CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Champaign-Urbana audiences will have the rare opportunity to experience the 600-year-old Japanese theater art called Noh when the Kashu-juku Noh Theater troupe from Kyoto, Japan, performs March 29 (Tuesday) at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, 500 S. Goodwin Ave., Urbana.
One of the first performing arts to be designated an “intangible heritage of humanity” by UNESCO, Noh plays incorporate music, dance, sumptuous brocade silk costumes and masterfully crafted masks to convey stories of relationships among humans and between humanity and the supernatural world. These intense, ritualistic plays are traditionally presented in tandem with comic skits called kyogen.
The Kashu-juku troupe is led by Katayama Shingo, a ninth generation Noh master in the Kanze school, Japan’s top school of Noh, and includes members of the Shigeyama family, the most celebrated kyogen lineage in the Kansai region.
David G. Goodman, a professor of Japanese literature at the University of Illinois, said the Noh performance will be a departure from the Japanese theater style local audiences know best.
“Audiences in Champaign-Urbana are fortunate to be familiar with Japanese kabuki theater, from productions directed by Shozo Sato, who was on the theater faculty here for many years,” Goodman said. “Noh is not like kabuki. It’s full of drama, but where kabuki acting tends to be exaggerated and the plays are action-packed, Noh is understated, minimalist and focused on evoking a sense of mysterious beauty.”
The evening will begin with a short, energetic dance excerpted from a
warrior-themed Noh play called “Yashima,” followed by “Boshibari”(literally “tied to a pole “), a classic kyogen play replete with wacky shenanigans.
“It’s about two servants left alone by their master with a keg of sake,” Goodman said. “In order to prevent them from drinking the sake, he ties them up, and the two servants have to find a way to get at the sake.”
After an intermission, the troupe will perform the Noh masterpiece “Aoi no Ue” (“Lady Aoi”), based on an episode from “The Tale of Genji,” one of Japan’s most revered works of literature and the world’s first psychological novel, written about AD 1010 by Lady Murasaki. The play involves spirit possession, exorcism and illness in a lethal struggle between Prince Genji’s current and former loves.
Translation of all dialogue will be projected on the stage in supertitles.
The performance is sponsored in part by the Illinois Japan Performing Arts Network, a three-year project funded by a grant from the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, which explores ways to use the Internet to facilitate artistic exchanges among Japanese and American artists, scholars, and audiences. IJPAN will webcast the theater performance as well as a workshop that will be held March 28 (Monday), in which members of the Noh troupe will explain the costumes, musical instruments, masks and acting conventions that are components of a Noh production.
Performers will travel to Champaign from New York, where they are currently featured in JapanNYC, a citywide arts festival organized by Carnegie Hall and directed by famed orchestral conductor Seiji Ozawa. The festival is proceeding as planned, despite the recent crisis in Japan. “All of us feel that it’s more appropriate than ever to be paying tribute to Japan and its culture at this time,” Clive Gillison, Carnegie’s artistic director, told the New York Times.
The North American tour of Kashu-juku Theater is organized and produced by Japan Society, New York, and is supported by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, government of Japan. The regional tour is made possible by a grant from Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Local patron underwriters are Misaho and Richard Berlin; patron co-sponsors are Masako and Wako Takayasu.
Tickets may be purchased online at KrannertCenter.com, or by phone at 217-333-6280 or in person at the Krannert Center ticket office from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays.
