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ekusudeiApologies for the delay, especially as this and the next are my two favorite chapters. This one is just a really fascinating look at the Central and South American Tour, and the next is an honest emotional telling of what a troupe transfer can feel like.
18 ~*~ First Foreign Performance
This is jumping around in the story, but in the autumn of the previous year (my 5th year), I participated for the first time in a foreign tour.
The performances took place in the three locations of Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and San Paulo, and were scheduled over forty days.
It was my first trip abroad in my life.
Moreover, I was getting paid and going for free, how lucky!
Which was as far as I thought it over, foolish me.
But of course the reality wasn't so sweet.
It was a select performance with performers from all four troupes, two members of Senka, Jun Mitsuki-san as top, 35 members in all, with the performance composed of an hour-long Japanese-style revue and an hour-long Western-style revue.
(A normal performance contains about seventy members in one troupe. I'd like you to imagine just how difficult it is to then to do a performance each night with half that number of people.)
The contents of the performance were nearly the same as the previous Soviet Tour, so we learned it while constantly watching the video.
All of the choreography was crammed into one week. The inside of my head became saturated with the memorized choreography -- in other words, I became like a sea urchin, going into rehearsals which hardened the choreography, being shouted at and belittled by the choreographers, bathed in a mountain of sweat. They were tough rehearsal days that I can't speak of now without tears.
* * *
After that, the ordeal waiting for me was the 'maiko' ¹.
When the curtain lifted on the foreign tour I had gone into so innocently, it began with maiko.
Me, so very far from anyone's image of a maiko.
168 centimeters of height plus wooden clogs and a wig easily put me at 190 centimeters, and a giant maiko was born.
And the director or choreographers had lost their minds, and lined up the maiko front and center.
In other words, when all twelve maiko were lined up on stage, the short musumeyaku were on both ends, and the tall otokoyaku maiko were in the middle.
Of all the members in that tour, I was the tallest, and I was placed in a prominent spot.
It wasn't that I didn't like standing out, but I hadn't wanted to stand out as a maiko. I'd call it the wrong kind of attention-grabbing.
If I took one step:
"You, the large maiko~! Can't you walk more sweetly~!?" they shouted at me countlessly.
Although they're the one's saying it's no good, weren't they the ones who made me the maiko?
At any rate, why do Takarazuka members like pointing out people's faults so?
All of the upperclassmen who were in the scene with us laughed to see us dressed as maiko.
Isn't it enough that the maiko looks out of place in these times?
Even though we weren't getting in anyone's way, and were diligently (?) portraying the role we had been given....
Amongst the foreign audience, whether because of kindheartedness or dread, not a single person pointed at us and laughed.
Since the maiko business, I came to love the foreign audiences.
Second row, second from the left.
After more than a month of grueling rehearsals, after a trial performance in the Grand Theater for the Japanese audience, I stuffed my trunk full of my beloved senbei² and turned toward foreign shores deep in the autumn of 1978, on October 6th.
The first soil was Mexico.
A land of sun and cacti, or so I expected, but because of unseasonable weather every day massive clouds filled a leaden sky, and it was bleak.
I had heard from others that Mexico was a place with a very thin atmosphere. For someone with poor circulation like me (not that I'm saying my head is weak!), once I began dancing my fingers and toes turned purple, and it was a terrifying place.
There were oxygen tanks in the wings of the stage to use in case of emergency, but I (being pitiable), couldn't struggle to them.
In the final scene of the Western-style show, after dancing like mad, there was a part of the choreography where we throw ourselves down to the floor.
The floor of the stage was slanted, so I rolled weakly without power, and when I looked at the ceiling I could just see the ceiling over the audience.
There was a painting of angels with harps.
My eyesight was swimming, and every day I thought I was Ascending then and there.
Come to think of it, I remember being told at the informational meeting before we left, "The air is a little thin, but they've even held the Olympics there, so you'll be fine."
What was fine about this!? At least a hundred people must have died running the marathon! In any case, I'm glad I lived to return home. Very glad.
* * *
Our next stop, Argentina, had beautiful cities, and the weather was also lovely with lots of air, so I was raring to go, but in truth the performance space lying in wait for us was a movie theater.
More than a regular theater, the stage and dressing rooms were extremely cramped, and if pushed I'd say-- No, without excuses, it was a dirty theater.
The dressing rooms were for four people, but it felt like we were stuffed into that room like four people stuffed into a train seat, shoulder-to-shoulder.
When the person seated furthest in wanted to leave, the other three would have to go out first, or she couldn't get out.
When you went into the wings of the stage, you immediately were faced with the wall.
How many people forgot that by mistake, came running offstage, and crashed into the wall? Wasn't there even someone who bounced back onto the stage!?
There was no place for quick-changes, no place to leave costumes, and if we found a gap in the dressing rooms (where if the four of us were standing our eight feet would conceal the floor), we would compromise to aid each other in changing, endeavoring as hard as possible not to open any holes in the stage or the costumes. We were heroic.
This theater sat more than two-thousand people, and the opening night was publicized insufficiently so that the house was half-full.
But from the next day, attendance increased by word of mouth, and by the third or fourth day we had a full house.
Thereupon, what the foreign promoters did was terrible. They doubled the price of the tickets.
And yet even still there was a long line of people at the ticket office every day.
Apparently they even talked about how we would have to use their lovely Colón Opera House when next we came back to perform in the area!
If that's so, you should have let us have it from the start!
Argentina is a country of late nights.
Performances would start at eleven or twelve o'clock at night. Consequently, it was common to finish performing at three in the morning.
For us coming from Japan, which had a twelve-hour time difference, we would leave the dressing rooms singing "Three O'Clock You", a theme song from a then-popular tea-time TV program.
In Argentina, there are many hot-blooded people.
Two or three in the morning. Really not the time you want to be going to the theater.
Nevertheless, they came to see us in high spirits.
And it was also in this country that I first experienced a standing ovation.
Terrific applause that seemed to gush from the the deths of the earth.
Starting in the last half of the show, the audience turned into a state of feverish excitement. It's come, it's come, it has come, I was thinking, though I knew it was just the first taste as it swelled, and the excitement surged. And then without that heat weakening at all, it reached an exploding point during the curtain calls.
Thanks to that, we rode on that high, and did our best until three in the morning.
I'd like to meet once more that moving audience in Argentina.
* * *
We changed suddenly from Argentina to a splendid theater in Brazil.
There was enough space backstage to hold a sports competition.
However, if I didn't put all my strength into running the long haul when traversing from stage right to stage left, there were sad incidents where I was late for my entrances. ----Unfortunately, for those particular scenes there was no time leeway, and the costumes were quite heavy.
And the dressing rooms were gorgeous, made of marble.
They were spacious, with a shower, rooms that made me feel like a star.
However, there weren't enough tables for all the people in the rooms, and so I was the poor child who ended up with the plywood dressing table.
In Brazil, many immigrants of Japanese descent also came to see us perform.
I felt keenly how thoroughly large the country was.
The men moving the scenery backstage were cheerful black men who danced the samba to Japanese music. I wonder if they're still moving spryly?
The crowds for the performances each day increased so much that people coming all the way from other countries weren't able to get in
Packed all the way to the ceiling gallery, they made the utmost effort to come and see us.
Old men and women who had emigrated from Japan came to see us with tears flowing.
I felt happy that we had made it all the way to Brazil.
* * *
The people of Central and South America are very leisurely.
Stage preparations that would take a half a day in Japan, take two days there.
Depending upon the completion of the stage preparations, a procedure was set up for us members to have rehearsals.
We would use our discretion to approximate the time, put on our costumes, and wait.
I acquired the art of sleeping in my costume.
If the stage curtain ripped before the start of a show, it would take an hour to repair. (In Japan it would be fixed in one or two minutes, or a new curtain brought in.)
The audience waited leisurely for that hour as well.
Once it hailed, opening a hole in the roof of the theater, and the show start was postponed until the hail stopped, because of the roof leak.
The audience also waited leisurely until the hail stopped.
However, for me experiencing my first maiko, who had to be in costume thirty minutes before the show started, with the curtain still shut after more than two hours I thought I was going to die.
The hotel elevator was also leisurely.
Even if I left my room thirty minutes before we were meeting in the lobby, there were several times I was late.
Meals were leisurely too.
After finishing desert at dinner, when I returned to my room it would be morning to the rest of the world.
However, this leisurely flow of time seemed to suit me, and even now I look back on it fondly.
And even now I can't keep pace with the restless flow of time in Japan.
* * *
There were only 45 of us, including staff, and that we could accomplish such a great performance, bringing joy to other lands, was a happy surprise to me.
The male staff members--without sleeping at night--would be making set pieces all night.
Although I developed tendonitis, the costumer didn't utter a word of complaint, simply wrapped it for me.
I saw upperclassmen and underclassmen helping each other out on stage without distinguishing, and I felt strongly that this was how you made a performance together.
There were a mountain of trials, but when the audience clapped during the finale, it all transmuted into joy.
I realized for the first time that this was the stage, that this was the happiness that professional performers relished.
And I thought how glad I was that I had joined Takarazuka.
_______
(1) an apprentice geisha; a dancing girl
(2) a baked rice cracker
18 ~*~ First Foreign Performance
This is jumping around in the story, but in the autumn of the previous year (my 5th year), I participated for the first time in a foreign tour.
The performances took place in the three locations of Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and San Paulo, and were scheduled over forty days.
It was my first trip abroad in my life.
Moreover, I was getting paid and going for free, how lucky!
Which was as far as I thought it over, foolish me.
But of course the reality wasn't so sweet.
It was a select performance with performers from all four troupes, two members of Senka, Jun Mitsuki-san as top, 35 members in all, with the performance composed of an hour-long Japanese-style revue and an hour-long Western-style revue.
(A normal performance contains about seventy members in one troupe. I'd like you to imagine just how difficult it is to then to do a performance each night with half that number of people.)
The contents of the performance were nearly the same as the previous Soviet Tour, so we learned it while constantly watching the video.
All of the choreography was crammed into one week. The inside of my head became saturated with the memorized choreography -- in other words, I became like a sea urchin, going into rehearsals which hardened the choreography, being shouted at and belittled by the choreographers, bathed in a mountain of sweat. They were tough rehearsal days that I can't speak of now without tears.
* * *
After that, the ordeal waiting for me was the 'maiko' ¹.
When the curtain lifted on the foreign tour I had gone into so innocently, it began with maiko.
Me, so very far from anyone's image of a maiko.
168 centimeters of height plus wooden clogs and a wig easily put me at 190 centimeters, and a giant maiko was born.
And the director or choreographers had lost their minds, and lined up the maiko front and center.
In other words, when all twelve maiko were lined up on stage, the short musumeyaku were on both ends, and the tall otokoyaku maiko were in the middle.
Of all the members in that tour, I was the tallest, and I was placed in a prominent spot.
It wasn't that I didn't like standing out, but I hadn't wanted to stand out as a maiko. I'd call it the wrong kind of attention-grabbing.
If I took one step:
"You, the large maiko~! Can't you walk more sweetly~!?" they shouted at me countlessly.
Although they're the one's saying it's no good, weren't they the ones who made me the maiko?
At any rate, why do Takarazuka members like pointing out people's faults so?
All of the upperclassmen who were in the scene with us laughed to see us dressed as maiko.
Isn't it enough that the maiko looks out of place in these times?
Even though we weren't getting in anyone's way, and were diligently (?) portraying the role we had been given....
Amongst the foreign audience, whether because of kindheartedness or dread, not a single person pointed at us and laughed.
Since the maiko business, I came to love the foreign audiences.
Second row, second from the left.
After more than a month of grueling rehearsals, after a trial performance in the Grand Theater for the Japanese audience, I stuffed my trunk full of my beloved senbei² and turned toward foreign shores deep in the autumn of 1978, on October 6th.
The first soil was Mexico.
A land of sun and cacti, or so I expected, but because of unseasonable weather every day massive clouds filled a leaden sky, and it was bleak.
I had heard from others that Mexico was a place with a very thin atmosphere. For someone with poor circulation like me (not that I'm saying my head is weak!), once I began dancing my fingers and toes turned purple, and it was a terrifying place.
There were oxygen tanks in the wings of the stage to use in case of emergency, but I (being pitiable), couldn't struggle to them.
In the final scene of the Western-style show, after dancing like mad, there was a part of the choreography where we throw ourselves down to the floor.
The floor of the stage was slanted, so I rolled weakly without power, and when I looked at the ceiling I could just see the ceiling over the audience.
There was a painting of angels with harps.
My eyesight was swimming, and every day I thought I was Ascending then and there.
Come to think of it, I remember being told at the informational meeting before we left, "The air is a little thin, but they've even held the Olympics there, so you'll be fine."
What was fine about this!? At least a hundred people must have died running the marathon! In any case, I'm glad I lived to return home. Very glad.
* * *
Our next stop, Argentina, had beautiful cities, and the weather was also lovely with lots of air, so I was raring to go, but in truth the performance space lying in wait for us was a movie theater.
More than a regular theater, the stage and dressing rooms were extremely cramped, and if pushed I'd say-- No, without excuses, it was a dirty theater.
The dressing rooms were for four people, but it felt like we were stuffed into that room like four people stuffed into a train seat, shoulder-to-shoulder.
When the person seated furthest in wanted to leave, the other three would have to go out first, or she couldn't get out.
When you went into the wings of the stage, you immediately were faced with the wall.
How many people forgot that by mistake, came running offstage, and crashed into the wall? Wasn't there even someone who bounced back onto the stage!?
There was no place for quick-changes, no place to leave costumes, and if we found a gap in the dressing rooms (where if the four of us were standing our eight feet would conceal the floor), we would compromise to aid each other in changing, endeavoring as hard as possible not to open any holes in the stage or the costumes. We were heroic.
This theater sat more than two-thousand people, and the opening night was publicized insufficiently so that the house was half-full.
But from the next day, attendance increased by word of mouth, and by the third or fourth day we had a full house.
Thereupon, what the foreign promoters did was terrible. They doubled the price of the tickets.
And yet even still there was a long line of people at the ticket office every day.
Apparently they even talked about how we would have to use their lovely Colón Opera House when next we came back to perform in the area!
If that's so, you should have let us have it from the start!
Argentina is a country of late nights.
Performances would start at eleven or twelve o'clock at night. Consequently, it was common to finish performing at three in the morning.
For us coming from Japan, which had a twelve-hour time difference, we would leave the dressing rooms singing "Three O'Clock You", a theme song from a then-popular tea-time TV program.
In Argentina, there are many hot-blooded people.
Two or three in the morning. Really not the time you want to be going to the theater.
Nevertheless, they came to see us in high spirits.
And it was also in this country that I first experienced a standing ovation.
Terrific applause that seemed to gush from the the deths of the earth.
Starting in the last half of the show, the audience turned into a state of feverish excitement. It's come, it's come, it has come, I was thinking, though I knew it was just the first taste as it swelled, and the excitement surged. And then without that heat weakening at all, it reached an exploding point during the curtain calls.
Thanks to that, we rode on that high, and did our best until three in the morning.
I'd like to meet once more that moving audience in Argentina.
* * *
We changed suddenly from Argentina to a splendid theater in Brazil.
There was enough space backstage to hold a sports competition.
However, if I didn't put all my strength into running the long haul when traversing from stage right to stage left, there were sad incidents where I was late for my entrances. ----Unfortunately, for those particular scenes there was no time leeway, and the costumes were quite heavy.
And the dressing rooms were gorgeous, made of marble.
They were spacious, with a shower, rooms that made me feel like a star.
However, there weren't enough tables for all the people in the rooms, and so I was the poor child who ended up with the plywood dressing table.
In Brazil, many immigrants of Japanese descent also came to see us perform.
I felt keenly how thoroughly large the country was.
The men moving the scenery backstage were cheerful black men who danced the samba to Japanese music. I wonder if they're still moving spryly?
The crowds for the performances each day increased so much that people coming all the way from other countries weren't able to get in
Packed all the way to the ceiling gallery, they made the utmost effort to come and see us.
Old men and women who had emigrated from Japan came to see us with tears flowing.
I felt happy that we had made it all the way to Brazil.
* * *
The people of Central and South America are very leisurely.
Stage preparations that would take a half a day in Japan, take two days there.
Depending upon the completion of the stage preparations, a procedure was set up for us members to have rehearsals.
We would use our discretion to approximate the time, put on our costumes, and wait.
I acquired the art of sleeping in my costume.
If the stage curtain ripped before the start of a show, it would take an hour to repair. (In Japan it would be fixed in one or two minutes, or a new curtain brought in.)
The audience waited leisurely for that hour as well.
Once it hailed, opening a hole in the roof of the theater, and the show start was postponed until the hail stopped, because of the roof leak.
The audience also waited leisurely until the hail stopped.
However, for me experiencing my first maiko, who had to be in costume thirty minutes before the show started, with the curtain still shut after more than two hours I thought I was going to die.
The hotel elevator was also leisurely.
Even if I left my room thirty minutes before we were meeting in the lobby, there were several times I was late.
Meals were leisurely too.
After finishing desert at dinner, when I returned to my room it would be morning to the rest of the world.
However, this leisurely flow of time seemed to suit me, and even now I look back on it fondly.
And even now I can't keep pace with the restless flow of time in Japan.
* * *
There were only 45 of us, including staff, and that we could accomplish such a great performance, bringing joy to other lands, was a happy surprise to me.
The male staff members--without sleeping at night--would be making set pieces all night.
Although I developed tendonitis, the costumer didn't utter a word of complaint, simply wrapped it for me.
I saw upperclassmen and underclassmen helping each other out on stage without distinguishing, and I felt strongly that this was how you made a performance together.
There were a mountain of trials, but when the audience clapped during the finale, it all transmuted into joy.
I realized for the first time that this was the stage, that this was the happiness that professional performers relished.
And I thought how glad I was that I had joined Takarazuka.
_______
(1) an apprentice geisha; a dancing girl
(2) a baked rice cracker
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no subject
Date: 2011-05-21 02:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-21 02:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-21 03:39 am (UTC)I had forgotten about that picture. ♥ ♥ ♥
no subject
Date: 2011-05-21 08:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-24 02:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-21 06:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-21 06:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-21 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-22 09:10 pm (UTC)That sounds like Brazil alright. How surprised would they be if they knew things in São Paulo are faster than most places here? XD
I'm glad that she liked São Paulo, and that the theater was good for them. I wish I could have been there, even though I wasn't even born at the time.
Just out of curiosity, Brazil has the largest Japanese population outside of Japan.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-24 01:55 am (UTC)I actually know that well! I keep ending up in places in Japan with large Brazilian and Peruvian populations, some 2nd or 3rd generation Japanese who have returned, and some Japanese-Brazilian or Japanese-Peruvian. Every time I walk into the convenience stores in Oizumi Town they try to talk to me in Portuguese. XD
no subject
Date: 2011-05-23 06:10 pm (UTC)Pet peeve of mine: Mexico belongs to North America, we aren't a Central American country.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-24 02:01 am (UTC)Is the rainy season in October and November?
no subject
Date: 2011-05-24 12:40 pm (UTC)Rainy season kinda begins in late April and ends in September-early October.
Norhtern part of the country is another story there it usually rains in June-July