Master on Stage: Reflections on “A Perfect Actor: Zeami’s Treaties on the Art of Noh”

Aneta Pierzchała

Abstract

Pierzchała comments on a Warsaw performance of Ko Murobushi, the Japanese dancer-actor of Butoh, the expressive avantgarde dance with strong ties with shamanism and Noh theatre. Murobushi, drawing upon Buddhist reflections on being, says that we are dying and coming back to life every day. Zeami, the 15^th century actor and theorist of the Japanese Noh theatre, said that we were constantly at the beginning of the road. Art, including the art of acting in the Oriental tradition, is a kind of an unending road, incessant inner work. What matters is discipline, spontaneity, precision and accident. Zeami’s writings reveal an entirely different understanding of actor’s functions from what we have been accustomed to in Western theatre and movies. Paradoxically, the Japanese actor is required both to get rid of one’s “self”, listen carefully to himself and be sensitive to inner truth. Creating meanings is not what matters. Master neither needs meanings nor wants them, master moves in the potential space of what is possible.