ABSTRACT
String Puppet Sanbaso-, a kabuki dance performed to the accompaniment of a nagauta ballad,1 is one of a long series of felicitous sanbaso-plays, a performance type that can be found in every major genre of traditional theatre. Indeed, the sanbaso-(a kind of divine clown who is the sidekick of another god, the Old Man okina) is a character whose performance predates Japan’s oldest full-fledged dramatic genre, the no-, and points to the sacred and ritual origin of all traditional Japanese performance. In the kabuki dance, two actors play a marionette of the little god and its puppeteer. When the puppeteer pulls an invisible string, for example, the puppet’s hand rises, and it seems as if his entire body is at the beck of his manipulator: limp, inert matter until animated by his controller. It is a brilliant dance, the actor mimicking the jerky, awkward – yet gravity-defying – movements of the little god made of wood and strings. Watching a performance of this play at the Kabukiza in Tokyo in December 2009,
I was struck afresh by the traditional Japanese theatre’s delight in metatheatrical techniques that reference not only a plethora of other forms, narrative motifs, and performance patterns (String Puppet Sanbaso-also references ningyo-buri, the technique in which kabuki actors imitate bunraku puppets), but also call to attention the meaning of mimesis itself, its chief purpose arguably being an effort to cheat death. Art’s pedigree can be traced back to the Orphic quest to resurrect the dead, to retrieve through recollection what has been lost.2
