Kabuki Theater
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Kabuki Theater was created around the year 1600. It was almost around the same time that the English began to form colonies on the American continent. The history of Kabuki is as long as the history of the United States.
Kabuki was created by a shrine maiden named Okuni. Okuni was from Izumo Shrine. Her performances in the rive beds of the ancient capital of Kyoto caused a sensation. Soon their scale increased and a number of competing companies started.
Early Kabuki was much different from what is seen today. It was consisted mostly of large group dances performed by women. Most of these women acted as prostitutes off stage. Finally the government banned women from the stage in an effort to protect public 'morals'. This would become just one, in the long history of government restrictions placed on the theater.
This ban on women, though, is often seen as a good move. This was because it required the importance of skill over beauty. It also put more stress on drama than dance. This put Kabuki theater on the path to become a style of theater. With the need for female representations in plays, 'onnagatas' were developed. 'Onnagatas' were female role specialists, in lowest terms- men who played women.
The last quarter of the 17th century is referred to as the Genroku period and was a time of renaissance in the culture of Japanese0 towns-people. It was a time when both aristocratic and common arts flourished. Since the West and China were cut off from the outside world for over 50 years, many new art forms were introduced during this time.
With Kabuki as the main form of theatrical entertainment for commoners, there was an outburst of creativity. During this period the styl...
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...i class, and actors where often thought of as gods when they played "aragoto" roles.
In Kansai, Sakata Tojuro perfected a style of acting known as "wagoto" or soft style. While the "aragoto" of Danjuro was a hit in Edo, still very much a frontier town with a large military presence, Kyoto and Osaka, collectively known as "kamigata," had histories of over a 1000 years and were dominated by merchant culture. "Wagoto" appealed to the refined tastes of the kamigata audiences. "Wagoto" characters were often the sons of rich merchants that had fallen in love with beautiful courtesans. Having spent mast amounts of money to visit their lovers, they would be disowned by their families and forced to wear kimono made of paper. Despite their sunken state, though, they never lost their own self-perception of living in the lap of luxury, giving the role a comic touch as well.
Since theatre was established as an art form, it has constantly been changing and developing as new methods of theatre styles came to light. This is also true with how musical theatre developed into how we know it today. Vaudeville and burlesque were forms of theatre in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s that forged the way for the American musical to emerge. The elements that writers used from vaudeville allowed for not just musical acts to be performed during the course of the story, but eventually became a way for the story to further be told. The American musical was not always as big as it is today, and vaudeville and burlesque acts made it possible for such a type of performance style to develop. Musical writers used multiple elements, not just the song element, in their stories. This change did not just happen overnight. The evolution from vaudeville and burlesque was a gradual one, taking years to further develop the performance styles into the Broadway musical we can see today.
In the early nineteenth century there was a trend toward portraying all types of evil—such as torture, incest, and sadism—on stage, and after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 a movement was started to adapt Kabuki to the spirit of the modern world. Be that as it may, even as Kabuki has created in style and substance, it holds a hefty portion of the components it obtained amid the 1700s, from the physical virtuosity of its performers to the utilization of beautiful ensembles and portrayal of shocking occasions. Because of the emphasis in Kabuki on performance, there is little interest among scholars in offering critical analyses of its most important plays; many feel, in fact, that to read a Kabuki play in print gives the reader no indication of its artistic power. Pundits writing in English about seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Kabuki have in this manner tended to focus on the social and chronicled setting encompassing the improvement of the shape or on imaginative components, for example, acting, organize procedures, and music. The Kabuki play that has garnered the most critical attention is Chūsingura (1748; The Treasury of the Loyal Retainers). This play, about retainers' loyalty to a feudal lord even beyond his death, contains all the elements that make for great, melodramatic Kabuki theater,
There was lack of professional bands of actors. Therefore those bands which found most success were patronized by the court. The Earls of Essex, Pembroke and others all had their own bands. Certain troops became so famous that people thronged to see them, therefore leading to the opening of theatres. The first playhouse "the theatre" opened in 1577 and the famous "the Globe" opened in 1599.
The term Burlesque is usually thought of as slightly naughty theatre produced and performed between the 1700s and World War II. Webster defines it as a literary or dramatic work that seeks to mock by means of bizarre embellishment or comic imitation, mockery usually by caricature or theatrical entertainment of a broadly humorous often earthy character consisting of short turns, comic skits, and sometimes striptease acts. The word derives from the Italian burlesco, which itself derives from the Italian burla – a joke, ridicule or mockery. Today Burlesque has no meaning as a modern marvel to most Americans. Burlesque is far from the commonplace twentieth century definition. The entertainment known as Burlesque has had many different types of audiences. "Burlesque" has been used in English in this theatrical sense since the late 17th century. It has been applied with hindsight to the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare. A later use of the word, particularly in the United States, refers to performances in a variety show format. These were popular from the 1860s to the 1940s, often in clubs, as well as theatres, and featured vulgar comedy and female striptease. American burlesque shows were originally an offshoot of Victorian burlesque. They consisted of three parts: first they had comic sketches by low comedians, second they had male acts like acrobats, magicians and solo singers and third they had a burlesque in the English style on politics or a current play. The entertainment was...
Denison. B. (2002, January 1). A Basic Overview of Japanese Culture . . Retrieved May 3, 2014, from http://www.mizukan.org/articles/culture.htm
first famous theater on record is none other than the Globe Theater. This wasn't your everyday
In the Elizabethan period, it was "forbidden" for women to appear on stage and considered "immoral", and so boys played...
In the first part of the 20th century, musical theatre consisted of vaudeville and minstrel shows....
Kabuki started out as a style of dance in the early sixteenth century, also known as the Edo period. Kabuki is an exclusive type of theater in which only males can act on stage. For over 400 years, women have only been allowed in the audience and not on stage. But ironically, a woman named Izumo Okuni along with her female troupe originally created the theatre. Okuni, who may have come from the shrine of Izumo, set up a temporary stage in Kyoto around 1603 where she and her troupe acted out slightly suggestive dances and skits (www.artelino.com).
This is to be expected in a society that did not even permit women to perform in theaters, so men played the women’s roles. Women were not allowed to perform on stage until 1660 when Charles II took the throne and the Restoration occurred (Nestvold). Hence, women are often restricted by husbands or fathers, like Juliet who was controlled by her father in Romeo and Juliet, or women are victimized by men and not in control of their own fate, like Desdemona who dies at the hands of Othello in Othello.
Butler, Judith. Ed. Case, Sue-Ellen. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution." Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
For more than 700 years, until 668, in the kingdom of Koguryo, embracing northern Korea and Manchuria, court music and dances from Central Asia, from Han China, from Manchuria, and from Korea, called chiso and kajiso, were performed. Many of the dances were masked; all were stately as befit serious court art. They were taken to the Japanese court in Nara about the 7th century. Called bugaku in Japan, they have been preserved for 12 centuries and can still be seen performed at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, though they have long since died out in China and Korea. In Koguryo's neighbouring kingdom of Paekche, a form of Buddhist masked dance play was performed at court, and, in the 7th century, it too was taken to the Japanese court at Nara by a Korean performer, Mimaji, who had learned the dances while staying at the southern Chinese court of Wu-hou. Called kiak in Korea and gigaku in Japan, the Aryan features of some of its masks clearly indicate Indian (or Central Asian) influence. Such complicated genealogies are common in East Asian performing arts.
"Drama and Theater in the Ancient World." Encyclopedia of Society and Culture in the Ancient World. Facts On File, 2007. Ancient and Medieval History Online. Web. 10 Nov. 2015. In the early ancient time people preformed without scripts or line. Bogucki states “The nature of these performances was often dictated by geography.” They were very spontaneous. Their performances occurred to celebrate victory in battle, births marriages, and also as well to mourn the dead, or fertility. When it comes to theater it was based off religious elements. The performance where made to honor or appease a God. In India the earliest performances where based off sacred texts. Dramatic presentations became common in Ancient India, Japan, and China. They often used makeup, mask, costumes, and other conventions. Most performances where done outside. The theaters resembled modern time. According to Bogucki “The development of theater as the word is understood in modern times began with the ancient Greeks and Roman.” A lot of the plays performed by the ancient Greeks where Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The Greeks distinguish tragedies and comedies with comic play. The Ancient Romans continued the Greeks tradition. The Romans as well performed the Greeks play, but produced their own
During this time, women were introduced in a completely diverted way then a male actor. Women
One of the most important types of Japanese performing art is the kabuki play. Developed in the early 17th century, kabuki has remained a popular form of theater in Japan (Johnson 1). A maid of the Izumo Shrine created kabuki in the 1600's (Johnson 1). The Traditional Theater of Japan written by Yoshinobu Inoura in 1981 stated that kabuki was named using Japanese characters in which "ka means song, bu means dance, and ki means skill" (218). At this time the plays consisted of females executing dancing performances (Johnson 1). These plays tried to show feelings and conflicts dealing with affection, envy and courage ("Noh and Kabuki" 1). Audiences enjoyed kabuki because the plays related to their lives (Kitazawa 4). The styles of kabuki changed though when women were first banned from kabuki.