MORAL: A Play by Kisaragi Koharu

Abstract

Tokyo playwright Kisaragi Koharu (1956-2000) wrote fast-paced, imagistic plays about consumerist society and challenges of urban life. She and her theatre group NOISE created performances that used words as rhythms and sounds, and actors' bodies as parts of some systematic machine. This translation of MORAL, her most expressionistic and perhaps most well-known play, is first English publication of her work. ********** Kisaragi Koharu and Her Theatre Kisaragi Koharu was an ultimate theatre creator: a playwright, director, artistic director, theatre educator, composer, lyricist, performer, and critic of current issues both theatrical and social. She was an all-round artist and advocate, and when she passed away suddenly in December 2000 from a cerebral hemorrhage, she left a young daughter, a husband, a vast world of unfinished scripts and projects, and a legacy of plays, essays, and theatre activism. Kisaragi Koharu was born in Tokyo in 1956. She majored in philosophy at Tokyo Women's University, and in 1976, while still a sophomore, she founded her first theatre group, Gekidan Kiki. With this group she wrote and directed her own plays following a mandate to examine urban problems and human life in big cities. In her early productions, she began to explore treatment of actor's body as a doll, simulating idea that urban life turned people into alienated robotlike beings. In one of her first popularly acclaimed productions, Romio to Furijia no aru Shokutaku (Romeo and Freesias at table; 1981) she paralleled a group of city dwellers with Capulets and Montagues, having Tokyoites put on their own version of Romeo and Juliet, and in production she used device of koken or stage assistants to manipulate actors' bodies like puppets. Theatre critic Senda Akihiko described her early work as a kind of bas-relief of people's daily life in city, and said that her characters were virtual phantoms--drifting through their urban lives, becoming symbolic tableaux (Senda 2001, 45). (1) In 1982, at age of 27, she left Gekidan Kiki and with a few other members founded a new group called NOISE. (2) Kisaragi was head of company, writing and directing all its productions, while her husband, Kajiya Kazuyuki, was main producer. Here she continued her work on themes of urban life. The name for group came from idea of white noise that exists in every second of day in city. The other meaning behind NOISE comes from a desire to speak out and make a difference. Particularly for women, concept of shizuka, or quietness, is seen as a positive attribute in society, while being urusai, or noisy, is not approved of. Kisaragi and her group insisted on being outspoken and making waves, and their productions were definitely argumentative and noisy. The company's work reflected Kisaragi's ideas about actors' voices and bodies. In her essay Ansanburu no Shiso (Thoughts on ensemble) she wrote that the point of departure is language and also that the body is subject of (Kisaragi 1991, 114). She worked with combination of voice and body, believing that body is what creates resonance, pitches, and quality of feeling in theatrical expression, and indeed that voice and body are only tools of human communication. She worked very actively with her company, linking all of her dialogue to full-out physicality. The movements and gestures were not realistic, but another level of expression for text, and often appeared mechanical or robotlike, illustrating Kisaragi's belief that city dwellers are often more machine than human. Kisaragi's ideas on theatre came from various sources. Her earliest performance experience was in music, in form of piano lessons, which she claims to have found generally uninspiring. As a child she was taken to some standard kinds of shows such as musical comedies and Western-style dramas, but declares to have always had more of an interest in television. …