The Red Color In The Maiden's Dance

Her first costume is a very traditional red kimono with a floral pattern. The red color in Kabuki clothing symbolizes happy feelings, and youth or innocence in context of The Maiden’s dances. The floral pattern of the first kimono is seasonally significant in that it traditionally symbolizes spring, a season with the positive connotations of youth and of the more symbolic “blossoming” of a woman, an important connotation as the theme of this dance “might be interpreted as the phases of a woman’s life, from infancy to maturity11. Since there is very little verbal communication between characters that allow the audience to fully understand all the deeper meanings within the dance, it is very important that the costuming be done utilizing all
symbols and characterization methods that a traditional theatre style such as Kabuki has to offer.
For The Maiden’s next costume, she changes into a blue kimono which is the visual cue for a pun that is in the original Japanese of the lyrics: “I am used to the freer ways of the city… but yet I am a lotus”, a note accompanies this section which reads, “The sense of the passage depends upon an untranslatable pun, a play upon the word hasu- the word for lotus and also a word to indicate looseness in a woman.
This is visually indicated when the maiden changes her kimono from red to blue”12. The blue kimono is accompanied by a “tiered ‘lotus’ head-dress”13. However, in one version of the dance-play featuring prominent Kabuki actor Tamasaburo, the blue kimono was exchanged for a softer looking light green kimono with a lotus print on it. Kabuki costumes are very open for experimentation as well as substitution so long as color symbols still make sense for the character. The “looseness” implied by the lotus head-dress or lotus print kimono suggests to the audience that The Maiden is not simply a young and innocent girl, this is the first real allusion that the audience has that there is something more sinister to The Maiden’s characterization, and it is imperative that it is translated so via
costuming.
The third costume change done in Musume Dojoji is to a lavender kimono, print unspecified and therefore open for creative license.
The lavender kimono has an accompanying cloth prop, “The Maiden returns in a lavender kimono and dances with a tenugui , a short length of cloth sometimes used as a towel”14. As the dance progresses, the audience, and priests are to become more and more wary of the Maiden, and as a costumer, this is imperative to keep in mind while designing the lavender costume. Lavender in modern society has rather neutral, if not positive connotations. One can combat these connotations by supplementing the lavender kimono with more typically ‘evil’ colors, such as dark red, orange, or even yellow in small amounts can be used as a transition color from this kimono to the next. Also to be noted is that this section of dance becomes faster, so weight and fabric choice of the lavender kimono must be relatively lightweight in order for it to be practical enough for the necessary movements to be made by the actor. Traditional kimonos are made from either silk, which is more common, or cotton can be used as
well.
In the last costume change of the play, The Maiden changes into a yellow kimono, which symbolizes vengefulness and evil. This final costume must be the visual interpretation of evil, whether one chooses to achieve this via multiple ‘evil’ colors within the yellow kimono, multiple patterns, or a sort of visual cacophony of patterns and colors, is entirely up to the costume designer.
In order to create a truly aesthetically pleasing performance of Musume Dojoji, the costumer and/or makeup artist must be able to recognize and utilize the traditions of Kabuki theatre such as color symbolization, using the correct colors in the correct places, while also ensuring that the audience can follow the nonverbal plot due to the costuming and makeup correctly characterizing the actors.