The Noh Mask or the Ambassador of the Unknown

What is she smiling at, the young Ko-omote? She comes from Japan at the beginning of the ^15th century, and she has the freshness of a young girl of today and of all times, with her mischief and the still childlike roundness of her features. Her face ( omote , in Japanese) is made of wood, but the flesh seems alive, palpitating. In her is embodied the art of the Noh mask, which has never ceased to fascinate beyond time. While the Greek mask of the great tragic era has been irretrievably lost, Noh masks have been kept and preserved like treasures from the beginning by families perpetuating the tradition of this theater from father to son.

The object has since become a theatrical secret, always to be explored and rediscovered, particularly among the great theatre renovators of the early ^20th century. Bertolt Brecht had a Noh mask on his desk. For Paul Claudel, a diplomat in Japan in the 1920s, the discovery of Noh was a revelation, which he summed up with the poet's brilliance: "Drama is something that happens; Noh is someone who arrives." Someone, therefore a face, therefore a mask - the same word, omote , serving to designate both. "God, hero, hermit, ghost, demon, the Shité [the main character of the drama] is always the Ambassador of the Unknown and as such he wears a mask" (Paul Claudel, Mes idées sur le théâtre , Gallimard, 1966).

"The Noh mask, the real one, the one made between the ^14th and ^17th centuries by extraordinary sculptors, is like a Stradivarius for a musician," Erhard Stiefel immediately states, amidst all the faces that populate his workshop at the Cartoucherie de Vincennes (Paris ^12th ). Unanimously considered one of the greatest contemporary mask creators, Erhard Stiefel has not only accompanied Ariane Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil in its research around the emblematic object of the theater. He has long been interested in the Noh mask, and was one of the very few Westerners to be able to contemplate the original models up close, the honmen of the great families who still own them.

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