Kabuki Stage Machinery and the Art of Keren: Revolving Stages, Trapdoors and Flying Actors of Edo
The wooden clappers ring out, sharp and clear, through the playhouse. After a moment of silence, the great thief Ishikawa Goemon strikes a dramatic pose on a rooftop — and the whole stage glides silently around, carrying him away, until a street in the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter appears in full cherry blossom. The Edo crowd erupts in cheers.
Behind this kind of moment stands a body of stagecraft that kabuki developed over four centuries: extraordinary stage machinery, and keren, the art of astonishing and delighting an audience. The revolving stage, the rising platform and the flying actor now seem normal in musicals and large theatres. Yet many of these devices were first put to practical use in the kabuki theatres of eighteenth-century Edo-period Japan.
While Western theatre moved toward separating audience and stage behind a proscenium arch, kabuki pushed the stage into the audience with the hanamichi, a raised walkway through the seats. Actors and spectators shared the same breath. How did the playhouses of Edo come to build such a mechanical, acrobatic world? The answer lies in the dedication of playwrights and stage craftsmen who staked everything on thrilling their audience.
Namiki Shozo and the Revolving Stage
The most celebrated invention is the mawari-butai, the revolving stage, credited to the Osaka playwright Namiki Shozo (1730–1773) in 1758.
Before it, changing a scene meant closing the curtain and having stagehands carry the sets away and rebuild them. These breaks drained the pace of a story and the audience’s concentration. Shozo cut a circle into the stage floor and built two different sets back to back on the disc; turning it from below swapped one scene for the other in an instant.
The mechanism was driven from naraku, the dark space beneath the stage. The word comes from the Buddhist term for the lowest hell. With no electricity or steam power, a dozen or so stagehands pushed heavy wooden poles around a great axle to turn the stage by hand.
The revolving stage made performances move faster. A viewpoint could shift from a parlor to a garden in a moment, scenery could glide like a ship on the waves, and the space could seem to bend while an actor kept performing. Revolving stages reached European theatre in 1896, at the Royal Theatre in Munich — nearly 140 years after Shozo’s invention.
Seri and Suppon: Rising from the Underworld
Next to the revolving stage came the seri, a lift that raises and lowers part of the stage floor like an elevator — also attributed to Namiki Shozo. A large seri could lift an entire castle or mansion set; a small one could bring a single actor into view. The most famous example is the rising gate of Nanzen-ji in Sanmon Gosan no Kiri: the upper floor of the huge gate slowly rises from below, and Goemon appears, smoking a long pipe. A flat stage is suddenly transformed into a tower in the sky.
About a third of the way along the hanamichi from the stage is a small square trapdoor called the suppon, named for the way a turtle (suppon) pops out its head. It was not an ordinary entrance. Only beings from the other world — spirits, sorcerers, ghosts, the transformed fox or badger — used it, appearing or vanishing in smoke to the rumble of drums. When the villain Nikki Danjo changes from a giant rat into human form in Meiboku Sendai Hagi, the suppon lets the audience feel the supernatural at very close range.
Flying Actors and Quick Changes
From the late Edo period, kabuki spectacle grew bolder still. Two highlights were chunori, flying through the air, and hayagawari, the quick change.
In chunori, an actor is fitted with a safety line and travels on ropes and pulleys from the stage over the audience, all the way to the top gallery. Actors playing fox spirits or tengu flew over the lantern-lit playhouse as cherry petals fell, a sight to rival a modern theme-park ride.
Hayagawari lets one actor play several roles in a flash. In the ghost play Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan, tricks such as the “door-board reversal,” in which a body tied to a board is swapped front to back, were devised to catch the audience’s eye and mind off guard. Costume tricks such as hikinuki, where a thread is pulled to change a garment’s pattern in an instant, are the work of skilled craftspeople. These were not mere tricks; they were refined as dramatic devices to reveal sudden turns of plot and a character’s true identity.
The Spirit of Entertainment That Lives On
As kabuki came to be treated as a classical art after the Meiji period, keren was at times looked down on. But revivals such as Super Kabuki, created by the third Ichikawa Ennosuke, show that the essence of kabuki is to surprise, to help people forget everyday worries, and to entertain from the heart.
From a plain wooden stage, kabuki grew into a space that revolves, rises, flies and plays with light and dark. The ingenuity that Edo stage craftsmen assembled in the gloom of naraku, with timber and rope, still lives in theatres around the world.
Enjoy Kabuki with Mori no Akari
The Mori no Akari Series offers a kabuki coloring set with colored-pencil samples as a download edition, so you can color kumadori face paint and the splendor of the stage yourself. The product name in the store appears in Japanese, and the printed edition currently ships within Japan only.
▶ View the Kabuki Coloring Download Edition, Set 01
Related Reading
- Kumadori in Kabuki: The Colors of Heroes and Villains
- Kabuki Coloring Pages: What to Know Before You Download
References
- Hattori Yukio, Kabuki no Kozo, Heibonsha, 1989
- Kawatake Toshio, Kabuki Biron, University of Tokyo Press, 1989
- Gunji Masakatsu, Kabuki Yoshikiron, Hakusuisha, 1991