Dancer, founder of kabuki
Izumo no Okuni
出雲阿国 · b. c. 1571 · Azuchi–Momoyama to Edo period
Izumo no Okuni (出雲阿国) was the dancer who started kabuki. Around 1603 she began performing on a dry riverbed in Kyoto. Her bold new show made the whole city talk. Today kabuki is an all-male art, but a woman founded it.
A dancer on the riverbed
Almost everything about Okuni's life is uncertain. She said she was a shrine maiden from the great Izumo Shrine, and she may have danced to raise money for it. In 1603 she and her troupe set up a stage on the dry bed of the Kamo River in Kyoto. Okuni danced in men's clothes, with a sword at her hip. Old paintings show her with a Christian rosary around her neck, worn as a fashion piece. In one popular sketch she played a dashing young man who visits a teahouse girl. Her style was named after the kabukimono. These were young men who wore loud clothes and broke the rules. The word comes from kabuku, "to lean" or "to act strangely."
From her stage to today's kabuki
Other troupes quickly copied her, and many of them were run by courtesans. The shows drew huge, rowdy crowds, and fights broke out over the performers. In 1629 the shogun's government banned women from the stage. Young boys took their place until they were banned too, in 1652. Since then, only adult men have acted in kabuki. Men who play women's roles are called onnagata. Okuni herself disappears from the records soon after her fame. Today a bronze statue of her stands in Kyoto by the Kamo River, near the Minamiza kabuki theatre.
Portrait: Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons
