Around 2:30am the kagura group took a break, something I have never seen before. I suspect that as the village has shrunk, so has the kagura group, and fewer members means each must do more and therefore not get any breaks during the long night. The audience took the opportunity to pull out some food and spread out... All night long Mr Yama operating the barbecue grill outside had been passing free food into us.... fried noodles, barbecued squid, barbecued crab legs..... along with copious amounts of cold beer and sake, so we were full but could not refuse the offers from different groups in the audience who insisted we join them and share their food....this, for me, is the essence of matsuri....
After the break the action started up with the Oeyama dance with lots of demons including the favorite of the audience, a junior demon...
The spiders web trapped the hero but he was of course able to free himself and kill the demon...
next up was Iwato, usually one of the first dances at a matsuri....
And then Ebisu, ably assisted by junior Ebisu, distributing lucky candy to everyone in the audience...
The penultimate dance was Shoki.......
Outside the sky was lightening and more people had been arriving...... in the countryside people get up at 5... and so it was time for the finale, Susano's battle with the multiheaded Orochi.... It was a small kagura group, so there were only four heads to the serpent, but even so they took all the dance space and spilled out into the audience. An exciting end to a great night..... time to go home to bed and rest up..... in 3 days it would be an Omoto Matsuri up in Nakano....
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I guess it's projecting on me , tonight was the first night I wasn't up for 4 or 6 a.m. ;-)
ReplyDeletehugz!