Noh is the ancient form of Japanese theater, which was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2008. It is respected but considered exotic by Europeans and even some Japanese.
When Noh theater comes to the Athenaeum, it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so I couldn’t miss the moment. From the first few seconds I was happy to be there and happy to see that the Theater with a capital T lives on!
Theater with a capital T lives! It lives in Osaka, and it is called Yamamoto Noh Theater.
This is what I was able to see last night in a performance that resonated, mirrored and changed realities. It purified emotions, shivered and washed human beings with sound.
When people generally talk in Western cultured environments about Noh theater, we hear about masks, slow gestures, ritual, subtle forms of elitism. But these are only the guardians who stand at the gate of the Law waiting to be understood.
Last night I „saw” something else with my whole body. I saw how in Noh theater the main actor and the main character is time. Which is measured in leaps, from seconds to centuries. It is the internal time of the human being, it is the time of the gods, it is time in the true sense of the word.
In Noh theater, time is the unseen actor, figured at the intersection between the actors’ voices, the actors’ movement, and the ancient choir of musicians.
The music in Noh theater shakes and changes realities, the drums and whistles give you chills. They describe time, but more than that, they engage you physically.
In recent years, the art of sound healing appeared in our country, as a millennial tradition (sound healing certainly appeared everywhere where people could notice the effects of echo – most of these traditions, however, have disappeared along the way).
In our country, in the Western space and ethos, that is, the tradition of sound healing has been revitalized in the last hundred years via the Orient (India, tantra).
The sounds in Noh work on the same principle of the influence of vibrations on the resonating body. However, Noh theater does not aim at what we would call healing, but rather something close to what the founders of this form of theater (Zen Buddhists) called enlightenment.
This is because Noh is neither entertainment nor medicine, but metaphysics and spirituality. Noh does not dwell on human issues but always goes beyond – this is just one of the purposes of the mask in Noh.
The concern for sound is of great importance in Noh theater – in Osaka, in the hall of the Yamamoto Theater, the central wooden stage stands on 12 wooden legs buried in 12 tall metal bowls that provide the necessary echo – in short, it stands on 12 circular 3D gongs.
While time is marked by landmarks through the sounds of Noh – produced by the instruments, but also by the voices that tell the story – sung in a way that is strikingly similar to the psalmody in the Orthodox church – time is drawn on the stage through the actors’ dance.
The „dance” I am referring to includes their entire way of moving, from movement to gestures with their arms, hands and fans. In last night’s plays, it became visible how the passage – perceptible only as a glimmer – from one side of the fan to the other changes worlds. Before our eyes, the actor’s fan acted like a mirror that separates one reality from another, one realm from another.
Noh costumes are made to be „danced” and their volumetric structure, their folding, exposed through the actors’ movements, suddenly makes visible another reality, hidden in the folds of the first. Remember origami?
In Noh you actually see how ideas come to life, with an unparalleled clarity and finesse.
In this way, I was able to watch two performances without understanding Japanese, without seeing the subtitles and especially without caring in the slightest about it and without having the feeling that I was missing out on something. The essence of this theater is transformation and I felt that happening, with my whole being.
In one way or another, every single one of the spectators in the packed Romanian Athenaeum Hall felt this – from there, from the back, I could observe with peripheral attention the phones freezing while they were filming. Practically no one moved, watching a narrative of which some rationally understood about 10%, others not at all. Nevertheless, the narrative was alive and we all participated in it.
An effect that I have only encountered before on the evening when my vision of theater changed radically: the evening in 1990 when I saw Ancient Tragedy staged by Andrei Șerban at the National Theater in Bucharest. Then, as now, I had the exciting feeling that Theater is alive!
Now, the demonstration of this fact also came from the composition of the performance, which included a classic piece from the Noh repertoire, ‘Tsunemasa’ (act 2), and a very contemporary one, ‘Jiai – Journey of a Soul’, written by Yamamoto Norishige himself and performed in the same way, with the same power to deeply impress.
The integrated innovation – the intervention of the soprano who sang in Italian with the grace of a water spirit – left the audience speechless and definitely impressed. I say „impressed” because it is the term closest to the impact that this performance had.
However, this impact goes beyond the level of affective impression and goes deep into the body, to the level where we are dealing with fine quantum changes of reality. A kind of enlightenment exercises or Zen exercises – although, if they are formulated like that, our Western mind has already ceased to perceive them as such.
I went out into the foyer, where costumes, accessories and images from Japanese theater from the George Banu collection were exhibited. An unspeakable beauty.
Seen after the show, the exhibition draws your attention to the fact that Noh is the art of embracing time and transformation, an art incarnated in the very being of the artist who will wear this unfolded kimono and will infinitesimally move this gold-plated fan like a mirror. The kimono and the fan are only righteous guardians of his art.
I therefore honor the devotion of those who have preserved, transmitted and enriched this art, from the depths of time to us.
Gratitude for the accomplished artists of the Yamamoto Noh Theater in Osaka!
Learn more about this performance on June 30, 2025 here: https://agerpres.ro/cultura-media/2025/06/04/teatru-noh-la-ateneul-roman-pe-30-iunie–1456131
Learn more about the Yamamoto Noh Theater in Osaka on its website: https://www.noh-theater.com/
Pentru varianta română a articolului click aici: https://palindrom.eu/in-teatrul-noh-personajul-principal-este-timpul/
