Equally peripatetic, but moving in the opposite direction, was the Japanese actor manager, Kawakami Otojiro, who together with his wife, Sada Yacco, toured the U.S.A. and Europe twice between 1899 and 1902. Their performances of traditional Japanese theater took the European avant garde by storm. Sada Yacco adapted quickly her Japanese traditional dances. She was a geisha with a very solid background in dancing and playing instruments. So she was educated as a geisha and had a sort of, she had a command of her gestures and her movement. She modified those dances which were first quite orthodox to adapt to Western tastes. Their first tour to America, and then Europe, was determined by economic pressures. They were bankrupt and they found a man who financed their ship, their trip to America. That was almost all, there they had to improvise every day. They tried to invent a sort of combination between Kabuki style or, generally, let's say popular style melodramatic short sketches which would be comprehensible without much text and without much explanations to European audiences. Kawakami pretended to be the writer, the author of all of those sketches, but actually, they contained less and less text. They were more and more sort of digests of various melodramatic scenes, which comprised much fighting. Samurai swords, and spectacular fighting, and melodrama with a woman suffering from love, dying from love. And after that, in Europe, they reduced repertoire even further to "The Geisha in the Night", which was not actually a play, but a sort of concoction, made up of, dramatic, scenes, easily understandable, and, effects, which were, preferred by the audiences. >> And it's well known that their performances in Europe, especially held a record traction for the European avant garde. And in fact, it's often said that they influenced the avant garde with the development of avant garde theater. What is your reading of that? >> Now, European spectators, and among them the intellectual theater-goers, tried to read their performances against their own background of theater, avant garde theater. They saw in them their own ideas of symbolism, as Japanese theaters always tends to abstraction and, sort of a systematic, codified movement. They, the Europeans and the Americans got it that Japanese theater was symbol gesture, abstract gesturing, and dance. And that seemed to them very avant-garde. Kawakami tried to describe his tour for Japanese audiences in quite different terms. He had the legend that Sada Yacco was only introduced, onstage after one of his Onagata, the Japanese, women impersonators, fell ill. Which is not true because when they arrived in Japan, the posters of Sada Yacco as an actress were everywhere to be seen. >> So, when they go back to Japan, in what they, did, or didn't they utilize or harness what they learned about American or European theater in Japan. I mean, was there a kind of a two-way traffic in that sense? >> Kawakami was well aware of his mission to bring European and Western ways of playing to Japan. Much prior to his first European tour. He escaped to Paris in 1893 and saw there theater by Victorien Sardou, Jules Vernes, and Denris. He saw "Michel Strogoff", one of the most successful, plays in, Paris at that time. He brought them back. He had his first, triumphs in Japan with patriotic plays designed after French models. >> One example I read about is a production of Othello, which he set I think in Taiwan. Is that true? >> Yes. >> Can you explain what that sort of re-contextualization means? >> Othello was for the Japanese spectator. He became a familiar figure in political contexts. Most of the important plays, or of Japanese plays invented by Kawakami, had a sort of political mission. And Shakespeare became a sort of contemporary. Shakespeare was used by Kawakami to, to express political situations and political problems. He adapted Hamlet, also thinking of Japanese, traditions of ghost apparitions, he was a ghost, he was a father's ghost there, and the familiar Kabuki-inspired images. All his adaptations are partly oriented on western performances, and partly linked to Japanese Kabuki traditions. That's what made them successful. >> By the 1890s, the actor manager model was coming under pressure, although tours of this kind continued well into the 1920s. We now see the emergence of much larger, almost industrial complexes of firms that were heavily capitalized, employed hundreds, and applied all the devices of monopolistic capitalism to the business of theater.
