Kenneth E. Lawrence

Lawrence received an Arts and Sciences Advisory Council
Award in 1998 for the study of gamelan in Bali and again in 1999 for a scholar
exchange with Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He has also
been awarded two Pacific Asian Scholarships, a Bank of Hawaii Scholarship, a
UCLA Japanese Studies Travel Grant.

From 1988 to 1996 Lawrence lived in Tokyo, Japan, studying
Noh flute and shakuhachi bamboo flute and their effects on the brain. He also
worked at the National Noh Theatre for the International Theatre Institute, and
wrote a monthly column on traditional Japanese theater and music for the Japan
Times. He was a featured musician on the CD Noh in English, and in Eliza, a
video recording of the premier 1990 performance at the Tokyo Umewaka Noh
Theater.

Lawrence has published over 100 newspaper columns on
Japanese performing arts. Northwest Classicist And his performance translations
of Sumatran songs have been published in the Asian Theatre Journal. His
research has been accepted for presentation to the International Society for
the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI) conference in Bergen, Norway, at the UCLA
Graduate Student Symposium, and in Lieden, the Netherlands. He also developed
an animation projection system that allowed for live-time visual analysis of
musical structures, featured at the Theatre and Technology Conference of The
Association for Theatre in Higher Education. His performance translations of
Sumatran songs have been published by the Asian Theatre Journal. His writing
has also appeared in the Parabola Magazine, the Northwest Classicist and
Mainichi Daily News. His monthly column ‘Stories From the Noh’ appears in the
Hokubei Houchi newspaper.

Lawrence has given workshops and lecture/demonstrations the
music, movement and chant of Noh, the
traditional masked dance drama of Japan, at universities, colleges and temples
in Japan, Hawaii, New York and
Washington State. Recent workshops include Soju Kai’s lecture/performances on
Noh at Seattle’s Nagomi Tea House and the East Shore Unitarian Church in
Bellevue, Washington; Lecture/performances with biwa (Japanese lute) performer
Kyokumi Tashiro at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and at
Microsoft featuring sumi paintings by Kumiko Lawrence; and publication in Parabola
Magazine of Lawrence’s retelling of an episode from the Indian epic Mahabharata,
accompanied by Kumiko’s sumi paintings; the monthly column ‘Stories From the
Noh’ in the North American Post/Hokubei Houchi newspaper. Lawrence has also
been studying with instructor Suren Shrestha, and is now a certified
practitioner of Himalayan singing bowl healing.