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 ...
Tightly traditional noh drama is loosening up, with theater groups trying out tablet computers to help baffled audiences understand what's going on. The devices show the actors' lines and help to explain plot twists in real time. "Noh groups are trying to get more people interested ...
The overseers of Yamamoto NohGakudo, a theater built in the center of Osaka more than 90 years ago, are tapping into the interest of new followers of the traditional theatrical art to fill morning classes that were launched last November. On a Sunday morning in ...
Of Japan's many traditional performing arts, noh is the most refined — and among its most prominent figures today is 55-year-old Kiyokazu Kanze, the 26th head of its largest faction, the Kanze School. A descendant of the father and son pair Kan'ami and Zeami who ...
French comedian extraordinaire Guillaume Gallienne has a sizeable Japanese fan base, which gratifies him most heartily. "I feel like the Japanese get me and vice versa — and at one time, I thought I'd even make my home here," the 42-year-old performer/filmmaker said in excellent ...
Hanae Mori, a revered Japanese fashion designer with a career on world catwalks since the 1960s, showed her unflagging creativity when she designed costumes for a recent revival of the Japanese opera "Yuzuru." The opera, whose title translates as "Twilight Crane," was written by Junji ...
Noh is a performing art originally developed by and for the samurai class that has continued without a break for 700 years — a mighty span through which Umewaka Rokuro Gensho, as the 56th-generation head of the Rokuro Umewaka family, can trace his lineage. One ...
The title of this book is exquisite, while the cover illustration is of something else, different yet just as exquisite. This is appropriate because the aesthetic concept that the book considers is not just beautiful, but elusive and difficult to define. SNOW IN A SILVER ...
Most Japanese people come in contact with Buddhist priests on formal occasions, such as when a family member passes away. But a cross-denominational group of young Buddhist monks is trying to change that — by putting together a unique cultural event involving three Buddhist ...
May 15, 1939 Note: The writer of the following article, Ezra Loomis Pound, although not well-known in Japan, is one of the few foreigners who made enthusiastic introduction abroad of Japanese "Noh" plays and stands shoulder to shoulder with Ernest Fenollosa as a scholar devoted ...
