Teaching and Learning Noh: Twenty-First-Century Technologies and Medieval Theater in Japan

• In Event: Scanning the Horizon: New Hopes for the Future of Noh Theatre

Abstract

Japanese noh has approximately a 650-year-history as a performing art. Like all forms of art it has evolved and adapted to its patronage in order to survive. At the dawn of the Meiji Period (1868-1911), noh lost its patronage and was in danger of disappearing. Shite performer Umewaka Minoru is largely credited with keeping noh culturally relevant. One way he did so was by taking on non-Japanese students who then helped share their appreciation of noh beyond Japan’s borders. This marked the beginning of noh’s “journey of transmission.” In the early days, those learning as amateurs were taught very much the same way professionals were, through master-teacher repetition. However as time has gone on, the need to teach someone “noh in an hour” has arisen giving rise to more modern forms of transmission. As performing arts professionals began travelling widely in post-WWII, a culture of “workshops” materialized, with international performers interested in sampling as much as they could. Noh performers also found themselves having to educate their audiences worldwide leading to a great variety of transmission methodologies. I will examine the pedagogies of two Kita-school noh performers, Matsui Akira and Oshima Kinue, and how their teaching methods for both Japanese amateurs and non-noh professionals have evolved. Matsui has travelled extensively working with a broad range of non-noh professionals. Oshima, as the only professional woman in the Kita-school, has worked frequently abroad and has developed a number of programs for teaching younger audiences.

Author

• John Oglevee, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa