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Noh Theater: Principles and Perspectives
The Noh theater of Japan is without question one of the most refined dramatic arts in the world. Originating in dance and music performed at sacred rituals and festivals, it was developed and brought to maturity in the 14th and 15th centuries by Kan'ami Kiyotsugu and his son, Zeami Motokiyo, two great dramatists who distilled the crude entertainments of the open fields into a predominately tragic drama of illusion played upon an empty stage. This volume, first published in 1983 and long out of print, is the first work in either English or Japanese to offer a comprehensive explanation and analysis of the principles of the Noh theater. The author was an active practitioner of the art, representing the 22nd generation in a direct line of Noh performers. His book painstakingly outlines both physical and intellectual aspects of Noh-its technical principles and its philosophical perspectives-on a scope hitherto unknown. An invaluable tool for the student of any aspect of drama, it offers as well deeper insights into Japanese history and culture.
400 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
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March 21, 2017
This is the book for understanding Noh.
However, because it aims to explain the deeply imbued ways of thinking about time, space, and being that characterize Noh, it can bring new ways to perceive and reflect to all artists or indeed to anyone who is interested in deep perception of the environment, emotion, time and space. I include a couple of instances below where it has already prompted new ways of thinking for me and those I described it to.
Kunio Komparu is a member of one of the major families who have dominated various schools of Noh training and performance for centuries. He is a professional taiko or stick drum player for Noh, but like all Noh professionals he had to learn all aspects of acting, dancing, singing, music, stage, props, costume, masks, etc. (Reason explained below.) But he also trained as an architect and was an architecture critic. This means he both has a deep knowledge of the history, culture, and performance of Noh, but he also brings an arms-length critical eye to the art, and has practice in communicating about art to a lay audience. In particular, he has a sensitivity to three dimensional space and its use, structure (both physical and conceptual), and systems thinking.
The first section of the book focuses on the concepts of time, space, emotion and being that are the foundations of the art.
* Three stages of beauty: hana apparent; Yugen invisible, or ‘graceful, somewhat mysterious elegance’; and rojaku quiet.
* Self / other: the process and practice of the Noh actor seeing himself as the other, as the audience sees him.
*Aesthetic of discord: preference for disharmony. Idea of shin-gyō-sō, which are three stages of giving “substance to a basic pattern created with an odd number of elements in accordance with the principle of heaven-earth-man…a principle of progressive transformation leading to maturation or fulfillment.”
* Another essential concept of Noh: jo-ha-kyū. is the beginning, in a spatial sense; it refers to position. Ha means break or ruin. It signifies the breaking up of a condition. Kyū means fast in the sense of tempo, and is this a time concept. It underlies the tempo of Noh performances, from slow to moderate to fast. It is the ordering principle of the “flow of time and the changes of space occurring in Noh.” That means acceleration in the beats of a measure of music, the measures in a section of music, the pace of dance, the progression through the stage space, the pace of an individual play.
*The five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, water.
*Ma time and space in Noh.
I found the chapter on ma to be the most crucial in the whole book. The word has many related meanings, including "space, spacing, interval, gap, blank, room, pause, rest, time, timing, or opening." These indicate the fusion of time and space in a conceptual approach to art. It includes the negative space in a physical art work, as well as the silences between notes in a piece of music. In Noh, and perhaps more broadly in Japanese culture, the emphasis in on the emptiness, rather than on the presence. “In the extreme form, the expressive part exists only to give shape to the blank, and it is progressively abbreviated in the process of attainment in order to make it symbolic. The blank part created by the symbolic expressive part is the core of the composition, ma, an entity that really exists.”
A few days later I was reading a lovely New York Times Sunday magazine essay on arroyos when I suddenly thought of the maness of them. The empty space of the arroyo is the point. The soil, stones, and drought tolerant scrub define the vacancy, and we know that time is essential to defining the space as well, because at other times it will be filled with water. It is temporary, and thus has a certain yugen, or haunting beauty.
A few days later I was describing ma to my daughter and son-in-law, when he decided that during Elon Musk’s PhD studies in battery technology, Musk had identified the ma in the timing of that technology. He took off, founded what eventually became Paypal, and returned to found Tesla when the time was full again. This may not be an exact application of ma ;-), but it shows how bringing the idea to a Western mind can flip switches.
Komparu then proceeds through detailed explanations of the various components of Noh performance: stage, performers, music, costume, masks, props, movement patterns. This is where you understand that what looks like a rigid, precisely prescribed, dull event is actually a highwire act.
There is no director. There are no rehearsals. Each performer is expected to have perfected all aspect of chanting, dancing, movement, drumming, etc. and to know which are appropriate to that play. The music is amazingly complex. In particular, the eight beat measure speeds up from the beginning of the measure to the end. The next measure also speeds up, but the entire measure is faster than the first, Same for the third measure. Eventually the section is over, and the musicians return to a slow measure and speed up again. But there is no prescribed tempo. Singing or chanting can be in time to the beat (with the importance attached to the empty half-beat between the actual striking of the drum or playing of the note on the flute) or disassociated with it.
So you have the main character wearing a mask that he can hardly see out of, and wrapped in six layers of clothing , moving around a stage in a dance that must be coordinated to music with a changing beat set by tradition, not the clock, and that hasn’t been rehearsed. Nobody is waving a stick to keep time for everyone. No director has told the waki to move here then kneel; they just all work on trust, training, and constant real-time adjustment.
Because every Noh performance is individual. The theater presents it no more than once a year in a particular combination of actors, costumes, masks, play sequence (a full playbill is 5 plays in the subject order: old man, warrior, woman, madness, demon), and season. It is both improvisational and deeply traditional. Fascinating.
Komparu finishes with several chapters on applying a unit structure analysis of Noh and describing two plays in actual performance, now that we have learned all the components. This works to some extent, but he stretches the architectural approach to far and too often, in my opinion. I did like Komparu’s use of diagrams to communicate concepts, as I think that way myself (perhaps my year of architecture school suggests a similar approach to learning) but again, sometimes the diagrams are not totally congruent with the concept. If you interpret them loosely, they are very helpful.
Highly recommended for anyone trying to understand Noh (the work is very, very comprehensive, but at just the right level for a non-professional reader), for all varieties of visual and performing artists, and for anyone interested in stretching their perceptual and conceptual abilities. Unfortunately it is out of print; someone please pick it up.
However, because it aims to explain the deeply imbued ways of thinking about time, space, and being that characterize Noh, it can bring new ways to perceive and reflect to all artists or indeed to anyone who is interested in deep perception of the environment, emotion, time and space. I include a couple of instances below where it has already prompted new ways of thinking for me and those I described it to.
Kunio Komparu is a member of one of the major families who have dominated various schools of Noh training and performance for centuries. He is a professional taiko or stick drum player for Noh, but like all Noh professionals he had to learn all aspects of acting, dancing, singing, music, stage, props, costume, masks, etc. (Reason explained below.) But he also trained as an architect and was an architecture critic. This means he both has a deep knowledge of the history, culture, and performance of Noh, but he also brings an arms-length critical eye to the art, and has practice in communicating about art to a lay audience. In particular, he has a sensitivity to three dimensional space and its use, structure (both physical and conceptual), and systems thinking.
The first section of the book focuses on the concepts of time, space, emotion and being that are the foundations of the art.
* Three stages of beauty: hana apparent; Yugen invisible, or ‘graceful, somewhat mysterious elegance’; and rojaku quiet.
* Self / other: the process and practice of the Noh actor seeing himself as the other, as the audience sees him.
*Aesthetic of discord: preference for disharmony. Idea of shin-gyō-sō, which are three stages of giving “substance to a basic pattern created with an odd number of elements in accordance with the principle of heaven-earth-man…a principle of progressive transformation leading to maturation or fulfillment.”
* Another essential concept of Noh: jo-ha-kyū. is the beginning, in a spatial sense; it refers to position. Ha means break or ruin. It signifies the breaking up of a condition. Kyū means fast in the sense of tempo, and is this a time concept. It underlies the tempo of Noh performances, from slow to moderate to fast. It is the ordering principle of the “flow of time and the changes of space occurring in Noh.” That means acceleration in the beats of a measure of music, the measures in a section of music, the pace of dance, the progression through the stage space, the pace of an individual play.
*The five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, water.
*Ma time and space in Noh.
I found the chapter on ma to be the most crucial in the whole book. The word has many related meanings, including "space, spacing, interval, gap, blank, room, pause, rest, time, timing, or opening." These indicate the fusion of time and space in a conceptual approach to art. It includes the negative space in a physical art work, as well as the silences between notes in a piece of music. In Noh, and perhaps more broadly in Japanese culture, the emphasis in on the emptiness, rather than on the presence. “In the extreme form, the expressive part exists only to give shape to the blank, and it is progressively abbreviated in the process of attainment in order to make it symbolic. The blank part created by the symbolic expressive part is the core of the composition, ma, an entity that really exists.”
A few days later I was reading a lovely New York Times Sunday magazine essay on arroyos when I suddenly thought of the maness of them. The empty space of the arroyo is the point. The soil, stones, and drought tolerant scrub define the vacancy, and we know that time is essential to defining the space as well, because at other times it will be filled with water. It is temporary, and thus has a certain yugen, or haunting beauty.
A few days later I was describing ma to my daughter and son-in-law, when he decided that during Elon Musk’s PhD studies in battery technology, Musk had identified the ma in the timing of that technology. He took off, founded what eventually became Paypal, and returned to found Tesla when the time was full again. This may not be an exact application of ma ;-), but it shows how bringing the idea to a Western mind can flip switches.
Komparu then proceeds through detailed explanations of the various components of Noh performance: stage, performers, music, costume, masks, props, movement patterns. This is where you understand that what looks like a rigid, precisely prescribed, dull event is actually a highwire act.
There is no director. There are no rehearsals. Each performer is expected to have perfected all aspect of chanting, dancing, movement, drumming, etc. and to know which are appropriate to that play. The music is amazingly complex. In particular, the eight beat measure speeds up from the beginning of the measure to the end. The next measure also speeds up, but the entire measure is faster than the first, Same for the third measure. Eventually the section is over, and the musicians return to a slow measure and speed up again. But there is no prescribed tempo. Singing or chanting can be in time to the beat (with the importance attached to the empty half-beat between the actual striking of the drum or playing of the note on the flute) or disassociated with it.
So you have the main character wearing a mask that he can hardly see out of, and wrapped in six layers of clothing , moving around a stage in a dance that must be coordinated to music with a changing beat set by tradition, not the clock, and that hasn’t been rehearsed. Nobody is waving a stick to keep time for everyone. No director has told the waki to move here then kneel; they just all work on trust, training, and constant real-time adjustment.
Because every Noh performance is individual. The theater presents it no more than once a year in a particular combination of actors, costumes, masks, play sequence (a full playbill is 5 plays in the subject order: old man, warrior, woman, madness, demon), and season. It is both improvisational and deeply traditional. Fascinating.
Komparu finishes with several chapters on applying a unit structure analysis of Noh and describing two plays in actual performance, now that we have learned all the components. This works to some extent, but he stretches the architectural approach to far and too often, in my opinion. I did like Komparu’s use of diagrams to communicate concepts, as I think that way myself (perhaps my year of architecture school suggests a similar approach to learning) but again, sometimes the diagrams are not totally congruent with the concept. If you interpret them loosely, they are very helpful.
Highly recommended for anyone trying to understand Noh (the work is very, very comprehensive, but at just the right level for a non-professional reader), for all varieties of visual and performing artists, and for anyone interested in stretching their perceptual and conceptual abilities. Unfortunately it is out of print; someone please pick it up.
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July 15, 2019Really useful and helpful and important
January 16, 2021
Extremely informative and well-translated.
August 18, 2019
A serious and rather dry description of everything concerning the No theater - but only little space is given to what interests me most, the content of the plays. The book gives most of its space to such things as the music of No, the movements of the dance, the costumes and masks, and even the various props used. It is a excellent reference work when one needs to look up something on the subjects discussed, but not suitable as an introduction to the subject.
February 2, 2013
A pretty dry read, but incredibly thorough and well broken down. If you want to learn about Noh I can't imagine a better English-language source.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews