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2. Fairy
Dance
This schoolgirl
"Fairy Dance" seems to 'illustrate' Theseus' lines in the
Caption Box, though the fairies' mini skirts are as
improbably short as their legs are long and their movements
suggestive. The mode appears to hover between realism and
fantasy. The music too is tantalising, a jazzy, disco-like
rearrangement of a wartime "swing" tune. (During the Allied
Occupation, swing became popular in postwar Japan)
At the opening of
the dance, with the fairies in a line downstage, a
schoolmistress-like fairy in a long demure dress is seen
upstage pushing a tennis marker-trolley in a circle where
Puck and the man in black have been. A white powder circle
is inscribed. On its completion, the fairy dance moves
inside the circle.
In the course of
the play, this circle becomes even more deeply imbued with
meaning: by the circling movements of the actors, by its
echo of other motifs such as moonlight, and by the fact that
it becomes literally stamped out by the passage of many
feet.
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