Kyogen comedies: disorder is distilled

In the uncompromisingly bleak Japanese Noh drama, existence itself is the only joke. But Kyogen -- the comic counterpart to Noh -- has been making fun of human foibles and pretensions for more than 600 years.

Sharing a performing legacy that stretches back nearly that far, the Tokyo-based Izumi School of Kyogen presented three plays and a demonstration of Kyogen lore Sunday at the Aratani/Japan America Theatre.

Recent exhibitions at UCLA and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art displayed the antique costume splendors of Kyogen. However, all the checks, stripes, decorative embellishments and distinctive crests on Kyogen robes seemed even more spectacular when worn on a platform stage that remained bare and unornamented except for the traditional pine tree painted on the back wall.

The one-act comedies, “Two People in One Hakama” and “A Monster Crab and a Mountain Ascetic,” both found Izumi Motoya (the young 20th headmaster of the Izumi School) portraying the growing consternation of authority figures who became increasingly helpless in ungovernable situations.

“The Buddhist Image Carver” featured Izumi Junko and Miyake Tokuro, the first female performers of Kyogen, in a depiction of a con man’s attempt to impersonate the statue he’s supposed to deliver.

All three works ended in outbursts of desperation -- but restrained, refined and stylized, like everything else in Kyogen. This is an idiom in which a walking pattern signifies a change of scene and the downward motion of a fan the act of filling a wine bowl.

The body tilts slightly forward on bent knees (only monsters stand perfectly upright), the voice has a husky resonance, and even the archetypal comic servant, Tarokaja, maintains a stoic dignity until all hope of rectitude disintegrates.

Like Noh but with compassion for human frailty, Kyogen is a theater of essences -- of voice and motion meticulously codified, of disorder distilled into a formal pattern of behavior, of everything about ourselves that we’d like to keep hidden on view for the last 600 years, balanced on the tip of a fan.