Photo: Kawakami Naomi
It will soon be eight years since playwright Kisaragi Koharu passed away (see also OoT 006). At this occasion, the piece "Traumerei (2008)" was staged with Takahashi Yuji playing at once the roles of director, author, composer and pianist (on 9/19-21 at theatre iwato). Known as "Kisaragi Koharu’s original portable theatre" (written in 1984), the piece was announced on the flyer as follows. "Bright and white, unspeakable sorrowfulness / anchoring the blank in the boy’s mind, with a thread so thin that it could break at any moment / reassembling the story of the girl pulling the boy back to life / as a fabric made of fragments of language, sounds and silence / a voyage running after the shadow of Kisaragi Koharu, who wrote this drama in 1984 and disappeared out of this world in 2000."
I caught the performance on the second day, and among the audience of about 100 guests I spotted several individuals associated with the late Kisaragi, such as Yanagisawa Michiyo, formerly an actress in Kisaragi’s "NOISE" company and now a voice actor, as well as musician Makigami Koichi and Kondo Tatsuro, who was in charge of music for the performances of NOISE; musicologist Hosokawa Shuhei, and Black Tent producer, director, editor and critic, Tsuno Kaitaro. However, I think this performance was supposed to be more than a mere eulogy or alumni gathering.
The stage set was extremely simple. Placed in front of a back wall covered with white cloth - apparently bed sheets sewn together - were a piano, a guitar, and a chair with a white ball about 40 centimeters in diameter, just as it used to appear in NOISE’s shows. The performers entered the stage from behind the white cloth: protagonists Kay (Suzuki Kosuke) and Saki (Endo Ryoko), "mankind" (Kajiya Kazuyuki), who opened the performance holding the white ball (all of the above wearing white clothes and masks), and finally pianist Takahashi and voice actor/guitarist Ayuo. With the exception of "mankind", who vanished for the rest of the show after his brief appearance at the beginning until his return at the end, all other performers remained on stage throughout the entire piece.
The pianist placed his hands on the keyboard, and began to play a famous piece by Robert Schumann. It was a clear-cut performance delivered while minutely investigating every single note. However, the graceful melody gradually dissolved as Takahashi kept repeating it, and finally crumbled to dust like a shooting star entering the atmosphere. Then the actual piece began with two actors speaking Kisaragi’s famous line, "Toshi, sore wa yuruginaki zentai…"("The city, that’s an unshakable body…")
The instruments used had a function similar to the actors' voices (at least that’s how it appeared to me), and (again, as it looked to me) were backing the lines they were speaking in several scenes. For example, when Kay and Saki began to speak, the piano’s mid- and high notes, and the guitar’s harmonics were obviously trying to get involved in the dialogue. Only in those moments, the unrelieved talk among people in the homogenized, impersonal city sounded as if blessed by the song of birds in a deep forest. This reminds of St. Francis of Assisi, who loved the sounds of birds more than anything in the world, and of course also of Liszt, Messiaen, Boulez and other composers who were inspired by his story.
The music and dialogues were delivered anything but fluently. They were so subtle and weak that they rather conveyed a fragmented, segmentalized impression. The performers were in fact quoting a line from another one of Kisaragi’s dramas, "watashi ga koko ni iru koto wo shirasetai… (I want to let you know that I am here…)" Like it was done in the original performance, this time again the line was broken up into syllables that were separately pronounced as they were added one by one. "Wa / wa wa / wa wa wa ta / wa ta / wa ta shi / wa wa / wa ta shi / wa ta shi ga / ga ga / ga ga ga / ga ko / wa ta shi ga ko / ga ko ko / ko ko / ko ko ni / ko ko ni i / i / i ru…" The above-mentioned, bird’s song-like music was layered on top of the spoken lines in a very delicate and careful manner. It was a touch as delicate as a caress with thin paper or a feather, making me feel that the performance was appealing more to the sense of touch than to the sense of hearing. Although direct meanings were diluted, there was something serious that got through to the depth of the ear. At the end, Takahashi played once again the "Traumerei" melody, and then stopped abruptly to mark at once the end of the piece.
If Kisaragi were still alive, I guess she would be happy, but even more than that, she would be jealous. For the playwright who titled her essay compilation "Watashi no mimi wa toshi no mimi" ("My ears are the city’s ears"), "language" and "sound" must have been a very important topic. Takahashi was well aware of that, and presented in this event the best possible deconstruction of "Traumerei", if not of Kisaragi’s entire universe. As a matter of fact, "Toshi, sore wa yuruginaki zentai…" is not from "Traumerei", but from "Ie, yo no hate no…"
The entire performance was summed up in the part, "reassembling the story of the girl pulling the boy back to life / as a fabric made of fragments of language, sound and silence" on the flyer. I don't know of any other attempt to revive a past work as successfully as this.
Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO