Jiutamai Dancer
JIUTAMAI is a form of classical Japanese dance traditionally practiced and performed only by women. It is an embodied way of preserving stories, experiences and coping strategies of past generations. It is also a beautiful technique that helps to express one’s heart with big respect towards earth, nature and other people. Each choreography is a poetic story told by gestures and movements that are passed to us from previous generations of dancers and teachers.
SADA HANASAKI is an alter ego of Hana Umeda, a jiutamai dance professional, natori member of the Hanasaki-ryu family school in Tokyo where in 2020 she attended a Natori ceremony of symbolic adoption by my master and teacher, Hanasaki Tokijyo. That gave her the right to teach and preserve the tradition of jiutamai dance under the stage name Hanasaki Sada.
photo credit: Karolina Gorzelańczyk