Shibaraku: Just a Morment

Shibaraku: Just a Moment is another of Mori's multiple depictions of kabuki's most celebrated dramatic gesture — evidence of the particular hold this theatrical moment had on his imagination throughout his long career. Each version of the Shibaraku subject offered him the opportunity to explore a different aspect of the role's extraordinary visual vocabulary: the costume's geometric boldness, the makeup's fierce patterning, the pose's architectural rigidity. His sustained return to this subject across decades demonstrated both its inexhaustible appeal to him and the flexibility of his stencil technique in finding new graphic solutions to the same dramatic moment.