Nihon-Buyo

This Saturday, an afternoon-long performance of various Nihon-buyo dances were performed at the National Bunraku Theater in Osaka. The audience was packed with mostly vivacious old ladies, passing around coughdrops and yelling "dekimashita!" for their favorite performers. The performance is an all-day event, as it spans seven hours.

Since I have been focusing on contemporary dance, I was initially not too interested in Nihon-buyo, a Japanese traditional dance that presents movements from centuries of Japanese theater and court dancing. However, I met a 23-year-old Japanese man named Akie at butoh class who studies Nihon-buyo. I was intrigued that people my own age were interested in Nihon-buyo and decided to see it.

The performance was a collection of dances, and each dance could stand apart from the others. The dances either featured a simple story, developing from the relationship between two or three of the performers, or a theme, focusing on one of the seasons or nature. As I sat down, there were a man and woman onstage, both clad in kimono. As they danced, they were accompanied by singers and musicians sitting on stage right. The music was four shamisens (a stringed instrument), a few small taiko drums, and four singers who sometimes spoke. The music was sparse, and a refined atmosphere fell on the stage. The movements were very subtle and small, and not showy. Communication was achieved through the smallest tilt of the head or ripple of the ribcage. The dancers wore kimono and sometimes held a fan or cloth, and the woman wore white facepaint. After the first small dance ended, Akie explained:

"The Japanese like silence, because within it is easy to understand various types of emotion. It says what you want to do and what you think, and what kind of person you are. I think love comes from silence. If it is noisy, we cannot understand. In nihon-buyo, form is important, but more important is emotion and atmosphere."

As for form, the performers kept a low center of gravity and danced with bent knees. The mastery of the bent-kneed position addedto the fluidity of the dance, because their legs could shuffle forward or change the level of body as if their lower body was made of air rather than flesh. "You know nagare?" Akie asked. "It means waterfall." Nagare seemed to be the energy moving through their bodies. Their body and hands kept an upright, regal position. The hip and ribcage are stacked on top of the other, the fingers are extended straightly. This straightness signifies beauty. A broken form, such as the hip separated from the chest, signifies no beauty. Butoh often uses this broken form. "But, no-beauty is beautiful."

Kabuki has had a complicated history,regarding gender, but for the most part, men play all the roles in Kabuki. Nihon-buyo largely comes from Kabuki. On this day, men played women, and women played women. I asked Akie about this, and he said that "when a man becomes woman, it is beautiful." One dance began with a man and a call-girl, who is played by an old man. She carried a caged bird, which she let loose. The woman's movement is more complicated in the body, resulting in softer and more fluid movement. The man still moves fluidly, but with larger,more stately movements. The woman has to move through complicated movement patterns, with subtle leans of the chest and head. The woman is portrayed as gentler.

The power of Nihon-buyo seems to be the tension and atmosphere that it creates. The movement is not showy, but instead small and subtle. The dancer communicates her feelings/motivations/personality through the simplicity of the medium.

Although Japan has a noisy landscape, visually and aurally, this mode of communication is evident in the Japanese style of interpersonal relations. Feelings and thoughts are not fully expressed in words, but instead in their implications and accompanying body language. When we study Japanese culture, we know this restraint as tatemae and honne. Below is a quote from the statistics professor Hayashi Chimio, which is taken from Alex Kerr's book Dogs and Demons:

"When people say 'There's no communication between parents and children,' this is an American way of thinking. In Japan we didn't need spoken communication between parents and children. A glance at the face, a glance at the back, and we understood enough."

Kerr mentions the harmony created by this reserve, but ultimately speaks of the trouble this mode of communication can cause in contemporary Japan. But that "trouble" is a different topic, a chaos in contemporary dance that I did not find in nihon-buyo.