Noh-Opera ‘Macbeth’ Astounds Audiences of East and West Alike
By Keiko Kai
What is Noh? Noh is a traditional Japanese performance expressed through dance, music and poetry, and mainly based on legends and myths. Highly trained artists, mostly men, who have passed down the art among family members from generation to generation since the 14th century, perform it. Noh is considered a form of highly aesthetic theater performance because it creates an imaginative ‘Yugen’, an aesthetic term suggesting quiet elegance and gracefully subtle, profound beauty that seduces the audience out of their passiveness and into participation. The Noh music, dance and acting penetrate the actor’s feeling and breathing, spaces of pausing which are called ‘Ma’. These spaces become abstracted and the only way to understand ‘Ma’ language is through experience and practice. In addition to such intricate ‘Ma’, the stage has no scenery and no stage set. Noh-actors use a fan as a prop to mimic such various items as a sword or a sake cup.
Combining the elements and concepts of Noh with the settled beat, rythm, line of melody and descriptive and decorative stage settings of the Western opera is no easy task. For this reason, the Noh-opera Macbeth, at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in Brooklyn, was an innovative and pleasant surprise. Composed by Akiko Asai, the orchestra consisted of only percussion and piano elements. Nevertheless, the atmosphere and drama of the famous Shakespearean witch’s world was captured in the abstract ‘Ma’ throughout the performance. Especially in the duel scene, her music was greatly effective: as two Noh-actors moved calmly but strongly across the stage, they enacted a montage of a duel scene charged by the impulse and rhythm of the music. As I was seeing this scene, I was very excited and amazed by the synergy of the music and movement. Then I realized that I was using my own imagination to understand this scene in addition to seeing it as it is. I could vicariously experience the thrill of the duel although the movement was calm and even graceful. Besides music and movement, the lighting effectively juxtaposed the two actors, adding the contrast of brightness and darkness at the climactic moment of defeat to simulate themes of life and death.
Last but not least, in this Noh-Opera, each role contained a duality; from my point of view, this was the best effect of this Noh-Opera. While the Noh-actors dance and perform, corresponding singers echo the movement from the rear of the stage. Visually, we see one Noh-actor and one opera singer on the same stage but they work to depict a single character. In addition to such complexity, all of the female Noh-actors had male singers and a male Noh-actor had a female singer. I found this added complexity amazingly effective and appealing, as it gave an idea of a duality of selves wherein both masculinity and femininity reside in one body. Physically, our appearance may be that of a man or a woman, yet actually we carry both mentalities and exist in between them.
For example, the leading role of ‘Macbeth’, acted and danced by Ryoko Aoki, was a strong and faithful man to his king. However, after hearing the witch’s prediction, his mind became turbulent and fragile as if he was a submissive woman. Subsequently, his wife manages to convince him to murder the king. In this scene, we see both mentalities of Macbeth, as he is not only strong-headed but also harbors a weakness in his mind, which leads him into infinite darkness.
I believe that this Noh-opera was successful as an innovative theater art and effectively depicted the world of ‘Macbeth’ with Noh and contemporary music. Nowadays, theater performances are relatively gaudy and exaggerative, lessening our imagination and participation in every scene. Here, Noh-opera gave me an opportunity to realize how minimized movement, simplified stage setting and reduction of prop devices can stretch the imagination and create vivid theater imagery in the mind of every audience member.
