Golden Amateur Endeavors
Verily, the Kyiv public’s desire for exotic cultural imports in indestructible. All one has to do to secure a packed audience is include a strange exotic name or term in the list of foreign concert tours.
This was precisely the case with the Tenri Gagaku Japanese Classical Theater. The National Opera’s capacious auditorium was literally jammed, as word about an unusual Japanese company teasing the eye and ear with unprecedented rites and sounds attracted intellectuals, music devotees, and those never otherwise going to the theater.
The performance had two parts. The first was dominated by music and the second by military ritual dances. Apart from this two-part arrangement, nothing connected the performance with the theater. The program, with its grandiloquent title, Yamato Mystery, had nothing whatsoever to do with mystery. The Kyiv audience was offered a standard, well-costumed concert of Japanese music and dance, essentially no different from those performed by numerous foreign touring song-and-dance groups. Of course, such folk cultural exchanges deserve all possible praise, although, after all has been said and done, they rate about the same as stores selling Matrioshka dolls somewhere in New York, a Chinese dining room on Chervonoarmiyska Street in Kyiv, or a public lecture on Hinduism in Zhytomyr. Such low level cultural diplomacy, rather than acquainting the public with another country, helps the man in the street realize that there are different peoples and civilizations somewhere on the planet far from him. Of course, it never even claims the status of big-time art. In fact, the group performing at the opera that night was an amateur one, made up of Tenri University students who prefer Orientalist pastimes away from classes. And so the costly promotional campaign preceding the performance leaves one wondering. Moreover, there were attempts to lend the Japanese amateur tour a religious touch, as evidenced by the booklet and pre-concert speeches stressing that Tenri is a Japanese city famous not only for its linguistic university, but also as the venue of a latter-day religion already having millions of adherents. What all this had to do with the concert, and gagaku music in general, was hard to understand.
However, there may have been one idea uniting the minds of many young people that entered the audience by hook or by crook, crowding the stuffy and acoustically poorly equipped galleries during the concert. Indeed, even a provincial Japanese university could afford such an impressive and effective hobby for its students. Well, perhaps we also will live to see such luxury at home.
