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Volume 7 Number 2, August 2006

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Coldiron, Margaret, Trance and Transformation of the Actor in Japanese Noh and Balinese Masked Dance-Drama.  Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edward Mellen Press. Studies in Theatre Arts, Volume 30,  2004, pp. 350. ISBN 0-7734-6431-0 and 0-7734-9721-8.

Reviewed by

Ralph Yarrow

University of East Anglia

 

This is a very useful book for anyone thinking about performance practice and traditions, as well as investigating the processes and functions of masks in ritual and performance. It is based on a great deal of detailed research; it provides good and full accounts of the background, history and cultural context of the traditions it examines; it is well-illustrated and clearly written.

 The book engages with previous work, and looks at the use of masks and masked drama in Bali and in Noh; it deals with maskmaking and maskwork in performance; with performer training and the aesthetics of performance; gives a series of relevant and interesting case-studies; and is particularly interested in the psychophysiological processes of masked performance and trance, which are analysed in a clear and sensible way.

 Early on some of the distinctive characteristics of the two traditions are set out: for Noh, restraint, the use of fixed form, links with Zen practice and a highly poetic charge; for Topeng and Calonarang, absence of set text, basis in a mix of history and mythology, and the use of improvisation. Where Noh masks are refined, individualised and stylised, Balinese masks are mainly exaggerated types not too different from those known to western Commedia – kings, ministers, comics and demons. Underlying both kinds of practice is a strong cultural matrix which supports the need for performers to inhabit or become the masked ‘other’, which is not however perceived as radically separate from the everyday world but rather contiguous with it.

 Some excellent summaries of the scope of the book are provided on pp. 19-20. The key features of trance and transformation which are illustrated further in subsequent chapters are:

 and the book will cover:

 There are 8 chapters and 49 colour illustrations of masks and performers/performances – these are very good though sometimes a bit small; useful glossaries of Balinese and Japanese terms are also appended There are also, within the text, explanations of key terms (e.g. yûgen, kokoro for Noh) and major categories of masks and plays.

 The diagram on Japanese history is helpful; that of Schechner’s ‘braid’ is potentially useful in attempting to show how Noh and Topeng cross over frequently between the two ends of the ‘entertainment-efficacy spectrum’. However, this would have been a good deal clearer if different colours or formats had been used for the lines tracing each form.

 In the Bibliography, the term ‘books’ is employed somewhat confusingly to include articles and essays, as a contrast to ‘films’ (of which there are not really enough cited to justify this aberration). It is perhaps surprising that, although D. E. R. George’s work on Balinese forms is cited, there is no reference to his 1999 volume Buddhism in/as Performance, which contains illuminating insights on Noh.

 Coldiron is right to assert a fundamental difference in the underlying assumptions of these forms from ‘western’ views of history, truth, time. The question here is, does this radical difference mean that the whole reality/mimesis/imagination ‘braid’ is different? If so,  is the psychophysiological transformation process itself likely to be different in quality? Or do the examples of Plato and Shakespeare, for example in the ‘Cave’ analogy and The Tempest  (Coldiron doesn’t mention either), indicate that this kind of cultural/physiological interface is not ‘foreign’ at all but merely obscured in the west? The plausible claim that these forms represent ‘fictions [which] form the basis of cultural understanding’ (50) might be paralleled with Raymond Sukenick’s postmodern view that ‘reality is a tissue of overlapping fictions’, for instance. However, statements such as ‘the function of much of Balinese masked drama is to help maintain [the] balance between the powerful forces of the universe’ (59) and ‘the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane has never been as well-defined in Japan as in the West, and aesthetic values have as much force as moral ones’ (156/7) resonate effectively against each other and help to establish fundamental parameters. So too, the indication that ‘the mask belongs to the language of signs and the mask drama is a series of signs that communicate, not through written or spoken language, but directly via vision to thought’ (72, re. Topeng) makes it possible to situate the western interest in these forms in terms of semiotics, theatre anthropology and training for theatre practice, as Coldiron discusses in Chapters 1 and 2.

 Later chapters fill out the detail of the general evaluations in Chapters 1 and 2.  It’s difficult in a short review to avoid overemphasisisng the actual and potential parallels between the forms, so it’s important to signal that Coldiron does provide plenty of culture-specific contextualisation, particularly with reference to underlying belief-structures and ritual practice. In the case of Bali, she deals with:

All these are broken down into further sections discussing e.g. the nature of Balinese Hinduism, tenget (the sacred power of trance) and pedagogy.

 For Japan the major divisions are:

 In both cases there are comparisons, particularly with Indian practice, which could usefully be made; but Coldiron seems wary of cross-referencing even virtually identical claims about ‘origin’ or strongly similar teacher-pupil systems. Perhaps because she’s aware of the danger of neo-colonialist homogenising, she fails fully to pursue the implications of what is actually happening to performers – and sometimes to other participants. She rightly signals both Keith Johnstone’s somewhat confused veneration of the ‘Mask’ and the western tendency to mystical interpretation as opposed to the pragmatism of eastern practitioners, but rather closes off further avenues of discussion by not cross-referencing Copeau’s and Lecoq’s identification of neutrality as central to actor transformation, or assessing how far many of the processes used by Balinese and Japanese actors, though clearly based in distinct aesthetic assumptions, may generate the same kinds of psychophysiological state as methods followed employed by performers elsewhere.

 She also accepts reports of ‘thousands’ of trancers in Barong processions without exploring in what way the state they achieve may have arisen differently and be of a different quality to that of the mask-wearing performers. What might be the role of the ‘horizon of expectation’ here? In the case of Noh, she again frequently refers to some special quality of masks which affects performer, performance and reception, but does not really use the theoretical models she has signalled to interrogate further the performers’ beliefs or belief-structures: what about cultural politics or assumptions about gender roles, for example? However, more direct comparisons are suggested in terms of the physiological effects of wearing masks: severely limited vision and reduced oxygen, plus the need to imagine the mask-self and hence suspend the everyday variety.

 There are good accounts of training and performance aims and tasks in both traditions: these are practical, not theoretical and physical, not verbal; both forms are transmitted by means of a very strong teacher-pupil relationship. Both, like the phenomena mentioned above, lead to an ability to ‘disassociate’ from personal feelings and a tendency to operate rather like a puppet or a kind of ‘ego-less’ entity. The latter term would be more immediately applicable to Noh, but Coldiron also notes that the weight and bulk of the costume in Calonarang makes the character into a kind of ‘giant puppet’ (249) manipulated by the performer.

 Tasks for Balinese performers are:

 The first three aims apply equally to Noh, where training is also matter of imitation and repetition; neither improvisation nor technical exercises figure, Coldiron asserts; though some views of Suzuki’s work might qualify the latter claim, and there is a sense in which technical mastery, as in Indian Kathakali, may be the licence to a kind of virtuoso layer of extra subtlety. It is also the case that for Zeami, ‘the flower only blooms once’, performers do not rehearse together, and each performance is a one-off. So here too, whereas the detail is accurate, the lack of lateral thinking sometimes compromises the commentary. Other observations do however remedy this to an extent, for example the statement that transformation in this kind of performance is a learned skill, and central to it is the state or phase of mushin (Chinese wu-hsin, cognate with Sanskrit samadhi): emptiness is the source of phenomenal change; also ‘the concentrated effort of imagination’ (40) of the masked performer leads to ‘physical, psychological and neurophysiological alteration’. Coldiron quotes Kanze Hisao’s remark that ‘the Noh actor is something like a soul, always drifting between this world and the other world’. The training for Noh enables physical and verbal elements of performance to ‘exist at a level of subconscious automaticity’ where the body remembers and performance is without ‘self-expression’ (157). Coldiron suggests that this represents an altered state of consciousness (ASC) but doesn’t link it with e.g. Winnicott’s and Cziksentimihalyi’s concept of ‘flow’, or with Barba’s work on ‘pre-expressivity’, Lecoq’s explicit claim that ‘man thinks with his body’ or even some aspects of the Proustian/Stanislavskian investigation of ‘affective’ or ‘involuntary’ memory.

 In the account of the five key procedures of Noh (Jo-Ha-Kyû, Monomane, Hana, Yûgen, Kokoro), there are good summary comments: for Monomane, in spite of its translation as mimesis or role-playing, it is not imitation but transformation which is required: the actor ‘obliterates his own identity and puts himself at the service of the character defined by the mask’ (162); yûgen indicates a minimalism producing a semiotic richness; kokoro a condition of ‘selfless concentration’ on which depends the animating force required to bring the character to life. Here it might have been useful to compare outcomes: in her account of a production of Tôru, Coldiron signals the complete transformation achieved by the Noh performer from a fragile old peasant to a virile and youthful aristocrat (275); Topeng Pajegan requires the portrayal of a number of different characters by the same actor (188). Both these would seem to link with what Keralan forms call pakarnattom (multiple transformational acting) or Lecoq would characterise as disponibilité. In other words it may be possible to use further degrees of comparison both within and beyond Coldiron’s example to track the processes involved. It would also have been helpful to draw on George’s (or Kiyoshi Tsuchiya's) illuminating discussion of hana, and the suggestion that through the key procedures of Noh, the spectator is drawn to look at the stillness before or after the gesture or move, to listen to the silence more than the note. The crucial factor in all these situations is the foregrounding of the generative condition which performers can assist the audience to enter and share.

 p. 289 has a good summary of the elements which help to produce transformation, viz:

 These things affect the function of both the ergotropic and the trophotropic systems, according to D'Aquili and Laughlin (for whom there is a sense in which myth and ritual are neurobiologically necessary), and produce intense and unusual affective states: Coldiron reports that her own experience confirms that 'relationship to self is fundamentally altered' by mask and costume. She proposes a continuum of performance states, from imitation ('me') through to trance possession ('not me'), passing through enactment, identification and transformation ('not-not me'). Her discussion of the physiology of trance in this section is quite extensive, though some questions remain and the correlations sometimes seem odd (e.g. between 'dissociation' and samadhi). But her claim that performance of this kind results in a 'holistic, intuitive and imaginative mode of cognitive processing' (317) is largely substantiated by both example and argument.