Candlelit Noh: Why the Blue? Aug 16th Daimonji Noh Utoh Utoh is one of my favorite noh plays. An unusually vivid depiction by a Bird-Hunter Ghost of his double torment: inability to return or communicate with his wife and son, attacked merciless in the everlasting hell-fires of sinners. I had produced a version for Matsui Akira's Women in Circle one-man show that he toured to Europe and the U.S., using slides of Shiko Munakata's woodblock prints with translation of "Blood-birds", an early Wetherby work. Matui danced the climactic kuse powerfully, the iron claws of the giant Auk (seabird) and bloody, fatal tears of the mother shown with vigor and pathos. A laquered black sedge hat and pole his only properties, a feather-skirt and light white vest his ghostly garments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH8lm40bilw&t=56s (with Richard Emmert's chorus on tour in UK) So, I was eager to see how the head of the Kongo school would perform the piece by candlelight in
an occasional document of theatrical life in Kyoto and the virtual world at the beginning of the 21st century