An unexpected pleasure - and unexpected grief. My friend H is visiting from Japan, and in her work managing an arts center has got to know Kanya Yoshida, a bunraku (puppet theater) master who sometimes gives performance- demonstrations of the craft. He was in NY this week for a first such presentation, and we scored tickets!Kanya and the two men with whom he works to animate a puppet (since the early 19th century three puppeteers per puppet has become the norm) opened the evening with Sambaso, a dance, performed by a male puppet at the start of every performance (sometimes before the audience comes) as a sort of blessing of the stage. The usual barrier which obscures the puppeteers' feet was removed so we could see the puppet hovering in mid air, running, gesticulating, prostrating, dancing. Then Kanya showed us how it was done, how each part of the puppet is moved - assembling it bit by bit, starting with just the head - and, more interestingly, how the puppeteers wordlessly communicate with each other to make the puppet move as one, an art that takes decades to master. The demonstration first took apart some of the movements of the male puppet's dance we'd seen, then introduced a female figure, whose movements were more fluid and eloquent,
The climax of the evening was the performance of a scene ("Fire Lookout Tower") from the famous Bunraku play Datemusume no koi no higanoko, where the female doll played a grocer's daughter who gives her life to save her lover's by sounding a false fire alarm. This is so the city gates will be opened and her lover be able to retrieve a lost sword for whose disappearance he's supposed to kill himself the next morning, but the pathos comes from her knowledge that sounding a false alarm is a capital offense. He will live but she will be burnt at the stake - but living on without him is unimaginable.
An absurd story, but just the kind of celebration of the nobility of ordinary people bunraku is about. The play was in fact based on a true story, we learned (a genre called "overnight pickles"!). A grocer's daughter's shop burnt down and she found refuge at a temple, where she fell in love with a page; when the shop was rebuilt she set the shop ablaze again to be able to be with him. But somehow everything came together, the artifice of the dolls, the symbiosis of puppet and the puppeteers, literally joined at the hip (all male, though the character is female), the contrived story...
I didn't expect to be moved but was in fact devastated. What love!
