University of Virginia Library

II

The art of dance has played a richer part
in Chinese and Japanese life than it has in
Europe. In prehistoric days, when men or
women were strongly moved, they got up and
danced. It was as natural a form of self-expression
as improvised verse or song, and

was often combined with both. But the growing
decorum of a polite society tended to
relegate this dancing to occasions of special
inspiration and to professional dancers. These
occasions were roughly of two sorts—formal
entertainments at Court and religious ceremonial.
The former, which survives to this
day in the Mikado's palace, represented the
action of historic heroes, frequently warriors
posturing with sword and spear. This was
accompanied by the instrumental music of a
full orchestra. The religious ceremonial was
of two sorts—the Buddhist miracle plays in
the early temples and the god dances of the
Shinto.

The miracle plays represented scenes from
the lives of saints and the intervention of Buddha
and Bodhisattwa in human affairs. Like the
very earliest forms of the European play,
these were pantomimic, with no special dramatic
text, save possibly the reading of appropriate
scripture. The Japanese miracle plays were
danced with masks; and the temples of Nara
are still full of these masks, which date from
the eighth century. It is clear that many
popular and humorous types must have been
represented; and it is barely possible that
these were remotely derived, through Greco-Buddhist

channels, from the masks of Greek
low comedy. In these plays the god is the
chief actor, sometimes in dramatic relation to
a human companion. The god always wears
a mask. The solo part is established; and
herein the play differs from the Greek, where
the original rite was performed by a group of
priests, or (in the comedy) by goats or fauns.

The most certainly Japanese element of
the drama was the sacred dance in the Shinto
temples. This was a kind of pantomime, and
repeated the action of a local god on his first
appearance to men. The first dance, therefore,
was a god dance; the god himself danced,
with his face concealed in a mask. Here is a
difference between the Greek and Japanese
beginnings. In Greece the chorus danced,
and the god was represented by an altar. In
Japan the god danced alone.

The ancient Shinto dance or pantomime
was probably, at first, a story enacted by the
local spirit, as soloist—a repetition, as it were,
of the original manifestation. Shintoism is
spiritism, mild, nature-loving, much like the
Greek. A local spirit appeared to men in
some characteristic phase. On the spot a
Shinto temple was built, and yearly or monthly
rites, including pantomime, perpetuated the

memory of the event. Such things happened
all over the country; and thus thousands of
different stories were perpetuated in the dances
—hence the wealth of primitive material. The
thing can be seen to-day in every village festival.
Even in great cities like Tokio, every district
maintains its primitive village spirit-worship,
that of some tutelary worthy who enacts the
old story once a year on a specially made
platform raised in the street, about which the
people of the locality congregate. The plays
are generally pantomime without text.

In the Shinto dance the soloist has no
chorus. He performs some religious act of
the spirit, though this is often turned into
rude comedy. This dance takes the form of
a dignified pantomime. It is not an abstract
kicking or whirling, not a mere dervish frenzy,
but is full of meaning, representing divine
situations and emotions, artistically, with restraint
and with the chastening of a conventional
beauty, which makes every posture of
the whole body—head, trunk, hands, and feet
—harmonious in line, and all the transitions
from posture to posture balanced and graceful
in line. A flashlight glimpse across such a
dance is like a flashlight of sculpture; but
the motion itself, like a picture which moves

in colour, is like the art of music. There is an
orchestral accompaniment of flutes, drums, and
cymbals, slow, fast, low, passionate, or accented,
that makes a natural ground-tone. Akin to
these are the moving street pageants, which
are like early European pageants, or even those
of to-day in Catholic countries.

Thus the three sources of the Noh, all
belonging to the first period, are, in the order
of their influence, (1) the Shinto god dance,
(2) the warrior court dance, (3) the Buddhist
sacred pantomime.

As the old Chinese court dances were
modified in the aristocratic life of the second
period, it was natural that lovers of poetry
should begin to add poetical comment to the
entertainment. Thus the next step consisted
in the addition of a text for a chorus to sing
during the solo dance. They were already used
to accompany their verses with the lute.

In the first of the five periods, Japanese
lyric poetry reached its height. It was quite
different from the Chinese, as the language is
polysyllabic, the sentences long and smooth,
the tone gently contemplative. About the year
900, when the capital had been removed to
Kioto, the longer and straggling verse structure
went out of fashion. A tense stanzaic form

had come into almost universal use. This
fashion may be referred to Chinese influence.
Rhyme, however, was not introduced. The
lines, usually of five or seven syllables, are rich
and sonorous. Soon afterwards the passion for
composing and reciting this Japanese poetry
became so powerful among the educated classes,
especially in the cultured aristocracy at Kioto,
where men and women met on equal terms,
that the old court entertainments of dance and
music had to be modified to admit the use of
poetic texts. At first the nobles themselves,
at their feasts or at court ceremonies, sang in
unison songs composed for the occasion. The
next step was to write songs appropriate to
the dances; finally the chorus of nobles
became a trained chorus, accompanied by
court musicians. Thus by the end of the ninth
century there was a body of performers definitely
associated with the court, with a minister
in charge of it. There were two divisions.
The composition of the texts and the composition
of the music and dances were allotted
to different persons. At this stage the old
Chinese subjects fell into the background, and
subjects of Japanese historical interest, or of
more national and lyric nature, were substituted.

Thus arose the court entertainment called
Saibara, which ceased to be practised after the
twelfth century. Most of the details of it are
hopelessly lost, though a few texts remain
from a manuscript collection compiled about
the year 900. The music and dance are
utterly lost, except so far as we can discern a
trace of what they must have been, in the later
practices of the Noh. It is interesting to find
that the very names of some of the pieces in
Saibara are identical with those used in Noh
five centuries later. The Saibara pieces are
very short, much like the lyric poems of the
day; and they are often so lyrical or so personal
as hardly to suggest how they may have
been danced. It is also uncertain whether
these brief texts were repeated over and over,
or at intervals during the long dance, or whether
they were a mere introduction to a dance which
elaborated their thought.[3] The following Saibara
will serve as example:

This new combination of dance and song
soon spread from the court ceremonies to the
religious rites of the god dances in the Shinto
temples, not, however, to the Buddhist, which
were too much under the influence of Hindu
and Chinese thought to care for Japanese verse.
In Shinto dances the subject was already pure
Japanese and fit for Japanese texts; and it
may very well have occurred to some priest, in
one of the thousand Shinto matsuris (festivals)
going on all over the land, to sing a poem concerning
the subject of the dance. By the end
of the ninth century, in the second period, this
custom had become common in the great

Shinto festivals, in the Mikado's private chapel,
and at Kasuga. The texts were sung by a
trained chorus, and here is a second difference
from the line of Greek advance. In Greece
the chorus not only sang but danced; in
Japan the chorus did not dance or act, but
was merely contemplative, sitting at the side.
The songs so sung were called Kagura.

A few examples of these ancient Shinto
texts for Kagura have come down to us.
They are not exactly prayers; they are often
lovely poems of nature, for, after all, these
Shinto gods were a harmless kind of nature
spirit clinging to grottoes, rivers, trees, and
mountains. It is curious to note that the structure
of the texts is always double, like the
Greek strophe and antistrophe. They were
probably sung by a double chorus; and this
is doubtless the basis of the alternation or
choric dialogue.

Here is a kagura, sung by a priestess to her
wand: