How do rehearsals differ between past and present?

It helps to see how a kabuki rehearsal moves. It begins seated around the script, reading the lines aloud; then blocking, where the movement is set; then the tsukedate, at which the music — takemoto, nagauta — is joined; then the full run-through, and opening night. This skeleton is held to have changed little since Edo.

The fundamental way of learning is also the same. The kata passes through the body, not the page: watched and taken from a senior, corrected in the rehearsal room, tested again on stage. It is closer to seizing than to being taught, which is why the same role breathes differently in different houses. That person-to-person circuit is still the live one.

What has changed is the means of record. Film and audio of past stagings now survive, and can be consulted when reviving a play long out of the repertory, or when studying a line of kata belonging to another house. What once simply vanished when the last person who knew it died now has somewhere to be kept. But film shows only the result. Why that pause is taken, where the breath is drawn — that still passes only from a person, and that is the part held not to have changed.