Throughout the 20 th century, jap noh drama used to be a huge inventive catalyst for American and ecu writers, dancers, and composers. The noh theater’s stylized choreography, poetic chant, astonishing costumes and mask, and engagement with background encouraged Western artists as they reimagined new methods to culture and shape. In Learning to Kneel, Carrie J. Preston locates noh’s impression on Pound’s imagism, Yeats’s Irish nationwide Theater, Brecht’s studying performs, Britten’s church parables, and Beckett’s spare dramaturgy. those artists discovered approximately noh from a global solid of collaborators, together with the Tokyo-born dancer and theater artist Ito Michio, who played with Pound in dance-poem recitals and in Yeats’s well-known noh edition, At the Hawk’s Well.

Preston’s paintings has been profoundly formed by means of her education in noh functionality strategy lower than a qualified actor in Tokyo, who taught her to kneel, bow, chant, and undergo the lessons of a conservative culture. After first and foremost assuming noh classes could consider humiliating, Preston discovered herself experiencing the price of and delight in submission to a professional instructor and coaching routine. This cross-cultural trade challenged her assumptions approximately potent instructing, fairly her developments to stress innovation and subversion and disregard the complicated levels of employer skilled by means of lecturers and scholars. It additionally encouraged new views concerning the generative dating among Western writers and eastern performers. Pound, Yeats, Brecht, and others are frequently criticized for his or her Orientalist traits and misappropriation of noh, yet Preston’s research and her personal trip replicate a extra nuanced knowing of cultural exchange.