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Zeami: Performance Notes
Zeami (1363-1443), Japan's most celebrated actor and playwright, composed more than thirty of the finest plays of no drama. He also wrote a variety of texts on theater and performance that have, until now, been only partially available in English.
Performance Notes presents the full range of Zeami's critical thought on this subject, which focused on the aesthetic values of no and its antecedents, the techniques of playwriting, the place of allusion, the training of actors, the importance of patronage, and the relationship between performance and broader intellectual and critical concerns. Spanning over four decades, the texts reflect the essence of Zeami's instruction under his famous father, the actor Kannami, and the value of his long and challenging career in medieval Japanese theater.
Tom Hare, who has conducted extensive studies of no academically and on stage, begins with a comprehensive introduction that discusses Zeami's critical importance in Japanese culture. He then incorporates essays on the performance of no in medieval Japan and the remarkable story of the transmission and reproduction of Zeami's manuscripts over the past six centuries. His eloquent translation is fully annotated and includes Zeami's diverse and exquisite anthology of dramatic songs, Five Sorts of Singing , presented both in English and in the original Japanese.
Performance Notes presents the full range of Zeami's critical thought on this subject, which focused on the aesthetic values of no and its antecedents, the techniques of playwriting, the place of allusion, the training of actors, the importance of patronage, and the relationship between performance and broader intellectual and critical concerns. Spanning over four decades, the texts reflect the essence of Zeami's instruction under his famous father, the actor Kannami, and the value of his long and challenging career in medieval Japanese theater.
Tom Hare, who has conducted extensive studies of no academically and on stage, begins with a comprehensive introduction that discusses Zeami's critical importance in Japanese culture. He then incorporates essays on the performance of no in medieval Japan and the remarkable story of the transmission and reproduction of Zeami's manuscripts over the past six centuries. His eloquent translation is fully annotated and includes Zeami's diverse and exquisite anthology of dramatic songs, Five Sorts of Singing , presented both in English and in the original Japanese.
528 pages, Hardcover
First published March 21, 2008
24 people want to read
About the author
Zeami
119 books12 followersKanze Zeami (1364-1444), also called Zeami Motokiyo, was a Japanese actor, playwright, and critic. His theoretical works on the art of the No are as justly celebrated as his dramas.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
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May 18, 2023A helpful guide to learning the aesthetics of noh but I was still out of my depth with this.
February 17, 2016
A loose agglomeration of thoughts...
The texts, which are fractallic (fractalacious? fractacious? fractallifiscent?) in themselves, are entombed here in spiraling layers of endnotes, footnotes, and confreres. It takes a great deal of effort to unpack it all, and there are some redundancies in the footnotage. That said, the result is an unparalleled trust in the captain of this particular ship. Tom Hare is a Genius. There's quite clearly no-one on planet earth that could have done his job here better.
This book does not stand alone as a guide to noh. It doesn't really illuminate what is happening textually, and what it describes in terms of stage action is either too philosophical and abstract, or so vanishingly narrow and technical that the meaning of the terms used have been lost.
This book goes great with Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Seiobo There Below, however, for learning about noh. Watch a noh play—any play. Read 'Pick Up a Jewel and Take the Flower in Hand' from PF. Then read the first chapter of Seiobo. For me, at least, it all became clear, then...
But, no, really, this isn't a guide to noh. In fact, modern masters of noh warn against taking the book too seriously—mostly for performers themselves, but viewers, too (http://www.the-noh.com/en/people/acto...). These manuscripts only came to light in the 20th century, and by then all this stuff had been baked into the master-pupil transmission technique of the Japanese traditional arts. These attempts to codify the artform in text strain a little bit. The reason Zeami kept them so secret was probably to keep his thoughts out of his enemy's hands, yes, but it also might have been because he sensed that these notes didn't measure up to the reality of noh.
No, this book is one thing: a fascinating window into the mind of a Genius hoisting an entire artform upon his back. His brain was the supercollider in which the art of the court tradition and the art of the volkstimmemet head on; these Notes are the charmarks left on the inside of his brain in its effort to contain the resultant explosion.
**
For anyone who's ever wondered about just how brambly medieval Pseudo-Chinese Japanese is without being able to read either languages (anyone...?), the appendix on Zeami's language in this manuscript is probably as good as it gets.
**
tbc...
The texts, which are fractallic (fractalacious? fractacious? fractallifiscent?) in themselves, are entombed here in spiraling layers of endnotes, footnotes, and confreres. It takes a great deal of effort to unpack it all, and there are some redundancies in the footnotage. That said, the result is an unparalleled trust in the captain of this particular ship. Tom Hare is a Genius. There's quite clearly no-one on planet earth that could have done his job here better.
This book does not stand alone as a guide to noh. It doesn't really illuminate what is happening textually, and what it describes in terms of stage action is either too philosophical and abstract, or so vanishingly narrow and technical that the meaning of the terms used have been lost.
This book goes great with Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Seiobo There Below, however, for learning about noh. Watch a noh play—any play. Read 'Pick Up a Jewel and Take the Flower in Hand' from PF. Then read the first chapter of Seiobo. For me, at least, it all became clear, then...
But, no, really, this isn't a guide to noh. In fact, modern masters of noh warn against taking the book too seriously—mostly for performers themselves, but viewers, too (http://www.the-noh.com/en/people/acto...). These manuscripts only came to light in the 20th century, and by then all this stuff had been baked into the master-pupil transmission technique of the Japanese traditional arts. These attempts to codify the artform in text strain a little bit. The reason Zeami kept them so secret was probably to keep his thoughts out of his enemy's hands, yes, but it also might have been because he sensed that these notes didn't measure up to the reality of noh.
No, this book is one thing: a fascinating window into the mind of a Genius hoisting an entire artform upon his back. His brain was the supercollider in which the art of the court tradition and the art of the volkstimmemet head on; these Notes are the charmarks left on the inside of his brain in its effort to contain the resultant explosion.
**
For anyone who's ever wondered about just how brambly medieval Pseudo-Chinese Japanese is without being able to read either languages (anyone...?), the appendix on Zeami's language in this manuscript is probably as good as it gets.
**
tbc...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews