Kusunokiren – Awaodori Men
Last weekend I visited the Kawasaki Awaodori festival, which I thought would be the last Awaodori event of the year for me, but happily I saw my favorite team the day after in Shinjuku (maybe that will be the last one of the year). The Awaodori festival in Kawasaki (which is a big city just south of Tokyo, in Kanagawa prefecture and has nothing to do with the famous motor vehicle maker Kawasaki) is quite different from other festivals in that they don’t do the normal awaodori parade, instead the festival area is divided into six zones and each team perform a set in one of the zones before moving on to the next zone. So all the performances are set pieces which gives the teams the chance to perform much more complicated and elaborate pieces. All teams have a basic parade routine and at least one set routine but some teams have more, picking the best set routine for the space that they are performing in.
Here’s some male dancers from one of the teams that performed in Kawasaki, Kusunokiren (くすのき連) from Ota Ward (大田区) in southern Tokyo. Kusunoki is the Japanese name for the Camphor tree, the official tree of Ota. The team has its origin in the Ward Office, which means that most members are public officials or staff at the local government offices.
Now, if you’re female and looking for a boyfriend in Japan I recommend getting an awaodori dancer like one of these! These guys are powerful and have a tremendous amount of energy compared to most other guys. Don’t go for perfectionist photographers or people who spend all their lives online! You might not know if just from these photos, but the male dance is incredibly energetic, hour after hour they dance around, jumping, screaming, singing! The basic stance of a male dancer (many females do this dance as well) is very low, in fact the lower the better, which is why foreign dancers have to train even harder. This low, wild, reckless dance contrasts beautifully with the female dance with is tall, stretching, arms up, head held high, noble and graceful. It’s the combination that makes it. But no awaodori would be complete without the music, so I have a drummer and a shamisen player in here as well. There’s usually not enough shamisen players and since their instrument isn’t very loud even a team of four-six shamisen players will get drowned out by a a couple of drummers of flutists. Personally, if I ever joined an awaodori team I would pick up a shamisen and leave the dancing for the really cool guys!
Tokyobling's Blog 
That looks like such fun. I think I’d be boogieing in the streets with them if I were there. But then again I’m just a dancing fool sometimes. It’s a good stress reliever.
LikeLike
Funny you should say fool! The word fool features heavily in the lyrics of all awaodori songs! I’m sure you’d be popular! (^-^)
LikeLike
Some great pictures here. I’ve seen Kusukokiren a couple of times and they are a pretty high level team. Also I live in Ota-ku so they’re quite local for me.
LikeLike
Oh yes, I’ll be swinging down south to your part of town sometime soon I think! Thanks for the kind comment! Unfortunately, a certain team, I won’t mention which one, but they share their name with a certain station on the Yamanote line, hint-hint, performed almost exclusively to the right while I was on the opposite, left side, so I couldn’t get as many good shots as I would have liked to! The two ladies next to me was Oooh! Aaah!-ing and the word Kakkoi featured heavily in their conversation whenever a certain broad shouldered giant of a man danced towards us! (^-^)
LikeLike
I’m sure said broad shouldered giant has never heard that before in that context. 😉 I think “they” performed entirely exclusively to the right. The two main stages both have the teams come on from one side, perform to the right, and then leave from the other side, so that’s the way it was practiced. Normally at a shōtengai they’d decide on a direction, set up, and have the takahari lantern guy back right up against the shop windows so it’s clear which side is front. Having the audience on both sides cordoned off made that problematic to say the least. Hopefully next year they’ll have a comparable road formation that serves audiences 360°…
LikeLike
Haha… Some teams made an effort to perform to the left side as well but but after a few teams had passed I managed to get a spot on the right side. “Managed to get” is a nice way of saying “shouldered my way in” by the way. Looking forward to seeing your 360° set though! (^-^) Photos are on their way.
LikeLike
Awesome! Looking forward to seeing them. I need a good holistic selection of pictures to put on our top page as the ones currently up are all from last year, which had different members and we were all a bit sucky. If I can grab some of yours, that would be excellent.
Haven’t really decided on the road formation yet. There’s a lot to do before next summer, including a lot of fine tuning of our regular formation (not to mention teaching the parts to everybody – we had a lot of new members this season). Thinking about it, we can probably just take the existing formation, turn it 90° and have the members face outwards – shouldn’t be too hard to do. The real killer is the parade formation which has to be short or it holds everyone up, but also has to be interesting. Parade is 95% of the summer festivals, so that needs a lot more emphasis.
Ah, and I also want to start work on a little project of my own – drunken style charade by myself. At the moment our ex-captain comes on and does a little jester style charade by himself, but he doesn’t come to all the festivals, so if it works out we may be able to use it. 🙂 The mrs is asking her Nihon-buyō teacher if she can help choreograph one. 😀
LikeLike
Way cool! I have never seen the jester part done by a foreigner! There’s a few different styles to chose from and I know that some of the more accomplished jesters join different groups on different occasions, there’s also a jester who has his own team (you know him – he always has two flowers in his headdress and wears a mix of a male and a female dancer’s dress). I’ve blogged before about different jesters, and there’s a few young jesters out there as well, for example the one in the Hatsudai team who is both good and probably around your age. Then there’s also the guerilla jester, the guy who follows other teams around while wearing his regular streets clothes. You must have seen him in Koenji.
LikeLike
Kawasaki is the city I grew up! (not in the main town though) I can imagine how vigorous the dances must be just by looking at your photos. And they are government workers? How mismatchingly fun! I used to take shamisen lessons as a kid. I should’ve joined one of the Awaodori teams! (but maybe they didn’t exist when I was there…. ^^;)
LikeLike
I can’t imagine growing up in Kawasaki! It’s really close to Tokyo though. Some of the sandbars and islands in the river bordering Tokyo and Kawasaki are only accessible from the Tokyo side at low water but are still in the jurisdiction of Kawasaki. It’s kind of cool to step back and forth between Tokyo and Kanagawa! Almost like when you’re coming in to Tokyo on the expressway from Saitama and there’s that little loop that takes you 100m into Tokyo and then back to Saitama again a few hundred meters before entering Tokyo properly? I love it when the GPS navigator goes “You are now in Tokyo, you are now in Saitama, you are now in Tokyo”. (^-^) It’s never too late to take up the shamisen, move back and join a team! And force that obstinate daughter of yours to join you!
LikeLike
Haven’t seen that much Awa outside of Tokushima, but I think the jester part is very hard to without comprising the essence of the dance. If you take it too far in the wrong direction (which from videos I’ve seen, the guy with the flowers in his hair certainly does) then it ends up becoming Awa Odori in name only. Fine if that’s the sort of team you’re into, but it’s beer vs happōshu all over again. 😉 The last couple of sets we did at Kawasaki, there was something I wanted to try called “abare-boke”. Our cousins in Tokushima often do it. During the men’s “rampage” part, the gong is hit once and everybody stops, striking a pose. It’s very cool. With abare-boke though, one person fails to notice that everybody’s stopped and carries on dancing, jumping and shouting. He gets scolded by another member (in a comical performance), apologises and asks the musicians for another go (which of course everybody gets right that time). Doesn’t sound that interesting written down, but taking a break for a bit of comic relief just before the climatic finale resonates well with the audience. For two different sets I was the guy that messed it up, and the audience were laughing their heads off! Neither me nor the scolding guy had rehearsed it (I suggested it just as we were about to go on) but we’d both seen it done before so we just instinctively filled the roles playing it by ear and it worked out well. We’ll definitely be keeping that in the routine. 🙂
LikeLike
It seems that miming is essential to the awaodori jester. My favorite jesters are adept at miming drinking, eating and even sitting at a table while dancing! But there’s a few people who have tried taking it in other directions, like the flutist who’s dancing like one of the faeries out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the bald shamisen player who does a wonderful rock’n’roll routine. Very few drummers seems to be involved in jesting though, the only thing I can think of is a drummer in Hyokkoren that has a rubber duck on wheels following him around. Either you go purist and try to excel at what is really awaodori or you go for the laughs and create something of your own, luckily there’s room for both!
I have actually never seen the abare-boke in the wild but your description sounds great! I think it’s an added dimension if you do it as a foreign dancer as well. All kinds of boke can be hugely comic though, if timed right. If overdone on the other hand, it’s easy to mistake for pure incompetence! But the way you do it twice and get it right the second time, hopefully ending in a triumphant high pose while the others almost form a circle around you, keeping very low, would be brilliant. I can imagine the crowds cheering the poor boke-dancer! (^-^;)
LikeLike
Yeah, matter of taste really. We’re pretty purist, as are most of the professional teams, but that’s a fairly recent phenomena.
With the abare-boke, I found we actually got a better applause than normal when we get it right the second time (after messing it up the first). I guess it’s perception disruption. I’d been quite prominent in an earlier part and hammed the comedy acting right up to pantomime levels so I doubt anybody thought it was unintentional, but it still had the same effect. The other part that makes it work is after asking for a second chance, there’s a single ring of the gong and we all reset our dramatic poses ready to go. We could hear the collective gasps suck all the air out of the area when we did that. Good times!
Another abare-boke that our Tokushima cousins did with last year’s routine was to have everybody stop on the chime as they’re supposed to, but then the team captain (who’s rather large and a very comical character) sneaks onto the stage and exaggeratedly bangs her foot on the ground (this is timed with a single beat of a large drum for effect). Everybody mistakes this for the start of the next set, loses their composure and falls over. They get up and do “aw come one?!?!” gestures towards the team captain who sniggers and leaves the stage. This year they went back to one guy messing it up for the main formation, but they had another curious take during the “wa odori” (that’s something we don’t really see in Tokyo – it’s a kind of freestyle formation where the different dance parts try out new ideas in front of an audience to see what response they get, how it works, and generally have fun with it). After the chime, everybody stops and poses, then one of the onna odori laughingly runs on from the side and hits her bottom against the bottom of one of the otoko odori guys, who falls over and rolls on the ground. It was funny because it was unexpected, but it didn’t really work that well.
LikeLike
Comedy in dance, must be very well choreographed to work, otherwise it will look just like people fooling around for larks. I think it is obvious you’d get a better reaction as you introduced an element of tension, you created an interest in the otherwise very passive Kanagawa audience. I’m also not surprised that the joke with the onna odori didn’t catch, their role is to be the elegance rather than the joke of the team. I guess here I am being conservative? (^-^;) The beauty of the comedy in awaodori is that it’s a totally different tradition, no Charlie Chaplins, no Buster Keatons, no Mimes, no Manzai. It’s also always without exception totally benevolent, which is why I am a bit skeptical to pretending to be angry or upset with other dancers. Abare-boke works in itself I think, it doesn’t really need any interaction with the captain, you might not get the best reactions from the crowds but the connoisseur will pick it up in no time. Also, the jester is the only role that can confidently interact with the crowd, above the drummers flirting with pretty women (they always do) or the dancers smiling when they catch the eye of a spectator (that is what keeps awaodori so captivating).
The wa-odori sounds interesting. The one messing about thing I love is at the very end when the rhythm section leader can chose to cool things down or ramp it up for the last explosion of movement. It’s usually the biggest crowd pleaser of them all!
LikeLike