What does it mean when, after a climactic pose, the actor opens his right hand to the right and left to the left?

Around a mie or a decisive pose, the actor opens both hands wide to either side — a gesture you meet again and again in kabuki. As everyday movement it is unnaturally large, and that is exactly the point. Kabuki acting developed in the direction of pushing what is inside outward to be seen, and the opened hands are that principle in its clearest form.

The reading changes with the play and the character. In an aragoto role it reads as superhuman force radiating out of the body — something too large to be contained, overflowing. In a weighty history-play role it works as authority: the scene stilled, those around brought to heel. Merely spreading the hands shows that this person commands the space. Elsewhere it marks the instant a deep feeling is released all at once.

It is not, then, a sign with a one-to-one meaning. The sense of any instance is embedded in its kata, and the same shape reads differently in different contexts. Which is why this gesture is better understood watched in the flow of a play than memorised from a photograph with a caption. What has just happened, what the music is doing, how the other actor responds — only together with these does it become clear what the hands are saying.