Swaggering arts: ‘New’ Kabuki on Netflix
WHO would ever think that a theater form that dates back to the 17th or 18th centuries would make its way to Netflix? But then again why not? Netflix is a popular format and, for all its traditions and perceived ancientness, Kabuki is in reality a popular art—the regular people’s entertainment— and not the high art foreign writers are prone to designate.
Celebrating the pop in Kabuki are the two presentations of the theater form: one is the Kabuki piece itself, Akadousuzunosuke, and the documentary on pop idol Toma Ikuta joining the said production. Both are spellbinding, a coup for Netflix no less.
Matsuya Onoe is the lead of the Kabuki play. He plays Suzunosuke, a swordsman who is looking for ways to improve his fighting skills and work on his kokoro, interchangeably translated as soul and heart. He is with his good friend Rainoshin in the forest.
The play opens with what is supposed to be Suzonosuke’s dream, where his father figures in. An encounter with the King of Hell happens as his father, Tetsunosuke, searches for a fighting technique. The young swordsman wakes up still with the voice of his father ringing in his ears.
The two friends travel to Edo and join a dojo, a school where one immerses in martial arts and spirituality. Edo (which is now the present-day Tokyo) is a city of confusion and progress. It is this depiction of the capital that makes for an exciting reading of this Kabuki play. In the city, prices are rising high, even the price of soba when revealed shocks the two young men. Proto-capitalists are behind the manipulation of the economy. Behind the merchants and middlemen, however, is a resurrected evil from hell. This demon is represented on earth by a theater owner and a stage diva. Hiding behind the glitter of entertainment, they aim to transform men into oni, or demons.
The density of metaphors is both manipulative and tantalizing. And so contemporary.
The warehouse/headquarters of the master of the Chiba Dojo, in which Suzunosuke and Rainoshin are enrolled, is depicted as difficult to penetrate. It is guarded by robots and fitted with electricity.
Akadousuzunosuke belongs to the category of “New Kabuki.” These are plays written after the end of Second World War (other scholars use the Meiji Period as the cut-off), the reference being that most Kabuki plays were composed during the Edo period, with the older ones based on the oldest theater tradition, the Noh.
Being a well-guarded tradition, it is rare for a non-kabuki actor to be made part of a production.
There is the long training to consider and there is also the patronage that protects the theater. But Matsuya Onoe, the lead of the play, is a good friend of Toma and they had a pledge back in high school that, one day, they will perform together in a Kabuki play.
One day, Toma, a pop idol, and a product of Johnny and Associates, the talent management firm noted for pretty boys, decides to fulfill that promise with his friend. He has zero training in Kabuki although he has an active career in theater. Despite all that, he is entering a terrifyingly untested arena insofar as being an actor is. He will be acting with his friend who began his career in Kabuki at the age of five. All of this can be found in Sing, Dance, Act: Kabuki, a documentary on Toma Ikuta and his incursion into this theater form dating back to the Genroku Period, the so-called Golden Age of Edo, an era when the arts flourished.
The documentary has two aspects: the personal and the theatrical. The first one looks into the artistic journey of Toma and how he feels he is a rut. Where should he go? When he begins the rehearsals for the play, it is a fearless venture. The other aspect should interest even the scholars of Japanese theater and this is because Toma brings us into an up-close examination of what makes Kabuki a truly original form worthy of being designated as Intangible Cultural Heritage by Unesco.
Toma is given the privilege to perform several times a mie, that exaggerated pose where the actor raises his two hands, sometimes one hand with a sword, to frame his face as he crosses one eye (!) and freezes. Foreign critics call the mie a theatrical equivalent of a close-up shot. In the Kabuki play, imagine not one but at some point five or six characters all doing a mie, their positions held for seconds, a spectacular combination of a tableau and a mise-en-scene.
Other techniques unique to Kabuki are shown to the audience as Toma rehearses them. He does a roppo (literally, “six motions”), a set of rough actions and swagger, presently employed by the lead actors (or the important ones) as they exit via the hanamichi (the road or way of the flowers), a ramp-like structure.
For all the perceived rigidity of Kabuki, the documentary and the Kabuki play itself indicate how a popular culture, when attended to by artists and governments, can evolve into a more relevant cultural artifact. Note how Kabuki magnificently resonates in the more current forms of anime, manga, samurai films, cosplay, mecha and technologies—indices to a material culture that has reached various classes of people. In this development, the audience, and not just a claque of critics, demonstrates a fastidious knowledge of the art form. This is real patronage, the kind needed to prop up an artist that represents a nation.
The documentary is directed by Tadashi Aizawa. It is interesting to note that in 2003, the UP Center for International Studies presented Kanjinchō (The Subscription List), a Kabuki play translated by Jerry Respeto and directed by then Professor Emeritus Tony Mabesa and Jina Umali, with non-kabuki actors performing the lead.