This paper will explore the recent performance and publication project 'Echoes and Callings’ (2018-23) that aims to transcribe elements from Japanese noh drama into the photographic medium. This project tests intermedial and non-representational possibilities of 'photographic noh' as a form of visual staging.

Performative portraiture of re-enacted and collaged expressions serves here as a method to analyse the transformations of female characters into fierce demons by concentrating on the development of a single emotion typical for noh. The focus is upon a crescendo of sequences of facial masks that evolve from displaying pained fear into expressions of terrifying anger through a three-fold structure of emotional tempi and material intensities (which in Japanese noh is understood as a ‘jo-ha-kyū’).

Linking performance theory with practice research, our paper will focus on the wider context of 'fourth category' Hannya plays about ‘crazed women’ – especially The Dōjō Temple (Dōjōji), Kurozuka and Viewing Autumn Foliage (Momijigari) – who seem to represent both patriarchal victimhood as well the possibility of its resistance. Informed by the textual and the visual elements from the historical canon of these plays, 'Echoes and Callings’ takes the abstracted analytical form of a 'meta-noh play' that translates these narratives into word and image.

The collaged portraits work with the ambiguities of the physiologically impossible compound expression of the Hannya mask - sadness in the lower and fury in the upper part - through combining different angles and expressive stages to characterise, activate and interpret the mask's expression as a process of coming-into-being. The performance script develops the possibility of release and/or revenge for the female character, thus expanding the Edo-period theme of the 'mad woman' (horned and screaming) towards stating a right to be angry about societal injustices.

Wiebke's book ‘Echoes & Callings: A Hannya Manifesto’ was published with Ma Bibliothèque in May 2023 and performed as a live collage projection with sound improvisation at Kings Place in June 2018. https://mabibliotheque.cargo.site/THE-CONSTELLATIONS

Ashley's essay about Wiebke's book and performance project was published in Source magazine in June 2023 (#111, summer 2023: 30-39). https://www.source.ie/archive/issue111/index.php

Dr Wiebke Leister is a German artist and researcher who teaches at the Royal College of Art in London. Her work looks at the intersection of photography, writing and theatre by way of developing a performative understanding of how movement enters the structure of the still image, and how the liveness of viewing interacts with our interpretative processes in form of a transformative interplay between viewer and imaginary referent. As an expanded critique of portraiture, her research challenges the limitations of mimetic representation and individual likeness, often focusing on the human image as a catalyst to explore human boundaries and how one encounters oneself in others. Building on her long-term research into the ambiguous character of snake-women in Japanese theatre, she is currently working with the National Gallery in London on comparing the ambiguities of Serpent Symbolisms in pan-European and intercultural contexts.

Dr Ashley Thorpe is a Reader in Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research focuses on East Asian theatre as practiced in Asia and Europe. A member of Theatre Nohgaku, he organizes the annual Noh Training Project UK and has written his own English-language noh, Emily, which was performed at Tara Arts in London in 2019. He also performed in Between the Stones (London, Wexford, Kilkenny, Paris, 2020) and the first French-language noh Medea (Paris, 2023). He is the author, editor, or translator of ten books, which range from a performance history of Chinese opera in London to the analysis of the latest developments in contemporary ceramic art.