Kwaidan (review)

Reviewed by: Kwaidan Philip Auslander Kwaidan. By Ping Chong. Center for Puppetry Arts, Atlanta. 15 June 1998. Click for larger view View full resolution The Ghost Lady and Jinininki in the Center for Puppetry Arts of Atlanta’s production of Ping Chong’s Kwaidon, directed by Ping Chong. Photo: David Zeiger. Click for larger view View full resolution The Ghost Lady and Jinininki in the Center for Puppetry Arts of Atlanta’s production of Ping Chong’s Kwaidan, directed by Ping Chong. Photo: David Zeiger. Click for larger view View full resolution The Ghost Lady in the Center for Puppetry Arts of Atlanta’s production of Ping Chong’s Kwaidon, directed by Ping Chong. Photo: David Zeiger. Kwaidan, a collaboration between Ping Chong (credited as conceiver, adapter, and director), puppeteer Jon Ludwig, and designer Mitsuru Ishii, represents a new departure for Chong. Although he has always worked with mixed means, mingling live actors with projections and scenic effects, Kwaidan is Chong’s first performance piece to eschew human presence almost completely in favor of puppets. Kwaidan had its world premiere at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, where Ludwig is Associate Artistic Director, and will tour nationally. The source material for Kwaidan (the title is Japanese for Strange Tales, approximately), is a trio of the Japanese ghost stories collected and translated by Lafcadio Hearn. In the first, an itinerant priest encounters a former monk whose excessively worldly ways resulted in his being transformed into a demon that devours the deceased citizens of a small village. The second story concerns a young blind musician and acolyte, played by an actor, who is pressed into performing a ballad recounting the military defeat of a clan for the ghosts of that clan. The final tale is a bit different in tone: it’s a romance in which a man’s dead fiancée is reincarnated years after her death; he spends his life seeking her in her new identity. At a lecture for an Atlanta arts group, Chong reminded his audience that his background is primarily in the visual arts and film. It is in these terms that Kwaidan was most readily appreciated, for each of its three sections represented a different attempt to translate the language of film into a live performance vocabulary based in the manipulation of two- and three-dimensional objects. The stage for all three stories was an elegant black construction whose central part was gridded into rectangular sections. For the first story, the three middle panels were used like the sections of a painted Japanese screen. The opening scene, the priest’s trek through a mountainous region, was played against a pen-and-ink landscape. As the priest neared his destination, larger puppets representing him were substituted for the smaller ones used initally, creating the effect of a cut from long-shot to medium-shot. The priest’s progress into the village was rendered by means of projected slides that dissolved into one another, beginning with an establishing shot of the village nestled in a valley that gave way to closer shots of the village, leading up to one particular house. The tripartite division of the panels allowed for different framings of the scenes. The bedroom in which the priest slept was [End Page 521] a tableau that occupied only one section. The climactic scene, in which the demon devours a body over which the priest maintains a vigil, was presented on all three panels and as if seen from above. The staging of the second story was a study in playful scalar juxtapositions. The entire stage was used to represent both the monastery that is home to the blind musician (played by an actor) and the ghosts’ palace. The live human figure of the musician contrasted with giant puppet eyes representing the ghosts’ emissary that peered through the open panels of the set, now functioning as upstage windows. The ghosts were represented by puppets much smaller than the actor, suggesting that they could be seen only from a distance. The third story was presented almost entirely in close-up. The three panels in the set were modified into oval openings through which we glimpsed a succession

Art · African history and culture studies · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism