Kyoto performance reviews

 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 ...

Why can’t Western instruments and noh work together? Why do Western-trained actors have trouble sharing the stage with Japanese noh-kyogen actors? And why oh why do producers seeking publicity, frisson, and doling civic funds equitably seek to marry the two in under-rehearsed, one-time experiments? Three reasons spring to mind: 1/ On a basic level of dramaturgy, the two are self-contained and other-rejecting. Noh’s frontal declamation style and stylized expression of emotion demands focus; Western “cheating” diagonals and detailed facial expression pulls focus from the stage picture to the individual portrait. Vocal energy and melodic chant, coiled taut and loosened strategically through MA pauses and accents in conjunction with drum/flute accompaniment are potently precise; Western vocal energy is emotionally, not musically based. It follows the flow of breath swept up in the surge of passion and concrete logic of debate. The trained actor’s voice itself is the instrument, needing no...