely how the Method is understood. However, as the Stanislavski Method was disseminated around the world, this aspect that requires the actor to imagine himself living

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in his character’s everyday reality—so that he actually transmogrifies into the character—became overemphasized. The result has been a mutated form of Stanislavski’s Method which presumes that, when an actor portrays a character in a given circumstance, he must have the same emotional experience onstage as the character would in reality; indeed that the actor must relive that “real” experience. Thus, when portraying an emotionally painful scene, real tears must be shed. However, this mutant form of the Stanislavski Method skips a critical stage in the creation of a role. Somehow, in incorporating the Method into practice, a step was lost: the step where the actor must use his or her imaginative work to create a fictional space and experience emotions unique to the act of being onstage.

Stage Emotion and Real Life

When I was in college, the Moscow Art Theatre came to Japan, and several of the actors actually visited my university. In performing a portion of the final scene from Chekhov’s Three Sisters, the actresses playing Olga, Masha and Irina cried while they spoke the final lines. Afterwards, the teacher who was serving as master of ceremonies explained that it was their brilliant training which made these actresses so impressive. According to him, every time they said these lines, they would actually feel the emotions of a real woman shedding tears. This alone proved the richness of their inner life. I had a problem accepting this interpretation and thought his enthusiasm rather mysterious, although I did think the actresses ability to cry at will mildly interesting.

In hindsight, I can see the severity of that teacher’s misunderstanding. The ability to cry when speaking certain lines is not necessarily a sign of good acting. In fact, I tend to question whether things like crying onstage are even desirable in the first place. Of course, I don’t mind if the audience cries, but I am suspicious of how we assume such scenes lack believability unless actors cry. Isnc this merely a kind of Pavlovian response to a predetermined stimulus,

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a conditioned reflex? If so, it couldn’t be more different from what I consider to be acting.

I had a similar experience at the Actors Studio in New York City. There, one actor portrayed a bankrupt laundromat owner. Soon to be evicted, the character sat in solitude in the store he had worked in for years, reminiscing on his life there. At the start of the scene, he sat still in the middle of the stage and began crying, sputtering several lines with long pauses in between. This heavy mood quickly saturated the theatre, and shortly thereafter, several members of the audience began sobbing as well. Undoubtedly, there was a physiological reality affecting everyone present.

However, unlike most of the audience gathered there, I did not feel this actor to be experiencing the same type of emotion he would feel in reality. In fact, it seemed to me like nothing more than a deliberate shedding of tears onstage. The actor was not feeling an emotion equal to one he would experience in everyday life, but rather was engaged in the unique emotion-inducing action of “crying onstage.” This phenomenon should al\s^ys be referred to as a “stage emotion.”

When reading through a text, we imagine a character living in a very specific reality. We develop this understanding by examining his psychological attitudes, emotional states and the kind of will which accompanies his actions. However, when an actor begins to move through his performance, he is not going through an everyday emotional or psychological experience, but rather the euphoria and revelation of being onstage in an artificial environment—^what we could call a specific “stage awareness.”

Living in the Fiction

I don’t think my concept of a unique “stage awareness” is so different from Stanislavski’s ideas. However, as his theory spread, a dogma materialized which misconstrued his teachings. Good acting became based on the degree to which an actor could embody a character in everyday life—^how deeply he could “ground” himself in reality. As

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I said when referring to the job of the director, dramatists themselves don’t write plays for the sake of conjuring up quotidian reality They write, rather, to interrogate it from a distance. They dont create artificial conversation to reproduce daily life, but rather manufrcture fictions that engender new realities that we can’t encounter in daily life.

The actor’s job is not to return to an everyday reality in acting, but rather to use his contemporary life as a springboard for discovering an alternate reality or fiction. Thus, the only emotion truly connected with acting is the exhilaration and amazement derived from the complete concentration required to live in this fiction. This is “stage awareness.”

Stanislavskis Method

Though the Stanislavski Method is famous for its stoic theories of actor movement, speech and rehearsal ethics, etc., behind these theories lies the belief that, in order to live with one another, most human beings adopt a repetitive, copacetic daily routine that dulls their personal desires and instincts. As a result, the rich and dynamic potential that exists inside them is forgotten, repressed in the subconscious realm. Stanislavski’s hope was to release this trapped charismatic potential by compelling people to manifest their unique inner being onstage and thus reconfirm the astonishing nature of human existence. He created his method to give people a chance to rediscover themselves through a spontaneous personal blooming onstage. Those who think the Stanislavski Method existed merely for the purpose of living out everyday emotions onstage have it backwards. His method does not demand a recreation of known experiences pulled from our socially repressed quotidian life, but rather a surprising discovery of unknown, subconscious phenomena that are deeply personal and unique.

Stanislavski makes the following analogy: If a stage actor is an airplane, then his process is his runway. Whether or not the airplane actually flies, however, depends on the airplane itself Just as an air

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plane can’t take off without a runway and maintenance, the actor must establish a creative process and train if he wants to fly. Stanislavski proposed a way to build runways that would allow sound airplanes to fly skillfully through the sides of realism.

An Actor Prepares describes various psychological barriers that keep many actors from improving. For example, the more an actor repeats an activity onstage, the less he is able to experience it anew, and his artistry deteriorates. When set movements and speech are mechanically repeated, they become joyless. The human spirit naturally dwells in a state of perpetual evolution; having to duplicate something spoken the previous day, word for word, feels forced and quickly loses its charm.

Every day people ask me “Why are you a director?” At first, I could answer this question with interest, but over time, it has become tedious. So too the actor, through daily repetition of the same stage business, tends to grow stale. His acting deteriorates into a mere retracing of his original performance, entirely for self-aggrandizement. This dissolves the vibrant, gratifying relationship that should link actor and audience, as can be seen with the commercial theatre stars or in inexperienced actors who choose to go with their day-to-day impulses and feelings instead of carefully rehearsing to develop a structure that will allow for endless discovery.

Stanislavski himself slumped into this monotony that seemed bereft of any creative energy. Consequently, he sought a method to avoid this trap—a method with which the actor could go onstage each performance and not only encounter something new in himself, but also make that discovery instantaneously evident to the audience. Instead of acting to show one’s talent or to stand out in a crowd, he sought a method to help the actor to give the audience a sense of spiritual wonder and human worth. To use Stanislavski’s own description:

In our art you must live the part every moment that you are playing it, and every dme. Each time it is recreated, it must be lived afresh and incarnated afresh.®

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A Criticism of Formulaic Acting

The Stanislavski Method is readily understood if taken as a criticism of the sort of stock acting often seen in contemporary Kabuki actors, who routinely trace over predetermined traditional forms. I believe Stanislavskis ideas were a response to the disappointment he felt with this sort of stylized acting which, in tracing over an external pattern, foils to conjure up human emotions, or rather fails to express even a little of the internal nuances of the human psyche—resulting in a performance that has no heart or spirit.

It was thus that Stanislavski devised his method in opposition to the star system acting style popular in his time. Not unlike the commercial theatre of today, this style restricted the variety of sensitivities or inner sensibilities an actor was capable of experiencing and expressing onstage. The Stanislavski Method developed in the context of deliberately trying to overcome the clear limits of this system.

Stanislavski is noted for saying “there are no small parts, only small actors,” a point of view precipitated both by his opposition to the star system and his wish to make the actors art something of greater spiritual worth. This can be seen in Stanislavski s criticism of the French actor Coquelin:

You can receive great impressions through this art, but they will neither warm your soul nor penetrate deeply into it. Their effect is sharp but not lasting. Your astonishment rather than )^ur foith is aroused. Only what can be accomplished through surprising theatrical beauty, or picturesque pathos, lies within the bounds of this art. But delicate and deep human feelings are not subject to such technique.^

This argument is persuasive in the case of Kabuki as well. Modern Japanese intellectuals, who tried to follow in the footsteps of modern European art, held a similar point of view when criticizing Kabuki. Even many Kabuki actors themselves began doubting that

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their theatre could still probe the depths of the human condition. It was most likely this sentiment that provoked the movement to reform and modernize Kabuki.

A Theatre of Internal Psychology

In Stanislavski’s era, many people began to view the human being as having an individual and invisible interior life. This was the heyday of the psychological drama, which stressed the importance of the human psyche. In order to express the emotional realities of this inner world, a demand for a new method of acting developed, and the Stanislavski Method responded to this demand.

Consequently, Stanislavski’s Method and the modern realism of writers like Ibsen and Chekhov shared a common view of the human being. They believed that the different ways people speak and behave expressed subtextual desires and emotions, or rather made them decipherable. The style of acting that resulted from this view placed strong emphasis on allowing the audience to interpret visible everyday behavior of a character as something generated by the invisible psychological or emotional nuances of an individual psyche. Yet the emotions of the actor, as I insisted before, must always be connected to the unique inner reality of being onstage, not to something experienced in quotidian life. For these reasons, I believe the Stanislavski Method functions as a revolutionary working hypothesis which actors have used to effectively perform the texts of modern realism.

The Method's Limits

The subject of theatre is endless in scope. Therefore, for much contemporary theatre, Stanislavski’s Method has definite shortcomings. When preparing certain works of Noh, Kabuki, Greek tragedy, Shakespeare or the Theatre of the Absurd, it is futile to implement

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a method based on emotions experienced in reality, or on the individual psyche underlying a character’s actions. What is the inner life of a ghost? Do gods have an inner life? Could an actor ever possibly draw on emotional memories of being a god? Can such inner states be believably recreated onstage? In such cases, the Stanislavski Method often falls under criticism.

The historically accumulated forms of expression which we collectively refer to as theatre were not all created solely for the sake of expressing the human psyche, nor do they objectively deal with strictly human subject matter, which was the particular focus of the vast body of work generated by nineteenth-century European realism. For this reason, acting, in the broad sense, is not only an expression of inner life, but an ongoing experimentation with the language of performance as it has evolved throughout human history. Certainly, behind all language lies a human presence, but insisting that the primary goal of acting is to make the human behind the language tangible tremendously confines its potential.

Take for example Euripides’ The Trojan Women. Greece has defeated Troy in a war that has raged for ten years, and the surviving Trojan women wait to be taken away to a life of slavery. The heroine of the play, Hecuba, speaks the following lines:

And yet, had not the Gods so cudgell’d TroyTo stark oblivion, our names of memoryWould want, in verses men will heed forever.'^

These lines, if spoken in the context of realism, are bizarre. It is impossible to objectively evaluate one’s situation from a future perspective when in the throes of a trauma. Such language, in fact, does not represent the thoughts of a character, but rather the thoughts of the playwright who has a distance from the events he or she is writing about. Naturally, it is pointless to apply the Stanislavski Method and its singularity of quotidian perspective to such language.

Perhaps the reason why so few American actors can satisfactorily perform Greek tr^edy or any other highly poetic text (at least that is

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the impression I get) is the strong influence this Stanislavski Method has had on them. Standing still in one place and delivering a long speech that is not conversational proves difficult for them. For many American actors, acting seems to be synonymous with ceaselessly gesticulating around the stage in an everyday manner.

Most likely, the huge popularity of the Stanislavski Method in America was related to the burgeoning film industry. Hollywood has made a big deal out of this hidden inner life through a long string of romance films, where the Stanislavski Method has been easy to apply. To this day they persist in beating the love story to death, dividing it into small psychological bits from every angle conceivable, one after the other, creating a sort of endless inner-life parade.

THE TRADITIONAL AND THE CONTEMPORARY

Acting in Noh and Kabuki

Up to now I’ve touched on the aims of the Stanislavski Method and the limitations thereof. The next stage of this process is to examine the difference between the acting Stanislavski refers to, and a traditional acting form, like Noh or Kabuki. Speaking in terms of the “stage awareness” I mentioned previously, there actually is no difference. Noh and Kabuki actors, however, don’t view acting as an expression of the human interior. They focus instead on developing certain physical sensibilities and experimenting with them in performance. Acting for them is not an expression of emotional or psychological idiosyncrasies, nor a revelation of human individuality acquired through examining the psyche from various angles. Noh and Kabuki, rather, have developed from unique physical discoveries—sensations that cannot be traced back to everyday life. In this kind of theatre, spiritual sensitivities and aspirations are pursued physically, much like they are in dance.

For example, when a Noh actor gendy, slowly slides his feet over the stage, the Stanislavski point of view might interpret this action

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as an attempt to represent an old man or an invalid. Of course, the Noh actor does not use this movement to suggest old age or infirmity, but rather experiments with the inner state generated by this movement. The movement alone gives life. As the actor perceives that the audience feels the presence of this inner state, he adds conventions such as the mask and the costume to make the audience imagine a phantom, a spirit of the dead or some other phenomenon which doesn’t exist in everyday reality.

The audience for a Noh actor’s performance does not cultivate a new point of view toward humanity as described in An Actor Prepares^ but rather experiences a precise image conjured up by the Noh actor’s physical sensibilities. In fact, such is the ultimate goal of traditional Noh performance; to create something not possible in daily life—a fiction which the audience engages through the actor’s body.

Extraordinary Artistic Experience

Consider a pyramid in the middle of a desert for example. We cannot hypothesize about what kind of everyday emotion the pyramid expresses. The question itself is nonsense. In such cases, there exist only the initial sensations we experience by observing the abstracted

form of a triangle.The same is also true of music. Beethoven and Mozart did not

compose with the intention of expressing common emotions like misery and anger. Of course, when we listen to their music, we may claim we hear misery and anger. Indeed, we are free to employ any language when articulating our aural impressions of music. However, the composers themselves did not compose out of a desire to express a specific emotional experience already accessible in everyday life. Instead these composers tenaciously experimented with the composition and form of sound itself. Consequently, the emotional experience we may have when listening to them, while part of our everyday reality, is not something derived from it. Outside of the artistic experience, it simply doesn’t exist. It is nothing more and

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nothing less than the instantaneous fictional experience we have when encountering music in the context of reality.

In the same way, the sensations we enjoy through naturalistic acting rooted in the Stanislavski Method are not recreations of something known in our daily life, but simply a direct result of the fictional experience of theatre. Unlike realism, Noh- and Kabuki- style theatre engages subconscious sensibilities acquired through the body. Whether slowly gliding over the stage in suriashi, or exiting in a roppo style, the actor receives a certain pleasure from the movement itself. Incorporating other theatrical elements based on these sensations, the actor strives to make an impression on the audience.

What Is Referencing?

I believe both the realistic acting of the Stanislavski Method and the traditional Japanese acting styles are appealing in their respective ways. Recently, however, a lack of awareness about their differences has strained their relationship. When theatre artists and audiences started tiring of Stanislavski-based acting and the productions created to support this style, they began to desire a theatre that would experiment with alternative ways of speaking and using the body. Under such circumstances, a trend developed where certain directors began transplanting or referencing diverse forms of pre-contemporary theatre into a contemporary setting.

This tendency can be observed in both the Eastern and Western worlds. Especially in theatre like Greek tragedy, Stanislavski-based realistic acting doesn’t function. When such problems are clear, some directors attempt to get over them by taking advantage of theatrical styles uninfluenced by the scourge of modern realism, styles like Noh and Kabuki.

Though I’ve seen countless attempts at this sort of referencing, most of them have unfortunately failed. This is because, though traditional theatrical styles possess certain conventions, the original aaors did not create these using the forms that remain today, but instead dis

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covered them through experimenting with the inner state generated by the movements and sensations at their origin. Therefore, if directors intend on making artistic reference to traditional theatrical styles, they must first understand the invisible physical sensibilities that lie within these forms, and then try to play with them onstage. This is the most meaningful way to en^ge in theatrical referencing.

Referencing Physicality

More precisely, referencing in theatre is not the simple transplantation of language or movement from certain theatrical styles into a contemporary context, but the recreation of the physical inner states that these elements generate. Since actors embody the essence of the theatre, acting must celebrate the inner states of the body. To express this in the context of realism, the actor does not live out an everyday emotion onstage, but rather lives out various stage sensibilities; as I like to say, “the actor is someone who plays with the sensation of being onstage.” In the act of speaking, he savors the diverse sensations catalyzed in his body through the formation of words. In this way, I believe, the voice and the body become one in performance.

It is impossible to consider the crude transplantation of classical styles of movement into a contemporary forum (styles like ballet and Kathakali, or the speech techniques of Kabuki or Noh) as a kind of collage or juxtaposition. While the collage is a viable concept in fine art, it runs into problems in the theatre. If various fragmented references to traditional forms of movement and speech—or rather to the physical sensibilities that sustain them—feil to assume a fi-esh and unique set of relationships in performance, the act of referencing has no creative ^^ue. In this way, the theatre is similar to architecture. When architects reference historical forms, they pay special attention to the qualities of the materials used in these forms, and generate fresh combinations while maintaining a kind of structural and functional integrity.

To place this in the context of my work, I never try to “translate” the texts of Greek tragedy using Noh and Kabuki techniques. Nor

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do I merely replace the Greek setting with a Japanese one. If there are parts of my work that closely resemble the stage artistry of classic styles like Noh, Kabuki and ballet, it is because the physical sensibilities of these styles have been fused into a contemporary amalgam. The unique relationship formed in the actors body between these eclectic elements serves to revive the ancient Greek text, thus enabling the contemporary audience to access it.

However, when most Japanese try to stage Greek tragedy or Shakespeare, they do not make references in this way, but instead imitate external forms of movement and elocution, assuming they are independent from the time and place of their creation, and apply them arbitrarily. For such artists, theatre is merely a visual collage.

Stage actors exist in the moment via physical phenomena. The degree to which an actor possesses a spontaneous reality and rich inner state driven by these phenomena determines if and how he moves his audience. Thus, the act of referencing various formal fragments will bear no fruit unless it elicits a dynamic variety of physi- calities. Indeed, what makes acting difficult is that even an exact trace of a styles outer form will not reproduce the physical sensibilities that lie within it. The act of visually and aurally clipping off parts of the whole, or simply tracing over external forms, renders classic movement and speech styles obsolete.

From Ritual to Theatre

I said earlier that, in Kabuki and Noh, acting exists for the purpose of playing with spontaneous physical sensibilities experienced only on the stage, in the flesh, which are different from the physical sensibilities experienced when trying to imitate real life onstage. Even so, I don’t mean to make it sound as if the sensibilities of Noh and Kabuki are completely unrelated to real life. Daily life was the starting point from which the sensibilities present in Noh and Kabuki were heightened to a level of abstraction through artistic experimentation. In foct, Noh and Kabuki were born out of the harvest festi-

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vals that served, as communal rituals. Over time, these rituals trans

formed into theatrical styles.Why did these rituals ascend into the abstract plane of theatre?

The reason, to quote Japanese anthropologist Kunio Yanagida, lies in the arrival of people who “didn’t believe in the ritual.” These nonworshippers came as spectators, causing the people being observed to begin showing themselves, on the spot, in the flesh, and this generated a performative consciousness. Religious ritual, in other words, only exists when a secluded group collectively worships an invisible god. Once outsiders enter and begin observing this sacred ritual, the worshippers develop an awareness of being watched, not by god, but by their fellow humans. Once a performance is sparked in this way, theatrical artistry begins, much in the same way a group of children will play differently when grown-ups are watching them.

The historical transition that Sarugaku made to the formal Noh of Zeami also illustrates this point. In the time of Kan ami (Noh’s founder), Noh was performed in farming communes as part of a sacred ritual also found in shrines and temples. By the time Kan ami s son Zeami became a practicing artist, Noh had become urbanized and was attracting immense attention, which inspired him to pen such essays on actor training as Kadensho and Kakyo. Cut off from the amicable acceptance of communal farmers participating in a harvest ritual, Noh actors had no choice but to expose themselves to the critical eyes of total strangers. This need to be objective toward themselves in a modern context gave birth to an intense performative consciousness. Since then, Noh actors have maintained the tradition of sharply probing the body’s hidden potential for expression.

Even though Japanese performance history has generated a variety of physical play which from our contemporary perspective can only be described as “abstract,” the survival of these forms reveals Japanese culture’s collectively diplomatic consciousness, or rather how Japanese society developed through a network of incredibly strong human bonds. When Japanese society encountered conflicts that threatened the frbric of its society, the abstract form of Noh emerged as a guide through its communal identity crisis. The

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abstract pyramids of Egypt functioned in the same way, giving society a space to reinvent itself. I imagine this phenomenon is, perhaps, similar to the way Greek tragedy was created through the transformation of public rituals into contentious theatrical performances. In this way, the theatre, and with it the actor, have functioned as part of an important strategy for dealing with social identity crises, individually and communally.

A Theatre of New Physicality

When Japanese society, in the wake of Western influence, transformed from a network of agricultural communes into a modern industrialized society, a theatre form emerged based on physical sensibilities different from the collective ones that formed the keystone of traditional arts.

When Kabuki and Noh were at the center of the theatrical world in Japan, I think most Japanese felt themselves to be living in an age in which human consciousness and physical sensibilities determined by language and lifestyles did not change so readily. I doubt they were able to anticipate the sudden appearance of new living environments or the rapid birth of language and music possessing completely new rhythms.

It is true that, if Noh actors were to perform Beckett’s Waiting fir Godot, it would seem as if aliens were speaking the parts. The grave intonations and physicality of a Noh actor when he speaks and those that typically accompany the words of Beckett don’t correspond. The language of Waiting fir Godot fails to come to life or resonate in the modern age if spoken with a physicality cultivated and advanced by Japanese forming communities of yore.

The modern theatre genre Shingeki, in introducing the Stanislavski Method to Japan, adopted new physicalities and vocalities to find fresh means of expression that were not possible in Noh or Kabuki. Now, the age has come when even Stanislavski’s Method is out of date.

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Cornucopia of the Senses

Looking at the contemporary Japanese theatre world, it seems a host of physical sensibilities is blossoming. Japan is feirly unique in this regard. From established art forms cultivated by agricultural communes, like Noh and Kabuki, to art forms like the musical and the all-female review Takarazuka; from the modern realism of Shingeki to the underground avant-garde studios, physical experimentation is flourishing. This is primarily due to the emergence of a new society whose lifestyles allow for investigating various physical sensibilities.

Before the Meiji era, the Japanese couldn’t experience the physical sensation of riding in a car or an airplane, or of watching television or listening to a stereo. Indeed, people before Meiji were only able to experience physical sensibilities derived from animal energy. However, with the onset of the modern age, new technologies, like the telephone and the Internet, based on non-animal energy (such as electricity and petroleum) have surfeced, triggering a drastic change in how we use our bodies to interact with our environment. Our contemporary lives are saturated with physical sensibilities induced by this non-animal energy. For example, if you go to a dance club, your senses are bombarded by various configurations of non-animal enei^—bright electric lights, prerecorded music and video reproduced through digital playback systems—things people in the premodern era could never experience, or even fathom. We have been provided with a world where we can play with a dynamic spectrum of sensations, even in our daily life. Now, even everyday life has become a sort of theatrical environment.

With so many expressive possibilities available to us through this multitude of new physicalities driven by non-animal energy, it is no wonder that plays treating this contemporary phenomenon Stan to appear.

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The Diaspora of Theatrical Experience

With various liberations occurring in the body, and daily life becoming a performative space, physical expression in the theatre has also been freed up. What s more, the theatre-going audience can now access myriad forms of physical experimentation. We could also claim, however, that these "advances” have diluted the theatres potential. This tendency is especially evident in the young urban theatre companies of today.

When one watches these productions, the gestural vocabulary and vocal work that coincides with these contemporary physicalities are apparent and often make a ftesh impression. Many young people, reacting to the magnification of the performative aspect of everyday life, have become familiar with theatre as a form that liberates their enjoyment of speech and movement. The theatre thus becomes an extension of their daily lives and so is more accessible. In fact, if these young actors were to stand next to a premodern Noh or ICabuki actor and start acting, our gaze would most likely move toward the newer, since their words and gestures possess the fresh pathos of our contemporary life. This is also the case if, for example, we'set a can of beer next to a bottle of beer. The can is lighter, easy to carry, and feels very modern and feshionable. But this does not make the bottle of beer undesirable. Its antique quality allows it to survive in contemporary times. From this point of view, there isn’t much meaning in comparing and contrasting the two to see which is better or more progressive.

All the same. I’ve noticed that most of these current theatrical styles do not have what it takes to last. Even when something ftesh surfaces, it is soon replaced by something newer. Why doesn’t this kind of theatre last? I believe that, by attempting merely to please on an individual scale, such theatre limits itself to functioning purely as spectacle and so does not truly engage the raison d’etre of the theatrical endeavor. It does not address the theatre’s essence but its effect.

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Such theatre has only a subjective understanding of contemporary cultural problems in a theatrical context, and does litde to address them. As a result, its impact on society is ephemeral.

Kabuki "‘Kata”

From a contemporary perspective, the physical sensibilities experienced in Noh and Kabuki are out of date. They seem distant and unrelated to our lives. However, if we think about acting in terms of the continuity of physical sensibilities, we realize that Noh and Kabuki carry within them remnants of past cultures that can still stimulate our contemporary bodies. While they may not be “fiin” to watch from start to finish, Noh and BCabuki provoke us to think about why these kinds of theatre continue to thrive. Why are actors able to continue performing them, and why have Japanese people continued to support them over the years. This is the raison d’etre of Noh in our contemporary milieu.

In Kabuki we have what are called katay or historical acting forms. Of course these kata have not been passed down through the ages without changing. The kata of Utaemon Nakamura, a famous onnagata, for example, is not something he created on his own, but something with an entire history, of which Utaemon s kata is the latest phase. It is that relationship which we see when this kata appears in performance. Moreover, in the physical sensibilities of Utaemon’s kata, not only can we discern a history of the Japanese people or style of performance, we can also appreciate Utaemon’s originality. These sorts of things allow us to engage the Japanese people and the ways in which their collective spirit has come to be symbolized. In short, the cultural issues discernible in this act of performance are both fascinating and entertaining. This is the significance of pre- modern art in the modern age.

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Enduring Forms of Expression

The new urban theatre in Tokyo at present has done a wonderful job of expanding the language of communication and experimenting with new physical sensibilities. It’s almost as if, in the place of a standard bottle of beer, we can now enjoy a choice of several dozen types of beer in differendy designed aluminum cans—an enjoyable freedom. But if we ask what new focets such styles contribute to the theatrical endeavor or what new cultural issues they reveal, we find most unaware of such problems. This schism between the historical and the instantaneous has proved to be one of the unique aspects of contemporary urban theatre.

For me, even if the theatre dies an early death, I will still be a theatre artist. I therefore find it difficult to trust anything that does not have some degree of continuity or lasting quality to it. The contemporary theatre has only one challenge to face: how to acquire a sense of historical continuity while relying on the spontaneity of the human body and spirit.

All that really needs to be said about Noh and Kabuki is that they have endured the test of time, or, rather, that they have fought to find a form of expression that would endure any change in environment. In our world, theatrical geniuses abound. Talented people who can keep an audience entertained come and go every two or three hours. All kinds of people, even politicians and economists, become temporary stars. However, these performances are nothing more than a momentary opening of a habitual personal flower—a sort of instantaneous charm, a "my flower” style of acting (to steal a term from Zeami).

My concept of acting, by contrast, struggles to create a kind of eternal flower or continuity—a style that weaves the physicali- ties of contemporary reality with those that inspired classic theatre like Noh and ICabuki. While my work with the Suzuki Company of Toga has often been compared to Noh and Kabuki, in fact it is a hybrid: bridging the classic and contemporary to illuminate the

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problems of our time in the imagination of the audience. The establishment of such a philosophy is the mission and social function of the contemporary theatre director.

Put another way, I view acting as a working hypothesis for theatrical experimentation with texts ranging from Greek tragedy to the modern realism of Ibsen and Beckett s Theatre of the Absurd. As we test this hypothesis through training and applying certain timeless physicalities, we explore the countless possible relationships between the body and the word.

THE ACTOR’S TRAINING

The Lack of Training Methods

Unlike classical music and dance, theatre does not have a global professional standard. Which is to say, generally speaking, todays actor does not have a system of training. In the case of certain Japanese theatre forms, like the all-female musical theatre Takarazuka, actors learn to dance and sing within certain musical styles. In Noh and Kabuki, actors are trained in specific techniques from childhood via a traditional rehearsal format that is passed down within frmilies from generation to generation. Nevertheless, in the case of Shingeki, and in the Japanese contemporary theatre in general, there is an absence of actor-training methods. Without a training method, actors in the contemporary theatre are unable to sustain any sort of continuity in their physical instrument, making them decisively flawed.

Take, for example, the notion that when human beings go into a state of psychological trance, their bodies become more expressive, manifesting sensibilities engendered by the release of sensations normally buried in the subconscious. Yet, since the human body unconsciously forms habits, these sensations over time become so routine and habitual that most people forget they ever existed. As actors, we eventually become aware of these forgotten, unconscious sensibilities. The problem is, no matter how we try to play with

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them as a means of expression onstage, we find ourselves unable to fully recreate them. However hard we try, we fail. Our desire to express and the ability of the body to achieve that desire have grown estranged. Without a regular training practice, the distance the body must travel to make this desire materialize proves too vast, and as the actor ages, the channels through which the body might have reached its expressive potential become increasingly blocked.

This is not the case for children. States like vigor and mania completely alter the child’s body. When children feel disgust, they get fevers and diarrhea develops; when they get excited, they can’t sleep. Observing the bodies, behavior and freial expressions of such children, we adults notice a flexibility that astonishes us—a kind of instinctual elasticity. This fluidity of instinct and expression make the child, in one sense, an ideal reference for the adult actor.

Most adults, on the other hand, are forced to function in society though highly repetitive daily routines. They are boxed into their respective activities and lifestyles for long periods. In fret, most quotidian activity nowadays implies physical or spiritual limitation: When studying, we face a desk; when relieving ourselves, we sit on a toilet; or when looking for work, we commute on a train. In this way, modern life controls the body’s sensibilities. The physical habits developed by this recurring behavior slowly sink into the subconscious until we reach a point when our conscious bodies are no longer able to identify them objectively. Thus, when the untrained adult actor tries to spontaneously play with a child’s sensibilities, they don’t realize they have lost the flexibility to extract them.

Creating Physical Continuity

When Noh and Kabuki actors say “the body leads the spirit,” they speak from experience. An act as simple as slowly walking across the hashigakari bridge is in itself a strenuous task for the young Noh actor. The aged aaor executes it successfully mostly because he has, over many years, sustained a body concentration focused on the image of

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walking. From a contemporary point of view, such work seems to take place in an extremely narrow and specialized artistic domain.

In the contemporary theatre, actors in their teens or twenties can produce fantastic physicalities; they are able to entertain an audience by playing with them, and so are referred to as having “natural talent.” However, this phenomenon is the materialization of their natural character, not the fruit of long training.

Even now, in this way, there exist any number of temporary theatrical geniuses. However, to prevent such “geniuses” from being one- hit wonders, or “momentary flowers,” we must institutionalize a process that investigates how such high-level artistry may be sustained for an entire lifetime. In other words, how can we make a continuously blooming flower, a “flower that never withers”? It is the way actors confront this question that distinguishes the professional from the amateur. The professional has chosen to be an actor not as an occupation, but as a lifelong creative endeavor. This is the difference between technical actors, who function as artisans, and creative artisK, who live their lives constandy feeing the challenge of creating continuity.

We see people called actors wherever we go, but it is not so easy to encounter an actor who has maintained his creative existence over time. This is because the act of distinguishing this kind of actor takes time in and of itself. On top of this, many people assume that actors who have continued to perform for many years must all automatically be skillful. This is a misunderstanding, for into the question of continuity also comes the issue of quality. Continuity is simply one of the elements necessary in the development of the actors craft, and continuity alone will not make the actor an artist. The complete artist perceives this clearly, leading a life committed to developing certain qualities. Its not just a matter of maintaining a career, but of sustaining a creative quality in the work. This is the difference between the artisan and the artist.

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The Suzuki Method of Actor Training

One of my achievements as a theatre artist has been the creation of a training method for actors. The purpose of this method is to make the actor newly aware of the physical sensibilities that have atrophied in his or her everyday life, and to reveal how this debilitated state prevents him or her from eflfectively cozening the audience. As the training reinvigorates these dulled corporeal sensitivities, I introduce a vocal component that connects the voice to the body. While observing the various actor training methods existing in diverse regions of the globe, I discovered several that focused on the expressivity to be gained from moving the lower region of the body, and consequently I tried, in my training, to activate the physical sensibilities that lay at the basis of these movements. In doing so, I realized that creating continuity required an awareness of the invisible body, and that developing certain internal aspects of human physiology were essential to achieving this.

The human body has certain essential needs that must be met to support life. An infent can survive without any kind of body awareness, but it depends heavily on the help of others. Even though its heart beats automatically, it still needs food. For the infent to become independent, it must learn to consciously control the key physical functions required to achieve its daily needs, the most important of which are:

(1) energy production(2) breath calibration(3) center of gravity control

Since energy, oxygen and gravity cannot be seen with the naked eye, they do not receive a lot of attention in our daily life. However, difficulty with any of them compromises our ability to maintain health and participate in modern society. This is due, in part, to the interdependency of these three functions. The more energy the body

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produces, the more oxygen it needs, which in turn intensifies the breathing. When the breathing intensifies, it challenges the body’s balance, or center of gravity control. Training exists, then, not only to develop these capacities independently, but also to deepen their interrelation. The more we are able to fluidly expand the process of producing energy, taking in oxygen and controlling our center of gravity, the more variety of movement becomes available to us, which in turn increases the stability and sustainability of life. Essentially the same principle can be applied to acting onstage. Through disciplined, integrated development of these three functions as performance parameters, the body gains strength and agility, the voice acquires range and capacity and an awareness of the “other” grows. Such work develops the expressive potency needed to transmit the actor’s point of view. It follows, then, that the art of acting is founded on disciplines that deepen an awareness of these three crucial, interrelated, “invisible” phenomena.

Energy, breath and balance also form the basis for training in most sports, dance and marital arts. In the theatre, however, we have the additional challenge of nealing to communicate with language ... to speak. Keeping this in mind, I devised the training to develop the actor’s cozening ability through both the body and voice. Of course, the way this cozening manifests itself differs somewhat from culture to culture based on the language, but these fundamental parameters of energy, breath and balance form the basis of any physical and vocal work. My training, therefore, is not a forum for the actor to show off his or her abilities, but rather something that allows the actor, as a specialist on the use of the body and voice, to cultivate flexibility and sensitivity in identifying and playing with the myriad of sensations of being onstage. It could be described as a strategy for cozening the audience in an infinite variety of ways.

In my work, if the actor has not mastered the basic training, he or she won’t be capable of creating a high-quality performance. This is not simply a matter of technique, but of possessing a base level of concentration, imagination and capacity to perceive and manipulate physical sensibilities and action. Of course, my training alone

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will not automatically bring an actor to the top of his or her art. Ihis depends on whether the actor understands the training philosophy deeply enough to use it as a springboard into performance, and whether he or she possesses an actor’s spiritual disposition. In any case, without a foundation of actually experiencing my training and grasping the philosophy behind it, it is impossible to build a superior performance on my stage.

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THE GRAMMAR OF THE FEET

In my opinion, a cultured society is one in which the perceptive and expressive abilities of its people are cultivated through the use of their innate animal energy. Such animal energy fosters the sense of security and trust needed for healthy communication in human relationships and the communities they form. The distinguishing characteristics of an animal energy-based society essentially differ from those of a society sustained by non-animal energy, such as electricity, petroleum and nuclear power. In our age of globalization, most people would automatically consider the society reliant on non-animal enei^ to be the more civilized. For me, however, a civilized society is not necessarily a cultured one.

If we consider the origins of civilization, we can see that its rise was intrinsically tied to the bodily functions. Its development may even be interpreted as the gradual sensory expansion of the eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin. Inventions like the telescope and microscope, for example, arose from the human aspiration and endeavor

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to see more, radicalizing the sense of sight. Over time, the accumulation of such achievements has come to be called civilization.

Consequendy, when we analyze the kind of energy required to realize such aspirations, the issue of modernizadon inevitably surfaces. In fact, a criterion some sociologists in the United States apply to differentiate modernized from premodernized societies is the ratio of animal to non-animal energy employed in production processes. Animal energy here refers to the organic physical energy supplied by human beings, horses, oxen and the like; non-animal energy again refers to electricity, petroleum, nuclear power, etc. According to the theory, one way of determining a country’s level of modernization is to calculate the amount of non-animal energy it consumes. In many countries of the Near East and Africa, for example, the amount of non-animal energy consumed is very low compared with such countries as the United States and Japan, where non-animal energy predominates in virtually all production processes.

If we apply this criterion to the theatre, we notice that most contemporary stage productions are modernized and rely heavily on non-animal energy. Electricity powers the lighting, sound equipment, stage lifts and turntables, while the theatre building itself is the end product of various industrial activities powered by non-animal energy, from the laying of the concrete foundation to the creation of props and scenery.

Japanese Noh, on the other hand, survives as a form of premodern theatre that employs almost no non-animal energy. In the case of music, for example, most modern theatre utilizes digital equipment to electronically reproduce prerecorded or live sound through amplifiers and loudspeakers, whereas in Noh, the voices of the principle actors and the chorus, as well as the sound of the instruments played onstage, are projected directly to the audience. Noh costumes and masks are made by hand, and the stage itself is built according to premodern carpentry techniques. Although electric lights now illuminate the Noh stage (which I still object to—in the old days it was done with tapers), this is kept to a minimum and never resembles the elaborate, multicolored lighting designs of the modern theatre.

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In its essence, Noh is pervaded by the spirit of creating something purely out of human skill and effort—so much so that it can be thought of as an epitome of premodern theatre: an endeavor driven by animal energy.

In both Europe and Japan, the theatre has developed along with the times and thus, in an effort to increase its audience appeal, has employed non-animal energy in nearly every facet of production. Paradoxically, this shift to non-animal energy has caused considerable damage to the art form. Just as the eyes’ natural capacity to see has been diminished through the invention and use of the microscope, etc., modernization has severed our natural organs from our essential selves, entrusting an increasingly larger portion of their workload to non-animal energy. The automobile replaces the act of walking. The computer takes the place of directly seeing and hearing. In vitro fertilization eliminates the need for sexual contact. In truth, all innovations created for the sake of civilization’s progress are the material result of efforts to minimize the use of animal energy. As a consequence, the potential of the human body and its various functions has undergone a dramatic downsizing, weakening the communication between people that is based on animal energy. Regrettably, this trend has also taken its toll on the expressive skills of the actor.

To counter this debilitating modernization of the actor’s craft, I have strived to restore the wholeness of the human body in performance, not simply by creating variants of such forms as Noh and Kabuki, but by employing the universal virtues of these and other premodern traditions. By harnessing and developing these enduring virtues, we create an opportunity to reconsolidate our currendy dismembered physical faculties and revive the body’s perceptive and expressive capacity. Only by committing to do so can we ensure the flourishing of culture within civilization.

In my method of training actors, I focus on the lower body and especially feet, because I believe that consciousness of the body’s communication with the ground is a portal into a greater awareness of all the physical functions: a point of departure for theatrical per-

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formance. The way in which the feet are used is the basis of a stage performance. Even the movements of the arms and hands can only augment the feeling inherent in the body positions established by the feet. There are many cases in which the position of the feet determines even the strength and nuance of the actors voice. An actor can still perform without arms and hands, but to perform without

feet would be inconceivable.Noh has often been defined as the art of walking. The move

ments of the actor’s feet create the expressive environment. The basic use made of the feet in Noh consists of a shuffling motion. The actor walks by dragging the feet, turns around in a shuffle-like motion and strikes a rhythm. The upper parts of his body are practically immobile; even the movements of his hands are extremely limited. Whether the actor is standing still or in motion, his feet are the center of interest. These feet, encased in tabi (white bifurcated socks), provide one of the most profound pleasures of Noh, as they move from a position of repose forwards and backwards, left and right, up and down with their own independent rhythm. Such patterns of foot motion are possible because of the intimate relationship between the actor’s feet and the surface of the Noh stage. The very life of the art depends on the fixing and deepening of this relationship in order to render the expressiveness of foot movements all the more compelling. In feet, this kind of ambulatory art is involved in

all theatrical performance.Classical ballet, for example, is equally dependent on the feet, as

is the traditional Japanese Kabuki. In Kabuki (except in the domestic plays, where the characters often sit), much of the audiences pleasure comes from watching the actors’ foot movements, which are often more pronounced than in Noh. The hanamichi (the runway that connects the auditorium with the Kabuki stage) is particularly well suited to emphasize the art of the feet.

Since the coming of the modern theatre to Japan, however, the artistic use of foot movements has not continued to develop. This is too bad, because realism in the theatre should inspire a veritable treasure house of walking styles. Since it is commonly accepted that

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realism should attempt to faithftiUy reproduce onstage the surface manner of life, the art of walking has more or less been reduced to the simplest forms of naturalistic movement. Yet any movement on the stage is, by definition, a ftbrication. Since there is more room within realism for a variety of movements than in Noh or Kabuki, these various ambulatory possibilities should be exhibited in an artistic fashion. One reason the modern theatre is so tedious to watch, it seems to me, is because it has no feet.

Since Japan’s modern theatre attempts to take European drama and wed it theatrically to lifestyles of contemporary Japan, there is no room for the movements of bare or naked feet. Actors, because they must wear shoes to perform, have, in a manner of speaking, lost their feet.

When an actor puts on shoes, the movements of his feet are limited. Stamping, sliding, walking pigeon-toed, walking bowlegged— all of these are virtually denied him. When an actor does struggle to make such movements, the sinews in his ankle or his Achilles tendon will pain him, and his feet will develop blisters. Even in the West, specially designed footwear has been developed for the classical ballet which somewhat resembles the footwear used in the traditional Japanese theatre arts. Japanese tabi, which have served so long in that capacity, can still be put to good use on the stage today. We occasionally wear tabi in our everyday life, but they always suggest a certain formality. The modern theatre does nothing to promote the expressiveness of the feet; the feet are merely used as they are in ordinary life. In Noh, where ghosts serve as the protagonists, the art of the foot exists, but in the modern theatre, which purports to show living beings, there is none. How ironic, since in Japanese folklore the ghost is represented invariably as footless.

A performance begins when the actors feet touch the ground, or a wooden floor, and he first has the sensation of putting down roots; it begins in another sense when he lifts himself lightly from that spot. The actor composes himself on the basis of his sense of contact with the ground, by the way in which his body makes contact with the floor. The performer indeed proves with his feet that

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he is an actor. Of course, there are many ways in which the human body can make contact with the floor, but most of us, excepting small children, make contact with the lower part of the body, centering on the feet. The various pleasures that an actor feels as he comes in contact with the ground—and the growth in the richness of his bodily responses therein—constitute the first stage in his training as an actor.

In training the actors in my company, there is one exercise in which I have them stamp their feet in tempo to rhythmic music for a fixed period. Stamping may not be the most accurate term, for they loosen their pelvic area slighdy, then move themselves by striking the floor in a vehement motion. As the music finishes, they use up the last of their energy and fell to the floor. They lie flat, in a hush, as though they were dead. After a pause, the music begins again, this time gently. The actors rise in tune with this new atmosphere, each in his or her own fashion, and finally return to a fully vertical standing position. This exercise is based on motion and stillness, and the contrasting expulsion and containment of bodily force. By means of strengthening breath support, this exercise develops a concentrated

energy in the body.The essential element in the first musical portion of this train

ing exercise is the continuous pounding of the floor, using an even, unremitting strength v^thout loosening the upper part of the body. If the actor loses his concentration on his legs and loins and so misses the sense of being toughened or tempered, he will not be able to continue on to the end with a unified, settled energy, no matter how strong he may feel. What is more, if the actor does not have the determination to control any irregularities of breathing, then toward the end of the exercise his upper body will of necessity begin to tremble, and he will lose the rhythm. In either case, the energy produced as the feet strike the floor spreads into the upper body. I gsk that the actors strike the floor with all the energy possible; the energy that is not properly absorbed will rise upwards and cause the upper part of their bodies to tremble. In order to minimize such a transfer, the actor must learn to control and contain that energy in

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the pelvic region. Focusing on this central part of the body, he must learn to gauge continuously the relationship between the upper and lower halves, all the while continuing on with the stamping motion.

Of course, the idea that an actor can learn to control the apportionment of his energy, unifying it through his pelvic region, is hardly unique to my training exercises. All physical techniques employed for the stage surely involve such a principle. What I believe I have added, however, is the idea of stamping the foot—forcing the development of a special consciousness based on this striking of the ground. This concept arises from my conviction that an actors basic sense of his physicality comes from his feet.

In ordinary life, we have little consciousness of our feet. The body can stand of its own accord without any sense at all of the relationship of feet to earth; in stamping, we come to understand that the body establishes its relation to the ground through the feet, that the ground and the body are not two separate entities. We are a part of the ground. Our very beings will return to the earth when we die.

It is often said that the concept behind my exercises is somehow very Japanese, but I don’t believe this is so. Even the classical ballet dancer who attempts to leave the ground behind altogether principally senses an intimate connection with the earth. According to the Dutch scholar Gerhard Zacharias, in his 1964 book BalUtt: Gestalt und Wesen^ the most classic of ballet movements, the pirouette, is conceived of in the following terms:

The pirouette is a symbol of the strength required to press down the foot. The foot that appears in a dream is that organ of the body that touches the ground, expressing the connection between the body and the surface of the earth. When one thinks of what the pirouette symbolizes, it is clear that the idea of the knee represents what is connected to the underground, to the sensual—consider the etymology of genu (knee) and genus (sex). After all, the image of the knee for the Greeks did not suggest the worship of the gods on Mount Olympus; the knee was utilized to pay homage to the gods in the under-

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world. Sophocles has Oedipus, before he goes in death to the gods of the underworld, kneel and pray to the earth itself. . . in praying to the gods of the underworld, kneeling does not at all surest devotion or service, but is rather an expression of anachment to them. The pirouette, in the classical dance, represents (in contrast to the usual academic explanations) the manifestation of a dynamic harmony, an equilibrium between height and depth, sky and earth, weightlessness and weight.

The traditional Japanese performing arts share this balance between height and depth, sky and earth. In the Japanese case, however, the equilibrium, the source of strength, emanates in all directions from the pelvic area, which radiates energy into horizontal space. This is why, while the upper body moves as far as possible upwards, the lower body attempts to descend in a kind of countermovement. Thus the sense, established by the feet, of an intimate connection with the ground is all the more strengthened. The symbolic gesture of dragging the feet or of rhythmically stamping thereby reveals this sense of intimacy with the ground.

Japanese culture scholar Shinobu Orikuchi (1887-1953), in his study of the Japanese traditional arts, drew attention to a consistent desire to strike a rhythm with the feet; this practice on the stage doubtless derives from the powerful foot stamping originally used to magically ward off evil. If such is the case, the traditional playing space in the Japanese theatre can be defined in terms of the area it ran provide for such movements. Vestiges of this can be found in the ancient dances still performed in Noh called sanbaso, which include a kind of foot stamping designed to create a sense of peace and harmony as the performer moves around in a fixed space.

The series of movements I have designed, which range from falling down to standing up, begin with the rhythmical repetition of stamping motions, in which the body, centering on the pelvic area, is made firm; movements of the upper part of the body are designed to send a gende strength throughout the whole body. As the actor stands up, he moves like a puppet to the rhythm of the music. The

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exercise thus eradicates the ordinary, everyday sense of the body. Therefore, when the great majority of actors begin these exercises, the nuances in their movements disappear and they tend to move in a mechanical, constrained feshion. It has been my experience that American actors, involved as they are in naturalistic theatre, most often react this way. When they begin, they perform the footstamping movements with considerable strength, but they soon lose energy and begin to move in a ^^gue and distracted way. From this they conclude that my exercises are somehow "Japanese,” that Americans cannot perform them because their legs are, on the whole, longer than those of Japanese actors. When Americans grumble at the difficulties in performing these exercises, even some members of my troupe find themselves responding that American legs are too long. Yet there is absolutely no connection between these exercises and the length of an actors legs. Nor is it a question of bodily strength. The exercises are intended as a means to discover a self-awareness of the interior body, and the actors success in doing them confirms his ability to make that discovery. The actor learns to become conscious of the many layers of sensitivity within his own body. A Japanese actor has no special claim to success, or to developing those skills in his own body, any more than anyone else. The gesture of stamping on the ground, whether performed by Europeans or Japanese, gives the actor a sense of the strength inherent in his own body. It is a gesture that can lead to the creation of a fictional space, perhaps even a ritual space, in which the actors body can achieve a transformation from the personal to the universal.

The Shinto goddess Ame no Uzume no Mikoto, who danced on an overturned bucket in front of the Heavenly Rock Cave, stamped and pounded with her stave in a kind of incantatory manner. This is often considered to be the mythological genesis of kagura, the sacred Shinto dance. Orikuchi, in his Six Lectures on the History of Traditional Japanese Performing Arts {Nihon Geinoshi Rokkot 1991), says the following about the frmous dance (as recorded in the Kojiki and other repositories of ancient Japanese legend):

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This overturned bucket can be said to represent the earth; it serves as a symbol of the ground. To stamp resoundingly on the earth, to pound on it with a stave, and to cry out, indicates that the soul, which has been sleeping inside the earth, lying concealed within it, or kept inside, can now come forth. The soul can now be released to join the other gods who are dose beside.

The act of stamping and pounding not only signiHes pushing down on the enemy, suppressing him or driving him away, but suggests as well the calling forth of the energy of an object of worship: the taking of that energy into oneself and the bringing to ripeness of that life energy. Such gestures can drive away evil spirits and bring about magical results, permitting the good spirits to come into the body of the performer with a strength greater than that of the bad. The many stamping gestures in Kabuki and Noh doubtless derive from these kinds of physical sensations. The traditional roppo movement, literally to “stamp in the six directions,” can be interpreted to mean gesturing to the spirits, arousing their spiritual energy, confronting it and taking it into oneself. When the spirit has entered the one performing the gestures, that person in turn becomes brave and finds himself ready for deeds of strength and valor.

It is for these reasons that the classic Japanese dramas were often set in spots where such spirits were thought to dwell—the site of a burial, for example, or a raised grave mound. The construction of the Noh stage, even as it exists today, includes empty jars implanted underneath the floor; the bottom of the stage is hollowed out. The purpose of this is not only the artistic eflfect of having greater reverberations when the actors stamp their feet. These sounds can also be understood as a means to help in the calling forth of the spiritual energy of the place, a summoning of the ancestral spirits to come and possess the body of the performer in a kind of hallucination. The very echoes produced stand as proof of the existence, through physical sensation, of a mutual response between actor and spirit.

This sort of sensation is necessary for performers on the stage, even today. The illusion that the energy which gives strength to one’s

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own body can be received through the feet is altogether natural. It is our good fortune that Noh actors have continued to act on the basis of this notion up until today. The gravesite or mound resembles the inside of the womb of a mother who has given birth; the surrounding surfoce represents the mother herself So it follows that the performer s actions are based on the premise that he can transcend his individual self and perform, symbolically, for all mankind.

Zacharias writes:

In Kurt Sachs’s World of the Dancer he has written concerning a dance for abundant crops, that there was a tribe, now vanished, in Tasmania that possessed a secret device for bringing rain. They threw themselves down and rolled on the ground, beating with their hands and feet. With this gesture they imitated the lightning and thunder with their own bodies; by analogy, they sought it out. Or they leapt up high into the air, guiding the energy of nature to the earth and thereby confining it in the ground. This ancient ritual seems to have existed in older German dance as well.

When Moses left ^ypt, he struck his cane into the rock at God’s order and so found water. Forms of this ceremony of striking can be seen in the rituals of many culmres. The clapping of hands is one version, a gesture of worship widely observed. This striking can be seen as a gesture of giving birth, of the effort of pulling forth energy (the striking of a flint stone may suggest another analogy). In ballet, the concept of batte- ment conveys the same meaning. It brings about the acquisition, then the release, of psychological and bodily energy.

In the communality of gesture that exists on a level beyond the specifics of cultural diversity, the lower region of the body and the feet always seem to be the operating parts of the body, rather than the upper portions. The feet alone can stamp and strike the earth, which represents mans unique foundation and authority. The feet have provided, up until now, the ultimate means of connection between man and earth.

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Contemporary Japanese actors are required to play in a variety of styles (setting aside such forms as Noh and Kabuki, where methods of performance, determined long ago, involve a fixed repertoire). All kinds of stage language are employed, from dialogue reminiscent of Kabuki itself, to the kind of Japanese language used when the text is translated from other languages; from the most contemporary slang that mixes English with Japanese, to the language of the drama of ideas, to that used in popular culture; from dialogues to long monologues. And words are not the only element involved. In terms of movement, actors must take into account Japanese-style costumes as well as Western dress. They need to practice different kinds of motions, from the dancing needed for musicals to the absolute stillness required when sitting on tatami matting in Japanese style. A committed actor will try to master as broad a range of movements as possible. The task is truly a difficult one, since audiences naturally expect to witness a variety of skills on the stage. Then, too, as the style of stage language changes, the actors movements and his psychological consciousness must alter. For a performance to convey its full flavor to the audience, the proper relationship between the words spoken and the movements of the actor must remain firmly established.

If, as in the case of the Noh actors, the upper body is held straight and remains still while the actor s voice is pressed out from the abdomen to resonate through the body, the performer cannot manage the kind of stage language used by such avant-garde playwrights as Samuel Beckett or Eugene Ionesco, or by such contemporary Japanese playwrights as Juro Kara or Minoru Betsuyaku. The Noh actors body has been trained to produce a kind of chanted vocalization employing a clear, sonorous voice: a sound quite unsuitable for naturalistic stage dialogue.

Famous Noh actors perform only in Noh, without attempting other forms of theatre. Most modern stage performers, generally speaking, are not trained to the level of Noh or Kabuki actors. In fact, if a modern actor did receive some kind of fixed training for the modern stage, then he too would risk becoming a kind of

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Noh actor, a new kind of onnagata who could only perform circumscribed roles, limited to one style from within the whole possible range of contemporary theatre.

Whatever the level of his training, an actor must continue to sharpen his consciousness of both voice and body. In a sense, a contemporary performer ends up being as busy as a person in a supermarket. He may have to know the traditional vocal techniques used in Noh and Kabuki, as well as those used in Western popular or operatic music; he needs a knowledge of traditional Japanese dancing techniques, modern dance, informal styles of Noh dancing, even fencing. An actor cannot simply decide for himself what skills he needs. A look at the actor-training schools and studios in America as well as in Japan reveals the same diversity of coursework. It is as if training in all these areas needs to be available to prospective performing artists. But in my view, all this training should not simply be for the purpose of showing off an individual s talents as an actor. I see it more as a means of discovering the substratum that lies beneath the surface of these divergent styles.

Expression in the theatre does not merely consist of dance-like motions of the body. What makes the theatre theatrical involves all the variations of the body when speaking. I have attempted to examine closely all the postures used in a persons daily life, particularly when speaking. The words that we speak truly influence our physical situation, but there are a limited number of basic situations that can be observed in a finite number of combinations. The contemporary actors first duty is to objectify those bodily situations, determine the emotional context that words will create under each set of circumstances, and then be conscious of these relationships.

What, then, are the basic postures involved in the conduct of our daily lives? To simplify the description, the body positions can be divided into two categories, those in which the body is still and those in which the body is moving. Stillness fleaving aside sleeping, of course) can be further subdivided into three groups: standing, sitting in a chair and sitting on the floor. In a standing position, balance can be achieved on one leg, but usually one stands vertically on both legs.

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The sitting position varies depending on the way in which the legs are folded and the form of the chair, but one usually bends at the hips; as in standing, there is only one basic position. The most common position for a Japanese person is sitting on the floor, in its many variations. I have adapted the various divisions employed byTatsukichi Irisawa in his 1921 study Concerning the Sitting Habits of the Japanese'.

Sitting positions on the floor:

(a) seiza (sitting on heels, knees together, tops of feet flat on floor)

(b) wariza (like seiza^ but sitting on floor between separated heels)

(c) koza {agura\ (sitting with legs crossed/“Indian style”)(d) gakuza (knees spread apart, feet together pulled in, palms

of feet turned up)(e) hankafuza (legs crossed with feet half {ntertwined/“half

lotus”)(f) kekkafUza (legs crossed with feet fully intertwined/“full

lotus”)(g) kikyo \nageash{\ (knees and feet together, legs extended)(h) utahiza (like koza, but with one knee raised, sole of foot

on floor)(i) tatehiza (knees and feet together, legs bent, feet flat on

floor)(j) sonkyo (squatting, knees and feet together, heels o