I’m a proponent of the idea that all art was originally associated with the sacred. Either it 1) chases away ghosts or 2) connects the artist to the ghost world (or both). Chinese opera (Nuo) and traditional Japanese opera (Noh) channeled and directed the gods to exorcise people and locations via possession and exorcism. A possessed performer is intimately tied to the spirit. In fact, it exercises a monopoly on the actor. There is only one Guan Yu, and only one human proxy.
I’m also a proponent of the idea that this hasn’t changed. Not much, anyway.
Nuo and Noh sound similar, but their characters are different. Nuo / 儺 is basically “exorcism”, while Noh / 能 is etymologically connected to “bear”. Among the native Japanese Ainu, bear worship was a huge thing. The Ainu would regularly catch and tie up a wild bear cub in the village square, treat it well, then pray that its spirit would tell the other bear-spirits not to kill them. They’d then shoot it with arrows, sending its spirit off to deliver the message. Despite a lack of etymological connection between Nuo and Noh, they function the same: protection against evil spirits in the community.
By contrast, Kabuki theater was born out of a very scientific era, the Shogunate. This was a time when the raw power of steel and manufacturing proved more powerful than the holy Emperor himself. Kabuki’s scientific foundation lent to satire and humanism, even feminism (its founder was a woman named Izumo no Okuni). The Noh masks came off; movements became simple and surgical.
Kabuki then birthed the chambara action style, which was minimalistic to the extreme. Chambara then birthed the Japan Action Club (JAC) whose early pioneers were Sonny Chiba, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Yasuaki Kurata. Kurata-san split from JAC after his success in Hong Kong, creating Kurata Promotion, which gave us Koichi Sakamoto, Kenji Tanigaki, and Kensuke Sonomura, who maintain the humanistic, scientific style of Kabuki to this day with The Furious.
Noh theater didn’t disappear from Japanese culture. “Mask” dramas continue today in wrestling, Kaiju, and Toku/Sentai. Toku movements are more shapely; their characters are more archetypal; the effects more fantastic. It’s why we still have Ultraman, Japan Wrestling, and Kamen Rider.
Motion capture has inherited the tradition of Noh. I’ve come across more than one motion capture performer who’s performed gameplay mocap for Japanese games, logging hundreds of hours of stunts, navigation, and combat to bring the playable version of a character to life. However, the Japanese company will forbid the stunt performer from claiming they worked on that character. Meanwhile, the voiceover actor, who might have logged some performance capture (p-cap) days, but did hardly any stunts, is encouraged to promote their ownership of the character. And this isn’t just a Noh phenomenon, where only one actor can claim possession by a character; it might just be a general phenomenon in mocap. I’ve found it in some American mocap too. I do lots of gameplay capture for many game characters, and yet p-cap actors’ contracts are starting to stipulate they “own” a character, and the stunt performers are now sometimes prohibited from showing ourselves doing stunts as those characters.
I find it fascinating that, even in the west, our entertainment IP and contract laws still show vestiges of spirit possession customs.
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