|
Fuji Musume
is a kabuki Shosagoto, dance with lyrics written by Katsui Genpachi, choreography by Fujima Taisuke and music by Kineya Rokusaburô IV, first performed in 1826. Originally part of a set of five different dances performed as a sequence, is the only one that has survived. The first time these dances were staged in 1826 at the Nakamura-za in Edo, actor Seki Sanjuro II performed all of them as part of his farewell performance. One of many revisions to the play, playwright and actor created a new, more supernatural version of the dance, staged for the first time in March 1937 at the Kabuki-za. In this version, the maiden becomes the spirit of the wisteria. The next year, performances of the dance by at the Minami-za in Kyoto and at the Kabuki-za in Tokyo, helped popularized the dance. remains a popular and famous dance in the kabuki repertoire. Characters The titular Wisteria Maiden is the only character seen in the play, and is accompanied by a musical ensemble of singers, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Utagawa Kunisada
Utagawa Kunisada ( ja, 歌川 国貞; 1786 – 12 January 1865), also known as Utagawa Toyokuni III (, ), was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist. He is considered the most popular, prolific and commercially successful designer of ukiyo-e woodblock printing in Japan, woodblock prints in 19th-century Japan. In his own time, his reputation far exceeded that of his contemporaries, Hokusai, Hiroshige and Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Kuniyoshi. Evaluation of Kunisada in art history At the end of the Edo period (1603–1867), Hiroshige, Kuniyoshi and Kunisada were the three best representatives of the Japanese color woodcut in Edo (capital city of Japan, now Tokyo). However, among European and American collectors of Japanese prints, beginning in the late 19th and early 20th century, all three of these artists were actually regarded as rather inferior to the greats of classical ukiyo-e, and therefore as having contributed considerably to the downfall of their art. For this reason, some referred to t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shamisen
The , also known as the or (all meaning "three strings"), is a three-stringed traditional Japanese musical instrument derived from the Chinese instrument . It is played with a plectrum called a bachi. The Japanese pronunciation is usually but sometimes when used as a suffix, according to regular sound change (e.g. ). In Western Japanese dialects and several Edo period sources, it is both written and pronounced as . The construction of the varies in shape, depending on the genre in which it is used. The instrument used to accompany kabuki has a thin neck, facilitating the agile and virtuosic requirements of that genre. The one used to accompany puppet plays and folk songs has a longer and thicker neck instead, to match the more robust music of those genres. Construction The is a plucked stringed instrument. Its construction follows a model similar to that of a guitar or a banjo, with a neck and strings stretched across a resonating body. The neck of the is fret ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nagauta
is a kind of traditional Japanese music played on the and used in kabuki theater, primarily to accompany dance and to provide reflective interludes. History It is uncertain when the was first integrated into kabuki, but it was sometime during the 17th century; Malm argues that it was probably before 1650. The first reference to as music appears in the second volume of (1703). However, there is no musical notation in this collection, meaning that it is only possible to make observations about lyrics, which tend to be longer than other texts. By the 18th century, the had become an established instrument in kabuki, when the basic forms and classifications of crystallized as a combination of different styles stemming from the music popular during the Edo period. is considered a subset of . Many of the "classic" repertoire was composed in the 19th century, which is the time of the best-known composers as well. Many pieces are based on Noh theater, partly due to the n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tokyo
Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 million residents ; the city proper has a population of 13.99 million people. Located at the head of Tokyo Bay, the prefecture forms part of the Kantō region on the central coast of Honshu, Japan's largest island. Tokyo serves as Japan's economic center and is the seat of both the Japanese government and the Emperor of Japan. Originally a fishing village named Edo, the city became politically prominent in 1603, when it became the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate. By the mid-18th century, Edo was one of the most populous cities in the world with a population of over one million people. Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the imperial capital in Kyoto was moved to Edo, which was renamed "Tokyo" (). Tokyo was devastate ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kyoto
Kyoto (; Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in Japan. Located in the Kansai region on the island of Honshu, Kyoto forms a part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kobe. , the city had a population of 1.46 million. The city is the cultural anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area known as Greater Kyoto, a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) home to a census-estimated 3.8 million people. Kyoto is one of the oldest municipalities in Japan, having been chosen in 794 as the new seat of Japan's imperial court by Emperor Kanmu. The original city, named Heian-kyō, was arranged in accordance with traditional Chinese feng shui following the model of the ancient Chinese capital of Chang'an/Luoyang. The emperors of Japan ruled from Kyoto in the following eleven centuries until 1869. It was the scene of several key events of the Muromachi period, Sengoku period, and the Boshin War, such as the Ōnin War, the Ho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Minami-za
is the primary kabuki theatre in Kyoto, Japan. It was founded in 1610 as . The current building, with a 1,086 seat capacity, was built in 1929. History The Minami-za is one of the earliest of the seven officially-licensed kabuki theatres built in the early Edo period (1615-1623) in the Shijo Kawara area in Kyoto; the theatre pre-dates those of Tokyo and Osaka. The current Minami-za theatre was built in 1929 in the architectural style of the Momoyama period, with a gabled roof and a traditional turret marking the official approval of the government. In 1991, after the end of the Shōwa period Shōwa may refer to: * Hirohito (1901–1989), the 124th Emperor of Japan, known posthumously as Emperor Shōwa * Showa Corporation, a Japanese suspension and shock manufacturer, affiliated with the Honda keiretsu Japanese eras * Jōwa (Heian ..., the interior was drastically refurbished and modern stage mechanism was installed. In 1996, the Minami-za was registered as a Japanese Tan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wisteria
''Wisteria'' is a genus of flowering plants in the legume family, Fabaceae (Leguminosae), that includes ten species of woody twining vines that are native to China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Southern Canada, the Eastern United States, and north of Iran. They were later introduced to France, Germany and various other countries in Europe. Some species are popular ornamental plants. The aquatic flowering plant commonly called wisteria or 'water wisteria' is in fact ''Hygrophila difformis'', in the family Acanthaceae. Etymology The botanist Thomas Nuttall said he named the genus ''Wisteria'' in memory of the American physician and anatomist Caspar Wistar (1761–1818). Both men were living in Philadelphia at the time, where Wistar was a professor in the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Questioned about the spelling later, Nuttall said it was for "euphony", but his biographer speculated that it may have something to do with Nuttall's friend Charles Jones Wister S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kabuki-za
in Ginza is the principal theater in Tokyo for the traditional ''kabuki'' drama form. History The Kabuki-za was originally opened by a Meiji era journalist, Fukuchi Gen'ichirō. Fukuchi wrote kabuki dramas in which Ichikawa Danjūrō IX and others starred; upon Danjūrō's death in 1903, Fukuchi retired from the management of the theater. The theater is now run by the Shochiku Corporation which took over in 1914. The original Kabuki-za was a wooden structure, built in 1889 on land which had been either the Tokyo residence of the Hosokawa clan of Kumamoto, or that of Matsudaira clan of Izu. The building was destroyed on October 30, 1921, by an electrical fire. The reconstruction, which commenced in 1922, was designed to "be fireproof, yet carry traditional Japanese architectural styles", while using Western building materials and lighting equipment. Reconstruction had not been completed when it again burned down during the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake. Rebuilding was finall ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fujima Taisuke
Fujima (written: 藤間 or 藤真) is a Japanese surname Officially, among Japanese names there are 291,129 different Japanese surnames, as determined by their kanji, although many of these are Japanese orthography, pronounced and romanization of Japanese, romanized similarly. Conversely, some surnames w .... Notable people with the surname include: *, Japanese dancer *, Japanese handball player *, Japanese dancer and actress *, Japanese actress {{surname Japanese-language surnames ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
.jpg "Click for more on -> Utagawa Kunisada")
_29_Apr%2C_2009_-_panoramio.jpg "Click for more on -> Wisteria")
