Certain Noble Plays of Japan: From the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa — John Shaqi
Certain Noble Plays of Japan: From the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa
General
Certain Noble Plays of Japan: From the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa
No plays -- Translations into English
My play is made possible by a Japanese dancer whom I have seen dance in a
studio and in a drawing-room and on a very small stage lit by an
excellent stage-light. In the studio and in the drawing-room alone where
the lighting was the light we are most accustomed to, did I see him as
the tragic image that has stirred my imagination. There where no
studied lighting, no stage-picture made an artificial world, he was able,
as he rose from the floor, where he had been sitting crossed-legged or as
he threw out an arm, to recede from us into some more powerful life.
Because that separation was achieved by human means alone, he receded,
but to inhabit as it were the deeps of the mind. One realised anew,
at every separating strangeness, that the measure of all arts' greatness
can be but in their intimacy.
III
All imaginative art keeps at a distance and this distance once chosen
must be firmly held against a pushing world. Verse, ritual, music and
dance in association with action require that gesture, costume, facial
expression, stage arrangement must help in keeping the door. Our
unimaginative arts are content to set a piece of the world as we know it
in a place by itself, to put their photographs as it were in a plush or a
plain frame, but the arts which interest me, while seeming to separate
from the world and us a group of figures, images, symbols, enable us to
pass for a few moments into a deep of the mind that had hitherto been too
subtle for our habitation. As a deep of the mind can only be approached
through what is most human, most delicate, we should distrust bodily
distance, mechanism and loud noise.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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