Bunraku

For Bunraku we all had to research different areas, I had to research the historical background as well as the shamisen and the chanter. For the historical background I produced a powerpoint, this is the information it contained:


The History

1590s:

·      Three arts joined together: puppet manipulation, narrative storytelling and shamisen players.

·      They formed commercial puppet theatre troupes.

·      One name for this theatre form was joruri, named after a musical style used to chant the epic, Twelve Tales of Princess Joruri.

17^th Century:

·      It was built around a narrative, sung, chanted and spoken by a single narrator (called the tayu), accompanied by one shamisen player and illustrated by puppets.

·      This remains the basic style of performance today

·      At first the narrator, shamisen and the puppeteer were hidden during performances.

·      But by the early 18^th century when Monzaemon Chikamatsu wrote his first psychologically persuasive ‘modern’ puppet plays, all the performers were visible during the performance.

Monzaemon Chikamatsu:

·      Monzaemon Chikamatsu was a well known Kabuki writer.

·      He began writing Bunraku plays using the Confucia ideas of loyalty over personal feelings which are widespread in kabuki

·      òHe also wrote plays about the merchant class, especially about current events or occurences that affected them.

·      His plays were a huge success  and are still performed today, because the majority of the audience were from the merchant class

Gidayu Takemoto:

·      Gidayu Takemoto also affected the development of Bunraku

·      He was the creator of the style of chanted narration, which is why it is known as Gidayu

·      He added his own emotive style to the performances

18^th Century:

·      There was a lot of exchange between Kabuki and Bunraku both from a movement and playwright point of view.

·      And number of plays were adapted from one to the other.

·      Bunraku flourished and borrowed elements of Kabuki’s stylized movements to make the puppets appear more real.

·      At the end of the decade there was a decline in the popularity of Bunraku due to a lack of good writers.

How did it get its name?

·      In the early 18^th century Bunrakukken Uemura built a small theater in the area of Osaka where ‘The National Bunraku Theater’ now stands.

·      In 1872 the theatre was relocated and given official government recognition.

·      It is now called Bunraku-za.

·      And this is how it got its name.

Bibliography:

http://www.essortment.com/bunraku---japanese-puppetry-58118.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunraku#The_chanter.2C_.22tayu.22

http://www.artelino.com/articles/bunraku.asp

http://www.osaka-info.jp/en/culture/2007may/03.html

http://www2.ntj.jac.go.jp/unesco/bunraku/en/contents/creaters/tayu.html

The Cambridge guide to Asian Theatre by James R Brandon

For the Chanter and the Shamisen I produced a movie using Imovie (which could not be uploaded).






Ms Hurst made two words games for us to learn the area she had to research. For the mechanics she had cut up the sentences and laminated them. The sentences had different colors, but there could be a red sentences followed by a blue sentence and then a red again. This blog: http://alisontheatre.blogspot.com/2011/05/bunraku-research.html shows the process of assembling the sentences. We learned that:

The Mechanism of the Puppets

The  heads  of the  dolls  are carved  of  wood and  are  hollow, and  they  are placed  atop  a special        head-grip   stick (dogushi),  which  is  placed through  a  hole in  the  shoulder board;   it is with this  stick  that the main puppeteer manipulates    the doll.    There are  lengths  of fabric  draped both  in  front  of and  in  the  back  of  the  shoulder board,  and  they are  attached  to bamboo hoops ―  it is a    very  simple mechanism. Loofahs  are attached  at  either   end   of  the  shoulder  board   to   create  the roundness  of  the shoulders.   The  arms   and  legs   are   each  attached separately  to  the shoulder  board by  strings,  but,    as a rule,  female puppets  do  not have  any  legs  at  all  ―  the  foot puppeteer  places his  fists  in  the hem  of  the  doll's robe  and  makes it  appear  as though  she  has feet  and  is walking.  A  long wooden armature (sashigane)  is attached  to  the puppet's  left hand,  through the  use  of  which  the  left-hand puppeteer operates  the doll's  left  arm and  hand.

And the website used to collect this information was:

http://www2.ntj.jac.go.jp/unesco/bunraku/en/contents/creaters/operator.html