Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching by Carrie J. Preston

Abstract

Reviewed by: Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching by Carrie J. Preston Alex Rogals Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, And Journeys in Teaching. By Carrie J. Preston. Modernist Latitudes series. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016; pp. 352. Redefining the act of submission is at the heart of Carrie Preston’s Learning to Kneel. Positing that “submission is a crucial aspect of our lives and desires” (205), she criticizes the contemporary Western notion that assumes that “submission to an authority and tradition would always be dehumanizing and oppressive”—an assumption that she herself admits to once having held (21). Focusing on the traditional Japanese performing art noh, Preston argues that its submissive learning model is essential to interpreting the work of notable figures in twentieth-century modernism, in both the West and Japan. Drawing from her personal experiences as a teacher and an amateur noh student, Preston provocatively unpacks the act of submission and explores its fertile role within political, social, and religious contexts. Her accessible memoir-style introduction presents the way that noh is typically taught, focusing on the student’s—in this case Preston’s—goal to copy her master by observing her master demonstrate speech and/or movement and then attempting to recreate it exactly. She acknowledges her own initial prejudices against this system of learning—prejudices she ascribes to her Western tendency to position individual agency as paramount in the creation of art. That there is something to be learned from submitting to the methods of a master is not a revolutionary notion, particularly when it comes to Japan’s traditional performing arts. However, Preston builds on this observation to argue that submission (be it within a performance context or otherwise) should not be unequivocally equated to a lack of agency; it is often a conscious choice made by a willing participant. From this vantage point, Preston engages modernism, a movement that arguably sought to subvert tradition, by illustrating how it actually benefited from its encounters with noh. She explores the work of early Euro-American modernists like Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats, because they drew inspiration from noh and collaborated with Japanese artists to create intercultural translations and stage productions. While Preston acknowledges some common criticisms of these artists—misinterpretation, cultural thievery, fascist political agendas—she argues that “our limited visions of theatrical and intercultural transmission” (93) have placed too much focus on artistic product. This misplaced focus has obscured the processes by which these modernists submitted to noh as artistic authority in order to create cross-cultural collaborations. Preston asks that we focus on the “intimacy of translation,” in contrast to “moralistic evaluations of fidelity or deceit” (39), in order to understand how Pound and Yeats sought respite from realism’s grip on theatre by submitting to noh’s alternative theatrical methods to find inspiration. Preston’s desire to consider process over product leads her to challenge “our shallow conceptions of failure and success” (22). She argues that previous judgments of Pound’s and Yeats’s work, which have simplistically labeled these efforts “failed noh,” have incorrectly assumed that these artists aimed to produce something culturally “authentic.” Contending that this scholarship has ignored how submission has been a tool for innovation, she reveals how both Pound and Yeats grew artistically by submitting to noh techniques and intercultural learning. In chapter 5 Preston returns to this argument to explore Benjamin Britten and William Plomer’s “noh-derived church parable” Curlew River (1964) through its instances of religious- and artistic-submission processes (204). She also provides an intriguing defense of Samuel Beckett’s notoriously controlling directing style by considering how his 1976 production of Footfalls/Pas (1976) demonstrates the artistic merits of submission. If “authenticity” is the guiding factor by which such Western artists have been unfairly judged, Preston also suggests that such biases have tainted the way in which scholarship has understood experiments in Japanese modernism as well. Her third chapter examines the life and work of forgotten transnational dancer Itō Michio, who was Yeats’s main collaborator in his one-act play At Hawk’s Well, which was loosely based on the noh play Hagoromo. Itō’s performance of “noh...