The Grand Kabuki brings tales of triumph and tragedy
It is an art as old as Shakespeare's. With in its emotional universe are found heroic legends and pathetic domestic tragedies, as well as broad comic treatments of such eternal human vagaries as 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
is offering a look at one of the world's most impor tant dramatic institutions at its very best—a'rich, culturally resonant blend of acting, sets, costumes, music and dancing that is likely to remind gaijin of grand opera melodrama, situation comedy and Richard III all at once.
As 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 establishes the tragic mood.
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 in 1629.