Message from richardrodriguez

[Anonymous]

I recently saw The Black Rider—Robert Wilson, Tom Waits and William Burroughs. An excellent musical play based on an old German folktale. (I will tie this into Asia soon.) The story is about a young man who sells his soul to the devil to win the heart of the girl he loves. He is given magic bullets that will hit anything he aims at. Unfortunately when time comes for the devil to collect his due another deal is struck resulting in the death of his girl and his confinement to an asylum for the insane. Sad story. So what does it have to do with Asia?

The costumes and the make-up were obviously Chinese militant and Noh/Kabuki/Butoh Theater influenced. Very simple lines, heavy fabrics, military style boots, mask-like white paint on the face with black lines to highlight various features such as long black silky hair, etc. The play has a skewed feeling meaning that everything is off center and not quite balanced. This lends itself well to the whole supernatural motif. I read that Kabuki actually derives form a verb that means “to lean” and that kabuki can be interpreted as bizarre or avant-garde. This is an excellent description of The Black Rider.

The body movements were also very stylized, simple and direct, slow and very reminiscent of Noh Theater. Of course the Beats were heavy into eastern philosophy and Burroughs coming from that probably had some input into the overall look and feel of the thing.

As for the music: Waits chose a jazzy lounge style that often clashed with itself. He employed chromatic lines and diminished phrasing to create an eerie soundtrack for the play. If you have ever heard any of the traditional Chinese and/or Japanese music (maybe in Memoirs of a Geisha?), you might argue that certain styles of Asian music seem to have preceded Stravinsky and the whole 12-tone school just a little bit.

I find it interesting that whenever we want to take a weird postmodern approach on something in contemporary theater we borrow elements of the Chinese and Japanese past. WB Yeats in fact seems to have borrowed somewhat from the Eastern aesthetic in many of his “odd” avant-garde plays and early poems. Could this have been due to his friendship with Ezra Pound?

Anyhow, there are so many more similarities between The Black Rider and ancient forms of Asian theater that I could spend ten pages here, but I won’t. Rather I will strongly suggest that you see it the next time it is in town.