You will never see their likes again in New York. Lincoln Center states: “This summer, Kiyokazu Kanze—the 26th Grand Master of the Kanze School and a descendent of the founder of Noh—brings the profound lyricism and aesthetic elegance of this ancient dramatic art form to Lincoln Center.” Five dramas are being presented from this classical repertory of a “nearly 700-year-old dramatic form” that is a official UNESCO “Intangible Cultural Heritage.”
“In the Noh we find an art built upon the god-dance , or upon some local legend of spiritual apparition, or, later, on gestures of war and feats of history; an art of splendid posture, of dancing and chanting, and of acting that is not mimetic. It is, of course, impossible to give much idea of the whole of this art on paper.” Ernest Fenollosa & Ezra Pound, “NOH'” OR ACCOMPLISHMENT A STUDY OF THE CLASSICAL STAGE OF JAPAN (1916) at 4-5.
Impossible to convey on paper and yet one perseveres.
Noh plays “present some more vivid hour or crisis. The Greek plays are troubled and solved by the gods; the Japanese are abounding in ghosts and spirits.” Id. Pound saw an immediate connection between the psychology of Noh and his own modernist aesthetic (and that of Yeats): “The suspense [of the Noh] is the suspense of waiting for a supernatural manifestation — which comes. Some will be annoyed at a form of psychology which is, ‘in the West, relegated to spiritistic stances. There is, however, no doubt that such psychology exists. All through the winter of 1914- 15 [as the real life horrors of the First World War were playing out] I watched Mr. Yeats correlating folk-lore (which Lady Gregory had collected in Irish cottages) and data of the occult writers, with the habits of charlatans of Bond Street. If the Japanese authors had not combined the psychology of such matters with what is to me a very fine sort of poetry, I would not bother about it.” Id. 44.
Last night (Wednesday) began with “Okina,” a sacred dance rite in which the mask is donned and the actor physically transformed into a deity. The evening began with the most remarkable sound ever heard in the Rose auditorium — utter, ear-splitting silence as the actors soundlessly entered the classical Noh stage, a three-sided platform reached by a “bridge” leading offstage. Here the exit was curtained with a rainbow fabric that lifted up and then inward entrancingly. This remarkable silence was a testament to the power of the form and lasted perhaps five minutes. The audience was mesmerized. Slowly, slowly the drama unfolds with simple drumming — so simple as to be reminiscent of a Steve Reich piece — changing and what they call “dance” which is a rigid sequence of set poses punctuated by occasional stomping. The effect was intense, highly-focused, mind-freeing tedium illuminated by an aura of grace, the feeling of peering back centuries into a pre-digital age to a completely non-Western culture.
The second piece was a veritable melodrama in comparison. “Hagoromo or The Robe Of Feathers” told the story of a simple fisherman who stumbles upon a sacred robe belonging to a fallen angel of sorts, a guardian of the Palace of the Moon, who must retrieve the robe in order to return to heaven. After an intense negotiation between the two —
Hakuryo: Give payment with the dance of the Tennin, and I will return you your mantle.
Tennin: Readily and gladly, and then I return into heaven. You shall have what pleasure you will, and I will leave a dance here, a joy to be new among men and to be memorial dancing. . . .For the sorrows of the world I will leave this new dancing with you for sorrowful people. But give me my mantle, I cannot do the dance rightly without it.
Hakuryo: Not yet, for if you should get it, how do I know you’ll not be off to your palace without even beginning your dance, not even a measure?
Tennin: Doubt is fitting for mortals; with us there is no deceit.
Hakuryo: I am again ashamed. I give you your mantle. Id. 165.
— The fisherman agrees to return the robe in exchange for the angel performing the sacred dance of the guardians of the Palace, not something that a fisherman or any human would ordinarily be privy to. And then the dance, again, static and fluid at the same time, again involving a mask, slow, fast, tedious, entrancing, altogether out of this world and fully evocative of the Palace of the Moon indeed.
As to the nature of this dance, where would Martha Graham be without Noh? “Graham was influenced by the Yeats-Pound-Eliot-Joyce branch of Anglo-American modernism” and thus by Pound’s deep appreciation of Noh. Graham, it seems, picked up Noh through dancer Michio Ito, who performed Yeats’ Noh-influenced play At the Hawk’s Well in 1916, and later introduced Graham to her future collaborator Isamu Noguchi, who created masks for a 1928 revival of the Yeats play. Graham also danced Ito’s choreography in New York. Graham thus picked up a “modernist ‘Celtic’ conception of Noh.” Franko, Martha Graham in Love & War (Oxford) at 103-04.
But back to “The Robe Of Feathers.” At the end, the angel simply walked offstage as she is said to have ascended to heaven, and I swear I saw her flying through the sky, past the clouds, all the way up to the Moon such was the full activation of the imagination after the hypnotic spell cast by the performance.
More from Fenollosa & Pound about the ancestors of the Kanze troupe which is performing at the Rose Theatre: “The Kanze method of acting was made the
official style of the Tokugawa Shoguns, and the tayus, or chief actors, of Kanze were placed at the head of all Noh actors.” This method, and the entire Noh tradition, is different from the “common theatre” characterized by “mimicry and direct imitation of life. . . . The Noh, the symbolic and ritual stage, is a place of honour to actor and audience alike.” Fenollosa & Pound at 13.
This is uncommon theatre, nonmimetic, not imitating life, as artificial and unnatural and profound a form as Italian opera. These forms force us to work harder to suspend disbelief, and thus bring us to deeper parts of the imagination.
The summer Lincoln Center Festival Asian offerings have never been less than bracing, an ice cube dropped down the mind’s back on a hot evening, something completely different, performed by gold-plated ensembles with impeccable artistic pedigrees. We are so fortunate to have this Festival.