傾く

Kabuku is an old verb meaning "to tilt" or "to lean." Around the turn of the seventeenth century, flamboyant nonconformists who dressed and lived against convention were called kabukimono—"the tilted ones." The dances that captured their spirit, kabuki odori, are considered the origin of kabuki itself.

Kabuki dance is said to have been begun by a female performer known as Izumo no Okuni. In 1603, in the capital of Kyoto, she dressed as a man and acted out a fashionable kabukimono carousing at a teahouse—a performance said to have taken the city by storm. Kabuki thus began with a woman playing a man, and would later cultivate the art of men playing women: from its very origins, it has delighted in gently overturning convention.

Kabuki, in other words, carries rebellion in its very name: the courage to live boldly in your own colours. On this platform, KABUKU is explored as a word for a way of living—one that speaks to anyone, anywhere, today.