Abstract
Drama is an effective tool to teach culture and language. It enhances cultural understanding, promotes cultural competency, and shows empathy to different cultures in the intercultural settings. In my paper, I focus on one of traditional Japanese performing arts noh and discuss the future of multicultural cooperation in globalized theatre. The training of noh helps us “learning new ways of speaking, gesturing, moving. Maybe even new way of thinking and feeling” (Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual.) In US universities noh is taught to expose students to non-Western culture in the field of arts and humanities. These past two decades, I was able to experiment with directing adaptations of traditional Japanese performing arts in the classroom. Recently I had a stunning experience of seeing noh and hula kahiko fusion performance composition by my former student at University of Hawaii at Hilo. Keli’i Kalaukoa Masao Grothmann has developed a collaboration work with his mentor and noh master of the Hosho School Sano Noboru. Grothmann has tied my experiment as educator with his artistic career as kumu hula currently active in Tokyo. My paper also investigates Sano’s multicultural and transcultural experiments as noh teacher traveling all over Japan to teach noh to K-12 children and as performer breaking barriers of dance genres with the hip-hop dancer SAM. I examine how training combines the body of the tradition and the future of globalized theatre as a human experience utilizing universalities of the language of theatre across cultures beyond time and space.
Presenters
Yoshiko FukushimaProfessor, Languages, Humanities, CAS, University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hawaii, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2025 Special Focus—Oceanic Journeys: Multicultural Approaches in the Humanities
KEYWORDS
Noh Theatre, Intercultural Theatre, Multiculturalism, Theatre Anthropology, Hula Kahiko
