Noh Theater of Japan

 

[I’ve posted a number of pieces about Kabuki, the dynamic traditional theater form of Japan, on Rick On Theater.  (See, for example, “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams” [1 November 2010]; “Grand Kabuki (July 1985)” [6 November 2010]; “Two Kabuki Reviews (2014)” [20 January 2018]; “‘Kabuki: Inside the Japanese Artform with its Biggest Star, Ebizo’” by Jon Wertheim [1 May 2020]; “‘The Ancient Art of Kabuki Made New, With Computer Animation’” by Micheline Maynard in “Computers and Actors, Part 1” [4 October 2021].)   

[I’ve even posted one article on the ancient performance form Gigaku (26 July 2011); but I haven’t run anything on Noh (14th century), which is older than Kabuki (17th century) and younger than Gigaku (7th century).

[On a recent Sunday, the New York Times published an interesting piece on a new movement in Japan concerning the making of Noh masks in the paper’s T Magazine, its periodic style publication.  The report, Hannah Kirshner’s “A New Face,” is short, and it doesn’t say anything about the theater form itself, so I decided an introduction to Noh was in order.

[The name Noh (sometimes written ‘Nō’) is probably familiar with most readers, but I suspect most Westerners are unfamiliar with the theater form itself.  So, before I present Kirshner’s report on the modern-day take on Noh masks, here’s a brief history and description of this classic drama.]

Noh is a Japanese classic theater form involving music, dance, and drama, originating in the 14th century.  It was developed together with Kyogen, which are comical pieces performed during interludes of the main Noh performance.  The dual art of Noh and Kyogen is known as Nohgaku, and has been designated an Intangible Cultural Heritage by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Noh, as we know it today, was popularized and formalized by a dramatist named Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1444) during the Muromachi Period (1333-1573).  Of the known 240 Noh plays in the current repertoire, Zeami wrote 100, and he codified the acting and production techniques in use today (1400-33; On the Art of the No Drama [Princeton University Press, 1984]).

It was Zeami's work that attracted the government's patronage of the art form.  Zeami later fell out of favor with the government and was banished to Sado Island.  Four main Noh troupes were subsequently established, receiving sponsorship from shrines and temples.

During the Tokugawa Period (1603-1867), the shogunate, the administration of the supreme military commander (shogun) of feudal Japan, made Noh its official ceremonial art and issued regulations for its governance.  Noh thus became increasingly standardized, with an emphasis on tradition rather than innovation.  A fifth troupe was added during this time, making five main Noh troupes which survive and perform till this day.

Noh theater is structured around song and dance.  The movement is slow and stately, the language is poetic (and spoken in a highly stylized form of 14th-century lyric Japanese that few modern spectators can understand), and it’s sung in a monotone.  

The name ‘Noh’ means ‘skill,’ ‘talent,’ or ‘to accomplish something.’  Zeami used the term ‘elegant imitation.’  When executed with excellence, the result is the experience of yugen, or ‘supreme beauty.’  This is the ultimate goal of the Noh performer. 

The rich, elaborate, and heavy costumes consist of multiple layers and textures that create an effect of resplendent elegance but also a bulky, massive figure.  Expressiveness is enhanced by props, most notably a folding fan.  Closed, partly closed, or open, the fan may represent any object as suggested by its shape and handling, for example a dagger or a lantern.

Plots are usually drawn from legend, history, literature (primarily Japanese or Chinese classical poetry and Zen Buddhist verses), and contemporary events of the era.  Themes often relate to dreams, supernatural worlds, ghosts, and spirits.

Noh plots are essentially dance-dramas, not concerned with dramatic action.  The plays seek to explore the essence of a situation or emotion in lyrical form.  All Noh plays reach fulfillment in dance.

Noh is performed on a square stage with a roof which is supported at its four corners by pillars.  The stage, made of planks, is hollow and resounds like a drum which the actors can use for sound effects.  All sides of the stage are open except for the back which consists of a wall with a painted image of a pine tree; in addition to no walls, there’s also no curtain to separate the audience from the performance space.  (All Noh stages are virtually identical.  Even the dimensions are standardized.) 

A bridgeway (hashigakari) runs at an oblique angle off the rear left corner (i.e., “up right” in western theater jargon) of the stage (to a small structure that serves as the “wings” of a western theater) for performers to enter and exit.  Noh used to be typically staged outdoors, but modern indoor theaters have also now become a common venue.

All performers in Noh are traditionally male (though that tradition is being successfully challenged more and more).  The roles are traditional and codified:

•   shite – the leading player.  Depending on the play, the shite (pronounced shi-TAY) may act as a holy old man, a deity, a demon, a spirit, or a living man or woman.  His movements express various moods.  (The shite is the only performer who wears a mask.)

•   waki – the supporting actor.  The waki plays roles such as a priest, monk, or samurai.  In contrast to the shite, the waki always portrays living people.

•   jiutai – the chorus.  The chorus of eight to ten people, including the chorus leader, sits stage left (i.e., the right of the stage from the perspective of the spectator) and assists the shite in the narration of the story.  (Unlike the chorus of a Greek classic play, the jiutai doesn’t enter the action on stage.)

•   hayashi – the orchestra.  Four musicians provide accompaniment for the performance with a flute (fue), shoulder drum (kotsuzumi), hip drum (otsuzumi) and stick drum (taiko).  They sit upstage, at the rear of the platform.

•   koken – stage attendants.  Dressed in black (to indicate they are unseen), the stage attendants are not part of the play but assist the performers in various ways, such as handing them props or adjusting their costumes.

The cast of a Noh play is a minimum of two (the shite and the waki), which is the usual, to up to six, plus the chorus and musicians. 

The roles each actor may play are rigidly conventional, unlike in western theater.  A waki one night can’t play a shite’s part the next, and a shite wouldn’t play a waki’s role in another production.  Training starts at around age three and it takes decades for a Noh actor to move up the ranks.

A Noh play generally runs around 60-90 minutes, some divided into two acts, and a Kyogen play lasts for around 15-30 minutes.  Traditionally, a Noh program includes three to five plays, one from each of several different categories of styles.  

Each play is separated from the next by a Kyogen, usually a comic version or parody of the main Noh play, making a total performance of between 3:45 and 10:00 hours (though probably more like 4-5 hours; spectators would come and go and bring food and drink).  Modern Noh performances, with fewer plays, are considerably shorter.

The lines of the play preceding the climactic dance establish the circumstances which motivate it.  The jiutai sings the narration of the shite’s dance-story; the hayashi furnishes a musical setting and establishes the timing of the shite’s gestures.  The dancer’s every movement of his hands and feet follows set rules.

Each gesture, each pose, each movement, each vocal inflection, each musical sequence has a specific meaning.  (These codified performance techniques, passed on from generation to generation, are called kata.)  The actors and musicians must learn these and execute them precisely, and devoted Noh fans understand them as if they were speech.

One key element of Noh are the masks which the shite wears.  They tell the audience what kind of character is being portrayed.  Some masks are general characters who may appear in many plays, while others are specific and are used in only one or two plays.  Frequently used masks represent demons and spirits, as well as women and men of various ages.  

The masks, which cover only the actor’s face, are carved from blocks of Japanese cypress.  Their three-dimensional properties allow skilled actors to evince a variety of expressions with changes in head orientation.  Some Noh masks, for example, are so carefully designed that the face smiles cheerfully when the actor looks up and takes on a dark, melancholy expression when the actor looks down. 

The masks are as codified as the actor’s kata.  The traditional mask-maker (unlike the ones in the article that follows), who’s an artist as well as a craftsman, can make only the subtlest modifications to the face, but master mask-makers have more leeway to do so than an apprentice.  Like the actors and the musicians, mask-makers have their traditions that are passed on to the next generations.

                     

— Pat Byrnes, New Yorker 29 Oct. 2001 

 “A NEW FACE”
by Hannah Kirshner

[Below is Kirshner’s New York Times report on the recent development in Noh mask-making (T Magazine 26 March 2023).  It’s also available online as “MAKING IT: The Female Artisans Honoring, and Reinventing, Japanese Noh Masks” (The Female Artisans Honoring, and Reinventing, Japanese Noh Masks - The New York Times (nytimes.com)).  There are several nice photo illustrations by Bon Duke, which I didn’t reproduce for ROT.]

Both honoring and departing from the tradition of Japanese Noh masks making, women are expanding its possibilities.

One of the world’s oldest surviving theatrical arts, Japanese Noh grew out of various forms of popular entertainment at temples, shrines and festivals, including seasonal rites offered by villagers giving thanks for a bountiful harvest. During the Muromachi period (1336-1573), those varied productions were codified into an elaborately contrived entertainment for military leaders, some of whom, like the 16th-century warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, also acted in Noh. Presented using minimal props on a stage comprising a roof, four pillars and a bridge way, the plays dramatize myths and tales from traditional Japanese literature with monologues, sparse bamboo flute melodies, periodic percussion and tonal chanting. Often, supernatural beings take human form. The pace can be almost hypnotically slow, with the colors and elaborate embroidery of the actors’ costumes indicating their characters’ age and status.

But perhaps the most distinguishing feature of Noh is the carved masks worn by performers. Of the hundreds of masks produced during the Muromachi period, about 40 to 50 form the archetypes for the masks made today, says the historian Eric Rath, who specializes in premodern Japan; many represent different characters, depending on the play. Master mask carvers have long been celebrated for their ability to create a static face that seems to come alive, its expression changing with the angle of the performer’s head and the way the light hits its features. While many Japanese people today have never seen a live Noh performance, the white visage and red lips of a Ko-omote mask (one of a few denoting a young woman) or the bulging golden eyes of the horned Hannya (one of the most famous of the demon masks, representing a wrathful, jealous woman) are both intrinsic to Japan’s visual culture.

Before World War II, only men were allowed to perform Noh professionally; now, some women play leading roles. But until recently, mask making, in which blocks of hinoki cypress carved in high relief are hollowed out, then primed with a white mixture of crushed oyster shells and animal glue -- with mineral pigment for lips and cheeks, and gold powder or copper to give the teeth and eyes of masks depicting supernatural beings an otherworldly glow -- was a craft largely handed down from father to son.

That’s changed somewhat in the years since the Kyoto-based Mitsue Nakamura, 76, started learning the craft in the 1980s. When she began, she knew of only one other woman in the field, but this year, all four of her current apprentices, some of whom study for as long as 10 years, are female. Some adhere to the traditional archetypes and techniques, while others radically reinterpret them.

For purists, Nakamura says, a true Noh mask is never entirely decorative: It has to be used onstage, and its maker must hew precisely to a narrow set of centuries-old parameters. Today, Nakamura says, actors prize masks that are antiques or appear to be. Her pieces, each of which takes about a month to complete, often look older than they are thanks to the shadows she smudges into the contours of the face, or a weathering she achieves by scratching the paint with bamboo.

In 2018, the Kanagawa-based playwright and screenwriter Lilico Aso, 48, came to see Nakamura’s process firsthand because she was interested in developing a character who was a Noh mask carver; instead, she became a mask carver herself, drawn, she says, to the idea of being “both a craftsman and an artist.” She’s been studying with Nakamura ever since and, last fall, in a show titled “Noh Mask Maker Mitsue Nakamura and Her Four Disciples” at Tokyo’s Tanaka Yaesu gallery, she exhibited a series of four masks called “Time Capsule” inspired by celebrities and fictional characters. Rihanna became an earth goddess with pearlescent blue lips and eye shadow. Ariana Grande morphed into the moon princess Kaguya, who, in an ancient tale, rejects all her mortal suitors and returns to her lunar home; in Aso’s rendering, she has the high, soft eyebrows of a Noh beauty.

For some female Noh artisans, subtle changes to traditional forms emerge from a deep personal connection. Keiko Udaka, 43, who also works in Kyoto, grew up steeped in Noh, with a father who was both a performer and a mask maker. She began studying with him when she was a teenager; in 2021, after he died, she took over an unfinished Noh play he was working on, commissioned by a town in Ehime prefecture, on the island of Shikoku. While one of her brothers completed the script, Udaka created a mask for the main character, a folk hero who starved to death while cultivating barley for future generations, imbuing it with the features of their late father. Such homages aren’t an uncommon practice among Noh artisans, and the allure is obvious: As Udaka says, a painstakingly crafted carving is more indelible than a photo. “Memories can be recorded too easily in many places now,” she says, “and they don’t remain in our minds.”

While Udaka’s departures from tradition are subtle, those of the Tokyo-based Shuko Nakamura (no relation to the Kyoto mask maker), 34, are unignorable. Inspired by Noh history, folklore and her own imagination, she makes masks out of modeling clay and paper rather than wood. One mask depicts an old woman, a crown of blue-black crows circling above her forlorn face, alluding to the ubasute story -- which appears in both folk tales and Noh -- of an elderly family member abandoned in the forest. With deep smile lines, a long horsehair beard and bushy pompom eyebrows, another mask honors the form of Okina, a spirit who appears as an old man. A gnarled pine tree sprouts from the mask’s head in place of hair; at the roots nestle a pair of turtles. The conifers and reptiles, she says, are references to the characteristic illustrations on the fan Okina holds when he dances.

[Ubasute (‘abandoning an old woman’) is a mythical practice whereby an infirm or elderly relative is carried to some remote, desolate place, and left there to die.  It appears to be the subject of legend and doesn’t seem ever to have been a common custom.]

Out of respect for the ancient art, Shuko Nakamura refers to her creations as “creative masks” rather than Noh masks, but the tribute is clear. And even a traditional mask maker like Mitsue Nakamura sees the place for works that expand the boundaries of Noh’s conservative culture. “Of course, the best masks are those used onstage,” she says, “but I think we should also make Noh masks that can stand on their own.”

[A little more than a dozen years ago, I published a post on Rick On Theater on “The Magic of Masks” (17 September 2011; Rick On Theater: The Magic of Masks).  I looked at masking in a number of different circumstances, including various performance forms—Noh theater among them—and from several different perspectives.

[The interested ROTter might want to have a look at this post (which also touches on puppetry, an allied art form, in passing).  If anyone wants further information on masks and masking, the afterword of “The Magic of Masks” is a list of the people whom I referenced in the post and some of the sources I consulted. 

[(A few words of caution: the mask post, and therefore the list, is 12 years old.  Some of the life-dates included in the list of names are out of date and the person named has since died.  Some of the sources, too, are old and may no longer be readily available.)

[Hannah Kirshner is a writer, artist, and food stylist.  Her reporting has appeared in publications including the New York Times and Food & Wine, among others, and on the Proof podcast from America’s Test Kitchen.  She’s the author and illustrator of Water, Wood, and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town (Viking, 2021).  

[Kirshner’s the winner of an International Gourmand “Best In The World” award for writing on Japan.  She grew up on a small farm outside Seattle, studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, and now divides her time between Brooklyn and rural Ishikawa, Japan.]