Excerpts from the essay*
"The practice of noh theatre"
Written by Monica Bethe and Karen Brazell.
Part I:
Dance, music, poetry, costumes, and masks combine in the noh theatre to create a performance which can be aesthetically impressive and emotionally profound. How is this art nurtured? What enables the beauty of noh to flower on the stage in a particular performance? What motivates the actors to devote their lives to nourishing a traditional art form? Are there new species of noh growing out of the old...
Noh is today practiced in Japan by several hundred highly trained professionals, both actors and musicians. As a traditional performance system passed down in an unbroken line from generation to generation of practitioners since the fourteenth century, every aspect- text, melody, instrumentation, choreography, and costuming- has become codified. The current repertory is essentially the same as that performed in the sixteenth century, and today's performers are responsible for mastering its two hundred plays.
The phenomenal memorization that this mastery implies is aided by the structure of noh, for it is an art based on the manipulation of fixed modules of performance combined according to underlying principles. Although the basic vocabulary is limited, the variations are endless…The underlying rules may never be explicitly stated or taught, but they are subconsciously internalized during the course of training...
Like many other theatrical genres with settled performance texts, noh emphasizes training. However, while for many other performance arts, this emphasis grows out of a need for traditionalism, in noh the essential role of training was recognized even in the formative period. Zeami's treatises, written before there were fixed performance texts and intended to instruct his descendants in the essence of his art, already concentrate on training. As Zeami perceived it, training lasts a lifetime; it develops the person as well as the performer, giving him a level of discipline, concentration and mastery which improves his soul as well as his art...
The training of a noh actor traditionally begins before he enters school. As Zeami decreed centuries ago and is still true today, early practice centers on the essential arts of song and dance. Typically the young boy begins training with his father. The first step is to learn, piece by piece, in bits and parts, the main plays of the standard repertory. The emphasis is on ingrained, intimate knowledge, the child internalizes the song and dance before he understands them intellectually.
In the early stages of training, the child actor learns through imitation and repetition. The father dances sections from a play with the child; the father singing the words while child struggles to imitate his motions. Frequently the father manipulates the child's limbs, accustoming them to the proper positions. The training is adjusted to the temperament of the child, involving him as naturally as possible in the world of noh…Formal vocal training often begins later than dance training, although Kongo Iwao describes having some training in both when he was six (Kongo 1984:76). In all of his lessons the child learns parts of plays, never isolated movements or scales…After the young actor has mastered a certain number of pieces and reached some degree of proficiency, the father begins to demonstrate less and to require the older child to study more. In addition to learning by imitating his father, the older child is told to study such and such a piece by reading chant and dance books. As Kongo Iwao recalls: "By the time I was in junior high I was expected to spend time practicing by myself, and to watch practices and study the instruments of the ensemble…"Memorizing a vast amount of text and technical detail becomes an ingrained habit which proves useful throughout a performer's life. Once the youth has learned a piece on his own, he performs it for his father at the next lesson...
This learning process is possible because in the performance system of noh all plays have a similar underlying structure. The section labeled the kuse scene, for example, has a recognizable poetic, melodic, instrumental, and kinetic structure (Bethe and Brazell 1978, 1982-83). Once one has learned enough of these scenes to have internalized the underlying models and to have experienced the major variations, it is not difficult to learn the kuse from a new play very quickly. The teacher need point out only the variations specific to the piece.
Actual stage experience from an early age is considered a necessary adjunct to training. The noh repertory includes numerous roles for child actors…As Zeami first emphasized, the attributes of an actor's age should be capitalized upon: the childishness of a boy who can barely hold still, the high-pitched chant of a young boy, and the blossoming of a youth should all be exploited as part of their charm…
The second major stage of the training process most often begins when the youth has completed the equivalent of junior high and he becomes a live-in disciple (uchideshi) to a master actor, usually the head of his school of actors. Noh performers are divided into schools of performers, each school having a head (iemoto) who oversees the training of all the members…The timing and length of live-in training varies considerably, but the practice is common to all groups of noh performers, instrumentalists as well as actors.
(To be continued...)
*The excerpts from the above essay are taken from the book "By Means of Performance", 1990. Cambridge University Press. Editors- Richard Schechner and Willa Appel.
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