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.