A Guide to Noh

Noh (能, "skill" or "talent") crystallized in late-fourteenth-century Japan out of two older forms: sarugaku, a comic-mimetic temple entertainment, and dengaku, a rural agricultural performance. Under the patronage of Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, the actor-priest Kan'ami (1333–1384) and his son Zeami (c. 1363–c. 1443) refined these popular roots into a contemplative court art.

Over the following two centuries Noh was codified, then frozen. The repertoire of roughly 240 plays performed today is essentially the repertoire of the Edo period. To watch a Noh play is, in part, to watch the past watch itself.

Zeami Motokiyo wrote the texts that turned Noh into a philosophy. His Fūshikaden (風姿花伝, "Transmission of the Flower through Forms"), composed around 1402, treats the actor's craft as a lifelong cultivation of a single image: the flower (hana).

秘すれば花、秘せずは花なるべからず。

"What is hidden is the flower. What is not hidden cannot be the flower."

The flower is not a metaphor for talent. It is the quality of an actor's presence at the precise moment the audience forgets they are watching an actor. It must be different at twenty, at forty, at seventy. It must be hidden to be felt.

Yūgen (幽玄) is the central aesthetic of Noh. The characters mean "dim" and "deep" — a beauty that points past itself to what cannot be shown. Zeami's example: a swan disappearing into snow. Not the swan; not the snow; the disappearing.

Yūgen prefers suggestion to statement, restraint to display, the dusk to the noon. In Noh it is achieved through stylization so extreme that it ceases to imitate the world and becomes a thinner, slower, more attentive version of it.

Ma (間) is the interval. The breath between syllables. The pause before the foot is set. The two seconds in which the mask is held to catch the light. Western theatre tends to fill time; Noh measures it.

The Noh mask (nōmen or omote) is carved from a single block of cypress and painted in layers of gesso, mineral pigment, and shell white. A mask does not change expression; the actor changes it. Tilted down (kumorasu), the face clouds with grief. Tilted up (terasu), it brightens into joy. The carving lives between these two angles.

小面

Ko-omote

Young woman — innocence, the face of a dream.

般若

Hannya

A woman transformed by jealousy into a horned spirit.

翁

Okina

The smiling old god — used in the sacred ritual play.

The Noh actor crosses the stage in suriashi, the sliding step, heels never leaving the cypress floor. A complete walk takes a minute. A turn of the head takes a phrase. To raise the hand to the mask in the gesture shiori — to weep — is a sequence of four measured beats.

Each gesture is a kata, a memorized form. There are perhaps two hundred. The art is not the invention of new ones; it is the inhabitation of the old.

The ensemble (hayashi) sits at the rear of the stage: a transverse flute (nōkan) and three drums (kotsuzumi, ōtsuzumi, taiko). The drummers cry — short, sharp vocal calls called kakegoe — which are themselves a kind of music, marking time without filling it.

Eight singers form the chorus (jiutai), seated stage-right. They narrate, comment, and at the play's centre take over the protagonist's voice while the protagonist dances.

A full Noh program follows jo-ha-kyū (序破急): introduction, breaking-apart, rushing. A traditional day's cycle moves through five plays, one of each category.

The two-part mugen-nō ("dream Noh"), Zeami's signature form, is the source of this site's title. In Act I, the protagonist (shite) appears as an ordinary person; in Act II — after an interlude — they return in their true form, a ghost, and dance the memory that has not let them leave.

1. 14th c.
   Sarugaku & Dengaku

   Folk performance traditions merge under shogunal patronage in Kyoto.

2. 1374
   Ashikaga Yoshimitsu sees Kan'ami perform

   The shogun's favour transforms a popular art into a courtly one.

3. c. 1400
   Zeami writes Fūshikaden

   The first and still most influential treatise on Noh aesthetics.

4. 1434
   Zeami exiled to Sado Island

   He continues to write. The flower of the late style begins to open.

5. Edo period
   Codification under the Tokugawa

   Five schools emerge. The repertoire ossifies and is preserved exactly.

6. 1881
   Noh almost dies

   Meiji modernization strips patrons; a few families keep the form alive.

7. 2008
   UNESCO heritage

   Inscribed on the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.