The Australian National University Za Kabuki Club has performed Japanese theatre in Canberra, around Australia and internationally for more than 40 years. It has described itself as the longest-running Kabuki group outside Japan and has been supported by the Embassy of Japan for more than two decades.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
About 30 of the 40 current members of the group - from a range of nationalities and backgrounds - are continuing the tradition with this year's production, an somewhat Australianised version of the early 20th-century comedy Topknot Bunshichi. It will be directed by the senior lecturer in Japanese studies, Dr Shun Ikeda. The play will be performed mostly in Japanese with English surtitles.
In Topknot Bunshichi , a poor man named Chobei (played by Nami Yasuda) has landed his family in debt through gambling and drinking. He returns home one day to find his wife Okane (Gen Kinoshita) upset because their daughter has disappeared only to make a heartrending discovery.
Dr Ikeda said he had begun the group in 1976 with contemporary Japanese drama but in the 1980s it had changed to Kabuki under a colleague, Professor Andrew Gerstle.
He said one of the purposes of the group was improving students' Japanese - "it's classical language not spoken these days, of course, but the vocabulary and the understanding of such words we can teach students".
He likened it to Shakespearean English: "It's quite useful in some expressions and subjects."
Putting on the annual productions was also valuable for cultural understanding, he said, in learning about the Japanese way of life.
Club president Erin McCullagh, an Asian studies student who is the producer and stage manager of the production, said she was in her third year with the troupe. She said Kabuki broadly translated into English as "song, drama and skill" and was begun in Japan in the 17th century by a lady named Izumo-No-Okuni.
"She was a dancer who used low-class dancing to tell stories. Slowly it became higher-class and they decided ladies' dancing was too exciting so only males could perform and over the years it evolved into high-class theatre."
Fourth-year environmental science and music student Gen Kinoskita is playing Okane, the wife of Chobei in his second year with the club. He said he enjoyed playing a female role in the play: "You get to know more about yourself by doing it."
He was part of a Japanese tour the troupe made in September last year in the Tohoku region of the island of Honshu. He said it went quite well, although "we were better received in the smaller cities than the bigger cities".
Topknot Bunshichi is on at Theatre 3, 3 Repertory Lane, off Ellery Crescent, Acton on Friday, October 6 and Saturday, October 7 at 6.30pm. Tickets $15 adults, $10 concession, $8 children six and under. Available at the door or at anukabuki6october.getqpay.com or anukabuki7october.getqpay.com.
