Dojoji — Temple (16+)

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The works of Yukio Mishima, the author of 40 novels and masterpieces such as «Confessions of a Mask», «Thirst for Love», «The Sound of Waves», «The Temple of the Golden Pavilion», became known for the Russian only 20 years after his death, when his famous play «Madame de Sade» was first published and later performed. But his short mask-plays, vision-plays are still practically unknown. Vyacheslav Dolgachev took the risk to be the first to show the Moscow audience the secrets of Japanese art form called Noh Theatre.
The «Modern Noh Plays» collection made by the outstanding Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (1925—1970) is considered one of the most bright and daring experiments in the XX century drama. The mere combination of «modern» and «Noh» seems to be provoking and inconsistent, because the Noh Theatre is an immovable tradition and adherence to text, the strictly performed rituals, the precise movements and intonations. It is the commitment to the canon that is most fascinating in the traditional Japanese Noh Theatre with its seven centuries of history.
And then all of a sudden the action of a play — for example Dojoji, the main play of the classical Noh Theatre — is moved from the temple, where a ceremony of the bell consecration is held, to the modern antiquity shop, where an auction is about to begin, and the characters start to talk in the plain language. What it has to do with Noh?..
The old canonical texts about malignant nature of worldly passions are transformed by the author with his ingeniousness into the rather everyday stories, mostly love melodramas. And this is not the mockery of the classics, this is a discussion with it, a respectful head-to-head dispute. Here a personality, a human spirit are regarded as something sacred and infinite. As a sort of a Temple. So the mystic-writer and philosopher-writer Mishima confirms his aesthetical concepts, based on Beauty, Love and Death.
The characters are contemporary citizens: officials, businessmen, homeless, artists... In some mysterious situations they try to grasp the value of life.

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