“Ma,” the Japanese concept of “space,” is much more than mere physical distance. It’s a nuanced and multifaceted idea that profoundly influences various cultural disciplines in Japan, shaping aesthetics, the sense of time, communication and expectation, even social interactions. When the late singer David Bowie saw—and heard—a Japanese Noh play for the first time, he couldn’t quite sense the rhythms of the music. He called it “variable time flow” and “found rhythm.” After asking the musicians what the rhythm was, they told him it was in eight counts, Bowie looked puzzled. Then they told him, “It’s eight counts . . . with holes in it.” The holes in the rhythm, stretching out the silences between drum strikes, creating distended and dilated theatrical moments, are ma. Emptiness at work, creating an open gateway to embracing deeper thinking and personal experience for the performer and the audience alike.
Ma is an ordinary word too. Anyone familiar with the London Underground will know the common announcement when a subway car stops at a station: “MIND THE GAP between the train and the platform.” The gap is ma: space, interval, active emptiness. The Japanese aesthetic term ma often refers to the intentional creation of space or emptiness as an active element in artistic performance and audience perception. A Shinto shrine in Japan, very much like a Noh stage, is little more than framed space. A Noh stage is essentially an empty cube, elevated and roofed. What is sacred at a Shinto shrine is the space, not the wooden beams. In a Zen rock garden, considered an expression of Buddhist philosophy and aesthetics, the stones are placed to create ma, space, into which the meditating observer can pour their own mind and spirit, traversing transcendent realms of inner meaning by means of the activated ma—emptiness, nothing-ness—as a tool and technique of consciousness cultivation. Pure gestalt: ma within ma, encountering ma; emptiness flowing and stillness active.
Ma connects deeply to notions of minimalism and the artistic function of clean lines, whether in architecture or performing arts such as Japanese Noh. There is no real “set” on a Noh stage, rather the main performer, in an elaborate costume and wearing a mask, is the locus and focus: the moving center of the whole. A pine tree, representing the site of the earliest Noh plays, is painted on the back wall. The stage is essentially a box of empty space, filled not only by the physical actor but with vital space, volume, energy, atmosphere, and nothing but the spiritual reality of the main character. And so, the space of a Noh stage is full of memory, poetry, spiritual crisis, and the openness of the aesthetics of emptiness. This allows the perceptions and sensations of the audience to join the performers in the emptiness out of which a Noh play arises, which in fact is intended to be that same emptiness at the core of being—the same emptiness experienced by a Zen monk in meditation or a miko, a Shinto priestess, tracing the abstract patterns of her accumulated spiritual possession.
In the Noh play, Izutsu, the ghost of a lover of the poet Narihira, wearing his clothes, peers into a well where they met as children. The decrepit well is a mirror of memories, heartbreak, and madness. Alone in the empty space of a Noh stage, the actor looks into an empty, framed space, and the climax of the drama is emptiness upon emptiness, the very nature of reality. There is space for the audience to participate in the creation of meaning. Ma—the empty space, its framing, and its artistic manipulation create the dynamic interplay of flow and stillness, enabling fluid transitions into non-material dimensions of existence. Physical, rhythmic, and aural space are the essence of Noh performance and of Shinto Miko Mai dances. The dancer glides, turns, and pauses, allowing the empty spaces to become integral parts of the choreography. These pauses aren’t mere breaks or stops. Rather, they are empowered energetic emanations created to amplify the grace and precision of the movements, inviting contemplation and connection with deities, characters, and inner realities.
Ma becomes a canvas for interpretation. The late ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev observed: “If you want to make something more beautiful, do it more slowly.” This aptly describes Japanese Noh’s very slow manner of performing, featuring its beauty. Instead of becoming boring, the slowness highlights the figure in space, trance-like, inviting the audience into a calm, concentrated artistic experience.
This manner of highlighting movement, slowly, in empty space is a universal quality of ma applied to performing arts. Please enjoy here a remarkable short film from the National Ballet of Canada, featuring choreographer-dancer Guillaume Côte, and the cinematography of Jeremy Benning. Emptiness and slowness are used to great effect, finally opening to a new and different emptiness; a quantum flow of open spaces, not negative spaces, defined by the dancer in the dimension of nothing. Dance itself is rarely so well displayed.
See more
Related features from BDG
Matsukaze: Wind in the Pines
The Ancient Noh Stages of Sado, the Isle of Exile
Noh Now
Pure Land Buddhism in Noh: The Shuramono Plays of Zeami
Beauty and Sadness: Reflections on a Japanese Noh Play
