Japanese theater workshop prepares actors for an upcoming BPA production.
Pamela Dharamsey turns her right hand, the hand holding a large purple-and-white fan, down and in toward her body a few degrees.
The slight shift adjusts the ‘camae,’ the basic pose of classic Japanese Noh theater.
“Now slightly bend your knees, Pam,” her teacher, islander Bonnie Showers, says. “Chin down.”
When Dharamsey is positioned properly, her knees flexed, legs hidden by the many layers of her samurai costume – the hakama, or split skirt, an obi sash, and several kimono – Showers starts to chant.
The song is about a woman viewing flowers over the mountains, the opening lines of a Noh piece beginning students study.
Showers will face a roomful of Noh beginners this weekend as she leads a workshop in “Japanese Theatre Skills for the Western Actor,” a course of study that will also feature the theater forms Kyogen and Kabuki in three days of intensive classes run by teachers noted for their Asian theater expertise.
The workshop serves as training for “Rashomon,” the play Showers directs in April for Bainbridge Performing Arts, based on the Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa’s tale of a single crime described from the different points of view.
Showers’ adaptation of the story will feature Noh, Kyogen and Kabuki, as well as more familiar Western acting techniques.
Both Noh and Kyogen – a comic theater form often inserted between Noh scenes – are over 600 years old, Showers points out, while Kabuki was developed in the red-light district of 17th century Kyoto.
“The thing with Kabuki, it was a popular art form,” Showers said. “There’s flamboyance associated with a form that incorporates whatever are the newest, most elaborate and most shocking features.”
In contrast, Showers says, Noh, a more introspective and philosophical theater, is less accessible.
“Noh is the mysterious, poetic, masked classical form of theatre which was beloved of the samurai class,” she said. “Noh includes chant and dynamically slow and energized formal movement.”
The classic Noh set is similarly understated, with just a few pillars and a solitary pine tree.
The Noh principles of restraint and subtlety are defined in essays by Zeami, the 14th-century Noh master who penned nearly half the Noh repertoire. Zeami’s writings described a form imbued with “yugen,” a Zen-influenced aesthetic. Noh actors, Zeami wrote, ought to be “feeling 10 and showing 7.”
Some Noh lines are chanted by a chorus, others by the actors.
The two voices overlap, Showers says, to carry the story line forward.
“The actor might say ‘I came from the capital and I am dying of sadness’ and the chorus picks up ‘I am dying of sadness and pain, I am looking at the sea falling and rising.’”
Dance and movement may seem to merge in performance, Showers says.
“They say you are chanting the dance and dancing the chant,” she said. “When I first started studying, the first very intensive three weeks, there was a fleeting moment when I was chanting (that) I felt myself moving through space on the energy of the voice.”
Showers, who holds a double degree in Dramatic Literature and Theater Arts and an MFA in Asian Performance, co-founded and led an avant-garde, movement-based theater company in Germany – Muenster’s Theater im Pumpenhaus – before moving to Hawaii to study Asian theater with students from all over the world.
But her studies were far from an academic exercise, she points out.
“My teachers are very funny people,” she said, “and they never teach with words. You are to learn through the form.
“It’s a humbling experience to understand that the secrets will not be revealed in just a few years of study.”
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Noted instructors Iitomi Yukie, Jubilith Moore, David Crandall and Bonnie Showers lead a workshop in “Japanese Theatre Skills for the Western Actor,” Jan. 16-18 at the Playhouse. Sessions include history, chant and movement and costuming for Noh, Kyogen and Kabuki.
Cost for the three-day workshop is $50. Registration: 842-8569.
