Dance Notation Preserved at Mōtsuji (An addendum to “Dance to Song in Japan”1)

In the northeastern part of the main island of Japan at the temple of Mōtsuji, documents survive which show notational practices used to preserve the choreography of dances performed there as part of the Buddhist ceremony of Ennen. I have discussed the Ennen of Mōtsuji in the section called “ Ennen: Dance to a Buddhist Text” in my article on “Dance to Song in Japan” and would like to explore here the records of some of its dances since they exemplify a notational concept specially appropriate to the documentation of a tradition of dance to song. According to Professor Honda Yasuji of Waseda University in his book Ennen the original documents date to the early part of the nineteenth century, although some go back to the middle of the eighteenth century, and one item contains elements which date to 1706. The dances themselves, however, go back much further. With a few exceptions, the diagrams published in Ennen are Honda's own drawings based on the older material preserved by various priestly families associated with the temple and the performances which are part of the Buddhist ceremony there. In addition to reproducing these historical records, Honda has made his own annotations to document the choreography of dances which he saw performed at the temple, giving a brief verbal description of the dancer's movements for each section of the song. Full texts of the songs and his movement annotations of dances of the sort described in “Dance to Song in Japan” can be found in Ennen ; in addition, there are texts, meant to be sung, of four plays in which danced sections served as climaxes. Of these, the one with the earliest date is that of 1761; another, though undated, appears to be even older. The diagrams for movement in certain sections of the play Ominaeshi , which are reproduced and explained here together with a translation, are preserved in two documents. The one in the Hakuōin collection is dated 1822.