Picture Josephine Baker gyrating suggestively on the stage of the Follies Bergere in 1920s Paris, clad in little more than bananas, against a jungle fantasy backdrop.

Now imagine an alternate history where, at the height of her success, she was declared a "threat to morality" and permanently banned from entertaining. In this timeline Baker’s titillating, immensely popular (and profitable!) form and style was preserved, and subsequently reserved, for exclusive performance by men. Why? Because only a man is considered to be strong and disciplined enough to harness the power inherent in female performance. And only a man can recognize and thus successfully reproduce "true" and "pure" femininity.

This thought experiment is intended to help the viewer of "Essence of an Onnagata" navigate the historic, ethnographic and arguably moral distance between today and Edo-period (1615-1868) Japan.

Curated by Monique D’Almeida, intern for the Society of Asian Art of Hawaii, "Essence" is a compact but deep exhibition of 28 woodblock prints focused on onnagata: the male actors who specialized in playing women’s roles in kabuki theater. The exhibit runs through May 24 at the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Though this alternate history is an admittedly coarse analogy, it traces kabuki’s actual development. Kabuki was invented in the 1600s by a woman, Izumo no Okuni, who drew from Kyoto’s female prostitutes and outcasts to form the first troupe. Okuni’s acting, choreography and singing would become definitive popular entertainment during the Edo period.

She played female and male roles in sometimes bawdy skits that drew on contrasts of everyday and aristocratic life. In what we would call a "moral panic," the Tokugawa shogunate really did ban kabuki in its all-female form, and after a brief experiment with young boys, settled on exclusively adult male casts.

This is the world "Essence" examines, where Katsukawa Shunsho’s portrait of kabuki actor Nakamura Kumetaro would, in terms of our alternate history, be like a fan club photo of "Oops! … I Did It Again"-era Britney Spears. But in this context, "Britney Spears," as a derivative of Josephine Baker, isn’t a real woman off-camera. "She" is a fictional character portrayed by, say, Jared Leto.

Amid the lush complexity of Kumetaro’s kimono, seemingly condensed out of an abstract cloudscape, Shunsho’s rendering of the actor’s delicate exposed foot is equivalent to Spears’ bared midriff at the height of its cultural impact.

The actor Kumetaro would have been recognized by his Japanese contemporaries as both a man and a professional portrayer of idealized womanhood. Today we call an actor’s complete immersion in a role "method acting," but the onnagata went further by actually living life as a woman in a kind of perpetual rehearsal.

Through a modern lens, the sexism and distortion here should be apparent, but onnagata were celebrated in the mainstream, by both men and women, as fashion plates, inspirational figures and role models. Impersonating a woman was a job that commanded such admiration and required so much expertise that it became a "family business," as one might treat any other skill or craft.

These prints have survived the centuries and entered an entirely different context. They are as brilliantly deceptive (or authentic) as the subjects they fixed back in the 1700s. "Essence" presents historical and aesthetic lessons, but it also gives us tools for thinking, epitomized by Katsukawa Shunko’s portrait of actors Nakamura Nakazo I and Iwai Hanshiro IV.

Bordering on the erotic, in this print it is difficult to determine where one actor begins and the other ends, for the inner linings of her kimono match the outsides of his, and their respective hairdos seems to reach out for each other as she looks over her shoulder seductively.

Shunko’s print is like the cover of a contemporary heterosexual romance novel, but in kabuki terms it is a highly charged interaction between archetypes of dishonesty, loyalty, virtue, corruption, greed and bravery. In kabuki, women represented the better side of human nature, but the era’s intellectuals and actors argued that only a man could do the job… and the people apparently agreed.

The "floating world" of Edo-era Japan was characterized by constantly evolving styles, shifting norms, complex social networks and celebrated hybridity. Beyond providing another view of the Honolulu Museum of Art’s exemplary collection of prints, "Essence" can serve as a compelling waymark for Hawaii’s generally progressive perspectives on gender and LGBT issues.