Kabuki

9 Pages 2203 Words

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Another important characteristic of kabuki is that it is an inclusive and accumulative theater. Born at the turn of the 16th century, it incorporated parts of all the preceding theater forms of Japan. Among the traditional arts from which kabuki has drawn for stage techniques and repertoire are the noh drama and the kyogen play (the comic interlude presented between noh performances). Today, the number of Japanese who appreciate noh proper is far smaller than that of those who favor kabuki, but those kabuki plays adapted from or inspired by noh plays enjoy a wide popularity and constitute an essential portion of the entire kabuki repertoire.
Another area from which kabuki has borrowed is the puppet theater, referred to as bunraku, the development of which roughly paralleled that of earlier kabuki. In kabuki, the primary importance has always been placed on the actor rather than on any other aspect of the art, such as literary value of a play. During the early 17th century, some of the great writers, including Monzaemon Chikamatsu, often called the Shakespeare of Japan, left kabuki with its actors' domination and turned to the puppet theater where their creative genius was more or less unrestricted. As a result, there was a period when puppets overshadowed actors and the puppet theater was more popular than kabuki. To meet this competition, kabuki adopted virtually all the puppet plays. Thus, today more than half of the conventional kabuki plays except for a group of dance-dramas are of bunraku origin. A final example of kabuki's all-embracing acquisitiveness came at the end of the 19th century, which added an element of literary realism to the art.
Until kabuki, the people of Japan had never seen theater that included incredible color, glamour, excitement and general extraordinariness. In these qualities, perhaps no theater elsewhere in the world can be likened to the kabuki dra...