Noh, el origen del vestuario de Stop Making Sense

En varias ediciones especiales de la revista Rock Stage hablé de la relación del vestuario con géneros, así como el uso de ciertas marcas para ser reconocidos como parte de una tribu urbana, en fechas recientes mencioné el caso de tres sacos blancos que aparecieron con motivos diferentes en la vida de Miles Davis, Lee Brilleux y Wayne Coyne, una prenda unida por la suciedad y la sangre. 

Leyendo How Music Works de David Byrne me encuentro un capítulo completo dedicado al vestuario en el escenario, donde explica el uso de ciertas prendas para ser identificados como músicos, su búsqueda por una identidad, no perderse en el escenario e incluso su uso como forma de expresión,. Haciendo memoria nos llevan al saco de Stop Making Sense y el tutú en el documetal Ride, Rise, Roar, Roar.

Les dejo, libre de traducción, el fragmento donde David Byrne explica la idea para el famoso traje 10 tallas más grande para la gira Stop Making Sense, sin duda una imagen distintiva de uno de los mejores documentales que existe en vivo.

"The tour eventually took us to Japan, where I went to see their traditional theater forms: Kabuki, Noh, and Bunraku. These were, compared to Western theater, highly stylized; presentational is the word that is sometimes used, as opposed to the puppet theater, often a whole group of assistants would be on stage operating the almost-life-size puppet. We weren’t supposed to “see” them, but they were right there, albeit dressed in black.G The text, the voices, would come from a group of guys seated off to the side. The character had in effect been so fragmented that the words they spoke didn’t come from close to or even behind that puppet, but from other performers on an entirely different part of the stage. It was as if the various parts of an actor’s performance had been deconstructed, split into countless constituent parts and functions. You had to reassemble the character in your head.

Was any of this applicable to a pop-music performance? I didn’t know, but over dinner in Tokyo one night the fashion designer Jurgen Lehl offered the old adage that “everything on stage needs to be bigger.” Inspired, I doodled an idea for a stage outfit. A business suit (again!), but bigger, and stylized in the manner of a Noh costume. This wasn’t exactly what he meant; he meant gesture, expression, voice. But I applied it to clothing as well".