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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 essential 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; additionally, 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. + 79 +
