The Art of the Benshi 2024 World Tour — New York

This April, the Art of the Benshi 2024 World Tour offers audiences a rare opportunity to experience the mesmerizing artistry of three of Japan’s celebrated benshi—“movie orators” who, since the days of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, have been breathing life into silent film. Joined by an ensemble of musicians from Japan, these masters of their art will transport viewers back to the golden age of silent film, when every movie screening was also a live performance.

During the heyday of the benshi, more than 7,000 of these charismatic artists narrated the action in films, and made silent actors speak. Their voices rang out in movie theaters across Japan, as well as in Korea and other Japanese colonies, and in Japanese American communities in the United States. The greatest benshi were famous enough to rival the stars on screen.

Now, thanks to a tour of unprecedented scale, audiences in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles and Tokyo will have a chance to experience the magic of the benshi as they perform not just individually, but together. This collaborative style of performance, in which each benshi takes on the roles of different characters, has been seen only once before in the U.S. since the advent of the talkie, at the 2019 Art of the Benshi program at UCLA that paved the way for this year’s world tour. All performances will be in Japanese with live music and English subtitles.

Encompassing 12 dates at six venues from April 5–26, the Art of the Benshi 2024 World Tour features six distinct programs of classic, newly restored, and rarely-seen silent films from Japan and the United States. The diverse array of works includes cult favorite A Page of Madness (Kurutta ichipeiji, 1926); the earliest surviving Japanese animated film The Dull Sword (Namakura gatana, 1917); classic films by Ozu Yasujirō, Mizoguchi Kenji, and Charlie Chaplin; and the recently discovered and restored The Oath of the Sword, which is the earliest known Asian American film production.

April 5 – 7
BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), New York
Programs I, II, III, IV