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(★)(Translated by James R. Brandon)(Titulo original : 出雲の阿国 [Izumo no Okuni, 1972] To be kabuki in Japan once meant to be outrageous, daring, flaunting convention. It was in sixteenth-century Japan, as Shakespeare was writing his masterworks half a world away, that the spirit of Kabuki theater was born out of a single woman´s passions and dedication to her art. In´Kabuki Dancer´, the popular Japanese novelist Sawako Ariyoshi retells the story of Okuni, the legendary temple dancer who first performed among jugglers and freak shows on a stage along the riverbank in the heart of the Imperial city of Kyoto. Blending the rhythms and movements of religious festivals with the words of popular love songs, she and her troupe became sensations. Their affairs and rivalries, infatuations and jealousies, were transformed into the very fabric of their performance, as it began its evolution into the classic drama of today. Against a backdrop of civil war, dynastic conflict, and social turmoil, Okuni and her companions and lovers, together with their audience of artisans, merchants, and aristocrats, struggled to survive the birth pangs of a glorious--yet sometimes deadly--new age. Based on fact, transmuted into powerful and moving artistic expression, ´Kabuki Dancer´ is at once a turbulent love story, a re-creation of an exotic and colorful historical period, and an almost mythic representation of the miraculous moment in which an immortal artform appears.／ ◆Sawako Ariyoshi was born in 1931 in Wakayama, Japan. As a student she developed a deep interest in the theater, both modern drama and traditional Kabuki, and her own plays are widely performed in Japan. She first rose to prominence as a writer of short stories, but went on to build an impressive reputation as a novelist dealing with crucial social issues. She died in 1984.／ James R. Brandon was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1927, and received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin. Professor Brandon saw his first Kabuki play in Tokyo in 1951, and subsequently has seen perhaps a thousand plays on the Kabuki stage. He has written or edited thirteen books on Asian theater, including ´Chushingura : Studies in Kabuki and the Puppet Theater´ and ´Kabuki : Five Classic Plays´, and is currently Professor of Asian Theater at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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