The purpose of this paper is to analyze the choreographic structure of a dance piece Nanyo-Hamachidori (South sea plover) [1933-34] created in the South Sea Islands by Inkichi Iraha, one of the distinguished actors of the modern and contemporary Okinawa, and to discuss what this piece represents. Nanyo-Gunto in Japanese, The South Sea Islands, is a collective term for the Micronesian islands governed by the Empire of Japan in the prewar era. Iraha assimilated dances of the native people such as the Chamorro and the Carolinian into the Ryukyuan dance. The piece centers on Koneri-te, a technique of Okinawan ritual dance, with the following four factors integrated at multiple layers: 1) The classical dance technique from the Ryukyu Dynasty era; 2) Hamachidori, a dance with nostalgia as a theme in the Meiji era; 3) the traditional dance technique kept among the Carolinians; and 4) the Ballet technique by the Chamorro. Through the piece, Iraha must have attempted to preserve the fact that dancing bodies of the Carolinian and the Chamorro have their own histories that cannot be generalized in words just as the Ryukyuan dance has encapsulated its own history accumulated since before the Dynasty era.
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