Mitsuya Mori
The upper and the lower levels have a similar structure in the way they are
produced. For this reason, music is called an art form of “double
productions.”
Different musicians may play the same score differently, but it would
not be unreasonable to say that what the composer composes and what the
musician plays are almost the same. In a competition of musical composition,
the nominated works are performed in front of the judges. What the audience
finally perceives is supposed to be the same as what the composer originally
had in mind. The audience and the composer share the same artistic
experience. We can modify the diagram to the cyclic structure as follows:
However, unlike music, the second production does not repeat the first one
in reverse. A theater performance onstage is quite different from a drama on
paper, and what the spectator conceives is not at all the same as what the
dramatist had in mind. It used to be said that the dramatist imagines the
stage production as he writes, so that one can read in the drama—provided
it is a good one—every detail of the stage production. Obviously this is
wrong. Even the realist Ibsen would not possibly have imagined the way A
Doll’s House or Ghosts might be performed today. This is because a theater
production is a combination of two different aspects: drama and play. I have
detailed these aspects elsewhere (Mori, 1997), but it is primarily the play
aspect that makes the difference between what the dramatist writes on paper
and what the actor performs onstage.
If what the musician plays is fairly much the same as what the composer
composes, the above written diagram of the music structure could be as
simple as this:
Au(dience)
playing
A ——— C
space —> <— drama
Au
floor, the burning heads being thrust in the air. Hundreds of thousands of
people come to watch this performance, standing on the ground below, so
that sparks of fire fall upon them. This is truly a spectacular sight. While the
torches are burning on the veranda, a group of monks conducts a special
rite in a small room inside the Hall. They continue the rite all night long,
sometimes sitting on the floor, sometimes walking or jumping around an
altar, but all the time chanting prayers. At around three o’clock in the
morning, a monk brings another burning torch into this small room and hits
the wooden floor with full force. Sparks of fire spread out and monks jump
over them. This is an incredible performance, even more spectacular than
the performance outside. Only those who have obtained special permission
from the Temple are allowed to witness this rite from a side room. No women
are allowed. They must remain outside, but may watch through a grill. The
monks completely ignore the spectators, the rite being conducted first and
foremost for themselves. I cannot deny the great excitement I felt when I
saw the enactment of this rite. And yet I had no personal feeling toward the
monks, but rather an impression of a great panoramic picture, like an erupting
volcano or an awesome ocean wave. It was an event completely of another
world, so to speak, which we were peeping into; similar to a cinematic
experience rather than a theatrical one. No definite theatrical relationship
between the performers and the spectators was formed.
It was different in the case of the ritual that I once experienced in the
region of Kofu, in central Japan. The performance took place inside curtain
walls set up around the village shrine, so that the performance was totally
hidden from the spectators. Nevertheless, we, standing outside, clearly felt
related to those performers inside. I say “we” because I could sense the
festive atmosphere prevailing among us while waiting for the end of the
performance. This feeling, I assume, came from the fact that we had talked
with the village performers and had walked behind them to the shrine before
the performance. The whole process was a ritual, only a part of which was
the performance inside the curtain walls. So we were participating in the
ritual not only by having followed them to the shrine, but also by waiting
outside the curtain walls. It was odd indeed that we had a feeling of being
related to the performers whom we could not see—a kind of feeling one did
not have for the other performers whose spectacular action had made an
awesome impression. Although I did not share the belief of the village people
in their divine being, I at least could understand their belief. Herein lies the
crucial point of our relationship. Both I and the village people perceived
something existing outside our relationship, or better said, something that
Au(dience)
actor or one generation of actors after another, what is called kata in Japanese
is born. This is the case with the stylized movements in Kabuki and Noh.3
And the traditional puppet theater in Japan, today called Bunraku, is an
interesting example by which we can illustrate each element of this scheme—
A, p and C—not in theory, but in actuality.
Any puppet theater consists of three basic elements: the puppeteer, the
puppet, and the narrator. The puppeteer manipulates the puppet according
to the dialogue or narrative spoken by the narrator. In most puppet theaters
the puppeteer and the narrator are the same person who hides himself from
the audience so that they see only the puppet. But in Bunraku, all three
elements are in sight. The narrator chants the story with the shami-sen (three-
stringed instrument) musical accompaniment, played by a shami-sen player.
Both narrator and musician sit side by side on the small platform, stage-left.
A puppet is two-thirds the size of an actual human being, and is operated
by hand by three puppeteers; the main puppeteer handles the head and the
right hand, the second the left hand, and the third, the legs. Usually
puppeteers cover their heads and bodies in black so as not to distract the
audience’s attention from the puppets, but curiously enough, the main
puppeteer shows his face in important, dramatic scenes of the play.
These three elements of Bunraku—puppeteer, puppet and narrator (with
music player)—correspond to the above-schematized three structural
elements of acting, A, p and C, respectively. This rare case of Bunraku reveals
that C cannot be a theatrical element without being bodily expressed by p,
and that p could not be theatrical p, no matter how stylized it may be, without
being framed by C. But the most interesting thing to see is that A and p are
indeed two separate entities in acting. The Audience can see p without paying
attention to A, or even both A and p at the same time but separately. The
audience can see all the structural elements of theater performance
independently. In this respect Bunraku manifests the most basic structural
characteristic of theater performance.
Of course this manifestation is not possible in an ordinary theater. But
what is really revealing in Bunraku for the present argument is the fact that
A does not play C in the sense that A’s movements represent C to Au. Au
watches p, or A and p together, but C is given independently from a different
side. In Bunraku, what the narrator chants is not only the dialogue of the
characters but the whole narrative story. It can be appreciated as a free-
standing form of literature. Herein lies a key to the everlasting question
concerning acting: is it the actor or the character that the audience is watching
on the stage?
Actor/Character
Our perceptive organs can perceive only one object at a time, never two
or more. It is not possible for us to watch both the actor and the character at
the same time. Some think that we watch them alternately. But this is absurd,
for then the character is split into pieces, and each member of the audience
may have entirely different portions of the character. Some also think that
the actor is a real person and the character an imaginary one, so that both
are compatible. But real or imaginary, we cannot perceive two objects at the
same time. What is wrong about the above-asked question is the
presupposition that character is a “person,” real or imaginary. For in fact, a
character is not a person but a conception, which is formed in the audience’s
mind.
When a person appears on the stage, we notice him, of course, but do
not know if he is an actor playing a character or not. He may be the man we
call Hamlet, but he may turn out to be the man who is going to apologize for
the delay of the performance. Even a man who we suppose is playing Hamlet
can take off his pretence at any moment and come back to himself as an
actor. This means that we cannot be sure of having a complete character
until the final curtain falls. We have a character only when the play ends.
But when the play ends, the character is gone. He remains only in our minds,
as a conception. Therefore, we may say that, watching the movements of the
actor and hearing his lines, we build up the conception of the character little
by little. Sometimes he may surprise us by an action, which his previous
behavior had not led us to expect from him, but we adjust our hitherto built-
up character to that new behavior and amend the conception accordingly.
No matter how much his behavior confuses us at a certain moment in the
play, we get a total conception of the character at the end. If we do not, we
feel that the character is incomprehensible.
Although everything in theater is pretense, a pretense that the audience
is well aware of all the time, the audience can believe in the character all the
same. This belief is supported by the fact that a man on the stage is a real
human being, which is not the case in cinema or the novel. So, coming back
to the question of actor-character confusion, the audience’s illusion of
character is based on the reality of the actor’s being. And if Character is a
conception that we complete only at the end of the play, it is to be understood
in the genuine sense of the word “character”—ethos in Greek.
Aristotle put the primary importance on mythos rather than ethos, in his
analysis of Greek tragedy in the Poetics. Mythos, usually rendered into English
as plot, is a series of actions. Hence his definition: “Tragedy is a representation
of an action.” But we humans have the amazing ability to discern the plot of
a play that consists only of dialogues. In a theater, we hear only actors’ lines,
with no explanations by the author or any one else, but we can still discern
the story of the play as if it were narrated. This ability is obviously related to
our ability to understand language. In the same way that we conceive the
meaning of a sentence in a linear sequence of words, we weave the texture
of the story little by little as we see actions going on. The story grows bigger
and bigger from the series of small stories within each scene, until we get
the whole story—the plot of the play—at the final curtain.
If the series of actions does not form a plot, everything we see is on the
level of bare reality, and there is no formation of character, either. If one
were to diagram the formation of both character and plot, they would be the
same, since character and plot are actually one and the same thing. A
character cannot stand alone, but can exist only in relation to other
characters.4 That a character is complete at the end of the play means that all
the relationships between characters are completed, which is nothing but
the plot of the play. We make up a character, little by little, in our minds, as
we gradually make up the plot. Here arises the question of Drama. But before
pursuing this question, I would like to take a couple of examples to illustrate
how reality and fictionality intersect on the stage.
concentrating greatly, the actor on the timing of his movements and the
musician on the beating of the drum. The fictional plane of the play
disappears for several minutes of this scene, and the audience senses both
players existing on the plane of reality.
A sudden stepping out of the fictional world happens more often in
Kabuki, and in a more festive mood. The typical one is koh-joh, a scene where
actors on stage pay the audience ceremonial greetings on the occasion of the
succession of a big actor’s name by a junior one.5 A koh-joh scene sometimes
takes place in the middle of the play; that is to say, all the actors on the stage
at the moment, who are usually the young one’s family and relatives, stop
acting all of a sudden and sit in a horizontal line on the stage to greet the
audience one by one. After the greetings are finished, they resume acting
and the play continues. It is even more obvious here than in ran-byoshi of
Noh, that we see actors in reality rather than characters in fiction.
However, if, as we have discussed, character is not a person but a
conception that the audience conceives in the course of the performance,
and if character is in fact the same as the plot, these scenes of Noh and
Kabuki, which seem to be carried out on the plane of reality in the middle of
the play, should also be included in the conception of character and plot.
Indeed, in these scenes actors do not change their costumes, and their
actions—stampings or greetings—are still very stylized. They are definitely
in kata. Therefore, the plane of reality that suddenly manifests itself in these
scenes is not everyday reality, but reality in fiction, one may say. It is a
theatrical device to make the audience realize that in theater, reality and
fiction are interwoven in a complicated fashion. And it is at this moment
that the audiences of Noh and Kabuki have the feeling of utmost theatricality
(engeki-sei), a feeling that we rarely get from any other art form.6
Drama
Audience builds up Character, which is identical to Plot. This
identification of Character and Plot forms Drama. Drama here is not the
drama the playwright writes. In my definition, Plot and Drama are the same
as Story, but Drama is an expression of a view of life, while Plot is a series of
actions. Drama emerges from Plot and yet is a larger world than Plot. We
can get a plot out of what the playwright writes (what a playwright writes
is also a series of dialogues, and the reader composes the plot of the play in
the same way that the audience does it from the lines spoken by the actors),
but Drama must be formed in theater—that is, from actual actions on the
stage.
sense of history, which the Christian tradition clearly holds. In the Kamakura
Era, the period preceding the formation of Noh, new schools of Japanese
Buddhism emerged one after another. One of them was Japanese Zen, under
the influence of which Zeami was culturally educated. This may have
something to do with the above-stated characteristic of Noh drama.
When new forms of theater emerged around 1600 as Kabuki and
Nin’gyo-joruri (the original name of Bunraku), they did not have a pure
drama form, either. To be more precise, Kabuki did develop a drama form
of dialogue during its early stage, but in time it came under the dominance
of the Puppet Theater and adapted the puppet drama form to human actors;
actors play in part according to the narrative chanting. Most of the famous
Kabuki plays in the present repertories are of this type. Kabuki, though closest
to Western theater among the traditional theaters, acquired a pure drama
form in dialogue only in the second half of the 18th century. Before long,
however, it succumbed to the temptation of performing only some scenes
extracted from a long play, which originally had been performed from dawn
to twilight. Bunraku, too, follows this custom today.
Kabuki’s Plot, like Noh’s, is not identical with Character, but is composed
of dialogue and narrative (stage directions). In a sense, the story has been
given to the Audience beforehand. Most audiences know the play; if you do
not know the story of the play, you do not understand the scene. The primary
enjoyment results from the appreciation of the acting. And yet, just as the
Audience of Noh conceives a larger world beyond the shite, the Audience of
Kabuki appreciates the manifestation of a long tradition in the acting styles.
This larger world, Drama, keeps the Audience’s interest within the realm of
the Actor, rather than having it dispersed into mere interest in the Player.
A —— C, R(ole)
Au
Note that Role or kata is nevertheless on the plane of abstraction, though
based on the level of everyday life. Different young men have different
patterns of behavior, but a certain typical pattern is abstracted from them
and called the role of the handsome young man. Character and Role are two
sides of a coin, a conception; they are not inseparable in actuality.
repertories for an evening consist of three or four famous scenes taken from
long plays. When children are playing Father and Mother, it is of this type,
too; the important thing is being Father or Mother and not the story that
they play.
C is split into C and R in the new diagram. But this is nothing peculiar.
A and Au also have double faces. As was mentioned before, A contains a
“Player” aspect in itself and Au is endorsed by “Spectator.” So, the triangle
structure should be like this:
Au(dience), S(pectator)
The double faces of each corner element are inseparable, but the one
stands on the plane of fictionality and the other more on the side of reality.
Apparently Actor is related to Audience, which composes C, but Player is
seen by Spectator as a person who plays Role. The triangle of three pairs is
in fact two triangles, (a) and (b):
(a) (b)
P(layer) ———— R(ole) A(ctor) —— C(haracter)
S(pectator) Au(dience)
To endorse the element of R in triangle (a), (a) needs (b), and (b) needs
(a) to assure A’s performative function. One may say that triangle (a) is a
triadic relationship—that is, we must look at the triangle from each corner
element, while triangle (b) is a tri-linear relationship—that is, we must look
at the triangle from each line between the corners. The ran-byoshi or koh-joh
scene seems to put more emphasis on (a) than (b) and makes the Player
aspect come forward because the fictional level is stripped away in these
scenes. But the Audience is never lost, for in the koh-joh scene in Kabuki, the
actors are directly addressing the Audience, and in the ran-bryoshi of Dojoji
everything is meant for the Audience. Noh actors look absolutely indifferent
to the audience when performing, but the goal of Noh is the satisfaction of
the audience, which Zeami called “making hana (flower) bloom.”
Being aware of the double triangle schemes of theater structure, we
may be able to clear away confusions that sometimes occur in theater
performances. When the Actor element is supposed to be emphasized, it
may, in fact, be the Player aspect that comes forth because of the lack of
Character. Or, when the Actor attempts to emphasize Plot, the emphasis
may actually be on Role, not on Character at all. New experimental theaters
are often entangled in two kinds of triangle relationship—the triadic and
the tri-linear—without being conscious of it.
Theatricality
Now we finally come to our main issue, theatricality. Theatricality is by
definition “being theater-like.” If theater is conceptually based on the
structural relationship between A-C-Au, it is the physical relationship of the
above-diagramed (a) that concretizes the conceptual (b) into an actual or
physical event, which is truly what we call theater. In short, it is the (a)
triangle that makes a performance of the (b) triangle. However, if the aspect
of (a) is too much in front, theater tends to be broken because of the loss of
fictionality. The less apparent the (a) is in a performance, the more we believe
in the plot in the (b), and it may be praised as a good theater of realism.
It seems that theatricality emerges when the (a) breaks into, and yet
does not destroy, the (b), that is, the (a) and the (b) are combined in the
stylized performance, which actually stands on the edge of ficitionality. A
spectacular scene or an acrobatic performance in theater, for example, gives
us a feeling of theatricality because of its manifestation of the (a) in the realm
of style, which actually is the (b).7 If traditional Japanese theater appears
rich in theatricality, it is because Japanese theater essentially appreciates the
aspect of (a) in style, as in the case of ran-byoshi in the Noh play, Dojoji, or the
koh-joh scene of Kabuki, discussed above.
This is the characteristic of what we call geinoh in Japanese, which I
mentioned in the beginning of this essay.
Geinoh or geinoh-jin (geinoh people) has in some contexts a pejorative
sense because it implies vulgarity or low artistic status. Modern theater would
refuse to be called geinoh. Geinoh covers traditional Japanese music
performances but never Western music (whose reviews in daily newspapers
usually appear in the culture section rather than geinoh section).
However, geinoh is often used in scholarly research works as a concept
to cover all the theatrical genres and performative activities, including the
tea ceremony and Sumo wrestling.8 Following the structural analysis we
have developed so far, we may say that geinoh includes every kind of
performance that contains the above schematized triangular structure of (a),
but that it needs even the slightest hint of the triangle of (b). Rituals have a
definite tendency to base themselves mainly on (a). But if they give us an
impression of geinoh, they always have certain aspects of (b). In the case of
the ritual performance, which was executed inside the curtain walls and out
of sight, we felt a definite relation to the performers, which means that we
were transformed from mere Spectator to Audience by something outside
us that we shared with the village people. This ritual performance definitely
falls into the category of geinoh. The rite in the Nigatsu-do Hall of the Todaiji-
Temple, on the other hand, refuses to let us be Audience. True, the monks in
the small room are no longer ordinary monks. They are playing sacred roles
that are quite different from their everyday roles. Nonetheless, they do not
go further to be totally characterized as Actor, and the rite remains on the
border between a geinoh and a purely religious rite.
Conventional theaters that hold a clear structural relationship of (b)
may dislike being classified as geinoh. But since triangle (b) could not stand
for a theatrical performance without (a), they, too, are categorized as geinoh.
Thus, geinoh requires: (1) the triangular structural relationship of (a),
Player-Role-Spectator, but (2) that at least one of these elements be lifted up
to the plane of the fictional relationship of triangle (b), Actor-Character-
Audience. Both traditional Japanese performances and Western experimental
ones tend to step out of the fictional plane of (b), but while the former still
keep the triangular structure with regards to the aspect of Audience, the
latter seem to put more emphasis on Actor in their own structure. Both share
the same intersection of reality and fictionality. Therefore, these Western
experimental performances give us a definite impression of being in the
realm of the geinoh even if they are rigorously trying to get rid of the
traditional structure of theater.
Thus, geinoh and theatricality go together, side by side. And whenever
the Western concept of “theater” suffers from narrowness and ambiguity,
the term geinoh may be recommended. Adopting this term, it will be possible
to denote the broader implication of theatricality as well as to make
distinctions between different kinds of performance, theatrical and non-
theatrical. Perhaps we need a new discipline of geinoh studies in order to
further explore the issue of theatricality.
Seijo University, Tokyo
Notes
1. Sino-Japanese characters for engeki did exist early in the 19th century, but labeled not as
engeki but as kyogen (see, Mori 2001).
2. The meaning of geinoh, which originally came from Chinese usage, first meant “skill,”
but went through a considerable degree of change from the 10th to 14th centuries (see
Moriya, 1981).
3. Kata is described in the New Kabuki Encyclopedia as follows: “Kata essentially are fixed
forms or patterns of performance and, while the term most commonly refers to acting,
may be found in all production elements, such as the arrangement of a program, of
scenes, and the traditions of scenery, props, wigs, makeup, music, and costumes.[...] A
kata may be said to have been born when an actor created an appropriate interpretation
of the spirit of a play and his role in it (in terms of movement, speech, appearance, and
so on) and this interpretation was transmitted as a convention to the next generation of
actors...” (Leiter, 289)
However, in my opinion, kata in Kabuki is more a pattern, while kata in Noh is
more form, or Form in the sense close to the Platonic idea. Kata as pattern can be changed,
as we see in the history of Kabuki, but kata of Form cannot, since Noh will no longer be
Noh if its kata is changed (See Mori, 1997, II).
4 Bert O. States holds a similar view of character: “All characters in a play are nested
together in ‘dynamical communion,’ or in what we might call a reciprocating balance of
nature: every character ‘contains in itself’ the cause of actions or determinations, in
other characters and the effects of their causality… Hamlet is made of Gertrude and
Claudius, Osric and Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, et cetera and vice versa.
Seen from the characterological viewpoint, Hamlet is a collection of relationships”(146-
48).
5. A Kabuki critic and scholar, Tamotsu Watanabe, claims that the koh-joh scene presents
the essence of Kabuki in various aspects (see Watanabe, 1989).
6. The intersection of reality and ficitionality is most clearly seen in the convention of
Kabuki’s onnagata, a female impersonator. As is well known, this convention was
practiced in Elizabethan theater, too. But the comparison of both cases would show the
differences of theatrical sensibility between the East and the West. To take examples
from Shakespearean comedies, Viola and Rosalind disguised as men do not conceal
their true selves from the audience, and the audience knows everything and enjoys the
various layers of philosophical implications in their ironic situations. In contrast, Kabuki’s
disguise hides the true self of the character not only from other characters in the play
but also from the audience, so that the revelation of the real self is a surprise for both. A
typical example is the Hamamatsu-ya scene in the play Benten the Thief. The thief is a
handsome young man and played by an actor who can be an onnagata. When he appears
on the stage, disguised as a young princess, the audience naturally takes him as an
onnagata—that is, a genuine princess who is not disguised. He even uses some theatrical
gimmicks to maintain that illusion with the audience. It is in the climactic scene that he
is detected as a man. He suddenly takes off his kimono and identifies himself with a
long and melodiously narrated monologue.
7. This characteristic of theatricality in theater will become clear when we consider cinema.
Cinema has, on the surface, a similar structural relationship between actor, character
and audience. In a movie house an audience is watching an actor playing a character,
but on the screen. The essential difference between theater and cinema is often expressed
by the phrase, “the theater audience confronts a real person on the stage while the
cinema audience watches only a shadow of a person on the screen.” Structurally speaking,
this means that cinema is based solely on the conceptual relationship of (b), not at all on
the physical one of (a), though this may sound the other way round at first. A movie
actor looks just like himself on the screen, that is, the same as in his actual life. But this
is so because there is no gap between Actor and Player. If what we are watching must be
either a real person or a fictional character, it must be a character, for otherwise we
could not enjoy the fictional world there. When we see Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet
on the stage, we never imagine that Hamlet actually looks like Olivier. But when he is
playing Hamlet on the screen, Hamlet is no one but he. This is another way of saying
that cinema is totally realistic. Therefore, a movie, even a spectacular type, does not
give us a feeling of theatricality. Anything on the screen does not appear artificial (not
theatrical in every sense of the word) to our eyes; if it does, it must be a miserable
failure.
8. It may be difficult to imagine that Sumo wrestling was in the old days regarded as
geinoh. But it was geinoh not because it was something like today’s pro-wrestling—a
kind of show entertainment—but because it was a performing competition dedicated
to divine beings. If this sounds odd to us today, it is because we have lost the ability to
sense the transformation of Sumo elements to those of triangle (b). In contrast, the tea
ceremony gives us a clear feeling of geinoh. Here Player and Spectator easily transform
themselves to Actor and Audience. Despite the fact that no shadow of Character appears
in the performance, the feeling for a larger world clearly emerges. Actor and Audience
constantly exchange their roles during the performance, and yet the host is the host and
the guests are the guests; the triangle structure remains.
Works Cited
Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. London: MacGibbon & Kee Ltd., 1968.
Carlson, Marvin. Places of Performance: the Semiotics of Theater Architecture. Ithaca & London:
Cornell University Press, 1989.
Leiter, Samuel L. New Kabuki Encyclopedia, a Revised Adaptation of Kabuki Jiten. Westport,
Connecticut & London: Greenwood Press, 1997.
Mori, Mitsuya, “Thinking and Feeling.” In Stanca Scholz-Cionca & Samuel L. Leiter (eds),
Japanese Theater & the International Stage. Leiden, Boston & Köln: Brill, 2001.
——. “Noh, Kabuki and Western Theater: An Attempt at Schematizing Acting Styles.”
Theater Research International, Spring Supplement, Oxford University Press, 1997.
——. “Koten-geki to gendai-geki (Classical and Modern Theater).” Iwanami Koza, Kabuki,