Wednesday, March 11, 2009

HINlMISING:

NŌ STAGE IN THE FOREST,
TOMOYA,MIYAGl,1995-96


by Kengo Kuma

I was asked to design a Nō stage in Toyoma, a small town on the Kitakami River, about 70 kilometres north of Sendai, the seat of Miyagi Prefecture.The name Toyoma, written
with the characters for 'ripen' and 'rice', may be a reference to the area's rich harvests of rice, but is more likely to be a corruption of toyama,meaning 'distant mountains'.Toyoma, which has been producing rice since the Edo period (1600­—1868),prospered as the castle.town of a branch of the Date clan.From the Meiji period(1868—1912),its location on the Kitakami River helped make it a transDortation hub;for a few brief years it was even the seat of the prefectural government.With its beautiful buildings and townscapes, the town is almost like an open-air museum.However,its population,now calculated to be 6,000, has been declining in recent years.


Toyoma has a number of old cultural traditions but townspeople are proudest of its own distinctive style of Nō, which has a 400-year history going back to Date Masamune, a daimyo of the domain of Sendai.1 Masamune loved Nō.He added original touches to the Kita and Komparu schools and founded the Komparu Ōkura school,later known as the Ōkura school.

There has always been an active interest in Nō throughout the TOhoku region.2 Whereas in western Japan Nō was performed by professional troupes—originally the descendants of nomadic hunters—here it was performed by ordinary villagers.The prototype of Toyoma Nō is believed to have been a synthesis of the Ōkura school and a form of Nō that had been performed in the town long before Masamune came on the scene.

Townspeople rather than professionals continue to perform Nō in Toyoma.The local No society has 70 members and is the last of its type in Miyagi Prefecture.Nō is still such an integral part of everyday life that NŌ songs are sung at practically every ceremony.But despite this, the town did not have a theatre.The townspeople's desire for a stage dedicated to Nō led to this project.

From its necessarily limited financial resources, Toyoma managed to scrape together l90 million yen.Constructing a Nō theatre is usually said to cost 500 to 1,000 million yen,so in working on this project,we had to make every yen count.Architectural work nearly always involves a struggle between the ideal design and the reality of the budget.However, as I discovered,no such opposition or conflict arose here.

In creating this project, I gradually began to understand that the use of material ought to be minimized in such a space.As a consequence, the design objective did not conflict with the reality of the budget.That did not mean the design was without difficulties;in fact,it consumed an extraordinary amount of time and effort.

Minimisation is very different from minimalism.Its motive is not the simplification and abstraction of form,but rather the criticism of matter.This critical attitude is consistent with Nō theatre, which is often focused on the spirit world.Zeami perfected a form of Nō in which almost all the characters are spirits of the dead.3 In plays in that form, time as experienced by the dead and time as experienced by the living are intertwined.The spirits censure this earthly world and the matter from which it is composed.That is the essence of Nō.

Of course, the actors are made of flesh and blood,and the stage is made of materials such as wood and tiles.It is both the paradox and the source of appeal of Nō that it uses matter to censure matter.Such paradoxical criticism of matter is what I mean by minimisation.

In what way, then, does Nō criticize matter? First, by the low position it assigns to it. In both the spaces and the direction of Nō, a low centre of gravity is of crucial importance.Raising a thing to a high position affirms its presence and causes it to lapse into being an object.For this reason everything in Nō is kept low.When all things that might rise up are eliminated,all that is ultimately left is the floor.Thee floor therefore acquires a particular importance.

Nō actors walk in a distinctive Way called namban,half-crouching and gliding over the floor.This posture is said to be modelled on the movements of farmers in rice paddies.However, in light of the fact that the tradition of Nō was maintained by people who were descended from hunters, it cannot be attributed simply to farmwork.Actors walk in this Way precisely because a low centre of gravity is demanded of them.

A space for Nō must also be low, that is, close to the floor.One might even say that a No space can be reduced to three floors:the main stage (butai),six metres square;the floor called kenjo where spectators sit;and the shirasu,the white pebble.covered stretch of ground between the stage and the kenjo.The stage is a space for the spirits of the dead,that is,the other world;the kenjo is the world of the here and now, and the shirasu divides these two spaces.The three floors with three different functions are all that is essential to the Nō space.Everything takes place close
to the floor.To make certain that spectators focus on that area, the actors stamp their feet on the floorboards.Jars are arranged beneath the stage to amplify the sound.Every design device is intended to focus attention on the floor and to lower the centre of gravity of the performance as a whole.No one looks up at the roof over the stage—it is there simply to protect against inclement weather,and to wrap the stage in dark shadow.The spirits of the dead must not stand out but must sink into the dark shadow of the roof barely distinguishable in the faint light reflected by the white pebbles.

In l884,the construction of an entirely enclosed Nō theatre called Kōyōza in the Shiba district of Tokyo destroyed this traditional arrangement.The building, which made it possible to perform Nō throughout the year,immediately became the prototype for the modern Nō theatre.Its stage and the seats arranged around it were both enveloped in a large outer structure.This prevented the weather from affecting performances,but many things were lost in the process,including the low centre of gravity.The building envelope became of necessity an enormous structure with a high ceiling, sheltering not just the stage but also the roof directly over it.Outwardly, the Nō theatre became a conspicuous object with a high centre of gravity. Inside,the roof over the stage became a towering object in the high—ceilinged space.Even more devastating was the treatment of the shirasu,which was reduced to a narrow strip less than two metres wide.The space that was once central to Nō,separating this world from the next,had been virtually eliminated.

The Nō theatre in Toyoma was intended both as a criticism and as a reversal of the arrangment first introduced in Kōyōza.Indeed,calling it a theatre is apt to give rise to a misunderstanding,for this suggests an enclosed,self-sufficient structure, that is, an object. Our goal was neither an object nor a building,but rather a garden in which three floor surfaces are carefully placed in a natural environment.

That idea was inspired by the site that the town provided—a beautiful hillside covered by woodland.Among the trees stood an abandoned house.I felt that I could create an excellent Nō space by arranging three floors on that spot.The floors would be open to the woods.There seemed to me no need for walls,for a complete building.

The work was more like garden design than architecture.First, I situated the stage and the bridge ( hashigakari ) in the landscape.Those two elements together constitute the performance space of Nō.I arranged the floor for spectators in an area facing the stage.The kenio is covered with tatami mats,which need to be protected from rain,so I provided the area with a roof, that I made as low as possible.A steeply pitched roof like the one over the stage would have been too assertive, turning the kenio into an object, whereas it is strictly a place for the spectator — that is,the subject.As a result,the kenjo is practically modernist in design,resembling a Miesian building composed simply of a floor a roof and the minimum structural support.It is open on all sides, though it can be closed off with movable glass panels when necessary.

Between the wooden floor where spirits dance and the tatami-covered floor where spectators sit is the shirasu.Those three floors are open to the landscape and people can access them at any time.That is the biggest difference between this stage and the enclosed No theatre of the Kōyōza-type.In principle, a Kōyōza-type theatre is closed except during performances.People are not free to come and go-a problem that nearly all public buildings share.

I wanted to propose an alternative to such closed facilities.Toyoma Nō is a form of Nō performed and watched by townspeople;it is an extension of everyday life.Anyone can approach the Nō stage at any time. They can stroll around the stage as they might stroll through a garden;they can even go into the woods.They can close their eyes, listen to the sounds of the woods, and imagine
past or future performances on the stage.

More than just open up the space to the public,1 wanted to make the tatami-covered kenjo a community centre for the townspeople.They proposed many possible uses for the space, including a practice room for the tea ceremony and traditional Japanese dance.At my suggestion the dressing room is also used during the day as a small museum displaying Nō masks and costumes, and in the evening as a place for practising Nō songs.In this way, each room serves multiple functions.By cross-programming and by opening up the space to the natural environment, I was able to dissolve the rigid framework of architecture.

In opening up the space to the woods,my greatest concern was the design of the shirasu.Ordinarily, this is a left-over area between two structures,the stage and the kenjo.In the modern era,the focus of design has always been objects;the design of open space has been treated as a matter of secondary importance.A garden designer is usually called upon to deal with the space that is left over when the structures (that is,objects) have been completely designed.Here, however, I felt this process ought to be reversed.This narrow, residual area is in fact key to the performance of Nō, sometimes separating and sometimes miraculously connecting this world and the otherworld.If it were correctly designed,it could assure the success of the scheme.

I felt that the shirasu had first of all to be large.I based its size on the shirasu of the south Nō stage in the Nishi-Honganji temple in Kyoto, but in contrast to that shirasu,this one is stepped so as to create another spectator area, a second kenjo, with a side-on view of the stage.This lateral view forms the main view of the stage, with the woods beyond providing a backdrop.(This sightline is indicated by arrow X in the plan on page l33.) Usually the main view of the stage is from the front, with the so-called 'mirror board' (kagamiita) seen directly behind.From this viewpoint (arrow Y in the plan),one cannot see beyond the mirror board.

The mirror board came into being as a way to enable performers to access the stage from the dressing room without being seen.It is painted with a stylised pine, the lower portion of which is never depicted,as it is meant to represent a tree standing behind the stage and partly screened from view.The introduction of the mirror board was a major event in the evolution of Nō.It helped create a backstage circulation route and,in the depiction of the pine,provided an opportunity for further artistic expression.However, something important—the open stage, a quite
unique theatrical space—was lost.

The natural environment that had originally existed beyond the stage was not a world unto itself, but simply another laver of space interposed between the spectator (i.e. the subject) and nature.Creating an entirely separate world within the confines of the stage would require an enormous space and ingenious stage devices.Stages in the West in fact underwent such a process of enlargement and elaboration.

Nō, however, took the opposite path.Its spaces were gradually stripped of material until they were reduced to simple frames that are self-effacing and so able to enclose anything.The otherworld (the immaterial world) reveals its true nature only when seen in the framework of this world (the material world).Likewise,this world begins to reveal its true nature only when seen in the framework of the otherworld.Nō in that sense is a drama about framework.It was to restore the stage's original character as a framework that I reorganised the entire spatial arrangement around a view of the stage in the X-direction, with the woods forming the background.The dark woods suggest an eternal distance that no man-made object can block.This position also provides a sideways view of both the kenjo (this world) and the stage (the otherworld);it makes manifest the great divide between them,but also their overlapping through the arrangement of the stage.The view suggests both result and structure,both representation and being.

Here,I made two decisions.0ne relates to the quality of the shirasu.This ground area is usually made of white pebbles:its whiteness indicates its special quality.In addition,it is considered to have originally symbolised water.In the Nō stage built out over the sea at the famous Itsukushima Shrine in Hiroshima Prefecture,water is used to separate this world from the otherworld.Perhaps 'separate' is not entirely correct in this case:the stage and the kenjo are not divided but instead both float on a surface of water that stretches as far as the eve can see.

Whether made of water or of white pebbles, the shirasu is not on the same level as this world and the otherworld (the stage), but exists in a space on an entirely different plane—that is,on a metalevel.It must therefore have the quality of infinite extension appropriate to the metalevel.It must be a space without form or distance, a space so abstract it seems almost mathematicalin character.Establishing a spatial metalevel makes possible the creation of a dramatic metalevel.

On this site in the woods,however,I felt that white pebbles would be inappropriate.The trees and the damp earth beneath them were both dark.Set against that dark background,the white pebbles would be too conspicuous and assertive.I decided to use crushed black stone instead, so the shirasu blends in with the forest floor, which in turn becomes an extension of the shirasu and thus comes to represent the metalevel.Just as the water in 'Water/Glass' preserves its abstract quality by continuing to flow out and spill over into the sea, the shirasu maintains its abstract state by continuing to flow out and spill over, from the stage towards the woods.

The other decision I made concerned the detailing of the stage.My first idea was to use a traditional design expressing the ideals of Nō.In a traditional No theatre, the main stage is six metres square;to this are added a bridge that meets the stage at an angle and a side stage (jiutaiza) 1.5 metres deep.The main stage is raised 90 centimetres above the shirasu, with a wainscot covering its lower portion. I was troubled by the idea of the wainscot, which would have created the impression that the stage was a large mass,an object, on the shirasu,whereas my objective was to reduce the materiality of the stage until it approached the condition of an immaterial frame—ideally, a single thin floor floating over the shirasu.The only precedent I could find for such a stage was the stage at Itsukushima Shrine.It had no wainscot,probably because the wood panels would have rotted in the water.

I came to the conclusion that this Nō stage, too, ought to be designed as if it were built on water.Such an interpretation seemed in accord with my decision to use crushed black stone instead of white pebbles on the shirasu,because deep water appears dark.I gradually began to picture a pale stage floating on dark water on the forest floor.Eliminating the wainscot reduced both material and construction costs.Design ideals were in happy agreement with budgetary objectives.

Once I had eliminated the wainscot, I began to be troubled by the thickness of the roof over the stage.The traditional roof has multiple layers of shingles applied at its bottom edge to make it appear thicker and enormous end –tiles (so-called 'ogre tiles' ),more than three metres high, ornamenting the ridge.It is too heavy and substantial to be called an immaterial frame.

I wanted to strip the roof of as much matter as possible.In a traditional NO stage, the roof is either gabled or hipped.A triangular gable would have presented itself to the kenjo, turning the roof into an enormous object.By contrast, a hipped roof would present only its lower edge to spectators;by reducing the thickness of that edge,I thought I could reduce the apparent volume of the roof as a whole.The lower edge of the roof was made quite thin, as in sukiya-style architecture.For the ends of the ridge, I used kawazu tiles,which are only about 15 centimetres high,instead of the larger ogre tiles.The ridge tiles,too, were thin and low in profile.

Despite these efforts,the use of tiles presented problems.Being thick and heavy they inevitably increased the presence and materiality of the roof.It would never be thin, no matter how we detailed it.We were studying alternative roofing materials when we came across a natural slate quarried in a mountain near Toyoma.This local slate was used to roof two well-known Tokyo landmarks:the old Ministry of Justice Building (Ende and Böckmann, 1895) and Tokyo Station (Kingo Tatsuno,1914).

What made the slate attractive was its thinness, a result of the great pressure it had been subjected to deep underground.Each material has its own distinctive system of dimensions.Knowing the material,one can with fair accuracy predict the dimensions of a unit of that material and the width and depth of a joint between two such units.The strength of the material and the method of construction define that system of dimensions.Conversely, given the dimensions,one can determine both the material and the method of construction.One can tell through dimensions everything about the way the material was collected and transported.Dimensions must therefore be determined with great care.

I decided to roof the building with this local slate.I liked the fact that it could be as thin as 6 millimetres, in defiance of the normal system of dimensions for stone.Materials are all basically the product of action and movement.In most cases, however, materials do not have the capacity to acknowledge that fact, nor do we have the capacity to understand it.Materials have incredibly rich histories,but we don't know how to read them, so materials and buildings remain silent.

I hoped that the 6-millimetre dimension would provide an opportunity to break that silence.We conducted repeated experiments on the stone's strength and were able to reduce the thickness even further, to 4-5 millimetres, which proved to be its limit.I felt that the slate would be most articulate in the vicinity of that limit.

The thickness and the distinctive surface texture reveal a great deal about the slate:the rippled folds on its surface tell us it was not cut by machine, but split with a wedge.In his perceptive study of folds.4 Deleuze reexamines Leibniz's sense of materiality.Leibniz believed that matter is not composed of autonomous particles (i.e. objects) with absolute hardness;nor is it a fluid of absolute liquidity (i.e. ground against which objects stand out as figure).Matter is instead aggregation and the product of pressure applied to aggregation.Time is built and folded into matter, and so cannot be separated from it.When the natural slate of Toyoma is split, that essential nature of matter is instantaneously revealed.Splitting the slate into thin sheets reduces its volume and leaves only time exposed on its surface.

Nō is similar in its effect.Matter and volume are reduced until they are virtually eliminated,making it possible to come and go freely between the immaterial and the material worlds, between life and death.Matter is converted into time.At Toyoma I attempted to take the reduction of matter in Nō even further.The stage, stripped of its wainscot,becomes a single thin plane floating in the woods.Split into the thinnest possible sheets,the slate drifts between matter and time.Matter melts away into the woods.

The dissolution of the distinction between matter and time and the conversion of matter into time are not themes unique to the dramatic spaces of No.We are today engaged in an effort to regain time.Up to now, time has been suppressed by an excess of matter.By stripping away matter, we can restore time.Enabling matter to articulate time, we can excite the flow of time.To do so, we must criticise matter but at the same time believe in the potential that is surely sealed into it.The result will be the emergence of something that is not so much architecture as landscape.


NOTES

1. Date Masamune (1567-1636),warrior of the Azuchi-Momoyama and early Edo periods. He was made dalmyo of the domain of Sendai after siding with Tokugawa leyasu at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600
2. Tohoko, the northeastern region of the main Japanese island, is comprised of Aomori, Iwate,Miyagi, Akita,Yamagata and Fukushima Prefectures.
3. Zeami (1363-1443),actor, playwright and critic. In his treatises,Zeami formulated such aesthetic principles as yūgen (subtle beauty). Zeami's father Kan'ami (1333—1384), also an actor and a playwright, took an older genre of performing art known as sarugaku and, under the patronage of the third Ashlkaga shogun.Yoshimitsu (1358—1408),elevated it into a dramatic art form of great refinement.His troupe,the Kanze school,is still one of the foremost schools of Nō.
4. Gllles Deteuze,Le Pli:Leibniz et Le Baroque (Paris:Editions de Minuit, 1991);trans. by Tom Conley as The Fold Leibniz and the Baroque(Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press,1992).

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