From their beginnings, Japanese performing arts are all about humanising the intangible world of the gods. The hardly accessible vastness of the Japanese mountains provides plentiful sources of religious imagination.
Sublimity of movement –minute control of subtleties that in their abrupt finiteness express more than what showing the whole could– is the essence of Noh. The Noh performer’s play of precision is driven by perfected emptiness.
The Izu Centre of traditional Performing Arts is more than a stage: It is an interface between two worlds. Rather than an enclosure, the ICPA is an intermediary between village and mountain, past and future. Stage and acoustic perfection are replaced by the immediacy intrinsic to the origins of the Japanese performing arts: Nature and the gods within it.