Word: utaemon
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...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 establishes the tragic...
...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...
...doll play, telling of a blind man and his wife who commit suicide, and of a goddess who restores them to life, scores chiefly through details and through Utaemon VI's acting as the woman. To a Westerner, the snail-paced story seems more often theatrically trite than poetically touching. On the other hand, the final play-telling of a rich provincial who falls in love with a courtesan and tries, with tragic consequences, to buy her out of her brothel-has not only pictorial charm but genuine story and character interest. Here Grand Kabuki conveys very well...
...exquisiteness of Hokusai prints brought to life. The Impostor, far more popular at the Japanese ) box office, has the look of a grade A Hollywood costume adventure that was shot with an almond-eyed camera. The story opens in a geisha house, where lies "the bored baron" (Utaemon Ichikawa), the D'Artagnan of Japanese fiction, too bored even to bother with the dish that has been laid before him-and it isn't sukiyaki. Enter a messenger: a pretender to the throne has appeared. Is he or is he not the emperor's true son and heir...
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