Light, darkness and the inner light (Seisaku’s Workshop)

 

My last session at Yuri & Seisaku’s Butoh workshop couldn’t be more touching exploring darkness and light as impulse of the movement.

When Seisaku explored for first time this exercise Hijikata made him stay seated under the sun for two hours, Seisaku told us in that mythical way all talk about that time when Hijikata was alive.

After Yuri guided the physical training, we worked the exercises of today’s Butoh:

-Seated with one knee in the floor to keep ourselves active we explored light and darkness: light, receiving from the sun, up; darkness attracting our body down to the earth, covered by layers of darkness.

-Light and darkness, sky and earth, day and night, one after the other.

-Feeding ourselves of light (wholes with lights in the room).

-Looking for the lights (light coming in through the windows), those sources of light afar, from the buildings, from the street and again feeding our bodies with those lights.

-With wholes of lights all over the studio and windows opened looking for parts of the body absorbing the light, one by one.

-Walking in a forest full with fireflies, looking for them; two fireflies are in our stomach, so we can attract easily the others to our bodies.

-The night, the stars, the forest, fireflies flying into our body one by one flying all over or body, till be hundreds inside.

-Balls of light around attract us, threads of light linking those balls of light to our bodies.

-Holding a ball of light in front of us, the light of the ball (which is no more a spherical material object) shows us our family inside, it is the light of our best family moments that lightens our face.

Many moments during the exercises were remarkable, memorable, touching, full of… light.

After the workshop we went to an Okinawa’s food restaurant to have dinner, I said good bye to them and we took the impossible to forget selfie all together.

A little note apart:

I asked Seisaku if he had seen Hijikata’s choreography performance of Tohoku Kabuki Plan IV, as I watched the video yesterday at the Hijikata Archive, and he told me that he actually had performed in that show, and described some actions and reactions. Well, what can I say? Simple that speaks for itself the importance of me being on his side learning from the line of the original fathers.

(Thursday February 21st, 2019)

A Horse’s Neck

(Yuri & Seisaku’s Butoh Workshop)

This evening was raining in Tokyo and at the end of the session the water had become watersnow (you know it is winter in Japan). 

This time I took the subway and not the train, just to try a different way, and I realized that it was 6 minutes walk from the metro station to the room instead of 12 minutes coming from the train station, so it’s worth the change. 

Yuri arrived late, we started with Seisaku doing also the physical training. It was the first time I heard him speaking English; he knows many words but as Yuri speaks better English he is just shy (or lazy) letting her doing all the translations during the workshops. Finally she arrived and continued the physical training till the point we all got exhausted.

For the second part, the Butoh one, Seisaku asked if anyone had a neck injury because the whole session was going to be a work with that part of the body. We all were good and he continued.

He started speaking about the horse and its body, as usual doing the movements himself while doing the indications. 

The most important thing to start here it was the long body of the animal and the movement of the neck coming from the bottom of the spine. 

We had to work in couples: one was the front part of the horse while the other, holding the waist of his/her partner, was the back. 

After that exercise we started the evolutive process he always uses. These are the exercises we worked at the session:

-Movement of the neck and long body of the horse (in couples)

-5 movements of the horse. A kind of basic movements choreography. (The video In posting is from this exercise doing it by Yumiko Yoshioka, Yuri Nagaoka and Kosule Ishiwara)

-Atmosphere around the 5 movements: morning with breeze and fog.

-Consciousness of the house being in a group of houses.

-Adding more details around: following a fly, eating grass, smelling the others, touching.

-The group again but keeping all the 5 actions worked before.

-A free improvisation using everything we’d worked and whatever came to us around the subject.

Then something came as a twist during this series of exercises:

-From the experience of the sounds coming from the horses Seisaku went to explain the movements of the Loch Ness monster as the movements of a dinosaur, with its heavy weight, super long neck and its sound coming from its immense body. The importance of the spine again for the movements of that dinosaur’s neck. We had to work that mythic dinosaur with its heavy weight, long neck in the shape of a S and its deep sound.

-The long neck became then the long -fantastic- neck of the rokurokubi, the famous Japanese ghost. So we worked that ghost with his long twisted neck that he/she doesn’t even know where it goes. (I’m posting the image of rokurokuri drawn by Hokusai)

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  Rokurokub, drawn by Hokusai.

-Finally a free improvisation being the horse, the dinosaur or the long neck ghost, or the three together if we wanted. Seisaku even remember Hijikata saying the we could become many horses in one moment.

We all truly enjoyed the session, another one when there is very few indications about the personal quality of our work, but mostly the emphasis is to work, to practice. Seisaku comments and laughs and takes photographs while we are working, he is everything but the image of the inspired divinized Butoh master, he doesn’t want to become that. 

But the most enjoyable thing for me, of course, is the process, what I call “the evolutive process to become and be”. Step by step, we work everytime the different levels of a transformation till the moment we become something we’re working on. Here, the philosophy of Butoh is in the practice of becoming.

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After the session almost the whole group went to have dinner again. I ate fantastic raw chicken and some unforgettable good cold soba noodles, and went home past midnight again. 

(Thursday January 31st, 2019)

A tree.

(Butoh workshop with Yuri  Nagaoka and Seisaku)

My first Butoh experience of this season in Japan was at Yuri Nagaoka and Seisaku’s Butoh workshop near Nakano.

The work with them always follows the same structure. First Yuri guides a kind of physical workout that makes the function of a warming up with massages, stretching and lines of movement combining strenght, balance and fluidity; then comes the Butoh work directed by Seisaku: in a series of different exercises (improvisations based in a specific image) we follow a development of transformation through the images of a specific object, today is was a tree. 

Levels worked today:

-roots

-the nurturing from roots to the end of a branch

-the growing of the branches

-the first leaves

-the blossom

-and the tree alive after blossom with its expanded shape full of leaves.

Each level is worked physically from the image of inspiration in a very intricate way linked to our inner body. We are becoming that tree as a result, but not as a goal (at least not from the indications of Seisaku today).

It was surprising to find that Yumiko Yoshioka, the renowned Butoh performer, was there as a student too. I knew about her but never met her before, so I found that she is a very interesting woman and performer, very friendly and charming.

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After the work I was more than happy to join them for a dinner at a very good Soba restaurant, and finally I took the subway with Yumiko chatting about Butoh and butohkas along the way. ¿What else could I ask for?

Tomorrow my plan is to take Natsu Nakajima’s workshop.

(Thursday, January 24th, 2019)