yūgen 'flower moments' or brain in the belly: “theatre is alive, a river static but constantly changing”

Objects and tropes: ambiguity and metaphor

Love and memory are also at the centre of Shunkin, the story of a domineering, blind player of an evocative stringed instrument, the shamisen, and Sasuke, her submissive servant lover, who blinds himself in an ultimate act of love. Bodies and objects recur as loci not only of memory but also of its shadowy ambiguity celebrated and eulogized as part of Complicite’s poetics. Minimally staged, Shunkin is inspired by the work of one of the most important Japanese writers of the twentieth century, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki. It is a tale of devotion, passion and power, where beauty is cruel and love literally blinding. Using puppetry modeled on traditional Japanese bunraku puppets the story is dramatized non-naturalistically, based on Tanizaki’s novella A Portrait of Sunkin. Complicite’s adapted piece also draws significantly on Tanizaki’s celebrated essay In praise of shadows, written concurrently in 1933, in which he discusses the traditional Japanese appreciation for darkness and ambiguity juxtaposed to the Western aesthetic that privileges ‘Apollonian’ values of clarity. 

Complicite follows Tanizaki by turning off the Western electric lights in this show to create a dreamland permeated and haunted by the hidden depths of yūgen or shadowy darkness. There is a wonderful simplicity and stillness, a playfulness with light and shadow at the heart of which are not just the Japanese performers’ visceral bodies but also the objects employed metonymically, metaphorically and ambiguously with a fluid ever-changing meaning; flapping papers turn into soaring larks, the space-delineating poles convert to waving branches, and Honjoh Hidetaro's shamisen music even evokes the horrific act of Suzuke’s self-blinding. As Williams points out:

McBurney’s dramaturgies of emergence and dissolution allow highly focused ‘image-worlds’ to appear from the deployments, interactions and transpositions of bodies and objects [...] with the economy of a haiku ... [T]he laws of Newtonian physics seem […] to be momentarily suspended as [...] displacement, connectivity and the fluidity of memory and identity have become recurrent themes in McBurney’s work. (Fifty Key Theatre Directors, 250-1)

As already seen in A Disappearing Number, mutation, deconstruction, migration, dislocation embodied by actors and objects, as well as a heterogeneity of forms, sources, materials and the privileging of an image as composite, often facilitated by technology, are constants in the Complicite tout bouge poetics. ‘Everything moves’ was the title of Lecoq’s lecture-demonstration performed internationally from the late 1960s, and it is of course the Heraklitean tenet par excellence! There is an astonishing limpidity in McBurney’s use of objects, not the clarity of the ratio or intelligence, or what the French call ‘la belle clarté’, but rather a kind of shadowy transparency following which behind a given element something else can be seen. McBurney writes of The Street of Crocodiles that: “if you had opened the door of the rehearsal room when we first began you might have thought you were in a prop maker’s workshop, a second-hand clothes store, or even a hallucinatory jam session, with the participants playing desks instead of drums and dancing with coats instead of partners.” (www.complicite.org.uk) In his post-show talk after the Shunkin performance, he admitted, with a nod to Heraclitus: “theatre is alive, a river static but constantly changing”. (My transcripts of his talk, 11/11/2010, Barbican) It is as though things move in order to remain the same, in self-similar, fractal ways: a movement of immobility, just like the Japanese tea ceremony which “has drifted and changed constantly as well as remaining the same.” (McBurney Essays, 61) Given that, what then is the function of the objects in this production? 

In her article in the Shunkin programme, Eleanor Margolies remarks: “Complicite has spent 25 years exploring the long street of theatrical animation, on which puppets are just one stopping point.” Margolies states that improvising with objects reveals two impulses: (i) evocation of the meaning of objects by past generations; and (ii) their liberation from everyday use, reinvesting them with new meaning(s). In Shunkin Margolies talks of a tripartite production in terms of animation: the bunraku doll with just a head and hands and all other body parts within a long kimono used to dramatize the girlhood of Shunkin, subsequently replaced by a female actor wearing a white mask puppeteered by two actors, one of whom evolves into Shunkin herself. This puppet to puppet-actor to actor sequence, writes Margolies (7), is reminiscent of the governor’s son in The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1997) who starts life as a baby-sized cloth doll then changes into a puppet; what seems to be the same puppet is carried on stage then puppeteered to reveal an actor child. In their evolving modalities of representation, these transformations themselves reference natural processes such as a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis or magic tricks such as producing a dove (animate life) from a hat (inanimate/lifeless object). 

There are moments of pure poetry in this show, as when Shunkin (still a puppet) and Sasuke first have sex, when she gives birth to their first child, and when Sasuke blinds himself, all on a dimly-lit stage, where a shaded ambiguity mesmerizes the collective act of imagining and rediscovering a shadowy world into which we are invited. In this world some associative correspondences with the Artaudian theatre of cruelty or Schechner’s rasaesthetics can be traced – to which I shall return later on - reenforcing this embodied poetics of ambiguity and indeterminacy.

One of the show’s most unbearably painful but beautiful scenes is the self-immolation of Sasuke, Sunkin’s servile music student and secret lover. Shunkin is herself blinded since her youth; the original text alludes to her blinding as a possible act of cruelty. When, on top of that, one of her adversaries disfigures her face with scalding water, to preserve the image of her former beauty forever in his mind, Sasuke at once blinds himself by thrusting a needle into his eyes. This horrific act staged with a shaded lighting is reminiscent of the aesthetics of sumie paintings. These are typically monochrome in design, being composed of tonal variations of a single color, namely, black India ink. According to Odin (1980), this monochrome blackness confers upon the painting the pervasive aesthetic quality of shadowy darkness. Just like a sumie painting, the self-immolation scene is extremely stylized with three planes of depth: a clear foreground with the two lovers, a mid-ground where we hear the samisen music, and a distant background that fades into the mystery and obscurity of the pictorial space. As McBurney stated in his post-show talk, lighting in this production is another character of the story. As Odin suggests, the pervasive aesthetic quality of shadowy darkness in a sumie picture suggests the Buddhist unobstructed interfusion of solid with void. (79-80)

Both the act of self-blinding and the specific way it is enacted by Sasuke, in my opinion, directly references Oedipus’s self-immolation – although, following the aesthetics of the Ancient Greek Tragedy, all acts of (self-)cruelty occurred offstage. In Oedipus’s case, the act of self-blinding, rather than plunging him into a world of darkness, gives him for the first time a clarity of vision regarding his identity and origins which his originally biologically perfect eyesight had denied him. Sasuke’s blindness also admits him into a world of a spiritual inner-vision into which come flooding youthful memories of the dark world of the closet where he used to practice; his perception of Shunkin is transformed by blindness into the sacred iconographic mandala-image of a Buddha enhaloed with an aura of luminous darkness. As Odin (86) observes: “The theme of Zen Buddhist sudden enlightenment and its relation to the visionary apperception of beauty as luminous darkness finally culminates in the last sentence of Tanizaki’s (1966) story”: It seems that when the priest Gazen of the Tenryu Temple heard the story of Sasuke’s self-immolation, he praised him for the Zen spirit with which he changed his whole life in an instant, turning the ugly into beautiful, and he said it was very nearly the act of a saint. (84)

This, following Odin, is reminiscent of the phenomenological profile of the organismic consciousness in the East-West syncretic, elaborated by the foremost modern Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945). Kitaro draws on the Dionysius Areopagite (qtd. in Odin 84) concept of “dazzling obscurity”, giving the self an unfathomable depth of meaning in the abyss of darkness. In contemporary Western metaphysics, this model of perceptual experience has been expressed in Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. As Whitehead suggests (1978): “Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension.” (267) In Whitehead's phenomenology, the recurrent notion of a “penumbral shadow” is the key organismic metaphor for expressing the unbroken, sumie-like continuity of the perceptual field and the beauty as “intrinsic to all phenomena by virtue of their hidden depths.” (Odin 74) Far from being an act of self-imposed cruelty, Sasuke’s blinding elicits an ultimate beauty though the extreme depths of its pain and intensity of feeling of love. As Odin remarks, Tanizaki’s eulogy of shadows relates to the subconscious as formulated by depth psychologists, including not only the Jungian underworld of archetypal imagination, but also the Freudian psyche with its dark interiors of erotic and demonic fantasies. 

Sasuke’s self-blinding constitutes then what Zeami called ‘flower moments’ (76), i.e. those supreme aesthetic experiences where dualisms are not reduced or resolved but ‘suspended’ (ibid.) i.e. cancelled and prolonged simultaneously. According to performance theorist David George, Zeami was the first ‘Ambiguity Theorist’ (75): the supreme Noh being reflecting the paradox of the sun shining at midnight. George suggests that phenomenology and Quantum Theory are based on the same fundamental theatrical shadowy indeterminacy; and the performance space “is already similarly fundamentally indeterminate in being both material and imaginary, perceived but conceived; performance time is fundamentally indeterminate in being both now and past, unrepeatable but repeated.” (78) George also states that all binaries are hidden dynamic triads. Paradoxically he quotes the father of dualism Plato in corroboration: “Two things cannot be held together without a third; they must have some bond of union.” (Timaeus 31 qtd. in George 79) In performance the actor does not turn into another person but acts in-between identities, hence performing is liminal, an in-betweenness.

And Complicite’s staging of Shunkin is indeed liminal, painfully so. “When Peter Brook characterizes the psychic traces of theatrical performance as a “silhouette” that “burns” in the mind and “scorches” the memory, his language indirectly captures the searing effect of such plays on the audience, the vicarious infliction of pain, both during and after performance” (Garner 161). This original metaphor comes from Artaud, and Complicite’s poetics in Sasuke’s act contains something of this Artaudian interest in bodily affliction, and its psycho-physical repercussions within spectators. According to Garner: 

Even in its dramatized (or simulated) forms, pain violates the perceptual 

demarcations and the differential spheres of otherness essential to representation, including the audience in its discomfort through a kind of neuromimetic transferral (the impulse to close one’s eyes during simulated blindings onstage reflects not simply an aversion to the representation of pain, but also a deeper defense against its sympathetic arising in the field of one’s own body). (180-1)

Witnessing on stage Sasuke’s extreme act, we feel the transgression of the audience-play boundary which Edward Bond has theorized under the label “aggro-effect,” setting discomfort in contrast to the privileging of rationality in Brechtian theory. (113) Aesthetically, Shunkin seems to be visibly drawing on this aggro-effect as well as on the Balinese theatre’s perception of a  performance as “An upset to the equilibrium. [...] A stab as well as a caress. A nuclear bomb that is also a haiku.” (Putu Wijaya 1997: 387 qtd. in Banes 191). Apart from being an attack on our sympathetic and neuromimetic systems, Sazuke’s act of extreme painful beauty fulfills what Cocteau has asked of a poet: “[he] must bring objects and feelings from behind their veils and their mists; he must show them suddenly, so nakedly and so swiftly that it hurts man to recognize them.” (qtd. in Cole 241). 

Just as the audience-play boundary is transgressed so too in this sensuous, experiential, fragrant staging the outside is interfused with the inside, the up with the down, the levity with the gravity in a sumie-like unbroken deep continuity; As such it reflects McBurney’s espousal of Rabelais’ pre-Cartesian centrality of the body in all its forms following which “our mystical experience begins in our bellies” (McBurney on Rabelais, 13/10/2011 at the Institut Français). It thus may fall clearly within Richard Schechner’s “brain in the belly” (qtd. in Banes 18) performance theory of rasaesthetics, from rasa meaning ‘taste’: “[it is] an aesthetic...fundamentally different from one founded on the “theatron”, the rationally ordered, analytically distanced panoptic.” (13). This is a radical departure from the Western epistemology of ‘knowing is seeing’. Following Phelan: “Aristotelian philosophy is undone by Newton [who discovered the prismatic properties of light]. Vision cannot be the guarantee of knowing once one knows that vision is never complete.” (qtd. in Welton 149) In rasic performances the emotions are expressed and feelings are experienced so as “to lead the performance to the spectators”. It is not Western narcissism nor Brechtian Verfremdumseffekt, but rather a liminal space to allow for play, improvisation, variation, self-gazing. (Schechner 24) “There is no narrational imperative insisting on development, climax, recognition, and resolution. Instead, as in kundalini sexual meditation, there is as much deferral as one can bear, a delicious delay of resolution.” (ibid.) This deferral is reflected in Shunkin in so far as: 

the narrator pieces together [her] portrait from a variety of sources that sometimes contradict each other: a formal document, some comments from a former maid, the gossip of friends and even conjectures of the narrator himself. By allowing this portrait to emerge as a series of piecemeal and uncertain fragments, Tanizaki very skillfully replicates the process by which we come to know the totality of people’s lives in the everyday world. (Dodd 11) 

Just as Sasuke’s self-romanticizing account of Shunkin’s life can’t necessarily be trusted, so the narrator throws doubt on the veracity of his chronicle, destabilizing the spectators’ value and belief systems. Both the activation of shadows in the subtlety of Complicite’s lighting in this production, and the transitional use of dolls to embody Shunkin in her early stages of life, serve to layer the production’s poetics in unique, ambivalent and multi-sensory ways. Phenomenologically this plunges us right back to the indeterminacy and primordial difference of the pre-linguistic developmental stage where infants, following Winnicott (1971), experience ‘transitional objects’ through play in a time where the ‘not-me’ is an extension of ‘me’ (xii). George points out that “humans learn from the beginning complex rules of association between different signs and even between the diverse sensory stimuli emanating from ‘one’ object: their visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile messages may be and often are quite different and even contradictory.” (82) Yet paradoxically amidst the indeterminacy of this show too, an overwhelming and enduring sense of connectedness emerges. As Gandhi says in a voice-over in A Disappearing Number: 

There is an indefinable mysterious power that pervades everything. I feel it, though I do not see it. It is this unseen power which makes itself felt, and yet defies all proof. (31)

Is there an explanation for this abiding sense of connectedness within plurality and indeterminacy?