SA actress performs stories in Japanese style
TELLING stories is an art form that, like a chameleon, adapts to different cultures.
Depending on the peculiarity and preference of the person telling the story, be they writer, poet, actor or artist, the art form assumes the colour and texture, shape and tone of the storyteller and the culture and context which has influenced or inspired them.
Actress, scriptwriter and performance artist Jemma Khan grew up in South Africa but has written and performed three plays using the ancient Japanese art of kamishibai. Her latest play, In Bocca al Lupo, will be at The Market Theatre Lab in Johannesburg from May 8-21, and at Alexander Bar in Cape Town from May 29 to June 10.
What moments in your life inspired your latest play?
I studied fine art and then I quit and transferred to drama because fine arts was very lonely. After I graduated I enrolled in the JET programme – English teaching in Japan. For someone who suffered from loneliness Japan was an odd choice – a very alienating place. In Bocca al Lupo is about the time I spent in Japan, getting weirded out (and then running away).
You use the Japanese art form of kamishibai to tell stories from vignettes of your life. Tell us about this and why you chose it for your three plays In Bocca al Lupo, Epicene Butcher and We Didn’t Come to Hell for the Croissants?
I first encountered kamishibai at a music festival in Japan, in the mountains near Hiroshima City. I was fortunate enough to learn the craft from a kamishibai performer, a strange old man who wore jumpsuits. We performed together a few times. It wasn’t so much that I chose to use kamishibai for [my plays]. It was more like I wanted to make kamishibai with lots of collaborators, and these were the three shows that came out.
Kamishibai translates as “paper play” or “paper drama”. It was invented centuries ago by Buddhist monks and until the middle of the 20th century, when TV came along, it was common all over Japan: men with kamishibai stages on the back of their bicycles riding from village to village telling traditional Japanese folk tales in an early manga style. A kamishibai stage is usually quite small, about A3; the stage houses several illustrated pictures that are revealed one by one to aid the storyteller’s narration.
My box for Epicene and Croissants is a little bigger so that an audience of about 100 can see the pictures easily. The Bocca box is much bigger – four boxes, in fact, that measure about 1.5m x 1m in all. With four boxes one can really get involved in the animation of these static pictures.
What led you to storytelling in a theatrical form?
Kamishibai was the missing link for me, so to speak, between performance and storytelling. Although there are many wonderful storytellers out there, the term has always felt a bit icky to me. But all performing arts are storytelling, aren’t they? Having said so, I do love it when theatre abandons narrative and becomes more like poetry than prose. I want to head in that direction myself.
Why the preference for more poetry than prose?
I’ve started to read more poetry and I am beginning to prefer movies and stories that don’t explain everything neatly. Poetry, or poetic films, or the real abstract arts like music, seem to be able to circumvent the conscious mind and affect an audience’s emotions directly. They go beyond entertainment and into the realm of the profound.
Tell us about your favourite story when you were a child.
My parents were very bookish, so we had lots of stories and story books. We also had books on tape . . . Margaret Mahy’s The Pirate’s Mixed-Up Voyage was a staunch favourite.