kachāshī

Kachāshī (カチャーシー), sometimes romanized as katcharsee, is a form of festive Okinawan folk dance. In Okinawa, it is often a feature of celebrations such as weddings and victory festivities after tegumi wrestling matches and public elections. It is traditionally accompanied by the sanshin and drum, and often punctuated with finger whistling called yubi-bue (指笛). The dance is executed with the hands in the air, palms flat for women and curled (or in fists) for men. The hands alternate pulling and pushing in an up and down elliptical motion, one hand facing outward and up, the other inward and down. The hand movements are difficult to execute without training. The steps are mostly improvised, generally made in a slight bow-legged stance, alternately lifting and lowering the feet to the rhythm.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Kachāshī”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

kachāshī is type of dance, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 1 external register, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶