Butoh Workshop With Jocelyne Montpetit in Montreal, Québec.

Gustavo Thomas and Jocelyne Montpetit. Montreal, Québec. 2011.

The decision to travel to Montreal was clear: Yoshito Ohno would perform at L’Agora de la Danse and I wanted to see him on stage; as I knew Jocelyne Montpetit lived there, I hoped that she could give one of her workshops during the period that master Ohno would be performing.  And so it was, as part of a 4 weekend workshop, I took 4 very productive sessions (two weekends).

It is known that if one does not work with a teacher (whether it be Jocelyne Montpetit or Yoshito Ohno) a longer time, like at his/her studio every day, for example, there is a danger that each of those "short" workshops that one is taking in this or that place could be the same as others you have already taken before. I did not consider it such a big problem in my case. I'm still in the very base of the pedagogical work of Butoh and a renewal of what I had taken with Montpetit would be a reinforcement, or at least one good review.

I'll do a simple (but not hollow) description of the 4 sessions, because I wanted to include them all in this post:

The sessions were conducted in an imposing building, the old library of Montreal city, today the offices of the National Arts Council, in one of several studios or rehearsal rooms that are very well adapted for performing arts works.

Ancient Montreal Library. 2011.

Ancient Montreal Library. 2011.

Jocelyne Montpetit was usually there before our sessions, rehearsing or working with others students. Close before 3 pm she would come to greet us and invite us to enter to the classroom.

Each session lasted 2 hours, from 3PM to 5 PM and there was always music to work.  Jocelyne usually gave an indication with a very small theoretical framework or story according to the objective of the exercise to come. Her comments after each exercise were always general (perhaps another story concerning the purpose of the exercise), and only in very special cases were there comments directed at a specific person.


Session 1: Golden threads, wind blows and eyes on the forearms.


- Walking with the image of golden threads which pull from the center of the body and arms (a thread in each finger) to the sky and, once we are at the highest point, on the verge of crashing down, the same golden threads pull us down, taking all our body (and fingers) to the ground.

- Walking while the wind hits parts of our body. We would have to open the body itself to the wind, as if there was a hole in our torso where the wind could pass. This was an idea of Kazuo Ohno: "open the body."

- Walking as if blind: our eyes in the head do not work anymore, our eyes are now in the forearms, and they lead our walking. We move towards where our eyes in the forearms look. Jocelyne asks us to walk in different levels, to the sky and to the ground. Our movement is slow, careful, gentle. For the first time I have a much more sensitive perspective of Maeterlinck's play "Les aveugles".

The exercises are long, a long time is dedicated to each one of them. Jocelyne, during the exercise, approaches and sometimes gives directions, sometimes touching parts of our body and provoking a different movement, more directed at what she believes is the purpose of the exercise. Sometimes, very rarely, someone in the group speaks or even complains about an indication, but that is exceptional, generally all our work is silent.

The music is varied and uniquely beautiful, profound and inspiring: Arvo Pärt, Maria Callas, Jessy Norman, some pieces of Latin Blues, Fado, and so on.

Jocelyne likes to work in groups.  The same exercise is repeated in small groups, dividing the whole group in two, or all together with a final indication of movement, as if she were directing a choreography.

Butoh workshop with Jocelyne Montpetit. Montreal. 2011.

Session 2: A sheet of silk in the hands, a soap bubble that should not be broken, the blind and the wind blows again.
 

- Moving with a sheet of silk in our hands, an imaginary sheet of silk with a small bubble in the middle. Our feet are as soft as the silk in our hands. Jocelyne talks about Noh theater and tells us about that child that had to learn to walk smoothly for years to make his debut, coming and going unnoticed for an entire 5-hour performance.

- Walking with a large soap bubble in the hands, a continuous movement with that bubble in different levels of high. Attention to the other soap bubbles, some are already on the ground and we should avoid breaking them. There should be an exaggerated attention to the whole space, the space itself is a soap bubble, we must avoid breaking the space.

Jocelyne recalls how in Japan, waiting for an appointment with an blind acupuncturist, there was a child playing quietly in the middle of the waiting room; when the blind acupuncturist opened the door and came forward, he gently stopped when he felt the child playing on the floor, then continued walking around the boy... With that attention we should move throughout the space.

- Walking as if blind with our eyes on the forearms again: we did it alone, in small groups, with the entire group split in two.

- Walking with the wind hitting us. Again we work in small groups, different levels of wind force hitting us; at times the wind pushes a particular part (the shoulder, for example), then the whole torso, sometimes we fall to the ground because of the power of the wind blowing; when we come back to walk, we do it facing it, its force against us.

Butoh workshop with Jocelyne Montpetit. Montreal. 2011.

Session 3: Bones movement, a carp moving inside our body, a million small flowers on the ground, and Ophelia with long hair, moved by the river flow.
 

- All movement start where our joints begin. Hijikata called it "movement of the bones". One special way to move, a way of being fully present during the movement. The idea of moving from the joints is not a technical idea, it is not a doll or robot that moves, we would have to find the soul of the movement of the bones.

As to being present while moving, Jocelyne recalls that Kazuo repeated the same question to his students during the improvisations: "Where are you? Where are you?”.

- Being moved by a carp swimming in our body. This is another story of Kazuo’s: when Kazuo’s mother was dying, she told him she felt something like a carp moving inside throughout her body; without thinking about it, she had taught Kazuo a new way of moving on stage. A carp should lead our movement.

- As we move we have to avoid crushing a million tiny flowers in the ground, we should be delicate and light. It is an image by Hijikata, to silence the movement of the body.

- Walking mixing the inner movement of the carp, and avoiding crashing that million tiny flowers.

The music, as usual, is deep, sensitive, charming. The energy is perceived in all of us; my walking is very delicate and sensitive, emotions run freely.

The difficulty of working with these two images is part of the challenge of the Butoh conceived by Hijikata: Multiple images provoking different movements simultaneously. Jocelyne remembers that one of Hijikata’s collaborators was able to manage up to 60 images in one sequence.

Jocelyne speaks about images and mixes that word with "visions"; sometimes images are visions, sometimes visions are images.

- We are Ophelia, Shakespeare’s Ophelia (even though our images inevitably are mixed with those by the painters who have also recreated the character). In the river, inside the water our immensely long hair is pulled by the river flow. There is no acting, but living the image. The music by Arvo Pärt, so beautiful, creates a blast of emotion, mixed with the strength of Shakespeare’s scene.

Jocelyne splits the group in two, women and men; one group watches the other. She loves how our movements look.

Gustavo Thomas. Butoh workshop with Jocelyne Montpetit. Montreal. 2011.
.

Session 4: A "Dandelion", moving bones, the carp, a million flowers, and Ophelia who dies again.
 

- We have to become a dandelion and use the onomatopoeia "Puff!" as an idea of expanding the body, exactly as dandelion expands when the natural time comes. A long exercise, with enough time to feel the flower, its characteristics, giving time for dilatation, for “expansion”, for that "Puff!".

- Moving the bones, leaving the bones move the body; lightening the body while walking.

Hijikata said that a butohka’s body should be like a corpse, a dead body that gets its life on the move.

- The carp moves us, swimming within our body; and walking on those millions of tiny flowers that we do not want to crush.

Repeating the same exercise, but never repeating it, each time we have to search for the life of the movement, feeling the carp once and a thousand times.

I remembered watching and enjoying some carps swimming at a little pond inside  a restaurant in Kyoto, and also, during my movement I recalled another carp, at the beautiful pond of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, drawing a curved line in the water before coming to me and opening its mouth asking me for food.

Jocelyne talks about images, visions, about different ways of seeing life. She recalled another myth about Hijikata: he used to chose his collaborators depending on their poetic vision of the world; he showed them a bowl of miso soup and asked what they saw there, and depending of their response he worked with them or not; if they saw a bowl of soup, they were rejected, if they saw images or symbols, they were accepted. A myth, explains Montpetit, but a myth that exemplifies the need for a poetic vision in the Butoh artist.

- Ophelia turned out to be an exercise of almost a whole hour. Her long hair was hit by the current and carried as far as possible. As this was the second time doing it, we could spend more energy in the movement of the river flow over our long hair. A very sensitive exercise, but long, tedious at times, perhaps an endless movement. Tabula Rasa by Arvo Pärt made it feel epic, tragic.

Jocelyne again insisted on splitting the group in men and women, watching each other; then all together but in a certain position. Was she already staging something or only doing something for her personal enjoyment? I don’t know and I didn’t ask her.

That was the final exercise, and it a very good end.

Jocelyne Montpetit and Gustavo Thomas at the end of the
Butoh workshop. Montreal. 2011.

I returned to Toronto with the idea of retaking my daily training with all that I could assimilate during those 10 days in Montreal, but it wasn’t possible: the Ophelia exercise left a physical sequel in me, an neck injury that has lasted more than a month (with several visits to the doctor). No problem, I’ve been waiting for many years to be free and create through Butoh, now I can spend some holidays resting and thinking about everything. In Spanish we say:  “Esos son los gajes del oficio”. (*)

(*) Which translates literally as “Those are the perks of the trade”, although it’s meaning is closer to “It comes with the job”.

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.

大野庆人 Yoshito Ohno's Butoh Open Class in Montreal (2011)

Yoshito Ohno and Lucie Grégoire at LADMMI, Montreal. (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)

If last April I had traveled to Yokohama with fears of exposure to nuclear radiation from Fukushima plant, why not face Montreal’s cold autumn this time? Master Yoshito Ohno had told me he’d come to Canada in November this year to perform “In Between” with Lucie Gregoire, a French Canadian contemporary dancer, as part of a trilogy they both have been creating since 2007. My experience in Yokohama had been crucial in my artistic path, so I did not hesitate at any point in going to see the show and if possible take a few more sessions, and so I went.

Two days before his performance, Yoshito Ohno’d gave an open Butoh class for students at LADMMI, L'École de Danse Contemporaine. It would be a class for students, yes, but some interested outsiders were admitted.

LADMMI is part of an art schools complex very close to the Place des Arts de Montreal, but independent from it, in one of the main shopping streets, Sainte Catherine. The building, in a forties style, has been remodeled to host art and dance schools and work spaces for everything having to do with bodywork and design; LADMMI is on the third floor and you can take a look from the street itself while some of the classes are happening.

BELGO, Montreal (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)

LADMMI, Montreal (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)

The wait was long, since I had to be there early to make sure I was included among those coming from outside (in the end, we were only three outsiders). So that gave me time to wander around Sainte Catherine, observe some classes at the dance school and eventually discover the difference between my view of Butoh and that of a school of contemporary dance. Obviously, for the dance school, Butoh is a complement to the training of its dancers and, possibly, a way to develop a style in dance. For me, Butoh is a performing art in itself.

Classroom at LADMMI, Montreal. (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)

Yoshito Ohno arrived with his wife, a translator, Lucie Grégoire and the school principal; we were waiting for him, among a huge mass of students with different levels of training. Lucie apparently had transmitted some knowledge of Butoh to her groups, but not all of those students had had contact with Ohno’s discipline.

Master Ohno, obviously, didn’t remember who I was.  He finally did it when I mentioned April, that I was Mexican and that I had taken his workshop in Yokohama.  These are the curiosities of certain re-encounters, which I enjoy a lot.
I guessed Master Ohno would repeat most of his common exercises: the flower, the prayer, working with silk, etc. But the presence of dance students made me think  I’d experience a kind of pedagogy of Butoh I did not know till that moment, a Butoh introductory class; and that was what he did.

It was an interesting class as a reminder of the rules of this art form, but also an example of teaching people these bases without having previous contact with Butoh.

Yoshito Ohno during his Butoh Open Class at LADMMI, Montreal (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)

Posture

The first thing Ohno (with help from the French translator) said was that we should understand the Japanese characters of man, heaven and earth, to identify our body as in the middle of two forces. He emphasized the image of a line passing through the center of the body to the crown and pulling us up, while the feet were “roots” that pull towards the earth. The chin pointing down and our gaze forward. With that posture, we were to walk. “Amazing Grace” was the first piece of music we worked with in this class.

He made a special comment about the hands; he spoke of the strength of the hands and fingers to remain together, with minimal separation. Then he took the idea of how those hands, that position, the chin down and the line between heaven and earth, were a hell to reach a presence on stage, a link between opposing forces.

We made several physical exercises as if pulling something and feeling the force, and then returning to the position and perceiving this new presence in us. This set of physical tensions initially left in us energy moving within us, and when standing, doing nothing, our body energy was charged without movement, what we call presence on stage.

The flower

In a case he had brought to the studio master Ohno had flowers for all, a lot of scented, artificial flowers. Then he spoke of the flower as the best example of what is standing between heaven and earth, in complete union. He asked us to move with the flowers.  At some point he talked about being the flower, but did not elaborate on it. And we moved along with the music towards our flowers.

He asked us to carry the flower as if we were wind, and at the sound of our steps he asked us not to make noise, even when walking quickly, giving an example by doing it himself, saying there was no need to disturb the viewer's attention from our objective; our steps then followed the flower in the wind.

He told us how, early in his career, asked his father, Kazuo Ohno, to teach him to dance, and he replied giving him a flower and saying, “look, you don’t have to learn to dance, just seek to be a flower. Move with the flower. Do this every day; one day you will feel that you are that flower and will not need to have it in your hand any more.”

The silk

Similarly, he took out from his case several small pieces of silk and gave them to us; each of us began to work with the idea of the strength and softness of silk, the strength and softness of our body. Moving from one state to another depending on the piece of silk we were stretching in our hands. That was our body and our interior; when strong, before stretching, as an adult, it was tense; as it stretched, it became soft, like a child asking for his mother.

As we were working on the technical aspects of the performance, he took from his bag Hokusai's painting “The Wave”.  And he tried to explain the idea emanated from the painting: the artist, who has a different view of things, can see far away and can see up close, like an insect. We had to represent that in order to move, we had to find different views of our work. There was a technical search, but we had to feel the technical work too.

The piece of cloth

Yoshito offering a piece of cloth (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)

He gave each of us a piece of cloth, and we began to squeeze  at the same time that our bodies squeezed, twisting with the piece of cloth. It was tension by stress, and the feeling of the texture of the fabric was to guide us in our squeezing movement, we had to work those points as the source of our movement and whatever came of it.

He made short mention of his theory of “forte pianissimo”, where the most complicated thing for the butokah is not to exploit but to maintain the strength of a possible explosion within while moving gently or slowly.

Squeezing the fabric was his way of addressing the “forte pianissimo” idea while moving.

The tissue

Then he showed us the image of the wooden sculpture of the Buddha of Nara. He showed the same photo he had in his studio in Yokohama as part of a calendar.  Master Ohno made us note the sculpture's hands, hands that are never fully attached but are together within a separation the width of a sheet of paper.

He then offered us each a sheet of tissue paper and talked about the meeting of these hands together but separated, the same for our knees, and our arms in contact with the torso.

We practiced with that tissue paper for a while, but then he interrupted our work and asked us to add a pray to our movement; without further explanation besides saying that it wasn’t a religious thing, but a personal prayer, internal.

The music played for the final movement was the "Ave Maria" by Schubert, which his father always used in training and was the background music of one of his most famous pieces on the scene dedicated to his mother.

Farewell

At that moment, the time allotted for our class had run out and had to stop. Without saying more, Yoshito Ohno thanked us, saying that all the objects we worked with that day were a gift and we could keep them and should use them daily in our training; then he said goodbye. We all applauded to him, we were at a dance school and this is the way dance students are used to thank to their teachers.

Yoshito Ohno's 4 objects for work (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)

Yoshito Ohno saying good bye to each one of the participants (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)

Although Yokohama left me a profound and enlightening experience about Butoh, about its origins and technique, with this short open class in Montreal I discovered (or confirmed), from my point of view, the basis of the pedagogy of Yoshito Ohno for Butoh. 

Now I also had something really tangible, physical, to support my daily training, a support as simple as an artificial flower, a piece of silk, a cloth and a small tissue. They will remind me, while working every day with them as physical objects, every of Yoshito’s words, and will be witnesses of my own development.

Yoshito Ohno and Gustavo Thomas. LADMMI, Montreal. (2011)

The performance Yoshito Ohno gave in Montreal together with Lucie Grégoire, “In Between”, will be part of another blog post.

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.

Photographs of 4 sesions at Yoshito Ohno's Butoh Workshop in Yokohama (2011)

I've been writing about my experience at Yoshito Ohno's Butoh Workshop in Yokohama and I'm very pleased with the result, many good and interesting comments and good wishes to my new career in Butoh. So, now I'd like to share not words but images, part of hundreds of photographs I extracted from the videos recorded during those days. These photograph also talk about my experience there and they are an invaluable record of my student life, hope you find them interesting.

You'll se only one photograph published of each session (I only choose 4 sessions) but a slideshow from flickr with all the other images. I'm starting with session 2.

2nd session

Slideshow: 2nd sessión Yoshito Ohno's Butoh Workshop in Yokohama

http://www.flickr.com//photos/gustavothomastheatre/sets/72157626701191638/show/

3rd session

Diapositivas: 3a sesión Taller de Butoh con Yoshito Ohno en Yokohama

http://www.flickr.com//photos/gustavothomastheatre/sets/72157626576955943/show/

4th session

Diapositivas: 4a sesión Taller de Butoh con Yoshito Ohno en Yokohama

http://www.flickr.com//photos/gustavothomastheatre/sets/72157626576706225/show/

5th session

Diapositivas: 4a sesión Taller de Butoh con Yoshito Ohno en Yokohama

http://www.flickr.com//photos/gustavothomastheatre/sets/72157626701528874/show/

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.

“If you feel that the flower is beautiful, then you are beautiful.” (Learning Butoh with Yoshito Ohno)

(Translated by Tadeo Berjon)

Being a flower. Yoshito Ohno studio. (By Gustavo Thomas. Yokohama 2011.)

Yoshito tells us that Hijikata used to say: “Your body possesses everything within, you just have to find it” and he would add that the way in which Kazuo Ohno and Hijikata did that was through Butoh.  Moving every day, each moment of their lives, every moment of doubt, of inspiration, of relaxation, of crisis; moving every moment of discipline and work, of dreaming, of pain, of remembrance.  And it’s true, that attitude is completely logical:  else, how could we find the all within our bodies if we don’t immerse ourselves totally in it, rummaging in every detail of our unknown interior?

The search is done initially by walking, and the slow pace would seem a premise.  In our slow walking we discover that the experience is risky too:  if our body contains all, then, besides life and prayer and love, it also contains death itself and its ghosts, that which others suffer and others ask themselves, violence and grudges, fears and anguish, mental labyrinths and hells... everything.

In those games of the logic of being congruent with our Butoh, Yoshito adds other words from Hijikata:  “the dead body always walks risking life.”

Nothing in the studio of master Ohno is compulsory; a proposal for movement is not an order, nobody is forced to search for their hates, their fears or their violence; everything is simple, soft; something is commented, something is told, something is proposed, and then we must move.  The risk appears because it finds you when you move, like a sunlight or a mother that cradles her baby. 

So, while moving in that search of the all within, I could write at the end of my second session:  “I’ve just arrived from my work with Yoshito Ohno.  Today, dancing, I was a three-day flower, a blossoming peach tree that died in the wind, a prayer, and a child’s heart.”

Our body contains everything and can transform itself into anything.  The proposal was always “be”, “you are...”

“If you feel that the flower is beautiful, then you are beautiful” would tell us Kazuo Ohno through the voice of his son,  Yoshito.

Tens of photos, both of Kazuo Ohno and of Tatsumi Hijikata, show them “being” that which they imagined while moving.  I remember them and learn too.

Hijikata being earth. Photo by Eikoh Hosoe. (book Kamaitachi)

Kazuo Ohno, a pond. Book cover of Hidden Body, The World of Kazuo Ohno.

And in that studio, for various sessions, we were dozens of flowers, under different circumstances and conditions; we were silk, and with it we learned the softness and strength of our bodies, by being the characteristics of silk, by touching silk, we discovered in movement the characteristics of our bodies; and we were bamboo too, and with bamboo in our hands, we explored the strength of our exterior and the emptiness of our interior, the hollowness of our physicality.

Silk. Yoshito Ohno studio. (Photo by Gustavo Thomas. Yokohama, 2011)

We were all if we found it in movement.  There are no fixed structures but each session some patterns repeated themselves:  Yoshito talks, shows, demonstrates, exposes, asks us to move based on that, we always do it with music, after some 5 minutes he stops, continues talking about the same subject or changes to a new one.  And so for two hours every session.  At the end, some tea and snacks while we talked about the petty details of life.

How happy I was because I was never judged on whether I really was the flower, silk, bamboo, the sea or the wave!  That’s right, I was never judged, nor were the others: we were invited to be and to move while being, and just that.

Looking at pictures of Rodin’s sculptures we learnt that he, like Butoh, was revolutionary because they didn’t imitate the movement of the body, but were simply the body that was expressed in itself, it was a kiss or a hug or a pride.  We learnt that impressionist painters, like Butoh, were revolutionary because they offered life from other angles, and that those impressionists got their inspiration to discover those angles from Hokusai and, in particular, his piece “The Wave.”

And then we moved being water, being the sea, being waves, being the force of gravity, the moon itself, and the wave again.  We were, in the line of the water (and not always in the same session), the feminine and the moon; we danced to a piece by Chopin, we remembered the mother, the bosom of the mother; we lived the night and retook the sea.

With a piece of cloth we discovered the intensity of our interior:  by stretching it or squeezing it the intensity was bigger; by relaxing its stretching our interior diminished its intensity.  We played with emotions without knowing which ones they were; it was my mind that associated to some, to my past, to my inventions, to my hidden desires, it responded to what the cloth itself was, my body in contact with the force applied to that piece of cloth. 

Working at Yoshito Ohno Workshop. (By Gustavo Thomas. Yokohama, 2011)

Yoshito tells us about the “remnants of emotion”, that which remains after squeezing the cloth of our emotions, that which remains and weighs and drags within.  While he commented he moved, his walking was slow, tense, heavy.  He talked about the difficulty of expressing those remnants on stage, of the so called “forte pianissimo” and he also moved with great intensity but in an extremely soft way: - “forte pianissimo” - he repeated while moving, and invited us to try.  “This is a challenge to face, every day” - he would explain.  Kazuo Ohno was a master of that “forte pianissimo”.

In the line of emotions we made them body and voice:  on a single occasion (and explaining that he did it specially because I was an actor), he asked me to say a sentence on the heaviness of life, in my language, and to say it while walking.  We were all charged with the search for the forte pianissimo.  Then he asked one of the participants to climb on my back and let his weigh drop on me; I was supposed to continue repeating the sentence during all my walking. That night we didn’t talk more.

I felt the flower was beautiful, then I was beautiful...

Yes, that night we didn’t talk more; but some other days we sang...

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.

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.

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