Satoshi Miyagi - Mugen Noh Othello

For over thirty years, Satoshi Miyagi—a student and heir to the Japanese theatre master Tadashi Suzuki—has engaged with the cornerstones of the Western stage tradition, from Greek tragedy to Shakespearean drama, refracting them through the lens of Japanese theatre and allowing them to resonate in new ways. Thus Mugen Noh Othello reinvents William Shakespeare through the ritual form of Mugen Noh.

One of the various forms of Noh theatre, dating back to the thirteenth century, Mugen Noh conceives the theatrical work as the re-creation of a dream or an illusion within a unified horizon in which the living and the dead coexist. Miyagi thus transforms the tragedy of the Moor of Venice into a rêverie performed by the ghost of Desdemona, who relives the original cause of her suffering and shifts the axis of the tragedy. This reinvention sets in tension the distance between bodies and voices, between gesture and narration, assigning each character to a double performer.