For the past week, I spent the majority of my time in Studio E of The Children's Dance Theatre in Cabbagetown. I've been going to this studio off and on for about six years now: as long as I've lived in Ontario. I go there to study butoh, and occasionally other dance styles, as well. This week, I was studying under the tutelage of Denise Fujiwara. The workshop was entitled Embodiment, and the theme was fear.
Every now and then, someone asks me what butoh is, and I always pause. I have a hard time defining it in a way that will make sense. Although I've been studying butoh for about six years now, I think it's only been within the past year or so that I have begun to get a tentative understanding of what it is I have been investigating. Butoh is not like any other dance or movement style I've ever experienced. For the most part, it's not a technique sort of thing. That is, there is no real component of first you put your foot here, and then you move your arm like so. No, it's not like that, at all.
And it's easy to get the wrong idea by watching a performance or two, as well. You might watch this incredibly compelling presentation and think that the dancer was showing us his or her most innermost feelings, or was taking on a character role, but no.
In a fucked-up sort of way, the closest way I can think to describe butoh is akin to shamanism. Or maybe even a strange form of lycanthropy. Let's say the dancer is performing something about trees. The dancer would not be doing a sort of kindergarten approach to trees, coming out with her or his body held out in the shape of a tree, with the legs playing the part of the trunk, and the arms waving about like branches in the breeze. Instead, the dancer might focus on some aspect of the tree and
become that.
Obviously, you are not seeing an actual transformation. The human in front of you is not about to start sprouting leaves and producing chlorophyl. But it's not so simple as pretending to be a tree....
Over the years of studying with Denise, I have learned that the progression is not fast. Our warm-ups are gradual. There is a certain amount of repetition. I have done many of the exercises numerous times, and I often wonder just how they will fit into the context of performance. We start with tiny movements. This week, we began with microscopic movements of the head on the occipital joint, and tiny movements of the tailbone. We worked on waking up the entire spine in a gradual fashion, getting larger and larger motions, and then progressed to suri-ashi, the gliding walk of Japanese dance (and Japanese martial arts). This walk, which is the only specific physical technique I've ever studied in butoh, gives a physical focus to practice while mental focus is upon external forces which do not actually exist. It is essentially a moving meditation, and I slip away into a different state while I do it. My mind may wander occasionally, but if I'm in the moment, the only things which exist are the floor beneath my feet and the strings which pull me along.
A string pulls the top of my head to the sky. Another draws my tailbone to the earth. Another string is attached a couple of inches below my navel and extends to the horizon. Each of these strings pulls inexorably, and I am drawn along at a constant speed. Once I am moving with no acceleration or deceleration, other strings are added. They may be attached to the back of my heart, my left floating rib, or the back of my right ear. They may be attached in multiple places, all pulling me along. Which string will pull the strongest? Which will change my direction or speed? I do not know until it happens. The impulse is subconscious. If I make a conscious decision, then my ego is too much at the forefront. The strings are what controls my direction, not my conscious decisions.
In an earlier workshop, we worked on killing the self. Since I'm here now, typing this to you, you know this wasn't a literal suicide. But it was a destruction of ego. If a dancer was caught emoting, s/he would receive a scolding. No choreographing. No showing. No acting. Just being. Embodying.
This week, as often before, we started working on the elements of fire, air, water, and earth. We would sit in a circle and free associate terms associated with one of those elements. For fire, we might hear the following:
- heat
- burning
- scorch
- incandescent
- radiating
Then we would become hollow beings, and we would become filled with the qualities of that element. I was filled with fire. My bones were no more. I was flame. My skin and eyes and hair and flesh were fire. Sometimes I flickered. Sometimes I burst in a conflagration. Sometimes I smouldered.
We repeated the same exercise for the other elements, and at the end of the first day, we were given homework: we were to prepare a list of our ten worst fears and bring it into class the next day.
The next morning, we shared some of those fears. Some are ubiquitous: things like losing your loved ones, violent death, cancer, old age. Some were unique: insects indoors, flushing the toilet at night, having feet skewered or smashed.
I was mystified. Here were were, sharing things very personal to us, but studying something which strips the personal away. What were we going to do with these fears? We paired up, and did a descension/ascension exercise while holding our partner's head, and moving it around gently while they relaxed and surrendered all muscular control of it to our hands. This takes a lot of trust and concentration, and is darned tricky. We then repeated the exercise, but this time, the person whose head was being held had to talk about their greatest fear throughout the exercise. This was difficult for multiple reasons. Just on a purely mechanical basis, it's much harder to free the muscles in your head and neck while you're talking. There is also the discomfort of talking about something that scares the shit out of you, and opening up to someone you don't know all that well about something intensely personal. There's the almost inevitable stiffening up that will happen while you think about something terrifying.
But something unexpected happened. Even though the exercise took us all outside our comfort zones, with our heads being supported by our partners, the initial tension melted away. Interesting....
We set that aside and went back to embodying elements. Once again, I was left wondering how everything fit in together.
And on the third day of the workshop, everything started to click. We each chose a fear from our list, and we mapped that fear to an element. My fear is decrepitude. I've sampled this a few times in the past because of sickness or injury. There have been times when I was unable to do simple things for myself, like walk or even get in and out of bed without assistance. The thought of experiencing these things again, or, even worse, experiencing them again without a chance of getting better, gives me the heeby-jeebies. This fear is an enormous stimulus for why I do so much physical training.
My fear of decrepitude is heavy, and weighs upon me like earth, so that is the element I chose. Specificity is key, so I decided upon sand. The way I see it, sand is infertile. It has no life of its own, but is blown by the wind, fills cracks and corners, and gets heavy and sodden. These are the characteristics I embodied. I did not act out my fear, but transformed myself into sand, giving it the same sort of "loudness" engendered by my fear. I was heavy. Everything about me was heavy. I was drawn toward the floor without collapsing. My eyes were blind because they were sand. My skin was heavy. Face. Belly. Legs. Lungs. Everything. I was pushed by a wind. I was pressed against a wall. Sodden with trickling grains.
We became these elements in groups. Some people were able to successfully transform themselves. Others had a harder time, and used their bodies to describe their element rather than to become it. Some had a difficult time divesting themselves of prior dance training, and there were exhortations to get rid of the embellishments and to stop choreographing. Demands included more specificity, no censoring, no hiding, and no expressing. With practice, there were no more frowns or sad faces, arabesques or pliés, and something much more primal, authentic, and unpracticed appeared. Performances became much more compelling, and though the dancers were not using expression of emotion at all, as an audience, what we saw was intensely expressive and deeply moving.
We continued to progress with these exercises for the remainder of the workshop, and by the end, we had three pieces placed together in a group: two fears and one thing which was the opposite or cure of a fear. I decided to go with the decrepitude again, and decided the opposite or cure is self-mastery.
So my three were:
- Fear of decrepitude as engendered through earth. Sand,
- Fear of tooth extraction as engendered through fire. Radiation and the contraction caused by heat.
- Self-mastery as engendered through water. Fluidity and the coalescence of water surface tension.
Our fears and chosen elements are immaterial to the audience. I did not know what fears were obliquely represented by the dancers in front of me, although I could make an educated guess as to what element they might be embodying. What mattered was what I saw. And I saw something beautiful and grotesque and powerful.
I saw butoh.
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