立廻り

Tachimawari names the stylized staging of combat—battles, arrest scenes, murders, brawls. Rather than realistic fighting, the aim is beauty: the action flows like dance to offstage music, and the basic pattern sets a single hero against a crowd of constables or soldiers.

Its vocabulary of moves is said to be extensive. The choreography is called tate, devised and taught by specialist fight arrangers known as tateshi. The hero strikes mie at the peaks of the action, the vanquished turn somersaults, and the crack of the tsuke clappers binds it all into a single moving picture.

Tachimawari has entered everyday Japanese. To describe a flamboyant quarrel or a wild scuffle, people say someone "performed an ō-tachimawari"—a grand fight scene—the stage term carried straight into daily speech. That a stylized theatrical combat became the common metaphor for real-life struggle shows how deeply kabuki has marked the language of ordinary life.

On the stage of the Ichikawa Sōke (the head family of the Ichikawa Danjūrō lineage), whose house art is aragoto, the tachimawari is a central attraction. In Shibaraku, one of the Kabuki Jūhachiban, the hero famously takes on a crowd with an enormous sword—aragoto power and the stylized beauty of the fight scene made one.