40 Years of Traditional Theater Training in Kyoto

Abstract

Who teaches strenuously in the height of the summer? Who would be mad enough to endure six steamy weeks in July and August of intensive practice of classical dance and theatre forms all towards a recital on an outdoor stage in the furnace of Kyoto’s summer? Teachers asked this question when Rebecca Ogamo Teele and I first floated the idea of Traditional Theatre Training (T.T.T.) in the summer of 1983. Previously, we had been contacted occasionally by professors and artists misguidedly asking to be introduced to nō and kyōgen teachers for a few weeks of one-on-one lessons, so that they could videotape and “master” the forms on their own. Arts in Japan are traditionally taught in a master-disciple transmission process that is intense, intimate, and long-term, an osmosis that only occurs one-on-one. Rebecca and I discussed how we could best replicate this intensive experience during the short vacation times when foreign scholars and artists could join, and teachers were relatively free.