The Dance of Rebellion: Tradition and Women's Liberation in the 1970s and 1980s, when Hanayagi Genshu shook things up (1970s-1980s)

The Dance of Rebellion: Tradition and Women's Liberation in the 1970s and 1980s, when Hanayagi Genshu shook things up (1970s-1980s)

Hanayagi Genshu (1941-2001) was a dancer and writer who became the Meidori (master) of the Hanayagi school, a prestigious Japanese dance school, and who directly challenged the Iemoto system (the so-called "Iemoto" = head of the school), which was a pyramid with each school at its top. In the 1970s, he began to take an "unconventional" stance through his avant-garde creative dance works and writings. These movements echoed the trend in Japan at the end of its period of rapid economic growth, when a reexamination of "authority" and "formality" was underway in various fields.

In the mid-1970s, she criticized the structural authoritarianism of the iemoto system as "suppression of creativity" and expanded her activities outside the existing schools. Linked to the rise of feminism, her work was groundbreaking in that she brought to the stage the message that women should govern their own bodies and expression at their own will. She also participated in the "Witches' Concert" (1974), an event created exclusively by women, and expanded the "space for women's expression" in solidarity with female artists and editors of the same era.

Around 1977, she formed an alliance with those who challenged the established political and cultural order, and clarified her stance of working outside the system. Later, the conflict over the iemoto system escalated, leading to an attack on the iemoto in 1980, an incident so controversial that it was referred to in international academic books as a "physical" indictment of the system itself.

In 1984, the TV drama "Hanayagi Genshu Jailhouse Diary," based on her own experiences in prison, was broadcast, and criticism of the iemoto system became widely visible as a social issue that transcended discussions within the arts.

Hanayagi Genshu's work was not an attempt to deny the tradition of Japanese dance, but rather an attempt to wrest creative freedom and female agency from the "kata" monopolized by authority. The criticism of the Iemoto system, which concentrates the economic and promotion of apprentices in the hands of the head of the school, is in line with the establishment of the "individual," the liberation of women, and the expansion of alternative culture in the 1970s and 1980s. Her path, from her origins as a traveling entertainer to joining a prestigious company with nothing but her own body, and her continued denunciation of the structural inequalities she saw on stage and in writing, has shaken the stereotype that traditional performing arts are closed, and left a path of female expressionists who "fight with body and words" in the cultural history of Japan.