Feminist Interventions and Intercultural Mobilities in Satoshi Miyagi’s ‘Othello in Noh Style’

Abstract

I shall examine the ways in which moving the excluded female body onto the Noh stage in this production constitutes a materialist feminist intervention both into the ‘form’ of historically all-male Noh performance, and into the ‘focalisation’ of Shakespeare’s narrative, providing a specifically female articulation of the memory and experience of trauma. Desdemona’s memory of the past becomes the dramatic plot of Othello re-constructed, to enact a new subject position: Desdemona’s ghost. This material intervention facilitates temporal and spatial mobilities unique to intercultural performance, opening possibilities for theorising at the intersection of interculturalism and gender. Noh is a classical Japanese performance form from the 14th century. However, Noh performance only allowed male actors, so there emerges a disjunction between female character-types, and codified performances that did not involve the actual participation of female actors. Consequently, feminine identity and subjectivity is rendered always performative, an effect of the citation and repetition of formal aesthetic codes. Casting actresses intervenes in the performance history of Noh – particularly because the visual presentation of the actress’s distinctly feminine features foregrounds the materiality of the female body on the Noh stage. Desdemona’s ghost inhabits the multiple temporal and spatial configurations of the narrative as well as that of the Noh stage, allowing for a complex working-through of her trauma. The material presence of the actress intervenes in the narrative focalisation of Shakespeare’s Othello – which concludes with the effacement and silencing of Desdemona’s agency and voice through death. By fracturing the temporality of Shakespeare’s Othello narrative, this intercultural Noh performance mobilises and re-constructs the working-through of traumatised female subjectivity as taking place in the present, shifting narrative authority to Desdemona’s ghost. The narrative is now focalised through her perspective as shite, the primary character in Noh, and is articulated in her own narrative voice: she is effectively wresting her narrative voice and agency from Shakespeare’s text in this intercultural performance.