My Japanese

Throughout my life, whenever I watch Japanese films or television dramas, I have the feeling that the characters either say too little or too much. I think of the office workers in Ikiru, who, despite the daily hell of their existence over decades of monotony and conformity in a stifling, overcrowded room, never say how they feel except in one scene, the drunken wake for their departed co-worker, the only one of them who, at the very end of his life, did as he pleased. In this moment, every detail of their frustration and anger release in a torrent of trauma against their boss and, even more, life itself.

Okay, so this film is over 50 years old, but I still see it in today’s TV melodramas. Different music, different hair, same sense of propriety, obligation, shame. And it’s not just actors. I also feel this way about real people. I think of my own grandmother, who, throughout her 80 years, never developed the habit of asking for what she wanted from life. I think of the countless individuals that I’ve met in Japan who ask the most limited and cursory questions upon meeting me as the polite way to make my acquaintance. (I’m not, of course, speaking of those many I meet there who are quite open and forthright in their feelings. Some artists, priests, farmers, etc. Is it somehow an urban, bourgeois thing at this point?)

There’s also that sense of structure, of order, that runs throughout everything in Japanese society. Everything, including every person and their every behavioral and visual detail, has its place. In fact, I’m finding it almost impossible to write these words without feeling like I’m falling prey to this tendency in this very text. I’m telling you exactly what I think and why. Probably because I’m reading a series of essays by Japanese photographers right now. Even when they studiously avoid explaining their artwork and in fact state that it’s impossible, they still explain exactly why this is true, which in my mind undermines the power of their statement.  Moreover, there’s also yet a sense of what shouldn’t (isn’t supposed to) be said, so that I experience these texts as constant frustration, alternating between knowing too much or too little, between the weight of didacticism and outright confusion.

I know this is coming from my biased perspective as an American, someone who neither worries about giving my opinion or stating my feelings and thus rarely feels a need to either hold back or tell the whole story.

There is that “Japanese” part of me, though.

It ebbs and flows throughout my daily consciousness, half-shaping my habit of processing information as both acceptance and refusal. I want to know everything, but I don’t need to. I want to act naturally, but I want to do what’s necessary to be a part of everything around me. I don’t care what others think of me, and I want everyone to like me. I accept everything and want to make sure it all comes out right. I’m a benevolent, dialogic, actively desiring, control freak.

Go figure.

Koan - A doer or a thinker?

A senior student asked the teacher, “Do you consider yourself a doer or a thinker?”

The teacher grabbed a priceless vase from his shelf and shattered it on the ground.

Unfazed, the student stated calmly, “A doer, then?”

“No,” replied the teacher. “I’ve been contemplating that gesture for 30 years.”

The teacher knows there’s no difference, but neither is he telling a lie. Two choices equally inadequate may cancel each other out if both are attempted by the same person. Unreflective and inactive are negative terms. What are some better ones?

The choice is yours.

Koan - The dancer's window

For years, a dancer watched the world going by his window. He tried not to imitate the movements of others, but rather to embody their essence. One day, he saw someone much like himself in the distance who was moving just like he was. He suddenly realized that the window was actually a mirror and stopped trying.

Some actions we are conscious of. Others we tend to forget. Still others we pretend not to see as beauty and ego become one in our minds and hearts, which yet know better.

Stop trying.

Koan - Am I still dancing?

A dancer kept a photo of his teacher over his desk for years.

One day, the teacher asked, “why did you begin studying?”

“Because I saw you dance,” said the smiling student.

The teacher nodded, handed him another photo, and said, “Use this one instead.”

“But it’s not the same one that inspires me,” insisted the student.

The teacher asked, “Am I still dancing?”

If you show the image in your mind to others, they can’t see it. The one they have in their hands is only something to agree or argue over. The one in your mind is fragile, absolute, and solitary. It is the most precious thing in life because it is a true possession with no proof whatsoever. Why spend a lifetime struggling against this fact, with unnecessary gifts, too many lovers, countless photos? Just accept the truth.

Tears fall as I step alongside death’s river under brilliant blue skies.

Koan - Thin broth

Some students were admiring the portraits of past masters when a cook entered the room with a pot of thin broth and began serving them.

“Why are you despoiling the Great Hall of the Masters with something so tasteless?” they asked.

The cook replied, “If you have the power to imagine their greatness, then you can also see this is full of flavor.”

One lie leads to other falsehoods. One honest moment leads to a river of truth. Where is the point of origin? In your eyes or someone else’s hands? If you are spoken to from outside, what’s the difference? If you operate on yourself, what’s the difference? Is the mirror reflecting light or shadow? Is it pointed inward or outward? What’s the difference?

Beauty’s certainty is infinitesimal. Grotesque falsities spread over the landscape. What’s the difference?

Koan - The old texts

A student asked the teacher, “Why do we study the old texts?”

“I have never told you what to read,” replied the teacher.

“But everyone knows them,” said the surprised student.

“If you know them, then can you tell me what they say?” asked the teacher, who covered his ears and waited.

Sacredness can be either personal or collective, but either way it escapes objectivity by nature. Not even the most humorless academics can assert the truth or falsity beneath a sacred text unless they experience it for themselves. Some would say that all sacredness is myth. Others that to write the sacred is to measure the infinite. Desire extends from all sides of dialogue and debate. To knowingly commit a futile gesture is a utopian act.

Thinking love.

Framing ecstacy.

Release the shutter.

Koan - Remembering the past

A student walked into a teacher’s office, where he was writing furiously.

“I’m remembering the past,” said the teacher.

The student watched in fascination as the teacher scribbled rapidly. Finally, the teacher stopped and looked up.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m sorry to stare, but I loved watching you preserve history.”

“I’m not preserving anything.”

Sensing the student’s disappointment, the teacher added, “Come back tomorrow. I’ll remember it differently then.”

Was the teacher giving a lesson before the student entered the room? Did the student know there was a lesson to be learned before he entered? If, as they say, art is a lie in service to the truth, then is history a fine art? If you fall in love with someone, will you believe everything they tell you?

The pen that invents fiction can also be the blade that cuts through illusion. Write words to draw blood, and you will know the nature of healing.

Koan - Ohno's flower

Ohno says to his students, “Be a flower. Don’t copy it. Just find your way into it. It’s right here, above your head. There’s a universe here, between your hands. Don’t waste it.”

This again, is the way I remember it. Jay remembers him saying something else. We each heard what we needed to hear. Isn’t that the way it always is?  Just as the flower is not a flower but you, so the universe is your world. Throwing out possibilities is fine if one is choosing wisely. It’s the accumulation of too many that is the true waste.

The master begins each time. It’s the students that pick up where they left off.

Koan - Why don't you dance?

A photographer asked a dancer, “May I take a photo of you dancing?”

The dancer replied, “Yes, but you won’t enjoy the shoot.”

“But I’ve long been an admirer of your work,” asserted the photographer, and raised his camera.

The dancer stood still and stared into the lens.

“Why don’t you dance?”, pleaded the photographer from behind the shutter.

The dancer stated, “I told you so.”

Breath. The cycle of life reveals itself when we open our lungs in the first moment after exiting the womb and when we close our mouths in the last moment before entering eternal sleep. In every moment, when millions of body cells burst and fade and congeal and rise.  We stand in line and hold on when we could be walking in circles and learning something. See what you’ve taken for granted, then notice what you’ve taken for yourself to live. Use what you have, and keep moving.

With what image did you breathe your first? With what gesture will you breathe your last?

In a public square

A man in a public square asked everyone he met if they would like to be his friend. He noticed shared traits and used this as evidence of kinship. He also pointed out differences, and how meaningful he thought it was that they could surmount these in order to act in harmony. Most of them weren’t so sure. He finally asserted that there was no true difference between them. They smiled at him and quietly disagreed. Finally, the man danced for the others, who were speechless. They asked questions, and then left him alone in the square.

Koan - Walk in a straight line

A teacher with an extra hip joint leaned to the side every day of his life. One day, he told his students to walk in a straight line, which they did.

“That’s a curve!” he shouted. He told them to walk in a circle instead.

“That’s an oval!” he shouted again. He told them to stand straight.

“Why are you leaning?” he asked.

The students instinctively leaned to the side.

“Better,” said the teacher. “Now walk in a straight line.”

Leaning, they could only walk in a curve.

“Ah, much better,” stated the teacher. “Now a circle.”

They could only manage an oval path.

“That’s it,” said the teacher. “Why didn’t you do it earlier?”

“We’re confused,” said the students.

“Now you know,” smiled the teacher.

The frustration from knowing what one means and having no one understand is only surpassed by the feeling of not knowing and having people understand. You sign your name, and people remember it. You take an oath, and people hold you to it. You walk a path, and people think you know where you’re going. It’s always the same. Better to be shocked by your own ignorance, if that’s what it takes.

Spell the words incorrectly and break the code. See yourself from behind and break the mirror. Retell the story so people have something to forget. Become the thing itself.

Koan - Why do we dance?

One day, after practicing for many years, a dancer looked around at his colleagues and asked, “Why do we dance?” The answers came quickly.

“Because my teacher ordered me too.”

“Because my teacher told me I could.”

“Because I don’t know what else to do.”

“Because I wanted to.”

The last person replied, “Why do you ask?”

The first dancer sat down in silence and then tried unsuccessfully to stand.

Where are the teachers? Are they in the room? What does it mean to stand up? You know when others are looking. Searching for an original face is simply to don another mask.

Writing it down. Taking a photo. Shooting a film. Looking for answers. Why do you ask?

Koan - Finishing the noodles

Stepping boldly, the student approached the teacher, who was sitting and eating noodles.

“I would like to learn from you how to dance,” said the student.

“I can teach you nothing,” said the teacher, slurping his noodles loudly.

“But surely there is some wisdom I can gain from you,” insisted the student.

The teacher stood up and walked out of the room, calling behind as he left, “You can begin by finishing the noodles.”

Don’t ask for what you already know from someone who has no system for letting you know. They only possess a method of their own devising that may someday allow you to realize this one truth. Your own reflection in the mirror will teach you more than a master can in 51 years. It’s all a matter of give and take.

Move what you see.

Speak how you feel.

Present who you imagine.

(Special thanks to Oguri-san)

Koan - Two dancers

Two dancers faced each other, intending to move in unison. One of them suddenly ran off quickly into the distance.

The other dancer called to him, “I thought we were moving together.”

Just before disappearing on the horizon, the first dancer replied, “Aren’t we?”

There are lies that we tell ourselves in order to maintain a false clarity, and there are those that we spin around the heads of others. True unison, or harmony beyond unison, is not a parallel, mirror, or inverse image. There is no measure for this. The dancer fading into obscurity beyond the horizon is the one we wanted to be. Who he is once he disappears is the dancer we will become. History, memory, and the future become one.

Forget what you know. Remember what you must.

Koan - This empty room

When the student met the master for the first time, he couldn’t think of a question to ask the old man. 

“What are you waiting for?” asked the master.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” replied the student.

“How is this possible?” said the master. “You’re the only one standing in this empty room.”

Master-student relationships reveal or hide depending on one’s expectations. To be a student, one must first be the master of one’s own head. This student, however, hadn’t found his body yet, so how could he know where his head was? The true master is simply the student once he’s found a way to begin the lesson.

If you know what you are looking for, you will never find it.

Just breathe. The lesson always begins where it ends.

My first encounter

Sometime in Summer 1991 – Kinokuniya Bookstore, Downtown Los Angeles

All I can think is that this man is in pain.

There’s a large book in my hands with a cover photo that I don’t understand.  It’s an old Japanese man.  He’s holding a flower, stem twisted and bent, petals shriveled.  His hands and arms curl inward close to his chest, arching down, concave.  His left shoulder droops low, withering.  Twisted, asymmetrical, near to chaos, his body struggling to stay standing, or upright at all.  Patchy white makeup covers every inch of his body, as if applied unevenly on purpose, or as if lived in too long.  Bright red lipstick and yellowed teeth, mouth only half-open but somehow feeling agape, as if that’s all he can muster, as if he has something to say, but instead of coming out through his tongue, the words are bleeding, oozing through pores at random points all over his body. 

Long, unevenly painted eyebrows.  Over the eyelids, smears of sky blue, desperate for attention, not rooted in attraction, but rather in pity, a long-lost desire to be someone’s queen for a day, or an hour, a minute even, an inexorable slide into decay.  And those eyes.  Surrounded by pure black, painted thick and messy, three streaks trailing off to the side of his face, simultaneously hopeful and despairing.  He’s looking upward, longing, resigned, saintly.

It’s obvious.  He’s dying.  You’re not supposed to watch this kind of thing happening.  I can’t keep my eyes off of him.  Other customers in the store are beginning to stare at me staring at this book. 

I’ve never seen anything so beautiful…

That’s what I felt, then. 

I look at this photo now, and I notice how staged it is.  The curve of the flower petals perfectly matching the arc of the lips, the fall of the hair, and the center point in the frame.  No tension in the large hands.  The dancer’s pose seems static, as if tailored and held for the camera.  There is still, however, that expression.

Ohno Kazuo sees something.  Heaven or God, since he is a devout Christian, opening his mouth wide to take in the breath of angels?  Or maybe he senses a ghost, a lost or kindred soul that fills him with childlike awe as well as aged exhaustion.  Either way, it’s a liminal feeling he’s created.  Even after 19 years, I feel a space opening up every time I see this photo.  Ohno appears to me intimidated by and anxious for what comes next, and its effect is visceral even now, just as it was when I first stood staring at it in that bookstore.  For me, the photo itself engenders a sense of liminality.  I look at it and have no idea what just happened or, even more, what is about to happen.

The image, however, could also simply be an interesting composition that the photographer, Ethan Hoffman, artfully captured, an instant when cosmic vision was activated in glass, metal, and silver halides, an old trick of the light, as they say.  We might remember that among the first photographers in history were the competing desires to either capture or depict reality.  Passive or active?  After over 170 years, we assume it’s a conscious decision made by every photographer, but, in reality, it’s a controversy that may never be resolved, just as after three millennia, most God-fearing worshippers have never reached consensus on whether to live their lives submitting to God’s will or doing his bidding.

Kazuo Stands

I’ve been staring at this photo of Kazuo Ohno for 17 years.

I’m not sure what I usually notice first.  Is it the perfectly upright body broken only by a slightly turned out left hand and the head slightly tilted to the right?  Is it the perfectly balanced and subtle tones of gray, white, and black that invite me in to this man’s universe as well as keep me at a distance with its otherworldly feel?  Is it the two cracks in the wall; one thick one emerging from behind Ohno’s head and the other traversing above, straight from left to right (or right to left if you read it in Japanese), a signifier (undeniably?) of a cross, (especially?) given Ohno’s allegedly devout Christian faith. 

Or perhaps other, smaller details.  The old, worn shoes.  The cheap linoleum floor.  The unbuttoned collar with no tie.  The right hand slightly clawing (inward or outward?).  His aged, thinning, crumpling hair?  It all leaves me with a feeling of simultaneous desire and emptiness that keeps me coming back for more.

The face, of course. 

Pasty white makeup.  80 years of wrinkles.  Eyes sunken, still, searching, though not actually lifeless.  Lips edging downward, unparted, perhaps never smiling.  A clown without a stage.  Neither beauty nor beast.  More the image of seeming absence while remaining the embodiment of presence.  He is definitely there, but perhaps defining a form of life that most would count as dead and gone.

I know for certain one thing that does not strike me very often but that instills me with a soft, gentle viscerality when it does is Ohno’s shadow.  If his body, his apparition, impresses at all, it is because of the contrast between the clarity of his shadow, impossible without the presence of something, yet that referent, his body, so ghostlike.

Seeing this image of Ohno for the first time, as I entered the concert hall to watch him perform, my first encounter ever with Butoh, I did experience love and terror.  After witnessing the performance, I did experience ecstacy.

For nearly two decades, this photo has defined for me what it means to be alive and dead, or perhaps more correctly, living and dying, at the same time. 

How many countless moments onstage have I consciously and subconsciously assumed this position?  This photo is my fallback, my security blanket, my reference point.  It is my tabula rasa from which I have measured so many performance experiences, so many hundreds of attempts at personifying, making real and tangible that which I love about my being as a generative entity in the world, my self a site for discovery and transformation.  It has been, in the worst moments, my escape, and, in the best moments, my way of knowing how simply to stand.

My Butoh

“My Butoh...”

If you hang out with Butoh dancers long enough, this is a phrase you’ll begin to hear repeatedly. Butoh artists tend to act somewhat proprietary, occasionally even territorial, in regards to their practice. Not that they think they have all the answers (although some do act this way). It’s just that they’ve spent a great deal of their lives developing a performance style and/or training regimen that both defines them as individual artists and is reliant on their own idiosyncratic interpretation of any number of aesthetic, practical, and historical factors.

I probably hear this discussion most often from Japanese artists. Many that I’ve met in Japan sooner or later ask me something like, “What is your Butoh?” or “What do you think Butoh is?” The multitude of possible answers to such questions is essentially old hat for them, especially the older ones, who have had to answer such inquiries themselves (and for themselves as well) far too many times over for it to retain any real meaning.

It’s a stereotype, of course, but interpersonal relations in Japanese society as a whole are more formalized than most Western cultures, which may be why I’m asked, before anything else and even more often than the above questions, “Who’s your teacher?” There’s an implicit sense of hierarchy and lineage in this, and frankly I never know what to say. I often mention that I studied Tanaka Min’s Body Weather Laboratory technique for three years in Los Angeles with Oguri, one of the original members of Tanaka’s Mai Juku dance troupe in the 1980s, and his wife, dancer Roxanne Steinberg. However, Body Weather is a more of a kinesthetic training form and not a specific performance style, none of the three consider themselves Butoh dancers, per se, and I never considered myself a student in the traditional master-apprentice sense.

The fact is, I learned to perform mainly from my first theater director, performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, and I am mostly self-taught as a dancer. Perhaps this has skewed my perspective on the issue of what makes a Butoh artist to a very loose definition that fundamentally involves self-definition and personal interpretation. Someone who’s trained with an older generation “master” for years will probably have a different, more formal or hierarchical conception. (A longtime student of Ohno Yoshito that I met, upon hearing that I had been a dancer for 15 years, called me his “Butoh big brother.”)

Moreover, of course, is that this all begs the question, why even bother asking what Butoh is? If there’s no way to productively limit it to one definition and it is inherently open-ended in practice, why does it matter how the word is used?

Well, on the one hand, my own answer is that it doesn’t. One’s artistic practice is just that, regardless of what labels may or may not be applied to it, and it has whatever place in the world it does. This can’t be helped, no matter how hard artists work, audiences applaud or neglect, or critics praise or denigrate.

On the other hand, I do care that artists continue to be able to push certain boundaries of embodiment, identity, socialization, and, most of all, being.  Generally speaking, the type of work, the type of body, if I can use that word holistically, that I’ve witnessed over the last 15 years in Butoh-based performance is more genuinely in and of the moment than many other performance forms that I’ve witnessed. I feel that Butoh-based dancers, or at least the ones that I’m most affected by, tend to emanate a sense of interiorized struggle, an inherent tension between (seemingly) contradictory, psycho-physiological elements within themselves. In a word, for me the most effective Butoh performers are liminal beings, embodying neither who or what they seem to be or desire but rather the struggle itself of becoming, of what in Buddhism is called form and emptiness, of life, death, and rebirth.

Perhaps what is most useful is not to delineate the limits of Butoh’s parameters but rather to contemplate its potential. Instead of asking what Butoh is, perhaps we should simply consider what it could be. Instead of asking myself, “Am I a Butoh dancer?” it might be more meaningful to ask, “Could I, or should I, be a Butoh artist, and what would that mean for my practice?”

So then, getting back to the real world…

Why do I consider myself a Butoh artist?

Good question.

This is the way it always begins.

This is the way it always begins. I’m no different. A dream from among the first upright moments in life. Grasping the shaky railing of an unstable crib, simultaneously transfixed, fearing, and fascinated by the flood of ghetto bird moonlight tracing across my room from a sky too low for heaven above but still over my head. I didn’t get it, but someone was clearly in control. I distinctly remember wondering then and there if, when the light found me, I would become a suspect, a criminal.

Now, four decades on, guilt a foregone conclusion, I know very well how to find my light, but even better how to recede into the darkness, still on my own, still waiting, contemplating, among the shadows in every possible moment.

Flat-footed, I still maintain that first stance from 40 years ago as an achievement worth repeating, leaning precariously, one at a time, on the outside edge of my feet, an unsure stance entirely assured of its identity. The gravitational clarity of flat feet denied, deferring to a desperate, hopeless plea against Earth’s pull out of respect, infatuation.

Forty years of stepping, one sole at a time scraping the concrete of a city too familiar and meandering. You see their virgin eyes upon arrival (No center! No there there!), but you know better, but you can’t explain. You can only stand (nobody walks), smile, hope for the best, that they can learn to find theirs in the sea of super lowest common flat surfaces and countless identifications lurking beneath, sandtraps of empty form without a mirror.

In such a forest, no one follows your steps. They can’t see a path you've no intention of marking, despite your occasional protestations.* Infrequently, finding your dimmest possible light, you stomp out a clearing, a window to let back out your store of ghetto bird moonlight, a frame betwixt and between through which you invite infinite peering, a canted, cracked mirror held uncertainly askance; a mute plea for sympathy; a distant, firm, loving embrace.

* “If I stop trying to define myself, would I still have something to struggle against?”

I'm bleeding.

I’m bleeding.

Here, right in front of your eyes. Can you believe it? I guess that depends on what you believe. Do you believe a person can be honest onstage?

It begins as a faint ripple. Sometimes in the tightening muscles just above my left knee. At other times in a slight relaxing dip of my right shoulder. More often it’s a strangely subtle magnetic pull upwards of my left wrist, which causes my left hand and fingers to curl and twist inward, as if conserving energy, like the last imperceptible throes of a leaf in autumn.

The genetic anomaly that is the extra joint connecting my last lumbar to the tip of my pelvic bone then tugs my torso down and around to the right, the opposite direction of my curling hand, causing my whole body to suddenly appear like the moment when two strands of a double helix slowly join, point by point, in a heretofore unprecedented combination. This moment of conception, when the lazy spark that first moved me now begins a slow climb along the randomly jagged, razor’s edge that is my dancing body, wants a way out, to find itself in the mirror of your eyes. It wants to know what you came for, to witness the image that it can never live up to.

My left hand reaches out, attempting to break its own grasp on itself. Flailing, it fails and sharply darts back to my abdomen, still grasping, now frantically. In distant sympathy, my right hand methodically meanders towards my center as well, while my brooding, confused consciousness slowly manifests itself through a wrinkled brow, tightened lower lip, and eyes afraid of the surrounding darkness.

You have a question on your mind, one that came prepared with its own answers, ready to speak at a moment’s notice, to frame the image that you now struggle to outline in black and white, the image reflected in but unmatched by my body at present.

My body begins to collapse under its own weight, unsure of how or why to stand. My hands claw at the clothes hanging on my body, fragments constructed for anonymity, a blankness now soaked within by osmosis that I beg my body to comprehend. I am falling to the earth below while lifting, dragging myself desperately upward to an imagined heaven.

As my hands finally lift beyond the limits of my body held down and pulled to its eventual dissolution by gravity, my eyelids gradually lift as well.

I see you seeing me.

I believe.

Why?