{"id":66,"date":"2021-10-17T08:44:48","date_gmt":"2021-10-17T08:44:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/?p=66"},"modified":"2024-02-04T12:07:27","modified_gmt":"2024-02-04T12:07:27","slug":"tadashi-suzuki-and-theodoros-terzopoulos-crossing-boundaries-creating-bridges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/tadashi-suzuki-and-theodoros-terzopoulos-crossing-boundaries-creating-bridges\/","title":{"rendered":"Tadashi Suzuki and Theodoros Terzopoulos: Crossing Boundaries, Creating Bridges"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Penelope Chatzidimitriou<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

In the first part, the paper focuses on Tadashi Suzuki\u2019s relationship with Greece and Greek tragedy, a relationship that dates back to the 1970s and extends to the present. At first, Greek tragedy helps Suzuki refashion the postwar Japanese identity in its clash with the colonizing West, but in the course of the decades and the historical changes that take place, the same genre becomes the means for a global artistic project of non-discrimination and solidarity. In this framework, Suzuki\u2019s collaboration with the internationally acclaimed Greek director Theodoros Terzopoulos is crucial and invites my attention in the second part of this essay.

Keywords: <\/strong>Tadashi Suzuki, Theodoros Terzopoulos, Greek tragedy, Delphi, Theatre Olympics, acting method, animal energy<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tadashi Suzuki: Revolt and Nostalgia<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

In my work \u201cTadashi Suzuki and Yukio Ninagawa. Reinventing the Greek Classics; Reinventing the Japanese Identity after Hiroshima,\u201d I stress that \u201cthe aesthetics of Tadashi Suzuki are rooted in the cultural specificity of post-war Japan\u201d (95). It is then that \u201cthe traumatized Japanese national body\u201d\u2014the national body that bore the guilt of allying with the Nazi villain in World War II, the body that was then polluted and affected with cancer by the U.S. atomic bombs, the body that was colonized by the Western culture\u2014that body \u201cemerged as a site of resistance\u201d (95).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, modern Japanese theatre has always been political. Be it Shingeki<\/em>, butoh <\/em>or angura<\/em>, twentieth-century Japanese theatre goes hand in hand with the milieu in which it is born and lives, reflecting or resisting the dominant ideology (Chatzidimitriou, \u201cTadashi Suzuki and Yukio Ninagawa\u201d 105). Early twentieth-century Shingeki <\/em>imitated Western theatre realistic practices whilst angura<\/em>, led by charismatic directors-auteurs like Tadashi Suzuki in the 1960s, revolutionized Japanese theatre practice when it transcended Western realism. Angura <\/em>transformed the Westernized Japanese body into a body of resistance that self-consciously mirrored the violence which Western society \u201cha[d] inflicted on nations with different cultural backgrounds\u201d (Marshall qtd. in Chatzidimitriou, \u201cTadashi Suzuki and Yukio Ninagawa\u201d 95). \u201cGoverned by anger at the historical control exercised on the Japanese body, a fundamental aesthetic conflict emerged\u201d (Chatzidimitriou, \u201cTadashi Suzuki and Yukio Ninagawa\u201d 97). One needs to think only of butoh <\/em>and its exclusively Japanese, anti-Western \u201ccrudeness\u201d and \u201cspirituality\u201d (Sanders, qtd in Chatzidimitriou, \u201cTadashi Suzuki and Yukio Ninagawa\u201d 97).<\/p>\n\n\n

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Tatsumi Hijikata, butoh<\/em> dancer and choreographer, in H\u020fs\u020ftan <\/em>(1972). Photo: Makoto Onozuka. Source<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Against the background of such a collective traumatic memory, Tadashi Suzuki and other angura <\/em>theatre practitioners moved toward traditional Japanese theatre codes and \u201ca nostalgia for a pre-modern Japanese world,\u201d as described by Takeshi Kawamura, a third-generation angura <\/em>playwright and director (qtd. in Chatzidimitriou, \u201cTadashi Suzuki and Yukio Ninagawa\u201d 104). Tadashi Suzuki \u201clooked to noh, the \u2018art of walking,\u2019 to provide \u2018feet\u2019 for the modern theatre\u201d (Armstrong qtd. in Chatzidimitriou, \u201cTadashi Suzuki and Yukio Ninagawa\u201d 104). Likewise, he was inspired by Noh\u2019s nonrealism, its \u201c\u2018do-or-die\u2019 battle mentality\u201d in performing and the fixed, eclectic security of the mise-en-sc\u00e8ne. These, combined with the dramaturgical collage of play materials, reveal a mistrust for the modern global age and linearity; they are viewed as \u201cresponsible for the atrocities of our age, since they justify inhuman expedience\u201d (Goodman qtd. in Chatzidimitriou, \u201cTadashi Suzuki and Yukio Ninagawa\u201d 104).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Summed up, Suzuki\u2019s effort is binary; it functions \u201cto overcome, on the one hand, what he saw as the main problem of pre-modern Japan, its static nature, and, on the other hand, to protest against an apocalyptic future\u201d (Chatzidimitriou, \u201cTadashi Suzuki and Yukio Ninagawa\u201d  105).<\/p>\n\n\n

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Powerful stamping is typical of Noh theatre. Photo: Jukka O. Miettinen (see Miettinen)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Suzuki and the Greek Classics<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Still, the Greek classics and Shakespeare\u2014the pillars of the Western theatrical canon\u2014escaped the fury of the post-Hiroshima Japanese artists. For Suzuki, Greek classics are precious because they offer \u201can archetype of the fundamentals of what it means to be alive as a human being,\u201d unlike the performance-oriented Japanese texts which seem to lack \u201cintellectual sophistication and profundity\u201d (qtd. in Chatzidimitriou, \u201cTadashi Suzuki and Yukio Ninagawa\u201d 97). The ancient Greeks gave Suzuki a larger ontological scale of the human experience in its confrontation with the divine or mortal other and their stories (Chatzidimitriou, \u201cTadashi Suzuki and Yukio Ninagawa\u201d 97). In ancient Greek tragedy and theatre architecture, Suzuki found the abundant animal energy required by his project (Suzuki, Culture is the Body<\/em> 127). He says:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What I felt when I came to Greece, as I looked at the text as theatre, what really amazed me, was the amount of human energy invested in its construction. Huge theatres were built […] without the use of energy sources such as electricity, gas or oil […]. This same type of [human] energy fills the characters appearing in the text […]. This used to be true in Japan, too […]. The whole body was involved in expression […]. That\u2019 s why we must produce again\u2014as may have been the case with Greek drama, Noh and Kabuki\u2014that kind [of] human energy which confirms human existence and entertains.<\/p>\nSuzuki and Terzopoulos 88\u201389<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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The Ancient Theatre of Delphi. The Open Air Theatre in Toga was modeled on the classic amphitheatre (see here<\/a>). Source<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Greek tragedies offer Suzuki the theme of mania\u2014be it ecstatic, erotic or vengeful\u2014to justify and foreground the high levels of energy that his trained performing bodies unleash on stage. For Erika Fischer-Lichte, Suzuki may also explore \u201cthe supposed kinship between Noh and ancient Greek tragic theatre\u201d (166), as the Noh actor Kanze Hisao and his theatre company Mei No Kai did before him, in the 1970s, when they staged a number of ancient Greek tragedies in the Noh style on the premise that both genres depict the confrontation of Man with Fate (Fischer-Lichte 164; McDonald 56\u201357).<\/p>\n\n\n

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Kanze Hisao performing Harlequin in the 1955 experimental production of Pierrot Lumiere <\/em>in Tokyo, created by Jikken K\u014db\u014d and Takeshi. <\/em>As the mask shows, avant-garde and Noh elements were combined in the performance. Photo: Kitadai Sh\u014dz\u014d, see Tezuka<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Although Suzuki feels a strong affinity with the Greeks, his sentiment does not preclude the possibility of collision. His tour de force<\/em> lies partly in his strong clash with the ancient Greek tragedies. The ancient Greeks gave him a larger ontological scale in which individuality is simultaneously transcended and yet paradoxically grounded in a plagued collective and social sphere (Varopoulou qtd. in Chatzidimitriou, 97). In his theatre, classics are collaged and replayed, resulting in a new textual vortex that sweeps away psychological interpretation to reveal tensions, struggles and traumas which are rooted in historicity before they become a trope, that of the world as hospital.His recurrent framing device of the world as mental hospital can be partly attributed to \u201cJapan\u2019s instability and social conflicts and the sensibilities these created\u201d (Allain, qtd in Chatzidimitriou, \u201cTadashi Suzuki and Yukio Ninagawa\u201d 101). This is a \u201cmad world,\u201d Suzuki implies, \u201cin which texts and bodies lose their \u2018sane integrity,\u2019 ending up butchered and irrational\u201d (Chatzidimitriou, \u201cTadashi Suzuki and Yukio Ninagawa\u201d 101). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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