Butoh by the Sea

With the day off lessons, I went to the seaside to dance with a couple of Japanese friends. We swam in the water, and sat in the sun. We walked by the seafront, and found a suitable boulder for a stage. And we danced.

Dancer - Ikumi

AKB 48

Not the new model of the ever-popular Russian rifle, but a Japanese pop band.



48 girls, dancing in short school skirts, and singing catchy pop songs about their misdemeanours.



One classic lyric "お父さん、ごめんなさい" - 'Father, I'm sorry'



This is Kayo Noro.



She's an attractive girl.



I am one month older than her.



But I don't think that would be too much of a problem.






And this is Aika Ohta.



She performs onstage several times a week with Kayo Noro and the other 46 girls of AKB.



She is 12 years old.



In fact the girls of AKB run right up from 12 to 22 - older than that, and you get 'graduated'.



They dance the same moves, wear the same clothes, appear on TV together.



You don't have to be Mary Whitehouse to realise that this is not a good thing.

Ouragan de Fleurs - Butoh performance

'Ouragan de Fleurs' - 'Hurricane of Flowers' a performance by the Fukuoka Seiryukai, featuring five talented butoh dancers, and me.

It would be performed in Fukuoka at the French Institute, after my teacher and the gang had taken the piece to Paris at the end of March.

They didn't like Paris that much. Too dirty, too rude, too many druggies. Just not Japan.

Actually, disillusionment with Paris is a common problem among Japanese visitors. So much so that the embassy there has opened an emergency helpline for Japanese tourists, suffering deep culture shock at the destruction of their idealised images of the lovers' city. [Original story]

There was a similar sense of culture shock in the making of the piece ('creative differences' - people finding ever move creative ways to differ with each other). But by the time of the performance, all was calm in the Seiryukai camp.

Preparations were rather last minute - rehearsals continued until 15 minutes before the start. The last time we practised the final scene (pictures below), the four of us collapsed in a sprawling heap. Should we fall over, the back-up plan was to make it into 'a falling dance'.

But with the lights set and the audience ready to come in, there was calmness back stage. The Japanese dancers and stage crew called out to each other in chorus "Yoroshiku Onegaishimasu" - the polite Japanese way of asking for a favour. Rather different to the western dark humour of 'break a leg'.

The audience in their seats (well, on their cushions), the lights down, and it began.

























Thanks to Brendan (again) for the photos.

Koen Debut - 公園デッビュー

*If you don't know what Butoh is, read this previous post first*

Koen Debut (公園デッビュー) is a Japanese phrase that refers to the first time that a new-born baby is paraded in the local park (koen). Its meaning has broadened to refer to any first-time presentation or debut, but it still keeps the element of the naive baby, not quite sure what is going on - an element that seems appropriate for my koen debut...

I knew a month or so in advance that my Butoh Koen Debut would be in February. We perform once or twice at every practice in front of other members of the group, but this would be the first time I would dance in front of a real audience.

But my actual first time came a week early.

A local bar, a centre for the Fukuoka art scene, was hosting an exhibition of paintings by a local artist. They were large figures of cut board, all crazed hair and technicolour flamboyance, very girly but full of energy. Liking the pieces, we offered to do a performance in the space, and I was volunteered to take part. My understanding of Japanese being at best partial, I just nodded and said 'of course', not entirely sure what I was letting myself in for.

I turned up on the Friday night, and was quickly pinned down by the artist and her make-up friend, who proceeded to paint my eyelids silver and dust me with stars. I got an ivy headband (weirdly reminiscent of a crown of thorns), and bunches of plastic grapes hung from my belt.

Butoh is usually improvised, which makes for unpredictable (and often exciting) performances. Unfortunately, the preparation also has a tendency to be somewhat improvised, which is rather more problematic. As I had brought my laptop, bulging with mp3s, my teacher asked me to put together some music for the performance - twenty minutes before it was due to start. Not the best pre-performance preparation.

Myself and three girls, decked out to the nines, danced solo in turn, before coming together at the end. While the others performed, we stood as statues, flat to the world like one of the paintings. Dancing last of the three, I stood there for half an hour, focussed on the back wall. When I moved and begun to dance, at last I managed to see the crowd - 30 faces, staring up at me from bodies hunched on the floor, watching my every move. The first time I've performed since I was about 9, this was definitely one of those 'how did I get here moments'. The end of the dance saw me dance with Maiko, a Japanese dancer bedecked with flowers. Stuck for ideas, I resorted to crass plagiarism, stealing an idea from a dance performance my father made a long time ago, in which he offered a woman a flower, which she took from him, and devoured whole. - Dad, apologies m(^-^)m

Here, I stole Maiko's flower from her head, and ate it cruelly. She pushed her fingers between my teeth, and took the sodden, half-chewed plastic flower from my jaws. She put it in her own mouth, chewed sourly, and spat it out violently into the audience.

The piece was supposed to end with the three girls surrounding me to form a final tableau. But this being improvised, Maiko preferred to walk straight out into the crowd to her new boyfriend, watching her dance for the first time, and seemingly not best pleased at the random English boy stealing his girl's flower.

I dare say we looked pretty good, much helped by the vibrant pictures. However, somewhat predictably, the tech side was a bit of a mare. More than a mare; actually disastrous. That side is best forgotten - it just makes me feel queasy...

The week after, a second performance, this time in my teacher's house, deep in the countryside in a rickety fishing village called Nakashima.

Wooden houses, mouldering fishing nets, gumbooted men smoking by the docks. It's a wonderful old place, though the whole lot will be demolished en masse to build a highway.

My teacher's house has a side building with a large performance space upstairs. With one whole wall of windows, it is light and airy, and has slick wooden and tatami floors. Two women, one Australian and one French, live in the building and study with Harada-san. Drop toilets and no central heating make for a basic lifestyle, but one with a suitably wabi/sabi aesthetic.











The performance space is walled on three sides, and backed by large window, over which is hung reams of thick white crepe paper that glows in the sun and billows in the breeze.

On the day of the performance, the house was full and busy from the morning. But the preparations were not physical or mental, culinary. Dish after dish was rustled up - pasta, stew, rice, oden, meat, fish - a veritable banquet.

As this performance would be entirely improvised, and each member of the group would be performing solo, there was nothing in the way of rehearsal to be done. An order was decided, music collated, lighting requested, and then back to the kitchen.

I was on third, and danced to two pieces by the Kronos Quartet - whirling, wild violin pieces; raw, modern, but finely crafted.

I'd had a lot of back pain, and had noticed a few weeks previous that my right shoulder is higher than my left (the legacy of an unnecessarily dramatic bike accident on my last day in Oxford, and when I fell in the Takachiho Gorge - not so funny now...)

Going for a 'can't beat them, join them' idea, I decided to make the most of how my body felt - hence the lopsided outfit, pulling my body further out of position.

I stood there, on the same stage where we practise a few times a month. It's a low ceiling, a small space, not designed for a body as long as mine; fortunately, it means I can't not fill the stage, which is all for the good.










All the other members of the group performed in turn, though I only have photos of a couple:

Ikumi















Shin-san, with her recently born sprog - the youngest dancer of the evening (I was the second youngest).

She brings her little baby to practice every Sunday, and he has a fine pair of lungs on him. Left to his own devices for more than a minute, he will bawl to the rooftops for his mummy. She either dances with him, or suckles him comatose before she can dance in peace.



Maiko, who I danced with the week before.

With a white dress and white face, she could easily have passed for a ghost. She has a very unusual character, normally sweet and kind, but when she dances she becomes something else - wild, intense, broken.

She carried a pair of white feathered wings in her hands, and took three minutes to walk from the edge to the centre of the stage, her faces knotted in total concentration. When she ran out of time and the music stopped, she pounded around the stage, repeating "mada, mada" ['not yet, not yet'].

With the performances over, the party began. The feast was a wonder to behold, and even better to eat. The beer and sake flowed, and the real dancing began. If I learnt anything that night, it was that dancers make good parties. Party Butoh is quite a different affair, closer to burlesque than what had come before.

What is it that the rugby boys say?

'What goes on on tour, stays on tour.'


N.B. Thanks to Brendan for the photos.

Nara

I'd been planning my Christmas travels for weeks - a big deal, my first extended trip that I'd ever done alone, travelling for three weeks across Japan, after only learning the language for two and a half months.

A virulent stomach bug kept me in bed for a week before my travels began, and I was still pretty shaky when I got up for my first morning's travel. I had a three-week rail pass, valid across the country; but, of course, I still missed my first bullet train of the day.

Spending most of the day on trains, I arrived in Nara around 3:30. I'd left Fukuoka in the far west, and was now close to the middle of Japan - to simplify horribly, I was in the bit of Japan that the history comes from. Nara was the capital of Japan from 710-784AD, after which it moved to Nara's more famous big-brother, Kyoto, about an hour away on the train.

It's a very small city, centred on a pedestrianised high-street which leads onto into a large, green park, full of mangy deer that flock to the tourist like pigeons in Trafalgar Square. But I guess the better comparison would be to Oxford - it had the same venerable air of peaceful dust - almost nowhere to go out at night, but steeped in ancient buildings and great treasures. It would be a great place to retire to, if anyone's looking to give up on work anytime soon.

But by the time I arrived there, the temples were shutting, the light dissipating to dusk, and tiredness was setting in. I stomped grumpily around the parks, and got a bit lost in the wooded pathways to the east. Wandering in the deepening gloom, listening to the sporadic deer shrieks, feeling a little unimpressed with the world. And then I saw a sign saying 'Pathway' (in English). It didn't say what to or where from, just 'pathway'. But it seemed like a good omen, and take it I did.

I found myself in the quiet back streets, a fair way from where I wanted to be. But then I came across a couple of wonderful instances of unusual light. Whipping my camera out, I began to feel a lot happier...


Warped, bare trees in neon street light.


A cat hunched on a flood light for warmth, by the historic Sarusawano Ike (but then everything in Nara is historic - it's basically just a nice pond).


The great wooden pagoda of Kofukuji, rebuilt after fire in 1426.


The next day, I went to see 東大寺 (Todaiji - 'Great East Temple') - the biggest wooden building in the world. And it really is BIG...


Photos always shrink things, but click on the pic to make it big, and look at the people on the steps for scale. There's something about its sheer bulk, a shape so familiar from a hundred temple roofs but stretched far beyond the scale of anywhere else. But it doesn't feel humbling, more uplifting to see something man-made and so monumental.


Inside sits the 大仏 (Daibutsu - Great Buddha), a vast bronze statue of Buddha that stands (or rather sits) over 50ft high, completed in 751. The next year, a ceremony was held to bring the statue to life, ceremonially painting in its pupils to see the world. It took so much bronze to cast the statue that it left the fledgling kingdom on the verge of bankruptcy.

The result really is wonderful, and it and the surrounding artwork has a clear, strong aesthetic. The shapes are bold and clearly defined, but abstracted into stylised forms. The pastel red wooden walls are as faded as the green wooden ornaments and dull bronze statues - it felt dry, but warm and accessible.

I timed my visit to Nara in order to see the On Matsuri, one of Nara's biggest festivals. It is a Shinto festival, in which the resident gods are invoked in a midnight ceremony, and housed within a single, portable shrine that is carried down from the hills and set up in state in a temporary temple in the woods for the 24hours of the festival.

During the day, hours of festivities see all manner of traditional costumes and outfits parade through the town; little kids stuttering along in wooden sandals, and rather tubby would-be samurai seemed to make up the largest part of the participants. It was fun, but didn't really set me on fire.


Around 4:30, as the light began to fade, the event began that I really wanted to see. In front of the portable shrine, a large covered stage had been set up, brightly lit and surrounded by braziers, flames billowing in the wind.

The wind picked up, and blew flocks of crows overhead.

A series of extraordinary figures appeared. One robed man walked elegantly on half-foot tall platform sandals, and carried a 3ft diameter headdress with a 2ft high diorama balanced on top, featuring seven dolls in full traditional dress.

An entire Gagaku ensemble was ranked up on the right, playing the ancient music of the Japanese Court (a very rare treat) - its history goes back over a thousand years, though it has changed much over that time. The music has an extraordinary, ethereal quality, with clangs, booms, whistling flutes, and harmonic voices. Underneath it all is the rasping Sho, sounding like an opening accordion, and looking like hands pressed together in prayer.





And to that unearthly music, dancers emerged dressed in fabulous, bright costumes, and wearing large, elaborate headdresses. I've seen them elsewhere, sitting dull and lifeless in museums, but here they were, in part of a real performance.



Four orange dancers walked slowly onto the stage, and spread out into a wide pattern. They danced slowly and gracefully, making curved, sweeping movements with one limb at a time. A circle with the arms, slow spin on the heel, step forward, sweep with both hands. They moved with glacial slowness, and an intensity that demanded attention.

The weather tried to steal our gaze, with scattered rain and a strong wind that blew away priest hats and music papers, shaking the marquees as the musicians tried to pipe over the blustering elements.

A later dance saw a proud dragon skip through the sparks of the fires fanned by the wind, flicking its arms and and legs in the air; a loose jaw hanging free beneath its face, its shining green eyes bulging large.

Another dance featured an orange insect with a long white beard, flicking its heels then sweeping into a protracted, slow turn, drawing its long orange train behind it.


These dancers were serious, powerful, and possessed a real gravity. I spent a lot of time staring at their moving backs, because they danced facing away from the audience. Instead, they danced to the shrine, making their purpose clear - this was a ritual, not a performance. As was partly true of the Yokagura, the point of these dances are that they are performed as well as possible, NOT that the audience enjoys them. But by performing them with such intensity, they drew the eye and had a powerful effect on the emotions.

That's a lesson artists in the west could certainly do with learning - we're too obsessed with the audience's view, their experience, whether its in the judgement of academic theory or arts funding. If the artist keeps looking at they're audience, they'll fumble the ball and stop listening to what's inside. It takes a real arrogance (or confidence) to just concentrate on your own work - maybe you need centuries of tradition to give you that confidence, and so we've lost it in much of our contemporary art.

That power derived from a performance of total, absorbed conviction sent shivers down my body.

Or maybe that was just the wind, rain, and biting cold.