Jonah Salz

Jonah Salz is an American theatre director, teacher, translator, and scholar based in Kyoto, Japan. Born in Buffalo, NY in 1956, Salz became interested in the theatre through ushering at the Studio Arena Theatre. Majoring in British literature with a minor in drama at Haverford College, he was arts editor for the News for two years and directed the Summer Theatre Festival there in his senior year. Upon graduation, he worked for Inter-action, a community education/theatre cooperative in northern London dedicated to innovative projects (City Farms; Community Publishing, Almost-free Lunchtime Theatre). As producer ED Berman’s assistant, Salz helped coordinate publicity and promotion for Tom Stoppard’s Dirty Linen/Newfoundland in London and the first UK/U.S. tour of the British American Repertory Company (BARC).
Seeking to discover the universal roots of world theatre, he taught English while enjoying a wealth of traditional theatre and ritual in Japan in 1980. Planning to stay six months before beginning a career as a theatre critic and/or director in the U.S., he found the culture and theatre rich and deep, and has lived in Kyoto, on and off, since then.
He received a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University (1997), studying avant-garde theatre (Michael Kirby), popular theatre (Brooks MacNamara), performance theory (Richard Schechner), and the aesthetics of everyday life (Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett). His master’s thesis examined the intercultural frictions and fruit of the first tour abroad by a Japanese theatre company, Sada Yacco and Otojirô Kawakami, in 1899-1900. His dissertation describes the required “roles of passage” that a kyogen (classical comedy) actor performs between ages three and eighty in order to become a full-fledged professional. He has written about intercultural theatre theory, Beckett in noh interpretation, acting training cross-culturally, and the challenges of translating comedy. He is theatre editor for Kansai Time Out.
Salz has taught Japanese film, anthropology, and theatre at Kansai University of Foreign Studies, Doshisha University, New York University, Portland State University, and Franklin & Marshall College. In 1996 he became a founding member of the Faculty of Intercultural Communication (now International Studies), a 45-person college at Ryukoku University, the oldest, largest Buddhist university in Japan. Salz has taught undergraduate and graduate courses, in Japanese to Japanese and international students, in traditional Japanese theatre, Euro-American Theatre, comparative theatre, and film. He has received short-term research grants to Europe, and funding for comparative actor training in the U.S., Korea, Bali, and Japan. He was a faculty fellow at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities, researching comparative acting and aesthetics; and visiting scholar at SOAS (School for Oriental and Asian Studies), London; and the East Asian Department, University of California, Berkeley.
Co-founding the Noho Theatre Group with kyogen actor Akira Shigeyama in 1981, Salz directs and produces plays by Shakespeare, Beckett, and others interpreted via noh and kyogen techniques. Noho is comprised of professional noh and kyogen actors collaborating with both Japanese and foreign contemporary artists. They have toured the U.S. four times, the Edinburgh Fringe Theatre Festival, Avignon Festival. In 2006 they visited Florence, Italy and in 2007, Paris to perform Beckett short plays at the centenary celebrations of the playwright. To gather international artists interested in fusion theatre, Salz began the Traditional Theatre Training program in 1984, an intensive summer workshop in classical dance and theatre forms. T.T.T. was taken as an official project by Kyoto City’s Kyoto Art Center in 2004; Salz continued as Program Director through 2015; he now advises T.T.T., now in its 35th year.
As translator, Salz has co-translated (with Laurence R. Kominz) Yukio Mishima’s modern noh play Yuya, Hirata Oriza’s Beyond the River in May, Issey Ogata’s monodramas (with Tomoko Onabe), and Takeshi Umehara’s “super-kyogen” trilogy (with Onabe). He has translated and coordinated the subtitles and narration for This is Kyogen and This is Noh videos (available through Insight Media in the U.S.); and subtitles for Mansai Nomura’s staging of Rashomon (In the thicket, M & O 2005).