DANCE : Among the World’s Treasures, the Kabukiza

A sense of ritual has always shaped Japanese theater, but the notables converging on the Kabukiza playhouse this chilly winter morning in taxicabs, subway cars, limousines and even rickshaws expect something out of the ordinary. On this day a brief ceremony that occurs only once a century has brought the entire Grand Kabuki family together.

Curtain times all over Tokyo will be delayed because of the event, this ritual of thanksgiving honoring the enduring stature of the Kabukiza, a 2,600-seat bastion of cultural tradition located at the heart of the hyper-garish Ginza business district.

Since its opening in 1889, the playhouse has been destroyed by fire, earthquake and bombs but each time it emerged from the rubble as a showcase for the greatest Kabuki performers. Today the performers and the company’s invited guests have come to pay tribute.

Maverick Kabuki innovator Ennosuke Ichikawa III has returned from his latest European tour. Enlightened conservative Senjaku Nakamura II (scheduled to visit Los Angeles in July) is back from performances in Kyoto--both of them just in time to join more than 100 colleagues kneeling on platforms arranged across the 87-foot width of the stage against a backdrop of red and white stripes.

But the performers are mostly witnesses today as plans for the anniversary season are delivered, with extravagant formality, to the senior craftsmen who supervise the company’s settings, costumes, wigs, properties and lighting.

“Maybe we should call the Kabukiza ‘Japan’s treasure,’ ” says the peerless specialist in female roles, Utaemon Nakamura VI, the head of the actors’ association and one of the Kabuki’s four designated Living National Treasures. But, the 71-year-old actor emphasizes, “Kabuki isn’t just Japan’s Kabuki (any longer), but the world’s Kabuki.”

As if to make Utaemon’s pride seem understated, Tokyo is concurrently displaying some of Kabuki’s most brilliant facets and influences: examples of antique all-star Kabuki, controversial avant-garde Kabuki and dated anti-Kabuki plays turned smash hits because of the participation of a young Kabuki favorite. There’s even a ballet by French choreographer Maurice Bejart based on a Kabuki classic.

Common to all these productions: the Japanese love of spectacle and the theme of fidelity, to duty, to relationships, to a commitment or a code of being.

In the month preceding its centennial rite, the Kabukiza has hosted the annual kao-mise (face-showing) potpourri featuring the company’s greatest stars--including all of the Living National Treasures and many esteemed performers of the younger generation.

As on the now-frequent Kabuki tours of America, excerpts and short plays from the traditional repertory make up these daily programs (four plays at 11 a.m., three different ones at 4:30 p.m.). Simultaneous translations (via rented headsets) keep foreigners alert to both plot points and the special circumstances of these historic performances.

Thus the comeback of the revered 78-year-old Shoroku Onoe II from illness and grief over the death of his son, Tatunosuke, causes translator Nanette Geller to insert a casting comment in her earphone guide to “Sanmon Gosan no Kiri,” an 18th-Century play about a defiant Kyoto outlaw:

“Two policemen come to capture the bandit,” Geller announces at the appropriate moment in the action. “In honor of Shoroku’s recovery, these minor characters are played by major stars--Danjuro Ichikawa (XII) and Takao Kataoka (I) . . . (his nemesis) Hisayoshi is played by Baiko Onoe VII who, like Shoroku, is a Living National Treasure.”

Danjuro, Takao and Baiko appear in vehicles of their own on the same programs, as do Utaemon (incomparable in the extended mad scenes of “Hototogisu Kojo no Rakugetsu”) and fellow Living National Treasure, Nizaemon Kataoka XIII, age 83, who makes a spectacular entrance in clouds of smoke via a trapdoor elevator as the evil magician in “Meiboku Sendai Hagi.”

Also prominently cast: Kanzaburo Nakamura XVII, a much loved Living National Treasure who died last month at 78. Kanzaburo portrayed the disowned playboy in “Kuruwa Bunsho,” reconciling with the courtesan he loves (Baiko) in scenes of sly wit and the most delicate debauchery: Kabuki foreplay.

These aged, endearing stars confirm Kabuki’s link to its gloriously disreputable past: its origins in a lively, licentious riverbank dance performance in 1603, its involvement with prostitution (female and male) in the early years, its evolution into a multidisciplinary, all-male idiom in which sex is still often the central preoccupation.

However, the strangest manifestation of Kabuki eroticism can be glimpsed at the prestigious National Theatre, where a cast headed by Koshiro Matsumoto IX is performing Yukio Mishima’s last play in a revival of the provocative, nouveau-Kabuki staging that Mishima directed in 1969.

Based on a 19th-Century novel about a warrior’s adventures, Mishima’s “Chinsetsu Yumihari Zuki” is a play obsessed with ritual suicide (a form of death Mishima chose for himself in 1970, a year after the premiere). And though the text and production incorporate the most venerable Kabuki conventions, the approach to violence often proves compulsively graphic compared to the stylized bloodletting of Grand Kabuki.

At one point, right after a quaint, dance-like swimming passage, a minor character disembowels himself and an enormous spurt of crimson liquid shoots all over him and across the stage. No symbolic red ribbons here, no exquisite stylization--just a dark stain on an aqua seascape.

However, Mishima’s most outrageous adaptation of Grand Guignol (as opposed to Grand Kabuki) violence occurs in a sequence where four women drug a male enemy, strip him naked in the snow and, while their leader plays a nostalgic melody on the koto, execute their helpless but conscious victim by pounding bamboo nails into his body with wooden hammers.

This harrowing action is prolonged into a sensual reverie, exploiting the fullest contrasts between the man’s nudity and the womens’ elegant formal kimonos, between his screams and the astringent music, between the textures and colors of blood, flesh and snow--all gleaming, all eventually mingled.

A lyric and even seductive dream of pain, the scene resembles those Renaissance paintings of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian that were far more concerned with depicting male beauty in extremis than conveying the suffering of a man who died for his beliefs.

Although “Chinsetsu Yumihari Zuki” sexualizes horror in the manner of such traditional plays as “Kasane” (presented in Los Angeles on the 1985 Grand Kabuki tour), it is utterly unlike classic Kabuki in its volatile mixture of old theatrical forms and the most contemporary expressive priorities. And, of course, the circumstances of Mishima’s death now makes its dark view of human struggle even blacker.

Meanwhile, at the Shibashi Enbujo Theater, near the Kabukiza, the company’s superb young specialist in women’s roles, Bando Tamasaburo V, has been starring in a hit commercial repertory of shimpa --the so-called new school of modern drama that arose in the late 19th Century in opposition to Kabuki.

To an unenlightened barbarian from the West, shimpa looks like archaic, overproduced soap opera. However Tamasaburo is an artist of remarkable originality: He develops a new agenda for the rambling naturalistic saga “Nyo Nin Aishi Tojin Okichi,” in which he plays the kind of free-spirited woman who habitually frees birds from cages and, even in need, won’t accept a handout. (Offered money, she contemptuously uses the bills to light her pipe.)

The notion of a male portraying the heroine of this proto-feminist vehicle may seem paradoxical, but in fact, the classic Japanese ideal of femininity has been greatly shaped by generations of male actresses in the Kabuki. Even butoh , the radical contemporary dance-theater idiom, hasn’t really repudiated the submissive stereotype.

So Tamasaburo’s earthy, easygoing portrayal of someone hell bent on being her own woman represents an important political statement: a deconstruction of Kabuki artifice about female identity.

Tamasaburo was reportedly one of Bejart’s consultants in his adaptation of the 11-act, 18th-Century samurai epic “Chushingura” into a full-evening work for the Tokyo Ballet called “The Kabuki.”

Working with Toshiro Mayuzumi (who composed the score for George Balanchine’s ballet “Bugaku” in 1962), Bejart assembles a mosaic of Eastern and Western idioms that uses the convoluted revenge plot of the original play to comment on contemporary alienation and the need to believe in something greater than ourselves.

As in his recent ballet about Alexander the Great, Bejart makes his protagonist belong to our time--here depicted as the Japan of high tech, hard rock and rootless youth. However, he is soon ensnared in the events of the past.

Picking up an ancient sword, this young man suddenly becomes a witness to the passionate rivalries and betrayals of “Chushingura” and, at a crucial juncture in the plot, steps into the pivotal role of the loyal Yuranosuke--a role that will inevitably involve him in acts of vengeance and self-sacrifice.

His fate, however, is less the issue than his absorption in a cause--a point made clear in the ritualistic finale, set to the last movement of Mayuzumi’s “Nirvana Symphony,” in which 46 white-clad ronin (masterless samurai) face death--newly avenged, purified, selfless--under the emblem of the rising sun.

Bejart choreographed the role of Yuranosuke for the French firebrand Eric Vu-An, but Chikahisa Natsuyama also danced it in the first (1986) season and does so again in a new Tokyo Ballet tour of Japan sponsored by Amway. He clearly lacks the startling intensity and bravura technique that Vu-An displayed in an excerpt from the ballet at UCLA early last year, but his performance at the Kan’i Hoken Hall in Tokyo does successfully trace the character’s transfiguration through duty.

Unfortunately, much of the storytelling in “The Kabuki” remains literal and simplistic. The movement style is seldom cohesive: Gestural elements are often Japanese while the footwork stays staunchly Franco-Russian. Bejart being Bejart, there are also narcissistic borrowings from his own “Bolero” and “Le Marteau sans maitre,” men gratuitously stripped to the legal limit, plus digressions and lacunae galore.

Still, he is right on target in his premise: It is incredibly easy to become swept up in the dynastic, larger-than-life world of Grand Kabuki, a world where the concept of loyalty can be stronger than the will to survive.

“We are all ronin , orphans of time,” Bejart has said. No wonder the Kabukiza feels like home.