Nankin_Tamasudare

Nankin Tamasudare

Nankin Tamasudare

Traditional Japanese street performance


Nankin tamasudare (南京玉簾 or 南京玉すだれ, Nankin-tamasudare, lit. "Nanjing Lily") is a kind of traditional Japanese street performance. The name "Nankin tamasudare" is a play on words, as it can mean a kind of flower, as well as mean something like "a wondrous woven screen" (sudare is a kind of screen made by weaving straw with twine.)

Katsumi Asaba performs Nankin Tamasudare
A commercially packaged Nankin Tamasudare set

The performance consists of a person skilled in manipulating special screens made of loosely woven sticks, as well as chanting an accompanying kind of poetry. The performer chants a rhythmic poem as he or she uses the screen to portray the objects in the poetry without stopping. The screen is twisted, folded, extended, etc., in many different ways to portray an object, and then brought back quickly to its original screen shape. The chant usually ends with a pun: kaeru nai has the double meaning that there is no frog (カエル, kaeru) under the willow tree, and the willow tree figure cannot return (帰る, kaeru) easily to the original shape. The story ends with the willow tree figure, with the performer slowly packing up the mat after the performance.

Nankin tamasudare is said to have been a popular form of entertainment that began in the Edo period.[citation needed] Today, it is sometimes performed at Japanese cultural festivals.[1]

Chant

There are many variations of lyrics used for the performance, but below is a set that one might hear when observing a performance. The reference to Tokyo Tower, built in 1958, is a modern addition.

More information Japanese, Rōmaji ...

See also


References

  1. "Participating Groups". Honolulu Festival. 2012. Archived from the original on 2013-01-25.

Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Nankin_Tamasudare, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.