W. B. Yeats's Noh-Inspired At the Hawk's Well Reimagined at Japan Society

On view October 14, 2016 through January 15, 2017, this ambitious new multimedia project reveals the ways in which Japanese traditional culture – particularly noh, Japan’s masked drama – has inspired new forms of creativity among the Western avant garde in the early 20th century and today.

[At the Hawk’s Well's original staging] was realized in collaboration with members of the international art community, many of whom had escaped the war-torn European continent. To commemorate the centennial of this landmark moment in the history of East-West cultural exchange, Starling re-imagines the scantily documented original production, with newly created masks, costumes and a dance on video juxtaposed with examples of classical Japanese art and masterpieces of Western Modernism that inspired the new works.

Find out more about this exhibition at Japan Society. There's a lot out there about the influence of early Japanese drama on Yeats. It came to him through pal Ezra Pound. Writes scholar Alison Armstrong: "Yeats’s discovery of Noh at this time helped to focus his poetic ideals. It was Pound, through the widow of Ernest Fenollosa, who was to get the most credit for introducing Yeats to the Noh at a critical time in his personal and writing life."

A great article about Yeats, his thinking on mask, and this period in theater history was published in February at Numéro Cinq. From Patrick J. Keane:

[Abbey Theatre collaborator and mask-expert Gordon Craig] sought a theater “purged of hideous realism,” and he and Yeats agreed that the Ibsen school of “realism” must be replaced by a theatre of masks if artists were to do justice to what Yeats called in this long-unpublished dialogue, the “battle [that] takes place in the depths of the soul.” It was a conviction realized in Yeats’s own mask-plays, combining Japanese Noh drama with the theatrical insights of Wilde and of Craig, who stage-designed Yeats’s Cuchulain play At the Hawk’s Well, featuring costumes and masks by Edmund Dulac. Launching his “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young” (1894), Wilde asserted that “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.”[14] He was being more than witty. Yeats agreed with Wilde and Craig, as with Nietzsche, that the purpose of artifice, specifically the wearing of a mask, was not merely to conceal, but to reveal deeper and immutable truths: gathering the audience, to adapt a famous phrase from “Sailing to Byzantium,” into “the artifice of eternity.”