A kyogen with no voices. Mibu Kyogen has been performed at Mibu Temple in Kyoto for some seven hundred years, and its performers never speak a word. The whole drama moves on percussion alone—a flat bell, a drum, a flute—and on the bodies of the masked players. It began as a way of teaching Buddhist doctrine through gesture, a theatre for commoners who could not read, a means of showing right and wrong without text. That is why it needs no language. The players don masks and move slowly, in broad exaggerated gestures, and in one famous scene unglazed clay plates are hurled from the stage to smash spectacularly on the ground below. It is wordless, and it is funny. Some scenes are sad. Without a single line, it carries. For seven centuries the ordinary people of Kyoto have watched this and nodded, recognizing something—something that sits just below speech, where words have not yet formed.