From Takayama's Spring Festival to an Extraterrestrial Ritual: The Shared Awe of the Crowd

Last November, I made my first visit to Hida Takayama to witness the god of luck, Hotei, balance two tiny acrobats on his shoulders and dance above an audience of expectant tourists. Many of us waited for hours, fiddling with digital cameras, snacking on onigiri, and gazing up at the empty stage anticipating the entrance of one of the world's most famous Edo era robots.

Accommodating over a thousand visitors into the shrine took some serious maneuvering, highlighted by the fall out between an enraged elderly man swinging a tripod and the tripod's owner, a photographer who arrived late and jockeyed through the crowd to set-up front row center.

After police officers removed the suspect from the shrine accompanied by the gentle applause from the grandmother to my right, things settled down as we stood shoulder on top of shoulder, heads tilted skyward, waiting patiently in puppet idolization.

After Hotei's performance, the small city of Takayama, filled with Sake factories, robotic puppets, and one of the best hamburger shops in Japan, had me hooked.

Just a few months later, I hopped on a JR Expressway bus and headed back. As the driver travelled through the winding Hida mountains during a small snow storm I was excited to return without the throngs of festival goers and packed itinerary. During my second trip, I found a quiet town in the grip of winter as I carefully balanced across ice-covered sidewalks to cozy-up in the karakuri ningyo cultural archives belly full of Hida beef.

My third visit to Takayama was three months later in April during Sanno Matsuri. Takayama's fall and spring festivals are both enormous celebrations, each with their own ensemble of elaborate floats, or yatai. They each attract thousands of visitors from across the world, filling the streets with 18 foot floats adorned in glowing lanterns, dancing teenagers manipulating wooden lion heads, and a contagious chaotic euphoria.

This year, for the first time in Takayama's history, an additional festival is scheduled in May to celebrate the designation of the yatai as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Treasure. The ten yatai from the fall festival, Hachiman Matsuri, will wake from their hibernation, decamp from their garages, and roam the streets of Takayama at the same time as the thirteen yatai of Sanno Matsuri. It's hard to believe, but this event will attract even more people than the annual festivals, which already feel beyond capacity.

To navigate through Takayama's main street during a matsuri means relinquishing all autonomy and giving-in to the dense tussle of the crowd. As someone who tends to avoid any event with more people than a weekly book-club meeting, I am bewildered by those who willingly attend overcrowded events, from pop-star studded concerts to professional sports games.

The next morning the three yatai with karakuri ningyo travelled over Takayama's famous Nakabashi bridge and met at the city center.

Caked in sunscreen, I spent hours scoping out a spot near a roasted rice ball vendor, Jinya Dango. It was just as crowded as the previous evening, but as the yatai arrived and the puppets emerged, we relaxed into a pleasant anticipation.

Photograph by William F. Condee

As the February snow thaws from Gifu Prefecture, Sanno Matsuri brings forth three puppets that embody the essence of spring's arrival - transformation. With the opening of a mysterious box, a young boy transformed into an old man, an angry dragon burst from a cage, and a fan-dancing woman mutated into a wild lion. With each transformation, the crowd gasped in unison. Similar to my experience in the fall, the karakuri ningyo are some of the best in Japan.

On the second day of Sanno Matsuri, the procession of yatai was cancelled due to rain. However, the karakuri ningyo puppeteers agreed to perform inside the yatai garages. I made my way through the historic streets of the east district to watch one of the performances.

In a narrow alley, surrounded by only a hundred or so spectators, I watched the same performance as the previous afternoon. The show is based on a Japanese tale about a young boy who welcomes a drunk old man into his home, suspects him of being a dragon, locks him inside of a box, and drops him off near the Japanese sea. Filled with vengeful rage, the old man transforms into a dragon and breaks from the boy's makeshift cage. The two puppets are skillfully operated by 32 strings running through the the extended stage, or toi track, by six puppeteers hidden underneath. 

Even though I knew what to expect, I couldn't help but join in with the collective gasp as the dragon burst forth and launched confetti into the air. Afterwards, I thought about the previous morning when this same moment of wonder was shared amongst thousands. Despite having spent the last twenty-four hours begrudging my fight through the crowds, I missed sharing this show with the enormous mass of visitors. Even though these performances are for the gods, there's something about reacting to transformations with thousands that makes them feel like a mystical event.

Takayama's karakuri ningyo performs the impossible - it unites crowds of strangers into one shared moment of awe. I left the garage with a newfound empathy for those who enjoy the thrill of attending a World Series.

A few weeks later I'm in the hometown of Mt. Fuji, where the theater director Kuro Tanino premiered a new work, Moon, at the Shizuoka World Theatre Festival. Last year I wrote about Tanino's production Avidya: No Lights Inn, and I spent the winter months of 2017 interning with his company, Niwa Gekidan Penino, as they remounted the production Darkmaster at Komaba Agora Theater in Tokyo. Now in Shizuoka, I found Tanino skipping the conventional stage for an environmental experience that transformed the city's famous open air theater into an extrasolar planet complete with a cast of five little people in spacesuits and a make-shift moon-landing set reminiscent of Tom Sach's Space Program.

Photograph by Chiye NAMEGAI.
Shizuoka World Theatre Festival. Kuro Tanino's Moon. 2017. 

Each show welcomed a substantial audience of about four hundred as they made their way through the performing arts park towards a massive collection of astronaut helmets. Adorned in these stellar costumes, the enormous crowd followed the cast through the woods, collected geometric sculptures, and assisted in the creation of a celestial monument at the peak of the massive outdoor theater.

Photograph by Chiye NAMEGAI. 
Shizuoka World Theatre Festival. Kuro Tanino's Moon. 2017. 

Mame Yamada, who also played the lead in Avidya: No Lights Inn, sat at the monument's apex as hundreds of spectators stared up at his tiny figure with anticipation. Towering above, with his long hair, short stature, and hypnotizing movements, Mame-san felt like a space-age deity or a living version of Takayama's mystical puppets.

Photograph by Chiye NAMEGAI. 
Shizuoka World Theatre Festival. Kuro Tanino's Moon. 2017. 

The enormous mass of space helmets, continually intensified the stage images. By interacting with other audience members, transforming the environment, and staring reverently skyward at a three foot astronaut standing on a geometric shrine, Moon felt more more like a extraterrestrial matsuri than experimental theater. 

There are many moments of awe-inspiring spectacle in the performance, including a dance scene with music played solely from a collection of amplified Gamboys. With an enormous float designed by German theatre artist Caspar Pichner, the event culminated with the transformation of the outdoor theater into a grand celestial view. As if watching Earth rise from the surface of the moon, the entire audience of space-helmet clad visitors quietly took in the stage.

Photograph by Chiye NAMEGAI. 
Shizuoka World Theatre Festival. Kuro Tanino's Moon. 2017. 

Takayama matsuri and Tanino's Moon are two rituals developed centuries apart. They don't ask us to identify with their characters, but create an environment where we identify with each other. During both experiences, I recognized my shared impulses with other audience members, and entered into a sort of group consciousness often overlooked in the darkness of a conventional theater seat.

In the performance of Moon I attended in Shizuoka, the experience ended with an awesome but somber image - the Earth is an unsettling foggy tint, no longer inhabitable, void of its natural green and blue wonder. Yet, it's still an uplifting conclusion. The audience emerged from the other side, together, looking down at the Earth's surface in a shared silent stupor. We've learned how to be with each other.

For more information regarding Kuro Tanino and Niwa Gekidan Penino: http://niwagekidan.org/english

Rooms of Desire: Checking In at Kuro Tanino's Avidya: No Lights Inn

This piece, "Rooms of Desire: Checking In at Kuro Tanino's Avidya: No Lights Inn" by Zach Dorn was originally published on HowlRound (http://howlround.com/rooms-of-desire-checking-in-at-kuro-taninos-avidya-no-lights-inn, a knowledge commons by and for the theatre community, on Date.

To turn a corner in Nishinari-ku is to be dropped into a maze of carefully orchestrated tableaus of desire. The notorious Osaka neighborhood is home to Tobita Shinchi, Japan’s only legalized red light district. Here, the curated scenes teeter between sexuality and chastity, as outsiders pass open street-side rooms of young women in various poses amid props, furniture, costumes, and elaborate lighting. To the left, a glamorous aristocrat holds a silk gloved hand to her face as she pauses to sniff an elaborate flower bouquet. To the right, a cheerleader prances across a deep red carpet for an audience of wide-eyed Hello Kitty dolls. Each frame offers a portal into another wordless reverie, with a woman that executes the performance of the mythical shy virgin, coyly waving from her porch proscenium. As quickly as it began, however, the fantasy must burst, as the madams approach onlookers with price tags for their seductive dioramas.

Tobiti Shinchi, Japan’s only legalized redlight district.

With her unwelcome entrance, the ornamental wooden awnings, golden embellishments, and glowing lanterns that surround Tobita’s red light stages fade into view. These stages aren’t just fantasies. These are shrines to our own subconscious desires.

Around another corner, in a different city, another tableau awaits. A deep red curtain opens to reveal the interior of a rickety hot spring in the mountains of rural northwest Japan. Upon receiving a mysterious invitation in the mail from the hotel manager, father and son puppeteers, Momohuku, a dwarf, and Ichiro Kurata, arrive at the cluttered lobby of the onsen (hot spring) only to find that the hotel manager does not exist. Instead, there’s Otaki, an elderly and anxious guest, who explains that the onsen is maintained by a group of dedicated patrons attracted to its healing properties. Mesmerized by Momohuku’s unusual stature, Otaki falls into a hypnotic trance of bewilderment and urges them to stay the night. As the Kurata duo heads to their room, the entire hotel lobby lurches forward against the magnificent groan of the set, rotating the scene to reveal the highly-detailed two-story interior of the hotel's tatami bedrooms as a narrator introduces the show. The voice croaks in a devilish whisper: “Niwa Gekidan Penino Presents Avidya: No Lights Inn.”

Photo by Shinsuke Sugino.

Avidya: No Lights Inn is one of the newest productions by director Kuro Tanino's theatre company, Niwa Gekidan Penino. It premiered in 2015, and earned Tanino one of the most prestigious annual awards for emerging Japanese playwrights, the Kishida Prize for Drama. I saw it at the Kyoto Experiment: Kyoto International Performing Arts Festival where it was remounted in November 2016.

The theatrical auteur has a background in painting and graduated from medical school, working as a psychiatrist as a backup to the precarious career of experimental theatre director. As a way to sharpen his skills as a theatremaker, Kuro Tanino transformed his Tokyo apartment into a twenty-five seat theatre, where audiences crammed inside to witness his frenzied and surreal staged hallucinations.

With obsessive anthropomorphic mammals, fractured sets, and sexually repressed college students populating hyper-detailed fantasy worlds, Kuro's work reflects both his background as a visual artist and experiences as a psychiatrist.

You can also see this in Tanino's approach to playwriting, where he abandons traditional scripts for graphic storyboards and miniature models.

"It begins with the completion of a first picture, and that leads to the idea for the next picture. That process continues one storyboard after another like a row of dominoes knocking down one after the other," Tanino told The Japan Foundation in a 2011 interview.

However, Avidya: No Lights Inn marks a departure. The play was completed before the first rehearsal, and is filled with highly expressive descriptions that feel more like illustrations of a Goya painting than stage directions. 

“His ribs can be used as a grater, his legs look like driftwood that have dried for many years. There is no hair on his pale body, but his glossy skin dazzles.”

Avidya: No Lights Inn suggests a new approach for Kuro Tanino, one that combines both a textual and visual foundation.

“Avidya” is a Buddhist concept that translates to “ignorance,” or as Tibetologist Alex Wayman translates it “unwisdom.” Avidya: No Lights Inn follows five patrons of the inn as Momohuku and Ichiro coerce them out of their states of “unwisdom” and into a strained confrontation with existence. Matsuo is a fidgety blind man who baths in the hot spring to bring back his sight, but is also optimistic that his blindness will open his third eye and draw him closer to Buddhahood. Momohuku's presence both deeply troubles and entices him. Left alone, Matsuo nervously gropes Momohuku's child-sized jacket with the fascination of a boy sneaking his first glimpse at a Playboy. While they bathe in the hot spring, Matsuo nervously floats around the mystifying little person. Momohuku cackles: “Do you want to touch?” However, this is not just another example of Tanino's reoccurring themes of sexual repression. At the end of their conversation in the bath, Momohuku callously foretells Matsuo, “The soul which you are looking for does not exist anywhere.” Through Momohuku, Matsuo is confronted with the futility of his third eye pursuit and the permanence of his blindness.

Momohuku Kurata is played by the actor Mame Yamada, who wears his hair in a long flowing sweep, and smokes cigarettes with an icy authenticity that fills Kuro Tanino's silence with unbridled tension.

“I feel drawn to people with faces that look like they have been persecuted or discriminated against all their lives,” Kuro told The Japan Foundation. In Mame Yamada, Kuro certainly found a muse.

Takahiko Tsuji plays opposite of Yamada as Momohuku's enigmatic son, Ichiro. In a leather jacket and constant scowl, Ichiro is silently unnerving, intimidating the hotels guests, but tenderly attentive to his father. With every step, you're unsure if he seeks to strangle or feed you.

Restrained and evocative, both Tsuji and Yamada give performances that illuminate their connection to an other-world, especially played against the neurotic uncertainty of Matsuo, acted by Hayato More, who, at twenty-nine, disappears entirely into the role.

Photo by Shinsuke Sugino.

Avidya: No Lights Inn avoids the more surrealist elements that parade through Kuro Tanino's previous landscapes. We're in a real city, in Japan’s Hokuriku region, in the year 2013. The stage is meticulously detailed to create a hyper-realistic environment. In the bath house, steam rises from the hot spring as the nude actors bathe in flowing water. Yet, it's this adherence to reality combined with Kuro's illustrious visual language, revolving stage, and use of restrained performance, that creates one of his most strange, uncanny, and stirring productions. It reminds me of one of Duchamp's most disturbing works, Étant Donnés, where viewers peer through a wooden door to view a nude woman lying in a field of grass, a miniature waterfall in the background flows like an electric painting in a Chinese restaurant. It's one of Duchamp's more figurative works, but with its miniature environment and realistic waxed figure framed within the wooden door, it's also his most surreal. Like Kuro's loft turned theatre, Duchamp created the masterwork in his apartment's bathroom, using miniature models and photographs to guide its eventual installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Today, it's one of the museum's most popular works, as thousands of people visit a year, to stand on their tip toes, and gaze into a new and mysterious world. As the audience watches Kuro Tanino's Avidya, it feels like we're all on our tiptoes, peering into the mysterious hot spring that feels all at once familiar and unreal.

In Kuro Tanino and designer Michiko Inada's beast of a set, you are constantly peering through windows and door frames, trying to catch a glimpse into other worlds. As a scene plays in the laundry room, you can see Mame through a doorway climbing into the foggy hot spring. Masayuki Abe's lighting design never overstates Kuro's surreal qualities. It's subtle realistic golden hues capture a dusty haziness that reinforces the production's uncanniness, and recalls the unsettling photographs of Roe Ethridge. While Kuro Tanino may be softening a bit to realism, his hyper-controlled direction and aesthetic inside Inada's teetering dollhouse mirrors a marionette performance. This becomes even more transparent as the guests each find themselves in the Kuratas’ bedroom for the climactic puppet show. Instead of a joyful farce of hand puppet delight, what the audience witnesses is a disturbing dance between Momohuku and a skeleton with swinging genitals. The performance references traditional dokumbo-maswahi, a Japanese puppet ritual performed as a purification rite.

From Jane Marie Law's Puppets of Nostalgia, an insightful look into ritual puppetry, Dokumbo-mawashi led puppeteers into “... overlapping worlds of sacred forces and human beings, order and chaos, life and death, and fertility and infertility.”

As Momohuku dances on a table with the crude primitive paper mache skeleton while giggling and thrusting his tiny legs, the hotel guests look on horrified. The audience does the same.

Avidya: No Lights Inn is our own dokumbo-mawashi ritual, orchestrated by puppeteer Kuro Tanino. For two hours, the lights are turned off, and we are forced to confront the darkness, and, hopefully, come out better for it on the other side. Kuro Tanino has gone from Freudian psychoanalyst to Shinto Priest.

Avidya: No Lights Inn should give theatremakers pause about our approach to the playmaking process. By combining both a textual and highly visual foundation for the development process, Avidya: No Lights Inn's forceful pursuit of a unified visual universe creates a compelling narrative with fully realized characters. But most significantly, it makes theatre mythical, transforming the play into a ritualistic and darkly spiritual experience. Like Osaka's Tobita Shinchi, the show connects our subconscious existential anxieties, repressed desires, and humanity to the nonmaterial world of gods.

Nagoya Matsuri, Avidya: No Lights Inn, and 11/9

On the day of Nagoya Matsuri, I walk the streets around Nagoya Castle with my mentor, Yasuko Senda. Traffic has been redirected due to the festival, so today this iconic Japanese landmark feels more like a sanctuary and less of a major urban attraction. 

(Creative Commons, Wikipedia)

On a typical October afternoon, taxis line-up with eager tourists as young men stroll the grounds cosplaying as Edo era samurais. This theatrical fad has sparked admiration from teenage girls, who often come out in large groups to take photos and interact with the sword wielding thespians. This trend of Edo era recreation is mirrored by the castle itself. The majority of the historic monument was reconstructed after being demolished by American air raids during World War II.

(Creative Commons, Wikipedia)

The attacks didn't just destroy the 17th century castle, but a quarter of Nagoya's structures, thousands of human lives, and countless cultural artifacts, including the dashi and karakuri ningyo puppets that were the hallmark of Nagoya's original matsuri, Toshogu Fetival. 

During the Edo Period, puppets were recognized as a bridge between the human and spiritual world. Bunraku stems from the shinto ritual of ebisu-mawashi, where puppets serve as vehicles to eliminate impurity and grant good fortune. Karakuri ningyo puppets, operated on top of 6 meter dashi, are considered channels to the transcendent. These performative practices wade through darkness to reach the intangible. However, in 1945 the human world rendered these devices spiritually and physically powerless. After World War II, one of Japan's oldest festivals, Toshogu Matsuri, was discontinued and ritual puppetry went quiet for decades.

In Nagoya, the destruction from War World II was paved over by large efficient highways, modern skyscrapers, and pachinko parlors. Compared to Japan’s other major cities, Nagoya feels extremely new and many signals from the past are difficult to discern. It's easy for outsiders to spend weeks in Nagoya without recognizing its trauma from World War II. 

Yasuko Senda was a young girl in Nagoya during the Amerian air raids. There's a part of me that wants to ask about her experiences - but the issue always feels too complicated to broach. Instead, we talk about puppets, and spend the afternoon watching Nagoya's karakuri ningyo performances.

One month later, I am sitting in rehearsal for Niwa Gekidan Penino's original production Avidya: No Lights Inn when I read the results of this year's election.

The play is the creation of psychologist turned theater director Kuro Tanino. On the stage, a blind man, Matsuo, played by Hayato More, nervously makes a cup of a tea for the Inn's newest visitor, a three-foot itinerant puppeteer named Kurata.

"Some say the blind are closer to the mind's eye." Matsuo tells Kurata.

I stare at my phone as anxiety sets in. I grow hot. My heart races.

Kurata lights a cigarette. The actor, Mame Yamada, captures a lifetime of unsettling melancholy with a single puff. The clouds of tobacco rise across Tanino's highly detailed and Kafkaesque set. I think about my mom, who admired Hillary more than any other public figure. For my mother, she was a symbol of self-worth, and the pursuit of a dream in the face of ridicule. She would have looked to Clinton’s victory as a reconciliation with unjust pieces from her own past, and in many ways, I looked towards the election to reconcile some of the grief from my mom’s passing.

It didn't come.

"What will you do when you see it? Your spirit?" Kurata asks Matsuo.

Matsuo is caught off guard. He drops his cup of tea against the table.

"Just see it, I guess."

Often, I look at this fellowship the same way. I imagine there will be answers to plaguing existential grief waiting for me at Ise Shrine, or a farm village theatre in Tokushima. These opportunities bring me to new worlds — I discover new ideas. But instead of resolve I once expected to find, I'm met with only more questions, and perhaps that is the only resolution I should expect.

In Avidya: No Lights Inn, Kuro Tanino has created an unsettling world. The suspense digs into deep-rooted feelings of anxiety. The play is pushed inside a magnificent oversized dollhouse, where actors appear in highly-detailed rooms like distressed fish in an aquarium. As I move between my phone and the play, my reality blurs between the two. The show spills from the stage and illuminates the dread that's been lurking this whole time.

            (Photograph by Shinsuke Sugino)

Avidya is a Buddhist concept that translates to “ignorance." It's a refusal to accept the world's impermanence and our fixed state of anguish.

I stare at my phone, my Wifi reception spotty, as I refresh the news feed over and over.

Kurata and Matsuo sit naked in the inn's hot spring. Surrounded by rocks and flickering candles, Kurata whispers to Matsuo, "The spirit you seek, does not exist".

Suddenly, Kuro-san turns to me from the house seats. "Trump?" he asks. "Trump?" he holds up his phone with the United States colored in red swatches.

In order to reach Buddhahood, Matsuo explains, you must surrender your ignorance and face the darkness.

I fear returning for opening night. But I do, and with a couple hundred other people, we confront the dark together.

Avidya: No Lights Inn takes us into a world in-between reality and a dream. Here, transcendence isn't pleasant. And although it’s theatrical, bizarre, and in another language, Avidya holds more truth for me than the last two years of news, history books, or commentary from political pundits combined. 


                                                                               (Photograph by Shinsuke Sugino)

After the performance, a group of American spectators ecstatically compliment Kuro Tanino on his show. At the after-party, festival directors are pleased, the cast is excited, and the drinks are plentiful, but Kuro Tanino looks shaken. As actors joke over shared dishes of spicy tofu and Chinese noodles, he keeps returning to the chair next to mine. "Where does America want to go?" he asks over and over. "I don't understand."

I can't answer. Not because I don't know the language, but because I just don't know.

Kuro Tanino created a show that wrestles with darkness and swims around in a wonderfully dreadful dream, and yet the American election left him clearly troubled. 

But theater never promised answers like our political system. Instead it creates a place to linger in fleeting transience. It takes us into the dark, where we'll momentarily relinquish our ignorance, and stumble around, hands out-stretched, fumbling to find each other.

For more information on Kuro Tanino and Niwa Gekidan Penino, please visit: http://niwagekidan.org/english