Waking passions in the geisha's dream world
An African-American actress dressed as a modern geisha slowly glides across the stage, while a male Japanese kabuki performer, dressed as a traditional geisha, dances to the tune of a three-string shamisen.
This is a scene from director Ong Keng Sen's Geisha, a blend of traditional and contemporary performances. Seemingly an encounter between two different cultures - between 'somebody outside the culture and some-body that seems to be inside the culture' - there are subtler inferences, too. 'Theatre audiences buy a dream; the geisha makes a dream world,' says Ong. 'There's a parallel in the world of the theatre and the world of the art of the geisha.'
The mystique of the geisha has inspired a number of novels, including Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha, which was made into a Hollywood movie last year. Ong's production, which had its premiere at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, in May and will be at the Singapore Arts Festival this month, is inspired by Liza Dalby's anthropological book Geisha.
The production brings together Japanese kabuki performer and female impersonator Gojo Masanosuke, American actress Karen Kandel and shamisen player Kineya Katumatu.
'The geisha is one of the biggest symbols of Japanoiserie,' Ong says. 'For me, she's an empty screen on which we project our identity of Japan and fantasy of Asia.'
Kandel plays the role of a narrator, weaving together stories from geishas, maikos (apprentice geishas), okamisans (mama-sans), and clients, giving voice to their secret world. 'She's dressed as a modern geisha and her role is that of a dream weaver,' says Ong. 'She reads texts from anthropological books about geisha, the translation of the lyrics of the geisha songs, and some new text was also written.'
Kandel spent three months in Japan to learn first-hand about the world of a modern-day geisha. 'The cumulative effect of what I have learnt is probably somewhere inside me, deep,' she says. 'I've had the most unusual glimpses of art and culture in the oddest places. I've seen traditional arts like kabuki, Noh, and the tea ceremony. I've taken Noh lessons with Shimizu-sensei on the stage of the Tessenkai Noh Theatre. I've been invited to speak with geisha and watch dance lessons instructed by Kikushiro-sensei and Kikunojo-sensei [master of the Onoe Dance School].'
Kandel says the title of the production 'may be misleading because of the many associations with and fantasies about geisha'.
'We're attempting, through geisha culture and the culture that created geisha culture, to find a metaphor for ourselves, as artists - how we provide the space, away from everyday life, for people to dream,' she says.
'It's like making a contract to live truthfully in an imaginary world. That's what my job is as a performer. The audience or a geisha client makes the same contract.'
Ong says he came up with the idea for his project in 2004, while travelling with Masanosuke on a train to Vienna, where the two were working on another project, Chinoiserie.
'We were talking about the mystic that surrounds a lot of European perceptions of Asia,' he says. 'As we were talking, we realised that a man's perception of a geisha is very different from that of a woman. Dalby's perception is really about the kinship between the women, about sisterhood, while Golden's is more about the objectification of the geisha, her sex-ification. These two writers' perceptions are very different.
'I knew from the beginning we weren't going to do the fictional geisha. I was more interested in the culture encountered and the idea that we're all outside of this and looking in, and what does it mean about us, rather than them.'
In Geisha, the two actors complement each other to evoke the geisha through vignettes about her world.
Masanosuke dances the female onnagata role, drawing from the age-old repertoire of kabuki and nihon buyoh (classical Japanese dance).
The geisha is the tragic heroine of many kabuki plays, Masanosuke says, and the role is physically challenging.
'You need to drop your shoulder, move your neck very gently and pay great attention to your hands and wrist movements,' he says.
Geisha, Singapore Arts Festival, Jun 9-10, 8pm, Victoria Theatre
