能ーNoh.

During the first week after we arrived in Kumamoto, Y took me to a Noh performance in Suizenji Park, For centuries, the park had been the private garden of the Hosokawas, the Daimyo (feudal lords) of Higo, or Kumamoto as the province is now known. I have a vivid memory of Hagoromo being danced by an old man. I was struck by the ability of the frail, tremulous body to convey the angelic beauty of the dance to win back the hagoromo or “feather cloak” from the fisherman.

A year and a half after that, I was introduced to Tsuiji sensei by Greta, who had taught at the YMCA with me the previous year. Greta was a passionate Noh student, devoting every ounce of energy to her studies, and teaching English just enough to pay the bills. Greta and a Canadian friend, Jane, had been learning from Tsuiji sensei for about a year. I was welcomed by Tsuiji sensei to one of his Friday night classes, and he invited me to join as a student.
There were many reasons to accept. Tsuiji himself was (and is!) a gentle, unpretentious man with a hearty laugh and endless patience. He loved Noh with a single-hearted thoroughness that I could admire but not emulate.
Apart from the year and a bit that we were away in France, I have learnt from Tsuiji sensei ever since. Through him, I have been a member of the school of Noh that he is affiliated to, the Komparu, or “Golden Spring” School. For the first year or so, the foreigners were given special treatment, being exempt from the normal membership duties and fees. When I realized that was happening, I asked to be treated the same way as everyone else, and have been, as far as that is plausible in a society like Japan, where foreign participants are still few (written 2002).

Unlike Greta, I have had an intellectual, rather than an emotional admiration for Noh, and have devoted no more of my time to it than most of my Japanese companions, that is one session a week, with the occasional extra practice before a “Noh kai” or a performance. The Komparu Noh calendar consists of Spring, Summer and Autumn gatherings, with other special events like Takigi or torchlight performances for the Kumamoto Castle Festival in Autumn, and for the annual Fujisaki Shrine Festival. Some of these are Komparu gatherings. Some are in combination with other schools, which are active in Kumamoto, in particular the Kita and Kanze schools.

The typical programme for a Komparu performance would be something like this:

1) a number of shimai: extracts from well-known Noh plays, the equivalent of arias in European opera;
2) A kyougen, a short, comic play, usually based on a Edo period household, with husband-wife-servant relations figuring prominently;
3) a Noh play, somewhat less than an hour in length.

This programme would be about three hours long. When the schools combine, there will be several Noh plays, and the performance may last seven or eight hours. In that case, it becomes rather like a five-day cricket test. People come and go depending on their interest in the programme, and their relations with the participants. Many will nap at some time during the performance.

Alan, a friend and mentor, wondered why I was bothering learning Noh, since it was so difficult for a foreigner that there could be no question of achieving any level of understanding or competence, especially when I was devoting so little of my time to it. I could see his point, but since I was enjoying it, I did not worry about how much progress I made.

Tsuiji sensei, whenever he talks about his experience teaching non-Japanese students, always says that we have brought home to him the theatricality of Noh, the fact that it is first and foremost theatre. The tendency in Japan is for Noh to be seen as something apart, with minimal connections to other forms of theatre.

Noh crystallized in the fourteenth century, under the dynamic influence of an actor called Zeami who followed his father, Kanami in providing the basis for the Noh repertoire, and a body of theory which, even today, is inspirational to Japanese performers. Their two names combine to form the name of one of the Kanze School, which is one of the largest.

The goal of a Noh student is to reach the point where you perform the leading (shite) role in a Noh play. I still haven’t done that.
In fact, the only time I have performed in a full Noh play was in a minor role in Greta’s farewell performance of Hagoromo around 1990. “Farewell” because it was just before her return to the U.S,--where she has continued to do Noh-influenced theatre ever since.

From the first lessons, I enjoyed the lack of what I came to see as the performance anxiety of Western theatre. Whenever I had acted, whether in lesson, rehearsal, or play, in Western theatre, I had always felt worried by the question: “Are you good?” “Is this a good performance?” While something of that anxiety remains in Noh, it is much less. In the Western theatre I had done, I had always felt that the important component of a performance was the part brought by the actor, the individual genius which creates the role.
In Noh, there is almost no worry about that individual component. All your energy and concentration go to learning the role, guided by the model provided by the teacher. That model is determined in great detail, down to the finest finger position, to the angle of fingers from the wrist. Paradoxically, and this was something I remembered from mime classes in Barcelona, the more a performer strives to match an abstract model, the more inevitably individuality will shine through.
I delighted in watching a succession of “shimai” by actors, all trying only to “do it right”, and yet managing to “express themselves” in a way that would delight the teachers of any New York theatre workshop.

I came to realize that the duty of the Noh actor was not to “be good” as a performer, but rather, to be the adequate vehicle for the play which you were transmitting, along with the other people around you: the chorus, the musicians, and all those who had worked to prepare the theatre and make the performance possible.

Like the Irish traditional music performers I so admired, the Noh performers received the pieces from their teachers and felt a duty to pass it on just as they had received it. I remember Sean Potts of the Chieftains saying that you had to pass on “the bones” of the tune, whatever the flesh that an individual performer might choose to add.

For all that there is an impression of a conservative, unchanging tradition passed down over the centuries, I soon realized that there is lot of variation in the Noh tradition. Even within the Kumamoto area of Komparu, different teachers provide noticeably different patterns for their students.

Greta found it very difficult when she had to do lessons from K sensei since Tsuiji sensei could not teach her to play the drum, a skill which was necessary for her to get a teaching licence. She soon found that the two teachers were giving her conflicting directions regarding the position of her hands while dancing. She had to remember the two sets of instructions and vary them according to whose class she was doing.

Although all the schools have a national structure, and most are clearly focussed on the “iemoto” (lit. “head of the house”), the Kumamoto section of Komparu enjoys a level of autonomy which reflects both the strength of the local tradition and the weakness of the national structure. This is a mixed blessing. While local teachers, like Tsuiji sensei, benefit from a kind of federal-style autonomy, they perhaps are deprived of the stimulus of frequent contact with top-level performers.

Over the fifteen years that I have been there, I have generally been impressed by the co-operative and harmonious way in which the Komparu people work together. Each performance requires a huge amount of preparation and physical work, not to mention money. For each Takigi (torchlight) Noh performance at the beginning of August of each year much work is needed:lanterns have to be made from bamboo which has been cut in the shrine grove; marquees set up, and. some years. a whole new stage must be built—and all of this in the 30 degree plus heat of a Kumamoto summer. After two days of such labour, Tsuiji Sensei will then have three hours of performance, leading the chorus, and preparing each of his students for their five minutes of shimai.

The only authority I can see being referred to during all this work is the authority given to those with experience and expert knowledge. There are moments however, when the winds of jealousy and strife wrack even the world of Noh. The death of a teacher has produced tense relations as his authority is passed to his students.

Tsuiji sensei has always been completely untouched by the accumulative instincts of so many of those involved with the traditional crafts of Japan. So many of the tea ceremony and flower arranging hierarchies appear more like pyramid-selling schemes than artistic circles. I had thought such practices were not to be found in Komparu until one of my Noh friends switched his allegiance from another teacher to Tsuiji Sensei. We learned he had been paying large amounts of money to the other teacher over the years to obtain various “certificates”, the main function of which was to provide income for the teacher and for those above him in the hierarchy. As a low-ranking civil servant, on a secure but modest salary, X. was ill-able to afford the fees involved, often more than a $1000, and had been paying them without telling anyone, even his wife.

One straw finally broke the camel’s back, and he made Tsuiji his Noh companion as well, after many years of friendship and doing modern theatre together. I realised once more how fortunate I had been in my own choice of teacher.