Dance Offered to the Kami

Kagura is the sacred music and dance offered to the kami, among the oldest and most characteristic forms of Shinto ritual performance. The name is generally understood as the seat, or the entertainment, of the kami, and the mythological charter is the dance of the goddess Ame-no-Uzume before the cave into which the sun goddess Amaterasu had withdrawn, a dance whose noise and laughter drew her out and restored light to the world, recorded in the eighth-century Kojiki. Kagura re-enacts, at its root, an act that brings a deity into presence.

Two broad streams are usually distinguished: the formal mikagura performed at the imperial court and major shrines, and the many local sato-kagura, village traditions that range from solemn purification dances to lively masked performances of mythological episodes. In all of them the dance is understood not as a depiction offered to human spectators but as an offering made to the kami, who are invited, entertained and honoured, with the human audience present as participants in a rite rather than as an audience at a show.