Solemn beauty with a hint of wistfulness

Text: Håkon Styri
Translated by: Andrew Smith

Anyone coming to a Noh performance and expecting to see something reminiscent of Western theatre will be greatly disappointed. Noh is one of the oldest existing dramatic traditions; a form of elegant imitation, lyrical drama that is not easily described in Western terms.

Noh consists of song, dance and drama. Whereas the latter are not prerequisite elements of a Noh performance, and might even be totally absent from it, every play contains singing. There is very little dramatic conflict, and most of the text is either sung or recited in an archaic and conventionalized, yet poetic, form of the language not easily accessible even to a Japanese audience.

A Noh performance attempts to create the atmosphere of yugen, a Japanese term with no direct equivalent in English. The word derives from the sign yu, meaning deep, dark, clouded, barely visible, and gen, a term originally describing the deep, dark, calm colour of the universe, with reference to the taoistic conception of truth. Yugen can best be described as unobtrusive, solemn beauty with a hint of wistfulness — beauty which is partly hidden, yet ever present.

The idea of Noh theatre is not to reveal a preconceived plot scene by scene, but rather to capture the atmosphere of a given moment, reproducing it in an aesthetically pleasing manner through the use of words, music and dance. Some of the gestures carry a particular meaning, others are just abstract; the entire perfomance us a theatrical idiom which does not aspire to realism, and in many ways can be seen as a stylized form of dance.

Medieval moonwalking

From the middle of the twelfth century the Noh tradition grew and developed, reaching a more standardized form in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Over 2000 plays exists, though the classical repertory consists of around only 240 of these. The plays are performed today much as they were three or foor hundred years ago, though recent years have seen a certain amount of experimentation with both form and content.

Each play is divided into two acts and is usually very short, often no longer than a one-act play in Western theatre. The plays fall into five groups, determined by the main character: There are divine plays, which include a Shito parable, warrior plays, plays in which the main character is a woman, a mixed group and demon plays. A traditional Noh performance comprises five plays, one from each group; contemporary perfomances, however, consist of only two or three plays.

Between the plays either a shoty dance called shimai or a farcial interlude known as kyogen is performed. In kyogen, the actors portray genuine charecters and the language is easier to understand, in strong contrast to the Noh plays. Kyogen developed parallel with Noh, though traditionally the two forms each have their separate social status.

A single Noh play requires only a few actors. The style is slow and ceremonial, the actors in their colourful costumes gliding over the sparsly-set stage as is walking on air; the leading actor can be distinguishes as the one wearing an intricately carved mask.

The perfomance is accompanied by three or four musicians on flute and drums, as well as a small choir of eight to ten singers. The chanting style of singing is a derivative of shomyo, traditional music sung by japanese Buddhist monks. Guttural cries from the musicians are an interesting feature of a Noh performance.