As an actor in New York in the 1990’s, I was involved in the downtown scene where narratives were being discarded for more atmospheric expressions of performance. My heroes were the directors Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, and Julie Taymor, as well as the performance collectives like The Wooster Group or Mabou Mines among others. It was all very experimental and often full of irony. Then in 1994, I saw noh live for the first time at the Japan Society in New York. I was stunned. Beyond the minimalist controlled movement and the incomprehensible sounds emanating from the performers, there was a precision and attention to detail that was beyond anything I’d experienced before. This was not the work of “actors” slavishly following the demands of an outside director (a common occurrence in downtown NY theater at that time) This was deeper than that. It was a commitment to form, to succumbing to hundreds of years of tradition, to finding ways of expressing more by showing less and it was sincere.

“Less is more” is a dictum that is often espoused in the world of art. I come from America, a land where the band the Grateful Dead made popular the expression, “too much of everything is just enough.” It’s a country that grew and thrived through the use of excess. When I moved to Japan 25 years ago to study noh, I was sure I’d learn about a few acting techniques and then bring them back to New York and incorporate them into the work I was exploring.

However, the more I studied noh, the more I realized that there was no way to really extract particular techniques from it to bring back, it was too enmeshed in the world it was a part of. If I brought anything back with me, it would have to be “all of it,” and that would be impossible. To perform a noh it takes a village.