Afterimages of Japan: Traces of Far Eastern Aesthetics in the Theatre

2-czacki-jestes-piekna-3_fot_edward_hartwig.jpg, default, ‘You Are Beautiful’, directed by T. Łomnicki, photo: Edward Hartwig / Contemporary Theatre in Warsaw, Afterimages of Japan: Traces of Far Eastern Aesthetics in the Theatre

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Japanism in Poland is primarily associated with the art of modernism, and artists such as Stanisław Wyspiański were inspired by oriental iconography. Inspirations from Japanese aesthetics and Zen philosophy, however, are also to be found in contemporary theatre.

Although one of the most outstanding Polish playwrights, the author of Wesele (The Wedding), Wyzwolenie (Liberation) and others, denied reaching for aesthetics originating from the Land of the Rising Sun, it’s hard not to notice the similarity between the pastels in the series Widok na Kopiec Kościuszki (View of Kościuszko Mound) and the cycle of colourful woodcuts by Katsushika Hokusai presenting a view of Mount Fuji, the highest peak in Japan and an object of worship for Shintoists. Japanese inspirations can also be found in the paintings of Olga Boznańska and Leon Wyczółkowski.

Thumbnail — Feliks Jasieński in samurai helmet & Japanese kimono, photographer unknown, 1903/1904, digital collection of National Museum in Kraków

Feliks ‘Manggha’ Jasieński, the wealthy Kraków critic, patron and above all ardent collector, was a unique ambassador of Far Eastern aesthetics in the early 20th century. Obsessed with collecting, he infected and inspired his artist friends with his passion. (His pseudonym came from the title of one of the woodcuts in the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji cycle).

Wajda’s Japan

Andrzej Wajda created the Centre of Japanese Art and Technology in Kraków, named Manggha in honour of the famous collector. Jasieński’s rich collections have been placed there (among the over 12,000 exhibits, as many as 6,500 were of Japanese origin). The place was initially a branch of the Kraków National Museum but has been functioning as an independent museum facility since 2007.

Japan was present in Wajda’s aesthetic thinking throughout his adult life. As a 19-year-old, he saw Jasieński’s collection in Kraków for the first time and was delighted. And when many years later, in 1987, he received the Kyoto Prize in the field of Theatre and Film (the Japanese equivalent of the Nobel Prize), he said ‘I would like others to be as happy as I was when looking at the masterpieces of old Japanese art for the first time’. He used the money he received then to fulfil his dream of creating a ‘little Japan’ in Kraków.

Hamlet as in Noh theatre

The inspiration with Japanese aesthetics can also be seen in Wajda’s theatre work. His Hamlet IV, directed in 1989 at the Stary (Old) Theatre in Kraków, contained obvious references to formal solutions from Japanese Noh theatre. These references seemed quite natural, as Wajda had just finished working on Nastasja at the Benisan Theatre in Tokyo.

In Kraków, the director placed the action in a dressing room, separating it from the stage with an additional, small corridor surrounded by mirrors, just as in Noh, where the protagonist (shite) prepared for the performance and put on a mask in a special mirrored room, which was equated to the sphere of the profane, to then come onto the stage – the sphere of the sacred.

‘Hamlet IV’, directed by Andrzej Wajda, photo: TVP promotional materials

In Hamlet IV, the title character was played by Teresa Budzisz-Krzyżanowska, and the audience could watch as she prepared to come onto the stage. As Joanna Walaszek noted in the book Teatr Wajdy. W kręgu arcydzieł (Wajda’s Theatre: Among Masterpieces), the actress did not try to play Hamlet by ‘imitating male movements and other people’s behaviours’. Her stage presence was far from being imitation and approached the Japanese principle of monomane: the noble imitation of the essence of a character while eliminating falsehood. Probably the casting of Budzisz-Krzyżanowska in the male role itself was inspired by Wajda’s earlier work with Tamasaburo Bando, an onnagata actor – that is, an actor who plays female characters in Japanese kabuki theatre. Budzisz-Krzyżanowska’s masterful, precise portrayal, created in the atmosphere of an intimate meeting with the audience, elicited the admiration of critics. Kazimierz Kania wrote the following about it:

The viewer watches first and foremost the main actor (actress!) struggling with the burden of the role, closely following the tiniest tremors, the character’s ever greater filling in with life and death. This happens in an atmosphere of intimacy and confessions. How does the woman-Hamlet bear this burden? It’s certainly a showpiece role. It contains everything, a whole range of artistic possibilities. Budzisz-Krzyżanowska’s Hamlet is mad and sober, gentle, violent, lyrical, dramatic, tender, ruthless, sharp, weak, heroic, desperate, quivering, filled with pain.

Here we can clearly see how inseparable Japanese aesthetics is from the philosophy of Zen that lies at its foundation. Every external effect is ethically justified, resulting from the Japanese attitude toward the world and phenomena. It is therefore often difficult in the case of Japan to distinguish the sphere of aesthetic inspirations from the philosophical because over the centuries thought crystallized both in action and in object.

The art of dying

The impossibility of separating these spaces is evidenced by the biography of Mishima Yukio, probably the most outstanding Japanese writer of his time (1925–1970), who was present on the stages of Polish theatres since the 1960s thanks to Tadeusz Łomnicki. Mishima was tormented by a ‘desire for a beautiful death’, and he fulfilled his vision by committing public seppuku, the first ritual suicide after World War II. Mishima’s seppuku was a carefully thought-out part of the work: on the eve of his death, the author sent the publisher the last part of the novel The Sea of Fertility, which he was working on at the time.

In 1965, the pre-premiere of the play Jesteś piękna (You Are Beautiful, orig. title: Sotoba Komachi), directed by Łomnicki, took place at the Współczesny (Contemporary) Theatre in Warsaw. The adaptation of Mishima’s one-act plays – in addition to the title play, also including Wachlarz (The Fan) and Adamaszkowy bębenek (The Damask Drum) – was not intended to be an attempt at recreating the aesthetics of Japanese theatre. In an interview prior to the premier published in Trybuna Ludu (People’s Tribune), Łomnicki said of his directorial debut:

As for ‘Japaneseness’, we avoided it in this literal sense. […] The whole thing is conceived in the convention of European poetic theatre in which one has to accept a certain conventionality.

The sparseness of the set design – benches or an armchair in an almost empty space, a painted background depicting a tree (such as a pine tree painted on the back wall of the Noh theatre stage) and styling elements (a fan, the most important stage prop; hairstyles; the kimono) – these accents in the staging indicated the classically Japanese origins of the text: Mishima, although he wrote contemporary plays, was inspired by Noh theatre (today we would say that he ‘rewrote’ the classics), which Konstanty Puzyna emphasized in the playbill:

Because in essence Mishima treats Noh themes in the same way as many European playwrights today treat Greek myths.

After the premiere, critics were mainly delighted with the performances of the guest actress Irena Eichlerówna. Adolf Rudnicki, one of the critics who wrote about the role with an air of mystery, as if attuning himself to the character of this creation:

I. E. saw everything in ‘Wachlarz’ in ten minutes, and yet she was only being true to herself, her wave, her psychology, in the space in which she became metaphysics.

In a mirror, unclearly

Agnieszka Olsten reached for Mishima in 2007 in that her Lincz (Lynch) from the Polish Theatre in Wrocław was inspired by David Lynch’s films and was an adaptation of the one-act plays by the Japanese writer. Pani Aoi (Lady Aoi), Wachlarz and Szafa (The Wardrobe) were announced as ‘an intercultural dialogue between the East and the West taking place in the subconscious and dream layer’. Olsten managed to create a mood that was like the spirit of yugen, a category essential for Japanese Noh theatre. Yugen literally means ‘gloomy, dark’, and as an aesthetic concept it evokes a mood of elusive beauty, sadness and longing. It refers to a mysterious depth and to what, though imperceptible at first glance, lies beneath the surface of phenomena.

‘LYNCH: Lady Aoi. The Fan. The Wardrobe’, directed by Agnieszka Olsten, photo: Krzysztof Bieliński / Polish Theatre in Wrocław

Like Łomnicki, Olsten distanced herself from conventionally understood ‘Japaneseness’ as an undefined oriental folk art in a European style. In Lynch, she focused rather on those aesthetic categories that result directly from Zen ethics. Aneta Kyzioł, noticing the director’s precision in staging, wrote this about Lynch:

This is a performance with an undefined yet disturbing and hypnotizing power – like the films of the American master of mystery David Lynch. Stories rooted in reality imperceptibly stray into the realms of a nightmare, and the flesh-and-blood characters become some kind of monsters possessed by memories, desires and unfulfillment.

Olsten managed to cover the stage with an aura of mystery and understatement, which are characteristic of the aesthetics of Noh theatre, thus avoiding literalness in formal references. However, the emblematic motif of mirrors appeared in her performance, evoking, as in Wajda’s Hamlet IV, the architecture of the Japanese stage. Choreographer Tomasz Wygoda performed a near virtuosic pantomime sequence in the mirror cube that was both beautiful and disturbing. Also important for constructing the mood in Lynch was the lighting direction by Wojciech Puś based on the play of semi-darkness, shadow and underexposure. The light in Olsten’s performance brought to mind In Praise of Shadows, a famous essay by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki from 1933:

The beauty of a Japanese room is nothing more than the interplay of varying intensities of semi-darkness. […] The darkness that envelops the Noh and the beauty that emerges from it define a separate world of shadows.

Lights & mirrors

This very separate world of shadows was explored by Jerzy Grzegorzewski in his stage work. Elżbieta Morawiec (in the book Jerzy Grzegorzewski – mistrz światła i wizji [Jerzy Grzegorzewski: Master of Light and Vision]) calls the process of directing light in Grzegorzewski’s theatre a ‘derivation of the world from darkness’. She compares the director’s work to Caravaggio’s paintings and emphasises the role of mirrors in his performances, which recur in the context of Japanese inspiration:

His light, as if bound in some beyond-world, dispersed by invisible prisms and mirrors, reaches the world of the stage sifted, enlivening not so much the world presented as the ‘afterimage of the world’.

Such a handling of light allowed the director to soften the stage reality and build, as he himself said, a ‘field of conjecture’. In one of his conversations, Grzegorzewski mentioned that, being near-sighted, he becomes disappointed with the sharpness of the world after putting on his glasses because it appeared ‘finished and ready’.

Jerzy Grzegorzewski, 2000, National Theatre in Warsaw, photo: Wojciech Plewiński

Morawiec compared the play of light and shadow in Grzegorzewski to the fight between Ahriman and Ormuzd from ancient Iranian beliefs, but one can also see in it a praise of semi-darkness, which comes from Zen. Tanizaki also describes the acceptance of shadow in ethical and existential categories as an acceptance of existing reality and its imperfection. The love of, or even the emphasis on, imperfections is gently combined with another tendency of Grzegorzewski’s, also visible in his performances: that of finding and ‘adopting’ various old objects. Grzegorzewski’s famous pantograph, present in America (1973), Bloomusalem (1976) and Powolne ciemnienie malowideł (The Slow Darkening of Paintings, 1985), has become a legend.

The role of an object

‘He liked and valued old, worn-out things’, said Wojciech Plewiński about Grzegorzewski, adding:

It always surprised me. I waited for the next plays, wondering what else he would bring and in what unusual context it would be used.

Jerzy Karpiński, in turn, talked about his ‘hunt’ together with the director:

I went with Grzegorzewski to the flea market in Wola a few times […]. He once bought a strange object there – something resembling a fisherman’s stool with a rod rest. Years later I saw that this stool was playing a part in the National Theatre in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.

Grzegorzewski’s pantograph, photo by Barbara Sierosławski from album ‘INVENTORY: Jerzy Grzegorzewski’s Scenographic Objects Preserved in the Theatre Warehouses of the National Theatre in Warsaw as of 2007’, photo: theatre materials

The role of the object in Grzegorzewski’s work brings to mind the almost empty stage of Noh theatre, on which a few individual but significant objects would appear, such as small temple buildings, boats, a carriage or a small tree. Grzegorzewski’s collection also included many objects of Far Eastern provenance. Like Feliks Jasieński many years earlier, the director collected Japanese vases and Chinese furniture in his apartment. He had a vision of recreating a Japanese garden in his house. But his theatre was nothing but this ‘afterimage’ of that world, consciously operating with its aesthetic categories and thus based rather on what is invisible and unspoken and therefore on yugen, the inexpressible depth.

Imperfect & beautiful

‘Nobly damaged by the tooth of time’ – this is how the ambiguous concept of ‘wabi’ can be translated into Polish, also meaning poverty, denuding, simplicity and getting to the core. This category, paired with ‘sabi’, the meaning of which could be expressed by the phrase ‘sublime withering’, is gaining popularity today among fans of the latest trends in design. Intentionally scratched walls with peeling paint, unvarnished, decaying wood, vessels with a rough texture, visible scratches and cracks – these are the external attributes of this Zen aesthetic. To put it simply, it would be a matter of seeing beauty in imperfection, although the philosophical foundations of wabi-sabi are, of course, much deeper. The abandonment of artistic flair allowed for the experience of ‘the fullness of spiritual values’ – for example, during the tea ceremony, where ‘the inclusion of irregularly shaped vessels contributed to establishing a new canon of beauty associated with spirit rather than with matter’.

‘The Presidents’, photo: Bartosz Maz / Polish Theatre in Wrocław

When you look at catalogue photographs of interiors inspired by these categories, it’s easy to see a similarity with… Krystian Lupa’s stage designs. The entourage of his performances often resembles design in the spirit of wabi-sabi; even new stage designs for Lupa’s performances look as if they were already old, already worn out, already ‘tarnished by time’. This effect was visible, among others, in Prezydentki (The Presidents), a 1999 performance in which the set was to be a reproduction of Lupa’s kitchen from his family home: old wooden furniture with flaking paint, a cracked mirror on a scratched wall, a dirty tablecloth as if it had not been changed for years, chairs that look as if they were about to fall apart. Everything is in shades of blue and white – a dusty, forgotten brightness. This association is, of course, a speculation and a personal interpretation, ‘filtering’ the world built by Lupa through the aesthetics of Zen.

From the catwalk to the stage

The turn towards the imperfect can be seen in the designs of contemporary Japanese fashion designers, whose ideas also inspire theatrical creations. Sławek Blaszewski’s costumes from The Tempest directed by Krzysztof Garbaczewski (premiered in 2015 at the Polish Theatre [Teatr Polski] in Wrocław) look as if they’d been transferred from a catwalk presenting one of the collections of Yohji Yamamoto or Rei Kawakubo, founder of the famous Tokyo fashion house Comme des Garçons.

Yohji Yamamoto during Paris Fashion Week, spring/summer 2016 collection showing, photo: Kristy Sparow / Getty Images

Maintained in the convention of ‘all black everything’ – like Aleksandra Wasilkowska’s set design, which is a black abyss absorbing light – they sometimes resemble moving works of art, peculiar textile sculptures in which the body submerges. This was the intention of Yamamoto and Kawakubo: to go against the Western tendencies of emphasizing the figure, exposing its shapes. Oversizing, asymmetry and multi-layering leading to the decomposition of the silhouette also make the ‘gender of clothing’ lose its significance. Avant-garde Japanese designers (Yamamoto and Kawakubo – both born in the 1940s in Tokyo, both graduated from Keiō University) were inspired by the ‘genderlessness’ of the kimono, which does not hug the body and leaves a space between the material and the skin. The monochromatic clothes-robes created by Blaszewski have a unisex character – the fluidity of gender is also part of the staging itself, in that Ewa Skibińska incarnated herself as Prospero in Garbaczewski’s case and Halina Rasiakówna was Alonzo.

Zdjęcie z przedstawienia "Burza" w reżyserii Krzysztofa Garbaczewskiego, fot. Natalia Kabanow — Photo from performance of ‘The Tempest’, directed by Krzysztof Garbaczewski, photo: Natalia Kabanow

Both the designs of Yamamoto and Kawakubo and the costumes designed for Garbaczewski’s performance sometimes resemble bizarre, amorphous structures: what we have visible here – or even exposed – are the unravelling seams and stitching, faded, ‘old’ black crooked sleeve lines, flowing layers of material. According to Blaszewski, the ‘total black look’ in The Tempest was also intended to enhance the resonance of Shakespeare’s text and give the actors expressiveness: ‘Thanks to this, their faces stand out beautifully, and the words of the text can sound clearer’, he said in a pre-premiere interview.

The aesthetic thought of Yamamoto and Kawakubo, although chronologically modern, is deeply rooted in the traditional Japanese worldview. The ideological changes in the Land of the Rising Sun are evolutionary (not revolutionary) in nature and gently develop what has been cultivated for centuries, harmoniously annexing new things. Hence, perhaps, the inspirations arising from this aesthetic often remain subtle, understated, and their tracking and discovery are based largely on assumption.

_Sources:

_{Kozyra, A.}_{Estetyka zen}

_{Kubły, kubły, miliony kubłów w zupie!}_{(Materials from the session dedicated to J. Grzegorzewski’s theatre), published by AT in Warsaw.}

_{Morawiec, E.}_{Jerzy Grzegorzewski: mistrz światła i wizji}_.

_{Walaszek, J.}_{Teatr Wajdy w kręgu arcydzieł}

_{Wilkoszewska, K.}_{Estetyka japońska. Estetyka życia i piękno umierania}_.

_{Żeromska, E.}_{Japoński teatr klasyczny. Korzenie i metamorfozy}_.

_wyborcza.pl.

_manggha.pl.

_{jerzygrzegorzewski.net}

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Translated by Michał Pelczar

Language English

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