DANCE: A kiss, when all is said, what is it?

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As one of the seminal figures of modern Japanese theater, it is fitting that Tadashi Suzuki’s production of Cyrano de Bergerac should open the National CKS Cultural Foundation’s (國立中正文化中心) Window on Japan (世界之窗日本系列) program next Friday.

The series of performances provides a sampling of Japan’s varied artistic developments, including representative dance, multimedia, musical and dramatic works, that is designed to provide a deeper insight into some of country’s cultural currents.

Japan has proved remarkably successful in creating a dialogue between its traditional culture and the avant-garde, and Suzuki played a key role in that process.

Drawing heavily on Noh and Kabuki techniques, Suzuki developed a training program that places great emphasis on actors’ physical discipline.

In an article titled Culture and the Body, published in 2002, Suzuki summarized his approach as consisting “of training … to speak powerfully and with clear articulation, and also … learn[ing] to make the whole body speak, even when one keeps silent.”

The Suzuki method is famed for requiring a level of control more akin to that of a dancer than a stage actor.

Lin Yu-beng (林于立立), an assistant professor of drama at the Taipei National University of the Arts (國立臺北藝術大學), says Suzuki’s achievement was to distill physical movements from Asian theatrical traditions.

“Similar in some respects to the forms used in Beijing opera and other Chinese opera styles, it is a physical expression that does not require words,” Lin said. “The presence of each actor is sufficient to command the audience’s attention.”

While inspired by traditional Japanese performance styles, Suzuki ranges freely

through the cannons of drama to find his

material. In 2007 he brought his production of Dionysus to Taiwan, a work based on Euripides’ play The Bacchae.

His reworking of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, written in 1897, has seen many successful modern versions, and was popularized in the 1990 French movie adaptation starring Gerard Depardieu.

Suzuki’s Cyrano bears little resemblance to those redactions. Not only do the actors don traditional Japanese dress, but Suzuki has also incorporated whole sections of Verdi’s La Traviata into the score.

Suzuki also frames Cyrano’s story within another story whose central figure is an author, and compares the latter’s position, hidden behind his words, with the former’s, who is forced by circumstance to declare his love by proxy.

Suzuki’s Cyrano, with its strange, even absurd hybridity, transcends specific styles and is universally expressive, Lin says.

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