Kata as convenient shortcuts to Japanese traditional performance culture http://www.miyagawacho.jp/pdf/kyoodori_leaflet_2019.pdf The highly-codified dance forms, Kata, found throughout Japanese traditional dance and theatre, and even some modern theatre, are shortcuts. They are highly refined and defined, capable of infinite varieties of combinations, at a wide range of levels of energies and paces. They are pre-fabricated material ready to be enlisted to quickly and beautiful put up new creations, lego blocks of beauty and power. This was evident in the annual dances of teenage maiko and middle-age geisha in the Miyagawa-cho Kyo odori held April first in rainy, sakura-strewn Kyoto. The small strip of teahouses just east of the Kawabata Avenue south of Shijo in Kyoto is home to the Miyagawa-cho, one of the “Five Geisha Districts” that includes its more famous neighbor Gion. http://miyako-odori.jp/english/ The Miyako Odori is a pillar of Kyoto’s spring to...
an occasional document of theatrical life in Kyoto and the virtual world at the beginning of the 21st century