Why ask why? Nothing happens for a reason. Cause and effect are an illusion. Or so they tell us. Telling us what we already know, as usual.
Perhaps I’m doing it because kabuki’s as far away as I can get from the chaos of the West. The East is in chaos, too; but it originated in the West and spread to the rest of the world, like a cancer.
Art attempts to tame, to impose order on, what seems to us the chaos of the world. But having failed to tame it, the West now celebrates chaos' most destructive avatar: war. Only in the East are traditional arts like kabuki still revered, even if ignored by most easterners, just as traditional western arts like opera are ignored by most westerners.
We are actors, performers. Traditional arts eschew the naïve illusion of naturalism and display the artificiality of our rôles and our language.
I used to smile when people said they preferred listening to opera in a language they didn’t understand because knowing the words distracted from the beauty of the sound; but I understand now. Words are a distraction. We communicate more through sound and gesture than through words. Giving names to things deceives us into thinking we know them. That’s why most of us speak to each other not to communicate information, but to assure ourselves we’re not alone; and we speak to ourselves to assure ourselves we’re real. In both cases, we lie.
Every bard knows poetry and song communicate information better than does prose; but dance, and/or music without words, do it best.
In kabuki, as in ballet, every gesture has a meaning; but not for me, because I don’t know the language and don’t care to learn it.
I could probably learn it easily enough. I have a gift for languages. But learning what sounds and gestures mean is not enough to understand. Too much is lost when we put what we’ve learned into words we think others will understand, and/or others think they understand.
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