Character Research: Old Man

Old Man and Old Man Puppet ideas:

Character Research: The Girl

Ideas about the Girl and the Puppet of the Girl:

(only the green "dress" on the right)

Color Ideas

IDEAS ABOUT COLOR:

Puppet types

I am about to bombard you with blog posts!

Here are some different kinds of puppets:

SMALL PUPPETS: Marionettes

SMALL PUPPETS: Rod puppets

GIANT PUPPETS: Bread and Puppet style

Puppets

Yeats and Noh Theatre 2

http://www.csun.edu/~hceng029/yeats/holmes.html

****I define Yeats's broad goal for his Four Plays as establishment during performance of an atmosphere of 'strange intimacy.' This phrase is adapted from McFarlane who interprets Yeats's ideas as expressed in CNPJ as follows:

The over-riding concern was to achieve a distanced intimacy: to counterbalance this new intimacy of setting with a new and organic separating strangeness. This strangeness was entirely different from the 'bodily distance' which the mechanicalness and noise of the contemporary theatre created; it was to be achieved by 'human means,' by ritual, stylizations, the formalizations of the dance, by abstractive transpositions into music, by the depersonalizations of the mask ...(565). [Italics added.]

****McFarlane describes Yeats as being part of the Neo-Modernist movement in twentieth century European drama. Yeats had a "desire to liberate contemporary theatre from its continuing naturalistic constraints - physical (the 'missing fourth wall') as well as ideological (the 'slice of life')... (561)."
Yeats sought to establish a 'strange intimacy' in his plays as opposed to the 'familiar distance' evoked by contemporary naturalistic productions popular both in England and at the Abbey Theatre. Drama such as that of Ibsen, Shaw and Galsworthy was familiar because of its social subject matter and physically distanced by mechanization and its trappings (e.g. large auditoria, elaborate sets, orchestras). This familiar and distant drama was a product of the materialistic, mechanized, prose dominated age which Yeats sought to transcend with dramatic poetry.


****Noh plays neglect character just as Japanese art neglects relief/depth, being two dimensional with repeated patterns (CNPJ, 235). Yeats appreciated this focus and sought to make his characters less individual and more universal in his Four Plays.


****Yeats sought physical intimacy between actors and audience. Noh achieves this by having the audience on three sides. Yeats's went even further as can be seen from his stage directions for Hawk's Well :

The stage is any bare space before a wall...the most effective lighting is the lighting we are accustomed to in our rooms. These masked players seem stranger when there is no mechanical means of separating them from us. (207).

****Yeats saw collective interactive imaginative potential in theater which he sought to maximize by engaging the imagination of the entire audience. His innovations in technique were not used merely for their novelty factor. In his notes on Hawk's Well , Yeats wrote, "I seem to myself most alive when a room full of people share the one lofty emotion" (Alspach, 415). This one emotion is what he wished to evoke through strange intimacy at each performance of his Four Plays.
Yeats's words from "The Symbolism of Poetry" explain what this one emotion involves:

All sounds, all colours, all forms ... evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down among us certain disembodied powers...and when sound, and colour, and form are in a musical relation, a beautiful relation to one another, they become, as it were, one sound, one colour, one form, and evoke an emotion that is made out of their distinct evocations and yet is one emotion. ...the more various and numerous the elements that have flowed into its perfection, the more powerful will be the emotion, the power, the god it calls among us. (157).

In the light of this statement, it is possible to see the Four Plays as dramatic experiments into which Yeats poured as many different "sounds, colours and forms" as he could muster in order to create a drama with musical unity[9] capable of putting his audience into a "trance like reverie" through which it could tap into the Great Memory. In Mythologies, he wrote that he wished to "immerse [my mind] in the general mind where that mind is scarce separable from what we have begun to call the subconscious" (343).

Yeats and Noh Theatre

http://writing.colostate.edu/gallery/phantasmagoria/sands.htm

****During his middle and later years, Yeats was compelled to explore the world of theater and was highly influenced by the mysterious elegance and beauty of the art of the Japanese Noh Theater. He sought to establish what is referred to as “strange intimacy” in his plays as opposed to the “familiar distance” evoked by contemporary naturalistic productions popular both in England and at the Abbey Theatre at the time.

I need a theatre. I believe myself to be a dramatist. I desire to show events and not merely tell of them...two of my best friends were won for me by my plays, and I seem to myself most alive at the moment when a room full of people share the one lofty emotion. –W.B Yeats 1917

            The two “best friends” he is referring to here, of course, are Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa who introduced Yeats to the Noh Drama. Yeats borrowed structural elements from Japanese Noh as well as to incorporate this highly stylized theater into his own plays. Two Yeats plays showing this influence of the Japanese Noh Drama were At the Hawk’s Well, performed at the Abbey Theater in Dublin in 1917 and The Death of Cuchlain first published in 1939 and performed at the Abbey Theater in 1945.

****Modern Japanese poet, Yone Noguchi once said,

…the actors and audience go straight into the heart of prayer in creating the most intense atmosphere of grayness, the most suggestive color in all Japanese art, which is the twilight soared out of time and place. (Hakutani, 17)

            This was precisely the energy, atmosphere and style Yeats aimed to emanate in his plays; two of these being At the Hawks Well and The Death of Cuchulain and the westernization of the Japanese Noh began. Edmund Murray puts it perfectly in his article, in his article, Noh Business:

. . a journey, a surprise meeting, a revelation, a disappearance from the surprise meeting, an interlude of explanation, then a reappearance in a transformed state, which results in some expiation or resolution, often of a past event, which leads to a dance, all in a landscape which is imbued with the power of the past event, which is embodied in a ghost or spirit or god. The waki is like the base, the shite like the lead guitar. ( Murray, 60)

            In his initial flush of enthusiasm for Japanese theater Yeats wrote the first series of “dance plays,” and the most frequently discussed of these is At the Hawks Well . It was his first attempt at a drama consciously patterned on the Noh. It explicitly uses elements such as dance, masks and the supernatural. The stage is a “bare space before a wall which stands a patterned screen.” (Finneran, 219) In his notes to At the Hawks WellYeats argued that;

Painted scenery is unnecessary because our imagination kept living by the arts can imagine a mountain covered with thorn-trees in a drawing room without trouble. (Hakutani, 17)

****Not only did Yeats adapt Noh scenery into this play, he also incorporated the use of masks. All the characters in this play are wearing masks or have faces with make-up that resemble a mask and this serves to create a sense of “simplicity, impersonality, and profundity in symbolism. (Hakutani, 17) 


****The black cloth is refolded again at the end of the play. This ritual of unfolding and refolding the cloth creates an atmosphere subtle strangeness and intimacy and the chanting here has a haunting quality to it. Both of these are aspects directly drawn from Japanese Noh. This was very exciting for Yeats who was always on the lookout for new ways of using occult research, “to hear that the Japanese Plays were full of spirits and masks, and that the crises in plays usually occurred when a character who had appeared to be an ordinary mortal was suddenly revealed to be a God or spirit” (Ellmann, 216)


****Unlike contemporary productions which were concerned with ‘slice of life’ themes, like the Noh Yeats’ At the Hawks Well is not concerned with slices of life, but rather the whole pie. Rather than focusing on the struggle of one character, Yeats explored universal issues, such as the dichotomy between artifice and nature. For example, in At the Hawks Well Cuchulain and the Old Man are characters searching for immortality. The young man speaks to the guardian of the well, “ Do what you will, I shall not leave this place / Till I have grown immortal like yourself (Finneran, 227) and they old man states,

If I may judge by the gold

on head and feet and glittering in your coat,

You are not of those who hate the living world.

(Finneran, 222.)

            They both seem to be obsessed with their own eternal human state and are aching for immortality.

****Yeats was an artist, not a copier. In April of 1916, in one of his most famous essays of drama criticism, "Certain Noble Plays of Japan," Yeats described his revolutionary conception for a new form of drama:

With the help of Japanese plays . . . I have invented a form of drama, distinguished, indirect and, symbolic, and having no need of mob or press to pay its way – an aristocratic form -W.B Yeats 1916