Dear Robert Kibler

What a fabulous project. I hope you get the funding and if you do, that you
will document the performance in film and in writing (and put it on the
web).

It is a good idea to look at film documentation of Noh drama but at the same
time it should be kept in mind that the practical performance source for the
Yeats and Pound 'Noh' drama was modern dance.

Michio Ito, who choreographed and danced Hawkwoman in the first production
of At the Hawk's Well, added elements from Noh drama to his performance (I
think he culled that mostly from the British Library) but his practical
training and mainstay was in the eurythmic dance. (See Helen Caldwell:
Michio Ito: The Dancer and His Dances, U of California Press, 1977). I
imagine that eurythmic dance would have determined the syntax of the
movement, rather than Noh. And other performance elements too derive
recognisably from an early twentieth-century dance avant-garde. In the
transformation scene in At the Hawk's Well, the cloak of the old woman
unfurls into the huge wings of Hawkwoman: the inside lengths of cloth were
painted with a feather motif and extended with long sticks. This must have
been inspired by the technology of Loie Fuller's famous dances.

Ninette de Valois choreographed Yeats's dance dramas for the Abbey Theatre
in the early 30s. These performances too were based on modern dance
principles. Ninette de Valois (ballerina with the Ballets Russes not that
Yeats cared for ballerinas) would have acquired modern dance techniques
through Marie Rambert, who also was trained at the Eurythmic School and
assisted Nijinsky with his choreography of Sacre du Printemps.

As for Pound: the dancers he admired were trained in the Margaret Morris
School of Dance (see, Others, 1915 and all those Vorticist representations
of dancers which were inspired by Margaret Morris dance geometric movement).
M.M. dance was based on the principles of  'Hellenic dance'  taught to M.M.
by Raymond Duncan (brother of Isadora) in Chelsea in 1909. The 1929-1930
British premiere of "Hagoromo" (music Edmund Rubbra) was produced by Eleanor
Elder and Blanche Ostrahan for the Arts League of Service. Both were trained
in Margaret Morris dance. (See: Eleanor Elder, Travelling Players, London,
1939). Kathleen Dillon, also a Margaret Morris trained dancer and a member
of the Arts League of Service, designed the costumes and sets for Ninette de
Valois at the Abbey Theatre. The historical performance practice of the
Yeats/Pound 'Noh' plays at the time comes out of this modern dance milieu,
not film as an documentary source on Noh (which does not mean there would
have been no instruction in Noh performance but find me those sources and I
will pay you a compliment)....

The Margaret Morris School of Dance had a consistent form of dance notation
already as early as the 1910s, so it is not impossible that specific
notations for dance-dramas are extant. And that dance form is still taught
(if you want to learn M.M. dance go to the Waterloo Action Centre, by
Waterloo Station, London, at 7 pm on Fridays) just as, I suppose, you could
get very good Noh drama teachers today....

But is it the right approach?

I saw, this summer at Covent Garden, a painstaking reconstruction of
Nijinsky's 1913 "Jeux" by Kenneth Archer and Millicent Hodson, and
interesting though it was to the academic eye (the eurythmic syntax) and
justified to the caring eye (so properly historic), I am afraid that to the
eye that has seen Glen Tetley & Pina Bausch it was just, well, very academic
and proper.

It seems more interesting & even more truly spirited, then, to get people
who have done dance training (as in Mark Morris rather than Margaret Morris)
and to show them some HongKong John Woo movies (or whatever film reveals to
you (as those do to me) a new spatial tactic, rather than the filmed 1939
Noh drama which Pound might have seen (though those may do to you)  and then
get them to work on the Pound. For grant-writing this is not very useful
'idea', but it does reflect how I would like to imagine the impetus of the
performances of these texts: a performance to foreground locatable things to
think about in down-to-the-point-of-it current movement (in the edited
camera-work or trained bodies of now), and that through the text that is
derived and dislocated and static (a strange quite-past convention).

Something like that. In any case a registration of it would be interesting
to see, and good luck with it,

Karlien van den Beukel.