As an actor in New York in the 1990’s, I was involved in the downtown scene where narratives were being discarded for more atmospheric expressions of performance. My heroes were the directors Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, and Julie Taymor, as well as the performance collectives like The Wooster Group or Mabou Mines among others. It was all very experimental and often full of irony. Then in 1994, I saw noh live for the first time at the Japan Society in New York. I was stunned. Beyond the minimalist controlled movement and the incomprehensible sounds emanating from the performers, there was a precision and attention to detail that was beyond anything I’d experienced before. This was not the work of “actors” slavishly following the demands of an outside director (a common occurrence in downtown NY theater at that time) This was deeper than that. It was a commitment to form, to succumbing to hundreds of years of tradition, to finding ways of expressing more by showing less and it was sincere.

“Less is more” is a dictum that is often espoused in the world of art. I come from America, a land where the band the Grateful Dead made popular the expression, “too much of everything is just enough.” It’s a country that grew and thrived through the use of excess. When I moved to Japan 25 years ago to study noh, I was sure I’d learn about a few acting techniques and then bring them back to New York and incorporate them into the work I was exploring.

However, the more I studied noh, the more I realized that there was no way to really extract particular techniques from it to bring back, it was too enmeshed in the world it was a part of. If I brought anything back with me, it would have to be “all of it,” and that would be impossible. To perform a noh it takes a village.

Noh has been touted as one of, if not the, oldest continuously performing arts in the world. Following the Meiji Restoration (1868), there was a push from the Japanese government to promote noh as one of the country’s model cultural representative expressions. Nohgaku got lumped in with Kabuki and Bunraku as the triumvirate, “traditional Japanese theater.”

But again, as I got deeper into the form, I came to think of noh as closer to sport than to theater. As I mentioned above, it takes a village to perform a noh. Let me extend this sports metaphor. If you wanted to import the sport of baseball to a new country, you couldn’t just have a pitcher show up and “do baseball.” There are a number of positions, there is a standard field, there is standard equipment, in addition there is a whole book of rules. If you deviate from any aspect of the game, while it might be interesting, it would not be baseball.

Noh is very much like this. The size of the noh stage is set, the way one moves on that stage is set, the text/script is set, the music the hayashi（instrumentalists）plays is set, the masks are set, the costumes are set, the props are set. If one of those aspects are missing, while the result might be interesting, it’s not noh.

There is a great world of artisans that surround the world of noh and have been developing since the Muromachi Period (late 14th century. I say “developing” as noh is continuing to evolve. While we can say noh has been continuously performed for close to 700 years, noh today is most certainly different than noh then. That said, it’s not that noh is departing wildly from its medieval roots, rather noh has been “deepening.” Allow me to explain. Since its birth credited to the father/son team of Kanami and Zeami, the art form has been traditionally transmitted from parent to child. Each new generation tries to emulate what came before and “get better.” Noh performers have been improving by taking more time, by inserting more ma (space). How do we know this? Well the noh world has been very good at keeping records of the performances that have been given over the years and if we look at the programs from 500-600 years ago, there were sometime 10-15 pieces offered per day. If that was performed now, it would take two or three days! Today the longest program happens just once or twice a year and that’s six pieces and takes from morning until night. So as time has gone on, each discipline in noh has learned to take more time with their art.

Jump to my personal experience of 25 years being immersed in this form and I would say I’m beginning to understand the depth of noh’s profundity.

Some years back, my mentor Richard Emmert who himself has been studying noh since the early 1970’s, approached a group of native English speakers who had some years of noh training and proposed forming Theatre Nohgaku, a company dedicated to the promotion of traditional noh as well as the development of new noh in English. We were not interested in “using noh as inspiration”, but to create new noh very much modeling our work on the tradition that we study/practice. Our aim at Theatre Nohgaku continues to be to further the development of noh beyond the borders of Japan, without losing the essence of the form.

As previously mentioned, this does not mean that we can just “set up shop” overseas, it has and continues to take concerted effort to plant seeds around the globe to develop both the interest and skill level of noh internationally. To return to the baseball analogy for a moment, baseball was imported into Japan in the late 1800’s and one could now argue that Japan has the strongest baseball program in the world. That’s taken about 120 years.

Noh already has a nearly 700 year history and its time spent as an international art is less than 30 years.

What makes noh, noh? The easy answer would be the text. That was the first component of noh that was accessible to non-Japanese audiences. Some texts of noh were translated into English as early as the 1880’s and to a certain degree, this where noh’s image as “Japanese theater” stemmed from. Those who read those texts had never experienced noh in its entirety. While I agree that the text of noh is an essential element of the form, it’s only one segment of a fully formed being.

If we think of noh as a living breathing being, I see the text as the bones, or skeletal structure. The kata (movement patterns) and the tachi-kata (standing performers) are the muscles, the shozoku (costumes), masks, fans are the skin, the utai (chant) is the breath/lungs and the hayashi (instruments) are the blood/heart. When all these elements are performing together, a noh can be seen. Without any one of the elements, it is not a full noh. We have names for performing excerpts from noh, just like an aria is a section from a full opera, we have terms that describe performing just short dances, or just the chant, or just the hayashi.

So I write all of this background to emphasize the importance of the entire noh world.

Here is a partial list of specialists needed for noh:

Performance:

Shite-kata (including main performers, chorus, stage attendants)

Waki-kata

Kyogen-kata

Fue-kata

Kotsuzumi-kata

Otsuzumi-kata

Taiko-kata

Craftsmen:

Shozoku

Weavers

Silk thread makers

Custom tabi (split toe socks) makers

Chukei (noh performance fans)

Masks

Carvers

Lumber makers

Mask cord braider

Flute makers

Drum makers

Each of the above disciplines are generational occupations and as interest in the analog declines, so too does the ability of the noh world to remain independent and a vital part of the culture. So it’s not enough for a noh performer to simply pass down their knowledge to their children or students, the whole noh eco-system is dependent on each other.

They’ve been able to maintain a rather healthy support system now for more than half a millennia, but there are cracks in the supply chain. For example, custom tabi-makers and mask cord braiders are nearly extinct. Japanese produced silk has also nearly vanished. So noh will need to pivot and evolve again in order to survive.

At Theatre Nohgaku, we make every effort to involve as many traditional craftsmen in the creation of new work. We have developed very strong relationships with a number of visual and textile artists and while it would be much cheaper to simply use “costumes,” to create new work, it would not be noh.

That said, we do want contribute to noh’s growth so we take extra time with the shokunin when commissioning new works. The question of how to inspire the use of traditional techniques to express contemporary narratives is tricky. When designing for a noh about Elvis Presley, it took more than a year from our first discussions through to completion as these are tricky cultural waters to navigate. We want to employ and not exploit the tradition. This could only have been possible, after many years of training in the form though, so that we could have a similar vocabulary.

I want to make clear that noh is most certainly a performing art, but at its core, it is a stylized performed ritual that has roots in shamanic exorcism as well as agrarian planting and harvest ceremonies. Audiences have just as important a role in the success of a noh as the participants on the stage do. Their appreciation of the form and the artisanal components used by the performers, contributes greatly to the whole room being able to concentrate for the duration of the noh. A noh is in many ways a group meditation centered on a theme, and when executed well both audience and performer achieve a flow state where the perception of time is altered. When this happens, it is indeed the space between the sounds that resonates the loudest and provides the audience with the greatest chance for self-reflection based on the noh’s theme.

The job of the tachi-kata is in some ways to be still enough to allow the audience to appreciate the art on stage. At the same time, they need to be active enough to maintain an “energy of life” through the stillness which conveys the emotional content of the narrative as seen through the subtly of the mask. As opposed to blockbuster Hollywood films, or larger than life Italian operas, the audience is not meant to simply consume, but also to engage in the experience themselves. Like many fine wines or complex flavored foods, noh is an “acquired taste,” but once understood, can deliver both practitioner and audience to nirvanic heights.