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SCRIPTED AND EMBODIED RITUALITY IN A YOIK-NOH PERFORMANCE
transcultural way of opening up the hearts and minds of the Japanese audience
to Valkeapää’s equally simplistic style. This has much to do with the yagen
aesthetic principle manifest in traditional Noh plays as well as in the modern
Noh pieces by Okura and Valkeapaa.
The fourteenth — fifteenth-century Zen aesthetician, actor, and playwright,
master Zeami, prescribed a number of required qualities thought to be essen¬
tial to Noh as an art form. Yügen is one of these principles. The name yügen
means “deep meaning, sensitive or tasteful, and full of sentiment, profound
sublimity.” It is a concept valued in various forms of art throughout Japanese
culture. Originally used to mean elegance or grace, representing perfect beauty
in the poetic tradition of waka, yagen means the invisible beauty that is felt
rather than seen in a work of art. The term is used specifically in relation
to Noh to mean the profound beauty of the transcendental world, including
mournful beauty involved in sadness and loss. This aesthetic principle is an
important component in both Okura’s and Valkeapaa’s plays, encouraging the
poetic meditative atmosphere to arise. As Okura points out in his article, this
atmosphere allows for the manifestation of silence and the sublime; addition¬
ally, slow rhythm is a constitutive structural part in both plays.’” Thus, yagen
contributes to aesthetic presentivity in both pieces.
THE PLAY
Although he meticulously followed the structure and the traditional roles for
a yugen-Noh [mystic Noh] play, in his piece Ridwoaivi ja nieguid oaidni [The
Frost-haired and the Dream-seer], Valkeapää reimagined the role of the shite as
a timeless mythical figure called Ridn’oaivi [the Frost-haired]. Ridn’oaivi acts
as a mediator of the wisdom that young people can use to achieve a responsible
harmony with nature and with the inner self. Similarly to Okura’s play, the
role of the waki, the human counterpart of the shite, is embodied in a young
Sami boazovdzzi [reindeer herdsman]. He wanders the tundra alone with his
herd on an autumn night, while lamenting on the following:
how strange,
when I make a halt, it is as if I am on the move,
and as if at home, when I am roaming.
and my travels are not ended by wandering,
even now — after a couple of dog’s runs —
Beatrix Schönau: Zeami színháza és a nó elmélete, Budapest, Primo, 1993, 62. Tamás Vekerdy:
A színészi hatás eszközei — Zeami mester müvei szerint, Budapest, Gondolat, 1988, 119-120.
17 Okura: Ibid., 369.
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