English Language Noh: Past, Present, Futures

Richard Emmert and Ashley Thorpe will join Alan Cummings to discuss the significance of English-language noh. They will explore its emergence in the 1970s, more recent projects, and possibilities for the future.

They will discuss the upcoming book Intercultural Japanese Noh Theatre: Texts and Analyses of English-language Noh, which is edited by Emmert and Thorpe, and will be published by Methuen in December 2024. They will talk about the textual, musical and performance-related relationships of English-language noh to the traditional repertory of noh, focusing on what makes this body of work distinctive from other kinds of intercultural work.

About the speakers

Richard Emmert is professor emeritus at Musashino University, Tokyo, where he taught classical noh and Japanese and Asian traditional performing arts. Born in Ohio (USA), he is a certified Kita school noh instructor and has led noh performance workshops worldwide. Founder of Theatre Nohgaku, he has composed noh music for numerous English noh productions for which he was awarded the Koizumi Prize for 2019. He recently composed music for a French noh and arranged music for a Spanish noh. He co-authored a series of seven noh performance guides and authored the six-volume The Guide to Noh of the National Noh Theatre, both for Tokyo’s National Noh Theatre.

Ashley Thorpe is Reader in the Department of Drama, Theatre & Dance at Royal Holloway University of London. He began studying noh in 1997 and has been taught by Kita School performers, Richard Emmert, Akira Matsui and Teruhisa Oshima. Theatre Nohgaku member and Director of the Noh Training Project UK which began in 2011, he has published twelve books, including the forthcoming Intercultural Japanese Noh Theatre: Texts & Analyses of English-Language Noh. He has also written his own English-language noh, Emily which premiered at Tara Arts, London in 2019, and has performed in international touring productions of the English-language noh Between the Stones (2019) and the French-language noh Medée (2023 & 2024).

Registration

This event free and open to the public. This discussion will be hybrid: in-person and online. If you would like to attend, please register using the link above.

This event is part of the 'From Tradition to Modernity: Understanding nohgaku from its establishment 650 years ago to contemporary times' series of events. The full programme of events can be found on the Between the Stones website.

Header image: Richard Emmert - Noh performance