TheatreWorks
appears to be heading in a new and productive direction lately. With
its emphasis on solo performance and a determined focus on a single
cultural institution, Geisha comes off as the most thoughtful
and poignant work of intercultural theatre piece I've seen from the
company - and, mark you, I've been watching their progress since the
days of their first forays into combining traditional and contemporary
performing arts with the launch of the Flying Circus Project and Lear.
The Flying Circus Project, TheatreWorks' continuing research and development
project exploring Asian collaboration, places an incredible amount of
faith in the democratic spirit. It proposes that different global performance
traditions can encounter and influence each other without canceling
each other out. The productions that spring from this approach look
great onstage - hence the oohs and ahs as kudiyattum artists and kagok
singers share the stage in Desdemona,
or Liyuan opera divas chastise khon dancers in The
Global Soul. But the reality is that it's very difficult for
the preserver of a classical tradition to allow herself to be influenced.
Moreover, there's a disturbing power differential that occurs when contemporary
arts practitioners serve as cultural interpreters. In Sandakan
Threnody, Singaporean and Australian performance artists pretty
much cut the turf away from the feet of kabuki performer Gojo Masanosuke,
dominating the conversation with their more lively action. This runs
against every Confucian grain in my body - how dare we, as artists of
an anything-goes age, steal the spotlight from a veteran who has honed
his craft for decades in a rigidly structured classical discipline?
Geisha solves both these problems by downsizing itself to
a total of three performers - Masanosuke-san again, dancing classical
female roles, Karen Kandel from New York as our English-speaking cultural
go-between, and the shamisen player and miyo-singer Kineya Katsumatsu.
All three of these artistes thus get an ample share of solo time, showcased
against the white cube of a minimalist set. The brain is thus forced
to shift from the critical/conceptual context of contemporary theatre
to an antique one, where emotion and beauty are strictly ritualised.
Furthermore, the play's specific focus on the geisha allows for an
in-depth, investigative study of this role, especially its place in
the modern world. The text of the play comes not only from the folk
songs that Katsumatsu intones, but from a patchwork of ethnographic
transcripts from maikos (apprentice geishas), retired geishas, patrons,
wives of patrons, wig- and kimono-makers and teahouse owners - but,
notably, never the geisha themselves. When the geisha's voice is presented,
it is only through imaginative filters - in reported speech, in monologues
from films or bunraku dramas about geisha. None of the three performers
- two Japanese men and an African-American woman - own the definitive
body of the Asian woman upon which the image of the geisha is ideally
mapped. The identity of the geisha is thus constantly deferred, defined
as a white void in the middle of a carefully drawn border that describes
her social environment, the eye at the centre of the storm.
It's a crucial stroke that there's this central silence about the
geisha within a play that purports to describe them. The world has lately
had geishamania, what with Zhang Ziyi doing ethnic drag in Memoirs
and all of us making jokes about going to okiyas to bid for each other's
mizuages. The image of the geisha, the height of the Asian exotic, becomes
pure kitsch, especially absurd to we who live in an urban Asia where
her aesthetic is completely foreign. We dismiss the geisha as ridiculous,
assuming that we know what she is. By hiding the voices of the woman
herself, Geisha denies us the authority to say we know who she is.
It's also essential here that Kandel does not hide her own cultural
background when performing her roles - she lengthens the vowels in Japanese
words as only an American will, even putting on a ghetto accent when
playing a pimp who agrees to sell a geisha's "mee-zoo-ah-gay", because
even though prostitution is illegal and her hymen is long gone, in the
end, all they're really selling is dreams. One never loses sight of
her role as performer - an especially jarring experience when she plays
the parts of maikos, but crucial to her later roles playing people definitively
outside the geisha community, including a loud Western man who jokes
that he'd trust these girls with his life, but also, intriguingly, two
Japanese women. In a bleached Afro wig and a khaki house dress, Kandel
played both a housewife struggling to accept her husband's patronage
of geishas and the legendary "maniac maiko", who danced on tables during
her training and set up a geisha-style bar in Germany upon her expulsion,
making good business doing slipshod versions of the formal geisha dances.
Both roles served to illustrate how Japanese women themselves find geisha
profoundly anachronistic. Gender and race alone do not a geisha make:
her identity is almost universally foreign.
Certainly, with its mix of traditional dance and anthropologists'
notes, Geisha tended to maintain a certain emotional distance from the
audience, even when characters expressed their sorrow at the fading
away of their heritage. Yet this was still far more productive than
the superficial spread of responses to Japanese mistreatment of POWs
in Sandakan Threnody - we felt immersed and invested in a particular
issue that is relevant to people living in our time with lives not so
different from our own.
At the show's end, by simply playing the sound of stamping feet, the
audience was prompted to remember an earlier line from the play. This
described how the stamping in geisha dance recalls the days before instrumentation,
when performers had to make their own music. The realisation of this
motif - forgotten music, preserved by echoes - created a heartbreakingly
beautiful moment, the like of which I've never experienced before at
a Flying Circus production. It is that which was the proof of the play's
power: its ability to truly touch me.
In terms of the play's shortcomings, I'm not entirely comfortable with
how Kandel was costumed in a succession of bizarre garments and wigs
for her different scenes. Certainly, her magnificent white dress at
the opening, which covered the floor, was a self-justifying spectacle,
but later scraps and pieces seemed to have been salvaged from a Harajuku
remainders bin. One multiple-piece kimono costume even included a turban
- perhaps to build a sad pastiche of Masanosuke's own graceful succession
of dresses, but more, I felt, to be strange for the sake of strangeness.
But Geisha is saved by its strong focus. The sensory overload
of previous multidisciplinary pieces tended to turn them into hybrids
of the academic essay and the variety show. I'm hoping that Ong hasn't
abandoned his hopes of reconciling disparate Asian traditions, though
- there is surely something to be learned from marrying different cultures
from outside the mainstream, before they too become forgotten musics.
But in the meantime, one can say with conviction that the simpler strategy
of Geisha is effective. Poised between past and present, with almost
equal weight distributed amongst its performers, and above all, intimately
concerned with its subject matter, the play emerges as a work that is
balanced, beautiful and moving. |
"Intimately concerned with its subject matter, the play emerges
as a work that is balanced, beautiful and moving"
Credits
Director: Ong Keng Sen
Composer: Toru Yamanaka
Text: Robin Loon
Stage Manager: Kathryn Hindley
Producer: Tay Tong
Costume Design: Mistushi Yanaihara
Lighting Design Scott Zielinski
Technical Manager: Jim Larkin
Translator: Sumida Michiyo
Production Coordinator: Nora Lim
Collaborator-Performers: Karen Kandel, Gojo Masanosuke,
and Kineya Katsumatsu
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