Embodied Performance: Warriors, Dancers, and the Origins of Noh Theater

In this groundbreaking book, Matsuoka Shinpei--a leading scholar of noh theater--provides a detailed account of the birth of one of Japan’s most celebrated art forms. Although noh has often been associated with the elite, Embodied Performance explores its links to a wider popular culture, revealing a rich and colorful public space where courtiers and commoners mingled.

Matsuoka traces noh’s connections to popular and religious dances, linked verse, and chigo (beautiful temple boy) culture, emphasizing performance and the body. He describes the world of noh playwright Zeami as well as his views on dramaturgy and performance--and argues that Zeami was once a chigo. Matsuoka shows how religious rituals and cultural forms like ecstatic dance prayer and plays about demons in hell attracted people on the margins. Such activities, Matsuoka contends, drew on the tension between wild acrobatic movement and corporeal restraint, influencing the development of noh as well as the art of flower arranging and the tea ceremony. Janet Goff’s translation makes available in English a classic work of Japanese scholarship that will be invaluable to those interested in medieval Japanese culture, noh, and theatrical practice.

Matsuoka Shinpei is professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He has published numerous works on medieval Japanese literature and culture.

Janet Goff (1946-2022) was a scholar and devotee of noh and the author of Noh Drama and The Tale of the Genji: The Art of Allusion in Fifteen Classical Plays (1991).

Haruo Shirane is Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University.