{"id":282,"date":"2019-10-29T21:07:51","date_gmt":"2019-10-29T21:07:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/?p=282"},"modified":"2022-02-05T13:27:49","modified_gmt":"2022-02-05T13:27:49","slug":"a-case-study-of-the-intercultural-production-of-vaike-jumalanna-the-little-goddess","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/a-case-study-of-the-intercultural-production-of-vaike-jumalanna-the-little-goddess\/","title":{"rendered":"A Case Study of the Intercultural Production of V\u00e4ike Jumalanna (The Little Goddess)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Izumi Ashizawa<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

A devising theatre practitioner, Izumi Ashizawa has been facing the challenges and privileges of creating multi-lingual and intercultural works in different countries for the past 15 years. Each project presented its own unique developmental process, based on the specific traits of the local actors, designers and technicians. In this essay, Ashizawa examines the collaborative creative process of an original intercultural musical puppet play V\u00e4ike Jumalanna (The Little Goddess) that she wrote and directed at the National Estonian Drama Theatre (Eesti Draamateater) in Tallinn, Estonia, in January 2018. The article investigates the creative process of a multicultural\/ multilingual musical production from an artist\u2019s perspective.
Keywords: <\/strong>Eesti Draamateater, Esthonia, Bunraku, V\u00e4ike Jumalanna, Nepal, living goddess<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I first received\nan invitation from Eesti Draamateater\nand Eesti Muusika-ja Teatriakadeemia in Tallinn to create a devised\ntheatre piece to represent and transmit (both aesthetically and pedagogically)\nthe culture of my motherland, Japan, I knew neither the performers nor the\ncreative team. The only thing I knew was that I would be working with a\nmulti-cultural ensemble.\nOur actors, musicians and creative team came from five different nations and\ncultures: Estonia, Finland,\nLithuania, Japan\nand the U.S.A. For me,\nthis became an incentive to compose a play whose themes and characters would represent a cultural, aesthetic and philosophical hybrid. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ideas\nof alienation, displacement and the loss of personal cultural values informed\nthe making of V<\/em>\u00e4ike Jumalanna <\/em>(The Little Goddess<\/em>);we invoked magical\nrealism and musical puppetry in order to creatively embody these concepts. At the same time, V\u00e4ike\nJumalanna <\/em>was devised specifically for\nEstonian audience and within the repertory system of the Estonian national\ntheatre, co-produced by Eesti Draamateater\n(the National Estonian Drama Theatre) and Eesti Muusika-ja\nTeatriakadeemia (Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre), in January 2018. Given the context of the\ncultural makeup of the play\u2019s contributors, V<\/em>\u00e4ike Jumalanna <\/em>did not have the feel of an imported product. V\u00e4ike Jumalanna <\/em>had\nturned into an original play about migration that had emerged from the local\ncontext of its own making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inspired by the living goddess\npractice in Nepal and the ancient Shinto ritual of young shaman girls in Japan,\nthe play tells a story of a young girl who is chosen to be a living goddess.\nFramed through three different layers of storytelling, it uses magical realism\nand the Japanese acting techniques. Haru, a male narrator, recollects the story\nof his former lover, Tara, the human goddess. This is the first or outer\nframing device of V\u00e4ike Jumalanna<\/em>. The second frame presents itself\nthrough the gaze of Tara\u2019s spirit, who looks at her own past. The inner frame\nis the entirety of Tara\u2019s own story: a girl from a small village in the\nmountains is born with a physical disability and is chosen to be a goddess. The\ngoddess\u2019s worshippers make Tara believe that she is special, and thus entitled\nto be a living goddess until her first menstruation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This play is inspired by the ritual\nof the living goddess from the Nepalese mythology, but the final story is my\nown fictional creation. In the play, the ancestors concocted the living goddess\nreligious system in order to survive during the times of natural disasters. For\nthem, the goddess served as a tool to release psychological distress. Today,\nthe tradition survives unchanged, although the world around it has drastically\naltered. In order to validate this obsolete tradition in the changing world,\nthe religious worshipers cling onto the mystic ritual more vehemently and make\nthe goddess practice believable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the play, Tara slowly loses her sense of reality. She starts to believe that she is indeed a goddess with magical powers. Because of her isolated living conditions and the so-called \u201critual happenings\u201d that worshippers perform on her (in reality\u2014can be seen as a child abuse), imagination becomes her only means of survival. Following the climax of the play, Tara\u2014a child\u2014transforms into a young woman as the fictional world around her collapses. She is now destined to lose her goddess status, to be chased out of the palace and to be forced to seek out a normal human life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Video 1<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n
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