Why does the lead actor often double as director in classical kabuki?

In modern theatre a director decides the interpretation of a work and coordinates the actors' movement and the design. That role is, in the history of theatre, relatively recent. Kabuki has been staging plays for centuries longer and solved the same problem by other means. The solution is the kata.

Kata does not mean merely a fixed pose. Where to stand, how to walk, which line rides which beat of music, when a property comes on — a vast accumulation of decisions needed to raise a play, handed down through the bodies of successive actors. A classical play, in other words, arrives with its staging already woven in. To perform it is closer to re-erecting that kata with this month's company.

If that is so, it follows that the person who has inherited the kata most deeply should guide the company. The lead doubling as director is less a question of authority than of where the knowledge resides. Behind it also stands the Edo way of forming a company, in which the zagashira headed both the art and the business. This holds for the classics; in new kabuki works and projects that invite contemporary directors, direction from outside is common enough.