Introduction

Japan’s vibrant scene of performing arts encompasses a profusion of participative and spectacular forms: festivals and courtly ceremonial, mainstream professional theatre and a variety of fringe performances, ancient genres along with cutting-edge experimental forms. They juxtapose, meld and merge native and imported elements, using materials from the past and present. It has often been called a living museum of performing arts that preserves classical forms but also material and immaterial traces of ancient continental genres no longer existent in their places of origin (masks, musical instruments, textiles, gestural patterns of religious ritual or courtly dance). Their well-documented histories reveal a deep entanglement with other cultural technologies and a rootedness in religion and ritual. Ancient and medieval performances absorbed apotropaic and propitiatory acts from a spectrum of religious beliefs, such as shintō 神道, Buddhism, in 陰 and yō 陽 (yin-yang), Daoist creeds and shamanistic practices: prayers for fertility and abundance, for the prolongation of life or for rain, dances meant to repel pestilence, ghost appeasing rites, memorials for the dead and other rituals.