Kabuki

"Odori keiyou Edo-e no sakae 踊形容江戸絵之栄 (Figures in Motion: The Glory of Edo Pictures) (Figures in Motion: The Glory of Edo Pictures)", a triptych print by Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III), ca. 1858. The print depicts the interior of a kabuki theater during a performance. URL: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_2018-3021-210-1-3. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. 

Most salient aspects of kabuki as we now know them were initiated in the later 17th century and fully developed in the 18th. However, practices have never been static. Kabuki has been an art of constant change and adaptation over most of its history, including in the modern period when new kinds of plays (shinpa, shin-kabuki), new production structures, and new relations between performers and audiences marked change.

Edo-period kabuki is often discussed as a performing art of the townspeople (chōnin), those officially and primarily of the artisan and merchant classes who lived in large cities and towns and whose work served samurai and members of their own classes. Samurai were not encouraged to attend kabuki, yet records of various sorts – such as diaries or performance and production-related materials – make clear that many did. 

Kabuki is frequently described as an actor-centered performing art. In the Edo Period, audience members did indeed flock to see outstanding actors, especially those they favored and patronized through their fan clubs, but others as well. Generations of actors, each continually honing their art, portrayed characters associated with the role types they enacted on stage and were celebrated for their extraordinary and defining talents, both during performances and in circulating print materials. However, the “actor-centered” description is perhaps best saved for kabuki of the first three-quarters of the 17th century, when the performers, appearing on temporary stages or borrowed nō stages, were truly the sole focus of the art. Actors always remained central, but as theatre architecture, production methods, and play material diversified in content, form, and complexity beginning in the Genroku Period (1688-1704), actors were embedded in a remarkable system of collaboration among all the professionals involved in a performance. These included those who created sets, props, costumes, music, staging, and of course, the plays.

The four principal genres of Edo-period kabuki plays are jidaimono, sewamono, shosagoto, and buyōgeki. Jidaimono (best translated as period plays, although sometimes given as history plays) and sewamono (contemporary life plays, often given as domestic plays) are also the two principal play genres of the puppet theatre (bunraku or ningyō jōruri), with which kabuki had a competitive and often highly productive relationship via mutual adaptation of each other’s play material and performance practices.

The other two principal play genres, shosagoto (dance pieces) and buyōgeki (a hybrid form combining dance and drama), are kabuki-specific genres. All four genres are created out of a combination of words (dialogue and/or lyrical passages), music (of various styles used for various purposes), dance and stylized movement, and acting. In fact, these are the components of the word kabuki as it later came to be written with three Chinese characters, KA (encompassing the aural component of words, vocal production, and music), BU (the element of movement, including dance), and KI (acting, gesture.)

To fully appreciate and grasp this rich art, historical examination of kabuki’s who (who created, who attended), what (elements of performance, what was performed), where (urban and regional venues and arrangements), and how (creative methods, structures of support) is the purpose of this site.