Between East and West

With the twentieth century thus began a much more discerning interaction than the eighteenth-century practice of appropriating performance elements from an otherwise exotic culture. New modes of transport enabled individual artists and entire troupes to present their performances in the bodily co-presence of audiences from other, hitherto largely unknown, cultures. The concept of interweaving cultures in performance captures this phenomenon. The turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century also saw the invention of new telecommunication technologies; and since this revolution in transport and communication marks the onset of globalization, it also determines the beginning of a new mode of interweaving cultures in performance.

Thus, the process of modernization, to which I will return later in more detail, went hand in hand with the coming into being of a modern theatre in Europe and other parts of the world. Processes of interweaving proved constitutive for modern theatre.

In Europe, newspaper articles and books on the Asian and particularly Japanese performing arts conveyed to readers tired of naturalism the impression that the Japanese performing arts might provide a countermodel to their own theatre, which they felt had taken a wrong turn. The initial enthusiasm for Japanese theatre reached a peak with the European tour of Otojiro Kawakami’s troupe, starring Kawakami’s wife, Sada Yakko. The troupe was not a ‘real’ Kabuki troupe, but belonged to the shimpa, a school attempting to modernize Kabuki. Nevertheless, even this school only admitted male actors, enforcing the decree of 1630 which banned women from the stage. Sada Yakko, who was trained as a geisha and thus as a dancer, first took over the leading roles during the troupe’s tours abroad (1899 in San Francisco).

The troupe was the first to travel through Europe and America, offering a large Western audience the opportunity to see Japanese performing arts, even if it was not traditional Japanese theatre. However, for the guest tour, Kawakami chose traditional Kabuki plays, which he nonetheless rewrote in order to adapt them to what he thought was the taste of Western audiences.

In order not to bore the spectators by extended dialogues in a language they did not understand, the dialogues were heavily curtailed. Instead, additional dance scenes were incorporated. So, the danmari, the pantomimic scene, which traditionally works as the link between the most exciting episodes, here became the main part of the production, and in addition, Kawakami reduced the music, which usually accompanies the whole action.

Sada Yakko was a sensation at the World Exhibition in Paris (1900), in London (she performed twice in front of Queen Victoria, in 1900 and 1901), and Berlin (1902). She captivated audiences and, despite feelings of estrangement and even arrogance, the critics aptly pointed out the originality and remarkable aspects of a performance art that might rejuvenate the literary theatre of illusion prevalent in Europe: Thus Henri Fouquier:

To us, the plot seems naive. It is, I repeat, a pantomime libretto. But it is through mime that they principally convey and express passion, and not merely passion alone, but also the nuances of emotion. It is just as in Wagner’s music where the voice sometimes only serves to narrate the dramatic situation in a simple melody while the orchestra expresses all the nuances of feeling borne by that situation. Mime is the essential art of the Japanese artists.3

Two aspects of Fouquier’s critique are worth mentioning. By referring to Wagner, he explicitly points out that theatre does not imitate but creates its own reality – a reality of ‘emotion’. He also acknowledges the fundamentally different positioning of theatrical elements; the role of language (the literary text) in European theatre is here subordinated to the art of acting.

Creating an Emotional Community

The dominance of the performance art, particularly in Sada Yakko’s death scenes, seems to have overwhelmed the European audiences. In this respect, Paris critics even went so far as to place her above their national treasure, Sarah Bernhardt:

An incomparable spectacle. Without contortions, without grimaces, she gives us the impression of a death that is physically progressive. We see life slowly abandoning the little body, almost second by second … Our Sarah Bernhardt herself, who so excels at dying, has never given us a stronger feeling of artistic truth.4

And: ‘After her temptress smiles, what eyes deep with anger! Her nose dilates, her cheeks become hollow, fright convulses her whole frame, as she dies with a sort of supernatural realism.’5

When the troupe performed the two plays Kesa and Shogun in Berlin in 1902, however, Franz Blei wrote somewhat mockingly:

The whole world in Paris went to be charmed by ‘Sada’s death’; the accommodating Japanese changed this scene, so that what only took a minute in New York when I saw it lasted the whole play in Paris and in Berlin seemed endless.6

What Blei attributes to Japanese ‘politeness’ is rather to be accorded to the physical co-presence of actors and spectators. Sada Yakko’s art of acting had such a strong impact on the corporeality of the spectators that observable changes of their physiological, affective, energetic, and motor state were brought about. The artists responded to such transformations by changes in their performance.

Obviously the fact that Sada Yakko, an actress from a very different – a ‘foreign’ – culture, playing in an unusual style not known in Europe, was capable of exerting such a strong impact on the spectators made the critics who experienced the same effect in themselves wonder.

At such moments it was not the point to understand or explain the other culture. Rather, it was experienced that the Japanese and the French or German culture, respectively, were here interwoven with each other and that this let an emotional community emerge out of the Japanese performers and the French and German spectators. This became possible since, in the performance, theatre was realized not as a literary but as a physical art.

The emotional community coming thus into being in the course of the Japanese performances in Paris and Berlin most likely did not outlast the end of the performance. However, even if it was experienced only in its course, this has political implications. For members of European and a non-European cultures not only met here on equal footing, but Europeans were taking the others as their model. Moreover, the idea of a community, which is not only conceived of as a local or national community, but as comprising members of very different cultures, seemed feasible. It was the space of theatre in which such a utopia could temporarily materialize.

This happened at a time when, because of the growing industrialization and urbanization that was causing the process of migration from villages to big cities, the question was raised how, under such conditions, communities can come into being. While the kind of community, emerging in the course of the Japanese performances in Paris and Berlin, was not considered either by sociologists or by anthropologists at the time, it points forward to the last decades of the twentieth century, that marked a new stage in the process of globalization.

One can easily understand the European audience’s addiction to Sada Yakko’s death scenes. It was through such scenes in particular that Western spectators experienced performances which relied on the body’s movements and could largely dispense with language to create a reality of ‘emotions’ performatively. One can thus assume that at least part of the audience and the critics received the theatre practised by the Japanese troupe as a counter-model to the predominantly literary theatre of Western culture, which had come only to imitate reality: ‘What a spectacle for the imagination, what a feast for the eyes,’ wrote the French critic Arsène Alexandre in Le Théâtre.7

Thus, in Europe, Sada Yakko’s performance was celebrated as the epitome of innovation, soon to be recreated by the European avant-garde movements. A review of her 1901 guest performances in Berlin described her art of acting in opposition to naturalism and proclaimed it to be a model for reforming European theatre:

What we are able to see, conceive, and understand – the outer appearance, the physical – … is anything but naive, undeveloped, juvenile, an art form of the past, which lies behind us and which we surpassed. It is still before us, it is imminent, perhaps we are steering towards it. … We are looking at the future. … No, there is really no reason for us to shrug off this art. We may infinitely profit from it.8

3. Henri Fouquier, ‘Sadda Yacco’, Le Théâtre, October 2, 1900, p. 10. [↩]
4. Lecture pour tous, March 1908, quoted in Leonard Pronko, Theatre East and West: Perspectives Towards a Total Theatre (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1967), p. 121. [↩]
5. Je suis tout, quoted in Pronko, op. cit., p. 122. [↩]
6. Franz Blei, ‘Otojiro Kawakami’, Die Insel, III, No. 7–8 (1903), p. 66. [↩]
7. September 1900. Cf. Pronko, op. cit., p. 123. [↩]
8. Critic for the Berlin newspaper Der Tag, cited in ‘Die Kawakami-Truppe (Sada Yakko) in Berlin’, in Ost-Asien, IV, No. 46 (January 1902), p. 449–50, p. 450. [↩]