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Costumes
The garb worn by actors is typically adorned quite richly and seeped in symbolic
meaning for the type of role (e.g. thunder gods will have hexagons on their
clothes while serpents have triangles to convey scales). Costumes for the shite
in particular are extravagant, shimmering silk brocades, but are progressively
less sumptuous for the tsure, the wakizure, and the aikyōgen.
The musicians and chorus typically wear formal montsuki kimono (black and
adorned with five family crests) accompanied by either hakama (a skirt-like
garment) or kami-shimo, a combination of hakama and a waist-coat with
exaggerated shoulders (see illustrations). Finally, the stage attendants are
garbed in virtually unadorned black garments, much in the same way as stagehands
in contemporary Western theater.
Masks
The masks in Noh (能面 nō-men or 面 omote, feature) all have names.
Usually only the shite, the main actor, wears a mask. However, in some cases,
the tsure may also wear a mask, particularly for female roles. The Noh masks
portray female or nonhuman (divine, demonic, or animal) characters. There are
also Noh masks to represent youngsters or old men. On the other hand, a Noh
actor who wears no mask plays a role of an adult man in his twenties, thirties,
or forties. The side player, the waki, wears no mask either.
Several types of masks, in particular those for female roles, are designed so
that slight adjustments in the position of the head can express a number
emotions such as fear or sadness due to the variance in lighting and the angle
shown towards the audience. With some of the more extravagant masks for deities
and monsters, however, it is not always possible to convey emotion. Usually,
however, these characters are not frequently called to change emotional
expression during the course of the scene, or show emotion through larger body
language.
The rarest and most valuable Noh masks are not held in museums even in Japan,
but rather in the private collections of the various heads of Noh schools; these
treasures are usually only shown to a select few and only taken out for
performance on the rarest occasions. This does no substantial harm to the study
and appreciation of Noh masks, as tradition has established a few hundred
standard mask designs, which can further be categorized as being one of about a
dozen different types.
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