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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 performance 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 yoiking 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 stagings, 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 completely 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). s 74 +
