Outline

date	November 25–27, 2008
Venue	Waseda University (Okuma Memorial Tower)
Organizer	Global COE Programme
outline	Seminars on Baroque Theatre Stage Structures

Details

The International Institute for Education and Research in Theatre and Film Arts is currently conducting a collaborative research project with various institutions in the Czech Republic. The project began under the auspices of the 21st Century Global COE programme, the predecessor of the current programme. Last academic year, a group of researchers in Japanese and Western theatre made a trip to the Czech Republic, where we conducted a survey of baroque stage structures and bibliographic materials on the baroque theatre, and held seminars on Japanese drama. This year, Pavel Slavko, director of the Administration of Český Krumlov Castle and co-founder of the Foundation for the Baroque Castle Theatre in Český Krumlov was invited to provide lectures to the same group on the development of the baroque stage and its distinctive structural features.

Český Krumlov, situated in southern Bohemia, is a small city known for its fine historic town, old Český Krumlov, which dates from the 16th century, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The theatre in the castle was completed in 1766, but it subsequently fell into disrepair. In 1980 Slavko initiated a move to restore and repair the theatre to its former glory. Now fully restored, and astoundingly ornate, the theatre is a site that draws thousands of tourists every year; and as a very rare example of a baroque stage, it is also a most precious example of baroque theatre history. The reason the Japanese Theatre Research Course held these seminars on European theatres is because the stage mechanisms visible in the Český Krumlov Castle Theatre such as the lift mechanisms for raising and lowering parts of the stage floor, and the machinery that allows actors to "fly" over the stage, are extremely similar to the mechanisms in Japanese kabuki stages dating from the same period. Petr Holy, head of Czech Centre Tokyo, and a scholar in kabuki studies who provided Czech-Japanese interpretation during the meeting as well as other helpful explanations, has argued that it is very possible that there was an influence from kabuki.

Since the most important objective was a comparison of stage structures in Europe and Japan, Slavko's lectures on each day were followed by responses from specialists in Japanese theatre, followed by a general discussion in which everyone participated. The titles of the lectures and the responses were as follows.

November 25:
Slavko lecture: "Reflections on 20 years of restoration of Český Krumlov Castle Theatre".
Response: Tadayoshi Kako (senior technician for restoration of architectural monuments), "On the restoration of Kumamoto Prefecture's Yachiyo-za playhouse".

November 26:
Slavko lecture: "Stage lights in the 17th and 18th Centuries: Reflections on lighting in the Baroque Age, and experiments with candle wicks."
Response: Hideo Furuido (Visiting Professor [GCOE], and Professor at the University of Tokyo), "Lighting in pre-modern kabuki".

November 27:
Slavko lecture: "Machinery: Baroque technology in Český Krumlov Castle Theatre—Stage effects in a historical theatre".
Response: Mikio Takemoto (Global COE Programme Leader, Director of the Theatre Museum). "Why stage mechanisms did not develop in Noh drama".


Slavko accompanied his account of the process of reconstruction and restoration of Český Krumlov Castle Theatre stage with a fascinating collection of photographic documents. The restoration was apparently carried out on the basis of more than 3,200 records surviving in various localities in Europe, with a fine attention to each and every detail. Where there were no records to help with reconstruction, at times the theatre itself would give them clues: nail holes in the stage, for example, indicated the locations for stage lighting. In his response, Kako related a similar account of how, during his recent restoration of Kagawa Prefecture’s Kanamaru-za playhouse, holes for nails left in the crossbeams of the building had told him how the kake-suji, a mechanism that allows actors to hang suspended above the heads of the spectators, worked. Such painstaking investigation gives us an idea of the structures of the stage, and it also provides clues to the performances of the plays. These examples highlight the importance and relevance of stage conservation. Baroque theatres and kabuki playhouses share numerous things in common: they both involve scene-changing structures that enable productions to be "spectacles"; they both use mechanisms such as lifts employing counterweights; and they both use effects to reproduce the sound of waves or the sound of rain, etc. Clarifying the similarities of these two types of theatre also allowed a much clearer appreciation of the uniqueness and particularity of each. In contrast to the baroque theatre, for example, which has a proscenium arch through which the spectators view the play, the kabuki playhouse has a ceiling which holds actors and spectators in the same space, and other architectural features such as the hanamichi, a runway for the actors that passes through the audience, and chu-nori, where actors fly in mid-air over the heads of the spectators. Whereas baroque theatre shuts out all outside light and attempts to approximate natural light with artificial lighting, the kabuki playhouse tries as much as possible to incorporate natural light. These particularities in stage structure also form the basis of dramatic composition.

An experimental production at the Kanamaru-za in 1985, and the growth of interest in Edo kabuki playhouses stimulated by Hattori Yukio's 1986 celebrated study Oi naru koya: Kinsei toshi no shukusai kukan ["The Prodigious Playbox: Early Modern Cities as Spaces of Festival and Celebration"], led first to the kabuki spring productions at the Kanamaru-za becoming a fixed event, and subsequently to a veritable boom in the use of old kabuki playhouses, as represented by promotional activities nationwide of the leading kabuki actor Nakamura Kanzaburo XVIII. We were surprised to learn that projects in the restoration of theatrical spaces for traditional performing arts started in the Czech Republic at around the same time, which also allowed us to feel a certain pride in the happy coincidence that 20 years later both countries have joined together to develop this new area of research. Something that comparisons of cases from the two countries makes absolutely plain is the fact that whether theatres reach their full potential or fail to do so will be left entirely up to people of our generation, particularly when the theatres have distinctive features, as well as a long history. The cases of Český Krumlov, Kanamaru-za, and Yachiyo-za are fortunate examples of theatres and playhouses that have been restored to their former glory and have become working theatres once more, as well as symbols of their localities. Now that plans have been passed for the reconstruction of the Kabuki-za in Tokyo, issues such as the influence of theatrical spaces on plays, the relationship a theatre has with its locality, and indeed the importance of theatre conservation itself, are all highly relevant.