Noh theater Quotes

“I long ago developed a very practical smile, which I call my "Noh smile" because it resembles a Noh mask whose features are frozen. Its advantage is that men can interpret it however they want; you can imagine how often I've relied on it.”

“I long ago developed a very practical smile, which I call my "Noh smile" because it resembles a Noh mask whose features are frozen. Its advantage is that men can interpret it however they want; you can imagine how often I've relied on it.”

“A lot of my stories are inspired by Japanese folklore or literature or movies: I've done stories based on Kabuki and Noh plays, and on Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' movies.”

“If formality and courtesy take over the feelings . . . how silly and meaningless these things could become. And despite all this, I still take part in it!”

“We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.”

“I have a lot of respect for the musical theater plays.”

“If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that.But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.”

“I was there when the quote-unquote golden age of musical theater was flourishing. I met everybody who worked in theater or was famous in theater from the '40s on.”

“The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.”

“When I was doing theater, I was very successful at believing that I was great, God's gift to the theater.”

“Theater cannot include only people. What acts on stage is matter.”