Dance, music, poetry, costumes, and masks combine in the noh theatre to create a performance which can be aesthetically impressive and emotionally profound. How is this art nurtured? What enables the beauty of noh to flower on the stage in a particular performance? What motivates the actors to devote their lives to nourishing a traditional art form? Are there new species of noh growing out of the old? And finally can noh, or aspects of noh be successfully transplanted to a climate as unfamiliar as that of the modern Western world? These are the questions we explore here.

Noh is today practiced in Japan by several hundred highly trained professionals, both actors and musicians. As a traditional performance system passed down in an unbroken line from generation to generation of practitioners since the fourteenth century, every aspect – text, melody, instrumentation, choreography, and costuming – has become codified. The current repertory is essentially the same as that performed in the sixteenth century, and today's performers are responsible for mastering its two hundred plays.

The phenomenal memorization that this mastery implies is aided by the structure of noh, for it is an art based on the manipulation of fixed modules of performance combined according to underlying principles. Although the basic vocabulary is limited, the variations are endless, so that each play, indeed each performance of a given play, offers fresh vision, new insights. The underlying rules may never be explicitly stated or taught, but they are subconsciously internalized during the course of training.