For something new and different, we attended the Miyako Odori yesterday at the Gion Kobu Kaburenjo (theater) in the famous Gion district of Kyoto.
The Miyako Odori is a performance, maybe one could call dance, or maybe stylized choreographed movements. A traditional spring occurrence, specifically April, every year since 1872. The very first performance was developed as part of the Kyoto Exposition.
No photos allowed during the performance so all photos below are courtesy of miyako-odori.jp
There are around 60 performers, all geisha or maiko (apprentice geisha). Along the right side of the stage were a line of geisha playing a stringed instrument (a shamisen I think) and singing. The singing was, um, non-melodic (to my western ears) and from what I’ve researched may be naugata (long songs) and kouta (little songs). The vocals incorporated little grunts and gasps that seemed to go with the storyline which we could only guess at.
Along the left side of the stage (I couldn’t see because of my seat location) were geisha playing a woodwind instrument (perhaps the shinobue) which could hit some pretty shrill notes.
The stylized movements were slow and graceful. There were eight scenes without the curtain ever coming down. Large set pieces and backdrops rolled in from the side or up through the floor or down from the ceiling as the scenes progressed through the seasons.
The program is newly developed every year to illustrate traditional Japanese tales. We didn’t get the English audio guide (we should have, we realized, just after the performance started) so we sort of guessed that this story revolved around a fisherman taking in a young woman who arrived in a clam shell from the sea. There was a sword fight (slow motion) which had to do with the woman.
The performance was only an hour. I’ll just come out and say it…thankfully. The audience was primarily Japanese and every performance sold out. I bought our tickets back in February when I first read about it. There were only a few seats left back then. Three performances a day, every day in April. I wonder if different geisha rotated through or the same had to bear the brunt every performance. That’d be brutal.
