The Bird Cage

My weekend adventure in Tokyo took Sir S and the travelling Antipodeans to this ornate aviary of a dance hall, Alamode. With two ballrooms and one conversation salon, there was plenty to divert us throughout the evening.

In Ballroom the First, a visual kei band swanned about on the stage, sparkling in white wedding dresses, and all the chaps in the quartet were meringue-white in make-up with enticing Egyptian eyes. The music was jaunty rock that got many a pretty debutante doing the Charleston in a most saucy, outrageous manner with danglies rattling from handbags and fans flapping about.

In Ballroom the Second, slender ladies and men of bird-like fragility flittered about in the fanciest attire. Splendidly dressed Gothic Lolitas ruffled their puffy skirts and adjusted their miniature top hats, men in long tails fluttered about, young chaps in hakama tossed from side to side their long black locks, clowns tumbled, French courtesans powdered their noses and reapplied their beauty spots discreetly in the shadows. Unlike Oriental trance halls (where dancers face towards the music conductor in a pose of worship), the dancers here twirled and swirled alone, enjoying the song in their own bubble of solitude.

In the Conversation Salon, weary dancers rested their feet on velvet puffs, the livelier people chattered vivaciously to their partners, while lookers-on browsed the stalls that were selling silver jewellery and hats - my fave was a tiny, pillar-box hat encrusted with brown gumleaves, over which was tossed a veil and perched upon it a bronze dragonfly. Tres chic!

A cabaret performance particularly titillated the ballgoers. One featured a woman dressed as a Chinese opera singer, giving a somewhat panto-ish routine of pleasuring her master (!) with a quick-witted tongue (!!) upon a folded sensu fan (yipes!); followed by song and dance from a trio dressed up in zebra-inspired attire. The women each had a zebra ear and tail, and were dressed in spangly gymnast costumes of green and blue; the man had on a zebra-ish mask and an intimidating two-pronged codpiece, striped in black and white, which he regularly thrust in our direction. Most shocking!

As the evening came to a close, when one's pin-curls were going limp and the decorations dwindled, I espied this golden bird upon the ballroom floor that at a guess had inadvertently fallen off someone's masquerade mid-waltz. There is a certain joy with which one finds a discarded, forgotten trinket. A fine souvenir from the bird's cage!