Word: kabuki
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Backstage, the models are sitting half naked on the dressing-room floors, painting pink and blue Kabuki stripes on their eyelids. The dressers hover over their racks, rolling pink and yellow and gray pantyhose for instant changes. The hat, jewelry, makeup and music co-ordinators stand ready. "Take it off, it's too white," says Galanos, snatching a rope of beads from the neck of a black-and-white coat. The models line up for the opening parade. Makeup and style have reduced them to pure line and angle. They look like fashion sketches of, say, 1936. They swagger...
...Right this way," the barkers used to murmur softly on the streets of Kabuki-cho, Tokyo's red-light district. "She'll show you everything!" No more. Responding to the cries of outraged citizens' groups and local businesses, the Japanese government cracked down last week on adult or, in the Japanese term, "pink" entertainment. Among the new regulations: all pink neon out by midnight, no more come-ons from bar girls, no new massage parlors in restricted areas, no new love hotels near schools or libraries. And no lewd barkers...
...midnight on P day, pornographic posters had disappeared in Kabuki-cho, love hotels had transformed themselves into business hotels, and some strip joints had become coffee shops. The only neon in sight ornamented conventional pubs and restaurants, sushi shops and fast-food outlets. The first police patrol of the area after the crackdown booked only 27 offenders, mainly for soliciting, keeping a restricted business open after hours or permitting minors on the premises. One barker was unfazed. "Politicians and police think they can stamp out pink," he said, "but it all has to go somewhere --someplace darker and dirtier...
What's the matter with kids' movies today? There are too damn many of them, that's what, and they are all about the same damn thing. Since 1978, when National Lampoon's Animal House revived the teenpix genre, rites of passage have become Kabuki rituals: popping zits, snapping towels in the locker room, dancing in the streets, ogling the girls in the shower, getting crazy drunk and tearing up the strip in a "borrowed" Porsche and grossing out Mom and Dad. Sentient adults must unite to cry: Enough already! The glandular convulsions of adolescence are just not interesting...
...Amagatsu and his four dancers coil and slide, curl and waddle, spring and go still, they seem to shape themselves into grooves. Their bodies, whitened with traditional Kabuki makeup, can go as stiff as steel beams being hoisted skyward on a cable, as supple and serpentine as a garden stream. When Amagatsu moves diagonally across a stage past two huge brass circles in Jomon Sho, the movement is a piece of modest majesty that sets down a single, perfect line in Sankai Juku's geometry of mystery...