A Secret (Learning Butoh with Yoshito Ohno)

Yoshito Ohno drinking tea at his studio. Yokohama. (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)

-As you pray (while we pray in motion) gather your hands .-

And the hands lead us, thinking about what we are praying, seeing it, dancing.

Yoshito stops and, approaching us, says: - A secret! -

He takes the page of a large photo book and shows it to us:

-Nara, a beautiful city, a very old and important Japanese city. There are many Buddhas there but one of them is special; this Buddha is special, look...-

Then he brings the photo of the Buddha closer to us... What's special about it?

Cover of Buddha of Nara Photo Book. Yoshito Ohno studio. (By Gustavo Thomas, 2011)

- Look at his hands ... They don't come together; there is a minimal separation in between, barely a rice-paper fits in between them.  There is not another one like it in all Nara. That makes it very special. Everything is compressed between his hands; it is powerful. Kazuo Ohno knew that; it is a secret ... 

He looks at us, smiling and thoughtful, at each and every one of us around ...

-Pray with your hands together and feel a separation the width of rice-paper.-

And our hands worked with that separation, and we moved with Maria Callas and Anthony singing in the background. In later sessions we used a handkerchief. That separation could be not only in our hands, but between our knees, as a young and caring woman, and you could also feel that paper between the arms and trunk, between the feet and the ground as the walk of a Japanese Noh master.

Yoshito Ohno shows all while speaking: he is the Buddha of Nara, he is the beautiful and shy teen who walks with a minimal separation between her knees, he is Kazuo Ohno when he performed a woman and his arms barely touched the flanks of his trunk and he is also a walker on rice paper.  He continually separates from us and takes a few steps with his hands almost joined together and raising them to heaven. He doesn't pretend to be a role model, it is just that he must inevitably move as he speaks.

Yoshito Ohno and the rice-paper between his hands. Yokohama. (By Gustavo Thomas, 2011)

Yes, his sessions are full of little and big secrets about Butoh, on how to achieve the inner strength of our movement:

- pay attention to your back, as if it spoke;

- a direct encounter with the whole of the space, with its corners, the front, the back, the up and down; thanking the space...

- know where to land your gaze while walking; if you look down you always seems sad, it is better to look neutrally forward, openly.

We "move" every secret, we explore every secret, we practice, without further instructions, without judgement.

The examples to reveal the secrets each are given, as always happens in his workshop, with the remembrance of passages from the two great masters of Butoh, Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata, but also with simple drawings: geometric patterns to discover the different displacements of our body in space, or Chinese characters (Japanese writing originated in, and retains the use of, Chinese characters) on the body, on man, on day. He talks while drawing, he shows us each drawing he makes, he lets us touch it and review it.

The showing of a palpable example when mentioning every secret functions as an inspiration pivot, as a guide beyond than words or formal instructing; at the end every secret comes to us through an internal image that is created from listening to him, seeing him move, looking at a picture or touching an object. We did it, as I'll talk about in the next post, touching flowers, silk, bamboo, balls...

Zen circle image at Yoshito Ohno studio. Yokohama. (By Gustavo Thomas, 2011)

That painting, so simple, known as the "Zen circle" is one of the biggest inspirations for the discovery of the body in motion as a circle, as a whole, as philosophy on scene. Yoshito tells us that his father was also a philosopher and that he philosophized on stage through Butoh, and that one of the inspirations for philosophizing while moving was that image of the circle drawn by a Zen monk, a circle that clearly doesn't close but which we know includes everything. Kazuo Ohno was not Buddhist but he was a sensitive, religious man, wherever he found inspiration he stopped and moved.

That circle is explored everywhere, be it in the space, be it inside and outside the body, be it with our hands. The hands that emanate from the circle itself, those hands that he tells as waterfalls of force surging from Hijikata. Hands are the holders of the circle that is a sphere, the moon. Yoshito asks us to look at the moon, to feel the moon and see it as a manifestation of that zen circle, and the sphere. Our hands can touch the moon, take it, split it into two, move with it, with its strength, with its attraction, with its poetry.

Moving with the spheres on each hand. Yokohama. (By Gustavo Thomas, 2011)

Several sessions with a number of spheres; inner images that move us, and that make us philosophize without thinking, while moving ... How can one philosophize without thinking? I never asked myself that question while working ... Perhaps there was also another secret.

Those secrets and that philosophizing cause a change in others, teacher Yoshito Ohno tells us. For years people around the world came to the workshop of his father, they listened to him speak, watched him move, moved with him and then something happened, they changed, their life changed. Kazuo Ohno had the force to change others through their own secrets unveiled at each session (secrets that no one could decipher or explain), explored through the philosophical or poetic or surreal movement of Butoh. 

After a few sessions, those visitors changed the paths of their creativity and, in many cases, their very lives.

Texts, photographs and videos in this Blog are all author's property, except when marked. All rights reserved by Gustavo Thomas. If you have any interest in using any text, photograph or video from this Blog, for commercial use or not, please contact Gustavo Thomas at gustavothomastheatre@gmail.com.

4 Days of Monlam Festival (Tibetan New Year). Day 3: Carrying of the Buddha Maitreya Statue at Rongwu Monastery.

Procession of the Buddha Maitreya Statue at Rongwu Monastery. Qinghai, China. February, 2009

Note: See the introduction to this series about the Monlam Festival in Tongren, China on the March 20th, 2009 post: "4 Days of Monlam Festival (Tibetan New Year). Day 1: Procession of the Buddha Maitreya at Niantog Monastery".

Day 3
Procession of the Buddha Maitreya Statue at the Rongwu Monastery.

Photographs of the Buddha Statue procession at Rongwu Monastery.
If any of the pictures of the slideshow can’t be seen, click inside the box and it will take you to the Picasa site where all the photos are in.

The event


After two days of truly extraordinary events, my idea was to rest a little and I even considered not going to this event which I thought was very similar to that of the Niantog Temple two days before; that event and the ceremony of the unveiling of the Thangka had each lasted more than five hours and I thought that a repetition of it would be almost physically unbearable. Obviously I was wrong.

The huge Rongwu Monastery is home to hundreds of monks and novices participating in the ceremony of that day, and for this special event many more had come from the neighboring monasteries, also this event was apparently the first that where the Lama Rinpoche, the second in hierarchy (after the Dalai Lama) in Tibetan Buddhism, was present.

The known structure was repeated: around 10:30 in the morning monks came and went across the square and we saw how they were specially dressed again for an important ceremony, carrying various objects, each one with narrowly defined tasks. Inside the main temple a truly unusual amount of monks (I stopped counting at 300 when they closed the curtains) remained seated. The atmosphere seemed a bit more chaotic than the previous days, I guessed there would not be a structure of presentation, but everything was as the day before, with a strict ritual order.

Around noon the preparatory ceremony inside the temple finished and most of the novice monks who were praying inside came out from the temple in an endless stream, red blankets and shaved heads filled the main square. I got to see some groups of 5 or 6 monks driving new model cars and coaxing the crowd out of the way with the sound of their klaxons in a hurry to go and have lunch (at least that is what I was informed) .

So we had to wait because all the monks and novices had to go to eat. The wait was not long, less than 30 minutes, and all were back to continue.

The traditional Tibetan horns sounded and chaos in the square increased. This time I preferred to stand in a remote place near one corner and make my shots from one of the walls so I could be able to control my camera and avoid any fight with the crowd; I really wanted to use the zoom for the best shots if I needed. It was not paradise but I liked the angle from where I took everything. I could also have contact with some of the common Tibetan people; I did not understand their language, of course, but it was easy to deduce that they were talking to us about the ceremony, about the presence of the Lama Rinpoche and how important it was to see him there, what a delight of communication!

The Lama Rinpoche sat at the upper level of the temple in a large terrace, with a group of monks and next to a group of privileged Chinese, and the rest, all of us, were scattered below them in the square.

The first part of the ceremony, the presentation of many groups of monks, of their religious hierarchies, of objects and banners, was immensely long (obviously the video is edited and I have made it very short). However, this time I enjoyed and observed a bit more than the last days: I could appreciate how they achieved their circular formations, I observed attentively the objects they carried and in particular their costumes within the religious ceremony; the leader (the Lama Rinpoche) was dressed as simply as any other monk, but not those who participated in the presentation ceremony: the high level monks reminded me of Greek tragedy actors dressed in huge costumes and wearing masks, marking their difference from the terrestrial world. As tragic actors, Rongwu monks wore a kind of high shoes or stilts (some more than 5 cm high) that I had only seen in Chinese Opera; they also wore a large number of clothes of different colors with "shoulder supports" to make them look larger and to expand their body. Similarly to Chinese opera characters, they had objects and “props” according to their hierarchy, with their own spiritual symbolism; and, of course, they all had special hats.

In the next photo (taken at the Niantog Monastery) you can see an example of how the monks' dress look like. The monks playing the trumpets had small stilts, while the main monk had very stylized shoes; you also can notice the excess of clothes and how one of his shoulders is expanded using many pieces of fabric.

Monks in a ceremony at Niantog Monastery (Amdo. Feb 2009)

In the following two photos (taken from my Rongwu video), we can observe the same "theatrical" phenomenon. In the first photo you can notice the difference between the character dressed specially for the event and the other monks in the same town. In the second picture, a really special one, at the background, one of these "characters" gets out of the temple, its presence is so remarkable due just to the costume, he looks enormous and the image resembles an epic character, I would say. (All photos can be enlarged for better viewing by clicking on them)

Monks in Rongwu monastery ceremony. Amdo. Feb 2009.

A monk exits from the temple during the ceremony. Rongwu monastery. Amdo. Feb 2009.

Looking for similarities is inevitable, I did not find anything new, the link between religion and theatrical events (that is most evident in Greek tragedy) in Tibetan ceremonies is acknowledged by both social anthropologists and performing arts researchers. But I can say that I experienced and enjoyed this live, and I could also document it. That made me immensely happy.

Once the presentation took place and the monks began to leave the square, as in the previous day, people literally rushed to the doors of the main temple. From that door came monks pulling a rope wrapped in white gauze, a sort of umbilical cord linking to the chariot-palanquin of the Buddha Maitreya. There were murmurs and shaking all over, its was as sloppy and chaotic as the day before, only this time I was not pushed by the crowd and I could see from a more stable place.

One of the most striking images was the emerging of the Buddha’s “palanquin” from the huge door, apparently immensely heavy, the monks were making a big physical effort, and the crowd only wanted to touch it, throwing strips of white gauze or trying to help carry it. On the “palanquin” a small chapel was mounted, decorated in colors and brilliant gold, with its Buddha Maitreya "caged" in it . The Lama Rinpoche and the monks on the terrace let fall dozens of strips of white gauze. It was like the moment of the unveiling of the Thangka, it was a very religious moment, energetic, perhaps ecstatic, but this time all along the peregrination: hundreds of Tibetans sang, the horns sounded, many were praying, throwing handfuls of rice and colored paper with mantras printed on. I loved the singing of Tibetan religious women, a high pitched sharp singing, a singing I will always identify with this trip to Amdo, a singing that I know will appear continuously in my dreams.

On their way towards the exit of the main square the palanquin was about to topple, we did not know whether people laughed or were horrified by this, their reaction was a bit strange for our cultural codes; the man with the umbrella who was escorting the Buddha statue fell under the crowd, but he made it back and opened it again.

When the procession passed close to my corner in the square I took a close-up of the Buddha Maitreya: I was surprised, immersed in my Christian culture I saw the image of a Catholic virgin on her pedestal like at any Mexican religious procession, there was a transposition of place and object in my mind, a kind of strange feeling; but it was the statue of a Buddha, a golden statue of a Buddha with a very feminine face.

After the palanquin left the square I tried to do the same and follow the procession a little bit more outside the temple’s walls. I did it and I mixed myself with the crowd, there was no way of getting out of there without being "carried" too. I felt a little religious, a little ritualistic, a little Tibetan too.

Once outside the main square, the procession would visit most of the temples and chapels of the monastery and would last two hours or more, although our guide told us that the procession would surely return after it walking around the main temple (not the whole monastery) to prevent further damage to the portable shrine.

It had been too much excitement, I was happy and tired. I let the procession go and its people after it, for me the event was over when I left the main square.

I wanted to rest, download all that material to the computer, try to edit some photos, think about the ceremony, and sleep well. The next day would bring the event for which I had specifically come to Amdo, the performance of a Cham dance-theater.

Video in Youtube: Procession of the Buddha Maitreya Statue at Rongwu Monastery (Feb 2009)

Video in exposureroom.com: Procession of Buddha Maitreya Statue at Rongwu Monastery (Feb. 2009)

Carrying of the Buddha Statue Ceremony at Rongwu Monastery. By Gustavo Thomas
View in HD Download 720p HD Version Visit Gustavo Thomas's ExposureRoom Videos Page

Version in English revised by Tadeo Berjón.

4 Days of Monlam Festival (Tibetan New Year). Day 1: Procession of the Buddha Maitreya at Niantog Monastery.

Map of Qinghai Province, China

Introduction

The ancient Tibetan region of Amdo in western China is known today as Qinghai Province, a region populated mostly by Tibetan-speaking ethnic groups that have been part of China for hundreds of years. Amdo is part of a vast region of Tibetan culture, which extends from Nepal, India, Tibet, the Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Inner Mongolia and Mongolia (the country), all these regions share a common language (which varies by ethnicity and of course under the influence of national languages and Mandarin), Tibetan Buddhism and with it a variety of religious paraphernalia that makes up the everyday life of its population, including the festivities and, of course, their performing arts.

Each lunar new year is celebrated throughout the region with a festival that the western world calls the Tibetan New Year, and Tibetans call Monlam Chenmo (which means "Preaching festival”). Monlam Chenmo comes after a few days Chinese lunar new year is and has its own calendar of events, all of a religious nature. There is no event during Monlam Chenmo not led by the monks of the monastery of each region and, so "represented" by the monks themselves, people from their villages are involved in a seemingly passive way or, as we would say in the performing arts, they act as spectators.

This year 2009, due to the problems facing China across the Tibetan region of its domain (almost one third of its territory), the central government decided not to allow foreigners to enter any Tibetan area except the small region of Tongren, precisely in Qinghai, the former Amdo. As the monasteries of Lhasa, Labrang, and others would be closed to tourism, there was no choice but to visit this region, and it was a wonderful choice; Tongren was kind, peaceful and rich in scenery and religious traditions.

In the Tongren region there are about 10 monasteries, one in every small town; the monasteries are gigantic in comparison with the smallness and poverty of the villages, and each held, on different days, the same religious events during Monlam Chenmo; so you can see, if you have time, the same event represented in a different way by each monastery.

On this visit I had the opportunity to observe the celebration for 3 days at the main and biggest monastery of Tongren, Rongwu Monastery, and one day at Niantog Monastery. At Rongwu there were three events: the unveiling of a gigantic Thangka with the image of Buddha, a procession of the statue of Buddha Maitreya, and a representation of Cham Dance or Demon Masks Dance, and, at Niantog, a small Monastery 10 minutes from Rongwu, another procession of the statue of Buddha. All those were wonderful events for my eyes as a foreigner, but they were also deeply moving and interesting acts for those who travel and seek representational art worldwide.

It is experiencing live this kind of festivities and religious rituals when we discover the undeniable origins of human theatrical activity, and we can also understand much of its extent and development into many fields of human activity. I usually define my experience with a very recurrent phrase, "a return to sources”.

I've been (and I remain) completely ignorant of the structure and origins of most of the events I witnessed in Tongren and the information I give about them surely has blunders and shortcomings; however, I believe that the document itself (photographs and videos), in addition to my personal descriptions of the events, can be a useful material for both the merely curious as the researcher who has not had the opportunity to witness these events live.

Day 1.

Procession of Buddha Maitreya at Niantog Monastery.

Photographs of the procession of the statue of Buddha at Niantog Monastery

If for some reason the pictures of the presentation can’t be seen well, click inside the box and it will take you to a Picasa page where all the photos are in.

Narration of the event:

On February 7, 2009, we were told that at Niantog monastery there would be a procession at midday, we arrived there at about 11:30 in the morning and we had to wait for about 2 hours for it.

The preparations occupied the entire time of our waiting. Monks came and went with religious objects, musical instruments, and placing all at different parts of the monastery; the temple was closed to non-monks and villagers were also preparing their offerings, some elderly women slowly started taking a seat at the back of the monastery’s small square, some children appeared wearing beautiful and colorful costumes (worn especially for the occasion), and dozens of photographers and journalists were upsetting me by taking photos here and there, arranging people as objects and demanding poses for their shots ... They simply broke the charm of those preparations I was witnessing.

Almost at 2 in the afternoon we began to hear the sound of the so-famous Tibetan horns, and a small procession of beautifully attired monks came to the temple among the raucous music of their trumpets, entered the chapel, and hung a curtain to prevent us from seeing inside. They started to pray, it sounded like mantras (I’m sure that was), repeated over several minutes, one after another, relentlessly. The beauty of the thangkas painted on the walls of the temple’s entrance and the sound of the prayers of the monks created a unique atmosphere around.

On the other side of the monastery a monk followed by a group of villagers was walking and praying, performing certain rites that were simply hard to grasp and understand; I could see how he entered with the group of followers into a small temple near the main one (every monastery has between five and ten smaller temples), some minutes before I had listened to a monk playing a drum in that place, and now this other monk had climbed unto a small bank and stayed at the same place, ringing a metal bell several times, and all the others followed him to his side repeating a mantra.

Even when I speak of prayers, mantras and rituals, I must clarify that, without exception, none of the participants seemed to be concentrating or in a "special" psychological mood, they even seemed to be as if at something both very common and without much sense, but my perception was unfounded, my ignorance about these people's body language, which I watched for the first time in my life, is evident.

Suddenly we heard the sound of a gong that came from the top of the temple, and deduced that the celebration was about to begin (if it had not already started hours ago, of course). Dozens of monks, one by one, and with a very slow pace, were leaving the main chapel. Horns and drums were the only sounds, repetitive music, solemn, it seemed to mark the rhythm of the steps yet it never came up to become a dance or a procession, it was a kind of presentation that lasted around half an hour.

The square was filled with a fairly wide circle of monks, with their musical instruments and banners of various types. Those elderly women I talked about before now were singing at several points of the monk’s presentation, they sang a very common kind of singing in Tibet, in a sharp and “spiritual” tone, we heard that chant throughout this festival.

After this long presentation and ritual, the monks began to spread, it seemed they were simply going out; as if it were a sign, people started to pile near the entrance to the Buddha’s chapel, a chapel with a beautiful and colorful altar entirely made with yak butter. The carriage for the procession was ready to receive the Buddha and the excitement was quite high. When the small statue took its place everything went crazy, men ran for the rope that would help pull the carriage, old women threw white scarves to cover the statue, many of them, men and women, were frantically trying to put their forehead somewhere near the Buddha, and songs were chanted to follow the procession. Someone threw candy and the crowd ran to pick them, the procession continued and the crowd followed the carriage in turn.

The carriage with the Buddha would stopped at every church and chapel of the monastery and then it would return again to rest in his chapel until the following year. As we had been there for almost five hours already we could only stand to see the first stop on a beautiful newly renovated chapel. Hence we decided to leave the place, completely satisfied with everything that we had finally seen and experienced.

Video: Procession of the statue of Buddha at Niantog Monastery

The video is edited in HD (high definition), here you'll see it in standard resolution, but if you want to see it in better definition go to the Youtube page and click on "watch in HD.

Singapore Arts Festival 2007

I've been twice to Singapore; in this second visit last May (2007) I had the chance to meet one of the best musicians of the city-state, Mark Chan. Mark had the premiere of his new spectacle, Dreaming of Kuanyin Meeting Madonna, at the 2007 Singapore Arts Festival, which is a huge effort to support performing arts, from Singapore and the world. It was a very good reason to see several high quality dance, theatre and music groups and companies, to know about them and enjoy this amazing city.

Singapore is an expensive country, so I had to be very selective choosing the spectacles I wanted to see: first of all, Mark Chan's spectacle, of course; another concert-spectacle by the famous Singaporean string quartet T’ang; The Map and Paper Concerto, a surely amazing performance by Tan Dun, the orchestra director and postmodern Chinese composer; and one energetic group of street precussionists from South Korea, Noridan. I could even come across other street spectacles on my way to different places, like when going shopping, for example.

Without being part of the festival, but as part of the season’s festivities, Singapore commemorated the anniversary of Buddha's illumination (and death, of course), celebrating with a big parade-show of cultural manifestations from several Buddhist groups from all over Asia who live in the island: Malay, Indian and Chinese mainly. This year Singaporeans also celebrated the inauguration of a new Buddhist temple dedicated to a strange relic: a tooth from Buddha.

There were performances all over the city, inside amazing ultramodern cultural venues, always on time, and with many restrictions for us, uneducated spectators from the undeveloped world, restrictions such as “photography is not allowed inside the theatre”(even if the performance had not started yet, or was already over), or being forbidden to take photographs of the artists giving autographs, for example.

I'm writing a detailed post of every show, of course.

Well, Singapore with an average temperature of 35 degrees Celsius and a humidity of more than 70%, was full of warmth and life during those days, a lot of life I'd say.


This is a video with some nice moments of the festival: