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- Convenor:
-
Roberta Strippoli
(University of Napoli L'Orientale)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Roberta Strippoli
(University of Napoli L'Orientale)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Performing Arts
- Location:
- Lokaal 5.50
- Sessions:
- Friday 18 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
Noh theater remembers and makes sense of war in different ways and historical moments. Through the examination of three plays, traditional and contemporary, this panel explores the role that noh has in offering solace from the trauma deriving from violence and fostering hope for a peaceful future.
Long Abstract:
War and its consequences are a common topic in noh theater. At the same time, noh, possibly more than other performing arts, had a strong role in offering solace from the trauma deriving from violence and creating a sense of shared identity in difficult times. More generally, noh provided ways to learn from the past and better understand the present by enacting past trauma on a stage. This is true for all historical contexts, from the highly militarized culture of late-medieval Japan, when noh flourished, through postwar and contemporary Japanese society, in which traditional plays are staged to commemorate cultural loss and new plays reliant on the traditional idiom of noh are created to address specific modern traumas.
The three papers of this panel explore how noh remembers and makes sense of war in different ways and historical moments. The first paper examines the shinsaku (new composition) noh play Genbakuki written by Tada Tomio to mark the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In this play, war becomes the common enemy against which humanity, no longer divided into conflicting armies, must ultimately struggle in the name of life and peace. The second, on the celebrated Ohara gokō, addresses the complex relationship between memorial and placation and the role of survivors who must navigate the devastating loss of loved ones while also performing acts of communal healing. The third paper looks at the play centered on Tomoe, the famous woman warrior, and examines how, through noh, new legends and traditions are created, and monuments (such as temples and graves) built to honor and pray for the dead, but also to receive protection from them and to foster a sense of shared local identity.
All three noh plays give great importance to remembering what happened in the war, entrusting the characters and the audience with that memory and with the task of consoling the souls of the deceased and praying for their rebirth, and in creating a dynamic reminder of a past that must not repeat itself, a function very specifically explored in Genbakuki.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 18 August, 2023, -Roberta Strippoli (University of Napoli L'Orientale)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the connections between the noh Tomoe and the Buddhist temple Gichūji in Shiga Prefecture, suggesting that they are complementary ways of remembering the events and mourning the dead of the Genpei War (1180–1185).
Paper long abstract:
Characters in the Heike monogatari generally belong to one of two groups: men, who fight and die, and women, who survive, remember, make sense of history, and pray for the dead. In the story of Tomoe we find the two sets of functions combined in the same character. She is an accomplished warrior at the service of Kiso Yoshinaka (1154–1184), but also a woman who survives the Genpei War to fulfil the task of retelling what happened in Kiso’s last battle and, by becoming a nun, pray for his rebirth.
The noh Tomoe (a fourteenth century play by an unknown author) situates the heroine, or better, her spirit, in the Awazu Plain in Omi (today’s Shiga Prefecture), the place where Kiso lost his life after ordering her to leave the battlefield. In the noh, Tomoe’s ghost appears to a monk traveling in the area and informs him that her lord is now venerated, in a syncretic way, as a local kami or buddha, and encourages the monk to read sutras for him.
In Ōtsu, the area in which both Kiso’s last battle and the events narrated in the noh supposedly happened, there is a temple called Gichūji. Its funding or revival in the late Muromachi period is possibly connected with the popularity of the noh Tomoe, which appears in the repertory of all five schools. According to legends related to this temple, a beautiful nun, later identified as Tomoe, set up a hermitage near Yoshinaka’s gravesite and held memorial services for him. The temple subsequently fell into disrepair and was rebuilt in the Edo period, becoming one of the poet Matsuo Bashō’s favorite places.
This paper explores the connections between noh and cultural heritage such as temples and graves, showing how they are complementary ways of remembering, mourning, and, in the case of cultural heritage, affirming local identity.
Elizabeth Oyler (University of Pittsburgh)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation addresses the way motifs of movement and stasis are used in the noh Ohara gokō, a play explicitly addressing the losses caused by the Genpei War. I consider the stasis of the main character as she narrates movement through charged spaces (the capital, Dan-no-ura, and Jakkoin).
Paper long abstract:
Ohara gokō is a masterpiece of the noh repertoire, esteemed for the lyricism of its text and the relative stillness with which that text is staged. Based on the “Initiates’ Scroll” (Kanjō no maki 灌頂巻), of the Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari 平家物語), Ohara gokō enacts a visit between Go-Shirakawa, the retired emperor, and Kenreimon’in, widow of his son (Emperor Takakura) and the now-tonsured bereft survivor of the Heike clan recently defeated in the Genpei War. The visit elicits from Kenreimon’in a recollection her clan’s fate (and her life’s journey) in terms of transmigration through the Six Realms of Buddhist existence.
Ohara gokō is noted for its quietude. Although most noh end with a final dance, it has none, as that would be beneath the dignity of the main character, a tonsured former empress. The center of the play is her retelling of her life, which reenacts it in only the most cerebral sense, but nevertheless nods to the form of a mugen (ghost) noh. The stillness of the piece moreover embraces a variety of imagined movement which takes the audience from Kenreimon’in’s retreat at Jakkōin to the capital, to the extremities of the realm, and through the Six Realms.
This presentation addresses the complexity of this play which both adheres to and shifts genre expectations in its treatment of movement and memory. I focus specifically on the staging of the play, including stage directions and the use of set pieces and props. I give special attention to Kenreimon’in’s act of reordering the troubled past, including her clan’s expulsion from the capital and destruction at the edge of the realm. What is the role played by invisible and imaginary spaces, and movement from, to, and through them, in a play focused on loss and focalized through the grieving former empress ensconced in her retreat? To what degree does this recasting of the experience of the Genpei War – one framed in the Tale of the Heike as exile – as Buddhist pilgrimage restore order and contain both aching personal loss and significant political upheaval?
Claudia Iazzetta (University of Napoli L'Orientale)
Paper short abstract:
This paper, through character and language analysis, explores how in the contemporary noh play Genbakuki (Anniversary of the Bomb) the playwright and immunologist Tada Tomio conveys the horror experienced by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to the classical structure of noh.
Paper long abstract:
When the immunologist and playwright Tada Tomio visited the Hiroshima Peace Museum and Memorial Park for the first time in 1995, he was shocked by the horrendous and frightening consequences that the bomb blast had unleashed. Immediately he thought that all that horror had to be witnessed and noh theatre offered him the right dimension and language to fulfil his purpose. Genbakuki, staged for the first time in 2005, is the result of his effort to reconcile the rawness of the event and the minimalism of noh.
In classic shuramono, war constitutes both the backdrop against which individual tragedies unfold and the matrix of a code based on loyalty and honour in whose name the heroes are ready to sacrifice their lives. However, the tragedy staged in this play is collective. War is perceived as timeless and without nationality: it is death looming over all humanity. If the desperate cries of the survivors, begging us not to make the same mistakes, were not convincing enough, Tada uses hellish images, evoked in the second part, to shake the conscience. In a pouring rain, the spirit appears and describes the horror and suffering characterising the last moments of his existence. The heat and thirst that the victims suffered, before they died, seems relentless. Even the rain seems unable to give the spirits any relief.
The author presents the war from two perspectives. Through the words of a survived woman, he succeeds in condemning the use of nuclear weapons and issuing a warning to future generations. Simultaneously, with the tale of a victim's spirit, he can give voice to the dead, whom he calls the witnesses to history.
Analysing how characters and their roles are built, this presentation highlights Tada’s ability to address modern themes while adhering, as faithfully as possible, to the classical structure of noh, in this case specifically mugen noh; likewise, attention will be paid to the language adopted, which reflects, in its alternation of classicism and modernity, the discourse that the author believes is still possible with an ancient form of art like noh.