Part III:

During the long years of intensive training, slow painstaking work on a single piece goes hand in hand with rapid memorization of new pieces from the repertory. The aim of this two-sided process is to increase the young performer's capacities for concentrating on several levels simultaneously and to develop a respect for fundamentals. A young performer may spend months preparing for a stage appearance, practicing and being corrected…The pieces are graded by level of difficulty, although the level may vary according to which art is being practiced. For example, Basho is considered an easy piece for chanting, but a more advanced piece for dance.

Noh performers constantly return to pieces they have already learned. This return to "easy" pieces is an integral part of the system and occurs in several ways. For example, when an actor learns the hand drums, he must review the text of plays he has learned to sing and dance, this time with the added dimension of rhythmic give and take. He may be asked (with no advance notice) to chant a passage at his drum lesson to accompany another student or to sing while his father teaches an amateur…After learning complex pieces, the very simplicity of early pieces leads to the discovery of new levels of difficulty. The performer is suddenly face to face with unadorned, naked simplicity whose ultimate expression cannot, he now understands, depend on technical virtuosity. Even when, as a mature actor, he reaches a point where the control of nuances is as much an element of technique as pitch or gesture, he increasingly relies on the fundamentals like stance and walk and breath. Zeami expressed the importance of returning to the basics with the admonition: "Do not forget the beginner's heart."

The very simplicity of the form of noh makes its mastery extremely difficult…Each performer must develop a concentrated sensitivity which picks up, responds to and adjusts to all the other performers on stage during the actual performance. The drummers, for example, may signal other performers through the quality of their calls. These calls regularly mark the eight beats of the measure. The shoulder drum players usually quickens the pace at the end of each measure by clipping short his calls before beats 7 and 8. However, if he wishes to suggest to the other performers that they are rushing, he may not accelerate in this manner or he may even deliberately lengthen his calls to alter the mood to one of greater dignity. If the main actor feels that the drummers' tone is too light, he can communicate this by filling out his syllables thus signaling the drummers to slow down and fill out their own calls. The ability to maintain such give and take within a set format comes only after broad training in all the arts of noh and extensive performance experience; it is partially for this reason that a noh actor is not generally considered fully developed until he is in his mid-forties.

The later stages of training, which to a large extent are accomplished through the self-examination of the performer as he practices, work towards a highly sophisticated art of stage presence…Continued growth requires that a performer believe in his own ability and also that he have total humility, acknowledging that what he has achieved is not the full capacity of what noh can be.

Though the noh performer continues to learn throughout his life, he also teaches for much of it. Teaching is a form of practice. During lessons, as he sings, dances, beats out drum parts, and sings the flute solmization for his students, he reinforces memorized patterns for himself as well. Lesson time is always serious. The teacher brings to bear all the concentration he has developed in his own training…Even if he knows the student will not notice three-quarters of what he is putting into the demonstration, he still performs seriously. This is partly because the unteachable aspects of noh are considered more important and therefore should always be there in case the student can pick them up, either consciously or unwittingly. It is also because seriousness of attitude is as much a part of teaching and training as it is a part of performance.

Training professionals and amateurs is integral to the noh world; it is the system by which noh propagates itself, maintains a discriminating audience and keeps up its artistic standards. Amateur students may be housewives, retired people, college students, foreigners…There are thousands such people in Japan today. In fact many performers are financially more dependent on lesson fees paid by amateurs than on the proceeds from performances. Amateur students also provide an educated audience trained to pick up on the subtler aspects of performance and therefore to provide the discriminating evaluation which spurs performers to greater proficiency. Both critics and scholars of noh have also often had some training in noh practice, and a few of them are good amateur performers.

The importance of amateurs in supporting noh is not a recent phenomenon. Already in Zeami's time there were interested non-professionals studying from noh actors…By the end of the sixteenth century even the military leaders Toyotomi Hideyoshi, his son Hidetsugu, and Tokugawa Ieyasu actively performed noh. This practice continued among the feudal lords of the Edo period, who competed in collecting costumes and masks both for their own use and for the use of their privately maintained noh troupes. Amateur women's troupes also flourished until 1629 when women were prohibited from appearing on the stage altogether. However private lessons for women did continue, and in the nineteenth century it was not uncommon to find wives of high ranking officials studying noh chanting or drumming.