What is Noh?

During the Edo period (1603-1868), noh became the official performance art of the military government. Feudal military lords supported their own troupes and many studied and performed the art themselves. With the societal reforms of the Meiji period (1868-1912), noh lost its governmental patronage and was left to fend for itself. Although it nearly died out, enough performers regrouped, found private sponsors, and began teaching the art to amateurs so that it slowly began to flourish again. Today, noh has the popularity of many classical performance forms throughout the world. Its supporters are enthusiastic and its professional performers are highly trained and extremely busy performing and teaching throughout the country. There are now approximately 1,500 professional performers who make their living largely through performing and teaching noh.

Types of plays

There are five categories of noh plays. These feature gods, warriors, beautiful women, miscellaneous (notably madwomen or present-time) figures, and supernatural beings. During the Edo period, a full day’s programme consisted of the ritual piece Okina-Sanbaso followed by one play from each category in the above order. One Kyogen (comic) play would be presented between each noh. Of the five categories, the women plays are the slowest in tempo but the most poetic, and of the highest level in expressing yugen, an aesthetic term suggesting quiet elegance and grace, and subtle and fleeting beauty.

Text

The classical texts of noh follow a narrow set of parameters in terms of the rules of their construction. All classical plays are of either one or two acts, the latter generally with an interlude consisting of a long narration performed by a kyogen actor. The acts are made up of structural “scenes” called dan which in turn consist of smaller “segments” called shôdan.

Shôdan are the building blocks of a text and tend to be put together in similar ways in different plays, but overall there is considerable variation. Shôdan characteristics are both textual and musical in nature: some have a regular poetic syllable count made up of phrases of 7 and 5 syllables; others have an irregular poetic syllable count which breaks away from 7 and 5. There are also phrases with non-metered syllable counts, as well as those that are prose in nature.

Characters

The main character of a noh play is called the shite (pronounced sh’tay) who sometimes appears with a companion character(s) called tsure.

In many plays, the shite appears in the first half as an ordinary person, departs, then appears in the second half in its true form as the ghost of a famous person of long ago. They are traditionally performed by the same actor. The secondary actor is called, the waki, often a travelling priest. The waki’s questioning of the main character is important in developing the story line.

The waki often appears with companion wakitsure. An interlude actor called ai or ai-kyogen also often appears as a local person who gives further background to the waki, and thus to the audience, to understand the situation of the shite.

Music

The music of noh involves the chant by the actors and the chorus, the purely instrumental music of the four hayashi instruments, and the combination of chant and the instruments.

The chant involves two singing styles: a melodic style called yowagin or wagin, and a dynamic style known as tsuyogin or gôgin. There is also stylized speech called kotoba. All chant can have an intensity which ranges from the powerful to the restrained creating a wide variation of vocal expression.

Purely instrumental music is used for the entrances of the actors as well as the dances by the main actor or actors which tend to be abstract representations of the feelings of the character.

The relationship between the drums with the flute is important as the flute melody either is in rhythmic sync with drum rhythm or has more of a non-matched free expressive association with the drums.

The combination of the drums and the chant meanwhile has a similar association as that of the drums and the flute; either there is a clear rhythmic sync or there is a non-matched free association. The former is particularly interesting because musical phrases often go back and forth between a regular metered music-centered rhythm and an irregular metered text-centered rhythm.

Instrumentalists

Instrumentalists, known as hayashi, sit at the back of the stage. The instruments comprise a transverse flute (nohkan), an hourglass-shaped drum held at the shoulder (kotsuzumi), a slightly larger hourglass-shaped drum placed on the lap (okawa or otsuzumi), and a barrel-shaped drum on a small floor stand & played with two sticks (taiko).

The rhythms and melody of these instruments follow highly prescribed systems. One unique feature is the use of drum calls (kakegoe), the shouts or cries of the drummers, which serve as signals between the drummers as well as between the drummers and singers. These drum calls add an important element to the sound texture of the performance, creating the mood and with the chant, establishing the tempo.

Chorus

A chorus, called jiutai, usually consisting of eight persons, sits at the side of the stage, narrating the background, the story and its mood. It sometimes describes the character’s thoughts and emotions or even sings lines for the characters.

Movement

A noh performance is not a performance of realistic theatre. Rather, its movement is highly stylized and prescribed. While some gestures have specific meaning, others serve as an abstract aesthetic expression to convey the emotions of the main character. All of noh can be described as dance. Although, sometimes there is little movement as dramatic tension is built mainly through narration.

At other times there is strong, vigorous movement. Movement takes place sometimes to the singing of the chorus or sometimes to purely instrumental music. In general, deliberateness, brevity, suppression and abstraction are important features of noh movement.

Costumes

Costumes in noh are elaborate, with dyed silk and intricate embroidery. The costumes reveal the type of character being portrayed and follow prescribed conventions as to their use.

Still, there is much variety. The design, the color combinations, richness of texture, and strength of form give noh its visual impact.

All characters, whether rich or poor, young or old, male or female, are beautifully costumed. The costuming process is complex. Rather than the actor putting on his own costume, two or three costumers are needed to sculpt the costume on the actor.

Stage Attendants

Noh performances usually have one or two stage attendants (koken) who sit at the back of the stage. They serve to support performers by handing them or taking props, straightening or changing costumes, or in extreme cases even taking an actor’s place if he/she is incapacitated.

Masks

Makeup is not used in noh. Rather, delicately carved masks are often used by. the shite main character and/or the tsure attendant. Masks are considered objects of superb beauty as well as a powerful means of expression. In general, any character being portrayed which is not a middle-aged man living in the present will wear a mask.

Therefore all characters portraying women and old men wear masks as well as supernatural beings such as ghosts, deities, demons, and divine beasts. In general, masks either have a more or less neutral expression, or portray a very strong emotion. The former allows the mask a variety of expressions with the play of light and shadow on it as the actor changes slightly the tilt of the mask. Even in roles in which an actor does not wear a mask, the sense of a masked face is evident.

This is called hitamen, literally ‘direct mask’. For this, the actor does not use his face for realistic expression, but rather for mask like expression. The waki or accompanying wakitsure never wear masks as they were traditionally middle-aged (generally, men) living in the present-time of the play.

Stage

The main part of a traditional noh stage has a curtain-less square with a bridgeway leading to it from backstage. At the end of the bridgeway a hanging curtain swings up and back allowing the characters to enter and exit.

Stages were traditionally outside and covered with a long sloping roof. From the late 19th century, stages have been mainly moved indoors. Inside stages are open on two sides in a kind of semi-theater-in-the-round. There is no attempt at designing a realistic stage set. Rather, only symbolic stage properties are used.

The pine tree painted on the back wall of the stage represents the tree through which noh was, by legend, passed down from heaven to mankind. In Japanese culture, the evergreen pine has come to be an important symbol of longevity and unchanging steadfastness.

Space and time

In general, the use of space and time is not portrayed realistically. Rather, there is a freedom of portrayal that requires the audience to use their imaginations. Characters take only a few steps and through their song or that of the chorus, the audience knows that they have travelled a great distance. Two characters may appear on the stage nearly side-by-side, but again the audience comes to understand that they are not yet in each other’s presence. While this may be confusing for the first time viewer, for many people who come to understand these and other conventions, noh creates a much more powerful theatrical expression than realistic theatre.

The following account of tradition and change in noh by Richard Emmert was first published in the special tribute book for Akira Matsui's Noh time like the present programme.

Tradition and change in noh

Many people seem to believe that noh is a monolithic tradition that hasn’t changed in its 650-year history. Noh, indeed, has a long history and its strict traditions have been passed down largely through families, from father to son, generation after generation. Many noh families can still trace their ancestors back to the 14th and 15th centuries and further.

However, researchers have evidence that many aspects of noh have undergone transformations since its development largely into its present structure during the 14th and 15th centuries. These include the length/time of performances (performances of 600 years ago are thought to have been about two-thirds the time they take today), the shape of the stage, the development in quality of the costumes, the change in the structure of the noh flute, and the development of the dynamic singing style (all probably from 450-500 years ago), the use of a theatre building to house the stage (140 years ago), and the appearance of professional female performers (the last 100 years or so) to name several prominent transformations.

Smaller changes also constantly take place. No two performers are alike even from the same family. Noh has considerable freedom of expression while performing within implied parameters. That freedom of interpretation clearly results, not in a static tradition, but in a living and breathing one.

In terms of plays, the present classical repertory numbers around 250. Yet over the last 650 years there have been over 3000 noh plays written and one presumes many of these have been performed. That said, the number of new (shinsaku) plays dropped considerably during the Meiji period (1868~1912) and through to the 1980s. With only a few exceptions, new plays, if created at all, tended to be made by only the most prominent noh performers. Similarly, there were revivals (fukkyoku) of earlier plays made during this time, but very few.

A catalyst for change in this regard was the opening of the National Noh Theatre (NNT) in 1983. Several years later, the NNT began creating revivals by small teams of scholars and actors. Often these pieces had merely a text or even just parts of texts from hundreds of years ago, so any revival required developing ideas for music, costume and staging—in essence they required the skills to create anew rather than the skills needed to maintain tradition.

In this way, more performers began to understand the importance of creation while maintaining tradition. Particularly, in the 1990s, many noh performers began creating and performing new pieces, and those numbers have continued to grow over the last two decades. That said, performance of traditional pieces still make up probably 99 percent of performances that take place in the noh world during the course of a year.

In addition, a few actors—Akira Matsui being one who stands out prominently—have collaborated with non-noh performers. Mr. Matsui, for example, has collaborated with a variety of Western and Asian theatre, dance and music practitioners, both classical and modern. It seems that for the most part, these collaborations take place with the noh practitioners maintaining a strict adherence to noh traditional techniques while performing with non-noh performers. Other prominent performers from the noh world who have participated in such collaborations from the 1950s include brothers Hisao and Hideo Kanze, several generations of the Shigeyama kyogen group, and Mansaku Nomura, and his son Mansai Nomura from the 1990s, then Reijiro Tsumura from the 2000s, and musicians Shonosuke Okura from the1980s and Yukihiro Isso from the 1990s. There certainly are others.

While it is difficult to refer to such collaborations as noh, clearly performers are using their noh skills in new and profound ways. Mr. Matsui has said that what he does in such collaborations is noh, although his non-noh collaborators are doing something else. However one might refer to these collaborations, the important point is that the noh performers in these collaborations are not attempting to be ballet dancers or Western actors or jazz musicians. Instead, they are using their traditional training in new performative circumstances.

Another strain of change in the noh world is the advent of English noh. While there are varying definitions of what makes an English noh, it is clear that beginning with W.B. Yeats’ At the Hawk’s Well which he termed a noh play when it was first performed in 1916, there has been interest internationally in noh performance and various attempts to use noh or noh-like elements in English and other non- Japanese plays. There is also interest in this development within Japan as can be seen in the entry entitled “English Noh” in the third edition of the Japanese-language Noh-Kyogen Encylopedia (Noh-Kyogen Jiten), as well as several paragraphs within the even more recent Nohgaku Encyclopedia (Nohgaku Daijiten).

Today’s performance of Opposites/InVerse is in that vein of English noh. Jannette Cheong as author, and myself as composer, are collaborating for a second time after working on the strictly English noh play Pagoda performed by Theatre Nohgaku and the Oshima Noh Theatre and toured in London, Dublin, Oxford and Paris in 2009 and in Tokyo, Kyoto, Beijing and Hong Kong in 2011. This time, considering the ballet dancer and the opera singers, Opposites/InVerse would be more properly labeled a noh-influenced dance-drama rather than a strict noh play. It was Jannette’s wish to use opera singers and a contemporary dancer with the idea of creating a true collaboration between Western and noh elements. Of course, it could easily be a more strictly English noh in a future iteration. Hopefully its beauty will be apparent in either.

Richard Emmert

Useful links

The National Noh Theatre

The noh.com