Word: kabuki
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...drunkenness and adultery. Immediately accessible on the level of mime, it is nevertheless highly sophisticated, yielding its ultimate secrets- and thus pleasures- to those who have taken the time to study it. Its name once connoted "outlandish" or "eccentric," yet it literally means song-dance-skill. It is Kabuki...
...Kabuki is probably best viewed in its context, as part of the Japanese social tradition from which it derives. But this month Americans are seeing several of the most famous Kabuki plays without venturing overseas, as Tokyo's Grand Kabuki tours New York City, Knoxville (at the World's Fair) and Washington, B.C. The 77-member company...
...with any other highly developed art form nourished by centuries of performance tradition, nuance is everything in Kabuki. The simplest dramatic idea may be drawn out to great length to express an emotion or state of mind. Take the openemotion or state of mind. Take the opening of the touching Sumidagawa. Hanjo (Utaemon), a mother searching for her kidnaped child, appears first at the back of the hanamichi, the runway used for important entrances and exits that extends from the stage well out into the audience. Her torturous progress in slow, halting steps shows her distraught emotional state and firmly...
Utaemon, of course, is a man, as are all the members of the troupe. Kabuki originated at the beginning of the 17th century, when a legendary shrine maiden named Okuni took her temple dances on the road for profit. When prostitutes began imitating Okuni, using their dancing to entice customers, a shogunate concerned about public morality banned women from the stage...
...evolved, with men known as onna-gata performing the female roles, Kabuki became more explicitly theatrical, drawing on the earlier dramatic conventions of serious Noh theater, comic Kyogen plays, and stories from the Bunraku puppet theater. Parts were passed down the generations as leading theatrical families established themselves. Today, when a Kabuki actor reaches a sufficient level of artistry, he is rewarded with the name of a distinguished ancestor. Leading Kabuki artists like Tamasaburo, 32, a brilliant onnagata, may achieve the popularity of rock stars. One of the most effective works in the tour repertory is Narukami (The Thunder...