Oldal 84 [84]
OCR
JOHANNA DOMOKOS the chorus sits in a Noh play). Meanwhile, in the left back corner, where the instrumentalists usually sit in a Noh play, two yoikers in colorful baize dresses were standing. These two units never left their places during the performance. The character of boazovazzi [the reindeer herdsman] moved mainly along the rear and front ends of the central axes of the stage. The most mobile figure on the stage was the main character, Ridn’oaivi, in traditional leather Sami dress, played by Valkeapää himself. While the verbal parts were acted out by Sami actors in Sami costumes, their voices were spoken by the Japanese actors, who were dressed in black suits. Aside from a gékti (a traditional SAmi costume) no other props or settings were used. The simplistic setting, the author’s presence in the performance, the infrequent rehearsals (“maybe three times,” as Okura reveals in his 2017 article),* and the improvised acting, contribute to the categorization of the first two performances as art performances. As is well known, Valkeapää was a very talented improviser who often performed in his homeland as well as around the world during the healthy period of his life (in 1996 he had a very serious accident, which led to his early death in 2001). Regarding the acting out or the embodiment of the liminal storyline, the play was constructed along the tension of the “old me” [Ridn’oaivi] and the “young me” ([nieguid oaidni] lit. the Dream-seer, who is the reindeer herdsman). During the play no other elements interfered with this “inner monologue,” vocalized in Japanese words and acted out by the two Sami characters, who occasionally also sang yoiks. In this sense, this play manifests the liminal state of a person embodied in two characters, which is carried out with movements, words, and yoiks by the six people on the stage. The Japanese audience was endowed not only with a somewhat familiar liminal storyline - the Noh structure of the play - but also witnessed a nuanced interweaving of Sami and Japanese cultural codes. As pointed out above, Valkeapää included in his play well-known haikus by Basho, the Japanese haiku master from the seventeenth century. This ritual and liminal aesthetic experience made a strong impression on the Japanese audience, who remained in a deep silence for several minutes after the play ended. A few days before he passed away, Valkeapää sent a postcard to the Sami National Theater Beaivväs expressing his interest in staging his drama as a Noh play. The card was postmarked in Japan on the day of his death, November 26, 2001. Valkeapää had worked closely with several artists from this company even before the group’s inception in 1981. The Icelandic theater director Haukur J6n Gunnarsson, who served the Beaivvas group between 1991 and 1996, and again 2007-2015, is one of the most successful promoters of Japanese Kabuki theater in Europe, for which he was awarded the UNESCO Uchimura prize in 2003. As he explains on the playbill: 18 Okura: Ibid., 368. + 82 +
