Noh Fun

This weekend we got clued into another small part of traditional Japanese culture - Noh Theatre. Upside, it was free. Downside, boring is kind of an understatement. Imagine samurai culture mixed with opera (sans high C notes) as performed by your local theatre over-actors and you are pretty close to experiencing the real thing. You think it'd be hard to go wrong with spider-demons & sword fights, but it still managed to be pretty dull. More interesting to me were the drums they had as musical accompaniment. (In the photo, the gent in black is holding one of them.) They were beautiful and intricately designed, but basically made the sound of someone knocking on a plank of wood. I'm curious how these instruments have survived so long.

The upside of the theatre experience was that the Noh performance was preceded by another play in the equally ancient style of Kyogen, which is more comedic and definitely more interesting. It's nice to know that the slapstick we see on TV here is actually rooted in hundreds (thousands?) of years of tradition. I won't forget "ITAI!" is the word for "Ouch!" any time soon.

-Mike