The Flowered-hat Dance (Hanagasa odori), from the series "Comic Performances from the Niwaka Festival in the Pleasure Quarters (Seiro niwaka kyogen)"
- Date:
- c. 1776/81
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print; chuban
- Source:
- Art Institute of Chicago
The Flowered-hat Dance by Isoda Koryusai is a print from the series Seiro Niwaka Kyogen, Comic Performances from the Niwaka Festival in the Pleasure Quarters, in which Koryusai documents the amateur theatricals staged each autumn in the Yoshiwara. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the impression that records this design, dating it to 1771. The Hanagasa odori, or flowered-hat dance, was one of the recurring set pieces of the Niwaka festival, in which courtesans and their attendants performed in costumes that ranged from the elegant to the deliberately ridiculous. Koryusai's handling here captures the precise moment when the dancers raise their flowered hats in unison, allowing the audience to see both the patterned costumes and the choreography of the figures across the sheet. The series belongs to the same broader project as Koryusai's celebrated Hinagata Wakana Hatsu Moyo: an effort to document the Yoshiwara as a self-contained cultural world with its own calendar, its own theatrical conventions, and its own visual identity. The Niwaka prints functioned as souvenirs of the festival for visitors who had attended and as anticipatory advertisements for those who had not, and they have since become primary sources for historians of Edo performance culture. For collectors, the Flowered-hat Dance is an unusually lively example of Koryusai's ability to handle multiple figures in coordinated motion.
The Flowered-hat Dance (Hanagasa odori), from the series "Comic Performances from the Niwaka Festival in the Pleasure Quarters (Seiro niwaka kyogen)" was created by Isoda Koryūsai (礒田湖龍斎) in c. 1776/81.
The Flowered-hat Dance (Hanagasa odori), from the series "Comic Performances from the Niwaka Festival in the Pleasure Quarters (Seiro niwaka kyogen)" depicts birds & flowers.
