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Alexandra Tomalonis
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Okinawa Classical Dance Troupe

by Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, March 30, 2000

The Kennedy Center’s Arts of Japan Festival, presented each year in conjunction with the Cherry Blossom Festival, is a wonderful opportunity to sample Japanese art and culture. The dance event this year is the G8 Summit Okinawa Classical Dance Troupe, a rather unpoetic name for a very poetic company.

The Okinawans, a group of female dancers and male musicians, presented a mixture of old court dances and more recent folkloric ones Wednesday night at the Eisenhower Theatre. The performing range of the dancers was extraordinary. They were equally convincing as grave boy pages in their first service at court; high-spirited market women in the folkloric “Kariyushi-Achine;” and fierce martial artists in “Bu-no-Mai.”

In some ways, the older court dances – spare, nearly abstract, and unemotional – seemed more modern than the more recent popular ones. Their elegance and the importance of beauty for its own sake, though, marked them as products of another time.

These uneducated Western eyes can only begin to imagine what the original audience of these dances saw. Each color, each fold of the kimono, each nearly imperceptible movement of a finger or eye once had a very specific meaning far beyond the particular movement or gesture being performed. Today, we can only appreciate the skill of the dancers and the splendor of each dance—“as fine as the wings of a dragonfly and as gorgeous in color,” as the program described a cloth the dancer dreams of weaving in the dance called Kashikaki.