Kanze Kiyohisa (観世清尚)
Kiyohisa Kanze (died 1782) was a Noh actor who played shite-kata (main roles) in the Kanze school. He was the seventeenth head of the Kanze family. He was the progenitor of the Tetsunojo KANZE family. He went by the name Oribe KANZE.
He was the son of Kiyochika ORIBE, the fourteenth head of the family, and studied under Motoakira KANZE, the fifteenth head of the family. His brother, Motoakira KANZE, having served as an instructor to Ieharu TOKUGAWA, the eleventh Shogun in the art of Noh, established his own branch of the family with official recognition in 1752. Recognized as being second only to the Shiza Ichiryu (a general term for all schools of the art of Noh [Kanze, Konparu, Kongo, Hosho and Kita] in the Edo period), the branch also obtained a qualification to perform in Noh plays staged for the bakufu (Japanese feudal government headed by a shogun). The family of Tetsunojo KANZE derives from this branch.
After that, because the sixteenth head of the family, who was his nephew, had no adoptive hier, Kiyohisa became the seventeenth head of the family. His eldest son, Kiyomitsu KANZE, became the eighteenth head of the family, and his second son, Kiyooki KANZE, the nineteenth head of the family.