A Noh Way of Seeing Things

Watching the stage production of “Aio Nu Ue”, a couple of warring thoughts crossed my mind. “Wow,” was one of them. “Are the people who made the captions (with their use of frenzied and other action verbs) watching the same show I am?,” was another. I’m embarrassed to admit that at one point I even contemplated reenacting the final eye-poking scenes of “Equus” in an effort to end the experience. After we were done watching the film, other people voiced these thoughts and others thoughts. I particularly appreciated Conrad’s comment that watching the film was just such a foreign experience for us as Americans, as Westerners, to fully grasp or comprehend.

That thought stuck with me because of its truth. How do we grapple with material foreign to us on a number of different levels? The script is translated for us into a more familiar language but what about the complexities of the movements, a means of communication that is just as foreign as the language? How do we learn to overcome this barrier of foreignness in order to study and analyze works like that of the Noh style?

The easy and lazy answer would be that we don’t overcome this barrier and that we either don’t bother to challenge ourselves at all or we simply read and watch it, struggle for a few minutes, and then move on. This, of course, is a real disservice both to non-Western cultures, who have much to offer, and to ourselves, who can only benefit from an expanded worldview. So how then can we work to make something like Noh theater more familiar?
Three ideas present themselves with varying degrees of complexity. The first is that we can just keep forcing ourselves to encounter Noh and hope that repetition will negate foreignness. I’m not sure that this is a very good idea or even one that will work. The second idea is to expand upon what Christine wrote about in her letter, to bring some familiar elements into an otherwise foreign land. I liked the idea of her Scream mask and other Western-friendly elements that provided some accessibility to “Aoi Nu Ue.” This removes some of the foreignness but it also establishes the West as the only means of interpretation, in a way suggesting that the West is the only lens that through which the East can be observed. This isn’t what Christine meant by her letter but it is a problem that arises if this is the only means of approaching Eastern theater.

This leads me to my last idea of approaching Noh (or any Eastern) theater. Instead of using the Western lens to study the East, I wonder what would happen if one studied the West through an Eastern lens. Obviously, people unfamiliar with the West would take such an approach but I wonder about the ramifications of a Westerner purposefully looking at their own literature but through an Eastern gaze. For example, Akira Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood” is an excellent retelling of “MacBeth” but with distinct Noh influences. Watching that film enriched my experience of Shakespeare in a way that was unanticipated but greatly appreciated. I wonder what would happen if we approached other great American classics from the same way? I don’t mean simply seeing similarities between West and East work, like the blogs on “Meadea” and “Aio Nu Ue,” although I think their comments were extremely insightful and helpful to my understanding. Instead, I mean taking, for example, “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” and infusing it with the specific and intense gestures of Noh. Loomis would step in a slow and methodical rhythm, using specific stylized gestures to indicate his mood instead of acting in a more natural method. “Pygmalion” might feature masks for certain characters to indicate their stock nature.

It might not work. It might be disastrous, but I think it’s worth the try. Instead of seeing how Aristotle applies to “Aoi Nu Ue,” maybe we should see how Zeami’s treatises apply to “Cloud 9.”