Compagnie Kanze Motoaki

Most of the NÔ interpreted today were composed by Kan’ami (end of the 14th century) and especially by his son Zeami, at the beginning of the 15th century, at the time of the Kyoto Shôguns. “An original and special form to Japanese literature, moreover, the first manifestation of dramatic art, a summary and in some way a synthesis of the arts of an already long past, such are the aspects in which the NÔ presents itself. It resuscitates before us, in a striking form and which his lyricism makes still more powerful, the feelings, the thoughts, the beliefs, the superstitions, the aspirations, all the intellectual and moral life of these tumultuous and restless generations, he makes act before our eyes their gods, their lords, their religious, their miracle workers, their warriors, their heroines and even their ghosts; above all, he shows us marvelously the deep imprint with which Buddhism had marked the men of this time, the poetry that he knew to draw for them from the spectacle of Nature, and how it clothed with it the instability of things and the universal impermanence.”

Source : Noël Péri – Cinq Nô, Festival d’Automne à Paris