The Performative Aspect of Voices in Ku Nauka’s “Medea”

Recently, studies on voices in theatre, pursued by names like Dorisch Kolesch and Erika Fischer-Lichte to list but two, have been significantly developed, and will continue to be.  It has been pointed out that voices and theatre have a lot of performative factors in common, such as physicality, ephemerality, happening, and role exchange between speakers and spectators. It seems, however, that there have been few thorough studies on the diverse performative factors of voices in theatre to date.

For studies on this theme, “Medea,” (premiered in 1999) performed by the Japanese theatre group, Ku Nauka, is relevant. This performance as another variation of Bunraku, in which each character is embodied by two actors (a narrator, “Gidayu” and a silent performer, “puppet”), gives spectators an opportunity to reflect on and experience a performative aspect of voices. The reflection is caused by the way the male actors vocalize, and the empirical effect is realized by actresses who remain silent throughout the play. Especially through the empirical effect, the “real” voices, which were considered as incomprehensible by Lacan and were denounced by Derrida, are “playfully” possible in a theatre performance. In this presentation, I would like to show a wide range of theatrical possibility of performative voices in two dimensions; reflection and experience.