First Rehearsal for "Takarazukushi"

Ima-san talks to saki-san and I for two hours about the meaning of Takarazukushi, and the various themes connected to it. She also has pictures of the theater and a calendar of rehearsal dates.

But the moment that strikes me now is when we are in the studio, and Ima-san asks me about my parents, and what my mom thought of Obake Yashiki.

Me: Ummm... she enjoyed it?
Ima: chuckle
Me: Maybe because she is American, but she didn't understand why people are nude.
Ima: I don't think anyone was nude during obake yashiki ...
Me: I showed her pictures, too.
Ima: Well, I don't think a lot of people understand that.

And then what she says next, poorly paraphased and translated by me, is that nudity is a removal of modern dress, nudity is a return to the primal, nudity is beauty...

Me: So, it is to forget the ages?
Ima: Not to forget, but to tap into the memory bank of the body.
Me: oh.

It makes me wonder what is in the memory bank of my body. White imperialists, coming to the new world, farming in South Carolina, and enslaving their brothers? Or even further back, English royalty, dining on whole pigs, beheading traitors, and laughing at the commoners who cannot afford a loaf of bread? Every time I have heard of a native american on my mom's side of the family, or possibly a black woman on my dad's side, I clutch to the idea that maybe I have roots for how I have felt my whole life. Being born into advantage does not make one a bad person, but I have never felt like the dominant, the majority. Maybe I can take it even further, back to ancestors roaming Europe, fighting to stay warm and surviving on game and walking through the wilderness. And not that it is strict. Ima-san once said that the materials that make us up have been around since the beginning of time. Maybe I can remember it all?

WE TIGERS

My friend Elizabeth and I made a dance film! It features a wicked soundtrack, hot Hankyu train action, and the Kobe/Nishinomiya area. Please check it out:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3319335926889173716&hl=en

Bridge Project Workshop

The Bridge Porject is a two-week series of dance workshops held at the Kyoto Art Center. Each workshop spanned three or four days and was categorized as training, technique, or creation. When I asked someone about the bridge project, he pointed to morikawa-san's picture and said "he is good." Also, since I was extremely impressed by his piece at the gala performance, I chose to take Morikawa Hirokazu's workshop, four two-hour workshops held from June 4th- 7th.

Morikawa studied mime and circus in France, and then he returned to Osaka and danced with Monochrome Circus for five years. Recently, at the beginning of his sixth year with MC, he quit in order to pursue creating work on his own.

The space in the art center was a large wood floor with no mirrors and windows. The dance floor is like a pit, as it is lower than the entrances and must be reached by walking down steps. Songs by Radiohead, mostly from their OK Computer Album, were coming from a stereo.

We started with isolations, concentrating on how to move around different parts of the vertebrae. As we traveled from the tips of our heads to our tailbones, we specificied one vertebrae and experimented with how to move the surrounding area. For example, how would one move the section above the bone while keeping the section below it still? Also, how would one separate just that vertebrae from the rest of the body?

When we finished stretching, we were lying on our stomachs with our hands in front of our heads. From this position, Morikawa effortlessly pushed his hands into the floor, scooped his feet underneath his pelvis, and stood. He moved seamlessly from lying face down to standing upright. Afterwards, he gaves us a slightly teasing nod and then reversed the motion, back to the lying position. This meant that we were now supposed to try. We struggled, and clunkily heaved our bodies into standing and back to the floor again.

Morikawa can efficiently move his body in a way that makes the movement smooth, seamless, and organic, with no show of the effort. He remarked in class that he could not dance prettily, but his movement is the most elegant and sinuous that I have seen for quite some time.

The challenges continued. Can we roll across the floor seamlessly, as one piece, all body parts moving at same speed in unison? Could we insert a push-up into this roll, so that the body dips up and back down again as we roll? Could we crawl smoothly, with all body parts at one, steady speed?

After spending all of this time on the floor, he initiated an exercise from the standing position. He ushered us to a dry erase-board, where he drew a picture of a metaphorical pelvis (see graphic on the right). It is a sprinkler that shoots water our of each of the circular nozzles. He asked us to think about moving in each of the directions indicated- front, back, one side, other side, up and down. What would it be like to follow each direction in a committed way? Moving upward is kind of impossible, beyond standing up with a elongated spine. To explore that direction, he asked us to pretend that there is a bee on our nose, which then flies away quickly. We followed the bees, initiating from our noses, as they flew up into the air and changed directions quickly.

He demonstrated that, when we walk, the pelvis moves kind of like a horse's gallop or an ocean wave. How could our walk have more ... commitment? More of a push forward, instead of a sloshing in the air. Something smoother, more seamless ... the two words that I use the most in describing his movement.

We took a water break and finished class with an amazing floor combination. Weight shifted from our entire bodies touching the floor, to our pelvis being lifted over our hands, to following the imaginary bee.

Morikawa talked to me a little afterwards, in a very relaxed way. I asked him about himself, and he told me, in the middle of which he remarked "eh, you pretty much understand what i am saying, don't you?" Sometimes class was difficult, because it was taught in Japanese. So, I probably have confused some of the verbal meanings. However, the body meanings were very clear, very inpsiring. The next few classes of the workshop were also amazing, adding variations to the material above, like using different points of to body for initiation in counterbalance, moving the spine like a chain, and so forth.

Morikawa's next performance is a collaboration with a film artist at the Shiga Performance Center for Creating of Art for Citizens on Sunday July 1st at 4:00 pm. The admission is free! For more details, visit www.shiga-bunshin.or.jp.

Gala Performance and Talk Session

Selenographica, Monochrome Circus, Morikawa-san, and j.a.m. dance theatre each performed a piece in a Gala performance at Kyoto Art Center, in order to kick off the Bridge Dance Project workshops.

The four pieces were all duets between a male and female dancer. Oddly, all of the pieces seemed to crescendo (or have a suspenseful/gasp sort of moment) when the two performers confronted each other directly in an embrace or stood closely and face-to-face. All of the pieces were interesting explorations of movement and sound, but the piece that grabbed the audience the most was Morikawa's "A room with chairs." The two performers had such connected energy that it was amazing. Their relationship felt very alive and real and interesting. During the talk session, Morikawa-san said that he created the piece through exploring interesting movement and interest in the body, rather than exploring a certain concept. Yet, through tight movement and relationship between the two performers, Morikawa-san's piece was the most conceptually coherent and striking, it seemed. Just not in a way that i can express in words at the moment.

It was a good feeling to see these four choreographers and be impressed by each one of them, because the last three (Morikawa, j.a.m., and Monochrome Circus) seem to be holding workshops and performances quite regulary in Kyoto and the Kansai area.

Contact Improvisation Workshop

"Hot Summer in Kyoto" concluded with a weekend-long Intermediate-level contact improvisation workshop that ended with a dance jam. The teacher was Ingo Rosencratz (pictured on the left), from Germany, and the students were about 1o dancers from the local area (although one had to travel by shinkansen, i think), one visiting from Canada, and Cara and me. The mix was mostly women with anywhere from two to four men at different times. The workshop was held in a black box theatre in the Osaka Municipal Arts Center.

The first day, Saturday, we focused on having a solid, physical connection with our partners, and the various movement and lifts that can use that connection. We began by rolling across the floor using our centers (the muscles just under your belly button) with our partner's guidance. Then, various games of leading each other by the hand. A particularly interesting exercise was when one placed their hand on their partner's shoulder, closed their eyes, and followed their partner. The partner would walk, run, crawl, and jump while the partner followed blindly, with only a dim sense of light change and invisible objects moving around them. Next, we learned different ways of walking while connected with our partner and lifting our partner onto our backs, sides, shoulders, and etc. We ended with free dancing.

The second day, Sunday, took a creative turn- today was more about finding one's own movement quality (the internal), being inspired to create by external stimuli, and doing all of this while moving in and out of contact with other people. This day was amazing. We played in solo, duet, trio, and quartet like autistic children romping around in a playground. However, it was important to maintain the our own qualities and stay committed to curiousities as well as feel, support, and draw inspiration from our partners. The day ended with a two-hour free dance jam.

One interesting exercise was standing across the room from your partner, and facing him. Ingo instructs us to take in this human being in front of us. Next, you and your partner walk toward each other, and stop at the distance that feels appropriate. If one person gets to close, the other can back away. And both parties can play with speed, how this space is maintained. My partner was a roughly 35 to 40-yr-old man in glasses. When we began, I could see his eyes tense, and his body question how much to walk towards me. As the exercise continued, my face relaxed, and I could see his face do the same. As we tested the distance that was comfortable between us (about a meter?) his face became ten years younger. We had some good dances after this.

There were two familiar faces - two j.a.m. dance theatre company members. Also, there were at least three people from the contemporary dance company Monochrome Circus, which also runs the "Hot Summer in Kyoto" workshop. Butoh dancers, contemporary dancers, and people interested in free movement all attended. During a water break, an interesting point of conversation was that one man in the workshop cut down trees as a living, while another man made wooden furniture in a small shop in kyoto.

Contact Improvisation is relatively new for me, since I have been doing it for little under a year, and I was rather nervous at times. Because of this, I was very caught up in myself and not paying the best attention to those around me. I considered talking to Ingo afterwards, asking him about contact dance in relation to Japan, and his experience in teaching workshops in Japan... and somehow the very idea of it seemed racist. There was nothing particulary different about the workshop because it was held in Japan or taken by many Japanese people, except for maybe the fact that there were only 14 or so students. It was a dance workshop with other people, with energies and feelings and qualities. And they are each different, with experience travelling and living in other places, a sensitivity to art and movement, and a different career/life path.

The main players of Monochrome Circus are Yuko Mori and Kosei Sakamoto (pictured on right), and they were also two of the students in the workshop. Founded in 1990, this contemporary dance company focuses on communication, contact improvisation, and stage work that "reflects urban Japanese life and society." I want to run away and join the Monochrome Circus.

Meditation

Joseph Campbell describes dance as a zen discipline, an art in which one has to have total concentration and yet have no-mind (no chattering, distracting thoughts). The act of dance shares many of the same characteristics of meditation. To explore this connection, I am comparing recent dance classes with Mark Epstein's book "Thoughts without a thinker."

In meditation, one wishes to achieve bare attention- an impartial, nonjudgemental perspective on the feelings and emotions that bubble into the mind. The meditator neither clings nor denies the emotions - they are allowed to arise, exist, and naturally fall away. The effects of the mind can be sublimated, transformed.

Transformed into what? I'm honestly not sure. For Shimazaki-sensei, feeling is transformed into movement. After all, "Feeling is Everywhere" is the quote printed on the dance majors' Team Shimazaki sweatshirts. When Shimazaki walked into class on Monday, he seemed more brusque than usual, as if some frustration floated in the back of his mind. No jokes, only a few short comments. It was like a summer day, hot and uncomfortable. We completed barre exercises, and then the center floor combination was completely different than the usual feeling. The movements were beautiful in a mournful way. The body whirled one way and then the other, and different shapes appear effortlessly with each turn. Our heads tumbled backwards and forwards with the movement, and our feet were sensual bodies, feeling our own legs and seeking new hiding spots. It was exhiliarating.

When it was time to set it to music, Shimazaki turned to the Hiraiyama, the pianist, and asked what he though the feeling of the music was. Shimazaki suggested that "Kizuitara" - before you know it - the leaves are falling from the trees and they start to dance like this. From this suggestion, Hiraiyama began playing. It was perfect.

Dance allows the dancers to pour out feeling, let it consume their whole body and move them like madmen. The feeling exists, has it's turn, and then the dance is over, and the dancer rests. The body is tired and awashed in feel-good chemicals, and the feeling has dissappeared along with the shapes the dancer imprinted in the air. Tranformation and dissipation- of the ego's feelings.

But ultimately in meditation, one wants to let go of ego. Feelings cannot be pushed away, but they are ultimately illusory bodies that contribute to strong senses of self and identity. In Butoh, there seems to be little room for personal, everyday feelings, as the dancer is connecting with forces greater than herself. For example, in time she will travel to the beginning of history through the matter in her body and throughout evolution with the memory of past movement patterns. While butoh dancing, one's roots reach deep within the earth, and one's shin, or consciousness, extends out and into the universe. In order to connect with these primal forces, one needs concentration and mindfulness, the two main components of meditation. Concentration is the ability to focus strictly onto one thing, and mindfulness then allows the meditator to be aware of what happens while she is in this focus.

At butoh class on Tuesday, the participants were Cara, Ima-san, and me. We were joyful, exploring the body and thinking about our connections to the universe. One exercise we do is to exhale and feel a big ball in front of our torso. Then our body shrinks and hardens into stone. A seed is in the stone, and a plant grows out of it. The plant is rooted in the earth, and we then must walk with this image. (Also, our veins are like roots, carrying nutrients and connecting the whole of our bodies). Ima-san says to walk like you have roots. The walk requires very slow half-steps, a careful and conscious move from one foot to the other. She described it as "Teinei," meaning polite, but also proper. This walking seems the same as the standard type of walking in butoh, called tsuruhashi walking. With legs slightly bent, it is a pattern of pick up foot slowly, move it slowly, place it in front of the other foot carefully. Repeat. The result is a seamless, intentful walk. Saturday, at Clear Sky Dharma Center in Kyoto, a teacher named Paul Jaffe demonstrated the meditative posture of walking. It was exactly the same method. "This will definitely make you a better butoh dancer," he told me.

On the other hand, Dance can be a method to achieve confluence in the realm of the gods, and to feel ones ego boundaries dissolving. It's a rapturous experience that can be addictive and possibly detour a would-be Buddha. With the proper understanding, dancing can open an entirely new world.

j.a.m. dance theatre workshop

As part of the company workshop series in the "Hot Summer in Kyoto," a 3-day class was given by j.a.m. dance theater. Led by Kinki University dance graduate Mayuko Aihara, j.a.m dance theatre is a contemporary dance company founded in Osaka in 2002.

I participated in the first two days of the class. It began with a basic contemporary warm up, maybe some relaxed plies and different series to get the body loose and moving. Then we did an across the floor section that used wide sashes, level changes, and whimsical turns. The center combination was from one of their pieces, and it was a syncopated, almost jazzy combination, that seemed to be investigating the relationship between the arms and legs.

Sennichimae Blue Sky Dance Workshop

Sennichimae Aozora Dance company, a butoh dance company from Osaka, held a two-hour company workshop today as a part of the "Hot summer in kyoto" festival. I saw their performance last October at Art Theatre Db, so I went to watch the class.

The first three people were women that I saw in the performance "Jazzzzz" at Art Theatre Db. I never got around to writing about the performance. It was good. I thought it was a critique on gender, but after I talked to these women today, I learned that it had no meaning and was more an experiment in form, making dance the same way that one would make free-style jazz - the addition of new movements as new instruments, and a progression of slow-fast-slow. Well, those three women are members of Sennichimae, and they came to lead the class. Wow! Connections.

Next, came the students- five people. Two older women, one middle-aged violinist, and two dancers in their twenties. We were in a big black box theatre space. For the sake of answering the question, "what is a butoh dance class like?' I will now recount the class in detail. For people who read this (elizabeth and my mom), skim until you get to the part where the Sennichimae director buys me a cream soda.

Akadama-sensei, the company director, began the class by asking everyone to sit in a circle and introduce themselves. Then, he introduced his plan for the class. He said that Kazuo Ohno is good, but his dance is all feeling and little form. He prefers Hijikata's type of butoh. He mentioned something about Laban. He said that the class would start with the basics, finding the 人間のじさいの体, which seems to be Japanese for "the neutral body."

He said that the next part would work on transformation, へんしんすること. He gave becoming a flower as an example. First, one must think "what kind of flower? sakura? etc?" and grasp an image of the flower. And then, a collection of images can create a story. He said things about what happens when you transform, but I didn't understand them. Using images, he would teach them a small piece.

The class was led by Inakichi. They all use stage names, and Akadama chose this name because Ikanichi is the name of a senior geisha. She was the dancer I admired the most in "The end of water."

First, she started with jumping up and down with no force, letting the body be loose, and then with hips moving side to side. This is the toy water balloon exercise we do in Ima-san's class.

Then, hips moving to each diagonal to the fullest extent. She said that "the body is like a bag, and just this point (hipbone) goes forward." ”ななめ引っ張ります。” Then, a circle. The chest stays over the feet while the hip separates. Ima-san also does this one.

Then the chest separates to each diagonal. The diagonal is approached in a figure-eight pattern. The shoulders aren't supposed to move. I'm going to start just putting *Ima* next to things I have done with Ima-san. Ok. *Ima*

Next, shoulders tense up, drop down, roll forwards and backwards. *Ima*

Right shoulder rolls back, left shoulder, both shoulders, then drop in an exhale. *Ima*

Next, arms to sides and front and back. Roll head, move sideways, forwards, side to side, and diagonals. *Ima*

The body is a bag. When it inhales, it fills with air, and when it exhales it falls limp over feet. The body fills bag up with particles moving into the body from the feet. Variation: relax in the same way, but the breath pops the body upright onto heels with jazz hands. *Ima*

Take a wide second position plie, each person counts off ten plies. Heels go up, down,hold,drop. *Ima*

On hands and knees, raise the center of the back as much as possible with an inhalation, lower to the extreme with an exhalation. They went from slow to maniacally fast, and their bodies looked like balloons inflating and deflating. This is similar to Ima's "man as mountain" exercise, but a different approach. Then they took the shape into a circular motion.

With legs in front, point and flex feet alternately, raise pelvis. *Ima*

Next they sat in lotus position with their hands on their knees. Akadama-sensei intervened and instructed o keep the eyes half open and use the third eye, and he said something about the palms of the hands. He also said to focus diagonally down at the floor. They sat like this for a few minutes, and then folded their upper bodies over their legs. Rise, spiral body to left and right.

”おばあさん形やります” he said to signal that they would sit in a grandma-style seiza, with calves on outside of thighs. The upper body contracts and hinges backwards. ”たまごのかんじです”　he said to describe the egg-shape of their upper body. *Ima*

Next, the three dancers demonstrated the piece, after which Akadama-sensei explained it. Oceanic music was playing, and they began in fetal position. Akadama-sensei said that the first shape was something to do with the mother- I think he said that the dancer is in the mother's womb and feeling the liquid around it. Their bodies hardly moved at all, except for a gentle roll from one side to the other. Akadama said that when it looks like they are not moving, they are. It actually takes a lot of inner movement to move that slowly, and a lot of energy to focus on that transformation. As they did this, their fingers and feet would flicker as if they were probing idly. I heard Akadama say ”かんせつから、目”　and I think that means that there are eyes coming from their joints? Like they are looking with their whole bodies. Next he said that "Slowly, slowly, the body gets bigger" until the women are sitting upright- except their spines are relaxed and their head hangs downard. Akadama called this the ”にんぷの形。” In this shape, the students were told to ”くうかん目がめます”　or to look at the space. The energy from the space causes the Right elbow to raise. The arm straightens skyward so that it looks like the body is suspended from a rope. Then, the body moved like those hollow flags that fill up and fall as the wind blows. I could swear that Akadama said that the arm becomes a boa- a snake. I'mnot sure about that. But I am sure that he said that the body moves like a "flag in the wind," and I was impressed that they communicated that idea so clearly with their bodies. Akadama said that next, from the tip of the dancers' feet, energy entered the body and raised their arms by both elbows. Then, they turned quickly. Akadama explained this motion, which he called まりかた, as definitely not ballet. The right foot and left foot take weight alternately - the right foot is always flat, the left foot is always on demi-point.

Next, they did the slow walk series. Ima-san does these, too, but uses a few different images. Bascially, there is a horizontal line going through the dancer's forehead and her center,and she must walk along these lines of energy and keep her head stable,as if she were balancing something (he referenced ikebana here) on it. During the walk, the moment of weight transfer from one foot to another cannot be seen, so that the body is one continuously moving unit. It is similar to the smooth walks and turns in nihon-buyo, in which the lower body looks like a floating kimono rather than human legs. As the women walk with utmost concentration, they look like monks. Akadama mentions a line of energy that extends sideways, and the women walk in a triangle formation, together, to feel this line.

After class, he explained more about the use of imagery to the students. He says that the butoh dancer uses and image to get a feeling. The choreographer would not say "oh, do a sad thing" or "do a happy thing," but instead would say something like "it's raining and you are drenched" in order to get a certain effect. So all of the dancers have the same image and feeling, but it may take a different form or shape when they embody it. Megumi, one of the twenty-ish dancers, remarked how this is a large difference with ballet; in ballet, she said, each dancer uses a different approach to get to the same shape.

Afterwards, I ambushed Akadama and two of the dancers (Inakichi and Ayame) as they left the building, managing a clumsy "Hello, thank you for emailing me, I'm Caitlin." They were really kind, and we started walking down the street together as I asked them many questions. Akadama-san and both dancers were born and raised in Osaka. We went into a fancy cafe and ordered drinks. We talked about all sort of dance things. Ayame told me that there are many modern/contemporary dance companies in the kansai area, but said there were only five major butoh teachers. She named- Toru Iwashita, Masami Yurabe, Tenko Ima, Kuritaro (Kobuzoku Arutai), and Akadama. Except Akadama is not his real name- he is really Iku Otani, and he is the Executive Director of Dance Box, the dance NPO for Osaka city. Dance Box is the organization that runs Art Theatre Db, the dance venue I frequent. It all comes together. Inakichi, or Aya, is the director, and Ayame is a volunteer. We talked about the difficulty for dance in Japan - DanceBox only receives 1/4th of its funding from the government - that leaves 3/4 of the support to come from fundraising and concerts. Wow. And they work together often with JCDN, the dance NPO that operates in Kyoto. Sennichimae Dance have been together since 2001, but DanceBox was founded in 1996, so that is where Inakichi and Akadama met. Before that, Inakichi mostly did contemporary dance and theatre. I don't know much about Aya's dance background, but I know she likes Kansai comedy a lot.

We took the subway together and waved goodbye. They are performing at New York's PS 122 from October 18-21. Below is information and pictures about the piece "A Bowl of Summer" that they will perform there.

Danse de Gonzansu

Danse de Gozansu, a monthly dance performance at the Kyoryukan, ran full speed on April 22nd. The line-up was a hurdy-gurdy player, the gaijin dance group Tricycle performing "333", a pantomime, Peter Golightly on the trapeze, and Ima Tenko-sensei. The hurdy-gurdy-ist talked and played forever; the gaijin group was me and my two friends being supernatural people; the pantomime demonstrated the relationship between dracula and a morning glory; Peter did some modern dance stuff; and Ima-san was startlingly and amazingly beautiful. Her dance, entitled "Quo Bodis- doko he iku?" was inspired by conversations with retired prostitutes. The first half seemed to be her as an old woman, and it contained more conventional movement to traditional Japanese music. The second half was more experimental, modern-butoh fusion, as she portrayed a young woman.

I saw all of it from the viewpoint of Tricycle, as I sought to portray the demon-goddess Lucy and her interactions with the demon Choranzon and the bodhisattva Vajrasattva. Below are some visual aides of the day:

Cara is painted white ...

...by Ima-san!!! Someday I hope to have a "shironuri" (white makeup) experience.

Choranzon, by Adam Rose.

Tricycle! Cara Conroy as Vajrasattva, Adam Rose as Choranzon, and me as Lucy.

Dance Secrets

With a title like "Dance Secrets," the best entry would be a blank page. However, I will recount some of the conversations in the past week that have danced around the topic of dance secrets.

April 5th, class registration day at Kobe College, I kept running into Yuko. Yuko is a 23-yr old, 2nd year dance major at Kobe college. She has already graduated from an art university in Osaka and has choreographed and perfomed in various Osaka venues. Yuko can instill vibrancy in any choreography, and her movement carries a sensuous spark. I have often gotten lost in class from seeing the beauty she can feel in an ordinary, reptitive exercise. I saw Yuko in the library, reading an art book by a Japanese painter. We got on the topic of dance and her recent improvisational performance at an art gallery in Umeda. I said that I was delighted by her dance, and she looked like a little creature blissful in her immediate surroundings. Beyond that, I admitted that I did not know what to say, for this fact: I do not understand modern dance anymore. When people perform modern dance, I am not sure who they are or what motivates them.

Yuko gave me a simple formula- form plus feel equals dance. Dance is a coupling of form, the codified movement in class that teaches the toolbox of the body, and feeling. Feeling is “せいしんてき” or the “spiritual, mental, psychic, inward.” Through the feeling, the dancer is free to explore “自分のやりたいこと” what one wants to do. People forget feeling, which Yuko described as “love and living,” but they are reminded of it all when they see modern dance.

When Yuko dances, her mind runs in two simultaneous modes: an awareness of her outer environment- like the air, the weather, and her physical surroundings- and an inner awareness that monitors her body alignment and her next movement direction and body shape. A modern dancer adventures in her immediate location using the tools of her body to the fullest extent. She is so free to change her own shape while investigating the shapes around her that the dancer is lost in them. Not lost in a negative way- Lost in her situation in the same way that a person can be lost in bliss. The dancer reaches a dreamy, blissful, vibrant state and invites the audience to join them there. That is a modern dance secret.

Before dance class yesterday, Ima-san imparted a butoh dance secret: 100% consciousness in each moment. Almost all movement in class has a strong image association that changes the inside feeling of the body. We are concentrating heavily on becoming a toy balloon filled with water and hanging from a string, or feeling a ball in our center separating from our chest. These exercises assist the mechanics of the body but also create a meeting of our concentration and our movement, of our body and our soul. Consciousness is attained. However, when Ima-san says 100%, she means a full realization of our bodies. She spoke of how the materials that make up our bodies have existed from the beginning of time, of our DNA and family lines which go from our mother to our mother’s mother, ad nauseum. This history must all be danced. The dancer must transcend her everyday 21st century self and realize the fullness of her being. It’s almost like the dancer becomes a god. A connection, a force emanates from that being onstage.

For comparison’s sake, I can connect the two in this way: A modern dancer is a being lost in a dream. A butoh dancer is an entity who has slashed the dream and become one with existence.
After class, Ima-san made tea and told us the meaning of white paint in butoh dancing. She had a photo album when she was 20-yrs-old and had her first butoh experience at a one-week byakko sha workshop in the mountains of Kyoto. When she used white make-up for the first time, she said that it was a gate, a symbol of change for her. She likened it to a coming-of-age ceremony. She also said that when she puts on the white, an old Japanese face appears – the white paint removes her modern face. The meaning is different for everyone. Hijikta’s wife Motofuji said that the white make-up is the powder of dead people’s bones. Dancing in white make-up signifies dancing and living for all of the people who died, especially in reference to the massive deaths of World War II. Ima-san’s old teacher said that the white make-up creates a blank canvas.

Ima-san spoke of her 14 years in Byakko sha, a second-generation butoh company like Sankai Juku. She danced with them from 1980 to 1994. The studio that we use for class used to be the Byakko-sha studio, and twenty of them all lived under the same roof. They were very poor, and cooked meals for all of them for around 20 dollars a day. The teacher seemed to be a bit domineering – taking their money, encouraging them to do club shows to raise more money, and discouraging members of the group from having relationships. Due to this and other reasons, the group disbanded in 1994. The stories were amazing to hear. Now, Ima-san is working with the group Kiraza and has been living in Kyoto for 26 years. She is an awesome and mysterious lady, who probably has many secrets. Secrets!

Presence

I have been thinking heavily about "presence" since February. "Presence" is the feeling that the performer is there, phsyically, mentally, emotionally, or whatever-ally, in the room with you. An analogy for the levels of the force of presence is the different depths you can reach in a conversation. A low form of presence can be compared to a conversation where you talked about the weather and your conversational partner seemed to stare at your forehead or, even worse, the door the whole time. On the opposite end, a high form of presence can be compared to a conversation where your partner seems to understand you in a way that words can never achieve, good eye contact is made, and maybe you touch the other person. There are energy waves or a wind emanating from the person onstage. Or, on the other end, they look like confused and blind deer frolicking.


When I performed with the Kobe College dance department, my main concern were their faces. There were the blind deer stares, the fake-concerned eyebrows, and the empty eyes that I can describe to you in words, and there was also that feeling of everyone hiding inside their bodies. Like retreating into their own bodies could somehow keep them all looking the same, all performing at the exact same counts, and all "gambare"'ing for the good of Team Shimazaki. Maybe is little agency or personality in the dance, because it is all for someone else, it is all part of the rigorous sacrifice typical of a discipline studied at school. Where is the question of "what are we doing and why?"

It seems that Japanese society and the spirit of dance (as I see it) do not mix. In Alex Kerr's book, Dogs and Demons, he states that "the real purpose of education in Japan is not education but the habit of obedience to a group, or, as Dr. Miyamoto puts it more strongly 'castration,' ". He then quotes Dr. Miyamoto, who says: "'... [bureaucrats] want this peacefulness because their ideal image of the public is one where people are submissive and subservient. With such a group people are easy to control, and the system does not have to change. How do the bureaucrats manage to castrate the Japanese so effectively? The school system is the place where they conduct this process,'" (285). After imagining modern dance explored in the Japanese educational setting, I can see how it would strive for technical perfection while forgetting what makes dance good. And what makes dance good? Well, humanity. The people who dance have the power to make dance good with their genuinine-ness and questioning and ... Presence. Their commitment to being 100% there with the audience, body and soul and spirit, makes dance good.

After a Monday Butoh class with Ima-san, I was talking with Ulala while we changed into normal-people clothes. Ulala, a butoh dancer in her twenties, has a bowl hair-cut with artsy bangs and a slim figure. She speaks in a cutesy lisp that is not annoying but, in fact, pleases me so much that I cannot refrain from smiling while she speaks. After she told me that she was a performer, she asked me if I wanted to perform. I told her that I was interested in "dance philosophy," "dansu tetsugaku"? I said that I thought the exercises we did were interesting, like when we become an octopus named Ha-chan who is obsessed with figure-eights. At this point, we were downstairs with Ima-san. Ima-san looked at me and said that there are many different exercises, but they were all created for the same purpose: "to make body and soul meet."

In modern and ballet class, students are obsessed with getting straight lines, flexible limbs, and perfection. In butoh class, there is a "right" and a "wrong" way to do the exercises (the "right" way favoring proper alignment and fluidity), but it is all for that purpose of truly inhabiting the body. What does that mean? It means for the performer to really be in their body, to really be in the room, to attain the highest level of presence. To produce a high level of intimacy in a performance. To be honest. To look their audience in the eyes, in a metaphorical sense, rather than watching the door. If one is to be a powerful performer, they first have to be a powerful person, with body and soul fully merged. (Ima-san is a genius.)



The day after class, I attended a performance at Urbanguild called "Bliki Circus." Bliki Circus is "a 6 piece orchestra from Kyoto, Japan. They play a modified form of Klezmer, Musette, cabaret and tango music from Russia and Eastern Europe." As Bliki Circus played, a kimono-clad female narrator spoke. She spoke in a dramatic, "poetry night" style, repeating phrases like "I didn't know it was a dream." Her speech would interlude to a dancer/artist performing. In all, there were two butoh dancers, two belly dancers, and two women in a sado-masochistic act. High contrast in presence was before my eyes. The belly dancers gyrated and seemed to scream "look at me, I am too sexy!" and the S&M ladies said "look at me, I am like some weird hentai-sexy!", but they were not truly present. The performer onstage was an artificial projection from the person dancing. Meanwhile, the butoh dancers were ... just completely there. They were human beings, with no pretense about their humanity, despite its ugly or awkward features.



Nie-san, a woman in Hanaarashi whom I nick-named "B&W" in an earlier post, performed in the middle of the show. She un assumingly walked to the front of the audience, wearing a button-down blue dress and pushing a broom. She swept in front of the stage in such a way that I didn't notice her at first, unconsciously thinking her to be an Urbanguild employee. She then performed a dance of violent rage and sexual frustration, in the character of a housewife. It was powerful and explosive, and I loved her every minute of it. I wish that I could recall more of it.

I know a very good dance in Japan when the audience starts laughing for no reason. It happened before at dance circus, when young people in the audience were laughing. During Nie-san's dance, the two women beside me giggled the entire time. There was nothing in particular that provoked it - they laughed continuously. What they were watching must have made them embarassed - embarrassed to be female, of their nice clothes and eminent marriages and enslavements to working-stiff husbands. I hated those bitches. I hated them for their laughter. We were all sitting in the front row, and Nie-san noticed them. I almost wanted to scold the girls in the middle of performance, but something was happening - Nie-san was feeding off of their energy, letting it magnify her chaotic dance, and redirecting the energy back to them. They kept laughing, and Nie-san kept ... being amazing. At the end of her dance, she came into the audience and began giggling in a silly way. She took off a girl's glasses, laughed, handed it to another girl, and laughed. Instantly, she went in a deadpan, emphasizing how idiotic her laughter was, almost looking directly at those girls. When she returned for an improv at the end of the show, she almost physically fell on the laughing girls. Nie-san, Nie-san, I am in love with you.

When I left, I saw Nie-san going backstage. I was delighted that I got the chance to stop her and tell her how wonderful her performance was and how much I enjoyed it. She said that she recognized me from the performance at the Garden. She said that I should come to her performance next month, that we should talk sometime. It gives me so much pleasure to be people like Nie-san's groupy, sitting in the audience and being inspired, and loving the performer every moment of it. Why can I feel so much for Nie-san? Because she was totally there in her performance, allowing the audience to see her, body and soul, while the two bitches sitting front and center were laughing.

Below are pictures of Nie-san and Himeko-san in pink afros dancing together.

Nihon-Buyo

This Saturday, an afternoon-long performance of various Nihon-buyo dances were performed at the National Bunraku Theater in Osaka. The audience was packed with mostly vivacious old ladies, passing around coughdrops and yelling "dekimashita!" for their favorite performers. The performance is an all-day event, as it spans seven hours.

Since I have been focusing on contemporary dance, I was initially not too interested in Nihon-buyo, a Japanese traditional dance that presents movements from centuries of Japanese theater and court dancing. However, I met a 23-year-old Japanese man named Akie at butoh class who studies Nihon-buyo. I was intrigued that people my own age were interested in Nihon-buyo and decided to see it.

The performance was a collection of dances, and each dance could stand apart from the others. The dances either featured a simple story, developing from the relationship between two or three of the performers, or a theme, focusing on one of the seasons or nature. As I sat down, there were a man and woman onstage, both clad in kimono. As they danced, they were accompanied by singers and musicians sitting on stage right. The music was four shamisens (a stringed instrument), a few small taiko drums, and four singers who sometimes spoke. The music was sparse, and a refined atmosphere fell on the stage. The movements were very subtle and small, and not showy. Communication was achieved through the smallest tilt of the head or ripple of the ribcage. The dancers wore kimono and sometimes held a fan or cloth, and the woman wore white facepaint. After the first small dance ended, Akie explained:

"The Japanese like silence, because within it is easy to understand various types of emotion. It says what you want to do and what you think, and what kind of person you are. I think love comes from silence. If it is noisy, we cannot understand. In nihon-buyo, form is important, but more important is emotion and atmosphere."

As for form, the performers kept a low center of gravity and danced with bent knees. The mastery of the bent-kneed position addedto the fluidity of the dance, because their legs could shuffle forward or change the level of body as if their lower body was made of air rather than flesh. "You know nagare?" Akie asked. "It means waterfall." Nagare seemed to be the energy moving through their bodies. Their body and hands kept an upright, regal position. The hip and ribcage are stacked on top of the other, the fingers are extended straightly. This straightness signifies beauty. A broken form, such as the hip separated from the chest, signifies no beauty. Butoh often uses this broken form. "But, no-beauty is beautiful."

Kabuki has had a complicated history,regarding gender, but for the most part, men play all the roles in Kabuki. Nihon-buyo largely comes from Kabuki. On this day, men played women, and women played women. I asked Akie about this, and he said that "when a man becomes woman, it is beautiful." One dance began with a man and a call-girl, who is played by an old man. She carried a caged bird, which she let loose. The woman's movement is more complicated in the body, resulting in softer and more fluid movement. The man still moves fluidly, but with larger,more stately movements. The woman has to move through complicated movement patterns, with subtle leans of the chest and head. The woman is portrayed as gentler.

The power of Nihon-buyo seems to be the tension and atmosphere that it creates. The movement is not showy, but instead small and subtle. The dancer communicates her feelings/motivations/personality through the simplicity of the medium.

Although Japan has a noisy landscape, visually and aurally, this mode of communication is evident in the Japanese style of interpersonal relations. Feelings and thoughts are not fully expressed in words, but instead in their implications and accompanying body language. When we study Japanese culture, we know this restraint as tatemae and honne. Below is a quote from the statistics professor Hayashi Chimio, which is taken from Alex Kerr's book Dogs and Demons:

"When people say 'There's no communication between parents and children,' this is an American way of thinking. In Japan we didn't need spoken communication between parents and children. A glance at the face, a glance at the back, and we understood enough."

Kerr mentions the harmony created by this reserve, but ultimately speaks of the trouble this mode of communication can cause in contemporary Japan. But that "trouble" is a different topic, a chaos in contemporary dance that I did not find in nihon-buyo.

Kyoto Butoh Class

I have begun attending butoh class with Ima Tenko (see picture to the left), a butoh dancer in Kyoto. Butoh seems like such an expressionistic, no-rules dance form, and so I was very curious to take an organized, two-hour class.

What happens in a butoh dance class?

When I ask this question, the answer is that the class depends on the teacher. The class material is often specific exercises for alignment and strength and/or visualization techniques. Different teachers may use more of the former or the latter. I have heard that Yoshito Ohno's class uses a lot of visualization techniques, where a teacher will give the student an image to move her body, such as "Become like the night sky, embody the full moon" (not an actua instruction, just my poor approximation).

Ima Tenko's class is in a small section of Kyoto, at the end of a tight walkway, in a rickety building. I arrived a little late, but that did not matter - the class often starts and ends a bit late. There were four other students in the class that day: Ulala, a young Japanese woman; Akie, a young Japanese man trained in Japanese traditional dance; Begonia, a flamenco dancer from Spain (who I think has some ties to the Ohno family?); and Adam, a young American man from Ohio who recently fell in love with dance through performance art at the liberal Antioch college. When I joined the group in the studio, Akie said that his dance teacher invited me to one of his performances, and I was welcome to come with him to some of his classes. At the same time, Ima-san was passing out class schedules, and we exchanged performance information. It is a shame that the community is small and under-funded, but because of this very fact, access to the inside and invitations are easy to acquire.

The class began sitting. We rolled our hands or arms over various parts of our legs to warm up the underside of the foot, smooth out the left from the hip, and feel the spiral in the leg from the hip to the foot.

From the back of the room, we crawled while imitating first a maggot, then a crocodile, next a baby deer, and finally a human baby. While it was "becoming" these different creatures, there was an end product in the body that was specific, and not too open to interpretation.

Standing, she asked us to feel the weight in our body by pretending that we are a toy balloon filled with water, hanging from a stretchy string. We jump, feeling the water crash against the floor, smash against the ceiling, and slosh from side to side. We dump the water out (after which our upper bodies dangle forward from the waist) and then feel the water refill from the heels and up to the head, the result of which is a typical roll-up.

A lot of the exercises were done with the knees bent, and the weight down to the ground. In one series, we isolated our pelvis by imagining that there is a ball in our core that wants to separate from out chest. Towards the end of the class, we did a long series of deep plies in a second position- type stance.

We used the image of a figure eight a lot. In one side to side motion, we imagined a figure eight going through our right heel to our left fingers in the upper left diagonal, down to the left heel, through the right fingers in the upper right diagonal, and repeated. We also drew imaginary figure-eights with various body parts - hands, feet, knees, waist, pelvis, elbow, head, and etc. We split up into groups and danced as small octopi while drawing figure eights with our tentacles. This was up for interpretation. Ulala hunched her upper back over to form the head of the octopus and moved with bent and waving arms and legs, with her head down. She was a cute octopus. Akie looked like the view of an octopus with its ink shooter as the center, as he stood and waved his arms and legs largely, while making a spaced-out octopus face.

In one exercise, one person goes on her hands and knees, making a table with her back that is the earth. Her partner puts his finger on a spot on her back, and she then has the task of gathering her energy and making a mountain in that spot. Akie was my partner, and even though it was a little unfair, I pointed to the spots where it was difficult to move the body upwards in that direction. I have often seen the body contracted in the normal way, with the center of the middle back making a sloping mountain. Because of this, it was amazing to watch Akie summon a mound near his lower right back or upper right shoulder, in places where i didn't know his body could make that shape. Ima-san said that butoh dancer's bodies are like the mountains, like the earth.

While I was in the class, I often got frustrated- it feels like my body has no creative spark left in it, that all I can do is perfom the same patterns that I have learned in other dance classes. It feels that all I can do is imitate and try to be the best, to be watched. I love investigating dance, but I am not sure if I love dancing anymore. It seems paradoxical, but I am thrilled by the existence of dance, but displeased by my dancing existence. It feels important to include this information, to report on what happened in me in addition to what happened around me. I am excited to continue attending Ima-san's class and see how my personal attitude towards me dancing changes, if it does.

Ima-san made tea for everyone afterwards, and I could have also visited Akie's dance class, but I had already promised to meet a friend and had to hurry off. The next day I was exhausted (before the butoh class, I had been travelling for two weeks non-stop) and languished in a walk around Nijo castle. The connection between my feet and the ground felt different, my head felt cloudy, and I hadn't showered. I was walking in one of the palaces with "nightingale" wooden floors, which squeek when walked upon to alert the castle inhabitants of intruders. We walked past the open tatami rooms, peering at the elaborate paintins on the walls depicting tigers, hawks, birds, trees, and rivers floating in golden clouds. The paintings seemed a mix of 17th century originals and reproductions, portraying the hundreds of years of history with each faded hue, and the care of preservation with the shiny gold flakes. One of the site's workers approached me. Since I just returned from Seoul, I expected her to yell at me. Instead, she told me to "please go ahead and look slowly." She explained some of the subtleties of the room to me in simple Japanese- like how the long wooden carving on the wall was made from one piece of wood, and had two images carved on either side of it. A peacock.

After I walked through the maze of the castle garden, I went into a special exhibition of an original wall painting. Again, another kind woman working, and another amazing piece of art. Three walls painted with an image of a few severe-looking hawks perched on large, vigorous trees by a river, all partially obscured by golden clouds. It was painted by young artists from the premiere school of art at the time, the Kano school. Mid-17th century, a few 20-something-year-old men painting the walls for the shogun, choosing the hawk image because of the shogun's hobby of falconry. I stared and stared at the different representations of leaves, the same strength exhibited in the hawk's claws and trees roots. Japan is magical.

Hijikata Tatsumi Archive

On Thursday, my first full day in Tokyo, my mind was filled with the name Hijikata Tatsumi. Today, I went to the Hijkata archives at Keio University. I met with the archivist, who allowed me to watch his films and read books from his library for four hours.

My previous knowledge of him had been supplied only by provocative pictures and brief biographies. I knew that the first Butoh piece was Kinjiki, translated as Forbidden Colors, performed with Yoshito Ohno in 1959. This piece was inspired by Yukio Mishima's novel of the same name. The piece features a homosexual relationship between the two men. It was erotic and violent and met mixed reviews - some were shocked, others were thrilled.

His other well-known piece is the 1968 Hijikata and the Japanese: Rebellion of the Body. This piece made Hijikata and ankoku butoh known, and we know it today by the picture of Hijikata's half-starved body wearing nothing but a golden phallus. He rehearsed religiously and fasted weeks before the show, eating nothing but milk and weak miso soup. This performance seemed to embody two rebellions: of the nation and of the body. Groups in Japan were in rebellion in the sixties; Coincidentally, ten days after Hijikata's performance, a crowd of more than ten thousand of students rioted in front of Shinjuku station with the motto from Mao Tse Dong: "Every rebellion has a reason," (information from Nanako Kurihara's amazing thesis on Hijikata. I will befriend her!). It's also the piece where Hijikata refers to his adolescence in the countryside of Tohoku, due to his idea that the physicality of the Japanese are determined by regional characteristics. His rebellion was a rejection of other forms of dance that did not suit him. The superb Kurihara states "Rejecting the existing dance styles of the West and those of native Japan, and equally uninterested in pedestrian movement, Hijikata attempted to create a dance of ritualistic quality that would transform the human body and mind," (2).

Hijikata moved to Tokyo when he was young, for the sake of his dance training. He studied German expressionist dance (influenced by Eguchi Takaya and thus Mary Wigman) in Tohoku and branched into ballet and jazz in Tokyo. Despite his passion, Hijikata was never good at these forms of dancing. They didn't fit him, his stiff body or lower center of gravity, and not even why he wanted to dance. " He said repeatedly that he desired to create a dance in which life was dance, and in which he could create his own universe.... a style that emphasized the presence of the dancers rather than communicating meaning of demonstrating virtuosity," (Kurihara 24).

He was born in the countryside and moved to the city. There, he always felt like an outsider because of his upbringing. He belonged to a small social circle of avante-garde artists and radical thinkers. He desired to dance, but this drive was not fulfilled by conventional forms of dance. Because of our similar backgrounds, I empathized with him and desired to see his progression throughout life and art. Yes, I do not want a dance that is only about "demonstrating virtuousity." I was questioning whether dance was about "communicating meaning." I have never thought about dance as "emphasizing the presence of the dancers." The sheer presence! Just the power to fill the room and to move people. I have said before that dance is experience. Hijikata did, too. "According to him, one must experience dance directly, rather than merely watch it from a distance and try to interpret it. The spectator must transform himself through the experience, like a ritual," (46).

His ideas about dance are clear and riddle-like all at the same time, pulling me in more as my desire to understand Hijikata's universe grows. His life and theories are intriguing, since he pulled so much of his perspective from German and French writers and visual artists before his time and then fed the Japanese avante-gard art world of the sixties. I love the relationship between the arts, the spinning of ideas, and the creating of a new cosmos. A flyer for Dance Experience 3 (1960) had this written on the back:

"I received secret information which Mr. Tatsumi Hijikata is said to perform a heresy ceremony again. I am peasant to see it and must be ready for black masks and suspicious perfumes for the night.

The classics and the advance guard here come to a crisis. I can find modern symbolic language in his work.

- Ukio Mishima" (page 25 of Tatsumi Hijikata's Butoh)

Joanna Newsom

Joanna Newsom performed in Urbanguild, a small club in downtown Kyoto, on Monday, February 19th with Bill Callahan and mamma!milk. That afternoon, I went to a butoh class taught by Ima Tenko (more on THAT later!), and went to see Joanna with two friends from class, Cara and Adam.

The club was so small that the fliers for upcoming shows and the merchandise tables were set-up in the hallway of the building. The audience and stage occupied a space about the size of two large living rooms put together. After we paid at the entrance, Cara was bold and clear, weaving through the crowd (about 3/4 Japanese, 1/4 foreigners) to find us ground seats a breath away from the stage, returning into the crowd to pull the timid Adam to his seat at the feet of the performers. Bill Callahan was pungent, sad-eyed and soothing. I like his songs, acoustic guitar, strong voice, and the constant tap of his shoe.

Joanna emerged and sat center stage behind her harp. To the right, a calm man playing a small guitar resembling a mandolin. To the left, a red-eyed man set up behind bass drums, barefoot.

She began with "Emily." The song is so breathtakingly beautiful,and it compounds with the vibrant hands on harp strings, her facial reactions to the words she sings, her voice, lower and more sonorous than in her recordings. Her face looks justlike my old friend Anna, and I traveled back in time while I listened with allof my being.The feelings of hearing a slow steady voice read me poetry, walking in the park and talking about love andlost promises, smoking clove cigarettes in the car and listening to Ani Difranco and Radiohead, her bright bright eyes and these feelings branched out to others, holding Melissa's hand as she cried at a performance of "this woman's work," Jae holding my hand in the art garage while I cried. I did not recollect the times consciously, but insteadl felt all of these rare moments that were real and didn't words, but were like growing up, caring for each other like siblings and instructing each other the difference between meteors and meteorites, gathering before our storytellers. As Joanna's song progressed, it built to heights I couldn't have imagined, Joanna unrelenting. the drumbeat louad and alive. I was crying uncontrollably, lips quivering, shaking. Oh sweet sweet sweet sweet Lord.

The song ended and I had a chance to pull myself together. While she spoke, I took a few pictures, mostly to remember alter how close I was. I did not dare use flash, so they are mostly Joanna blurs. (And remember - no zoom is used either!)

The show remained captivating until the end, even when they had left the stage and the vibrations still existed in the room. Her album Y's was presented in a scope and scale impossible in recordings. It is a good example of the full vibrancy live performances can achieve in comparison to recordings. They played a few of her milk-eyed mender songs, like "peach, plum, pear" and "the book of right-on," which were re-arranged for the trio present onstage. It sounded wonderful. I was enraptured. I cannot think of a time that I had felt like what I described above. Felt a longing and a joy for how life has fit together. And felt such awe. It made me hate modern dance.

Before the show started, I was talking with Adam, a dancer who has never been formally trained in ballet or modern dance. He has taken a few classes in a college in Ohio, but most of his work is him, moving. As he described some of the pieces to me, they sounded so clear and purposeful, and I could imagine his body achieving great communication and wonder. What he is doing wouldn'y be called modern dance. Would it be called contemporary dance? There is no school of technique or choreographic method behind it. Just one person talking with his body. I thought of the dancing that I have done and wondered if I have ever really danced. I wanted to divorce modern dance. I wanted to throw it away, complete with the person it made me, how it made me feel. I felt like I had been doing it all to communicate to myself when I was a smart and content child, dancing in the living room daily for joy. Modern dance takes me further away- just as the adolescent is socialized and therefore pulled further away from childhood, the modern dance body is trained in patterns, socialized in a technique in an effort to de-socialize the body. It sounds garbled. It all sounds garbled in my head, too. How did it happen? Perhaps I felt life in a way listening to Joanna that dance has only served to distort. It still sounds garbled.

Since Joanna did not have a set list that night, she would ask her two bandmates what they wanted to play after each song. When she asked the small guitar-playing man in front of me, I would whisper "what about Sadie?" and they would hear me but then play a song that was not "Sadie." It was in no way disappointing, though, since every song chosen was a joy, of course.

For the last song, she sang a duet with the percussionist. This man, with normally severe, slightly-red eyes, completely changed as he sang. His countenance was soft, his eyes peacefully closed. His voice was like aloe or honey or something equally soothing. Then they exited. Eventually, Joanna returned alone for an encore. I think she smiled at me the second before she sat down. And then she played "Sadie." Each intonation and stress was different, and the song hurried. It seemed an exploration of the song by a weary traveler, sincere, yet searching and tweaking sounds and looking for completion.

"Here We Are" at Kobe Jogakuin

Kobe Jogakuin dance majors performed their end-of-year concert, entitled "Here We Are," on the nights of February 14 through February 18th. This is the programs first year, and the concert showcases the talents of its 15 dance majors. Well, 16 - somehow I got onto the bill as well. I began learning material with them in September and followed the rigorous daily schedule of rehearsals before the show. The experience was fun and soul-shattering.

As this is a personal post, I am going to write quickly and with many mistakes. Get ready.

First on the program was a Graham technique piece, in which we demonstrated different Graham exercises. We started on the floor with contractions, long leans, turns around the back, knee work, and etc. We stood, did some plies and tendus, kicks, prances, triplets, leaps, standing contractions, majestic walking, and etc. It lasted about 25 minutes, and it felt good. It is always nice to relax into the contraction and release-activated movement of Graham. Although it is not at all "relaxing" - especially standing in very rigid ballet poses.

A problem with the Graham piece was that the dancers were not looking out. Instead, they were so focused inwards that they had a glazed look on their faces for the majority of the time. What is the importance of "looking out"? The way that I understand it can be explained by this metaphor: Think of how you feel when someone talks to you and make eye contact, as opposed to when they talk to you while staring off into space. Isn't the latter kind of weird? And when the eyes are actually looking outward, instead of inward, the person looks more aware, and thus more alive, and more sensitive to her surroundings. This is my personal explanation for why it is important to "look out." Simply - it is to avoid looking like a zombie.

The musical accompaniment was exciting; Sarah Shugarman traveled from Canada to compose and perform live music for the piece, with our drummer Kyoshi. Sarah plays violin, piano, and percussion, while singing and laughing. Currently, she teaches strings at the University of Toronto High School. She is shown at the right, with Toru Shimazaki. The second half of the concert was a collage of pieces choreographed and taught by Shimazaki.

On the whole, it felt like an entertainment medley. There was a dramatic piece, followed by an emotional piece, seguewaying into a burlesque-y jazzy piece, calmed down by a long lyrical piece, followed by a short improv game, then a clap-along energetic piece, changing to a softer-feeling chair piece, and then the grand finale of a stomping-zombie-body-yanking piece. The bow reprised the emotional piece from the beginning, wherein we hold hands, and I hug a girl for about3 counts of 8. About 30 minutes of dancing.

As I danced, I wanted to figure out what I was dancing- so much of it seemed contradictory. There was no overall story or theme to tie it all together, nothing we were trying to "say." It seemed to dash from one extreme of happiness to another extreme of concern. Yet, the audience would be riled. One of the women from the international center was crying at the end, stating that she could "feel my emotions." Can you emote strictly from catchy music and interesting movement? I suppose so. But something felt off. I would look at the people around me and see that they were wearing their "dance face." It has a blank stare that looks off somewhere into the distance, yet the face cooperates to say what it should be saying. For a dramatic piece, the eyebrows form a upside-down V. In a gesture to console another, the head tilts sympathetically. Yet the face looks like some kind of deer judging if there is food in the bushes.

There is one part of the emotional piece where another girl and I stand face to face, from opposite sides of the room, and slowly walk to each other to meet in the center. As we walked, her eyes seemed to be looking straight into my eyes, with an expression of concern on her face. But, at the same time, she was not looking into my eyes. It was like looking at a mannequin. Complete vacancy.

Yet, these girls have been practicing so hard, and one can tell the large amount of work and intention put into every single movement they perform. Their bodies and faces were so committed, but it was a commitment to performing a task. It was a commitment to these counts and this line and the corrections sensei gave us. It felt like there was no art in it. Nothing was being said, other than "'Here We Are,' look at us."

I obviously struggled with this, as I do not aspire too much for technique, yet desparately want to say something. However, the audience was touched. The piece pulled the audience's emotions for a ride, exciting them and provoking them. During the calm, lyrical piece, all of the dancers sit, facing the audience, as the dancers take turns leaving their seat, joining the dance, and then returning to their seat. I was sitting for quite some time, facing the audience. Usually, their faces were completely relaxed. Some heads were tilted, and the eyes moved from between the dancers as they came out. Sometimes a smile would break out, or one audience member would make a comment to another, but that was rare. Usually it was just a zoned-out and relaxed face, unaware that I was watching.

I have yet to understand it all. At the end, almost all of the performers were crying. They were happy tears of a job completed. I'm still not sure of all of this. Partly, it feels like a beauty contest where the winners cry at the end. On the other hand, I respect everyone very much and know that there is a depth beyond the superficial.

What was i saying onstage? The first night, before I knew that the dancing would effect the audience, I felt like I was in a marathon of being energetic, on time, and thinking thin thoughts. After the show, Shimazaki said, "See, Caitlin? It is not about the technique. If you go out there, and be a person, you will touch people." I don't understand what we were doing. But, I had fun, and the audience enoyed it, and it made 15 dance majors burst into tears of joy.

It ended last night, and my thoughts will hopefully develop with time. But for now, IT'S OVER!

Kagura Continued

The full Kagura, 33 sacred shinto dances, were performed from 5:30 pm on Saturday until sunrise on Sunday, in a house in the Takachiho mountains. To get there, I rode over a gorge and up steep roads, steeped in lush green mountains. When I walked into the house, two middle-aged women were sitting in the corner drinking apple juice boxes. Two groups of older men were sitting around heaters, drinking sake. I saw ice boxes of food and sleeping bags in the corner, and I worried that I had only brought an orange and some coffee for the next 16 hours.

However, at 7 pm the juicebox ladies gave me an aluminum plate and offered Brian and me onigiri and inari tofu. The men in front of us tossed chicken and vegetables onto our plate with a flick of their chopsticks. As we shared food, we shared talk. The men in front of us had all (except one newcomer) been attending the Kagura dances for over ten years. They pointed to the glossy photographs that lined the walls and named who had taken each dynamic dance shot. Each man had expensive-looking cameras and seemed to be playfully competing for the best pictures. Brian showed them his almost-antique Leica, and the cameras were passed around and admired.

Regarding food, the Japanese share. Dinner, in the home or at a restaurant, is normally served family-style, as everyone takes a little bit of each entree. Even snack bags come with each candy/cookie individually packaged, since the pieces will be distributed to friends. In dance class, it is usual for someone to open a gift box of candy or their own box of cookies and promptly run over screaming "Kay-chan!" with the piece designated for me.

(On right: Example of girls who scream "Kay-chan!" and dance well.)

At 8 pm older men and women emerged from the kitchen, carrying wooden trays full of onigiri, plates of nabe-style vegetables, and bottles of sake. We ate, again. One man was careful to ensure that my sake cup was overflowing to the point that it spilt on the tatami floor.

About one-third of the way through the dances, the middle-aged men in front of us began tearing off white paper decorations and wrapping a coin in the paper. They passed me one of the bundles and made a motion for me to throw it at the same time they did, onstage while the dancers were performing. They chortled each time someone had to dash on and off stage to pick up the coins. They were sitting on a sleeping bag, while i was sitting just outside of it, on the tatami floor. One of the men motioned for me to take a sitting space on the sleeping bag.

I'm not suggesting that this is a grand gesture for me to move from outsider to insider status, but it does make me think of the juxtaposition of uchi and soto that is prevalent in Japan. Uchi is the inside space, and soto is the outside space. Literally, uchi can mean "house" or the pronoun "I." Soto means "outside," and the Japanese word for foreigner literally means "outside person." A characteristic of the pair is that uchi and soto are perceived as opposites. Maybe, in Japan it looks like this:

Uchi: Soto
Japan: Rest of the World
One's Personal Space: Other People

The people in our vicinity were aware of us and casually pulled us into conversations or actions involving the event. Around midnight four dancers brought trays of rice onstage and threw them on the ground. (I assumed as an offering to the gods.) One of the men gave me a few grains of rice and told me to keep it. I asked him what it means and he said, "Omamori," which means "good luck charm." I said, "I don't know what that means, but I'll put it in my wallet, OK?"

As it got later, my mind began to wander. It felt strange to be thinking weird thoughts at a religious ritual. Almost immediately after thinking this, one of the men passed me a beer and peanuts, soon to be followed by more beer. I allowed my mind to roam freely for a while.

Another meal of onigiri and tsukemono was served at 1:30 am. Afterwards, People began to pass out in sleeping bags. One man was using an empty sake bottle as a pillow. My notes at this point were composed of different colored pens and illustrations. I tried to stay awake, because the action onstage was becoming more interesting.

Two gods move through the audience, one acting as a bull pulling a plow while the other god whips it. A young god does a precise and pleasing dance with a hoe, testing the air with two fingers pointing skyward. Three of the dancers, wearing a woman's head cloth covering, walk onstage and gesture downward to imply planting. One purpose of the Kagura is to thank the gods for a good harvest and to ensure another in the year to come.

A god enters the stage with a large wooden dowel. He begins chasing a "woman" god and prodding her in the butt with his now-phallic dowel. One of the men in front of me cackles maniacally at each butt-poke.

At 5:20 am I surrendered to exhaustion and lay down in the spot where I sat. When I wake up, I was positioned butt-to-butt with one of the older men, sharing his covers. If I didn't have to use the bathroom, I would have pretended to remain sleeping in order to savor the old man butt warmth. It was very cold.

After the dances about Amaterasu were performed at dawn, the event concluded at 8 am. Then, they served breakfast - more onigiri, tsukemono, and miso soup. The vinegar and unusual flavor of the food had already upset my stomach, but the old woman serving the food would not let me turn down an onigiri with a pickled plum in the center. I ate two. Brian and I both looked and felt awful, and I called a taxi to take us to the bus station. Bus, subway, shinkansen, train - I slept the whole way home.

Kagura

This weekend, I skipped dance rehearsal at Kobe-Jogakuin and traveled to Fukuoka. I took the train and then the subway, so I could board this guy, the kodama. I learned something about shinkansen: first, the hikari rail star and the nozomi go about the same speed, but kodama is the local train of shinkansen, (SLOW).






I was visiting Bryan so that we could go by bus to takachiho, a small mountain town, where we would attend an all-night performance of the 33 sacred Kagura dances.

Geography Lesson:

In the graphic to the left, the Hyogo prefecture is highlighted in orange. Kobe is on its East side, and that is where I currently live. This prefecture, plus six of its neighbors (including Kyoto and Osaka) make up the Kansai region. In the map on the right, the orange highlighted prefecture is Miyazaki, where Takachiho is. Regarding islands, Hyogo is in Honshuu, and Miyazaki is in Kyuushuu.

How does Kagura fit this blog?:

I have not researched Kagura yet- I prefer to get down my initial observations, before I learn the textbook definitions. However, I have heard rumors.

Rumor #1: Kagura is the oldest folk dance of Japan. That said, it is like the mother of dance in Japan. Could I see kagura influence in works of butoh or Shimazaki-sensei's modern dance? What would the differences be? And just how did ancient dudes dance?

Rumor #2: Kagura tells the story of Shinto myth, including the creation of the world and Amaterasu's hiding in and re-emergence from the cave. I love narrative dances. They are satisfying for the watcher (because she gets a coherent story from the piece) and challenging for the do-er (who has to tell a story clearly through movement/gesture, a difficult language).

The performance was in a home in the mountains. The cab driver was willing to brave our horrible Japanese and converse with us. I asked if he has ever seen the kagura dances, and he said that he has been dancing them for the past twenty years. Impressive! I assume that you do not have to be a priest or serious religious person, but can participate in the dance as a hobby. He dropped us off and said something to a person in Shinto dress, and it seemed like he was vouching for us and assuring that we made it back the next morning. The man in shinto dress told us to "Douzo," and so we did.

After removing my shoes at the small foyer, I stepped into a large tatami room, with a room off to the right serving as a backstage and rooms off to the left for the kitchen and bathrooms. The space for the stage was demarcated by green carpet; decorated with hanging paper pictures depicting images prevalent in shintoism like the rabbit and the moon, boars, a torii, and the characters for fire, water, and wood; and lined on the wall-side by food offerings and a ledge for the masks to be placed.

A shinto ceremony started at 4pm, after which the dancers proceeded to the house. All of the dancers were men dressed in white kimonos, some with masks and some without. Their ages ranged from young teens to men in their 50's. They proceeded in a single-file line, with the wooden box (home of the god?) being carried on two men's shoulders. Observers were taking turns tossing a coin into the box and running under the box and back over. Bryan and I each took our turn making an offering, after which he said, "Now we are a part of it!"

The dancers formed a large circle outside and then inside, doing a slow and controlled step-together, step-together, that twisted the body in two curving arcs.

Circles were a major theme of the evening, both in formations of multiple bodies and in the individual's movements. Often, as they were tracing a large circle on stage, the players would carve semi-circles with their steps. Weighty steps made a semi-circle intention downwards as their knees bent and straightened.

During the first dances, the dancers always carried items in both hands: either a sword, bells, a white fan with the Japanese red sun on it, or a staff with paper on one or both ends.

If my writing seems distracted or terse, there is a reason - the dance started at 5:30 pm and continued, nonstop, until 8 am. If anything, I should be hailed for my bravery for attempting to recall the highlights of an experience both soul-shattering and uplifting. Normally I think performance writing should be in present tense, but this is in past tense. So there you go.

In the beginning, I was very attentive to the movement. The first dances were all men without masks, human beings, and they sang along with the beats of the taiko and the sound of the flute. The older men sitting in our area expressed their regret that we couldn't understand what the dancers were singing. "Zenzen wakaranai ne?" It seemed like the chorus of greek plays, because the men moved simply as their singing probably told the story of the gods.

Their movements were weighted, with the loud thud of the taiko emphasizing downward steps. At the same time, each step was controlled (so that the step lands softly) and specific. The torso was not absolutely vertical, but had a slight lean forward, mostly in the upper back. The body was one-piece, with no isolation of body parts outside of hand or head gestures, and it moved gracefully between neutral and lower levels.

Because of watching Richard Lomax's "Palm Play," a documentary made in the sixties about indigenous dances' use of showing or obscuring the palm and Lomax's reductionist explanations about the cultural significance of the gestural choice, I was curious about the use of the hands. In "Palm Play," Lomax briefly states how indigenous dances in Japan often conceal the palms in kimono, and then some explanation I cannot remember about what that means. In the first few dances, done by "human beings"(no mask), their palms are always hidden either by the object they are holding or in the sleeve of their kimono. Even when they were holding an object, most of their hand would be in their sleeve.

Due to the simple movement and hidden palms of these dances, it is a shock when the first masked man (a god) takes the stage and reveals his palm, fingers stretched, in a movement curving in front of his head. If the dancer is not purposefully showing his palm, it is concealed- often by holding the end of their sleeve in their palm, as in the picture on the left.

The character of the dancer completely changes when he is wearing the mask - he looks straight ahead into the audience, instead of looking a bit shy like the unmasked men. He moves his head in a primal and inhuman way, quickly and slightly inclining it from side to side. The dance was so viscerally exciting that the men around me could tell that I was jazzed about it . "Subarashii" one man commented to me, meaning "wonderful." When I sat down, another man informed me that dancing with the mask was difficult, because the dancer has no peripheral vision. I didn't even think of this trouble, as I was moved by the different energy and excitement of the masked dance. After each masked man did a dance, another dancer, biting a green leaf, returns the mask to the shelf behind the stage and does a ceremonial shinto clap and bow. The masks represent the gods and are the gods, and their essence seems to infuse the dancers when they wear them.

There is so much meaning that i do not understand. Different props and clothing accessories mean nothing to me. As does the painting on the ceiling, or the words that the men sing. And my own questions arise: why do many gods have blonde wigs? Why is this dance, including the roles of female goddesses, all danced by men?

As the night progressed, the dances of the gods became more energetic and the human being dances more repetitive. When it was almost dawn, the action on stage was recognizable: Amaterasu (in the picture below-right) performed a dance, and the story of her hiding in the cave was enacted. Her emergence from the cave was well-timed with dawn, since she is the sun goddess, and the world was plunged into darkness until she came out. I will research more about the stories and symbolism of the dances and make a Kagura Story post.

Watching the dances analytically fizzled out after about Hour Four. When there is over 15 hours of continuous dancing, who cares if their palms are showing or not? It's really not important. What is important is the community event centered around these shared stories and traditions. So, on to the next post, Kagura Community!