Use in Traditional Arts
Doing seiza is an integral and required part of several traditional Japanese arts, such as certain Japanese martial arts and tea ceremony (a table-style version of tea ceremony known as ryūrei was invented in the 19th century). Seiza is also the traditional way of sitting while doing other arts such as shodo (calligraphy) and ikebana (flower arranging), though with the increasing use of western-style furniture it is not always necessary nowadays.
Many theatres for traditional performing arts such as kabuki and sumo still have audience seating sections where the spectators sit in seiza style.
Read more about this topic: Seiza
Famous quotes containing the words traditional and/or arts:
“I conceive that the leading characteristic of the nineteenth century has been the rapid growth of the scientific spirit, the consequent application of scientific methods of investigation to all the problems with which the human mind is occupied, and the correlative rejection of traditional beliefs which have proved their incompetence to bear such investigation.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“What ails it, intrinsically, is a dearth of intellectual audacity and of aesthetic passion. Running through it, and characterizing the work of almost every man and woman producing it, there is an unescapable suggestion of the old Puritan suspicion of the fine arts as such—of the doctrine that they offer fit asylum for good citizens only when some ulterior and superior purpose is carried into them.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)