The Difference Butoh Makes by Frances Barbe

The Difference Butoh Makes: A Practice-­‐Based Exploration of Butoh in Contemporary Performance and Performer Training

By Frances Barbe

Palpitation by Frances Barbe Jacksons Lane Theatre, London2003 Photo by Reuben Hart

Submitted for the degree of PhD By Practice By Publication in the Faculty of Humanities, School of Arts (Drama) at the University of Kent.

July 2011

I declare that this submission is my own work and that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, it contains no material previously published or written by another person nor material which, to a substantial extent, has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma of the university or other institute of higher learning, except where due acknowledgment has been made in the text.

Frances Barbe July 2011

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Preface and Acknowledgements:

I am indebted to my butoh teacher, Tadashi Endo, who has been both generous and challenging in guiding my journey with butoh. He was never satisfied and for that I am very grateful.

This work also owes much to conversations and workshops with other practitioners including Katsura Kan, Yumiko Yoshioka, Yuko Kawamoto, Tess de Quincey, Stuart Lynch, Lorna Marshall, John Nobbs, Jacqui Carroll, Thomas Prattki and Ephia. Lynne Bradley first introduced me to butoh in 1992 and in so doing launched my journey with butoh. I am also grateful that she gave me the opportunity to create my first butoh-­‐based works for the company Zen Zen Zo Physical Theatre in its early years.

I have benefitted greatly from support in the School of Arts at the University of Kent. I particularly thank Dr Frank Camilleri for his generous mentoring during the process of writing up this research, and Professor Paul Allain for his support and encouragement during my time at Kent.

Some of the research presented here began during a “Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts” based at the University of Kent (2001 to 2004) funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Daiwa Anglo-­‐ Japanese Foundation.

I am grateful to Keith Johnson for his music composition; Reuben Hart for his costume designs; and June McGrane and Giuseppe Frusteri for documenting the work on video and in photos and to the other photographers featured.

I could not have developed this research without the generous collaboration of all those performers who worked with me during this time, many of whom worked with me across several projects.

My title references Sondra Fraleigh’s phrase “the difference the other makes” from Dancing Into Darkness: Butoh, Zen and Japan (1999: 1). I also thank Sondra also for the generosity with which she has shared her knowledge in discussions with me over the years and for the encouragement and support she has extended to me as practitioner and researcher.

A note on translating Japanese names:

In Japanese language, surnames come first. I have chosen to translate all Japanese names into the English convention of surnames last for this work (that is so much about translation). There are scholarly precedents for this in Butoh: Shades of Darkness by Jean Viala and Nourit Masson-­‐Sekine (1988) and John Barrett’s translation of Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno’s book Kazuo Ohno’s World: From Within and Without (2004).

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Abstract: My choreographic works Fine Bone China, Palpitation and Chimaera form a body of work drawing on Japanese butoh. Each production emphasises a different aspect of butoh, allowing for a study of the difference butoh makes to the process of creation and performance. Fine Bone China explores the interaction between physical score and psychophysical subscore, and the distinction between “figure” and “character”. The group work, Palpitation, challenged performers with extreme reduction or distillation (stillness, simplicity and slow motion) and emphasised kinaesthetic listening and response in ensemble work. Chimaera focused on the transformation and objectification of the butoh body. Alongside these performances, original training methodologies developed that contribute to knowledge and understanding of butoh and performer training.

Examples of performance and training practice are presented on DVD and in photo galleries. The written thesis reflects critically on the process of making this body of work, and culminates in a consideration of the butoh body as an objectified, marionette-­‐like body, drawing on the famous historical essays of Edward Gordon Craig and Heinrich von Kleist, and terms such as the “dead body” from butoh and the “lived body” from phenomenology are unraveled.

The thesis locates the body of work within the wider context of global butoh and contemporary performance. It does not seek a reductive definition of butoh or ask, “what is butoh?” Instead the thesis considers what values are discernible in butoh or butoh-­‐based work? What demands does it place on the performer and on the spectator? What is distinctive about butoh dramaturgy? How do butoh artists train or prepare for butoh, given that butoh is not a technique or a style of performance? What contribution (difference) has butoh made to late twentieth century dance and performance? What aspects of butoh are transferable and relevant to current, contemporary performance and why have western performers turned to butoh to complement their work?

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Table of Contents: Introduction: Contextualising Butoh and this Body of Work.

Moments of Butoh: A Spectator’s Perspective Butoh’s Inception Seminal Productions of the 1960s and 1970s Butoh’s Export and Development Abroad Butoh’s Sources: East and West Gaijin Dancer: A Journey with Butoh

Revelations

This Body of Work

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Fine Bone China

Palpitation

Chimaera

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Production Chronology Photo Gallery DVD Documentation Reflective Analysis 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Distillation: The Potency of Reduction 2.3 Kinaesthetics and Ensemble Work 2.3.1 Flocking: Improvising in Unison 2.3.2 Finale Scene: Improvising in Time 2.4 In Dialogue with Music 2.5 Conclusion

A Lesson in Reduction from Japanese Tea Ceremony

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Production Chronology Photo Gallery DVD Documentation Reflective Analysis 1.1 Introduction 1.2 “Divine Neutrality” and Presence 1.3 Score and Subscore 1.4 Dramaturgical Weave 1.5 Conclusion

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Production Chronology Photo Gallery DVD Documentation Reflective Analysis 3.1 Introduction 3.2 The Unfamiliar Body: Puppets and the Object Body 3.3 Gargoyles and Other Hybrids 3.4 Conclusion

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Preparing Performers: Butoh and Performer Training

DVD Documentation Training Repertoire 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Distillation 4.2.1 Shaken Body to Slow Motion Walk 4.2.2 Circular Motion to Arrested Stillness 4.3 Being Moved: The Receptive Body 4.3.1 Clay and Sculptor 4.3.2 Butoh’s Insect Exercise 4.4 Training for Transformation 4.4.1 Face and Mask Work 4.4.2 Materiality 4.4.3 Butoh-­‐fu: Imagery in Butoh 4.5 Conclusion

CONCLUSION: Considering the Butoh Performer as Marionette-­‐ like Object

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Towards a Theory of the Object Body Unravelling Objectification The Body: Körper versus Leib Butoh’s “Dead Body” Remembering Kleist and Craig’s Marionettes Kleist and the Tree of Self-­‐Consciousness Craig’s Übermarionette Beckett’s “Marionette-­‐like” Figures Butoh and the Contemporary Performer Curtain Call

Reference List

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Bibliography

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DVD Portfolio of Performances

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Western dance begins with its feet planted firmly on the ground whereas butoh begins with a dance wherein the dancer tries in vain to find his feet (Tatsumi Hijikata in Viala and Masson-­‐Sekine 1988: 189).

When we experience ourselves through another cultural lens, we are enriched. When we interpret another culture through our own lens, we bring the difference the other can bring – sometimes the same things insiders see, but more often aspects that bridge the known with the strange. And it is the strangeness of the unknown (how it can rearrange our perceptual field) that calls us to travel across the bridge of difference (Fraleigh 1999: 17).

There are many questions: What is butoh? What is happening with butoh? We must always ask, but a concrete, final answer might be deadly to us (Tadashi Endo 2009).

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INTRODUCTION: Contextualising Butoh and this Body of Work

Moments of Butoh: A Spectator’s Perspective Butoh dancer Carlotta Ikeda appears to be a baby commanding attention from her crib, and a shaman-­‐goddess attending a ritual from her altar, in the solo UTT (1992). She triggers multiple images and associations in my imagination, making me see the goddess behaviour of the baby and the spoilt infant in the goddess. Her soul is palpable, even on video, and is all the more powerful when I see her live in another solo, Waiting (1998), when I am left thinking that I would have paid just to watch her curtain call.

Tadashi Endo in MA (2005) settles into a foetal position, his back to the audience with head and legs tucked out of sight. The image is doubled as a reflection in the pool of water left on the floor from the previous scene. He stays for a long time, breathing to Bach. It is an act of stillness typical of butoh that draws me deeper into the image. My imagination travels away to thoughts of the body as a breathing stone, and to the life and death of such objects.

MA by Tadashi Endo Jacksons Lane Theatre, London 2005 Photo by Gigi Gianella

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The subject of this thesis is not really “butoh”, but “my butoh” and it examines the difference butoh has made to my performance approach, as evidenced in a body of work created between 2003 and 2010. This submission is “By Publication” and “By Practice”. It presents previously created professional practice contextualised in a written thesis. My perspective as spectator, performer, teacher and scholar informs this thesis, bringing together moments of butoh I have seen, with revelations from training and performing in butoh as well as critical reflection and theoretical analysis.

After many years of chasing this thing called “butoh” I realise that it is different things to different people.

Not only do the large number of people influenced by the movement and the wide range of styles that have evolved from it conspire against coming up with a single all-­‐inclusive definition; but the philosophy of butoh itself is vehemently opposed to any critical interpretation that might limit the possible meanings evoked in the viewer (Klein 1988: 2-­‐3).

For some it is brutal and for others, therapeutic. Butoh can be grotesque, or serenely beautiful; it can refer to improvisational dance, choreographed pieces, or work similar to durational performance art. Despite the broad spectrum of colours within butoh, there are also discernible, recurring qualities or values common across the work of many artists. Those common qualities contribute to a strong sense of identity within that diversity of butoh.

I asked the question, “what is butoh?” for a long time before realising it was not the most useful or informative question to ask. This thesis asks instead, what values are discernible in butoh or butoh-­‐based work? What demands does it place on the performer? What is distinctive about butoh dramaturgy?

How do butoh artists train or prepare for butoh, given that butoh is not a technique or a style of performance? What are the main contributions butoh has made to late twentieth century dance and performance? What aspects of butoh are transferable and relevant to current, contemporary performance

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and why have western performers turned to butoh to complement their work?

I bring to butoh my own particular history briefly outlined here. I trained in ballet and modern dance from the age of six until twenty-­‐one and was introduced to butoh just as I was starting to step away from ballet. I was conflicted in my view of ballet. I was grateful for the technical understanding of the body ballet had provided, and frustrated that there was certain patterning or programming that I could not override as I started to ask for different kinds of movement from my body. At university from 1989 to 1993 I studied theatre and literature and began applying my movement skills to work that might usefully be described as physical theatre adaptations of plays, as well as dance theatre works inspired by the work of Pina Bausch, DV8 and other European innovators. It was at this time, around 1992, that I was introduced to both butoh and the actor training method of Tadashi Suzuki.1 Entering an in-­‐depth study of both these approaches in parallel shifted my work then and has continued to influence my creative process and performance aesthetic. While this thesis focuses purely on butoh, it is pertinent and important to mention the parallel influence of Tadashi Suzuki’s approach, particularly to my approach to performer training. In Chapter 4 I will talk more about how butoh and Tadashi Suzuki’s approach interact in my work.

Butoh’s Inception

Nineteen sixty was one of the most turbulent in postwar Japan.

It was in that year that the Japanese government […] approved the renewal of the US-­‐Japan Mutual Security Treaty which permitted US military bases on Japanese soil […] The nation was torn by debate and demonstration. [So while] butoh […] has never been a politically oriented movement […] one cannot fully understand it without some knowledge of the political, social and artistic context of the time […] At a time when “modernisation” meant Americanisation […] the Japanese were

1 I was introduced to butoh by Lynne Bradley of Zen Zen Zo Physical Theatre and to the

work of Tadashi Suzuki by John Nobbs and Jacqui Carroll of Frank Theatre.

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torn between an obsession with “progress” and a refuge in “nostalgia” (Viala and Masson-­‐Sekine 1988: 10-­‐11).

An obsession with progress and refuge in nostalgia was reflected in much of the visual and performing arts in Japan at the time of butoh’s inception.

However distinctive butoh is, it can also be seen as part of a wider artistic context that was rethinking the relationship between innovation and tradition or “progress” and “nostalgia”.2 Artists realised that much of what was “modern” was also “western”. Shingeki or New Theatre is a good example, being a Japanese imitation of western (Russian) naturalism. Artists such as Tadashi Suzuki and Shuji Terayama were part of a counter-­‐ movement called Shogekijo (Small Theatre) which encompassed a broad range of theatre and performance artists seeking a new (Japanese) performance language. Artists were rejecting western imports as well as their own rigidly codified traditions, such as Noh and Kabuki. Butoh reflected that spirit of reform and revolution, seeking to create work that was new, provocative and shocking. There is evidence of that the early pioneers of butoh sought the quality of something ancient or pagan in their new work which countered the highly refined quality of performance traditions that Noh and Kabuki had become.

Butoh’s navigation of the tension between tradition and innovation, between Japanese tradition and western influence is one of its most fascinating and defining features. It is interesting that it emerged at the same time as the postmodern dance movement in America. While it shares some of the same questions, butoh came up with very different answers and as such provides is an interesting contrast to American postmodern dance.

Butoh emerged from dancers. Its early pioneers were trained in modern dance, so it can be described as butoh “dance”; however, some butoh practitioners see butoh as very distinct from what is generally referred to as “dance”. Admittedly, such a distinction between butoh and dance is likely to

2 The exhibition catalogue Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (Munroe 1994)

includes several articles on butoh and Hijikata that locate butoh within vibrant developments in the visual and performing arts in late twentieth-­‐century Japan.

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assume a relatively narrow definition of dance, which now encompasses an increasingly broad range of practices. My understanding is that the distinction is made in order to set butoh apart from dance that uses a highly codified, pre-­‐existing vocabulary, and dance that is (purely) physically virtuosic.3 Butoh stretches the definition of dance, like many innovations in the field of dance in the late twentieth century. So when I align butoh with “dance”, it is with the broadest sense of that term, acknowledging that many butoh artists feel their work is very distinct from what many would call “dance”. I will often use the term “performer” throughout this thesis, to acknowledge that some of the people I work with are trained as actors and some as dancers, and the work we produce shares as much with theatre as with dance. I am explicit where their prior experience is significant.

The birth of butoh is generally agreed to be the 1959 performance of Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours). Its title acknowledged influence from the novel by avant-­‐ garde Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima. Its content borrowed heavily from French writer, Jean Genet and his casts of social outcasts. Hybrid (Japanese and European) sources were already in evidence at the birth of butoh, as will be examined later in this Introduction. Here are some critical responses to this first work.

Although Forbidden Colours only lasted a few minutes, it combined the barbarous act of strangling a chicken with the treatment of anti-­‐social and supposedly taboo topics of homosexuality. It made those of us who watched it to the end shudder, but once the shudder passed through our bodies, it resulted in a refreshing sense of release. […] Hijikata’s debut work […] expanded the range of dance; through it he forced us to experience not only the excellence of his style but also the abyss of existence, and by this means developed a theory of the body for all future dance (Nario Goda in Klein 1988: 81).

All the movements expressed pain, everyone seemed to be tied to the stage and straining at the bonds, and death appeared on the boards (Donald Richie quoted in Munroe 1994: 190).

3 It must be acknowledged that butoh has its own version of codification, however

contentious that is in butoh discourse. Butoh also has its own version of virtuosity, as will be examined later in this thesis.

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Viala and Masson-­‐Sekine call Kinjiki: A venture in destruction; a monument of rebellion […] there is no music. The images are striking […] There is nothing reminiscent of any particular dance technique, but the piece already displays the fierce desire to transform the body which forms the basis of Hijikata’s further experimentation with technique (1988: 63-­‐64).

The work clearly shocked its audiences and excited those who wanted to see a revolution in dance and performance. From our current perspective, when it is difficult to be truly shocking, it is important to remember how radical this kind of work once was, and why it was radical. Reviews make much of the shadowy darkness, the fact that there was no music, and that there was no recognisable dance form or technique.

Butoh’s inception was brought about by a number of innovators in addition to Hijikata. The collaboration of Hijikata with Kazuo Ohno is considered an important foundation for butoh, and Ohno’s son, Yoshito, performed with Hijikata in Kinjiki. Viala and Masson Sekine call Kazuo Ohno the “soul of butoh” and Hijikata its “architect” (1988: 62).

To Hijikata's dark and powerful charisma, butoh's co-­‐founder -­‐ Ohno Kazuo -­‐ provided a stark contrast. He brought to the dance the qualities of illumination and tenderness. Through twenty years of collaboration, the two men formed what might be thought of as the yin and yang that constitute the totality of butoh (Whelan 2006: 2).

The personality and tastes of butoh’s pioneers have made an indelible mark on the nature of butoh and its legacy. It is easy for that to be overshadowed by the kind of socio-­‐political, cultural and historical information that is more convenient to an academic study of butoh. Those pioneer characters become distorted and almost mythical as time passes. Some aspects become firmly embedded in butoh mythology through being repeatedly recounted while other aspects fall away and are forgotten.

Kurihara Nanako is critical of how butoh, and Hijikata’s work in particular, has been “essentialised and stereotyped” by western (particularly U.S.) critics

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who have been quick to connect Hijikata with Zen Buddhism and other such “Japanese” elements.

Yes, the war affected Hijikata greatly, as it influenced whole generations of Japanese artists and writers. And of course butoh contains a lot of “Japanese” elements. However the origin of Hijikata’s butoh is far more complex (Nanako 2000: 17).

Mitsutaka Ishii and Akira Kasai were also important pioneers of butoh who helped set the tone for this new and vibrant approach to dance. Min Tanaka and Akaji Maro were some of the first to collaborate with Hijikata and the legacy of butoh would soon fan out into second and third generation companies. (A number of new butoh companies would spring from within Akaji Maro’s company, Dairakudakan).

The term ankoku buyoh (later ankoku butoh) was first used in 1960, a year after Kinjiki. Ankoku butoh, generally translated as meaning dance of utter darkness, is now largely reserved for the work of first generation artists. It allowed them to distinguish their work from existing forms of dance in Japan (Viala and Masson-­‐Sekine 1988: 64). Referencing darkness in naming their new approach, the early butoh artists made a commitment to expressing “the most obscure facets of the personality” (Viala and Masson-­‐Sekine 1988: 64).

Use of the word obscure here should be taken to refer only to darkness that is bleak, threatening, cheerless or melancholic. Butoh’s exploration of darkness revealed those aspects of human life that are obscure in the sense of being murky, shadowy, or unexposed. Butoh shines a light on that which might otherwise remain invisible, not all of which is necessarily bleak. The shortened term, “butoh”, is now used as a much broader, umbrella term that references the influence of these first generation artists, without laying claim to their original work. 4

4 A literal or etymological translation of butoh is less informative than its translation as “dance of darkness”. The term butoh literally means “dance step” (bu relates to dance and toh means to step or stamp). Butoh also returns to circulation an old word used to refer to ancient dance, or foreign dances, such as the European dance of death. “Hijikata evoked an older meaning; that of ancient dance. It also refers to Western social dance imported to Japan” (Fraleigh 2010: 12).

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A comprehensive history of butoh is beyond the scope of this Introduction, but I provide a general overview of butoh’s development as context for the butoh-­‐based work presented in Chapters 1 to 4. I first track some of the seminal productions of the 1960s and 1970s in Japan and then follow butoh’s export and development abroad in the 1980s and beyond.

Seminal Productions of the 1960s and 1970s

In the first part of the 1960s Hijikata’s work drew inspiration from Jean Genet and other writers whose stories were filled with all kinds of social outcasts and taboos. “His study of the transformations experienced by the body when its most hidden levels are revealed allowed him to form the basis of a dance of ‘being’ rather than ‘appearing’.” (Viala and Masson-­‐Sekine 1988: 64) For example, in 1960 in Notre Dame des Fleurs (Our Lady of the Flowers -­‐ based on Genet’s novel) Hijikata directed Ohno in the role of an old male prostitute, Divine. In the second part of the 1960s, Hijikata drew on specifically Japanese themes, leading eventually to the creation of perhaps his most seminal (and most discussed) butoh work Hijikata and the Japanese: The Rebellion of the Body (1968), also translated as Revolt of the Flesh. “This piece left an unforgettable impression of uncontrolled savagery and destructive derision” (Viala and Masson-­‐Sekine 1988: 70). It has been hailed as an “artistic re-­‐awakening” for Japanese dance (Blackwood 1990: Unpaginated Video). It was Hijikata’s final solo performance, and represented his turn towards his own roots in the north of Japan, Tohoku, for inspiration.

It is discussed at length in most books on butoh, and while it is significant for many reasons, some who saw it live at the time are critical as to whether it is Hijikata’s best work.

It was Hijikata’s great misfortune that he became widely known by his greatest failure, Rebellion of the Body […] I disdain those who praise the Rebellion of the Body with the most flattering compliments after watching mature masterpieces such a Masseur, Rose Coloured Dance and Tomato. [These were] ahead of the times and anticipated multimedia theatre […] [Instead] all they can observe [in Rebellion of the Body] is the newness of

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the pas, the dance [steps] (Tone Yasunao in Morishita 2009: 56).

While most books on butoh in English discuss this work at length, a 2009 publication by the Research Centre for the Arts at Keio University (home to the Tatsumi Hijikata Archives) presents the most detailed account of its significance, and balances enthusiasm for it with more critical views. (See Morishita 2009).

Hijikata’s search for the roots of bodily movement soon led him away from using literature as inspiration to consider his upbringing in the cold, rural Tohoku region in the far north of Japan. There are a number of accounts of how Hijikata transformed his childhood memories into dance. For example, there is the story of children being left in baskets in the fields while their parents worked. At the end of the day, their limbs were twisted and they could not stand easily. Hijikata’s solo in the 1972 performance, Hosotan, shows a body twisted and confined in this way, a figure who is desperately trying to stand on twisted limbs.

Mark Holborn quotes Hijikata as saying; “I come from Tohoku, but there is a Tohoku in everybody. There is a Tohoku in England,” and goes on to suggest that Tohoku ceased to be a geographical location (for Hijikata), and became “a territory of the imagination” (Holborn 1987: 9).

Hosotan (A Story of Small Pox, 1972) and Natsu No Arashi (A Summer Storm, 1973) are two seminal works from the 1970s by Hijikata that are significant for me in illustrating some of butoh’s great depth and potential. Natsu No Arashi was only made available relatively recently, and its release by film-­‐ maker Misao Arai makes an important contribution to the study of Hijikata’s work. It offers us a very different impression of Hijikata to that presented in Rebellion of the Body (1968). Particularly the solo, A Girl, in which Hijikata’s delicacy, control and the craft of his transformations are very evident. It has an unnerving quality, like the earlier work, but without the overt violence and self-­‐conscious intent to shock. The “soul” of Hijikata is intensely present,

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despite the grainy footage.5 He emerges from shadowy darkness to dance with great delicacy, detail and specificity. The dynamics are compressed into tiny motions of intense volume. His body jangles like chains one minute, and falls like soft fabric in another. His face dances throughout, not in a self-­‐ conscious grimacing way, but integrated fully into the tensions and desires of the whole body. He rises as if gravity has no effect on him, and falls as if he lacks the strength to stand. His gaze is other than human; it is animal and puppet and child all at once, but this is more than just parody or comic drag.

He presents us with a deep transformational engagement with his notion of girlhood.

In front of a backdrop of hammered wooden panels, Hijikata performed two concentrated solos of minute, willfully disintegrated gesture, titled A Girl and Leprosy, wearing archaic, ragged women’s red dresses, his legs bare, his face coated in a layer of cracked white plaster (Barber 2006: 84).

Hijikata created Admiring La Argentina (1977) for Ohno, in which Ohno pays homage to the memory of Spanish dancer, Antonia Mercé. Ohno’s wearing of female dresses in this work is no caricatured drag act, but a homage in transformation to the female, within a work that honours the cycles of life from birth to death, from youth to old age.

One significant (and controversial) aspect of Hijikata’s work in the 1970s was the beginning of his formulation of a kind of method for embodying images.

Some are critical of this period.

Hijikata’s desire to create new forms had led him away from the original vigor of butoh, dance of “being”, whose truest expression is found in the freedom of improvisation. In his desire to enrich butoh, had he somehow lost its prime energy, its vital strength? Had the forms destroyed the being; had he closed behind him the very doors he had once opened? (Viala and Masson-­‐Sekine 1988: 92)

5 “Soul” is a term often used in butoh that can be problematic in an academic context because of its varied (and often heavily loaded) connotations for different people. I will elaborate on the use of the term in butoh later in the thesis but for now clarify that that I am using it to refer to that which is individual or unique to Hijikata; that which would be different were the same choreography to be performed by another dancer. I also use the word “soul” to conjure something akin to what yoga practitioners call “prana” or “vital life-­‐force”.

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There had been a relatively improvisational emphasis in the early works.

During the 1970s Hijikata withdrew from performing and worked in his studio choreographing a group of (mainly female) performers including women such as Yoko Ashikawa and Natsu Nakajima. Yoko Ashikawa is considered by many to represent the very pinnacle of butoh’s ability to transform the body. She was able to shape-­‐shift her body not only into various forms, but also into various textures and qualities that seem impossible for a body to assume. This is well exemplified in the film of Hosotan (1972).

In this period we witness the emergence of what would become signature butoh movements. These include the low crouched walking style, the painfully slow movements, the white eyes and extreme grimacing faces, among others. These emerged from very specific internal processes, including the embodiment of surreal, poetic imagery as a way of drawing dance from deep within the body. The reason that so many of them became clichés is they have been adopted as outer style, rather than as internal process that could have matched style with substance.

In this period Hijikata started to explore the use of dense, sensual (i.e. not only visual) imagery as a way of drawing dance from the individual body of the performer. Aspects of the process were documented by one of the dancers, Yukio Waguri, on the DVD / CD ROM Butoh Kaden. Hijikata’s own scrapbooks have now been deposited for further study with the Tatsumi Hijikata Archives at Keio University in Tokyo.6 The images that Hijikata used have become known as butoh-­‐fu, meaning butoh chronicle or butoh notation.

They often refer to paintings, such as those by Francis Bacon, Henri Michaux, and Aubrey Beardsley; and to well-­‐known Japanese art works, for example the Ukioe woodblock prints. The use of butoh-­‐fu as dance notation indicates a particular approach to the creation and performance of dance or movement; one in which sensation, imagination and transformation are central, as is explored in Chapter 4 of this thesis.

6 www.art-­‐c.keio.ac.jp/en/archive/hijikata/

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When considering butoh’s history in relation to its current development, it is exactly this controversial period of formulation that most interests me. This initially rebellious, avant-­‐garde art has just turned fifty years old. What has butoh become and what do we expect of it now, fifty years on? Addressing such questions relies on understanding what butoh was, and there is still some debate as to what constituted butoh’s most important aspects. Many consider butoh to be best defined in terms of pure improvisation; therefore, any formulation is a betrayal of the initial impulse of butoh. I contend that while butoh offered a fascinating and very particular example of pure improvisation, it has also made a significant contribution to the choreographic process and to the way in which choreography incorporates elements of improvisation. Without some acceptance of the role of formulation (or articulation) then butoh might wrongly be defined purely in terms of its approach to improvisation. This period of the 1970s when Hijikata struggled with formulation seems to be highly significant and has caused some debate amongst scholars and practitioners. I do not disregard the critical views of the works he produced at the time; they may well have been found wanting, but the issues he was grappling with were significant whether he failed or succeeded. I propose that these issues might not yet be exhausted in their potential and importance for understanding butoh and dance. The engagement with choreographic process and the attempt to articulate or formulate butoh, while at the same time maintaining its freedom and invention, presented a huge challenge. That challenge remains relevant to butoh and to dance more broadly.

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Butoh’s Export and Development Abroad

Butoh continued to develop in Japan during the 1980s and 1990s as more companies and practitioners aligned themselves with the work of first generation butoh artists. However, in this historical overview, I focus on the export of butoh abroad from the 1980s onwards.

The very first butoh performance in Europe was in Paris in 1978.7 The title was The Last Eden (La Dernier Eden) by Ariodone (including Carlotta Ikeda, Ko Murobushi and Yumiko Yoshioka). It is included here amongst the export of butoh during the 1980s, although in hindsight we see this export began shortly before in 1978. The cabaret theatre that Ariodone was booked into turned them away for being “too animalistic” (Yoshioka 2003), but the group were later given a short run in a small private theatre. This run would be extended several times as demand and appreciation for the work grew.

Japanese artists such as Carlotta Ikeda, Yumiko Yoshioka and Tadashi Endo, who moved their work permanently to Europe, were afforded the opportunity to develop their butoh in dialogue with western culture and artists. One might say they have enjoyed more support and resources there than they might have in Japan. Although Murobushi has kept a base in Japan, he has continued to work extensively in Europe teaching workshops and performing.

While not the first to perform outside Japan, Sankai Juku (directed by Ushio Amagatsu) is perhaps the most famous and commercially successful. They emerged from the large, Tokyo-­‐based company run by Akaji Maro, Dairakudakan. Sankai Juku became known for their mesmerizing, often slow-­‐ moving spectacles with very high production values and beautiful set and costume designs. One of their early signatures was using the dancer’s body hung upside down by their feet. Tragically, the death of one of their dancers during an installation above the streets of New York catapulted them to even

7 Yumiko Yoshioka has told the story of this performance at a number of workshops and symposia I have attended, including Exit ’03 in Germany in 2003. They did not know at the time that theirs would be the first butoh performance in Europe.

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greater fame. Sankai Juku are recognised for bringing butoh to a very wide audience, and at the same time are criticised for making butoh palatable and removing some of the roughness and provocation that had made it significant. Their works do seem far removed from the “dirty avant-­‐garde” with which the early butoh pioneers were associated. (Barber 2006: 41)8 Whether they represent a “watered-­‐down version of butoh […] or its greatest achievement” (Viala and Masson-­‐Sekine 1988: 109) is a matter of opinion, but there is no doubt that many people have heard of butoh, or heard of it first, through Sankai Juku. Europe and America had their own version of a dirty avant-­‐garde, so perhaps this “dirty” element was not the most important contribution butoh would make to the stage of global performance. As I will argue in this thesis, butoh’s deep structures are what make it of lasting interest and value to performers and audiences all over the world.

Unlike Hijikata, who never left Japan, Kazuo Ohno performed extensively abroad to great acclaim. Admiring La Argentina toured to the 14th International Festival in Nancy, France in 1980, followed by tours to Paris, London, Strasbourg, Stuttgart and Stockholm. He was in his seventies at the time, and dancing professionally at that age was rare and revolutionary in itself. Butoh, first through Ohno and later through many other artists, made a huge contribution to international dance by demonstrating the unique value of mature dancers. That aspect of the performer that we sometimes call “soul” is one that does not deteriorate with age but rather gets stronger.

Zeami’s writing on Noh Theatre talks about the power of the mature performer and uses the metaphor of the flower to discuss many aspects of performance, including what we might call “soul”. The impact of the ageing Kazuo Ohno’s work outside of Japan is immense. There are few regions that

8 Stephen Barber presents butoh as an example of what the Japanese media called “the dirty

avant-­‐garde”, a term referring to the abject sexuality and often perverted content of butoh.

The term was no doubt intended to be critical but might well have been received as a compliment by the early butoh pioneers.

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Ohno did not visit,9 and students came from all over the world to learn from him and his son Yoshito in their studio in Yokohama. His final performance abroad was Requiem for the 20th Century in New York in December 1999.

It can be argued that butoh found a more enthusiastic audience abroad than it did in Japan, and that its development abroad is quite distinct from its development within Japan. Its audience in Tokyo was committed, but small.

In Europe, the U.S. and beyond in the 1980s and 1990s, butoh artists gained serious recognition and presented their work on some of the world’s most prestigious stages. Was this because western audiences found butoh exotic and very “Japanese”? Or was it because they recognised something familiar in its play with European surrealism and expressionism? As we shall see, butoh draws as much on European sources as it does on inspiration from within Japan.

In the 1980s and 1990s while Japanese butoh artists were taking butoh abroad, western artists were also travelling into Japan to study its unique approach. Artists like Su-­‐En (Sweden), Tess de Quincey (Denmark/Australia) and Stuart Lynch (Denmark/UK) studied butoh in Japan before returning to their own countries to develop butoh-­‐based work in dialogue with their own cultural and artistic context. Their work was inevitably an evolution of butoh, and therein lies its integrity and importance. Such artists entered a deep and sustained engagement with butoh in its original Japanese context, before transplanting and evolving it. Other artists like myself have trained almost exclusively with Japanese artists based abroad. Our teachers have been Japanese but the context in which the work has been cultivated is very much European or western. For this group, the process of translating butoh’s ideas and terminology is strongly foregrounded and that generates a certain discourse around comparing and contrasting butoh with European performance. Foregrounded too are the perils of taking on butoh as a superficial outer garment.

9 Ohno toured throughout Europe, North and South America, Australia and Asia.

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Sources: East and West

It is significant that butoh draws on sources from within Japan and from Europe. While it rejected some of the forces of westernisation (particularly Americanisation) butoh also drew quite consciously on European dance and philosophy; and while it rejected the codification of traditional Japanese performing arts, it also drew on them, though perhaps less consciously, and carried forward some of their wisdom. Here I introduce some of the hybrid sources discernible in butoh.10 The Japanese sources or influences discussed here include the Japanese aesthetic notions of “wabi sabi” and “yūgen” and the way in which Noh theatre principles are detectable in butoh discourse and practice. 11

Wabi sabi refers to beauty that is imperfect, simple, impermanent, unconventional and incomplete. (Koren 1994: 8) The word wabi suggests simplicity,12 and sabi suggests something like rusty, rustic, or the beauty of an object that bears the mark of ageing.13 For example, when the famous Golden Pavilion was rebuilt after fire damage, an observer commented “Let’s wait ten years, until its gotten some sabi. “ (Richie 2007: 46) These qualities can be found in western art too. Wim Wenders’ photograph, Ferris Wheel – Armenia (Wenders 2008) shows a deteriorating, almost decomposing Ferris wheel that is beautiful in its desolation. This is clearly a notion recognised by many artists in many cultures, but it is significant that Japanese language and

10 Sondra Fraleigh’s publications explore this in greater depth than is possible here. For

example, in Chapter 1 of her most recent book, Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy, she explores “the pre-­‐western Japanese roots of butoh” (2010: 19) and “how butoh assimilates the west” (Ibid: 21).

11 I undertook a research project in 2003 examining the aesthetic concept of wabi sabi in order to deepen my knowledge of Japanese aesthetics and their relevance to butoh. This was funded by AHRC, and included theoretical and practical research that culminated in the production of an “illustrated pamphlet”, Instances of Wabi Sabi: Looking at Butoh Dance Through a New Lens.

12 Wabi derives from the verb wabu (to fade, dwindle), and the adjective wabishi (forsaken, deserted). Wabi is linked to poverty (having less) as liberation, and poverty that delivers great beauty and richness. “Beauty could be created from simplicity and abundance could be found in poverty” (Richie 2007: 47).

13 “Sabi is an aesthetic term … concerned with chronology, with time and its effects….[it] derives from a verb sabu (to wane) and a noun susabi (desolation)…Other meanings include sabiteru (to become rusty and by extension old) and sabishi (lonely)” (Richie 2007: 44).

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aesthetics have a single term for it. The idea that “beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness” (Koren 1994: 51) is explored in Leonard Koren’s book on “wabi sabi”, and resonates with the values of butoh. Photos and video of butoh performances speak very immediately of making beautiful that which is conventionally considered ugly. Rather than presenting an idealised perfect body, butoh presents the body (the human being) as it is, in all its imperfections, darkness or even perversity.

Yūgen is another aesthetic notion pertinent to an understanding of butoh.

Tadashi Endo, my teacher, sometimes referred to “yūgen” in rehearsal. It is variously translated as mystery, or the power of subtle suggestion. In A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics, Donald Richie traces its roots but asserts that it is now mostly associated with Motokiyo Zeami’s articulation of Noh drama, where it refers to “what lies beneath the surface; the subtle as opposed to the obvious; the hint as opposed to the statement” (Richie 2007: 57). In rehearsals, Endo defined yūgen by using the image of “the moon partially covered by cloud”. It is the beauty or power of something partially concealed.

The implications of this for butoh are that it is important to hold something back, to conceal something, so that the audience might complete the picture.

“Fran, you show me too much of your feeling, please cover your feeling a little,” Tadashi has said to me in rehearsal. He did not ask me to cut off my feeling, to stop feeling, only to conceal it; and this is a crucial distinction.

Aesthetic terms are often described using imagery as an attempt to: define the otherwise indefinable […] the definition of feeling is difficult […] so other means are attempted – those that indicate rather than state.” (Richie 2007: 50).

In the same way, butoh practitioners often use poetic statements to indicate, rather than state precisely, what butoh is; for example, “butoh is a step within” or “butoh makes the invisible, visible”.14

14 I have heard these in various workshops, too often to know the exact source.

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While butoh set itself in opposition to traditional aesthetics and performance traditions, particularly at its inception, there are useful comparisons to be made between butoh and Noh theatre.

I am very aware that my butoh originates somewhere totally different from the performing arts related to religion – Buddhism, Shintoism or whatever – I was born from the mud (Hijikata quoted in Viala and Masson-­‐Sekine 1988: 72).

Natsu Nakajima, an early female exponent of butoh who worked with Hijikata in the 1970s said:

We found that we were making the same discoveries as Noh actors made, using some of the same terminology, but we had never learned these forms (Stein 1986a: 111).

Butoh set the performer free from the binds of traditional forms like Noh, without abandoning the wisdom they contained. However indirectly, butoh seems to draw on and carry forward knowledge from Noh theatre. Its principles seem to have seeped into butoh somewhat surreptitiously. I propose that this link with Noh has been strengthened in the work of second and third generation butoh artists. Perhaps they feel the need to shake off tradition less intensely than the early pioneers. In the absence of a butoh method perhaps artists have turned to Noh, as they have to other approaches like yoga, to complement if not to define their work. A number of my butoh teachers reference Noh by quoting Zeami. 15 One principle often referred to is: “Have ten in your heart, but show only seven,” paraphrasing Zeami’s famous statement: “What is felt in the heart is ten; what appears in movement, seven” (Yamazaki 1984: 75). Like Noh, butoh appreciates this notion of reduction as compression, and the relationship between inner work and outer manifestation. Though butoh uses both reduction and wild excess,

15 Motokiyo Zeami was a Noh actor and playwright in the fourteenth and fifteenth century.

He wrote the famous texts on Noh performance entitled Fūshi Kaden or Kadensho, which was secret for many years, before finally being made generally available in Japan in the first decade of the twentieth century. (Rath 2003: 191) It was later translated into many different languages.

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at its most successful it balances the two. At its worst, butoh work can be all slow motion tedium or all unrelenting excess, which is just as tedious.

I agree with Bonnie Sue Stein that: Butoh is an anti-­‐traditional tradition, seeking to erase the heavy imprint of Japan’s strict society and offer unprecedented freedom of artistic expression (Stein 1986a: 111).

But I disagree with her further assertion that while There are many elements of butoh that link it to noh and kabuki, as well as to the other traditional arts of Japan […] Most of these links, […] are superficial (Ibid).

I would argue the opposite: That the links between butoh and the traditional performing arts exist at the level of deep structures and fundamental principles about performing.16 The aforementioned principle of having ten in your heart while showing only seven in movement is one example of such fundamental principles.

I now explore the European sources of butoh which include German expressionist dance, the work of Jean Genet (previously introduced), and the influence of Antonin Artaud. The pedagogical links between butoh and German expressionism in dance revolve around Takaya Eguchi who trained in Germany with Mary Wigman. Most significantly, he taught Kazuo Ohno (Hijikata’s collaborator) and Ando Mitsuko (later Hijikata’s teacher).

According to the website of Kazuo Ohno:

Seeing the German Expressionist dancer Harold Kreutzberg [disciple of Mary Wigman] dance in 1934 influenced him [Ohno] to begin studying with Takaya Eguchi and Souko Miya in 1936. Eguchi and Miya, two of the pioneers of Japanese modern dance, had brought back "Neue Tanz" from their study at Mary Wigman's dance institute in Germany (Ohno n.d.).

In addition to such pedagogic links, there are a number of significant comparisons to be drawn from the way in which practitioners of butoh and expressionist dance talk about their work. At the 2005 Daiwa International

16 Admittedly, Stein is talking about the reaction of western audiences to finding a similarity between the slow motion of Noh and the slow motion of butoh, while I am referring to the actual practice of performing butoh.

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Butoh Festival in London, Sondra Fraleigh’s keynote speech discussed the pioneers of both butoh and expressionist dance, and made reference to the fact that both distanced themselves from dance as “self-­‐expression”, or the body as a medium for expressing something. She referred to Wigman’s attempt to “unite the self with the universal” and Hijikata’s attempt to “allow something to emerge that we cannot name.” Butoh and “neue tanz” share the intention “to let the body to speak for itself” (Viala and Masson-­‐Sekine 1988: 16). It is interesting that German expressionist dancer Mary Wigman drew inspiration from Noh masks for her seminal, masked dance, Witch Dance. In turn her Noh-­‐inspired work influenced the early pioneers of butoh, whose work in turn would influence so many European artists. This process of recycling makes butoh a complicated and interesting study for the application of intercultural theory, though an exploration of that that is beyond the scope of this Introduction.

Most commentary on butoh mentions the writings of Jean Genet and Antonin Artaud. Stephen Barber’s book Hijikata: Revolt of the Body (2005) provides very specific detail on that link in Chapter Four “From France” where he recounts how Hijikata temporarily changed his name to Hijikata Genet at the beginning of the 60s. Barber emphasises that Hijikata was not the only Japanese artist of the time inspired by Genet. He states that Genet was “idolised” by many Tokyo artists and writers, including Kazuo Ohno (2006: 25-­‐6).

The principal fascination of Genet’s work for Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno was its determined movement outside of legal, social and sexual strata […] rather than its explicitly homosexual charge […] Two elements […] would remain with him [Hijikata] to the end of his work: the transfigured nostalgia for rural childhood experience […] and [Genet’s] concern with […] constant sexual metamorphosis (Barber 2006: 27).

Barber clarifies two main sources for Hijikata’s link with Artaud: the choreographer Hironobu Oikawa, and the writer and translator of French literature Tatsuhiko Shibusawa.

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Oikawa […] with whom Hijikata occasionally collaborated, believed that it was actually he (Oikawa) who had assembled the essential elements of Ankoku Butoh, which Hijikata had then surreptitiously manoeuvred out of his grip (Barber 2006: 28)17 .

Shibusawa had read Artaud in French and written essays on it ahead of the official translation and publication of The Theatre and Its Double in Japan in 1965. Hijikata used Artaud’s recording To Have Done with the Judgment of God 18 as late as the mid 1980s in a collaboration with Min Tanaka.19 Some commentators have suggested that butoh, particularly Hijikata’s work, comes closest to achieving some of Artaud’s ideals. “Unfortunately, Artaud did not live to see the birth of butoh although it comes nearest to his own theatrical ideal” (Whelan 2006: 4). Artaud called for “theatre that wakes us up, heart and nerves” (1970: 64) and called for the creation of theatre based on the physical language of the stage: a theatre of the senses to replace the psychological, naturalistic, and literary tendencies of theatre. Despite Artaud’s ideas being difficult, if not impossible, to stage, they inspired a whole new generation of artists in Japan and around the world to make urgent and inspirational work.

17 Oikawa “was an exceptional figure among Tokyo’s young artists and choreographers in

having already visited Europe where he had studied mime in Paris and developed a strong interest in Artaud’s work; …(he) directed a dance company named Arutokan (House of Artaud).

18 Hijikata was given a cassette tape of To Have Done with the Judgment of God by the young writer Kuniichi Uno in the mid 1980s and apparently it was “the only one of his possessions that he prized.” (Barber 2005: 30) 19 Min Tanaka is a very well-­‐known butoh practitioner still working internationally today.

He develop an approach he called “Body Weather”, and for many years had a farm where artists trained and performed while also working the land.

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Gaijin Dancer20: A Journey with Butoh

My first contact with butoh was in 1992 in Australia through Lynne Bradley.21 As the practical component of a thesis on butoh, she founded a new company, Zen Zen Zo, in Brisbane. I was a founding member, learning butoh from Lynne while developing my own choreography combining butoh with my background in ballet and modern dance. In 1993 I created The Horror and Hysterical Angels. The latter was a butoh version of the mad scene from Giselle for two dancers, performed to the original ballet music but with a gestural vocabulary inspired by butoh. It ended with the two women tearing each other’s tutus to shreds.

Hysterical Angels by Frances Barbe for Zen Zen Zo Performed by Sonya Davies and F. Barbe, Brisbane 1993 Photo: Christabelle Baranay

20 The Japanese word gaijin is translated as foreigner, alien, or not-­‐one-­‐of-­‐us.

21 Lynne Bradley studied butoh in Kyoto with Katsura Kan and returned to Brisbane in 1992

to complete a thesis on butoh, Shades of Darkness: The Origins and Development of the Butoh Movement, at the University of Queensland.

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It was immediately clear to me, even in the first workshop with Lynne, that I needed a very different modus operandi in butoh to what I was used to in ballet and contemporary dance. I had to allow myself to “be moved”, not to dance, but “be danced”. Another aspect of this early training with Lynne that was very rich for me, and I have gone on to develop in this current body of work, is the extreme face work. We played with taking on huge silent screams, crying masks, big smiles that extended through the whole body or tiny, sinister smiles manifested in the smallest curl of the mouth. They were taken on externally, then we explored how to invest in them internally. I had initially misunderstood this face work as being “emotional expressionism”.

By that I mean the performer conjures up an emotion like grief or terror and then expresses it. My further research has revealed that something far more complex and interesting is at work in butoh. This work raised important questions about inner life and outer form that I only really started to be able to answer a decade or more later. How do butoh performers make those incredible shifts, from one extreme state to another? How do they do it so quickly, or so slowly and so convincingly? At this time I conceived of an exercise called “Sour Lemon” to explore some of these questions that I have developed further over subsequent years and will explain in more detail in Chapter 4.

Extreme, grotesque face work is a signature of many early butoh works in which silent screams tear across the whole body. They demand an intense commitment of energy and intent from the performer. Such huge facial screams can become empty caricature when performers do not have enough internal work to sustain them. As Zeami said, you must have “ten” in your heart in order to show “seven”.

At the point when I came into contact with butoh I had noticed that ballet training had left me with a somewhat rigid style in my body, now that I was starting to ask for different forms and shapes from my body. I was finding it hard to break the patterning I had built up and this early work with butoh served to oust that style very immediately. After some years though I noticed

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that I could just as easily build up a butoh patterning in my body and would need to be vigilant not to end up being just as limited by butoh. For that reason I have reservations now about teaching this kind or work through imitation. I acknowledge the power of imitation as a training tool, and there is a long history of that approach in traditional Asian work. But the context in which I work, with western dancers or actors and often in a limited timeframe, a different, more processed oriented approach is important if performers are to move towards owning the work, and for them to be liberated and not bound by it. Locating butoh work more at the level of process rather than as presentation also insists on that internal investment that is vital to making the more extreme external work live. Having said all that, I must also acknowledge that even imitating something as extreme and uncompromising as butoh did transform me, and help me start to develop “a second nervous system” to use Eugenio Barba’s phrase (Barba 2006: 112). I started to listen for and to hear different things as I moved and performed.

The Horror by Frances Barbe Performed by Zen Zen Zo with Chris Beckey (front)

Andrew Cory in Tight, Red and Deadly Choreographed by F. Barbe for Zen Zen Zo Photos: Ivan Nunn

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A very neutral, simple face and body is as challenging as a big silent scream.

In this, the almost transparent body of Yoshito Ohno, son of Kazuo Ohno, is as iconic to butoh as its grotesque grimaces. That extremely simple presence has also been a recurring theme in my research. Butoh draws on a broad spectrum, from the complexity of a transparent or “neutral” body; to the extreme and grotesque faces; or a subtle, compressed and ambiguous smile.

My inquiry into butoh evolved significantly when I moved to Europe and joined Tadashi Endo’s Mamu Dance Theatre. Sustained contact with Endo from 1997 to 2009 allowed me to sink beneath the surface of butoh. Endo used the processes at work in butoh to reveal the limiting habits I had built up as a dancer, and therefore gave me access to a broader palette of possibilities. Because Endo’s work has been based in Europe for several decades, he understands the context from which a western performer approaches butoh, and has developed inspirational ways to articulate butoh in his pedagogy.

Revelations I articulate below some “revelations” from my work with Endo, presented in the first person, experiential voice of the performer. They are reconstructed from memory and rehearsal diary notes and are therefore not referenced as quotations.

Revelation 1: Jacket Dance 1998

“Fran, continue alone,” said Endo in rehearsal. So I stay “in state” but panic, wondering how I will improvise without some kind of starting point. I am walking, because that how the previous scene ends, and I am wearing my pink jacket back-­‐to-­‐ front. I am disturbed that if he is now making a solo for me within the show, I am going to have to do it in this stupid jacket!

My desire to get the jacket off is all I have, but I cannot just take it off. I put the brakes on and wait for these mental fluctuations to subside. Then I start from exactly where I am, with the desire to remove the jacket, which becomes the seed of a dance in which I am transformed by the dialogue with the jacket into some kind of creature shedding its skin. Endo had given me much to work from. I just had to slow down to notice it.

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F Barbe in Migration 01 by Tadashi Endo 2001 Photo by Marciej Rusinek

Revelation 2: Standing with Flour 2004 Three of us stand on stage as the audience enters for a performance of Back Pack, by Tadashi Endo (2004). We are in stillness wearing large, old, black overcoats and dusted from head to foot in flour. I hardly dare to breathe for fear the flour will fall and reveal itself too early. The tension and simplicity of the task charges me. I am consumed with the process of stillness. Later our producer Gabriele Endo, commented on how captivating this scene was, how electric the space was when she entered the auditorium. In simply standing I had captivated a spectator -­‐ thanks to stillness and the flour.

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I balanced sustained contact with one teacher, Endo, with various workshops and performance projects with other artists. I performed in Katsura Kan’s Curious Fish at the 2001 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, after working with him previously in Croatia the same year and briefly in Kyoto back in 1995.

Despite my short time with him, several revelations relevant to this thesis emerged from that work.

Revelation 3: Kan’s Curious Fish (2001) Painted white, wearing a white dress and carrying roses, I must enter through the audience calling out “fresh fish, get your fresh fish here”. I find it difficult to reconcile the quotidian words with my transformed “butoh” state. Dramaturgically, I understand it is the strange juxtaposition that works here, but it is at the level of the performer’s internal work that I struggle.

I feel self-­‐conscious and not fully inside the experience when speaking. How can I make this work? I imagine that I look with the eyes of a fish. Click! I am inside a process; I feel present and transformed.

This Body of Work I began work on the productions discussed in this thesis in 2003, a decade after my first contact with butoh in 1992, and six years after joining Endo’s Mamu Dance Theatre. At this point butoh was no longer a product or goal to strive for, but a “process” for me to enter. As a result the work “looks” less like butoh than the early work I created for Zen Zen Zo. While the productions presented here would not exist without my experience of butoh, I do not claim that they are “butoh”. For that reason I refer to them in this thesis as butoh-­‐inspired or butoh-­‐based. I do not want to wear butoh as a kind of stylistic overcoat, over a body or a dance process that is unchanged.

In these works I wanted to transform the processes through which I make performance. Paradoxically, the more “butoh” your process, the more deeply your own the work becomes.

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And so I have stopped chasing butoh, and realised that the harder I gripped it, the faster it slipped out of my hands. I have stopped asking, what is butoh?

The kinds of answers this question led to proved reductive and rarely informative. I have found new questions to ask that seem more fruitful and illuminating: What values are discernible in butoh-­‐based work? What demands does butoh place on the performer and on the spectator? Which of those values and demands recur across the diverse practices and practitioners existing under the increasingly broad umbrella of butoh? What is distinctive about butoh dramaturgy? How do butoh artists train or prepare for butoh, given that butoh is not a technique or a style of performance? What contributions has butoh made to late twentieth century dance and performance? What aspects of butoh are transferable and relevant to current, contemporary performance and why have western performers turned to butoh to complement their work?

This thesis is organised into four chapters. Chapters 1, 2 and 3 focus on three productions performed between 2003 and 2010: Fine Bone China, Palpitation and Chimaera. Chapter 4 presents examples from a training repertoire and the insights those exercises have led to. Examples of practices are provided in photo galleries and on the DVDs in the attached portfolio. Fine Bone China, Palpitation and Chimaera each emphasise a different aspect of butoh. Critical reflection on the solo Fine Bone China in Chapter 1 explores the interaction between physical score and psychophysical subscore, and the distinction between figure and character in contemporary performance dramaturgy. In Chapter 2 the group work Palpitation provides a case study for the examination of extreme reduction or distillation, used as the basis for a profound state of kinaesthetic listening in ensemble work. Reflection on the group work Chimaera in Chapter 3 focuses on the process of objectification and transformation in butoh. The conclusion will unravel some of the terms used in butoh discourse, such as “objectification” and the “dead” body and will consider the butoh performer’s “object” quality as one aspect of its great potential for making a contribution to contemporary performance.

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Why don’t they [dancers] try drinking from the wells within their own body? They should drop a ladder deep into their own bodies and climb down it. Let them pluck the darkness from within their own bodies and eat it. But they always seek resolution from outside themselves (Hijikata 2000: 51-­‐52).

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Chapter 1

Fine Bone China

Frances Barbe is a performer who comes from the tradition of butoh, but moves past it. The divine neutrality that often serves butoh is subtext for her, lending her work an inner core amidst dramatic antics.

She makes herself clear as glass, fine in bone, for this sheer and entertaining dance (Fraleigh 2010: 185).

Fine Bone China by Frances Barbe Clore Studio Royal Opera House, London 2006 Lighting Design by Ben M Rogers Photo: Giuseppe Frusteri

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Production Chronology: Fine Bone China

2002 London 2003 London Canterbury 2004 London

2005 Exeter University

2006 London Singapore Brisbane 2007 Brockport: New York Tokyo & Sendai

2008 Barcelona

2010 Naples

The Place’s Choreodrome, London 5 minute work-­‐in-­‐progress.

The Space, converted church.

15 minute “Solo with Chorus”.

Lumley Studio, University of Kent 20 minute “Solo with chorus”.

Jacksons Lane Theatre 30 minute -­‐ full version

UK Tour Exmouth, Whitstable, Exeter.

Changing Bodies Conference.

Royal Opera House, Clore Studio.

Initiation International Festival.

Woodward Theatre with Frank Theatre Co.

Somatics Conference at State University New York.

Die Platze Theatre and Droom Club Tantarantana Theatre.

Teatro Sancarluccio, E45 Napoli Fringe for Napoli Teatro Festival Performed by Scarlett Perdereau.

The 2008 performance in Barcelona is provided on DVD Disc 1.

There are versions of Fine Bone China available on the internet: • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahe4fCzvFRo

Scarlett Perdereau performing Fine Bone China Naples 2010

5 minute extract • www.criticalstages.org/criticalstages2 Illustrating Patrice Pavis’ article for Critical Stages No. 2.

Full length version filmed by Phil Hargreaves, Brisbane 2006.

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Photo Gallery: Fine Bone China

Fine Bone China by Frances Barbe Clore Studio Royal Opera House London 2006 Photos: Giuseppe Frusteri

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Frances Barbe in Fine Bone China with composer Keith Johnson Exeter Phoenix Theatre 2004 Photos: John Collingswood

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Fine Bone China by Frances Barbe Initiation International Festival in Singapore 2006 Photos: Artist’s own collection

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Fine Bone China by Frances Barbe Woodward Theatre Brisbane 2006 Photos: Phil Hargreaves

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Fine Bone China by F. Barbe Woodward Theatre Brisbane 2006 Photo: Phil Hargreaves

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Fine Bone China by Frances Barbe Woodward Theatre Brisbane 2006 Photo: Phil Hargreaves

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Scarlett Perdereau in Fine Bone China rehearsal 2010 Photos: Artist’s Own Collection

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Scarlett Perdereau in Fine Bone China rehearsal 2010 Photos: Artist’s Own Collection

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Reflective Analysis

1.1

Introduction

Fine Bone China was inspired by the image of colonial women in the outback of Australia as captured by painters such as Frederick McCubbin and Sidney Nolan of the Heidelberg School. 22 I was particularly inspired by those paintings that featured out-­‐of-­‐place colonial women, in their cold-­‐climate finery, sweltering in the heat of the outback, for example, Little Girl Lost (1886) and The Pioneer (1904) by Frederick McCubbin. Such figures set the choreographic process in motion, beginning with the experience of the period costume as a way to explore themes of confinement and restriction.

Contained in her corset, she is straight-­‐laced and buttoned up. The friction between body and costume, between “seen” outer shell and “hidden” inner experience guides the movement and gestural vocabulary in Fine Bone China.

Movement themes of shedding and transformation emerged from the layering of the period costume and from the outset there was to be a clear sense of friction and juxtaposition of this figure and her landscape.

It was important to create place or landscape for this figure within the stage space. The photo gallery on pages 33 -­‐ 38 shows the various ways this was done. Ideally the stage was covered with dirt or sand but where that was not possible lighting design created a “sky” as landscape or in other shows leaves were used to create a “ground”.

Keith Johnson’s music transforms a familiar Chopin prelude (No 4 in E minor Op 28) for the first half, which is distorted, stretched or intensified by Keith’s composition. 23 The familiarity of the piano piece eventually gives way to an

22 Their landscape paintings applied European Impressionist techniques to the painting of

specifically Australian landscapes. For a discussion of these artists see Lane 2007 and National Gallery of Victoria website -­‐ Australian Impressionism Education Resource. www.ngv.vic.gov.au/australianimpressionism/education 23 Keith Johnson has composed music for all three works presented in this thesis. We were introduced at the Royal Festival Hall’s choreographer and composer exchange in 2000 and

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atmospheric score of sounds that create a vast space for the second half of the dance. This section combines natural and electronic sounds, in which bird sounds morph into the single note of a soprano.

An important stimulus for the work was reading this quotation from Tatsumi Hijikata: Why don’t they [dancers] try drinking from the wells within their own body? They should drop a ladder deep into their own bodies and climb down it. Let them pluck the darkness from within their own bodies and eat it. But they always seek resolution from outside themselves (Hijikata 2000: 51-­‐52).

Fine Bone China was created with the intention to “drop a ladder deep into my own body”, to explore themes emerging from my own corporeal history, which influenced the personal and Australian content of the work.

Fine Bone China takes courage from butoh’s use of distillation in dance, particularly for the opening section; a sparse physical score of gestures. Its relative simplicity and moments of structured improvisation demand presence from the performer: presence in terms of responding to the specific moment, and presence in terms of allowing the performer’s life force or energy to be palpable. Butoh’s extreme use of the face moved away from facial expression, and into the face-­‐as-­‐mask, a distinction that will be defined more fully in Chapter 4. Fine Bone China plays on the borderline between face as mask, where the face is fixed but alive, and facial expression where the face is changing as it does in daily life. This work uses the familiarity of daily facial expression while pushing beyond it to something more poetic and abstracted. Reflecting on the dramaturgical weave of Fine Bone China I draw on the scholarship of Eugenio Barba (2006), Phillip Zarrilli (2009) and Patrice Pavis (2003) among others, to analyse the piece, particularly the idea of “subscore”, and distinctions of story versus content, and figure versus character in Fine Bone China’s dramaturgy.

have worked together since. Keith is a classically trained composer, whose work has been commissioned and performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sinfonia 21 and London Sinfonietta. He has also made multi-­‐media installation works. In a recent Wellcome Trust funded project he was artist in residence in a laboratory doing brain research on worms and produced his recent album, Music from the Worm Farm.

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1.2

“Divine Neutrality” and Presence

Fraleigh’s reference to “divine neutrality” provides an opportunity to consider the distilled presence of the performer that predominates the first section of Fine Bone China. While the image that opens this piece is not “neutral” at all (a woman in period costume walking amongst sand and tea-­‐ cups), the performer is trying to be as neutral as possible for the walk that circumnavigates the stage. Neutral in this context refers to simplicity; a simplicity that contains both potential (for anything) and ambiguity (as to what will happen next). In these moments I try not to express or demonstrate anything too overtly and to focus on the experience of sensations, images or associations as they arise. I find it useful to consider the body as “transparent” and hope this transparency will invite the spectator to look “into” the performer, rather than “at” her actions. Eugenio Barba calls neutral the fundamental quality of the actor: a presence ready to be projected in diverging directions and capable of attracting the attention of the spectator (Barba 2006: 113).

In the opening section of Fine Bone China, neutrality or transparency is intended to both draw in the spectator, and as a preparatory canvas for the figure’s later metamorphosis. It involves containing energy and attention within the body, and softening the exterior. It also involves becoming deeply present with the tactile quality of the sand on which she walks, and the weight and flow of the dress she wears. Fine Bone China is built around the “presence” of the performer, and by that I mean the energetic presence or life-­‐force, and her sense of “being-­‐in-­‐the moment”.

Jane Goodall’s book, Stage Presence, attempts to differentiate “presence” from “charisma” and “genius”. Goodall attempts to demystify the notion of performance presence by naming it in more precise terms.

By implication, someone who has presence is someone who can command the space of the stage so that the audience experiences it as full (Goodall 2008: 16).

Many butoh dancers exemplify this notion, but the master of “divine neutrality” must surely be Yoshito Ohno, son of butoh founder, Kazuo Ohno.

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Simply standing or walking across the back of the stage behind his father, he commands the spectator’s attention and appears to change the temperature or the colour of the stage-­‐space.

Fine Bone China lays a foundation of simplicity and pure presence in the opening section, on which more transformed states and forms can later be built. For example, the play with animal-­‐like forms and face work. From a very human and stiff verticality in the opening, the figure is gradually drawn into animal forms inspired by the kangaroo and later the cat, (as shown in photos on pages 36 -­‐ 40). In the final section she works with bird-­‐like behaviour, forms and rhythm. These transfigurations attempt to manifest externally the inner transformations and shifts taking place. The friction between inner world and external behaviour is explored, as the performer tries to maintain the inner perspective of the woman, within the outer form of the kangaroo. Such frictions in Fine Bone China are made possible by the techniques of butoh. Taught to appreciate animal movement as dance by butoh, I have keenly observed David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries for choreographic material. Seeing an old female lion looking completely fed up, inspired an exploration of simultaneously working with the body of a lion and the face of a tired old woman.

Transformation using animal forms in butoh emphasises the “architecture” of the animal as entry point for transformation, a form which invites in the spirit or experience of that animal. Instead of pretending to be a cat or kangaroo, the performer attends in detail to the architectural form, and then experiences themselves within that new situation and perspective. Some points of attention are not only the shape of its hands, limbs or spine, but how it makes contact with the earth and where in the body its senses are located.

There is a section in Fine Bone China that works very directly with the face.

The figure brings her chair forward to sit close to the audience, and proceeds to play on a fine line between recognisable “facial expressions” (such as the

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gossiping woman or her polite smile) and a more stylised work with “face-­‐as-­‐ mask”, in which the face is sustained in stillness so long that it becomes something strange and less familiar. A polite smile becomes a grimace. Or at other times, her guard drops, and the presented faces fall away to reveal a more abandoned, organic and human-­‐animal quality showing through. This face work allowed for an exploration of the friction between what is shown (or performed) on the outside of this figure, and what is kept covered on the inside. The figure’s inner world is made visible in the piece as the starting point for her metamorphosis as a smile hardens to a scream, and a repeated sigh becomes the panting of a dog. In terms of “becoming present” the piece also asked that the performer work with the audience reactions to this silently gossiping woman. If they laughed or turned away, the performer worked with those reactions, sometimes mirroring them or otherwise responding to them to enhance the sense of liveness in the work. The performer had enough of a score to keep the piece intact, whatever the audience did in this moment (or did not do), but there was also space to let the audience into her world in a particular way in this section.

1.3

Score and Subscore It is obvious that the organic action is not enough. If, in the end, it is not enlivened by an inner dimension, then the action remains empty and the actor appears to be predetermined by the form of the score (Barba 2005: 112).

One of butoh’s significant contributions to dance is its emphasis on the interaction of the internal and external work, balancing physical virtuosity with inner work. The processes butoh has cultivated in this respect have proved as relevant for the western actor as for the dancer. Theatre practitioners in the late twentieth century rebalanced the psychological emphasis of the actor’s process with a discussion of a “score of actions” or “physical score”, for example in the later work of Stanislavski and in the work of Grotowski. “Grotowski is convinced that Stanislavski’s most precious pearl is his final period of work, where the method of physical actions appeared” (Richards 1995: 5). The articulation of “physical score” points toward

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another score, that is “non-­‐physical”, the underscore, or subscore. These theoretical terms are explored and applied to the context of butoh and Fine Bone China. I reference both “underscore” and “subscore” but mostly favour Barba’s preferred translation of “sous-­‐partition” into “subscore” in English (see Pavis 1997).

Eugenio Barba defines subscore as follows: The invisible something which breathes life into what the spectator sees is the actor’s subscore. By subscore I do not mean a hidden scaffolding, but a very personal process, often impossible to grasp or verbalise, whose origin may be a resonance, a motion, an impulse, an image or a constellation of words […] The subscore does not necessarily consist of the unexpressed intentions and thoughts of a character […] The subscore may consist of a rhythm, a song a certain way of breathing or an action which is not carried out in its original dimensions (Barba 2006: 112).

Patrice Pavis uses the term underscore to point towards: What is hidden beneath the score as well as what precedes it, supports it, […] like the submerged part of an iceberg whose visible tip is only the ice-­‐cold superficial appearance of the performer [… ]the submerged solid mass on which the actor supports himself […] and sustain(s) himself on stage […] everything on which the acting is based (Pavis 2003: 96-­‐7).

Acknowledging Barba’s point that there is much in subscore that is impossible to verbalise, I focus here on those aspects of subscore in Fine Bone China that I work with more consciously, and therefore am able to verbalise.

Each moment of Fine Bone China is densely layered with subscore; ideas that fill each moment, that are not necessarily expressed but rather “compressed” within the performer. Here is an example of subscore reconstructed from the memory of performing Fine Bone China. (As it is an example of “reconstructed memory”, there is no reference).

When I enter, slowly walking, I deliberately split my focus between the very real and present contact of my feet with the cold dirt on the stage and what happens spontaneously in the space on a particular night (e.g. a sound within the audience).

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At the same time I imagine myself in a vast, fictional landscape, which my eyes strain to touch the edge of. And I also work with memories and fantasies, such as walking as part of an endless line of women sewing and breathing inside their corsets.

As suggested by both Barba and Pavis above, subscore in Fine Bone China is not simply a case of what the performer wants to express, of holding a sad feeling inside and either expressing it or keeping it within a movement representing sadness. Rather, subscore is a complex web of aspects which might be described very differently by each performer. I articulated some of this subscore based on my own inner material for Scarlett Perdereau when she performed this work in 2010. But it was important to make space for her to translate these or add her own as part of the process of “owning” the work.24 Some of the subscore was so personal to me that I wondered how this figure would exist or change, when built on another performer. In teaching Fine Bone China to Scarlett, I taught the physical score first in order to stress the overarching (horizontal) physical journey of the work. Then I addressed the dense (vertical) layers beneath the physical score.

For Barba, there is no particular method to generate inner life, but it is rather a matter of “negation” – of not interfering with something that would naturally occur (Barba 2006: p112). However, subscore in Fine Bone China might in some ways be seen as a very deliberate way of interfering, a method that allows something to emerge that might not without that intervention.

The images in subscore set the performer in motion.

The subscore of Fine Bone China might usefully be categorised as: (a) imagistic, (b) psychological, and (c) rhythmic. The imagistic is where a certain texture, material or quality is used (such as a splitting wood, or sticky mud). This is not what is being expressed, but something that charges the quality of an action like walking. The psychological category refers to my use

24 Scarlett Perdereau has worked with me since 2005, joining my company for Chimaera. In

addition to her dance background, she trained in acting at Central School of Speech and Drama. She learned Fine Bone China in 2010 for a performance in Naples, for the “Napoli Teatro Festival: E45 Fringe” in Naples in June 2010.

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of particular emotions or memories, such as men crouching in the bush to draw pathways in the sand, or chasing snakes in a car. The actual movement looks nothing like these, but is informed by such memories or fictions as subscore. The rhythmic refers to the use of a melody, rhythm or even just counting to push the duration of a movement or stillness beyond the body’s initial sense of time. There is a kind of inner song, a silent sound-­‐score throughout much of Fine Bone China, which provides dynamics to the performer, independent of the relationship to the music.

To this list one could also add that there are task-­‐based aspects. For example in the slow walk of the opening the performer is compelled to keep the centre moving, without stopping or swaying. Sometimes it is enough for the performer to adhere to a set of parameters or a kind of task like this, to render them very present, palpable and alive. Another example of this might be the standing with flour that must not fall, explained in the Introduction.

In butoh, and at times in Fine Bone China, the subscore is deliberately at odds with the score, conceived to affect a certain friction in the performer. In this case, it is not necessarily a case of one supporting the other, but rather of their collision being interesting, or creating a spark that the audience perceives.

Subscore can refer to a conglomeration of devices that brings the performer into full presence, encouraging them to inhabit or experience fully what they are doing; neither treating it as pure physical form, nor as purely inner or mental work, but as a dance between the two. The interiority of subscore refers not only to a mental space (mind), but also to the interiority of the body, the sensation of organs, of respiratory or circulatory systems at work.

Butoh’s imagery draws on and manifests itself as much in these internal spaces as it does in the more visible physicality of limbs, torso and spine.

Subscore should therefore not reinforce a duality of mind (inner) and body (outer), but rather open up a space in which such dualities lack relevance and precision. In his introduction to Psychophysical Acting, Zarrilli defines his use

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of the term bodymind, as “a deeply felt, resonant inhabitation of the subtle psychophysical dimensions of the body and mind at work together as one, in the moment.” (Zarrilli 2009: 4) He links this to what his Kalarippayattu teacher in India referred to as using your whole body. Zarrilli’s term bodymind refers to the state of open awareness to the environment and moment of performance. Interactivity is inherent in the term; interactivity between mental and physical aspects, between self and environment.

The first point of reference for psycho – within the compound term, psycho-­‐physical, is not psychology per se, but rather the actor’s complete engagement of her energy, sensory awareness, and perception-­‐in-­‐action in the moment (Zarrilli 2009: 21).

As the performance score extends outwards, “that action simultaneously moves within the actor herself. Inner feeling and outer (physical) form are two sides of the same coin.” (20) The terms psycho-­‐physical and bodymind bear residue of the duality that made them necessary, and Zarrilli has problematised some of the discourse around performance in this regard.

Most of what we experience when performing cannot be categorised as one or the other, but rather exists between and around such dualities.

The performance of Fine Bone China emerges from the interaction of score and subscore, and also from the location of those scores within a very particular dramaturgy and mise en scène.

1.4

Dramaturgical Weave

In a performance, actions (that is, all that which has to do with the dramaturgy) are not only what is said and done, but also the sounds, the lights and the changes in space […] Everything that works directly on the spectator’s attention, on their understanding, their emotions, their kinaesthesia […] It is not so important to define what an action is, or to determine how many actions there may be in a performance. What is important is to observe that the actions come into play only when they are woven together, when they become texture: text (Barba 2006: 66).

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The structure or weaving together of elements and events in butoh is distinctive in its ability to be meaningful without following the cause and effect logic of conventional (rational) narrative. Butoh unfolds in a manner akin to the logic of dreams. Dreams have structure, a linking logic of their own, though they are rarely rational. The links between one image or event and another can be violent juxtapositions or surreal transformations and mutations. Even the most incongruous shifts can seem feasible and contain meaning. A cat suddenly becomes an elephant, and while this is not possible or rational, there might still be meaning in that shift.

Fine Bone China draws on butoh’s associative, transformational logic. What is unfolding in the piece does not take place in linear time, but darts between memory, imagination, and immediate experiences. In one section the woman shifts suddenly between an action like serving tea or gossiping and more expressive gestures of a body that seems to be cracking open to let something out. The weave of Fine Bone China often emphasises a logic of conflict and friction. The piece progresses via a series of gradual mutations alongside sharp cuts, splicing one image (woman) with another (kangaroo); a process that requires minute and sensitive control by the performer. She must be fully engaged with each moment and fully prepared to let go of it. She must set up the next moment while fully in the present moment. One of the things that first captivated me about butoh was the performer’s apparent abandon into each moment, alongside their ability to make sudden and absolute shifts.

Though butoh dramaturgy is more akin to the dream than the novel, is there still character or narrative? Fine Bone China seems to set up a character and narrative, suggested by the period costume, but offers an interesting case study of the distinction between figure and character, and between content, meaning and story in butoh-­‐based work. There are many ways in which the woman in Fine Bone China could be considered as a character. A photo of Fine Bone China might suggest character and period drama. Her historical costume goes some way to locating her in place and time. Sondra Fraleigh

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makes several references to character and to story or narrative in describing her perceptions of Fine Bone China: Though not short on abstraction, this dance might well be a novel. It seems to be a story or character sketch […] She is familiar, somebody’s friend and mother, somebody’s wife in the Australian bush perhaps […] her communicative medium is staged for the imaginative mind to wander, and ripe for the dramaturge […]The drama […] is cast into what psychiatry would call liminal space […] This carefully painted portrait dismantles Frances the virgin, the bride and crone (Fraleigh 2010: 181 – 184).

It is the dramaturgy as a whole and the way that the different elements of the mise-­‐en-­‐scène interact that suggests something other than character and narrative. Does it perhaps suggest the figural, explored below?

“Does butoh have story?” A workshop participant asked this question to Yuko Kawamoto and myself during a joint workshop in 2009. Simultaneously, I answered “no” and Yuko answered “yes”. 25 The issue of translating the term “story” from English to Japanese was only part of the issue, and the conversation raised an interesting question for me over the conception of story, narrative, content and meaning in butoh. Was our conception of butoh really so at odds? I asked Yuko later in conversation if Fine Bone China had “story” for her as a spectator? She answered emphatically “yes”. Since I do not consider Fine Bone China to be a story as such, this suggested that we were perhaps using different words to point to the same thing. I do not presume to speak for Yuko, but my understanding of the conversation was that she was using “story” where I would use the term “content”. Butoh that lacks content can be very tiresome indeed. In our discussion, Yuko said that she saw a lot of butoh without “story” (content) and she didn’t like it. Viala and Masson-­‐Sekine accuse Tokyo butoh company Dairakudakan of a “lack of content masked by decadent staging” (1988: 100).

25 Yuko Kawamoto is a butoh dancer based in Tokyo. She invited Fine Bone China there in

2007. She was part of the London Butoh Festival in 2009 during which time we conducted joint workshops and practice-­‐based research.

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Fine Bone China has content, but it is not a story. A spectator may formulate their interpretation as story or not, but the work is not conceived or intended in such terms. It is relevant to reference the notion explored by John Cage, Merce Cunningham and others that spectators make meaning from whatever you put in front of them. The extremity of some of their experiments highlighted new ways of conceiving of meaning and content, locating it as much (if not more) with the spectator than with the performer or choreographer. Fine Bone China does not draw on the use of chance or random elements as many of their experiments did, but it has inherited from them and other approaches an acknowledgement of the spectator’s role in making meaning. It has inherited from butoh the imperative to deliberately make space for that process.

There is intent behind the work. I have thought carefully about the various elements of the piece, and set up a very particular world for the spectator to experience. But that intent does not necessarily amount to a story. “You set up an experience for the audience, but you do not control their interpretation” (Marshall 2002). 26 There can be coherence to the structure without tidying up the irrational, surreal or metaphorical. The dramaturgy of Fine Bone China is more akin to a moving painting than a dramatic narrative.

Its events unfold in time, but should almost be taken to happen simultaneously.

In the sense that story is “an account of past or imagined events” (Oxford English Dictionary), then Fine Bone China is not a story. It is a journey, during which there is transformation but it is not a narrative where that is taken to refer to “a spoken or written account of events, a story, telling a story” (Oxford English Dictionary). It is the discursive, verbal quality of these terms that are most at odds with butoh, and other body-­‐based works that have their

26 Lorna Marshall was mentor on the 2002 research project undertaken prior to making Fine

Bone Chine and Palpitation. Her book, The Body Speaks explores the body in performance and she is well-­‐known for her collaborations with Yoshi Oida. She also trained in butoh as well as traditional Japanese performance in Japan.

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own organising logic. The term “story” is too much associated with verbal language and literary structure to be useful in butoh dramaturgy.

A narrative is always a monosemiological system (for example a novel) or a polysemiological system (comic strip or movie), which may or may not be anthropomorphic, that regulates the conservation and transformation of meaning within a directed utterance (Pavis 1998: 231).

Reflective analysis on Fine Bone China also offers an opportunity to consider the notion of figure versus character. At stake here again, is the reduction to the singular (character) versus the expansion to the multiple and associative (figure). Through this distinction I aim to draw attention to the fact that this is not “the” story of one woman, but references “many” women or aspects of woman-­‐ness. What I resist in the term character is its roots in a singular and unified individual person, set within a discursive and linear narrative. The term figure seems able to refer to multiple stories. Pavis defines “figure” as:

A type of character […] a vague form that signifies more through its structural position than by its inherent nature (as in the German word Figur, which means both silhouette, outline, and character). As role and type, the figure groups together a number of fairly general distinctive traits and manifests itself as a silhouette, a still imprecise mass (Pavis 1998: 150).

He contrasts this with the character “of western theatre […] identified with the actor […] [as] a psychological and moral entity similar to other human beings (Pavis 1998: 47). Pavis goes on to present a further term caractère which brings together universality and individuality, the general and the particular, poetry and history. It is very precise but leaves room for adaptation to each spectator (Pavis 1998: 43).

This “universality and individuality” was my ambition for the figure in Fine Bone China; i.e. a woman who exists somewhere between the silhouette or outline of the figure and the precision that leaves room for the spectator of the caractère. The figural aspect opens her out to multiple associations, rather than narrowing her down. In that sense she is related to the notion of archetype. This opening out, a feature of the figure, makes the term appropriate to butoh dramaturgy. The figure is opening out to multiple

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meanings while also providing specificity. Without detail, an audience will not be stimulated to imagine and associate from what they see and to interpret it in accordance with their own imagination.

It is interesting to consider the term “figure” in the context of visual art, where Francis Bacon’s work provides a particularly relevant example in relation to butoh.27 In discussing the (spatial) isolation of figures in his work,

Bacon often explains that it is to avoid the figurative, illustrative and narrative character the Figure would necessarily have if it was not isolated. Painting […] has two possible ways of escaping the figurative: toward pure form, through abstraction; or toward purely “figural”, through extraction or isolation […] to oppose the “figural” to the figurative (Deleuze 2002: 2).

The narrowing down associated with character is not the intention of this work. The work attempts to develop more associative and metaphoric links, where the very specific choices made act as a launch pad for the audience’s associative imagination, but these do not amount to a series of signs to decode in order to arrive at a single (right or wrong answer). As “figure”, she is not one Edwardian woman but all women who are “out of place”. She is any woman restricted by codes: of dress and of behaviour. A feminist reading of the piece is certainly possible. She is in part autobiographical, but also fictional, a woman who never existed anytime anywhere. She is a figment from an Australian oil painting, taken down from the wall to be choreographed.

The “figures” of butoh dramaturgy are carved with specificity but refer outwards from that detail. They often have a quality of the “creaturely” about them, even when dressed in period costume, as in Fine Bone China.

Morphing, melting figures permeate butoh. Their meaning is not literal but ongoing and open to interpretation […] Like characters in calligraphy, butoh characters are signs and transparencies (Fraleigh 2006: 13 & 17).

27 Tatsumi Hijikata’s scrapbooks and imagery are full of references to Bacon’s work.

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Patrice Pavis uses the term “figurability” (from Freud’s term Darstellbarkeit) to refer to “the way of representing visually what was not originally visual; […] Like dreams, the stage ‘writes in images’ ” (Pavis 1998, 149). Butoh often manifests “internal” traits externally, in an example of this process of “figurability”, a kind of “turning characters inside out” to make visible their invisible qualities. In Fine Bone China internal feelings of fear, alienation or claustrophobia are shown externally in movement, behaviour, and the body’s relationship with buttons, corset laces and layering of skirts. The fragility of this woman is made visible in the bone china that rattles precariously in her hands as she dances.

The small units of action, moments or events within Fine Bone China, might be more accurately considered figural than discursive; a distinction explored

by Pavis in Analyzing Performance where he draws on Jean Francois Lyotard’s clear distinction between the discursive, which belongs to the order of the sign and linguistics, and the figural, which is a libidinal event irreducible to language […] Moments could be called figural insofar as their translation (which is always possible) into a linguistic signified, a discourse, by no means exhausts their meaning and function (Pavis 2003: 87).

Pavis also refers to the relevance of Gilles Deleuze’s “logic of sensation” as being relevant to body-­‐based work such as butoh, emphasising as it does a “sensory and kinaesthetic logic that slips through the grasp of any sociological notation of an external object, or at least supplements it” (87).

The mise en scène of Fine Bone China is a dominant influence in its dramaturgy and the sensorial, textural quality of its elements (sand, bone china, dress fabric) is emphasised. It provides a particular frame for this figure, a location that changes the meaning of the gestures performed. If she performs the same actions on a wooden floor, then they have a completely different meaning than if she does them in the dirt. Friction and contrast are central: indoor clothes with outdoor landscape; woman and animal behaviour; tightly controlled behaviour with instances of abandon. The sand

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locates this figure in an exterior, natural space. It contrasts with the costume to make possible the themes of displacement and friction between figure and landscape. Occasions when the sand was impossible for technical reasons were an opportunity to carefully consider the fundamental role of the sand and what alternatives could achieve a similar effect. Lighting was used to create a huge, vast sky around her for a performance at the Clore Studio of the Royal Opera House in 2006, as shown in the photo gallery at the start of this chapter. In New York and in Tokyo in 2007, leaves were used, which added the potential metaphor of Autumn as a season of transformation and change. The leaves had the same tactile quality of the sand, and added sound of the leaves crunching underfoot. In Singapore gargantuan lush-­‐green tropical leaves were supplied, just hours before the show, forcing a complete re-­‐think of the final section. (See photograph below). They made sense of this colonial woman in Singapore, where she would not face the dry dirt of Australia, but the wet heat of the tropical jungle.

“The objects used in the performance are also actions. They are transformed, they acquire different meanings and different emotive colourations.” (Barba 2006: 66) The objects in Fine Bone China range from the cup and saucer, to the sand that covers the floor, and the costume worn and manipulated by the performer. Sound can also be seen as “action” in this work. The piece begins not with a movement, but with the sound of a rattling cup from offstage. It is significant that it is a relatively small or subtle sound. The intention is that this sound will require the audience to “lean into” the work. The hope is that the small sound will tune the spectators’ senses to the subtler and more sensual aspects of the work; so that they notice not only what happens (what she does) but the quality with which she does it.

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Fine Bone China by F. Barbe Initiation International Festival, Singapore. 2006.

Photo: Artist’s own collection.

The sand and the costume have a particularly tactile affect on the body. They are taken beyond any mere representation or indication of place or character to facilitate movement, quality and presence. The sand is often cold when you first step onto it, it sticks to skin and costume and gets in your eyes and mouth, which changes the tonicity of the body and to a certain extent, the perspective of the performer. A useful discomfort emerges, part of the subscore in this work. Movement and dance are generated by the tactile interaction of costume and body, by the negotiation of what is possible, and what is not possible, in this skin, and what movements are facilitated by its

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shedding. For that reason there was never any question that the boning of the corset would be softened to allow for the performer to dance. The very real and actual restriction of the corset would be the starting point for the dance.

This female figure is quite literally shaped by this costume’s bustle, corset and buttons, which is later creatively employed to extend and distort the body’s shape to facilitate transformation and change. The costume is used to draw the spectator towards bodily metaphors, where physical restriction points to a related psychological state. She is enclosed, pulled upright and compressed by the costume.

Objects such as the cup or the sand place the solo figure in dialogue with something and they become her partners onstage. Being receptive and responsive is so much easier in group work, and objects can help the solo performer access that state.

I describe Fine Bone China as a “moving painting” because its many actions unfold in time and space but need to be considered simultaneously or at least as an accumulation rather than in a linear, cause and affect relationship where one thing leads to another. I draw here on Eugenio Barba’s distinction between the two poles of “concatenation” (cause and effect) and “simultaneity” (2006: 67) to make sense of my experience of Fine Bone China as a moving painting. It is not just that the work is imagistic, or non-­‐narrative, for painting can also be narrative or abstract, as dance can. It is the simultaneity of the dramaturgy that is important.

The question of narrative and story in butoh is significant in starting to understand why audiences are often polarised by butoh. There are those who are deeply and immediately affected in ways they cannot describe. And there are those who are left baffled and unmoved by the very same production.

Audience expectations affect this. If a spectator comes expecting story or narrative then it might seem that nothing is happening when they hear the rattling of a cup. While for another spectator that rattling sets off a myriad of

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associations and meanings that is already helping them to makes sense of and engage with the work.

Barba’s chapter on dramaturgy discusses the issue in useful, precise terms: The spectator tends not to attribute a significant value to the interweaving of simultaneous actions and behaves – as opposed to what happens in daily life – as if there was a favored element in the performance particularly suited to establishing the meaning of the play […] This explains why a “normal” spectator in the West, often believes that he doesn’t fully understand performance based on the simultaneous weaving together of actions, and why he finds himself in difficulty when faced with the logic of many Asian theatres, which seem to him to be complicated or suggestive because of their “exoticness” (Barba 2006: 67).

1.5

Conclusion

After performing Fine Bone China for many years as choreographer-­‐ performer, I recently stepped out from within it to teach it to another dancer.

This afforded me a new perspective with which to inform my understanding of how the piece works, and the demands it made on the performer. The performer must negotiate a very minimal physical score and a complex layering of subscore. The solo performer, in minimal activity, is required to cultivate “presence” in order to fill and to transform the space. She navigates complex shifts, transformations and transitions that are sometimes “in-­‐an-­‐ instant” and at other times are painstakingly slow. She must therefore be entirely “present” in each moment while technically also preparing what is coming next. She must relate to objects and costume in a way that transforms them, renders them poetic or metaphoric through the way in which they are used. She guides the audience through familiar gestures toward a process in which they are “made strange” through context and evolution. She works with both familiar facial expression (recognisable from daily life) and butoh’s “face-­‐as-­‐mask”, (a heightened or extreme version of recognisable

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expressions).28 The work requires an understanding of how the two (facial expression and face-­‐as-­‐mask) are distinct, as will be explored further in Chapter 4 section 4.4.1.

Whether Fine Bone China can be considered a butoh work, I do not know but it would never have been made without sustained, long-­‐term experience of butoh as a process, not as a product. Inspired by Hijikata’s insistence that dancers should look within themselves and not outside of themselves for dance, I wanted to see what my own “Tohoku” might be, to consider the landscape and history my body comes from. One of the responses to Fine Bone China that I most value came from an audience member in Tokyo in 2007. “It is good to see work from a western performer that does not try to imitate Japanese butoh.” 29 I was gratified that Japanese audiences could find an integrity in my dialogue with butoh in Fine Bone China.

The global mixtures of butoh can baffle the eye and stir the soul, and its theatrical realisations can also temper, as in Frances Barbe’s work […] She enters the space of her dance Fine Bone China (2003) carrying a fragile white cup clattering in the saucer as she walks. As her butoh continues from there, we soon understand that its source is not Japanese. It is also apparent to those who have studied butoh that she could not choreograph or perform as she does without a butoh background, but her study of the Suzuki acting technique is also in-­‐play, as is her wide acquaintance with contemporary dance […] Her dance morphs and migrates globally (Fraleigh 2010: 33).

28 One of the ways in which facial expressions are made strange or heightened is simply by

maintaining them in a “frozen” (but not lifeless) state across time. It seems humans recognise a certain rhythm to certain facial expressions. One way to make them strange while still accessing their familiarity is to change the way in which time is used. For example, in daily life, a scream is often short. When this is played out over double or triple the “normal” timing, it can be made more intense and strange while still referring to the notion of a human scream.

29 A comment paraphrased and translated to me by Yuko Kawamoto -­‐ Tokyo in 2007.

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Above all butoh implies total presence. In order to achieve this the dancer must develop the ability to tune into his body’s inner senses, to be sensitive to fluctuations of energy, to explore his relationship to the space around him and to the world. Dancing means ‘being’ in the cosmos, as well as containing the cosmos within oneself. Rather than aspiring to an aesthetic ideal, the dancer attempts to bare his soul. (Viala and Masson-­‐Sekine 1988: 17)

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Chapter 2

Palpitation

“Fran Barbe Dance creates work that leaves deep impressions, not only on the retina, but impressions which surface days later from the subconscious” (King 2003: 27).

Palpitation by Frances Barbe Jacksons Lane Theatre London 2003 Photo and Costumes by Reuben Hart

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Palpitation by Frances Barbe Jacksons Lane Theatre London 2003 Photo and Costumes by Reuben Hart

“A company of twelve performers […] entice us into a shape-­‐shifting world of creatures, beings and shimmering impressions [….] Palpitation is beautifully theatrical and wondrously atmospheric. I’m impressed by the simplicity and effectiveness of the costume; white gowns each unique [that] completely enhance and extend the body’s line and movement” (King 2003: 27).

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Production Chronology: Palpitation

2002

London

2003

London

2004

London and UK Tour

2010

Canterbury

Research Presentation Solo and group material Choreodrome at The Place

Jacksons Lane Theatre, Zone 3 commission.

60 minutes

Re-­‐staged at Jacksons Lane then UK tour: Exeter, Whitstable, Exmouth with Arts Council Funding.

45 minutes

Re-­‐staged at University of Kent.

30 minutes

The 2010 performance in Canterbury is provided on DVD Disc 2.

Evolution of the Work: The work has evolved through a process of editing and reduction, becoming shorter each time as certain scenes were cut, and others retained and deepened.

2003

2004

2010

London

UK Tour

Canterbury

Overture Flock Prologue Hand-­‐monster Masks Solo Duet Sleepwalkers Sphinx Metropolis Vast Solo Finale

Overture Flock Prologue Hand-­‐monster Masks Solo Duet Sleepwalkers Sphinx

Vast Solo Finale

Overture Solo Crescendo 1

Solo Duet Sleepwalkers

Solo Crescendo 2 Finale

Length: 55 minutes 12 Performers

45 minutes 7 Performers

30 minutes 7 Performers

(with live film projection)

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Photo Gallery: Palpitation

Laura Dannequin and Dan Canham

Kajssa Wadja and Nina Fog (front)

Yumino Seki in Palpitation at Jacksons Lane Theatre London 2003 Photos and Costumes by Reuben Hart

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Palpitation by F. Barbe Canterbury 2010 Photo: Thomas Peto

F. Barbe rehearsing Palpitation 2010 Photo: Giuseppe Frusteri

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Reflective Analysis 2.1

Introduction

Palpitation emerged from a choreographic research project in 2002 at The Place in London interrogating butoh’s potential impact on contemporary choreography. That research produced a series of solo and group choreographies that considered the theme of “figure in the landscape”, from which both Fine Bone China and Palpitation would later emerge. The project was documented on DVD -­‐ The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography, which included reflective writing that informs this chapter (Barbe 2004).

Palpitation was a deliberate attempt to reconsider dance and contemporary choreography through butoh. It was conceived as an experiment in reduction, by which I mean it was an exploration of how much can be conveyed using only the performer’s movement, form and energy. The production deliberately used no set and a very simple costume.30 The intention was to use fewer elements in order to make each element really count. It was also anticipated that an exploration of reduction in movement (as modelled by butoh), would make more demands on the performers, and open up a study of the relationship between the dancer and their psychophysical instrument, as explored in section 2.2. Cultivating kinaesthetic awareness and response was central to this production and is the focus of section 2.3. Kinaesthetics informed the ensemble training, defined some of the exploratory improvisations and became a compositional strategy in certain scenes.

30 The costume needed to reveal the body, giving it a kind of skin without resorting to leotards or nudity. Designer Reuben Hart created simple cream gowns, which clung like a second skin to the torso, but had skirts that flowed away from the body accentuating the flow of energy from the dancer’s body in motion. When the performers stood vertical, the costumes seemed “dress-­‐like” and humanised them. As the bodies morphed into crouching forms, the gowns extended and solidified those forms.

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I was interested in exploring the “flinching” body as a theme in this work. By that I mean the quality of movement associated with instinctive reactions or with the body in “fight or flight” mode. The actual size of the movement is often very small, but they have a big energetic intensity. Such movements provide an opportunity to explore scale or size of movement and the volume of that movement or their resonance in the space. In this project I was interested to explore how a very small movement can have a very large volume, and what that demanded of the performer. Butoh provided a useful frame of reference for researching these loud but small instinctive movements.

Palpitation used a relatively “neutral” body as a framing device to make the smaller details of the work stand out and to make the energetic shifts and dynamics more visible. Neutral is acknowledged as a problematic term in performance. I am building here on the discussion of neutral introduced in Chapter 1 Section 1.2 -­‐ Divine Neutrality and Presence – where I emphasised the simplicity of neutral and the notion of containment rather than expressing or demonstrating an idea. I also discussed building a sense of potential and ambiguity in work on “neutral”. In relation to the very simple white gowns of Palpitation, “neutral” refers to the sense of their “not supporting or helping”, “having no distinctive qualities”, or being “not strong or vivid” (Oxford English Dictionary). 31 In referring to the state of the performer, Jacques Lecoq offers this definition of “neutral”: “The state prior to action […] when the actor is […] presenting nothing but a neutral, generic being.” (Lecoq in Keefe and Murray 2007: 191) Neutral should be a highly potent state; a state of potential. The term suggests a certain economy, and if the analogy of the painter’s white canvas is used then neutral can be used to suggest a preparatory state. While that is a useful analogy in practice, it is important to differentiate that from any intention that the body can be neutral in terms of meaning. The human body, in the context of performance is never neutral in terms of meaning. But the performer can move towards a

31 Despite our best intentions toward “neutrality”, the audience in 2003 associated these simple gowns with something stark and cultish. For subsequent performances we added texture, while keeping the tonal palette simple, which gave an organic individuality.

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state of relative neutrality as a useful device in their work. Palpitation grew from research into this potent, preparatory state in performance.

In this chapter I also discuss aspects of the relationship between music and movement in Palpitation. This production was the first collaboration between composer Keith Johnson and myself, and so the relationship between music and movement was a key element of this work. We shared an appreciation for reduction as a compositional element and Keith talked about using silence in composition in a way that resonated with my use of stillness in choreography. We discussed early on the way in which film music works with the image, particularly horror films in which a relatively still or slow image might be contrasted with music to create an effect that exists in neither the image nor the music alone. We discussed some of the experimentation that had gone on in late twentieth century music for dance and how we saw our own work drawing on or contrasting with those experiments. I will use some of the terms and research brought together by Stephanie Jordan in Moving Music (2000) to elaborate on this in Section 2.4 Dialogues with Music.

Having started from a theme of “figure in the landscape” we questioned whether music was always a “landscape” for the “figure” of the dancer, or whether the bodies could also become “landscape” for the music. Palpitation began with three minutes of music playing in darkness. Where Fine Bone China used the subtle sound of a rattling cup to sensitise the audience’s senses at the start, Palpitation overwhelmed them with a complex orchestral score played loud in the darkness.

2.2

Distillation: The Potency of Reduction

To explain the term “distillation”, the analogy of distilling a saline solution is useful. In that context, distillation refers to the removal of excess liquid, and the resulting smaller volume of solution is stronger or more potent. In the

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context of this chapter, distillation is used to refer to the reduction that results in movement becoming stronger for that reduction. Distillation is reduction that intensifies. The energetic commitment of the performer plays an important part in whether reduction strengthens or weakens the work.

The performer must expend a lot of energy in performing distilled movements. Eugenio Barba refers to the use of excessive energy and its role in producing the “dilated body […] a glowing body […] [and] its complementary image; the dilated mind” (Barba 2006: 53). Different practitioners have their own images through which to discuss this quality of energetic, mental and imaginative engagement, or animating energy, as Phillip Zarrilli points out: Whether identified as the idling engine, the flame beneath the stew pot, the inner action that is manifest when one “stands still while not standing still”, or in the more culturally specific Asian terminologies as ki/qi/prana-­‐vayu, the first point of reference for the psycho-­‐ within the compound term, psychophysical, is not psychological per se, but rather the actor’s complete engagement of her energy, sensory awareness, and perception–in-­‐action in the moment. (Zarrilli 2009:21)

Reduction or distillation renders the performer more visible and if they are also working “psychophysically”, the subtle detail of that work is more palpable to the spectator. Reduction can be revelatory because it calls on (and makes space for) a negotiation with some of the complex, internal processes required of all work, but that are made more visible in stillness and slow motion. Simplifying “what” is being done makes more space for considering “how” it is being done. Stillness is not just waiting for the next thing to happen. Slow motion is not just taking a long time to get there. 32 The performer needs to appreciate the different qualities of stillness and slow motion in order to work creatively with them in performance. A great performer can produce a very quiet, settled stillness that has an intense

32 The phrasing – “don’t just take a long time to get there” was used by the SITI Company during a 2002 residency I joined. Although they do not use butoh in their work, they work with the Japanese actor training developed by Tadashi Suzuki, which also uses stillness and slow motion, and their work, under the direction of Anne Bogart, draws on Japanese notions of performance through Suzuki and also reference to their reading of Zeami. See Bogart and Landau (2005) as well as Bogart (2001) and (2007).

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vibration. There is stillness through which the trajectory of energy is maintained and stillness that makes a violent cut or interruption to the trajectory of movement or energy. Stillness punctuates the choreography of Palpitation, often functioning as a framing device for the presence of a performer. At other times it frames very small, isolated movements that would not be visible if the rest of the body was not drawn into stillness. I do not remember any of my butoh teachers talking about stillness in these terms, as a framing device, but I know I learned of it from watching them work.

In slow motion, oppositional force is useful as an activating force and in butoh an image is often used to conjure that opposition. An example might be using “moving through mud” or “dragging a heavy weight”. Such imagistic devices help to produce an excess energy thereby “dilating” the body. They affect the tonicity while also charging the imagination of the performer.33 When slow motion doesn’t work, that is when it results in a weakened rather than strengthened effect, it is often because this dilating process of the internal image is missing.

Distillation relies on attention to detail. For example there must be attention to the use of the eyes and the quality of the gaze. Reduction and distillation makes this work (or its absence) highly visible. The gaze is like an invisible limb that completes the work by linking the internal space of the organism with the external space of the stage. The gaze is often most visible to the spectator when it is left unattended and becomes a kind of hole in the work through which they glimpse the mechanism of the actor at work. When the gaze is fully incorporated into the work, it seamlessly integrates within a more convincing whole. Once the performer is attentive to working with the gaze deliberately as a “limb” they can start to work with the many different qualities of that gaze, whether that be focusing on something far in the distance, or looking with a very foggy, non-­‐seeing gaze, or to look with the eyes of a fish.

33 For a full discussion of opposition see Barba 2006: 196.

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In Palpitation, it was never my intention to deny movement, but rather to elevate stillness and consider the tiniest gesture as dance. I wanted to see if these elements could be made to reverberate in the space, and if they could, what did that require of the performer? Palpitation explored the amplification of small movements through highly detailed work on, for example, the flinch of a hand. The analogy of movement having a certain sound, rhythm or “volume” emerged from this detailed work and we experimented with the extent to which a tiny movement could travel or resonate beyond the fingertips and in the space. Such amplification demanded the generation of a large amount of energy, which was then contained in bodily form that was precisely shaped, and energetically receptive; that is not too rigid, and not too soft. The final scene of Palpitation began with this small twitch of a hand, framed by a landscape of bodies, all standing in stillness facing upstage. One twitch of one hand of one dancer was gradually amplified by repetition across all the bodies. We spent long time rehearsing this single twitch of a hand, sensitising ourselves to the specificity and detail it required. We explored different imagistic devices to charge the movement, for example the image of shaking off water, a beating heart, or an electric shock. And we attempted to make these all discernible and embodied, even in the smallest movement of our hand and fingers.

Butoh can be just as demanding on audiences as it is on performers.

Audiences are required to tune their perception to small, subtle shifts in the physicality of the performer. They must be able to enter another sense of time, and to appreciate not only what is happening from moment to moment, but to consider how an action is unfolding. Meaning and content in butoh is drawn as much from how things happen, as from what happens. A spectator who is only anxious to see what comes next will no doubt be frustrated by butoh’s slow motion and stillness.

In the Introduction, I referred to butoh demanding a very different modus operandi; that of “not moving, but being moved”. Another modus operandi at work in butoh might be the idea that you exist more strongly in stillness or in

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reduction than in motion. My experience of dance prior to butoh seemed by comparison to butoh, to emphasise my existence in motion in a kind of “I move, therefore I am” philosophy. Butoh challenged that assumption in me and I realised that I could exist just as strongly in stillness if not more so. This has implications for the creative process. For example in searching for a movement, I am more likely to stand in stillness than to move around when I am searching for a movement idea to emerge. Both strategies have their place, but at issue here is articulating “the difference butoh makes”.

Distillation can help performers overcome rhythmic habits and broaden their creative palette since it encourages them to work at the extremes of their range. It can help to avoid generalised movement by giving space for more attention to detail. In distilled movement there is time and space for the performer to notice more about their own organism and what is happening around them.

2.3

Kinaesthetics and Ensemble Work

The “distillation” of Palpitation provided the foundation for a profound state of listening within the ensemble. The relatively simple forms allowed the performers to notice more of what was happening in their own body and within the group and to cultivate creative responses that were immediate, spontaneous and instinctive. This state of listening (awareness) and response is discussed here as “kinaesthetics” and was a key theme in the creative process of Palpitation.

The term “kinaesthetic”, from kinaesthesia or kinesthesis, is defined as “the sense of muscular effort that accompanies a voluntary motion of the body” and also “the sense or faculty by which such sensations are perceived”. It encompasses both spontaneous physical action and perception. The term’s etymology links to the Greek -­‐ aesthesis – relating to the senses (Oxford English Dictionary). “Kinaesthetics” entered the process of making

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Palpitation through my experience with Anne Bogart’s SITI Company and their “Viewpoints” work.34 “Viewpoints” is a set of names given to certain principles of movement through time and space; [that] constitute a language for talking about what happens on stage. “Viewpoints” are points of awareness that a performer or creator makes use of while working. (Bogart and Landau 2005: 8) One of the Viewpoints the SITI Company works with is “kinaesthetic response” and here I use their explication of that term and its practical application to expand on the definition of kinaesthetics in a performance context. A full list of the Viewpoints is provided here, divided into the categories of time and space, although my focus in this chapter is specifically on kinaesthetic response.

Time

Space

Tempo Duration Kinaesthetic Response Repetition

Shape Gesture: (Behavioural / Expressive) Architecture Spatial Relationship Topography

Kinaesthetic response work resonated with my existing experience in butoh but allowed me to consider it in new ways through this new vocabulary. The SITI Company emphasise the “immediate” and “uncensored” quality of kinaesthetic response (Bogart & Landau 2005: p43), both in their practical exercises and in the language they use to discuss it. Kinaesthetic response is:

A spontaneous reaction to motion which occurs outside of you; the timing in which you respond to the external events of movement or sound; the impulsive movement that occurs from a stimulation of the senses. [E.g] Someone claps in front of your eyes and you blink in response; someone slams a door and you impulsively stand up from your chair. (Bogart and Landau 2005: 8)

34 In 2002 I joined the SITI Company for a one month intensive residency. It involved daily training in their “Viewpoints” improvisation system alongside sessions in Suzuki’s Actor Training Method and Composition work. Viewpoints originated with post-­‐modern dancer Mary Overlie and Anne Bogart developed its potential application within theatre for actors and directors to reconsider the composition of time and space.

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In practice, kinaesthetic response feels like a kind of “muscle” that is weak at first and gets stronger and more dexterous as it is used. It also feels like another sense, but not a single sense like taste, but rather a convergence of many or all the senses into a total and multifaceted sense. Using peripheral vision helps to activate kinaesthetic response. Peripheral vision is activated when performers are asked not to turn their heads to use direct vision. Just as blindfolding a performer heightens their sense of hearing and of touch, relying on peripheral vision as opposed to a more direct vision seems to facilitate more instinctive, immediate perceptions and responses.

The creative process of Palpitation cultivated kinaesthetic awareness and response in training the performers and in generating material. The production pursued the heightened “state” of readiness and responsiveness that comes in good improvisation. I wanted to invite that quality into the choreography of Palpitation, and to see if that spontaneity could also exist in more structured work. Could I structure spontaneity?

Here I will examine two scenes that attempted, in different ways, to structure spontaneity through kinaesthetics. In section 2.3.1 I explore flocking or improvising in unison like a flock of birds and in 2.3.2 I discuss the “Finale” scene of Palpitation in which the elements of time were largely improvised, although the movement series was set.

2.3.1

Flocking: Improvising in Unison

Conventional chorus work tends to rely on a strong group leader and the ability of others to follow their lead both quickly and accurately. The term “flocking” might sometimes be used in that context but the reliance on having a designated leader distinguishes it from what is proposed here in using the term. In my work, “flocking” involves working without a leader, or at least allowing leaders to emerge and change organically during the process rather than being designated at the outset. The natural advantage of someone being in front of the group and therefore clearly visible to everyone is

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acknowledged and utilised, but there is also the possibility of responding to someone behind you. Leading and following is part of the process, but it is the first stage of something far more advanced in ensemble work.

The flock research addressed the question of whether it is possible for a group to “improvise in unison”. The improvisation could not be completely free, and this work relied on the following parameters: a) Starting in a simple, vertical standing form, all facing the same direction and arranged in a “clump” rather than in lines. b) Standing close, but not touching, to activate the space around the body as a kind of force field. That allows for the possibility of sensing and responding to someone else without actual, physical contact. c) Using the energised, slow motion walk as a focused and highly charged foundation for listening within the improvisation. d) Beginning with a limited palette of actions including walking, stopping, starting again, and changing direction. e) Gradually introducing more elements such as changing levels or adding arm gestures when the quality of listening has developed. f) Relying on peripheral vision as much as possible but avoiding turning the head to check the position of others. g) Having the possibility of responding to actions taking place behind as well as in front of you.

The limitations of the work were that: a) The work relied on a relatively simple or neutral standing form appropriate for Palpitation, but potentially limiting in other contexts. b) Intricate or chaotic footwork or arm gestures are difficult to perceive using peripheral vision which limits the vocabulary to movements with clear, simple trajectories. c) The imperative towards unison can be hard to let go once established.

It is only a device to cultivate and test acute listening skills within the group and should ultimately be surrendered in favour of open

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improvisation built on the foundation of “being together” as distinct from unison.

Unison became then a kind of litmus test for how together the group was. But my goal was not the unison of doing the same thing at the same time. I was cultivating a distinction between being in unison and being together, which can encompass going up as your partner goes down, or starting as your partner stops. Crucially, the question is whether your reaction has been in response to something that happened outside of you, a kinaesthetic response? It was this I was seeking rather than deliberated ideas or even spontaneous impulse from within, as important as both of these are to performance process. The distinction is clearly palpable, if not explicable. 35

Rupert Sheldrake’s popular science book, The Sense of Being Stared at and Other Aspects of Extended Mind, (2003), informed and contextualised this research with examples from the scientific studies of birds and fish. I was curious if there was a different understanding of the senses in these animal studies that could inform our understanding of ensemble improvisation. In Chapter Seven “The Evolution of Telepathy”, Sheldrake outlines a number of experimental enquiries into how birds “flock” and fish “school”. It seems that science cannot yet fully explain what sense birds or fish use to stay together or follow the same course. Were they using visual or movement cues? “Visual stimuli may […] play an important role, but […] cannot in themselves explain the coordination of the flock’s movements.” (Sheldrake 2003: 116) Following movement cues taken from the nearest neighbour also falls short of explaining all cases of bird flocking behaviour because reaction times have been measured and rule out the possibility of a leading and following scenario. This suggests that the flock members are possibly anticipating movement. In the kinaesthetic response work with the SITI Company, we

35 As a caveat, although unison or “doing the same thing at the same time” was not the goal here, kinaesthetic listening and response can be applied to get a group working together in unison very quickly. Instead of relying on counting or a long rehearsal period, unison built on kinaesthetics depends on the quality of listening, perception and ability to respond. By working kinaesthetically I often get a group of strangers to spontaneously choreograph and perform a series of movements in unison with little or no rehearsal or discussion of timing.

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often talked about sensing the moment to move as a group, as opposed to having the movements come from a single leader. The notion of anticipating movement is a useful contribution to a discussion of what it means to “sense the moment to move as a group”, as opposed to following a leader, however instantaneously that is done. Sheldrake uses the term “manoeuvre wave” to explain how a movement can radiate through a flock like a wave that could start anywhere, including from behind. At first it seems impossible that one might respond to a movement that is taking place behind, but it is possible given the presence of a deep state of listening. Granted, copying detailed hand gestures or footwork is impossible, but one can certainly share the moment when movement might happen.

What is called a “flash expansion” in a school of fish is interesting in considering that there is an imagined force-­‐field around the body of the performer that helps them to listen and respond, and for the idea of responding to something from behind that cannot be seen.

The so-­‐called flash expansion, in which each fish darts away from the centre of the school as the group is attacked […] has no simple explanation in terms of sensory information from the neighbouring fish because it happens too fast for nerve impulses to move from the eye to the brain and then from the brain to the muscles. (Sheldrake 2003: 117) In studies of this, fish were fitted with opaque contact lenses to remove their sense of sight, and still responded to the school. Nerves running laterally down the fish’s body were cut to rule out water-­‐pressure sensors, and still they were able to “school normally”. (Sheldrake 2003: 117). Sheldrake concludes that fish and birds are coordinated by what he calls “morphic fields”. The idea of a morphic field is rich for performers wanting to connect as an ensemble. It also extends some of the nuances of work like contact improvisation into a context without actual physical touch. Once a performer opens to the subtler layers of awareness, their perceptions become more fine-­‐tuned and more possibilities open up. Science offered useful terminology and models for thinking about what is going on in the ensemble when it was considered as a human flock.

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This flock work fed into one scene of Palpitation in particular – the “Prologue” of the 2003 and 2004 version. This scene had set starting and end points, but how the group moved in the space in between those two points was improvised on the basis of this flock work. They started with the compulsion to be in unison, but what was interesting were moments in which accidents happened to break unison. Because of the compulsion to be in unison, the group splitting in two or one person being left alone downstage suddenly became a moment of drama. In an improvisation where everyone can do as they like, such moments are not charged in the same way. I was searching for this drama of the body in space, but wanted it to emerge organically, rather than to choreograph it from the outside. I believed the difference was palpable to the spectator. The rule of unison was therefore designed to be broken, but that was only dramatically interesting when it happened organically and the imperative of unison helped facilitate that.

In rehearsal the group produced endless interesting variations in the “Prologue”. We learned to recognise when this muscle of kinaesthetic awareness and response was activated, and when something else like planning, thinking, or composing was at work. However, as opening night came closer, and the rest of the show tightened up, the pressure of performance started to squeeze out the spontaneity. Any agreement of structure we made seemed to push further away the very liveness and charge of spontaneity we had in rehearsals. At the same time, complete freedom or openness also led to the process stagnating. It became clear that structure and spontaneity do not have to be mutually exclusive, but the balance must be right for them to co-­‐exist. We were learning so much through this process, I found it hard to give it up, even though I knew it was no longer working. The scene was not included in the 2010 version of Palpitation. Instead, the research has fed into numerous exercises in my training methodology to cultivate kinaesthetic response.

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2.3.2

Finale Scene: Improvising in Time

An exploration of structure and spontaneity that was more successful was the “Finale” of Palpitation. This was more structured, the performers knew exactly what movements they would do, but they were not given any timing specifications such as speed, duration, or how many times a movement could be repeated. Movement form was structured, but its timing was spontaneous, found through kinaesthetic awareness of the group. The work was conceived as a collective composition, using the sensibility we had cultivated in the flock work, but here only time was being improvised. Without having to consider what to do, they were free to be very creative with when and how fast to move. This proved a very useful choreographic strategy that continues to develop in my work, balancing better structure with spontaneity.

One of the limitations of cultivating a deep sense of listening is a tendency towards waiting for each other, a situation in which the performer is listening so intently that they are unable or afraid to respond for fear it will not be entirely together. The careful distinction between “kinaesthetic awareness” (that deep state of listening) and “kinaesthetic response” (the ability to respond instantly and instinctively) is important. Waiting often compromised the very group moments we were looking to facilitate. Discussion after a run would often reveal that performers had the impulse to move or respond but waited out of indecision. Had they all gone with the desire to respond, they would have been incredibly “together”, whether in unison or not.

Kinaesthetic listening must be balanced with responsiveness, an ability to act spontaneously in the moment. The fact that the group actually felt the moment was an important first step, and not simple to achieve. That heightened sensitivity was an important precondition for the work we sought in Palpitation. Another caution in this work is that as we “drive a stake into each moment” (Bogart)36 to enrich each step of the performance, we must not get lost there and lose sight of the overall drive of the work as a whole.

36 I paraphrase American director, Anne Bogart, from intensive training with the SITI Company in 2002.

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2.4

In Dialogue with Music

During this “Finale” that improvised with time, Keith Johnson’s pre-­‐recorded score played alongside the choreography, providing a fixed duration within which the performers had to work. 37 There were some agreed signposts in the music, which allowed the performers to locate themselves within that fixed duration, but these signposts never amounted to music cues. By that, I mean a sound or moment in the music was not a trigger for a particular movement. The performers had to really listen to the music, without using it as a kind of metronome for their work. The music was in some ways a space or environment the performers entered and moved freely within. At the same time we also worked with the image of a landscape of still bodies, through which the music moved.

Experiments in music for dance that took place in the twentieth century provide a rich backdrop for our own experiments with music and movement in butoh-­‐based work. Stephanie Jordan’s Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth Century Ballet provides a useful overview of some of the key developments. From early notions of “translation and equivalence”, where dance was required to manifest or translate music accurately into movement, through the need for music to serve the dance, and on to the emergence of “gentler terms of parallelism and correspondence […] conversation and counterpoint between the two strands of music and dance” (Jordan 2000: 21). There is a strong history of dance mimicking the rhythm of music very precisely, alongside historical moments of “extreme independence between music and dance” (Jordan 2000: 20) such as Merce Cunningham and John Cage explored in the final decades of the twentieth century when they brought music and movement together for the first time on opening night for some productions. They also explored the provocative use of silence, but were not the first to do so, since even earlier in the twenties and thirties

37 Involving live musicians in the process was beyond the scope of this production

financially, rather than it being a choice, so we had to work with pre-­‐recorded music as a parameter. But in future development, this work would be exciting where the play with time occurred not only between the dancers, but between dancers and musicians.

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silence had been used to question the relationship between music and movement.

As a late twentieth century development in dance, butoh certainly benefits from and contributes to a broadening of the possibilities for how music and movement might interact. It has made use of silence, sound effects from nature, western classical music, Japanese traditional music and pop songs.

Very often in butoh there is a friction between the image on stage and the music being played. But even where such friction is utilised, there is always some point of connection, be it the sound texture of an instrument, or the alignment of musical phrasing with movement phrasing. For example in Hosotan (A Story of Small Pox) Tatsumi Hijikata used a beautiful French song, Canteloube’s Bailero, to accompany his grotesque dance of simply standing and falling. Hijikata’s grotesque, distorted movements counter the highly refined associations of European classical music, but at the same time he seems to work carefully with the phrasing of the music as a kind of scaffolding to underline the trajectory of his movements.38 There is a friction but not a complete disregard of the music. Whether this refined musical “frame” made his work seem even more grotesque, or afforded it a quality of beauty the movement alone would not have had, is perhaps subjective and debatable. But undoubtedly there is a great deal of potential in the choreographer’s choice of unexpected or unpredictable music. Butoh shares a historical timeframe with American postmodern dance and there are interesting parallels to consider in their use of music, among other things. For example, Yvonne Rainer “made her pedestrian dances of the 1960s appear more pedestrian, more prosaic, even humorous, by contrast with high romantic or popular music” (Jordan 2000: 20).

One of the processes that emerged from Palpitation and became more formalized in our work afterwards was a process in which I would use found

38 Much of what we see of Hijikata’s work now has had sound added to video, so I am making

certain assumptions here, but they are based on my experience of working with butoh artists such as Tadashi Endo who does encourage performers to work carefully with phrasing, even where juxtaposition and friction might exist.

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music for creative improvisation and devising. Many choreographers work in this way, finding something to work with that works ahead of a composer’s addition. What started to crystallize more clearly for me as a result of this process was the distinction between what the performer needed and what the spectator or the dramaturgy needed in terms of sound and music. This relates to the idea of subscore discussed earlier. It might be that the vibration of an electric guitar solo is useful for the performer to work with but the scene might need something very different dramaturgically. Having worked with the guitar solo, it is interesting if a performer can keep that quality in the body when given something very different to perform with. On reflection I see that we worked with the assumption that Keith was serving more the dramaturgy and the spectator than the performer. It became clear that the needs of the performer in terms of musicality, rhythm and tone, can sometimes be very different to the needs of a scene.

Asking performers to work with a very different musical quality as part of their subscore while something very different played out in the space for the audience was interesting and difficult at times. In Chimaera, examined in Chapter Three, I rehearsed a scene from Act I to The Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up. Keith’s music for that scene was a very different piano-­‐based soundscore with a lot of space and silences in it, as opposed to the constant driving beat of The Prodigy. I was asking the performers to provide that driving pulse without the music helping them in the moment of performance.

I was asking them to move into the gaps in Keith’s music, to take them to assert their own existence. It is of course very natural to want to move when the music moves and stop when the music stops. But overriding that natural impulse can lead to fascinating results in terms of bringing the bodies and the music into a more equal dialogue. That dialogue could be one of friction and still be a conversation.

The analogy of conversation or dialogue is appropriate to the way in which Keith and I discuss music and movement. We try to allow music and movement to bring different elements to the stage, and for their interaction

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to create meaning that could not be delivered by either one in isolation. The performers in Palpitation and in Chimaera were asked to enter into conversation with Keith’s music; to push against it in a way that could give momentum to both.

This device of the performer carrying a different internal rhythm to that provided for the spectator is informed by my experience of butoh, and in particular the work of my teacher, Tadashi Endo, who has vast experience collaborating with some of the world’s top jazz musicians. He has worked with us in his company at length to get us listening more deeply to music, even as he asked us to exist separately from it. “Don’t ignore the music” he so often cried out during our improvisations. But he was not asking us to “dance to the music” either, and by that I mean not to simply mimic its rhythm without bringing something of our own. With freedom from the need to illustrate the music, comes responsibility: The dancer must not rely on the music to bring atmosphere or energy or rhythm that the body should bring.

We can see when performers are leaning on the music in a way that diminishes their presence and when they are matching the music with enough of their own substance so as to enhance the presence of both music and movement. It was a profound revelation for me the day Tadashi Endo removed Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain from a scene we were working on just days before opening night, after we had worked intricately with it for a long time. He replaced it with what he called “magma” a sound effect like a vibration, more felt than heard, and certainly with no rhythmic structure to match Miles Davis. The experience of trying to keep that quality in my body as I performed to the magma sound effect that better served his dramaturgy, has no doubt informed my research into music and movement.

Working with kinaesthetic awareness and response has also had an impact on how I work with music. I increasingly refuse to offer any counting in order to heighten the performers’ sense of listening to each other and to the music for more information than just its counting structure. The butoh artists I have worked with very rarely count music, although they may use a sign like a “ts”

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sound to each other, under their breath, to indicate when to do the next movement. Even that kind of cueing I have tried to remove from my process as much as possible in order to invite more kinaesthetic awareness into the work. As already explored, it is possible to be together, even in exacting unison, without counting. I propose to performers that counting actually robs them of a full sense of liveness and removes the imperative to really be together in a myriad of other ways. If their awareness is with the counting, it is often not with each other, and it is the latter that most interests me. I question whether counting might also impede their ability to listen to music in different ways. It is in part a provocation to think differently about performance, and of course there are many contexts in which counting is absolutely appropriate and necessary. But in Palpitation I avoided counting so that it did not emphasise too strongly the desire to make a performance or scene the same as it was before. I rather wanted to emphasise how today’s version would be different from yesterday’s version, using kinaesthetic response to work together in the moment of performance.

2.5

Conclusion

In reflecting critically on the making of Palpitation, I have found resonances with the work of a number of other practitioners interested in the nature of improvisation. The way in which they talk about their work provides useful terms of reference for my own understanding. For example, Ingemar Lindh’s research into collective improvisation led him to emphasise and articulate the idea of “giving space to the mutation” and to assert that a performer’s action should be the “consequence of [their] listening, and not of [their] wanting to act” (Lindh in Camilleri 2008: 427). Giving “space to the mutation” is just what I was trying to do in the process of making Palpitation. All of the butoh choreographers I have worked with have found a way to make space for the “mutations”. It was clear to me that they did not want to see an accurate reconstruction of the work night after night. I understood they were watching to see how I lived within the work.

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What began to interest me during this project was the navigation of structure and spontaneity. I was not so much interested in purely structured choreography, NOR in purely spontaneous improvisation, but rather I was looking for a balance between the two that would charge the performer, that would insist they were fully alive in each moment. By extension I believed that charge would affect the spectator.

Butoh’s value of economy, distillation or reduction makes it a rich challenge for the performer. The questions butoh poses for dance help to make visible the more subtle forces at work in performance. (Barbe 2004) Rather than an intention to “do butoh”, Palpitation was an attempt to better understand its use of distillation and to push it as far as I could in my own work. Working in such depth with stillness and slow motion in butoh changed my taste as a spectator of dance. Now I feel the weight that a single movement can have on stage, and often find that many dancers do so much movement in a single scene there is a danger that movement becomes “cheap”, even in the hands of the most talented technical dancers. As a spectator I notice now that I switch off and sit back when I sense a dancer is going to produce movement after movement ad infinitum without having the space to really live each movement. I am now more interested in how fully inhabited a movement is, and no matter how spectacular a form is, without that level of inhabitation I am left somehow cold. While technique is designed to provide the dancer or actor with a sense of ease on stage that is important, it is also important that performance must cost them energetically: It must tax their life-­‐force to be fully inhabited.

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A Lesson in Reduction from Japanese Tea Ceremony

I return to Japanese aesthetics and tea ceremony for an image of “reduction that intensifies”.

Sen no Rikyu was a master of tea ceremony whose garden of morning glory flowers was famous for its beauty. Rikkyu’s student, a warlord, arranged to visit and was furious to find that all the flowers had been cut down. He stormed into the teahouse to demand an explanation where he found

the modest flower arrangement [comprised] a single morning glory […] The warlord nodded and said that he had understood the lesson (Richie 2007: 52).

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“Form is a kind of antennae, a sensing device through which we can access different experiences and information”. (Yumiko Yoshioka paraphrased from a workshop, London Butoh Festival 2009).

“Find the form and the spirit will come” said Tatsumi Hijikata.

“Follow the spirit and the form will come”, said Kazuo Ohno.

(Author paraphrases Endo 2005: unpaginated DVD of workshop).

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Chapter 3

Chimaera

Chimaera by Frances Barbe Cecil Sharp House London 2006 Photo by Giuseppe Frusteri

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Production Chronology: Chimaera

Chimaera was structured into Act I and II. Act II: The Moonlit Ballroom was performed as a stand-­‐alone work on some occasions and is the focus of this chapter. Photos of both Act I and Act II are provided.

2005 London Practice based research and work-­‐in-­‐ progress presentation

2006 London Cecil Sharp House The Moonlit Ballroom (Act II only)

Hoxton Hall (Act I and Act II)

Canterbury Gulbenkian Theatre (Act I and Act II)

Brisbane Woodward Theatre, with Frank Theatre Company. The Moonlit Ballroom (Act II only)

2008-­‐ Creation of DVD Documentation Frances 2009 Barbe: From Studio to Stage

Two versions of Chimaera Act II are provided on DVD. Disc 4 Fran Barbe Dance Theatre Co. Cecil Sharp House London 2006

Disc 5 Frank Theatre Co.

Woodward Theatre Brisbane 2006

Extract from publicity material for Chimaera: Change punctuates our lives from the sudden, crash-­‐ landing of birth to the gradual, chrysalis-­‐like transformation of adolescence. Such transfigurations are reflected in our fairy tales and myths, where the pricking of fingers, the biting of apples and the drinking of potions brings on weird and wonderful changes. Chimaera explores a world of hybrid, transforming creatures: between animal and human, between the real and the fantastic.

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Photo Gallery: Chimaera

Act I Sc 1

Nina Fog and William Dickie in Chimaera Act I Photos: Giuseppe Frusteri

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Act I Sc 2

Chimaera by Frances Barbe Hoxton Hall London 2006 Photo: Giuseppe Frusteri

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Act II

Chimaera, Hoxton Hall, London. 2006 Photos: Giuseppe Frusteri

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Nina Fog in Chimaera Hoxton Hall London. 2006 Photo: Giuseppe Frusteri

Natsuko Kono in rehearsal for Chimaera Photo: Artist’s own Collection

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Reflective Analysis 3.1

Introduction

The Introduction to this thesis outlined how important the notion of transformation and metamorphosis is within butoh. Butoh’s metamorphic methodologies informed the creative process for Chimaera and helped define the research questions that drove this production. The intention was to explore transformation in butoh using “hybrid bodies” as stimulus. In addition, the exploration of kinaesthetics begun in Palpitation, was developed further in the context of highly transformed and less neutral or simple bodies than Palpitation. So metamorphosis was both methodology and thematic inspiration for Chimaera.

The initial impetus for the work was contemplation of the moment when woman becomes swan in Swan Lake. Then other stories and myths that revolved around transformation were added to the mix: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Alice in Wonderland, The Red Shoes, and Douglas Copeland’s novels exploring modern adolescence.

At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities – to clarify just who it is we really are?

(Coupland 1998: 32)

Do murderers seem like murderers at eighteen? An egg hatches. What will emerge – a cygnet? A crocodile? A turtle?

(Ibid: 16-­‐17)

A strange “moonlit” ballroom emerged as a kind of fictional location and a nostalgic time: a place and time in which change occurred. This ballroom was inspired by the “B‘n’S” (Bachelor and Spinster) balls of rural Australia and the scene was conceived as a modern-­‐day rite of passage between adolescence and adulthood.

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The critical reflection that follows explores how I developed a characteristic movement language for this work through butoh. In section 3.2 I examine the transforming potential of the puppet body as introduced to me by Tadashi Endo. In section 3.3 I examine the gargoyle figure as an evocative, hybrid stimulus or entry point for creative improvisations.

3.2

The Unfamiliar Body: Puppets and the Object Body

Working with Tadashi Endo on the puppet body for his production of Back Pack revealed to me the depth and potential of this process for the performer.

He began with almost mime-­‐like work to imitate the puppet, and led on to work that went far beyond pretending to be a puppet. Endo was interested in the limitation of the puppet and what that did to us as performers. He was not so interested in how perfectly we could imitate the puppet, but in how it could transform us. The transformative potential of physical limitation is indicated in this quote from Tatsumi Hijikata: When I begin to wish I were crippled – even though I am perfectly healthy […] that is the first step towards butoh (Viala and Masson Sekine 1988: 75).39

In Tadashi Endo’s company we experimented with the puppet body in depth, moving as if our body was constructed like a puppet. We considered the material of the puppet being wood not flesh, the focus on joints and the movement quality that results from those joints and we explored the quality of isolation that results from the fact that a puppeteer cannot be moving all parts of the puppet at once. After a period of exploration within these parameters, we were asked to dance “as puppet” or “as dancer”. Sometimes we improvised movement and at other times performed a set choreography.

The intention was to research the contrast between these two different bodies; the dancer and puppet. The puppet body was limited in its movement; the dancer had a lot of possibility. The puppet movement was

39 It is interesting to consider the implication of the reverse viewpoint, that a lack of limitation can be inhibiting to creativity.

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more isolated and required attention to the sequencing of movement events, where as the dancer was able to move everything at once. Mobility in the puppet was focused around the joints with other parts more fixed or solid.

The dancer’s body had more fluidity less rigidity around the joints than the puppet body. “Puppet” and “dancer” became like different bodies to step into, or different states or perspectives to work from.

This research with Endo profoundly impacted the way I approached movement and also opened up a new area of scholarly research. I was particularly struck by one moment, during the development of his production, Back Pack in 2004. We watched each other move as a puppet contrasted with moving in the dancer’s body. I was struck by how “moved” I was watching the “puppet” body rather than the “dancer’s” body. Why did this more limited body have such impact on me as a spectator? Alongside the physical limitation of the puppet body there was the inability to express feeling or emotion in the face since the puppet face is “carved” and therefore fixed. It seemed that the feeling of the live performer was being somehow compressed (because unexpressed) within the puppet body.40 This can be related to the notion of yūgen presented in the Introduction. The puppet body might be said to have yūgen, mystery or the beauty of something half-­‐ concealed. It seemed that working with the figure of the puppet as a starting point limited movement which in turn compressed energy and expression, particularly when the face is held in a fixed state while the performer continues to feel without deliberately expressing that feeling externally. This helps avoid affectation. The image of the puppet body gives the performer a strong, specific figure to work with that immediately transforms them. The image inherently cultivates the quality of “being moved” – that modus operandi that is so central to butoh and that elevates curiosity and discovery

40 There is a discussion of the expressive face of the puppet in Wilson and Minle Chapter 7,

including a look at “a deliberate design strategy in characterization, the puppet face is almost totally devoid of expression yet, paradoxically, vastly expressive at the same time […] So the face of little expression – in the hands of the puppeteer – can be considerably expressive” (Wilson and Milne 2004: 111).

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in the performer. I took this idea of the puppet-­‐body into the creative process of Chimaera to experiment further with it for myself. The puppet body came to be defined as a process in which the performer works with: 1. Not moving, being moved, being receptive.

2. Limited and isolated movements, avoiding fluid movements through the whole body. Stillness (in one part of the body) is used to frame motion in another part of the body.

3. A digital or stop/start movement quality.

4. A fixed or carved face that does not change.

5. A particular quality of the gaze in which the performer looks out from their body with a sense of both distance and connection between their interior and the outside.

There are practical examples of performers working with these qualities in rehearsal shown on Disc 3 Butoh and the Creative Process. Choose “The Unfamiliar Body: Puppets” from the index menu.

The puppet is an overt, blatant way to explore “not moving, being moved”.

Used as a starting point and not an end goal in itself, this can take performers beyond representing the puppet towards a state the draws the spectator deeper into their work. The quality of being moved gives a sense that movement is being discovered as each moment unfolds, rather than being consciously manufactured or demonstrated. Explained using a grammatical analogy, “being moved” is movement done with the quality of a question, experienced by the performer as “where am I going now?” Or it can also be experienced as observation, “Oh, now I am here”, a situation of noticing oneself moving. By contrast, a movement or action can be done with the quality of a statement or exclamation mark: I am here!41 The point here is that being moved refers not to what action is being done, but rather to the quality with which that action is done. Being moved is a quality that can be

41 Movement with this quality of being moved can still have specificity, and this should not be interpreted as purely being vague or unclear in our action onstage.

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added to almost any action. It is a modus operandi of the performer. The effect can be to make the body seem more of an object, even as it is very much alive, which gives an animate-­‐inanimate quality. The effect can also be to draw attention to the idea that something else is moving the body and to provoke the audience to imagine what unseen forces exist around the body.42

I attempted to estrange the body by using a digital, machine-­‐like quality in addition to the liveness of the performer. The digital movement quality emphasised in Chimaera gave the body a strange, non-­‐human quality of otherness. It is very human to move the whole body as one, whereas a puppeteer cannot be in all places at once, so isolation facilitates the quality of being moved and suggests something other-­‐than-­‐human. The fixed or “carved” face of the puppet body also establishes a friction between the animate, live performer subject to feeling, and the object, puppet body unable to express that feeling in bodily changes. I have experienced this fixed face as a kind of boundary between internal experience (feeling) and external form (expression). It can be considered as a kind of membrane that contains and therefore heightens sensation. So a feature of the puppet body is that it experiences sensation and feeling, without having the face capable of reflecting that feeling in flux.

The survival of puppet theatre over some 4,000 years owes a great deal to man’s fascination with the inanimate object animated in a dramatic manner, and to the very special way in which puppet theatre involves its audience. Through the merest hint or suggestion in a movement […] the spectator is invited to invest the puppet with emotion and movement, and to see it breathe. (Currell 1999: 9) Currell’s quotation on the power of puppets to move the spectator informs an understanding of why I was more moved watching my peers move “as puppet” rather than “as dancer” in Endo’s work. The puppet quality seemed to afford the spectator that same “invitation to invest” that Currell and others have aligned with the puppet. When a spectator has invested in that way,

42 I have quoted elsewhere Akaji Maro who said “It is not the bodies that dance; something

else crawls up onto the stage as a result of their bodily movement” (Maro in Blackwood 1990 unpaginated video)

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their experience will be stronger. An example of how the puppet quality was used in performance in Chimaera can be seen in the opening few minutes of DVD Disc 4 by choosing this version from the menu: “Chimaera Act II The Moonlit Ball” (April 2006 Cecil Sharp House, London).

3.3

Gargoyles and Other Hybrids

Another transformational, transfiguring device used in Chimaera was the figure of the gargoyle. Like the puppet, this figure gave the performers an evocative, detailed figure to work with. The gargoyle interested me for its hybrid character, being as it is often a combination of real and imagined animals. Attention to detail and specificity was very important in this work, for example attention to carving clawed hands or a gargoyle face. Where physical form was imagined rather than actual such as a tail or wings, performers were encouraged to consider, in very specific terms, how that tail might change the way the spine is held, or how those imagined wings might affect how the shoulder blades and arms are moved. This involved an act of imagination that was than manifested in outside form. Excerpts from the creative process with the Gargoyle as stimulus are shown on Disc 3: Butoh and the Creative Process. (Choose “The Unfamiliar Body: Gargoyles” from the index menu).

The gargoyle process involved four stages: 1. To “carve” the body into a still, gargoyle sculpture.

2. To stay in stillness or in “absolute reduction”43 as the music plays once; usually around 3 to 5 minutes.

3. To move into an improvisation when the music begins a second time.

43 This expression “absolute reduction” was used by Endo in rehearsals for Back Pack in

London in 2003 when I first experienced the potential for stillness to charge the performer for creative improvisation.

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4. To articulate material after the improvisation that records and recalls both images and movements. This might be done in writing or by composing a short sequence to show or to teach to others.

William Dickie in Chimaera rehearsal 2006

Scarlett Perdereau in Chimaera 2006 Photos: Artists own collection

I examine this process in detail here because it has become an important method for generating material in my work, beyond the gargoyle and Chimaera.

1. Carving Specificity Specificity was central to this work. I realised how significantly changing even the smallest detail of a physical form could completely change the performer’s experience of it. The nervous system is affected by whether the hand is clenched in a fist or stretched to full extension. That in turn affects the imaginative dimension of the experience. The imagination “fires” when the body is taken into a potent physical form, and it “fires” more intensively when the work is detailed rather than generalised; assuming of course that one is attentive enough to notice the sometimes subtle changes taking place

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in the body and in the imagination.44 A loop needs to be activated between physical form and sensation and imagination. In that way improvisation can be based on following and responding, rather than planning and constructing. Changing the fingers affects the brain and imagination and the whole “organism”, via the nervous system.45

Lorna Marshall refers to this kind of “body-­‐to-­‐mind” system in acknowledging the unity of the performer’s organism, and she points toward a number of scientific studies on the way in which, particular facial expressions link to emotion; [and that] measurable changes in autonomic functioning have been noted, as well as subjective perception of altered feelings. […] the exact patterns of operation and the mechanisms involved are obscure. But the trend seems to be towards a recognition of body-­‐to-­‐mind impact” (Marshall 2008: 22).

Antonio Damasio’s discussion of the brain as “nervous system” has been revelatory for me in considering the science behind this process and the words to use that avoid a brain/ body or mind / body dichotomy (Damasio 1994: 86). The distinctions he makes between different types of brain activity are very useful in the context of performing.

Actions, whether spontaneous or reactive, are caused by commands from the brain. [But] not all actions commanded by a brain are caused by deliberation (Damasio 2006: 89).

This notion of “deliberation” seems to be a potential replacement for that useful yet confusing command: Don’t think!” Are we rather asking the performer not to deliberate? Such precise terms can be useful and inspirational, helping to avoid some of the misconceptions that emerge in creative work.

44 The notion of the imagination firing is used here to conjure the image of a kind of chain

reaction in which some stimulus sets off a reaction that in turn mobilises another reaction.

45 Avoiding Cartesian duality in a discussion of such processes is still difficult, as it is so ingrained in our use of language that mind is located in the brain, and that the mind-­‐brain is not only separate to, but also over and above (in control of) the body. New knowledge from neuroscience and the specificity of language used by the likes of Antonio Damasio is helpful in overcoming the remnants of such thinking in the language we use in the studio.

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Maxine Sheets-­‐Johnson uses the term “thinking in movement” to suggest an alternative to the idea of pre-­‐considering an idea that is later manifested in movement.

Thinking in movement is a perpetual dissolution and dilation, even a mutability, of here-­‐and-­‐now movements and a moving present […] [It] is thus clearly not the work of a symbol-­‐making body […] mediating its way through the world by means of language […] it is the work of an existentially resonant body […] [created out of] kinetic intelligence (Sheets-­‐Johnson 2009: 35).

A feature of the gargoyle figure is often a strong or extreme face-­‐mask. While attention to specificity was important throughout the whole body, the face is an even more potent part of the body. It resonates even more strongly in the nervous system. When you smile, you start to feel different. When you take on the face of a gargoyle, your feeling and perspective changes. This will be explored more fully in Chapter 4, but the face is emphasised here as an important element of the gargoyle work.

Students of William Morris Sixth Form College London, 2009 In a butoh-­‐based workshop-­‐performance project with F. Barbe and Yuko Kawamamoto Photos: Artist’s own collection

2. Stillness Stillness in this context is not simply “not moving”, but what Endo would call “absolute reduction”. This implies not simply an absence of movement but an activated state of listening in which the strong desire to move is felt. The stillness should only be broken by a very powerful compulsion to move, and I have that compulsion as very conducive to creativity. It means I don’t have to think-­‐up any ideas but instead can follow the sensations of my body and the

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imaginative associations linked with those sensations. The duration of this stillness should be challenging to be most conducive to creativity. It charges the performer, awakening kinaesthetic sensation and imaginative activity which can become fuel for the second, improvised phase of the exercise. In this way the performer can rely on the feedback loop running between body and imagination via the nervous system. Playing music for this stillness provides a poetic structure for the experience. They should not allow the music to dictate, or to mindlessly follow it, but rather mindfully to pursue its phrasing (line of thought), to become present with it in time. 46

3. Movement Improvisation A long period of stillness packs or fills the performer with experience to pursue in the improvisation. It frees them from deliberating and allows them to respond and following the creative stimulus already built up. Performers were encouraged to start small and not to quickly drop the initial form altogether.47 They were encouraged to really process each movement finding more possibility within it before moving on to something new. They should uncover the deep vertical layers beneath a movement before letting it evolve horizontally into something completely new.

An analogy with drawing can be useful. Rather than feeling like one is “doodling” or “finger painting” the performer should feel a sense of improvising calligraphy brushstrokes. They are not planned, they are often improvised, but have a clear trajectory and discernible shape or form, whether that amounts to something verbal and discursive or not. The energy and effort of the calligrapher is evidenced in some way in the brushstrokes.

One of my teachers, John Nobbs, uses the analogy of finger painting in

46 The music used in this process, and in workshops since, was from Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite

No.1 Op.46 “Ase’s Death”. Awareness of the tendency of music to dictate a certain atmosphere or mood is important in this process. This piece offers very clear phrasing, that can help to anchor the experience in time.

47 This is not to say that the improvisation cannot evolve in surprising directions. But the improvisation should grow from and relate to this original form, as specific inspiration for the improvisation that follows. Otherwise the performer is soon left with nothing to work from, respond to and must start improvising from nothing. That is equally challenging, but a different process.

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relation to poor improvisation. “Don’t judge finger paint”, he often says. That led me to ask what the drawing analogy for a good improvisation might be.

Calligraphy offers a rich, informative analogy.

4. Articulation Following an improvisation with an act of articulation, ensured that material produced spontaneously and intuitively was, as much as was possible, being captured. It can be difficult to be both fully present in the moment and in a state of observing what’s emerging so as to have access to it later. This universal challenge faces all performance makers, and butoh’s emphasis on deep presence can make it even harder to recreate material discovered during improvisation. The process of capturing material for butoh ideally involves observing not only movement but imaginative, mental and emotional material as well. These can be very slippery. A word or phrase might not capture them whole, but they can provide a key to accessing them again later, a kind of name to use in calling them back. It is important for this process to stress that both movement material and imaginative material should be captured wherever possible. Director Anne Bogart has this to say on what she calls “the violence of articulation”.

To be decisive is violent. […] The decisiveness, the cruelty, which has extinguished the spontaneity of the moment, demands that the actor begin an extraordinary work: to resurrect the dead. The actor must now find a new, deeper spontaneity (Bogart 2001: 45).

What began as a way to explore the gargoyle for Chimaera has formulated into a skeleton structure used in workshops and other creative processes. For example, I use figurative painting, sculpture or photography such as this painting by Paula Rego as a potent, detailed form from which to begin the same process.

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Grooming by Paula Rego. 1994

Whether working with the gargoyle or with the Rego painting, the process uses reduction or stillness as the starting point for creativity. The progression moves from “carving” the body, followed by stillness that charges the body for movement improvisation and finally into the process of articulating what material has been found. This has become a model for a creative process with endless applications, since changing the original starting point will set the performer on a completely different journey.

Pedagogically, it allows me to give participants a clear and specific model that they can make their own by choosing their own initial starting point or picture. There are some specific points of awareness that are integral to the process, that distinguishes it from others that use art as a stimulus. It is important that a “figurative” picture is chosen. That is, a picture of a position the performer can literally get their body into. Working from an abstract painting is a very different process.

3.4

Conclusion

The bodies in Chimaera were transfigured using the puppet and gargoyle as stimulus. These evocative starting points were intended to give the cast an experience of their body as something unfamiliar or strange. The puppet and gargoyle were qualities shared amongst the ensemble. In addition “totem” figures, specific to each cast member, were used to develop individual movement vocabulary that sat alongside the shared qualities of the puppet

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and gargoyle work. Some examples of these totems were vampire-­‐bat or mermaid. So the cast of Chimaera drew simultaneously on multiple inspirations. This complex task was intended to cultivate a certain ambiguity or mystery in the presentation of the body, since they were neither explicitly puppet nor gargoyle nor mermaid but drawing on aspects of all of these.

Dramaturgically, I hoped that the spectator might see the body afresh as something unfamiliar through this work. Katsura Kan once told me that he always wanted to present a kind of “UFO” onstage, something unidentifiable.

He explained that if the audience cannot quickly name what they see, they will be forced to use what Kan referred to as their “back-­‐brain”, which I understood to refer to their unconscious. Since they have no ready-­‐made label for what they see they must search for or create one. I have always felt like some kind of creature when performing butoh, something other than human. However, while this is the performer’s process, dramaturgically I think butoh is always talking about the human being, albeit through the use of strange, extreme or transfigured bodies. Butoh makes the human body strange in order to look at it from a new perspective. It shares something with surrealism in the intention of “questioning the familiar in order to unearth its bewildering strangeness [or to create a] reality rendered fantastic” (Bressai 2009: 18).

The performers in Chimaera found it difficult at times to listen to each other in the same profound way, due to the highly transformed states they were working with. The analogy of the butoh body as mask emerged from work on Chimaera, and helped to unravel why the work was challenging at times. I was asking that the performers “carve” a kind of body-­‐as-­‐mask, and in the same moment to respond to it, or work creatively from within it. The real masked performer has a certain distance from the object to which they are responding, and that distance is liberating in some ways. They must traverse that distance to meet the mask and that process is part of their transformation. A similar process could explain what is happening in some butoh-­‐based work, where the butoh body is considered as a mask. The

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challenge is to be both completely within the work and distanced from it at the same time.

In this creative process, improvisational structures generated movement material for the production, but in addition they served to “pack” the performer’s body with a rich history of experience. A twenty-­‐minute improvisation might bear the fruit of a single movement or action, but the full experience of that twenty minutes would resonate in the performer’s body-­‐ memory and feed them during performance. The final, performed choreography of Chimaera is therefore built on a substratum of rich, imaginative and physical experiences built up in rehearsal that feed the performer and act as underscore to their performance.48

A great deal of attention was paid to detailed form in Chimaera, but it was always a starting point and not an end in itself. Form in butoh can be considered a “container for experience”, with the shape of the container determining to some extent the shape of its contents. “Find the form and the spirit will enter”, said Tatsumi Hijikata. “Find the spirit and the form will come”, said Kazuo Ohno. (Endo 2005: unpaginated DVD of workshop). This often-­‐quoted idea shows that the two founders of butoh were moving from different directions towards a point of balance between inner life and outer form. Yumiko Yoshioka refers to form as a kind of “antennae”, a sensing device that gives access to a particular vibration or frequency, determined by the form. She stresses how using different “antennae” can help performers access new qualities or aspects of themselves in order to go beyond the habitual in performance. 49

Endo discussed transformation in terms of it being “to exchange bones”.

(Endo 2005: [unpaginated DVD]) To “exchange bones” with the cat, for example, means to take on its architectural form. In this way, the performer

48 Several practitioners and theorists have referred to this as an iceberg, only the tip of which is visible to the spectator.

49 This is paraphrased from a number of workshops with Yoshioka in Germany and London, most recently for London Butoh Festival in 2009.

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avoids thinking of the process as “pretending” to be a cat, or “representing” a cat. Instead, they think of placing themselves inside the new architecture of the cat or gargoyle or mermaid. From there a new perspective can be cultivated, a perspective derived from actual physicality.

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Butoh plays […] with perspective. If we humans learn to see things from the perspective of an animal, an insect, or even inanimate objects, [then] the road trodden everyday is alive.

We should value everything. (Hijikata quoted in Viala and Masson-­‐Sekine 1988: 65)

Frances Barbe in rehearsal for Chimaera London 2006 Photo: June McGrane

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Chapter 4

Preparing Performers

Frances Barbe and William Dickie Company Training London 2006

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Each butoh dancer approaches the issue of “training” very differently […] but none of these approaches constitute a universally applicable “butoh method”. Min Tanaka’s influential “Body Weather” system tunes the dancer’s body for butoh, developing sensory awareness […]Yumiko Yoshioka calls her work “Body Resonance”.

[Body resonance] is based on the premise of awakening energy and potential inside the dancer by inextricably linking images with movement. (Barbe 2003a: 23)

Yumiko Yoshioka teaching London Butoh Festival 2009

Whether or not you want to dance butoh, the various ways in which it explores form and inner life, and its rigorous emphasis on presence, transformation and embodiment, all provide unique tools for developing the art of performance […]

After ten years of training and performing butoh, as my understanding deepens, I feel more and more like a beginner, catching a glimpse of something vast. (Barbe 2003a: 23)

W. Dickie and S. Perdereau 2006

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Training Repertoire 4.1 Introduction

This thesis presents a body of work comprising performances (explored in the preceding chapters) and training approaches, which are the focus of this chapter. Training exercises are examined for what they reveal about the difference butoh has made to my approach. No definitive, “universal” butoh training method is intended here, nor would that be possible. As explored in the Introduction to this thesis, butoh is now something of an umbrella term for very diverse practices. It cannot accurately be described as a technique or a style and it is not singular but rather multiple. This chapter examines my approach to training as one among many that are possible in preparing performers for the demands of butoh-­‐based work. My practice acts as a case study for examining some of the values of butoh and their relevance to contemporary western performers. Some of the structures presented evolved from the work of my butoh teachers and therefore reflect the people I have worked with. Other exercises have emerged from my own research concerns and the needs of the performers I have worked with. It cannot, and does not pretend to be “a” butoh method. It is rather “my” butoh-­‐inspired approach to training.

My company training combines butoh-­‐based exercises with a yoga-­‐based warm-­‐up, 50 and exercises from the repertoire of Tadashi Suzuki’s actor training method, as practiced by my teachers, John Nobbs and Jacqui Carroll.51 The focus here is on the difference butoh makes to training, so I will not elaborate on yoga and Suzuki, but acknowledge the multiple influences on my work with a brief overview here of how they differ and

50 I have practiced yoga since 1998 and I completed my teaching qualifications in 2004 with a short thesis titled “Yoga for Performers”.

51 John Nobbs and Jacqui Carroll (www.ozfrank.com) are among the few international teachers recognised by Tadashi Suzuki to teach his method. Their training evolves many of Suzuki’s exercises in new directions for application in their own company’s aesthetic and for their Australian context. I have worked with them since 1992, performed in several of their productions and accompanied them to Toga in 2007 to observe Suzuki’s company at work.

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complement one another. There is a vibration and a vibrancy to a performer trained in Suzuki that is very useful in butoh’s highly distilled states. Also, Suzuki’s clearly defined structures within which the performer must find spontaneity and creativity is a contrast to the often more open-­‐ended approach of butoh. Suzuki planted my feet firmly into the earth, so that when I was asked in butoh to “float like smoke” I had a base on which to build that fiction. Suzuki connected me outwards with the space, the audience and other performers, so that when I connected more internally in butoh, I maintained that outward connection. Finally, yoga provides a highly physical system that comes without attachment to a performance style. It allows for an exploration of how the material body, energetic body and mental aspects of the performer interact and integrate. It provides self-­‐knowledge, an opportunity to work on the self or the instrument in a pre-­‐performative context.

The terms “exercise”, “structure” and “experience” are used throughout this chapter because I am sometimes uncomfortable with the term “exercise”. It can imply a very linear, goal-­‐oriented approach, which is unhelpful. A bicep curl is an “exercise” to increase muscle bulk on the arms and it has a direct path to a single goal. Barba challenges the assumptions related to the term: “An exercise has a beginning, and an end, and the path between these points is not linear.” (Barba 2006: 113) I use the term “experience” and “structure” in place of exercise to open up other associations. For example, “structure” emphasises a series of agreed parameters which the performer must navigate. Eugenio Barba’s expansive notion of the performer’s “exercise” is useful here.

Exercises are like amulets which the actor carries around, not to show them off, but to draw from them certain qualities of energy out of which a second nervous system slowly develops.

An exercise is made up of memory, body-­‐memory. An exercise becomes memory which acts through the entire body (Barba 2006: 112).

Barba calls exercises “pedagogical fictions” and “work on oneself” (as opposed to work in the performance) that can teach not how to “act”, but

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rather “how to think with the entire body-­‐mind; […] [to] experience the body not as a unity but as a centre for simultaneous actions” (Barba 2006: 113).

This chapter is organised around the key themes of distillation (Section 4.2), being moved (Section 4.3) and transformation (Section 4.4). These categories reflect an organising structure that my workshops and company training sessions typically follow. They reflect those aspects of butoh that have made the most impact on my work. In beginning with distillation I do not suggest it is the simplest; it might rather be considered the most advanced aspect. But the experience of distillation is an important precondition to understanding “not moving, being moved”, which in turn informs a study of “transformation”.

4.2 Distillation

My workshops typically begin with work on stillness, slow motion, or small-­‐ scale movement and gesture. Distillation is a particular challenge for many western-­‐trained dancers who are used to the idea that they need to move in order to exist and the bigger and more dynamic their movements are, the bigger and more dynamic their existence will be. This chapter elaborates on distillation in the context of performer training.

The two structures examined here, (a) shaking to slow motion and (b) circular motion to arrested stillness, contrast distillation with dynamic action because distilled work can be deadly if not highly energised.52

52 The work of Yumiko Yoshioka, which she calls “Body Resonance”, models this process

very well. She shakes the body for a long time before coming into stillness or slow motion, thus charging the body with energy through movement, and exaggerating sensation.

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4.2.1 Shaking Body to Slow-­‐Motion Walk A light jogging motion creates heat and energy flow in the body and then the body is then brought to stillness, with knees soft (emphasising gravity). The mental aspect is actively engaged in observing the sensations of the body (e.g. heat, itching, spinal alignment and weight)

In stillness, the image is given of the pelvis as a bowl of water. The surface of that water is imagined to be very still. By “stilling” the container (their body) the performer stills the contents (the water). Any subtle swaying in the body is amplified by the image, encouraging performers to seek a more profound level of stillness.

Transferring the weight from one foot to another, the performer is asked to imagine that the water remains undisturbed. That action of transferring weight develops into a slow walk forward, with very small steps. The image of the water helps to reduce swaying and keep a constant motion forward. Once walking, the performer’s attention is taken to the spaces in and around the surface of the body -­‐ between arms and torso, between each finger and between bodies in the room.

The water image seems to enliven the performer by focusing their mental aspect creatively in the present moment, tasking them to actively observe bodily sensation. The image can stabilise the body and heighten the simple action of walking beyond a naturalistic or pedestrian level towards something more poetic; it is more “floating than walking”. The image of the water heightens the performer’s level of attention and that seems to enliven and charge the space around the body. This summons the image of the “force-­‐ field” around the body, introduced in Chapter 2.53

53 The image of the pelvis as a bowl of water is also found in the work of American post-­‐

modern dancers as they too cultivated the dancer’s consciousness of movement through more experiential approaches.

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4.2.2 Circular Motion to Arrested Stillness Performers are asked to move continuously using circular or “figure of eight” patterns. They find a speed that can be maintained for several minutes: neither so fast that they run out of steam very quickly nor so slow that there is no momentum or continuity.

In this context the instruction to “just move, don’t think” means to avoid planning how to move in advance and not to be concerned yet with how the movement looks. Music is given to assist with the flow. When the music stops, the performer should arrest their movement, and stop as soon as possible, exactly as they are in that very moment. They should not tidy or organise the body in any way. They are guided to investigate this exact form experientially. The following examples are paraphrased from my memory of teaching so there is no written source to reference.

Sense the physicality of the form (muscles and bones), its contact with the floor, the gaze (its direction and quality).

How is the spine? The breathing? What material might this form or sculpture be made from? Stone, sticks, ash or ice? What are you? Or who are you? Where are you and what do you wear?

The proposal is that the sooner they stop, the more likely they are to find themselves somewhere new and interesting. Stopping immediately helps to remove pre-­‐planning and falling into habitual patterns. The equation emerges that the more abandoned and un-­‐predictable the improvisation is, the more surprising and unique the final form can be. When this exercise is done in two groups it provides an added opportunity for one group to observe and then copy the form of someone else. This allows for an investigation of how attention to detail affects imagination and how the performer can own or inhabit a form that is not their own.

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My approach to exploring stillness here was clarified through David Zinder’s Michael Chekhov-­‐based work. In stillness, I had always felt the imagination “firing”. Images and associations were triggered by certain forms and strengthened in stillness. While I referred quite generally to “inner life” in my teaching, I left it to each performer to approach that realm of experience for themselves. David Zinder’s “Statue Exercises” demonstrated that I could be more explicit and specific about guiding this inner work and still leave space for the performer’s own experience.

I first experienced Zinder’s exercises in a workshop in 2006. 54 They are also described in his book Body, Voice Imagination (2002: 197-­‐203) where he describes “the body as a stimulus for the imagination”.

For the trained performer, even the tiniest change in physical posture has an enormous impact on what the performer radiates to the audience.” (Zinder 2002: p198) This work has clear resonances with the processes discussed in Chapter 3, in which attention to detail in stillness is used as a starting point for creativity.

Zinder constantly returns to the idea of “input from the physical position” (2002: 200). In his “Statue Exercises”, performers work in pairs and one moves the body of another into a position, then asks them a series of questions to access any unconscious or imaginative associations. For example, “what are you holding?” (For full details of the nature of this questioning process see Zinder 2002) The point is not to think up an answer, and so it is important to respond immediately. The speed of the response can indicate its potential “unconscious” source, though this is hard to prove. But in my experience when too much time goes by, a different, more cognitive or conscious mental process is engaged.

Although Zinder’s work originates in the work of Michael Chekhov, his reference to “the engaged imagination” and “training your creative instrument so that it will be able to transform […]” (198) are relevant to my butoh-­‐based work. Both approaches share an emphasis on training the

54 At the Changing Bodies Symposium (Exeter University 2006).

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imagination through the body. But there was also a discernible difference in the two approaches. When a participant answered one question by saying: “I am rope”, Zinder stressed that for his exercise, it was most useful to always work with the context of a human figure. In butoh, by contrast, considering the body as rope, or a “wet rug” or an “ash pillar” is desirable.55 Presumably this distinction arises because Zinder’s work on transformation is aligned with developing characters for theatre, whereas butoh works within a more movement-­‐based and often surreal, poetic or metaphoric dramaturgical context. It is valuable to notice that there can be crossovers as well as distinctions.

4.3 Being Moved: The Receptive Body

“I don’t dance. I am danced.” (Endo 2008: 36)

The notion of “not moving, but being moved” is central to butoh for many practitioners. Not all of them talk about it explicitly in such terms, but many do including Tadashi Endo, Yumiko Yoshioka, and Katsura Kan, all of whom have their own exercises to explore this idea. Yuko Kawamoto is a practitioner I have worked with who does not discuss this idea so directly but when she moves I detect that quality very strongly nonetheless.56

“Being moved” cultivates receptivity in the performer. It demands a particular modus operandi in which they seem to be following and not driving or controlling the body. It requires alertness without rigid tension in the body, particularly in the extremities (that is limbs or fingers) so that the performer is soft on the outside but firm on the inside.

55 “Wet rug” and “ash pillar” are well-­‐known butoh images used to transform the body.

56 Tadashi Endo, Yumiko Yoshioka, and Katsura Kan have worked for a long time outside of

Japan. Those artists working in Europe or America are often required to explain and articulate the work (and the culture from which it has emerged) which might lead them to articulate notions like this more explicitly.

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But what is it that moves the performer? Of course on some level “you” move you. The mental aspect activates the process, but it is a useful tactic to use the mind to contemplate an image like wind, which then activates the body. It is important to say “being moved” is not always a gentle experience of “wind” or “water”. Equally sudden or violent images can give the body a sudden impetus such as tearing or cracking.

One of the ways to start working with “being moved” or receptivity is to literally have one person move the body of another. For example I might move the arms of a performer while they walk slowly. This requires that they are “active” in the walking but “receptive” to the journey I make with their arms. This work can be developed in partner work such as that described in 4.3.1 below -­‐ “Clay Exercise”. A number of butoh practitioners have their own version of this including Yumiko Yoshioka, Katsura Kan, and Stuart Lynch57 who have influenced my approach. Partner work like this is used in all kinds of theatre approaches. The emphasis here is on using the experience of being moved to cultivate “receptivity” as distinct from both “activity” and “passivity”. Ultimately the goal is to be able to work with the quality of being moved without the aid of a partner having first experienced it alone.

4.3.1 Clay and Sculptor One person, the “clay”, stands in a state of readiness, with the vertical core of the body (the spine) enlivened and extremities (particularly arms) soft and receptive. The “sculptor” first checks that the performer can be “passive” in the arms, by lifting and safely dropping their arms.

The clay should be capable of complete surrender in the arms, while maintaining energy and alertness in the spine. The vertical core should not join in the floppy, passive quality of the arms. The performer needs to be capable of a different mode of operating in different parts of the body. Receptivity requires alertness alongside letting go; it draws on

57 Lynch trained with Min Tanaka’s Maijuku Company in Japan for many years in the 1980s.

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the qualities of both active and passive modes, but is distinct from both.58

In the second stage of the exercise when the “sculptor” moves the arms of the “clay” into new shapes and gestures, the performer holds the new position given, rather than letting the arm release. In this way they move from being “passive” to being “receptive”. The clay is encouraged to follow experientially the journey offered by the sculptor, observing the sensation of “being moved”.

In the third stage, the clay moves alone, trying to keep the quality of being moved without their sculptor/partner. Adding music to this stage can give a more performative context in which to observe this quality of “being moved”. The phrasing of certain music can be useful as a kind of “wind” to move the body, but this should feel distinct from “dancing to the music”.

Ephia (this is her stage name with no surname)59 introduces a further step in this partner work. One partner offers a stimulus, what Ephia calls a wind, to the other partner who is the clay. The clay must wait in stillness and fully receive the stimulus and only act on it once the wind has stopped. Clearly separating the moment of receiving from the moment of responding cultivates a kind of patience and attention valuable in butoh-­‐based work.

Ephia’s work has roots deep in butoh pedagogy, although her work has moved far beyond its boundaries and she no longer labels it as butoh. For me her work epitomizes the very best examples of butoh as a deep research process. She provides very specific, highly defined parameters, in a way that allows the mysterious aspects of the body to be observed but not stifled.

58 This is inspired by work in Stuart Lynch’s workshop, experienced most recently at the

London Butoh Festival in 2009.

59 Ephia studied with butoh practitioners Min Tanaka, Kazuo Ohno, Anzu Furukawa, and Akira Kasai in Japan. She travelled to study ‘ritual dance’ in Ghana, Java and Bali. She danced in the company of the late Anzu Furukawa in Berlin, appearing in Furukawa’s final production, GOYA: La Quinta del Sordo. She co-­‐founded Djalma Primordial Science in 1998, a performative and pedagogical collaboration with electro-­‐acoustic musician Jeff Gburek. (www.djalma.com)

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By way of expanding on the distinction between “passive” and “receptive” I refer to Nancy Wagner Udow’s paper of 1978. She discusses the active mode of consciousness as striving and achieving and the receptive mode as allowing and admitting (Udow 1978: 2). 60 Crucially she distinguishes receptive from passive. The relevance of this distinction was immediately apparent to me. As neuroscience opens up the study of consciousness even further, now more than ever performance can draw on such terms of reference to articulate what we do with greater clarity.

The Korean influenced work of Jeungsook Yoo also points to the importance of the active and passive modes as explored in her article Moving ki in Inner and Outer Space (2007). Yoo uses the term “passive to mark a receptive, non-­‐ assertive quality” (2007: 84) and so her notion of passivity would resonate with what Udow refers to as the receptive. In my work I have found the distinction between passive (completely inert) and receptive (alert but awaiting stimulus) useful for performers. I define them distinctly and explore them both physically and as a mental perspective.

The exercise that follows explores receptivity or “being moved” using the image of insects moving on or within the body. This image is a recurring motif amongst butoh practitioners and many versions of this exercise exist.61 What follows is not a definitive version but one I have evolved for my own purposes.

4.3.2 Butoh’s Insect Exercise To prepare, the performer stands with eyes closed, knees soft, and spine attentive. They are encouraged to become conscious of the space between arms and torso, and the space between each finger. They should consider the surface of the body, the skin, as a sensory organ and

60 I first used this reference in 2003 in a key-­‐note speech for Butoh UK in 2003.

61 I first experienced this image with Carlotta Ikeda (International Workshop Festival,

Nottingham 1996) and later in a slightly different version with Yumiko Yoshioka (London 2005).

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as a kind of membrane or boundary between inside and outside of the body.

The image is introduced of an ant or insect walking on the surface of the skin from a very specific starting point, such as the left index finger. 62 Specificity is very important in ensuring this does not become a generalised or purely internal experience. The body should respond as the imagined journey of the ant progresses. So, for example, the wrist rotates as the ant moves over it; the arm bends at the elbow as the ant steps into that space. In this way the body is “being moved” by the image of the ant.

The number of ants or insects gradually increases as a second, third and later a tenth is introduced, all from specific starting points. It is suggested that tracing each individual journey with the intellect is difficult (if not impossible), but that the body can “know” where fifty ants are simultaneously.

This exercise allows for a discussion of the “volume” of movement, moving as it does from one ant (provoking a small volume of movement) to a hundred or more ants with much more volume. It is a chance to propose that performers can set aside any emotional judgment or comment on an image -­‐ such as whether you like or dislike the ants. Instead, performers are encouraged to work with the image as “physical fact” without the need to express related emotions.63 The exercise demonstrates that there is a kind of bodily logic that is distinct from intellectual logic, that the body’s ability to trace multiple, disparate trajectories can build up an awareness of the body’s

62 There are slight variations in this exercise between the ant moving “inside” the body and having it move “on” the outer shell of the skin.

63 This is not to deny emotions that arise, but rather to propose that they do not need to be overtly demonstrated or expressed. Where a particular image is too psychologically charged to work with, like a phobia of insects, it would be better to choose another less charged image. To push through serious phobias is therapy and not performance work. The point here is to experience the quality of “being moved”.

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own “logic of sensation”.64 The performer deliberately conjures the image then allows a more sensory process to play out in the body. This notion relates to the distinction between an active mode (the deliberate taking of the image) and the receptive mode (following and allowing what the body then makes of that image).

4.4 Training for Transformation

The ability of the performer to transform is one of the defining features of butoh. Here the emphasis is on how one “trains” for the craft of transformation. Section 4.4.1 examines face work through three exercises: (1) “Sour Lemon (shown on DVD); (2) “Nina Simone” and (3) “Eyes of a Lion”.

Section 4.4.2 explores the materiality of the body through the “Ash Pillar” exercise and the “Cracking and Cotton Wool” structure (shown on DVD).

Finally I explore processes that explore Hijikata’s butoh-­‐fu (imagery) in Section 4.4.3 65

4.4.1

Face and Mask Work

“Sour Lemon” This exercise asks performers to make extreme face (and body) “masks” in response to imagistic prompts such as “sour lemon”, “cold shock” and “happy baby”. They must go into a particular “state” on cue, either instantaneously (on a clap) with no visible process of change, or very slowly (e.g. over ten counts) showing every inch of the metamorphosis.

They must maintain the “life-­‐force” of the state in stillness for it is in prolonged stillness that the performer observes the exact moment that a state starts to “die”. The research is to ask how to inject life into it continually in order to maintain a still but not static state. Initially,

64 I have taken this evocative term from the title of Gilles Deleuze’s book -­‐ Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2004).

65 The term “butoh-­‐fu” is used here to refer to the images themselves, as well as to refer to the process of working with that imagery.

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performers are taken into “neutral” in between each state, but eventually transit directly from “cold shock” to “happy baby”.

As mentioned in the Introduction, this exercise was created very early in my contact with butoh in response to the demands butoh made on me to shift into and out of extreme states on cue. It is based on the “standing statues” exercise in Tadashi Suzuki’s actor training method, in which a cue or trigger is given for performers to change the position of the centre, and whole body, with heels off in a precarious balance.66 The convention of a kind of trigger or cue is useful in challenging the performer’s preparedness. In my butoh version, I compound that challenge by asking them to take not only a physical position but a complete state, such as “sour” or “happy”. This “Sour Lemon” exercise is shown on Disc 6 -­‐ Preparing Performers. (Choose Chapter Title “Training to Transform” in a 12 minute segment showing both “Sour Lemon” and “Cracking and Cotton Wool” (an exercise described below).

This work uses the face as a kind of tool, exploiting its very particular and profound connection to the nervous system. For example, the way in which smiling can change how we feel. The face allows for a very particular exploration of moving from “outside to inside”, rather than a more familiar process of working from inside feeling to outside form. While the term “facial expression” relates to a more or less daily use of the face, “face as mask” is used here to refer to a more expressive or extra-­‐daily use of the face (Barba 2006: 122). Executed with the requisite amount of energy and commitment, these faces can be “convincing” without being “realistic”. What is most engaging is how they can be fixed and still seem alive. Just as a mask or puppet’s face is carved but comes to life when in contact with the performer’s life-­‐force.

66 For a full discussion of this exercise and Suzuki’s approach, see Carruthers and Yasunari (2004), Allain (2002) and Nobbs (2006).

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Dan Canham in company training 2006 Photo: Giuseppe Frusteri

Dan Canham in company training 2006 Photo: artists own collection

While the “Sour Lemon” exercise provides the performer with a strong stimulus from the trainer, like sour or happy, in the exercise that follows performers find their own face as masks, through an improvisation process described below and called “Nina Simone”.

“Nina Simone” 67 Performers kneel on the floor or sit on a chair to bring focus onto the face and less on the body. The body must be energised, as it might be for a voice exercise. The face should be calm (or neutral). When the music starts, the performer begins an open improvisation using only the face. They might start out working with expressions that can be named, like sour or surprise or smile. But ideally, the face should be considered as clay and moved more abstractly into shapes. This is so that more surprising “un-­‐nameable” face masks might emerge.

The music offers rhythm and structure to the improvisation. There is no compulsion to do anything specific with the music, it is there to help so if a performer finds themselves lost, they can at least work rhythmically. The music also helps to ease self-­‐consciousness and encourages a playful quality. When the music stops, the face is held exactly as it was in that moment. If someone happens to be in neutral in that moment, they should just draw the face into any shape very quickly

67 The name -­‐ Nina Simone – simply comes from the singer, because her song is used: “My

Baby Just Cares for Me”. Another piece of music would work just as well, but there is a certain playful tone and rhythmic structure that works and in fact inspired the exercise.

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to avoid planning. They need to have something to work with in the next section.

Performers are then asked to “listen to” or observe this face-­‐mask.

Some guiding questions are provided: What details do you notice about the physical form? What sensations (temperature, weight, texture) does it suggest? Then from detailed observation (not from thinking-­‐up ideas) they are asked to slowly build a body for this face-­‐mask as they come to standing until they find themselves in a kind of statue or state. What material might this body be made of? Ice or Paper? Wood-­‐chips or Stone? How does it contact the floor?

Performers are asked to come into neutral and go back into the state to test their understanding of the physical detail and knowledge of the inner energy required to repeat it. They might also be asked to walk, or even to waltz in this state, any action that will test how the body-­‐mask responds to tasks. How they are able to keep what is fixed while allowing the transformed body to be active and responsive to tasks set.

This stage of testing and challenging is important in ensuring this is not a “position” but a “body-­‐mask”. A position is static, a body-­‐mask can do many things and respond in many ways, despite having clear physical parameters and characteristic traits. Moving into interaction from here is delicate and interesting, and was important to Chimaera. It affords a group the chance to keep investing in this body mask at the same time that they respond to others. But they should never manipulate someone else’s body physically, (the masks are built on detailed physicality, so suddenly grabbing someone’s arm can shatter their work). Interaction does not necessarily mean only physical contact or (social) eye-­‐contact. There are other, often more subtle ways of making connections and working together across space. Imposed ideas are less useful in this context and become clearly visible as an intellectual idea acted out, as opposed to a more organic interaction which has emerged as the result of listening and responding in the moment.

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Performers are often discouraged from using the face because it can easily lead to affectation and because relying too heavily on facial expression can rob the body of its full expressivity. Understanding the distinction between “facial expression” and “face-­‐as-­‐mask” is crucial if performers are to make full use of the potential of the face without falling into affectation.

A number of traditional Asian performance methods work very directly with the face and eyes, such as Indian Kathakali (see Zarrilli 2009). Butoh shares with them the direct, extreme and stylised use of the face and eyes. But where traditional forms such as Kathakali often rely on a set series of codified forms with their related meaning (See Zarrilli 2009: 36) butoh admits more ambiguity and freedom. Butoh offers the performer a demanding structure in which to work with the face, without rigidly defining its potential meaning in performance.

Contemporary dancers are often discouraged from using the face, to avoid mimetic representation of emotion and affectation and to place the emphasis on the body’s expressivity. But care must be taken in contemporary dance that what they intend as “neutral’ doesn’t read as a detached or “cool” attitude. This also robs the body of its expressivity. Working so deliberately and extremely with the face can be revelatory. Even if a dancer does not use extreme face work in their performance, such work can deepen their understanding of the face as another (potent) part of the body.

The two exercises described above (Sour Lemon and Nina Simone) confront the face in performance very directly, and develop both discipline (craft) and imagination (creativity). On the one hand, the “Nina Simone” exercise treats the face as just another part of the body to be used in exploratory improvisation. On the other hand, the “Sour Lemon” exercise accepts that the face is a very particular and potent part of the body, connected as it is very specifically with the nervous system. Participants report a sense of liberation and revelation from this face work, which allows them to develop a new

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relationship with the face in performance. Both of these exercises explore the idea of face as mask versus facial expression. As already discussed, the face as mask is fixed but alive, whereas facial expression is changing as it does in daily life. The face as mask then could be defined as a situation in which there is no actual mask but the performer effectively creates one using their own face. What makes their face now “mask” is the fact that it is fixed but alive. An interesting analogy can be drawn with what puppeteers would call the “fixed point”. It is knowing where that fixed point is that allows the puppeteer to give life and motion to all other parts, without losing that central focus as the roots of that life. This becomes even more pertinent when we extend the metaphor to the whole body as mask.

I began to conceive of the butoh body as a kind of mask after conversations with Thomas Prattki, who employed me to teach butoh at LISPA (London International School of Performing Arts 2004 -­‐ 2008). 68 He commented that my butoh-­‐based work seemed to be asking of the students a kind of “mask work without the mask”, at times neutral mask work, without the mask. This observation resonated with me and provided a framework for developing my thinking about butoh. What distinguishes the body as mask from a bodily position is the idea of a “fixed point”, introduced above, that gives life to the state, and provides a focal point around which improvisation can take place.

The fixed point provides a kind of root system into the life-­‐force of the state, so that things can move and change, provided they do not disturb that root system, without which the state dies or become something else entirely. That is the challenge of the body as mask; the performer needs to carve the mask, their body, and then improvise with it, but only in a way that does not lose sight of the mask they have carved. This reference from the help pages of Adobe’s Photoshop software provides an interesting description of such a process. Their instruction for “transforming objects” provides a mechanism called “puppet warp” that allows you to

68 Thomas Prattki took over the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris after Lecoq died. LISPA,

which he later set up in London is based firmly in the Lecoq tradition of training, but Prattki experimented with complementing that approach with others, like butoh. (www.lispa.co.uk)

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drastically distort specific image areas, while leaving other areas intact. Applications range from subtle image retouching, such as shaping hair, to total transformations, such as repositioning arms or legs.” (Adobe Photoshop Help Pages in section “Transforming Objects”: unpaginated website)

Butoh had shown me that the performer needed to transform gaze and eyes as part of making their transformative work complete and convincing. In pursuing mask work with mask company, Organic Theatre, I clarified the relationship between the eyes and transformation, and realised the importance of working with the eyes behind the mask. 69 The exercise which follows, “Eyes of a Lion”, presents one way to explore gaze and eyes. It removed the body and the face, leaving the performer only with the eyes to work with.

“Eyes of a Lion” Performers kneel on the floor or sit on a chair to take the focus away from the body. From a calm but energised “neutral” (sitting) state, the performer is asked to observe the breath moving in and out of the body and to imagine that one might “breathe” through the eyes, so that energy is felt to flow on the breath and also through the eyes and gaze.

When prompted with “eyes of a lion”, “eyes of a drunk” or “eyes of a baby” the performer is asked to change the quality of the gaze, the energy and the breath without indicating the lion, the drunk or the baby in bodily movement or form. The eyes can move, and the head might, but only as a resonance of the work, not to illustrate it.70

This is subtle, difficult and often frustrating work. But when it works it demonstrates clearly that it is possible to transform even this small part of the body; the eyes. It is a training exercise designed to ensure that when

69 John Dean and Bianca Mastrominico of Organic Theatre did 2 days work with the cast of Chimaera. Their work is informed by both European and Asian approaches to mask work in performance. (www.organictheatre.co.uk) 70 If the head is held too rigidly, the energy does not flow. But too much deliberate movement robs the performer of the focus on the eyes and gaze, breath and energy.

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performers transform using the whole body, the eyes are not forgotten.

There is extensive discussion of work with the breath, face and eyes in Zarrilli’s Psychophysical Acting (2009).

The training begins with the breath because it offers a psychophysical pathway to the practical attunement of the body and mind. Attentive breathing provides a beginning point toward inhabiting an optimal state of bodymind awareness and readiness in which the “body is all eyes” and one is able to “stand still while not standing still.” (Zarrilli 2009: 25)

4.4.2 Materiality

In this section I explore how butoh uses material substances as particular imagery through which to objectify and transform the body. One famous example from early butoh uses the image of a “wet rug”.

In butoh exercises such as those led by Ashikawa, one was supposed to be able to become a twisted wet rug, heavy with too much water. How to achieve this was up to each person.

Ashikawa did not tell us what to do or how to behave; she simply gave us a few words […] But in a little while I became sensitive to my own physical state of being; I felt freed from my daily self by becoming such a lowly thing on the floor. (Nanako 2000: 15)71 Other famous examples are to “walk as smoke” or work with the “pillar of ash” – standing, walking and falling as ash. I have done this for long periods of time with Tadashi Endo, also watching fellow company members stand and enter a process of transforming into ash before falling. A spectator who didn’t know what was going on would not guess what they are doing -­‐ it is not a case of miming in a way that signifies “ash”. But they would surely observe that the performer was involved in a transformational process that altered their existence on stage. This work makes something very different out of each individual performer. It is therefore not “ash” that works on the spectator’s imagination. It is what ash makes of the performer that works on

71 Yoko Ashikawa is one of the most famous female exponents of butoh. She was working

with Hijikata in the 1970s and 1980s when he developed his way of working with imagery.

Apparently, she was a painter with no formal dance training, but she was clearly able to enter into the image-­‐making process. (Blackwood: unpaginated video)

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the spectator’s imagination. Female butoh exponent, Yoko Ashikawa taught that The audience for butoh might not receive the exact image the dancer internalizes, but they cannot mistake the imagistic process. The process of imaging for both the dancer and the audience is at the aesthetic core of Butoh (Fraleigh 1999: 142)

In my practice with this image, I imagine the space between separate particles of ash and consider that such space exists within my body. Falling, I imagine some parts of the body moving up against gravity, as the centre is drawn downward while other parts fly off in all directions; an elbow floats to the right as a shoulder draws back and down while the rib cage expands in both directions. In such work the virtuosity, the craft or skill required by and cultivated by butoh are evidenced. Falling as ash requires a denial of gravity (at least in appearance). Strong leg muscles are needed alongside minute control to fall as softly as ash.

One of my own exercises to explore materiality emerged from Chimaera – “Cracking and Cotton Wool”. It asks performers to work in pairs with contrasting materials that interact.

“Cracking and Cotton Wool” 72 In pairs the performers begin a basic, slow motion walk side by side.

One works with the image of a hard material cracking, (e.g. glass or wood). The other works with a soft material like fabric or “cotton wool”.

The “cracking” partner always moves first. Their action (sharp and sudden) instigates a (smooth and soft) reaction from the “cotton wool” partner who moulds themselves around the shape of their partner.

After one length of the room, they return to neutral, and switch roles for the return journey.

72 This exercise is shown on Disc 6 -­‐ Preparing Performers. (Choose Chapter Title “Training

to Transform”. This 12 minute segment shows two exercises: “Sour Lemon” and “Cracking and Cotton Wool”.

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This exercise is built on the foundation of a slow walk in which centre and feet provide stable roots for the transformational work. In evolving this we explored taking each other’s weight, where the “cracking” person gives weight to their “cotton wool” partner. This variation is only appropriate where performers have the requisite connection, trust and experience to make that work alongside the imperative to interact in a transformed state.

The “cracking” should have the quality of something “happening to you” and therefore builds on the work done on “being moved”. This structure emerged in the creation of Chimaera and later entered the training repertoire to explore interaction in between highly transformed bodies.

Company Training London 2006 “Cracking and Cotton Wool” Exercise

Photos: June McGrane

Nina Fog and Scarlett Perdereau

Dan Canham and Dominic Rouse

Photos: Giuseppe Frusteri

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4.4.3 Butoh-­‐fu: Imagery in Butoh Hijikata trained his dancers and choreographed works using words. His dance was notated by words called butoh-­‐fu (butoh notation) […] But Hijikata’s words are not easy. Often his writings are strange, equivocal, and incomprehensible even for Japanese people[...] He freely coined his own terms, such as “ma-­‐gusare” (rotting space) and “nadare-­‐ame” (dribbling candy). His writings are like surrealistic poems […] Hijikata’s language implies meanings and feelings that logical language cannot convey [...] Hijikata’s writings are both evocative and challenging.” (Nanako 2000: 14 – 15)

Butoh is well known for using transformational imagery in a very particular way. Perhaps all dance and movement work makes use of imagery in some way, but there is something distinctive about butoh’s use of language and its way of working with that language. Butoh engages with imagery not as something to be expressed through the body, but as a process that sets the body in motion and into metamorphosis. What we call “images” in butoh are not purely visual phenomena. They need to be considered for all their sensual and textural qualities, such as sound, temperature, motion, shape or taste.

Phillip Zarrilli uses the term “active images” in his psychophysical work to stress that the image is not purely visual but is an “activating force” for the performer.

Active images are not static pictures. […] They are active in that each provides a simple but clear point of entry into developing and sustaining a relationship to the exercise. […] The mind does not wander, but is active as one enters and embodies the image.

(Zarrilli 2009: 90)

The images or butoh-­‐fu of Tatsumi Hijikata are only available to a western performer such as myself through documentation and translations of his work from scrapbooks and his dancers’ memories. It is deceptive therefore to consider that we interact with anything absolute, fixed or knowable when we interact with the images of Hijikata. But that doesn’t mean there is no value in the interaction.

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I have drawn on Yukio Waguri’s DVD and CD Rom, Butoh Kaden, to study a wide variety of examples of butoh-­‐fu associated with Tatsumi Hijikata.73 I have also drawn on practical work with Yuko Kawamoto, one of Waguri’s company members who later set up her own company -­‐ Shinonome Butoh. 74 My intention has been to engage with butoh-­‐fu as a research into image-­‐ based movement work and to enter that research through the specific examples associated with Hijikata. I do not pretend to create a process that is authentic or accurate to the original butoh work of Hijikata or Waguri. I articulate here a process inspired by butoh which has evolved according to my own creative interests and the context of my work with western actors, dancers, directors and choreographers. It is not “the” way of working with butoh-­‐fu, but one that I have found useful.

The process is divided into two stages: (a) working with Hijikata’s butoh-­‐fu to create movement scores and (b) devising one’s own butoh-­‐fu to create movement scores. In this way, performers examine how they can draw inspiration from the specific model of Hijikata’s words while ultimately aiming to own the process by using their own words.

Stanley Hamilton working on butoh-­‐fu with Yuko Kawamoto London Butoh Festival, 2009 Photo: Artist own collection

73 Yukio Waguri performed for Hijikata in the 1970s and 1980s including in Twenty-­‐Seven Nights for Four Seasons in 1972 and in Hijikata’s last work Tohoku Kabuki in 1985. He founded his own company Kohzensha in Tokyo in 1990.

74 In 2009, Kawamoto joined me in London for a collaborative research project and a series of joint workshops.

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Here are two examples of Hijikata’s butoh-­‐fu 75 (Hijikata in Waguri Butoh Kaden 2005 unpaginated DVD).

Wall: You Live because Insects Eat You

• A person is buried in a wall.

Nerve Walk • The bone of your skull has

• S/he becomes an insect.

grown a twig from your

• The internal organs are parched

forehead.

and dry.

• The insect is dancing on a thin sheet of paper.

• Trying to catch falling particles from its body.

• This “skull-­‐twig” snaps.

• An ear on your nose follows sound.

• Birds fly out from behind your ears.

• It makes rustling noises.

• Worms crawl between your toes.

• The insect becomes a person,

• You crush the worms.

who is wandering around.

• So fragile, s/he could crumble at the slightest touch.

• A twitching in your cheek, and in your finger.

• Leaves are falling inside your skull.

• You try to step through a door.

• A small key locks your heart.

How do we prepare the body to work with such images? And into what body do we invite these words? The performers are primed for the task by being taken into a calm yet energised stillness. It is important to move away from a pedestrian or quotidian way of being and move into a more heightened state of awareness. Incorporating butoh-­‐fu or imagery into highly receptive flesh, with heightened senses and an activated imagination that is linked with the body via the nervous system, will bring results very different to working with those same images in a more pedestrian body.

75 These English translations of Hijikata’s difficult Japanese are bound to be a mutation. They

are based on the translations available on Waguri’s Butoh Kaden DVD, with adaptations made during practical work in the studio.

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Considering the body as a “kingdom of nerves” is useful ahead of introducing butoh-­‐fu. 76 Imagining a body without its skin and with all the nerves exposed, immediately brings a heightened sense to the performer -­‐ body and nervous system or brain.77 It prepares the performer’s sensibility (both imaginatively and physically) to work with imagery that typically is dripping with sensual information.

Another useful preparation is to consider the body as a container of clear water, into which these images will drop. This suggests a body that is both full and empty at the same time, priming the body into a neutral or transparent state into which the images can be dropped. To pursue the analogy further, consider the way a drop of coloured dye drops into clear water and in swirling patterns changes the water bit by bit, not all of a sudden. The performer is advised to focus on the gradual “process” of change.

I usually only embark on butoh-­‐fu work with a group after some exploration or discussion of the three categories introduced in this chapter: (a) Reduction and distillation: because work on butoh-­‐fu can lack focus and specificity without an appreciation of stillness or small scale movement. (b) Being moved: because the images are best considered as something happening to you, rather than something demonstrated or “acted out”. (c) Transformation: so that where possible the images are a stimulus to transform not only the body but the atmosphere around it.

76 Hijikata is documented as referring to the body as a “kingdom of nerves”. (See Waguri Butoh Kaden unpaginated DVD) 77 I use here neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s equation of “brain” with nervous system from Descartes’ Error (2006: 86)

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Having thus prepared the performer, I offer them space to improvise as I speak Hijikata’s butoh-­‐fu. I speak one line at a time of the “Wall” butoh-­‐fu for example, leaving space for their physical and imaginative exploration in between each line. I ask them to “improvise movement for these images” or to “embody the images”. Here, I articulate what precisely is being asked of performers when we say “improvise movement for these images”. What do we want them to do? What do we want them to avoid doing? What assumptions are embedded in this task, particularly in butoh-­‐based work?

The guidance outlined below is informed by Waguri’s Butoh Kaden and by my own experience of doing this in practice and observing what was useful for western performers experiencing this work for the first time.78

•

“Take written matters as things actually happening to your body”.

(Waguri 2005: unpaginated DVD) DON’T literally mime the words; avoid acting out or demonstrating the image. Try to “become”, that is allow the images to act on and change your body. Be moved.

•

Consider what form and figuration is suggested. What connection with the ground? What spinal orientation?

•

Consider the implications of these words and images for the senses. As Waguri says -­‐ “Focus on words relating to the sense of touch and nerves and awaken the memory of your sensations” (Ibid).

•

Take your time. Stay with one image until you are given the next one and rather than moving on quickly to the next new thing use the time to discover deeper layers to the image and your response to it.

•

Notice the verbs that appear frequently, for they suggest not only action, but also rhythm and texture and material qualities. For example the verbs to cramp, entangle, wander, float, smoulder, tremble, sink, overlap.

•

Consider changes of perspective, where subject becomes object.

78 This process was previously published as a contribution the “Dance Experience” section of Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo by Sondra Fraleigh and Tamah Nakamura (2002: 133-­‐138).

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•

Work intuitively. There is no single, correct response so avoid judging or analysing the work, at least initially.

•

Enjoy the moment in-­‐between one image and the next, when you could be both at the same time (e.g. both insect and person). Don’t skim over the process of transformation but enter fully into the process of change as you move from one image to the next. “From where to where are you going? Through what kind of circuit? A heavy neck dries and cools down and eventually hardens, transforming into a noble lady in a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley” (Ibid).

The chance to observe each other working is important in this work that can so easily become internal and purely subjective. Observing provides an opportunity to consider this kind of work from the spectator’s perspective. A chance to consider how presence and energy, form and imagination, interact to manifest these images in the body and in the space.

I had resisted using Hijikata’s words for many years for fear of “appropriating” his work. But meeting Yuko Kawamoto and learning a score of movements for some of Hijikata’s butoh-­‐fu showed me that my interaction with butoh imagery had thus far been too generalised to be meaningful.

Working with Yuko allowed me to understand how image and form interacted in butoh in more specific terms. For example, in the butoh-­‐fu called “Nerve Walk” I understood how some of these images could be packed inside the smallest and most intense movement. In “Sleepwalker” there is a strong sense of how the images connect the body with space.

a person is sitting […] a single stream of light hits their forehead from above […] the long hair of Orpheus is floating in a river. (Excerpt from “Sleepwalker” butoh-­‐fu by Hijikata in Waguri 2005: unpaginated DVD) 79

79 Yuko and I began with Waguri’s translation of this imagery, but also made some

alternative translations based on discussion around the different Japanese terms and their possible (or impossible) English equivalents.

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Yuko explained to me in our 2009 research that she understood the image should be used to transform the space and that is what she thinks Hijikata used images and choreography for sometimes – to transform the space.

There is a tendency when western performers come to butoh that they enjoy meditating on the image without ever manifesting it in physical details, let alone manifesting it in the space.

Workshop participants of London Butoh Festival 2009 Work on butoh-­‐fu with Yuko Kawamoto and Frances Barbe Photo: Artists Own Collection

After working with Hijikata’s words as an inspirational model, I take performers through a process of writing their own butoh-­‐fu or activating imagery. In supporting groups through that process, I noticed certain tendencies that detracted from the specific approach of butoh-­‐fu as I understood it. It was easy to slip into logical, cause and effect narrative describing a series of events that often left the body (and imagination) cold and immobile. Butoh-­‐fu should rather set the body in motion and into transformation and I needed to find ways to help performers distinguish between writing a story -­‐ or even interesting poetry -­‐ and writing butoh-­‐fu. I would define butoh-­‐fu here as transformational imagery with sensual information that could be manifested in the body. The words needed to be activating forces that could affect the body, nervous system and imagination.

Words that lead to contemplate a complex and beautiful idea are not useful to this particular process.80

80 I do not dismiss intellectual and psychological imagery entirely, but only distinguish them from what constitutes butoh-­‐fu as a choreographic strategy.

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It helped to offer writing exercises along the lines of “automatic writing” in which some stimulus and a limited timeframe were provided. Giving limited time to write 3 – 5 lines of text helped performers to work more intuitively.

Example stimulus were: •

Write a list of VERBS like “smoulder”, “melt” or “crumble” that are processes to enter rather than simple actions or instructions like “walk”, “jump” or “look”. They should have textural, sensual qualities and perhaps an observable rhythm, like “simmer” or “boil”.

•

Make a list of FIGURES that have physical details and specificity. An old tree can be a “figure” as can an animal or figure from a sculpture like Giacometti’s sculpture.

•

Make a list of SUBSTANCES such as “smoke”, “ice”, “chewing gum”, “pollen” or “dried leaves”.

When each performer has 3 – 5 lines of text they are asked to speak that text for a partner to respond to in movement – just as I had done with Hijikata’s butoh-­‐fu. The chance to observe someone else working with their images allows for the possibility of finding surprising ideas through collaboration rather than moving straight to their own preconceptions about the image.

They have their place and can always be summoned at a later stage. It is intended that in observing they will also consider what kinds of words or images set the body in motion, and those that halt the body, or make it freeze in contemplation rather than action. From here discussion often emerges as to whether it is the performer who needs to be more available to the image, or the image that needs to be changed. In this way butoh-­‐fu work allows for an examination of the interaction between director and actor or choreographer and dancer. Butoh-­‐fu models beautifully the responsibility of the director or choreographer to provide a stimulus that is both specific and evocative, leaving space for the performers artistry. It reveals the extent to which the performer’s body is receptive and responsive to embodying imagery and whether they have a kind of imaginative flexibility that can make the most of image-­‐based work and go beyond literal representation.

Butoh-­‐fu bridges training with creative process in an interesting way; it both

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trains the performer and director’s sensibilities and can be a means for devising movement material. It is increasingly an area of butoh that I apply to working with actors in a theatrical context, outside of the butoh-­‐based dance context from which it has emerged. My understanding has developed significantly from that application which has helped me to clarify and articulate this process and how it is useful to contemporary performers working in a broad spectrum of work.

Image-­‐based work is used by many choreographers in all styles and genres including Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton and Siobhan Davies, to name but a few in dance. It is also part of the actor’s work in many approaches, including the method of Michael Chekhov already mentioned in this chapter. A recent conference in Australia focused on understanding the use of imagery in dance and comparing butoh with western contemporary dance in this regard.81 Confirming THAT many people use imagery has been clearly established. But going beyond that to the specifics of comparing HOW they use imagery and WHY or for what purpose is proving more difficult to articulate in any satisfying way. The issue is confounded by the difficulty of describing the process in terms specific enough to make a useful comparison possible. To that end, I have tried to articulate the process as clearly as I can here, in terms that are as specific as possible, but there is more to be done in articulating and understanding how butoh’s work with imagery is distinct from other approaches. Such research will make a contribution beyond butoh and dance since it has implications for our understanding of how the imagination and the body interact, particularly within creativity.

81 For example, Monash University in Melbourne hosted “Where the Image Meets the Body” in November 2011 and the papers can be viewed at: http://arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/conferences/image-­‐meets-­‐body/ Another that I have attended is Exit ’03 at Schloss Broellin in East Germany (taking place every four years and co-­‐directed by Yumiko Yoshioka and Delta Rai and their team) which considered how butoh and contemporary dance differ and what they share.

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4.5 Conclusion

The training repertoire articulated here uses butoh-­‐based practices to “sensitise” the performer in very specific ways and trains the perspective and listening ability as much as it trains the physical body. Some of butoh’s more extreme or nonsensical aspects like the butoh-­‐fu imagery explored in section 4.4.3 can take performers away from the deliberate, planning and predictive modes of operating to access more intuitive processes. By listening to the more unconscious responses in the body and imagination, performers gain access to a broader range of material and start to move beyond a habitual use of the body. The way butoh makes space for those more unconscious processes gives them value alongside the deliberating, more intellectual processes that are also vital to making art.

This training repertoire works from distillation, through being moved and on into embodying images as activating forces through which to transform the performer. As I stated earlier, this is not an authentic butoh method, but simply one approach and a process I have found useful.

Butoh dancers are all so different. They are like fish, swimming in a river called butoh. They have a different way of swimming, and they eat different food, but they swim in the same river: in the same water-­‐temperature. We need a basic, common stream.

There is this big butoh umbrella that we all carry, but we should not hide under this umbrella; so sometimes I want to close it. You must swim with your own technique. I don’t know “what is butoh”, but something moves under us. (Tadashi Endo in workshop for London Butoh Festival 2009) Endo draws attention to the importance of finding one’s own technique while also acknowledging there is a commonality to butoh work; that “something moves under us”. This chapter on training, and the thesis overall, has sought to look more closely at what “moves under us”, to examine the values at work in butoh and the resonance they leave in the body of the performer and the dramaturgy of the choreographer.

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Katsura Kan once commented to me that performers in the UK approached butoh in a different way, compared to other places he taught. He said they are less likely to want to “become a butoh dancer” (I paraphrase from a conversation in 2006). They seem more interested in incorporating butoh within their training and creative process. I am aware of the intercultural arguments against appropriation that can be applied here, but I find (as did Kan) that there is integrity in this approach of not swallowing butoh wholesale. Appropriation comes when the outer garments of butoh are assumed in order to hide or cover a lack of original insight in one’s own work.

But when one meets butoh with enough of one’s own artistic insights and curiosity, then what results is the kind of cross-­‐fertilisation on which art and culture have always thrived.

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There is a metaphoric sense in which puppetry exploits an imaginative space between what is actually shown and what is “seen” […] a few shreds of tissue paper attached to a bit of wire were so brilliantly manipulated […] that what we “saw” was, to all intents and purposes, actually a squid. It is from the space between illusion and reality that the form takes its meaning (Wilson and Milne 2004: 1).

It is not the bodies that dance. Something else crawls up onto the stage as a result of their bodily movement (Akaji Maro in Blackwood 1990: unpaginated video).

In his struggle to manifest his being, the marionette must concentrate to a supreme degree the symbolic value of his expressions. For his part, the spectator must furnish a very intense effort to project onto the doll his subjective universe.

The concerted action of these two psychic courants creates a veritable magnetic field that privileges hallucination (Roger-­‐ Daniel Bensky quoted in Essif 2001 : 190).

Chisato Katata in DO Choreographed by Yuko Kawamoto of Shinonome Photo: Gigi Gianella

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CONCLUSION: Considering the Butoh Performer as Marionette-­‐like Object

This body of work would not exist without a sustained, practical enquiry into butoh, but that does not mean they are “butoh” works. This thesis has examined the difference butoh has made to this body of work in terms of the demands it has made on me and the insights it has guided me toward.

Chapter 1 explored Fine Bone China and the demands it made on the performer to make complex shifts from one state to another (both instantly and very slowly) and the requirement to be both deeply present in one moment while setting up for the next. It worked on the invisible, inner work of subscore, and made use of the distinction between realistic facial expression and butoh’s “face as mask”. Fine Bone China led to insights about the distinction between “figure” and “character” between content and story.

It exemplified what Eugenio Barba calls “simultaneity” in dramaturgy, functioning like a “moving painting” or as a series of simultaneous events rather than a cause and effect narrative.

Chapter 2 on Palpitation explored the demands of distillation and economy used as the basis for a profound state of kinaesthetic listening and response.

It played with notions of spontaneity and freedom alongside the structuring of choreographic work and developed insight into a useful balance that might “structure spontaneity”.

The training repertoire explored in Chapter 4 emphasised the importance of cultivating creativity alongside “craft” and explored how butoh trains one’s sensitivity and perspective as much as it trains the physical or material body.

It offered a particular way for the performer to gather knowledge about their own organism as the material for making art.

One of the key insights to come from this body of work, and from critical reflection on it in this thesis, is the conception of the butoh body as a kind of

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mask. This emerged from Chimaera as introduced in Chapter 3 and developed further in Chapter 4. It related to work with the puppet body and other processes aimed at “objectifying” the body, whether through the use of materials such as ash, or through use of a figure such as the gargoyle.

Chapter 4 also presented a number of evocative ways to think about form.

Form is “a kind of antennae” for Yumiko Yoshioka. And Kazuo Ohno is known for saying “find the spirit and the form will come” while Tatsumi Hijikata is know for having said “find the form and the spirit will enter it (paraphrased from several butoh workshops). Processes were developed that used stillness as an entry point for creative improvisation, with the body kept in stillness for an extended period in an evocative form like Paula Rego’s painting of Dogwoman. Tadashi Endo’s notion that “transformation means to exchange bones” (Endo 2005: unpaginated workshop) will come up again in this Conclusion as I examine the butoh body further, considering it as a potent kind of object.

So far, practice has taken centre stage in this practice-­‐based PhD; now theory steps into the limelight. I will consider butoh from a more theoretical perspective to develop ideas emerging from critical reflection on this body of work. I will propose that the butoh performer’s puppet-­‐like, object quality is central to what most makes butoh distinctive and compelling. Without the scope to fully elaborate on such a complex proposition, the intention here is to introduce it as one of the outcomes of this practice-­‐based research that warrants further investigation. This notion is important in deepening our understanding of butoh’s contribution to late twentieth century dance and performance practice.

In introducing the potential of the puppet-­‐like, object body, I draw on Maurice Merleau-­‐Ponty’s distinction between the lived body and the object body; and draw on Les Essif’s research on the marionette-­‐like quality of Samuel Beckett’s characters. I will also reference Edward Gordon Craig and Heinrich von Kleist’s texts elevating the marionette over the human performer.

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I acknowledge at the outset the suspicion with which many butoh practitioners might view such an intellectualising or theorising of butoh. I respectfully take those reservations along with me to ensure I resurface from the verbal tangles of theory to refocus once more on the actual, practical experience of performing.

Introducing a Theory of the “Object” Body

Instead of liberating the body from language, Hijikata tied the body up with words, turning it into a material object, an object that is like a corpse. Paradoxically, by this method, Hijikata moved beyond words and presented something only a live body can express (Nanako 2000: 17).

The idea that the body in butoh is “not moving, but being moved” raises complex questions about subjectivity and objectivity. It requires an “objectification” of the body, a term that recurs often in butoh discourse. The conception of the body as a kind of “mask” in butoh raises related issues.

Both conceptions of the body suggest a certain distancing effect that is complex (even problematic) to theorise, but very clear and immediate to do or to watch. The theory that follows will unravel the implications of considering the body as a kind of marionette-­‐like object, one that is anything but robotic or inert. It also follows through the idea of considering the body as a mask, carved by the performer themselves. A new related notion of the “dead” body, not yet explored in the thesis, will be introduced to further expand the notion of the body as puppet-­‐like object.

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Unravelling Objectification

The terms “objectifying” and “objectification” are often used in butoh discourse.

Hijikata’s method makes dancers conscious of their physiological sense and teaches them to “objectify” their bodies […] By practicing these exercises repeatedly, dancers learn to manipulate their own bodies physiologically and psychologically. As a result, butoh dancers can transform themselves into everything, from a wet rug to a sky” (Nanako 1996: 16).

The same term “objectification” is used to refer to the sexual objectification of women, or the “objectifying” (and judgmental) gaze of the model or sometimes the ballet dancer looking at themselves in the mirror. So some clarification is needed to understand how the term is used in butoh.82 The dictionary definition of objectification that proves most relevant to butoh is: the action or an act of objectifying something; to express (something abstract) in a concrete form; to render objective; to treat as an object; to reify; a material thing which embodies or expresses an abstract idea or principle (Oxford English Dictionary).

The process of “treating the body as an object” in butoh is the beginning, not an end goal, of a more complex and interesting process. Objectification in butoh points toward a perspective of distance from what one is doing. It means to take a new perspective on the body, to explore it afresh, as if for the first time, to find out how it “might” function, as opposed to assuming you already know everything about it. Entering imaginatively into images (such as the body as puppet, cat or ash) is an act of objectification that affords the performer distance and a fresh perspective. I am referring here to this distance or separation as an imaginative act, even a kind of “useful delusion”.

Whether such a separation is scientifically possible, or how one might more accurately name it, is exactly the aspect of this research that awaits further

82 “Objectification” is defined as “the demotion or degrading of a person or class of people to

the status of a mere object” (Oxford English Dictionary). This references a very negative process with little in common with the use of the term in butoh.

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(interdisciplinary) research. What I assert here is that at least imagining such a separation or distance renders the performer more creative and more compelling to watch.

The Body: Körper versus Leib The German language’s different words for the body are useful to my theory of the object body, particularly as they are contextualised within phenomenology.

We might say that Merleau-­‐Ponty replaced Körper (the body as it is given to external observation, the “thing body”) by Leib (the body as it is experienced, the “lived” body”), and that he turned the attention of phenomenology to Leiblichkeit, or “lived bodiliness” (Garner 1994: 28).

Many processes within butoh can be viewed in terms of “lived bodiliness” or what I have often referred to as “full inhabitation”. The approaches of distillation and reduction have been explored for their effect of bringing the performer more fully into each moment. The kinaesthetic work could similarly be said to revolve around a “lived bodiliness”, as could the butoh-­‐fu work, involving as it does the embodiment or inhabitation of imagery that engages all aspects of the organism (muscles, bones, nervous system, sensory organs, mind and imagination). At first, the above quote focused my attention on butoh in relation to Leib. But as I also used terms like “objectification” I realised there was an interesting paradox here to pursue.

This body of work presents examples of an objectified body, treating the body as a kind of object; making it into something “other” that links it with Körper (the object or thing body), not Leib (the lived body). One might say that butoh deliberately cultivates Körper as a creative tool, as in the case of the puppet-­‐body process examined in Chapter 3, or in the movement quality of “not moving, being moved”. Making a case for the butoh body as an example of both Leib (the lived body) and Körper (the thing body), I propose not to resolve this apparent contradiction, but rather point to it as the very source of what makes the butoh body distinctive and compelling. It is also

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what makes Tadashi Endo’s analogy of transformation as an “exchange of bones” so useful and profound. The performer enters into new “bones” (or architecture) and then lives there very fully. They make the body other; observe and objectify it, and then live within that otherness. This is not only a nice image, but really does resonate with my experience of doing butoh.

Fraleigh points out that such objectification is always part of the dancer’s art.

A dialectical dualism is apparent in dance [that] grows from an objectification of the body. […] A psychic distance from the body is necessitated in the dialectical creative processes of dance. It is significant though that such a phenomenal or (lived) duality is formulated upon a basic unity and according to intent, as existential phenomenology has held (Fraleigh 1987: 13).

That “psychic distance” is intensified when the dancer works with dense imagery, such as a body being a wet rug, a puppet, ash or being covered in insects.

Butoh’s “Dead Body” First of all you have to kill your body to construct a body as a larger fiction. And you can be free at that moment (Akaji Maro in Viala and Masson-­‐Sekine 1988: 197).83 The term “dead” body (or “corpse” body) arises quite often in butoh discourse, which can initially seem strange in reference to the moving body.

It opens butoh to both mystery and misinterpretation. For example, the quotation below contrasts the very positive qualities of a “dead” body with the negative and distracting qualities of the “living” body. I provide the quotation in full before unravelling it to examine what is meant by a “dead” body in butoh, and how it might relate to my consideration of the butoh body as object.

83 Akaji Maro is the director of Tokyo butoh group, Dairakudakan. He was involved with

Hijikata at the time butoh was establishing itself in Tokyo. Michael Blackwood’s (1990) documentary Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis presents interviews and examples of his work.

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[Kazuo] Ohno says that butoh revolves around the idea of the “dead body” into which the dancer places an emotion which can then freely express itself […] Without this technique, the “living body” would divert the emotion, drawing it into its own logic.

He tells us that as the puppeteer pulls the strings, the soul should guide the artist. He often speaks of the “freedom” of the dancer. This must be understood in the eastern sense: it does not mean “free will” but rather shaking off the confines of free will […] giving up the notion of oneself […] and discovering the soul stifled within […] As long as the body maintains an existence marked by social experience it cannot express the soul with purity […] “If you wish to dance a flower, you can mime it and it will be everyone’s flower, banal and uninteresting; but if you place the beauty of the flower and the emotions evoked by it into your dead body, then the flower you create will be true and unique and the audience will be moved” (Viala and Masson-­‐Sekine 1988: 22-­‐23).

I acknowledge the many difficult terms that arise here, like “soul” that was addressed earlier in this thesis. These are acceptable and inspirational in the studio but become problematic in the context of theory. Where practice can accept the limitation of words to accurately describe certain ideas, theory relies on the careful defining of terms. There will always be a gap. The theory I am developing is an attempt to straddle that gap, and look at the body from both sides of it. I cannot unravel all the difficult and interesting terms the above quotation uses, but will focus on those most relevant here.

The quote implies that the “dead” body is an “empty” body, or at least a body that has space within it “into which the dancer places an emotion”.84 This accords with my advice to performers before working with butoh-­‐fu to consider the body as a container into which the image should drop. There are many references to the butoh body as being “empty” and “waiting to be filled”. There are as many references to the butoh body being “full” to bursting. The image of the body as a container of clear liquid provides both emptiness or potential (in the clear, transparent water) and fullness (intensely lived).

84 I interpret the use of the word “emotion” here to also refer to ideas, images, or emotions (that is anything that the performer works with in performance, or their subscore).

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Ohno refers to the danger of the “living body” diverting one’s emotion. What is this “living body” with such a negative influence on the process of performing? It does not seem to relate to what has been discussed previously as “full inhabitation” or Leiblichkeit. It is possible this “living body” refers to the social body or to daily behaviour: “As long as the body maintains an existence marked by social experience it cannot express the soul with purity”. This “living body” potentially relates to what Eugenio Barba calls the “daily” as opposed to the “extra-­‐daily” existence of the performing body (Barba 2006: 7). It would follow that in part butoh’s reference to the “dead” body relates to an “extra-­‐daily” (non-­‐quotidian) use of the body. It is the experience of many performers (and practitioners of meditation) that there is a realm of existence and state of consciousness distinct from daily life. The “dead body” can be seen as a way of escaping the limiting influence of daily or quotidian behaviour. The transformed “object” of the butoh body seeks an escape from quotidian banality and points toward the realm of poetry (association and metaphor).

The quotation refers to freedom and free will in the “eastern” sense. This is a small reference to a very big idea that cannot be fully examined here. It is indicated here as potential future research that might grapple with notions of freedom, self, and ego in relation to performance, comparing European and Asian ideas. The writings of Yuasa Yasuo are important and useful in this area (1987 and 1993). What can be stated here is that the butoh body opens up an exploration of the performer’s complex relationship with their own organism.

The idea of placing the flower into your dead body […] where it can freely express itself resonates with the notion of not moving, but being moved. It suggests a process of allowing, of letting something happen, rather than deliberately controlling, predicting or expressing something. It is another way to see the image as an activating force. The “dead body” facilitates that process more than a “living body” with its free will, which might rather try to “express” the idea. I have referred before to one of the intentions of butoh

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being not to express or represent an idea through the body as medium, but rather to allow the body to speak for itself. Such an intention requires particular processes and certain perspectives that are distinctive to butoh.

For example, the intention is not to express or represent “ash”, but to allow “ash” as an activating image to make something of the performer (to make something of their “dead” body). The difference might seem semantic on the page, but the distinction is clearly apparent on the stage. Butoh’s “dead” body helps the performer avoid quotidian representation. The potency of yūgen (something half-­‐concealed) is recalled, that was so significant in Endo’s work with the puppet body that asked the performer to cover or compress feeling but not to cut it off. The butoh body also helps the performer to avoid “affectation”, one of the main reasons that Kleist and Craig wanted to see the human performer replaced by the marionette who is “incapable of affectation” (Kleist c 1810 in Miller 1982: 213).

Remembering Kleist and Craig’s Marionettes

Heinrich von Kleist (1777 -­‐1811) and Edward Gordon Craig (1872-­‐1966), both wrote provocative essays proposing that the marionette could be considered superior to the human performer. Kleist’s essay “On the Marionette Theatre” (c1810) and Craig’s “The Actor and the Übermarionette” (1911) lay out various arguments about what they see as the limitations of the human actors or dancers of their day. Despite the age of these essays, they raise fundamental questions about the performer’s relationship to their body and their art. These are questions that have not yet been exhaustively answered either theoretically or in terms of practice. They remain vital and urgent questions today at the start of a new century; though I acknowledge that both essays, perhaps Craig’s in particular, also include a number of ideas that seem dated and less urgent. Here I focus in particular on those aspects of these essays, and their conception of the performing body, that resonate with the butoh body as explored in this thesis.

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Kleist’s Marionette and the Tree of Self-­‐Consciousness

Kleist’s essay “On the Marionette Theatre” recounts a conversation with a certain Mr. “C” -­‐ “chief dancer in the Opera” – who proposes, “that any dancer who wished to improve his art might learn all sorts of things from them [marionettes].” (Kleist c1810 printed in Miller Ed. 1982: 211) The reasons given for the marionette’s power include: (a) their limited movement; (b) control at the centre that allows the limbs to move “pendulum-­‐like”; and (c) that they are “incapable of affectation” (Ibid: 213). All these relate to aspects of the body already discussed in this thesis. For example, the limbs moving like pendulums relates to the idea of a body which is “not moving, but being moved”. Kleist’s essay also contributes something new to a discussion of the performer’s self-­‐consciousness, innocence and knowledge. The essay tells the story of a youth who does a spontaneous movement which he recognises as being beautiful and similar to a famous statue. He tries in vain to recapture its beauty in repetition. Kleist refers to his awareness or knowledge of its beauty as a “loss of innocence” (Ibid: 214), making the analogy with the bible’s recounting of the fall of man as a result of eating of the tree of knowledge.

As reflection [self-­‐consciousness] grows darker and weaker, grace emerges ever more radiant and supreme. But just as two intersecting lines, converging on one side of a point, reappear on the other after passing through infinity, and just as our image, as we approach a concave mirror, vanishes to infinity only to reappear […] so will grace, having likewise traversed the infinite, return to us once more […] most purely in that bodily form that has either no consciousness at all or an infinite one, which is to say, either in the puppet or the god. […] That means […] that we would have to eat of the tree of knowledge a second time to fall back into the state of innocence” (Kleist c1810 in Miller Transl. 1982: 216).

This “eating of the tree of knowledge a second time” seems to reference performance technique (or going beyond it). One cannot imagine really aspiring to the state of naïve ignorance such as the amateur has; however, the professional performer might access a state of “not-­‐knowing” or “beginner’s mind” (as it is known in Zen) through certain techniques. The process of butoh might be seen then as an example of “eating of the tree of knowledge a

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second time”. When I ask a performer to move as a gargoyle or as smoke, they are not really “other” at all, but less self-­‐consciously themselves. To make a performer intensely self-­‐conscious, ask them to “just be yourself”; however, ask them to focus on becoming smouldering coal, or to imagine a thousand insects moving inside their body, and they will be intimately revealed in all their individuality, but not “self-­‐consciously” so. “We cannot go back […] we must make a journey around the world, to see if a back door has perhaps been left open.” (Kleist c 1810 in Miller 1982: 214) Objectification in butoh might offer such a door.

Craig’s Übermarionette

Edward Gordon Craig’s essay, “The Actor and the Übermarionette” proposes that the human actor should be replaced by an “Übermarionette” and uncovers some vital questions in giving his reasons why. Those reasons include that “art arrives only by design”, and not by accident, and therefore requires materials that can be controlled or calculated. (Craig 1911 in Chamberlain Ed. 2009: 28) He finds the human actor useless as “material” for theatre since he tends too much toward freedom. “The actions of the actor’s body, the expression of his face, the sounds of his voice, all are at the mercy of the winds of his emotions” (Ibid: 28). Craig contrasts the art of the actor with that of the painter or musician, questioning the lack of control the actor has over their instrument, by comparison with the painter’s materials or the musician’s violin. While Craig speaks in terms of “control”, my experience of butoh makes me consider it more fruitful to speak of the sense of “distance” that the musician and the painter have. This distance opens up the work while “control” seems to close it off.

There has been much debate over whether Craig was proposing to replace the actor with an actual puppet-­‐like (oversized) object, or a masked dancer, or indeed if he was talking about a new style of acting. Material only recently made available informs this debate, (see le Boeuf 2010) and presents an

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opportunity for a rich comparative study between the butoh body and Craig’s Übermarionette.

Craig’s call for “unity” in the art work, or for the actor to be an instrument of the author’s thoughts, seems less urgent now and becomes problematic within the context of contemporary dramaturgy; nonetheless, the questions he raises in the search for a balance between artifice and life are still pertinent, and are an area in which butoh has an important contribution to make. Craig referred to the Übermarionette in his essay as a “creature”. This is a term I have used to describe the sensation of performing butoh. I feel I am always a kind of “creature” -­‐ neither human nor animal nor puppet figure -­‐ but something that takes qualities from all of these.

The Übermarionette will not compete with life – rather will it go beyond it. […] it will aim to close itself with a death-­‐like beauty while exhaling spirit (Craig in Chamberlain 2009: 40).

This quotation resonates with the idea of the “dead body” already introduced. Craig was at pains to point out the danger of mistaking the puppet figure’s gravity of face and calmness of body for blank stupidity and angular deformity. […] There is something more than a flash of genius in the marionette, and there is something in him more than the flashiness of displayed personality (Ibid: 39).

This accords with the previous discussion of the puppet work in butoh as not aiming at being robotic or presenting the puppet; rather, it is a potent starting point that uses the limitation of movement and the compression (but not denial) of feeling to see what that friction generates in the performer.

One final idea warrants highlighting here, for it connects butoh’s objectifying process to the actor’s art.

There is a strange expression of the actor ‘getting under the skin of the part.’ A better one would be getting ‘out of the skin of the part altogether’ […]The painter means something rather different to actuality when he speaks of life in his art…It is only the actor, the ventriloquist and the animal stuffer who, when they speak of putting life into their work, mean some actual and life-­‐like reproduction (Craig 1911: 31).

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An actor might usefully approach character through the processes of butoh, using activating images to gain some distance from the work with character and emotion, allowing the body to “speak for itself”, and letting character emerge rather than be expressed. A famous example is RSC actor, Greg Hicks, who used butoh processes to perform the ghost of Hamlet’s father. “I took my first reference point for playing someone from beyond the grave from butoh.” (Hicks 2005: 2)

A comparison between Kleist, Craig and butoh’s object body draws attention to the fundamental questions of performance, and warrants further detailed comparative analysis than there is scope to undertake here. This introductory proposal allows us to pursue the links between butoh and European-­‐based performance questions, that date back in the early twentieth century and beyond. It is common to accuse western artists and audiences of exoticising butoh for its “Japaneseness”. That may have been the case early on, but as I go deeper into butoh I see that it addresses some of the fundamental questions and paradoxes of performance common across many time periods and cultures. I think audiences also see deeper than its exotic exterior when faced with the best butoh. It offers a unique perspective, to performers and audiences and the desire to understand drives my continued study of butoh.

Chisato Katata in DO Choreographed by Yuko Kawamoto Photo: Gigi Gianella

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Beckett’s “Marionette-­‐like” Figure

Les Essif updates the notion of Kleist’s marionette and Craig’s Übermarionette in his study of the figures of Samuel Beckett. In Empty Figure on an Empty Stage (2001) he refers to the “marionette-­‐like hypersubjective” (Essif 2001: 184) figures found in nouveau theatre, particularly in the work of Samuel Beckett (1906-­‐1989) and Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-­‐1949). It was the Introduction to Essif’s book that first drew my attention to the distinction between Körper and Leib, and the implications of this distinction to my study of butoh. Chapter 6 of his book produces a number of evocative conceptions of Beckett’s “empty” figures, informing an understanding of the butoh body’s relevance to current performance. Essif makes reference to Beckett’s figures as masks, as a “figure that masks what it would reveal” (Essif 2001:170), as “inanimate icon[s] of life” (Ibid: 186) and as “flesh turned to frame”.

The construction (author) and perception (spectator) of the dramatic character evolve along a path which is similar to that taken by the mask (in which) the body’s flesh turns to frame […] becoming the bearer of a deep metaphysical message (Essif 2001: 170).

The main (positive) qualities of the marionette in Essif’s discussion include: (a) their pretence; (b) their strangeness; (c) their “hollow space”; and (d) their immobility. I was immediately struck by the relevance of these to my conception of the butoh body. Like Craig, Essif points out that these figures are not marionette-­‐like in terms of being robotic automatons, but rather in terms of their “reduced mobility, including immobility” (Essif 2001: 164). He also cites their artificiality, and their presentational, and therefore distorted, quality as being integral to their power. That plasticizing effect is another way to look at the exercises in Chapter 4 Section 4.4 “Training for Transformation”, all of which explored the plasticizing of the performer’s work with transformation. The very fact that the figures are distorted and displayed affects our perception as spectators. The real significance of the object quality in butoh, whether it is seen as a puppet, a “dead” body, or as a mask, is the impact it has on the spectator. The effect is not just of an exterior automaton quality; rather, the effect is to “cause the spectator to cross the

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border…[and] to project on the doll his [the spectator’s] subjective universe [creating] a veritable magnetic field that privileges hallucination […] [or] the power of suggestion.” (Roger Daniel Bensky in Essif: 190) Butoh offers a very specific stimulus to the spectator’s imagination by offering something strange, relatively immobile and apparently hollow. Through that, it makes space for, invites or insists on the spectator bringing their associations and imagination to bear on the work. What butoh dancer, Katsura Kan, calls a UFO in his work, Essif calls a “referent unknown” or an “in-­‐between” space afforded by a hybrid body (Ibid: 188). His reference to “hollow space” relates to the “dead body” introduced earlier as an empty space into which the performer should place their image or emotion.

Butoh and the Contemporary Performer

It is not my intention here to prove that the butoh body equals Craig’s Übermarionette or Beckett’s marionette-­‐like figure; rather my intention is to look to the reasons why such a figure was considered desirable in the theatre.

The link with butoh lies in the desire to escape quotidian reality and to reach the level of metaphysical poetry that Craig saw the marionette as being capable of. I argue that it is the performer’s very proximity to themselves that makes performance so difficult and interesting. They are sculptor and clay, puppet and puppeteer. Butoh offers the performer some distance from the material of their art; that includes their physical body, their mental aspect and their personality. That distance is useful even if it can only ever be an illusion of distance. The butoh figure is not Craig’s Übermarionette, but addresses some of the same paradoxes and problems of performance that Craig addressed, Kleist raised, and Beckett’s figures summon in their own way. Because of its marionette-­‐like or object qualities, the butoh body has much to offer the contemporary performer in terms of training and creative process that can help the contemporary performer prepare for a broad range of dramaturgies.

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Curtain Call To resurface, as promised, from the verbal tangles of analysis, I conclude with a return to the stage and the voice of the performer in the midst of performing. Here I reconstruct a memory from performing the final scene of Tadashi Endo’s Migration 01.

I stand under a single white rope. (One hangs above the head of each performer). Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs is playing.85 In this final scene of the work, I hold the whole work in my body, as I transit toward the final moment and the curtain call. I slowly turn my back towards the audience, aware that this action displays the red marks on the flesh of my back placed there in the opening scene. This action returns me, and perhaps the spectator, to the memory of what has gone before. If the performance was a life played out for the spectator, then I experience the vulnerability and power of revealing the scars of that life.

In the curtain call which follows a butoh performance, I never fully exit the creature-­‐body I have inhabited to perform it. I hover between. Ending a butoh piece is not a matter of exiting a kind of trance, but rather of exiting a state of deep presence that is unlike ordinary reality. The performer “Fran” is present, and so is the “flesh turned frame”, the mask of otherness I call the “creature”. In the curtain call I am more aware than ever that in performance I am like two photographic negatives superimposed on one another, I am both performer and performed.

85 No. 3 Opus 36 circa 1978

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DVD Portfolio of Performances, Rehearsal and Training Disc 1

Fine Bone China Teatre Tantarantana, Barcelona, 2008.

25 minutes.

Photo: Phil Hargreaves

Disc 2

Palpitation Aphra Studio, University of Kent, Canterbury, 2010.

30 minutes.

Photo: Giuseppe Frusteri

Disc 3, 4 and 5

Chimaera Disc 3:

Disc4:

Disc 5:

Photo: Giuseppe Frusteri

Butoh and the Creative Process Rehearsal footage taken at Marylebone Dance Studio London 2006.

Chimaera (Act II) Cecil Sharp House, London 2006.

30 minutes.

Chimaera (Act II) Woodward Theatre, QUT, Brisbane 2006 30 minutes.

All from DVD set -­‐ Frances Barbe: From Studio to Stage (Barbe and McGrane 2006)

Disc 6

Preparing Performers: See section -­‐ “Training to Transform” From DVD set -­‐ Frances Barbe: From Studio to Stage (Barbe and McGrane 2006)

Photo: June McGrane

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PLASTIC SLEEVE

DISC 1

AND

DISC 2

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PLASTIC SLEEVE

DISC 3

AND

DISC 4

175

PLASTIC SLEEVE

DISC 5

AND

DISC 6

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