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JOHANNA DOMOKOS
that of Noh theater and haiku poetry. Additionally, Valkeapää’s longstanding
admiration of the works of Nobel Prize-winning author Herman Hesse must
have also contributed to his affinity with Eastern spiritual practices.
In 1995, upon receiving an invitation to the international Northern Light
Poetry Festival in the northern Japanese city of Sapparo, Valkeapää began to
conceive of a yoik-Noh poetic concert (as he later called it). By combining his
poetic verbal style with yoiking and adding the spirit and structure of the
ritualist Noh theater, Valkeapää was able to create a productive, compelling,
and successful piece on a topic very close to his heart: the insecurity of young
people. His performance script was ready in September 1995 and was entitled
Ridn'oaivi ja nieguid oaidni (Ihe Frost-haired and the Dream-seer). This per¬
formance was planned to be simultaneously poetic and musical, with equal
amounts of time devoted to text in Sami and Japanese as well as to traditional
yoiking (c. 25 minutes each). Just as Noh theater is thought to embody the
ancient, intuitive, and syncretic worldview of Japanese culture, which forms
the foundation of Japanese identity, the same is true for the yoik of the Sami.
Valkeapaa’s yoik-Noh poetic concert, performed with a three-person yoik¬
ing band plus two Japanese actors, was reconceptualized after his death by
the Sami National Theater Beaivvas (SNTB) in Norway, under the direction
of Haukur Jon Gunnarsson, one of the best Kabuki directors in Europe, who
had already served as theater director of the Sami National Theater for three
terms. Gunnarsson kept the same proportion of yoik and text for these stag¬
ings, which were performed locally and internationally in 2006-7 and again
in 2013. The remainder of this essay will investigate how scripted rituality
relates to the embodied rituality in the two scene versions and their different
performances.
Analyzing the performance texts — meaning the scene versions of the two
differently ritualized performances — we must state that Valkeapää intended
to write a scene version and not a drama from the very beginning. However,
the scene version prepared ten years later for the Sami National Theater was
altered substantially. No changes were made to the poetic text, but complete¬
ly different yoiks were inserted in the place of traditional ones. Moreover,
Valkeapaa’s simplistic yet powerful performance was changed from a one-man
show to a complex theatrical production by five professional actors and six
professional musicians on the stage (plus several backstage performers and
a director).
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