NO Plays Research Articles

FROM NOH PLAYS TO MODERN ANIME: THE ROLE OF PEONY FLOWERS IN JAPANESE CULTURAL IMAGERY

This paper examines the symbolism of the peony flower as an attribute of female demons or kijo in traditional and contemporary media. The peony, which symbolises the supernatural power of kijo, is depicted on the demon fan used in Noh theatre and remains in Japanese cultural memory. Over time, the meaning of this symbol has become ambiguous or lost, making it difficult for modern audiences to interpret. This study explores the linguistic, iconographic, and cultural sources of the peony on the demon fan and discusses how traditional aesthetic methods such as mitate (analogical representation) are used by contemporary media creators to revive the multilayered meanings of symbols.

A Research on the Origins of Ritual Theatre in Eastern Asia: The Associative Development of Chinese Nuo Theatre and Japanese Noh Theatre

As a region with a significant agricultural industry, the ritual theatre of East Asia played an important role in the early drama of its origins. In addition, the trajectory of the early agricultural and religious cultural interactions in East Asian countries was decisive in shaping their national cultural roots, so exploring the different developments of ritual theatre among different countries on the basis of the history of early cultural interactions can help to provide a more explicit understanding of the cultural development of ritual theatre in East Asia. This research explores the trajectories of Nuo theatre in China and Noh theatre in Japan, broadly in terms of both agriculture and religion, summarises the similarities and differences between the developmental routes of Nuo and Noh theatre, and analyses the causes of the contemporary phenomenon of Nuo and Noh theatre moving along different developmental routes.

Yuriko Doi’s Teaching and Transmission of Noh and Kyōgen in San Francisco

<p>Yuriko Doi founded the Theatre of Yugen in San Francisco and taught American students noh and kyōgen for more than thirty years. Noh theatre, in living practice in Japan for more than six hundred years, incorporates music, dance, acting, and singing. While noh is serious and sombre, kyōgen is a comedic form traditionally performed within or between noh plays. Starting in the late 1970s, Doi’s Theatre of Yugen performed new works inspired and informed by noh as well as kyōgen in English around the US and also in Japan. Noh training ideally begins in childhood as one-on-one study with a teacher and continues into adulthood. The transmission of noh is considered to be from body (teacher) to body (student) without verbal explication. To teach students in an ensemble theatre company in California, Doi adapted aspects of the transmission process as well as aspects of the form. Doi taught the exterior qualities of movement and vocal technique and, at the same time, tried to instill a sense of noh’s interior qualities, which include time, aesthetic intensity, and art practice as a life path. While teaching noh and kyōgen, Doi wants her students to draw from all of their training and influences. She explains that trying to hide other performance traditions held in the body, such as Western acting technique, will deflate the energy of a performance. She argues that if an actor can develop a complex sense of noh they can integrate it with all of the other knowledge structures in the body, which will lead to a masterful performance. Based on a series of interviews with Doi, the treatises of noh founder Zeami Motokiyo, and recent scholarship on noh, this essay examines the practice and transmission of noh and how the art is continued and revised through Doi’s work.</p>

Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory In Japanese Noh Theater by Susan Blakeley Klein (review)

Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory In Japanese Noh Theater by Susan Blakeley Klein (review)

Piercing the Structure of Tradition: Flute Performance, Continuity, and Freedom in the Music of Noh Drama by Mariko Anno (review)

Piercing the Structure of Tradition: Flute Performance, Continuity, and Freedom in the Music of Noh Drama by Mariko Anno (review)

The Antithetical Tincture, Spiritual Discovery and Absorption in God: Yeats’ Cycle Derived from Noh Theatre in <i>The Cat and the Moon</i>

The Antithetical Tincture, Spiritual Discovery and Absorption in God: Yeats’ Cycle Derived from Noh Theatre in <i>The Cat and the Moon</i>

From the Editor

From the Editor Ricardo D. Trimillos Aloha kākou! The lead article for issue 54(1) is the print version of Daniel M. Neuman’s keynote address presented at the 2022 meeting of the Society for Asian Music. His homage, “Remembering My Teachers—Bruno Nettl and Sabri Khan,” celebrates the importance of individuals, their agency, and their personae in shaping a music culture; the individual actor is the leitmotif of this issue. Although ethnomusicology has generally been a project of understanding music in broad, culturally defined strokes, studies of individuals have become more frequent, a development that narrows the putative methodological divide between ethnomusicology and historical musicology (the latter is often characterized as giving greater attention to individual composers, performers, and works). The set of essays found here displays an array of modalities for locating artists within the respective genre each inhabits and examines such ancillary themes as copyright, ownership, organology, spirituality, and gender. Neuman’s keynote is a narrative documenting the intersections and inter-penetrations of the personal and the professional in the life of one individual. Neuman is recognized as a leader and pivotal figure in our field, and the experiences he recounts will no doubt resonate with many readers. His engaging, personal account spans six decades; it comprises idiosyncratic histories of ethno musicology and of global Indian classical music populated by prominent personalities from both worlds. Informal in delivery, it nevertheless references important concerns in the field, including processes of continuity, dynamics of globalization, and valorization of those we work with.1 The next contribution provides dramatic contrast: a single performer is the central figure in a contentious legal and public debate concerning ownership and control. The article by Dave Fossum, “Neşet Ertaş and the Ontologies of Turkey’s Folk Music,” examines the rerelease of a recorded song that pits the rights of the composer against those of the performer. In this conflict, modern institutions of copyright, commercialization, and mediatization decenter indigenous notions of ownership, control, and entitlement. Fossum documents ways that the performer Ertaş negotiates and strategizes a pathway through disparate, competing perceptions of folk song and considers how these actions construct a “reality” of the single composition in question. Although the author directs our attention to the performer Ertaş as protagonist, [End Page 1] the figure of the composer Özkan as antagonist occupies a continuous, albeit backgrounded, presence. Elements including the rural-urban divide, regional identity, commercialization, and sonic features inform the multiple ontologies of the title. The lute gambus is part of instrumental-vocal music popular in Malaysia and provides a historical link for Southeast Asia to West and Central Asia. “The Exceptional Fauziah Gambus: Negotiating Novelty, Piety, and Self-Promotion in an Androcentric Malaysian Musical Scene” by Joe Kinzer problematizes notions of gender, religious piety, and consumerism in a contemporary island nation. Like Fossum, Kinzer portrays the performer—a female—as an individual successfully negotiating and rationalizing multiple ontologies that revolve around cultural practices rather than legal institutions. Gender is only one feature of her exceptionalism; her acknowledged mastery of genres within Malay traditional music and “Arab” music further reinforces this status. Her agency employs various strategies to create and maintain an image that is simultaneously diva, pious woman, and national citizen. Kinzer addresses other themes shared in this issue—the rural-urban divide (here, province and metropole), mediatization, and globalization. In the preceding articles the focus is on the performer as the individual of interest. “Staging Noh Performance in Contemporary Opera: The Dance of the Shite in Toshio Hosokawa’s The Maiden from the Sea (2017)” by Paulo Brito foregrounds the composer. In contrast to Kinzer’s study, Brito’s treatment of gender is implicit rather than explicit—the noh creative collaborator for the project is a female practitioner. His attention to intercultural opera reinforces an ongoing construction of a Japanese identity that is self-conscious and global. The historical and the traditional are consciously juxtaposed with the contemporary and the creative. Performance scholarship often emphasizes the inseparability of music and dance—sound and movement—among Asian traditions. Brito meets this truism head-on by using a dance sequence to compare sonic and movement features between the original noh play and...

Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theater By Susan Blakely Klein. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2021. xvi, 401 pp. ISBN: 9780674247840 (cloth).

Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theater By Susan Blakely Klein. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2021. xvi, 401 pp. ISBN: 9780674247840 (cloth). - Volume 81 Issue 4

Review: Form and Feeling: The Making of Concretism in Brazil, edited by Antonio Sergio Bessa

Review: <i>Form and Feeling: The Making of Concretism in Brazil</i>, edited by Antonio Sergio Bessa

Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theatre. By Susan Blakeley Klein. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2021. Pp. 401. £56.95/$70 Hb.

Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theatre. By Susan Blakeley Klein. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2021. Pp. 401. £56.95/$70 Hb. - Volume 47 Issue 3

Beckett and Buddhism

Beckett and Buddhism

Theatremachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context ed. by Magda Romanska and Kathleen Cioffi

Reviewed by: Theatremachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context ed. by Magda Romanska and Kathleen Cioffi Mischa Twitchin THEATREMACHINE: TADEUSZ KANTOR IN CONTEXT. Edited by Magda Romanska and Kathleen Cioffi. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2020; pp. 342. After more than thirty years now since his death, the ambition of this collection of essays (in the words of one its coeditors) is "to reframe and reexamine Kantor's work in the critical context of contemporary theory and aesthetics, while reclaiming the critical and formal opportunities it offers" (xvi). One might pause to reflect on this "while," as it suggests an interesting caveat concerning the relation between the two aims—not least, with respect to a "critical" understanding of "context" in the book itself. What kinds of questions, after all, might the singularity of Kantor's work still provoke, not least as concerns the context of theatre studies? Although the tension between the critical and the aesthetic is perhaps endemic in theatre research, it becomes especially noticeable in light not only of Kantor's lifelong polemics but, more crucially, of the artistic and conceptual commitments that underlie them. Distinct from exploring Kantor's own sense of "context" (such as he attempted to define it himself in his manifestos and in his archive project, the Cricoteka), many of the essays here seem to want, rather, to apply some moral to Kantor's work—or draw one from it—whether this concerns, for example, art "after Auschwitz," ideas of the post-human, post-memory, or the Anthropocene. In this respect, the collection interestingly invites reflection on aspects of Kantor's reception today, of which it offers an important example of its own. The scope of the "contexts" in which Kantor's work is read here is indicated by the three editorial headings under which the essays are grouped: "in theory," "locally" (that is, in relation to Poland specifically, including its Jewish cultural legacies), and "globally." Besides new essays from scholars such as Hans-Thies Lehmann (addressing Kantor in respect of "post-dramatic tragedy") and Michal Kobialka (exploring the reality of "objects" in Kantor's theatre, distinct from the conventions of "props"), as well as valuable essays by each of the editors themselves, the collection includes translations of essays by many Polish researchers, which makes for a particular recommendation of the editors' work. Among these, Grzegorz Niziolek, for instance, evokes a sense of the "obscene" (48) in the relation (the "scandalous collision" [45]) between Kantor's theatre and history, specifically the Holocaust, within the postwar Polish context. Another key to the collection is the editors' invitation to their contributors to put Kantor into relation with other theatre artists, including (among others) Bausch, Tanguy, Perceval, and the Wooster Group, to propose international connections through which to consider his work anew. Insights are derived from attention to cultural contexts here, with Izumi Ashizawa's essay on "Kantor and Japan," for example, reflecting on the difference between the onstage role of the assistant in Noh theatre (koken), as distinct from the supporting character (waki) that Georges Banu famously suggested as a point of comparison for Kantor (233); and from Kris Salata's examination of the key notion of a "poor theatre" in an essay reviewing what is lost in the English translation of a distinction in Polish between biedny (in Kantor's use) and ubogi (in Grotowski's) (157). With respect to the context of theatre studies itself, however, it is interesting how rare are the moments where different essays offer, precisely, different (still less contradictory) refractions of the very question of "Kantor in context"—where the use of the singular in the book's subtitle (rather than "contexts") is perhaps already indicative. The sense that, as Katarzyna Fazan notes, "Kantor's actions provoke ambiguous interpretations" (190) is barely explored, and only the essay by Anna Burzynska offers the explicit caveat "that there is actually no such thing as one 'theatre of Tadeusz Kantor,' an easily defined, unchanging monolith" (255). While, no doubt, all of the contributors would agree with this, such awareness is belied by the recurring assertion of themes, often caught up in a critical will to identify "influences," whether that of Kantor on others or, more...

Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theater by Susan Blakeley Klein

Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theater by Susan Blakeley Klein

Situated self-awareness in expert performance: a situated normativity account of riken no ken

We explore the nature of expert minds in skilled performance by examining classic Japanese dramatist Zeami’s account of skilled expertise in Noh drama. Zeami characterizes expert minds by the co-existence of mushin and riken no ken. Mushin (“no-mind”) is an empty state of mind devoid of mental contents. Riken no ken (“seeing with a separate seeing”) is a distinctive form of self-awareness, where the actor embodies a common perspective with the audience upon one’s own performance. Conventional accounts of riken no ken present it as a form of imagination: expert actors deliver their performance by imagining what it looks like from an external point of view. These imagination-based accounts, however, do not square well with the claim that riken no ken co-exists with mushin. We propose an alternative perception-based account that better accounts for this co-existence, drawing on the concept of “situated normativity” from embodied-ecological theories of cognition. The situated normativity account characterizes riken no ken as a form of “direct affective perception” in which actors are aware of their performance’s quality of attunement with the performative situation. Expert Noh actors realise a common perspective with the audience not by imagining an external point of view, but by perceiving the situation that encompasses their own performance from an aesthetic perspective cultivated and shared within the Noh community.

The Basic Knowledge of the Noh Play

The Noh play is a Japanese dance-drama performed at theatres. Its practice tradition has a glorious history of six hundred years and is still considered one of the most distinguished achievements of Japanese art and culture. In the thirteenth century, a traditional performance called Dengaku took shape and developed into a kind of Japanese opera. In the fourteenth century, another drama performance called Sarugaku flourished and the two famous actors, Kanami and Zeami, integrated the two performances into the Noh play. In the sixteenth century, a fixed set of rules about the drama performance started to come into fashion, which was accepted by all performers gradually and still prevails today. The whole set of rules include the follows: 1. A God play or a play of prayer; 2. A battle play, in which the spirit of a warrior appears; 3. A wig play, in which the actor wears a wig because the main character is a female; 4. A demon play; 5. A play which inculcates the values of benevolence, justice, politeness, and wisdom. The main actor is called Shite, and the subordinate character is called Waki. The others include Tsure, Tomo, Kokata, and Ai. On the Noh stage, there are eight persons named Jiudai, who sing the songs like a chorus, and there are four persons named Hayashikata, who play some musical instruments like an orchestra. The Noh play contains the performance of the actors, the stage setting (background), the tools and the objects named Tsukurimono, the masks named Nohmen, and the costumes named Shozoku. In this paper, the author o ff ers a detailed explanation and description about these elements.

Performativity and Spirituality in Noh Theater

Performativity and Spirituality in Noh Theater

Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theater by Susan Blakeley Klein

Reviewed by: Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theater by Susan Blakeley Klein Paul S. Atkins Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theater. By Susan Blakeley Klein. Harvard University Asia Center, 2021. 424 pages. ISBN: 9780674247840 (hardcover). Susan Klein's new book is a sequel to her previous monograph, Allegories of Desire, which explored the fascination in medieval Japan with searching for secret meanings in classic texts such as Kokin wakashū (Collection of Japanese Poetry from Ancient and Modern Times) and Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise), as well as the "Kokin" denju—the elaborate (and sometimes-lucrative) system of transmitting the secrets of Kokinshū from teacher to disciple.1 In that earlier book, she aimed to recover the importance of allegorical reading, or allegoresis, for understanding how Japanese medieval readers approached literary texts, especially ancient texts with their plentiful aporias. It was quite convincing and left me with the impression, for example, that a proficient allegorical reader might notice when watching the Star Trek series that its protagonist Captain Kirk (Scottish "church") and his ship, the Enterprise, can be interpreted as representing religion and capitalism, respectively. In Dancing the Dharma, Klein turns her gaze from the page to the stage, shifting her focus to dramatic texts and performances. The base texts are still Kokinshū and Ise, but their manifestations are noh plays and treatises. Once upon a time, noh librettos were dismissed as patchworks of quotations from the Japanese and Chinese classics, but the first wave of modern scholars demolished that myth with studies of the playwrights' creative and artful use of earlier literary sources. A second wave proved that the playwrights' engagement with earlier poetry and prose was sometimes mediated by commentaries. Itō Masayoshi showed that in Zeami Motokiyo's (1363?–1443?) play Izutsu (The Well Cradle) the protagonist is identified as the daughter of Ki no Aritsune (815–877) only in medieval commentaries and not in the original story in Ise, while Janet Goff demonstrated that noh plays about Genji monogatari (Tale of Genji) were frequently based on digests and manuals for composing renga (linked verse) instead of the tale itself.2 Klein's work builds upon and extends these previous studies. Part 1, "Allegory and the Commentary Tradition in Poetry and Noh," orients the reader with three introductory chapters. Chapter 1, "Establishing the Frame: Allegory, Commentary, Narihira," outlines the idea of allegory in poetry and noh, introduces key commentaries, and focuses on the figure of Ariwara no Narihira (825–880). To us, Narihira was merely a courtier, poet, and bon vivant who is tightly associated with the mukashi otoko (man of old) in Ise. Not so fast! Medieval readers and writers also recognized him as a deity of yin and yang and a bodhisattva of song and dance who brought enlightenment to 3,733 women by means of sexual intercourse (p. 36). Chapter 2, "The Six Poetic Modes: A Medieval Understanding of Allegory," explores secret understandings of the rikugi, six styles of Chinese poetry adapted [End Page 319] and introduced by Ki no Tsurayuki (ca. 872–945) in his kana preface to Kokinshū. The inapt and somewhat mystifying transfer of Chinese poetic concepts to waka (Japanese court poetry) left a gap that medieval interpreters were all too happy to fill. The noh actor and playwright Zeami composed an eponymous treatise on the rikugi at the request of his son-in-law and colleague Konparu Zenchiku (b. 1405). The most esoteric of all noh actor-playwrights, Zenchiku returns in chapter 3, "Zenchiku, Meishukushū, and Allegoresis," which discusses his mystical treatise Meishukushū (Collection Illuminating the Indwelling Deity), in particular his emphasis on the figure of the okina (old man) and his identification of it with Narihira. In Part 2, "Ise Monogatari Commentaries and Noh," Klein turns to the primary focus of her book, providing thoughtful and provocative readings of three plays and their relations to the Ise commentaries and, in an interesting twist, their contemporaneous political context, as the lines are sometimes blurred between political and religious allegory. Chapter 4, "Early Noh and Medieval Commentaries on Ise monogatari," briefly illustrates the concept with readings of two plays outside the current repertory...

Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination, by W. Anthony Sheppard

<i>Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination</i>, by W. Anthony Sheppard

Structural Imagery in Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones

Yeats establishes a symbolic poetic image of a wine-cup at the outset of The Dreaming of the Bones and diffuses it throughout. The image is the concoction of Irish influences and of mystical beliefs sustained by Yeats, for the play does not lose its Irish identity despite its incorporation of formal techniques of the Japanese Noh theatre. As the image encompasses the whole play, its analysis in this paper shows that every given detail refers back to it, whether in matters of setting, of actual physical movement on the stage, or of themes, as a result of which the image acquires a binding quality. There is a parallelism between this binding image, and the reflected altitudinal physical and thematic experience of the play in its virtual setting, reaching up to its climax. The paper thus finds that the image articulates everything it evokes and gives it visual presentation. Literally carrying the whole weight, the conclusion is that the image forms the structural basis without which the play cannot stand, and that, being the core of the play, it constitutes a thematic objective correlative. The divisions in the paper are arranged to steer the analysis towards a full appreciation of the structural role of this image in holding the play together.

Anxieties of Authorship, Critique of Readership: Mishima Yukio’s Modern Noh Play Genji kuyō

Mishima Yukio's dramatic suicide half a century ago ensured that his name would forever be associated with a certain fanatic imperialism, and largely fulfilled his own wish that he would die as a military man. And yet, he was until the end foremost a literary artist, concerned with the critical reception of his written works and preoccupied with his lasting reputation as an author. This paper examines Mishima’s portrayal of the celebrity writer, as well as the potentials and limitations of literature as presented in his oft-neglected modern noh play Genji kuyō (Devotional offering for Genji, 1962). It positions the play within the long history of prayers for Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji, ca. 1008) that began in the twelfth century in response to the perceived ambiguous morality of the author Murasaki Shikibu (d. ca. 1014). Mishima's Genji kuyō provides a pointed criticism of readers, as well as anxieties regarding a writer's life and literary recognition. Though Mishima himself famously disowned it after its initial publication, Genji kuyō offers critical insights regarding the writing and reading of literature.