SHIZUKA DANCING

Shizuka Dancing is a Kitagawa Utamaro design at the Harvard Art Museums depicting the famous shirabyoshi Shizuka Gozen, beloved companion of the medieval hero Minamoto no Yoshitsune. Shizuka's dance before the warlord Minamoto no Yoritomo, in which she sang of her loyalty to the absent Yoshitsune, became one of the most celebrated episodes in Japanese performance literature, dramatised in noh, jouri, kabuki and popular song. Utamaro draws Shizuka in dance costume, her stance arrested in mid-movement, the elongated proportions and refined facial type of Edo bijin-ga giving her the timeless allure he reserved for legendary heroines. Patterned robes are described in carefully balanced colour blocks, and the swirl of sleeves and skirts conveys the suspended motion of the dance. The print belongs to the long tradition within ukiyo-e of mitate-e, in which famous historical or theatrical figures are reinterpreted through the visual idiom of contemporary fashion, so that Shizuka becomes simultaneously a heroine of the twelfth century and a modern Edo beauty. Such works expanded the cultural reach of bijin-ga, making it the principal vehicle through which the Yoshiwara audience encountered classical literature. As held at Harvard, Shizuka Dancing illustrates how Utamaro and his publishers used established narratives to enrich the iconography of female beauty within ukiyo-e.