2026 Theses Doctoral

Choreographies of Eccentricity: Madness, Dance, and Gender in Medieval Noh Theater

Lethen, Hana

In this dissertation, I explore noh’s “madness plays” (monogurui nō), a genre spotlighting mad figures—especially madwomen—and first popularized in the Muromachi period (1336–1573). How, I ask, did medieval noh’s theatrical techniques give form to distinctly unwieldy bodies in this genre? Restaging earlier notions of madness (kurui) as a product of spirit possession, such plays depict madness as a condition that emerges from gendered social stressors such as being separated from one’s child or lover. In contrast to modern psychiatric conceptions of madness as an illness confined within a physical or mental interior, madness plays dramatize how madness in premodern Japan occurred on the plane of the moving body, with “madness” often extending to denote the act of dance.

Each of the dissertation’s four body chapters approaches the entanglement of madness, dance, and gender from a different vantage point, asking what kurui makes possible in the realm of plays and beyond. Chapter One, “Mastering Excess: Zeami and the Gendered Aesthetics of Madness,” traces the development of noh’s stagings of madness by way of the playwright and theorist Zeami’s (c. 1363–c. 1443) performance treatises. I contend that Zeami’s treatises articulate the aesthetics of madness in dialogue with certain elements of theatrical excess prevalent in noh of the time, gesturing to the dynamism of medieval noh’s performance styles and repertoire. Chapter Two, “Self-Possessed: The Performance of Madness as Metatheater,” examines how noh plays staged an emergent identification of eccentric behavior with emotionally driven performance rather than with the more conventional notion of spirit possession. I argue that the transformation can be understood as a reconfiguration of metatheater—elements of the theatrical experience that bring attention to theater as theater—that reveals how medieval modes of spectatorship differed from our own. In Chapter Three, “Eccentric Types: The Theatrical Construction of Hōka Entertainers,” I investigate the culturally specific models of personhood that inform noh’s recurrent figures of half-monk, half-lay entertainers called hōka, illustrating how they endow hōka with a distinct gender and eccentricity. I thereby demonstrate the importance of treating such figures explicitly as dramatic characters, rather than as transparent reflections of historical persons. Approaching the relationship between madness and performance in a more worldly context, Chapter Four, “Itinerant Bodies: Madwomen, Human Trafficking, and the Politics of Movement,” examines madness plays’ gendered dynamics of human trafficking. In several plays that spotlight a mad mother searching for a son taken by human traffickers, the madwoman’s portrayal as an itinerant dancer of the periphery discloses the displacement and exchange of bodies as aesthetically fundamental to the madness genre.

Throughout, I argue that noh’s seemingly contradictory assignment of strict conventions to the representation of the inherently disorderly condition of kurui reveals how conceptions of madness necessarily invoke the standard of a privileged ordering of experience, even as they index anxieties around that which disrupts this order. Moreover, I emphasize noh’s status as dance-drama as a means of illuminating the cultural contingency of madness and the gendered body. Accordingly, I show the importance of taking performance seriously as an embodied system of knowledge that offers insights obscured in textual and documentary archives. Finally, I reveal noh’s aesthetic and institutional formation from out of the nexus of culture, politics, and society. In so doing, I show that noh’s current status as canonized “traditional Japanese theater” was by no means assured from its inception.