Knowledge of Japanese traditional theatre outside Japan took many forms: from travel accounts by visitors, tours abroad, translations, and lecture-demonstrations (see Chapter 21, p. 463). For nearly a century, intensive, custom-made training programs by Japanese masters have existed, flourishing today in domestic and international courses and collaborations.

Fascination, imitation, acquisition, adaptation

As with so much else in twentieth-century intercultural performance, such experimental experiential learning began with Denishawn, the dance company of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. While on an extended tour of Asia in 1925 with a fifty-person troupe, they were particularly fascinated with kabuki, taking personal lessons from star actor Matsumoto Kōshirō VII (1870–1949) and his Fujima dance school. While in Tokyo, members trained four hours a day for thirty-six days at Imperial Theatre rehearsal rooms or rooftop, accompanied by shamisen. Film excerpts of young Denishawn dancers show a high-spirited but serious group absorbing the choreography of Momijigari (A maple-leaf viewing party).

While recognizing the value of their experiences, the two company heads deviated on how best to appropriate the acquired techniques. Shawn, who had succeeded with his pseudo-Japanese Spear Dance (1919), learned how to apply authentic kabuki makeup, then purchased a wig, fans, and expensive costumes. He performed both Princess and Demon roles in a condensed version of Momijigari on Denishawn's triumphal return tour 1926–7 throughout the USA; however, it was not revived.

St. Denis had long been fascinated by Japan, studying dance with a “former geisha” in Los Angeles for six weeks prior to her acclaimed 1913 O-Mika. This employed remarkably authentic backdrops and costume; photographs displaying a stillness and frenzy perhaps influenced by Sadayakko, whom St. Denis had seen at Loie Fuller's Exposition in Paris. When actually visiting Japan, however, she contented herself merely observing; a promotional film catching her posing in kimono holding a shamisen. Like Shawn, she respected the forms and spirit she witnessed: “If you will master to any degree the Japanese art of dance, anything else you do will be better done. For … I know nothing, not even the ballet at its strictest, which can exceed the precision and discipline of Japanese technique,” which, if mastered, “everything else you do will be better done.”