Staging Noh Performance in Contemporary Opera: The Dance of the Shite in Toshio Hosokawa’s The Maiden from the Sea (2017)

Abstract:Toshio Hosokawa’s The Maiden from the Sea, based on the noh drama Futari Shizuka, is an innovative opera that culminates unusually in a voiceless performance of noh dance. Considering this moment from the dual perspective of contemporary authored music and traditional noh choreography, this article shows that, in the dance, the opera paradoxically distances itself from its noh source play while simultaneously approximating the multidisciplinarity of noh performance itself. I analyze the dance in filmed performances by Ryoko Aoki, the noh shite (principal actor) for whom the opera was written, to address the range of factors beyond music and choreography that are engaged in transposing the “total” art of noh performance into the “synthetic” context of opera performance.