Kabuki Drama Analysis

Rich in showmanship, Kabuki is a popular and traditional form of Japanese musical drama. Derived from the individual kanji characters which mean “song”, “dance” and “skill”, it is a highly stylized performing art, containing all of these elements in an extraordinary spectacle of form, color and style. It is to a woman, Izumo no Okuni and her troupe of female dancers, which credit goes for the beginning of the Kabuki. Accounts of her personal history are conflicting but she has received a great welcome for her first performance and that paved the way for the modern Kabuki. Soon, this form of entertainment was developed into a formalist style of drama with stories based on history, legend and contemporary life, retaining its hold on the affections

These plays tended towards family-based themes and romantic drama, recounting the lives of these villagers and townspeople of the Edo period. One large category of sewa-mono plays deal with double suicide and it is in these pieces that wagoto are seen to their best advantage, since the portrayal of intense emotion exemplifies this style of acting. A later variant of the domestic play called the kizewa-mono drew in an increasingly jaded audience with their performance. They were seen portraying “bare” images of the lower fringes of the society by using violence and shocking subjects accompanied with elaborate stage tricks. Also, the style of acting is far more realistic and natural, bringing out the authenticity from time to time. The third major type of kabuki drama is the shosagoto plays, presenting the element of dance in pure form. Music accompanies all kabuki, which in fact makes the actors’ movements rhythmic and potentially pure dance at any point during the action. For instance, The Wisteria Maiden is devised entirely for the kabuki stage, acquiring colorful settings and costumes for the

The actors performing the male roles in historical plays often employ a large melodramatic style of acting, known as ‘aragoto’ or ‘rough-stuff’, and wear a heavily stylized facial make-up called kumadori, which uses a white base marked with heavy lines. Their voices are powerful and exaggerated, bellowing and braying their often-nonsensical lines as they performed in a broad and bombastic style. Wagoto characters are quite the reverse, often being played by onnagata, and are much more sensitive, restrained and romantic in feel. In traditional kabuki, men play all of the roles. These men are called onnagata as they express female beauty without negating their own male body by emphasizing and stylizing feminine movements and gestures. Not relying on their physical beauty, onnagata undergo a long training period and live their normal life as women to bring out the degree of realism in their role. The aragoto technique develops a form known as mie, which singularly typifies the art of the Kabuki actor. There are different kinds of mie, but whatever form is used the actor must impose himself upon his audience with the maximum power of his resources. The mie is a technique used by both good and evil characters that emphasized their feelings and emotions accordingly with it. Women characters on stage in particular use it when they are distraught, representing a supernatural character or someone of