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.