What is Kabuki?

Kabuki is generally said to have begun around 1603, when a performer known as Izumo no Okuni presented her kabuki odori — the kabuki dance — in Kyoto. The name comes from the verb kabuku, to lean or to tilt: a word for people who lived boldly and flamboyantly, outside convention.

After early restrictions by the shogunate, performance passed to adult male actors, and through the Edo period (1603–1868) kabuki matured into a fully developed theatre. Edo — today's Tokyo — loved the powerful, larger-than-life aragoto style, while the Kyoto–Osaka region refined the softer, more realistic wagoto. Kabuki became the great popular entertainment of its age.

The aragoto style is credited to Ichikawa Danjūrō I, and ever since, the name Ichikawa Danjūrō has been handed down as one of the defining names of Edo kabuki.

The hanamichi — a raised walkway running through the audience — is the most distinctive feature of a kabuki theatre. Actors enter and exit right beside the spectators, dissolving the border between stage and house.

The jōshikimaku, a curtain of black, persimmon, and green vertical stripes, is the visual signature of a kabuki theatre. The moment it is drawn open sideways is one of the quiet thrills of a performance.

At peaks of emotion an actor freezes in a mie — a held, sculptural pose — punctuated by the sharp crack of wooden clappers called tsuke. Together with kumadori, the makeup that paints a character's nature in bold colored lines, these conventions form kabuki's unmistakable style.

Kabuki plays fall broadly into three kinds: jidaimono, history plays set among samurai and court nobles; sewamono, domestic dramas about the lives and loves of Edo townspeople; and shosagoto, dance pieces in which music and movement take center stage.

A day's program usually combines plays of different characters. If you are new, start with a bold aragoto piece or a colorful dance — both carry you along even without understanding a word of Japanese.

Kabuki is still performed almost year-round — at the Kabukiza in Tokyo and in theatres across Japan — and keeps finding new audiences through film, streaming, and social media. In 2008 it was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The Ichikawa Danjūrō line is one of the defining names of Edo kabuki. The family's eighteen signature plays, the Kabuki Jūhachiban, are said to be the origin of ohako — the everyday Japanese word for one's specialty. Today the name is held by Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII, who shares the stage with his daughter, Ichikawa Botan IV, and his son, Ichikawa Shinnosuke VIII.