Abstract
It was at the Venice International Theater Festival in 1954, then in Paris in 1957 at the Théâtre des Nations, that the first European performances of nō theater took place, until then only known through a few translations of librettos, at the end of the19th century. The opening up of Japan to foreign countries coincided with the first Western-language studies of nō, and the influence of this theatrical art was exerted above all on writers. From the 1920s onwards, it was no longer primarily the literary quality and dramatic content of nō that found a favorable reception in the intellectual climate of the time, but its performative dimension. Rejecting the conventions of naturalism, the theatrical avant-garde of the post-war years found in the nō a model of reference, albeit a chimerical horizon, in at least three areas: the search for a "total art" combining poetry, music and dance, combined with an affirmation of the actor's body and the opposite of "text theater"; a rejection of realism and psychology in favor of symbolic content, favored by the nudity of a stage devoid of scenery and by the use of masks abolishing the actor's facial expressions; the possibility, finally, of a new type of interaction between stage and audience, favored by the absence of curtains and by a scenic device distinct from the Italian stage, which separates fiction from reality.
