Kyōgen sakusha

狂言作者 きょうげんさくしゃ

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歌舞伎

Kabuki play maker/playwright. Kyōgen means a kabuki play, and sakusha means a creator/writer. For most of the seventeenth century, actors developed their own performance material, but from end of the century specialists in preparing plays became fixed members of theaters. From the mid-eighteenth century until the end of the Edo period, each theatre employed a group of men who worked together as kyōgen sakusha. The work they carried out ranged from running errands and assistant tasks at the apprentice level, to copying sides and preparing material or notebooks on various aspects of a production, to helping run a production, and finally to play planning and writing at the higher levels of the hierarchy into which the group was arranged. (KSL)