Saturday November 15 at Osaka Noh Theatre Sekine Masaru is an interesting guy. Born into a noh family and trained as an actor, he became an academic (literature) and published books on Zeami and Yeats. Returning to Waseda now teaching performance at the Liberal Arts College and Japan, he continues to build bridges with his Roma Kyogen group. Students from Italy learned Japanese through kyogen, then performed adaptations of Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost. He experimented with commedia dell'arte adaptations to the noh stage. Now he is in the midst of the ambitious Si Project, directing 4 Shakespeare tragedies interpreted with noh, kyogen, and opera techniques. Hamlet, his first outing, was a failure in my opinion. While getting an interesting melancholic Dane out Zenchiku Tadaaki, the rest of the actors stuck to their own strengths: opera, djambe African drum, and three foreign players moving in a mixed salad remarkable only for the combination rather than any inherent
an occasional document of theatrical life in Kyoto and the virtual world at the beginning of the 21st century