Bunraku

I had the great opportunity to go to a Bunraku performance with my school on Tuesday. For those of you who don't know, Bunraku is traditional Japanese puppet theater. Needless to say I did not understand a word of it but this didn't seem to be a problem because judging by the looks on their faces, I don't think any of my friends did either.
Bunraku uses very old traditional Japanese the language, imagine really difficult Shakespeare then times it by 10 and you probably have about the right idea of what I was attempting to understand....yeah, probably not gonna happen any time soon. Not only this but the narrator (Tayu) puts so much characterization into his voice that even the Japanese people needed subtitles to have any idea what he was saying. Imagine really nasally shouting with a lot of breaks into the vocal ranges that shouldn't be possible for a grown man with lots of long drawn out syllables and you have about the right idea of what a Tayu sounds like.
However, through the eyes of a theater geek this performance was interesting on a different level. It was so cool to see the Tayu and Shamisen player working together to weave this story. At times it seemed like they were almost trying to outdo each other in their performances but according to the brochure this is the way it always is and in all actuality their efforts matched each other perfectly. The Tayu went from talking to singing and back seemingly at random but his "singing" was something new altogether.
All the puppets were so complex they needed two or three people apiece to operate them and almost every limb down to their eyebrows were mobile making this performance far more intricate than your standard sock puppet show.

I don't think any of my friends quite understood why I said afterward that I thought the Bunraku was quite interesting, most of them dosed off before it was halfway through but I wasn't lying when I said it. Bunraku is as different a type of theater as you can get from my usual Broadway musicals and quite an experience.





photos courtesy of: eee.uci.edu/clients/sbklein/images/EDOTHEATER /bunraku/images/chanter02.jpg and http://www.pref.osaka.jp/en/attraction/culture/bunraku/img/main.jpg