Professor Tim Moore has delivered a lecture entitled “Japanese Kyōgen and Ancient Comedy” at Illinois Wesleyan University.
The talk was the inaugural lecture of the University’s Tanaka Japan Lecture and Performance Series. In this lecture, Professor Moore compared comic performances in medieval Japan and ancient Greece and Rome, with attention to such items as stock characters, social inversion, masks and their absence, and staging. He also compared the relationship between kyōgen and the more serious nō plays to how comedy and satyr plays relate to tragedy.
