JOIN US FOR AN LLUMINATING JOURNEY INTO THE SPIRIT OF JAPANESE THEATER
March 24th, 2026
5:30 PM – 7:00 PM
500 W Madison Street, 3rd Floor, The Assembly, Chicago, IL 60661
RSVP no later than Friday, March 20th. Limited space availability!
Noh (能), the oldest surviving form of Japanese theater, is a living art that reflects both past and present values through its performances.
With its refined masks, distinctive stage, stylized movement, and evocative musical accompaniment, Noh transports audiences into a world shaped by Japan’s unique aesthetic sensibilities.
By placing Noh in dialogue with the later traditions of Kabuki (歌舞伎) and Bunraku (文楽), Dr. Mariko Anno guides audiences through the cultural foundations of Japan’s classical performing arts.
MARIKO ANNO, PhD Associate Professor at Institute of Science Tokyo
Dr. Anno is a bilingual Japanese American from Chicago. She is an associate professor at Institute of Science Tokyo and previously served as a Toyota Visiting Professor (2018-2019) at the University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies.
She holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Tokyo University of Arts and a Doctor of Musical Arts in Flute Performance and Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Piercing the Structure of Tradition: Flute Performance, Continuity, and Freedom in the Music of Noh (Cornell University Press, 2020), the first English-language monograph on the nohkan (能管), a traditional Japanese transverse flute.
