Hanaarashi

On a Saturday night in Kyoto, the three-person ensemble of Hanaarashi performed in the Nishi-factory Garden. The Garden is a performance space converted from a private home, located in the Senbon Kamidachuuri neighborhood of Kyoto.


Shortly before the performance, Beth and I wandered into a second-hand store and purchased an old-school gameboy for 300 yen from an old man who spoke the local dialect. "Okiini," he said to thank us, "nanbon," to ask us how much things were. He was prepared to haggle with us, an adventure I did not have time for, since we were looking for the Garden.


The entrance of the Garden was marked with an A-frame chalkboard and a lamp. I walked down a narrow corridor, which led to the entrance of the performance space. The space was a small square, with a light board in the back, then the audience, and then the stage.


The stage had black marley floors and walls of differently colored wood. On stage were a single goldfish in a tank on a table and hanging red orbs made of pipe cleaners and tinsel. The red orbs made the stage seem like a fish tank, so that the stage was a fish tank in a fish tank.




The house had tatami floors and zabuton cushions in the front row and living room chairs in the back rows. While we waited for the performance to start, a woman brought everyone a small cup of hot green tea.




When she retrieved our empty cups, she gave us a plastic sheet to cover ourselves with. Beth turned to me, and we pondered what sort of performance this would be anyway. Would there be hammers and watermelons, ala Gallagher?

The dance begins with the atmospheric tension and visceral fear that only Butoh can provoke. A woman in a red dress (I will call her "Red" from now on) is sitting in the traditional bent-kneed position onstage. We see her profile, and she is absolutely still. The room is quiet, until she releases a gutteral sound. She moves from this usual Japanese sitting position to something like the cobra, with stomach on the ground and torso lifted vertically. However, she drags her lower body like a fish on dry land. Her speed is also like a fish out-of-water, sometimes spasming violently and sometimes still. She makes her way over to the table, where she stoically unwraps and eats a small cookie. She watches the fish intently. Blackout. She exits the stage in the dark.

I fear butoh dancers while they are dancing in the same way that a holy person fears god. It's not an immediate threat: the holy person and I do not think that we will be physically harmed soon. But the "other" is so alien and supernatural to us that we do not understand them as beings and fear the possible knowledge of and power over us that they may have. At the same time that she is a god, she is a child who has just asked me why bad things happen in the world. This feeling shoots through me when Red slowly turns her face to the audience for the first time.

When the lights come up again, a lady in a black and white dress (she is now B&W) sits next to the table, where there is an apple and no fish tank. Her mouth forms an o-shape, and she moves it as if she were a fish. She points her feet and cycles her legs in a teasing manner. Her fingers flute over her body before slowly removing her top to reveal a red dress underneath. As music begins playing, she rolls the apple all over her body with pleasure, towards her mouth.

This introduction of B&W and her desire is interrupted by a curly head hanging upside down from the beam directly above me, a lady (now referred to as "Curly") looking at the audience with her teethbared, basking in some emotion that is the nexus of anger and delight. It kind of looked like the picture to the right, except real-life.

Meanwhile, B&W gorges herself in the apple by excitedly sucking on it, after which she exhibits dismay. She takes off her black and white dress to reveal the red dress underneath (she is shown in the picture to the left, borrowed from hanaarashi's website) and exits on her knees.

Curly descends from the ceiling beam via ladder and approaches the apple. She engages the apple, but in a different way. B&W is driven to experience the apple based on her inner stimuli; She focuses on herself, and how she feels when the apple touches her. Curly focuses on the apple and her curiousity of it- she tests how it looks in the light, how it smells, and how it rolls on varying parts of her body, such as on her arm versus in between her breasts. B&W returns for the apple, and she and Curly have a rousing apple fight, in which Curly breaks her fall on Beth's backpack.

In this first part of the dance, each character is introduced. Red is alone and unstable; B&W is sensual and in touch with her inner world; and Curly is adventurous and curious. They are all bound by eating and having a relationship with each other- these two things are not only needs, but they are inescapable needs. The title of the piece "Ningen wa tabezuni ikirareru hodo jiyuu jyanai" roughly translates to "Human beings are not so free that they can live without eating." We are trapped in these conditions in the same way that a fish is trapped in water.

As mentioned earlier, the fish imagery continues throughout the piece- B&W and Curly play with the floating orbs onstage and poke at the stage walls, the idle movement of fish in a tank. Red dips her head in the fish bowl. Both Curly and Red, at different points in the dance, crawl along the floor head first, in the same way that a fish initiates forward movement with its head. In one scene, the stage is completely dark except for a searchlight that Red wears on her head. As she moves, the light casts shadows of the orbs on the walls, giving the illusion of the stage being underwater (don't ask me how, it just does). After searching onstage, she stops at the fish tank. Red strokes the fish, grabs it, and slams it into her mouth. Immediately afterwards, there is a blackout.

(Picture borrowed from Hanaarashi's blog )

The plot onstage is the relationship developing between B&W and Curly. At first, they are forced to interact, because they both want the apple. They directly fight over the apple, then they both pretend that they do not want the apply and coyly offer it to the other. Ultimately, Curly chews up the apple, regurgitating most of it onto downstage center because of her rush to consume it. Their relationship should be over, because the apple is gone, but they return onstage. Both explore the stage. Curly plays with B&W as if she were a puppet, making her giggly like a Heian-period courtesan and say things like "what is hot inside of me! it is daimonji day." Curly plays ballet, B&W grieves to traditional music, and then both assume a wide fighter's stance while indescribable feelings and urges pass through their facial features. They do a rousing duet to mambo music and end the piece with a sentimental duet. Their interactions are based on play and artificiality. While considering the other, they feel many different characters flash through their faces. An interesting note is that both wear drab dresses with brightly-colored undergarments partially concealed. It could be suggesting that they play many different colorful characters in society while hiding their own color.

This poorly-done color metaphor makes me think of the book "Forbidden Colors" by Yukio Mishima, a prominent modern Japanese writer who influenced the Butoh's founder Hijikata Tatsumi. There is no specific connection of that book with the dance piece; however, the issue of true feelings versus outward expression is ubiquitous in Japanese society, and I feel like I run into it often in everyday life. To put it simply and linguistically, saying anything in a simple and direct manner is equal to tantamount rudeness.

Back to Hanaarashi, Curly and B&W's faces exhibit specific and rapidly shifting expressions. On the other hand, Red's face is a genuine human face, the face someone will only show you when you are close or lovers, the face of yourself when you accidentally peer into a mirror that you didn't know was there. It is the face that is outside of society. She moves from this neutral face to bouts of violence, flinging herself to the ground and eating a live goldfish. What does this mean? At the moment (interpretations often change with time), I feel like there is a carcinogenic absence inside of her, from which she feels pain and the need to fill it. The other two can live with only small bits of the apple, but Red eats both junkfood and a live goldfish. She listens to music on her earbuds and tries to dance, but no respite comes. She can only wail sorrowfully and pound herself on the ground. It seems like what she needs to live is human relationships, but it is not as easy to attain as a cookie.

At the end of the piece, B&W and Curly are reconciled and smiling gently. Red walks through the house and throws tomatoes onto the stage. She walks over to the table, where B&W and Curly just finished their duet, and throws the table over. Red hurls her body to the ground and yells. Blackout. The End.

In Hanaarashi's description of the piece, I understood one of the sentences to mean "We build human relationships while we eat." Basically, human beings are limited by our needs, which pull us together and allow us to survive, fascinated and propelled by the things which limit us. "The Winner" is probably Curly; she is the one who is motivated by external stimuli, appreciating the way light glints off of an apple or how the scene looks upside down from a ceiling beam or in a headstand position. Likewise, she is also the character who finally gets the apple, and in the puppeteer game, she is the one who controls B&W's speech and movement.

This is a simple rendition of the dance and its moral. The real value lies in the nuanced movements and masterful expressions of Hanaarashi, and the untellable truths that they told that night with their bodies. I'm not sure how much I understand Japanese, Japanese culture, or Butoh dancing, but I want to listen. Even after the apple is gone, I will come back on for the second act.