Meet Me The Geisha Stalker

For those that know me from my junior college days, I spent most of my second year either in the Japanese Embassy pouring over picture books of Kabuki or in the National University of Singapore's East Asian studies section learning Nihon Buyo (Japanese traditional dance) and the tea ceremony. Between that, I was locked up in the theatre studies & drama studio trying to perfect the Sakura dance and finding a Kabuki way to kill my character onstage. Hannah who was doing stage make up for her final exam would be dabbing me with white face paint and figuring out how a real Geisha lines her eyes. There were moments I would turn up for geography class half covered in face paint because we forgot to bring the make up remover. The pink yukata became my second uniform as I spent hours tying the obi and trying to get it perfect. My dramatic sequence was the modernistic nihon buyo adaptation of streetcar named desire and i was obsessed with the world of geishas, nihon buyo and kabuki.

It has been three and a half years since those crazy times and I hardly remembered the dance. And suddenly today, I find myself, thousand of miles away from Singapore and Japan, face to face with two "maikos" (apprentice geishas) performing the nihon buyo at a seminar. It was like, a childhood dream come true. It's like wanting something so much for so long that you gave up on it, and suddenly when you least expected, it appears. I never got to see a real geisha, or the real nihon buyo, or a kabuki performance. Everything i learnt was learnt third hand from a video, a book or a teacher. I wanted so badly at that time to see how the artform is actually like. Whether I am just making the whole culture up. And today I finally saw it. And in all places, in Philadelphia.

They were so perfect and beautiful. It broke my bubble later when i found out they were not real maikos but traditional dance students from Japan. It further broke my bubble when he said that one of them is also a ballet dancer and the other does hip hop. But they had the whole ensemble, the make-up done perfectly, the whole kimono and the clogs. It was like looking at a doll. They were as close to the real deal as the real deal got. For one hour my eyes were riveted to them, so much that they must think I'm some sick obsessed fan. Chie spoke to them after that while I bashfully stood speechless next to them and continued staring. Besides being awestruck, I also had no idea what they were talking about in Japanese. I just said "hai" and "arigato" once in a while to sound polite. They will be performing downtown this weekend and in DC next weekend. Guess what, I'm turning up downtown this Sat and I'm will be in DC next weekend. I'm turning into a stalker. While teenagers stalk boybands, I stalk Nihon Buyo dancers. I think I'm erm...weird.