The Kanze Noh Theater reopened in April in Ginza Six, a new upscale shopping complex in central Tokyo that seeks to attract domestic and foreign audiences to a wide range of the country's traditional performing arts.
With this in mind, the complex's owners reached out to producer Koji Orita, a senior adviser to the National Theatre of Japan who subsequently devised a project titled "Ginza Hanakagami" for the theater.
"Ginza Hanakagami is an initiative with which to view the history of Japan through Japanese performing arts at a noh theater," Orita explains. "All Japanese performing arts typically require their own dedicated spaces, and so dedicated theaters were created for noh, kabuki and bunraku. In this project, however, we want to break down such barriers."