PHOTOS FROM THE GRAVE SONG: GENTLE, STRANGE MARVELS

A Butoh performance by Ashley Rodd

Photos on behalf of Delisa Myles

My pilgrimage to the source of Butoh continues to the stage. The pilgrimage to the stage involves the same voluntary acts of the pilgrim, a trip to a special place, and a segment of symbolic time.

It is my up most ambition to welcome individuals, audiences, and societies as the stage provides us with the opportunity to forage forth with dance as pilgrimage. The journey is unknown, but in full faith we shall enter symbolic time together towards a transcendent experience to the source of sacred manifestations as we travel inward. The core objective of all pilgrimage is transformation. Mere examination and cognition must be deserted for the deep howl of this fate. Emptiness, renewal, change—how might we use that wisdom to see more skillfully, listen more attentively, and envision a more zealous path for all of our journeys?

I attempt to begin our journey at a place of foreclosure—the foreclosure of the American dream. In my daily life I recognize America reaching both its metaphorical and literal state of foreclosure. Illusion has replaced truth as I battle with the personal observation of literacy, love, wisdom, happiness, and America herself foreclosing beyond choice. I present to you, whether you shall choose to accept, this state of foreclosure as a holy relic, a temple of destruction seeking to be reconstructed. Only where there are graves are there resurrections. A new state of receptivity may be a way for us to reach a new level of sensitivity to the nuances of our own emotional situations.

My dance—the dance of an innocent death, the confrontation of what we have sacrificed in regards to all that is deeply socially and culturally embedded in each of us. How might innocence explore revenge in psychological and literary displacement? Maybe the parts of our nature that we have sacrificed to culture are retainable, and perhaps the place of foreclosure is the best place to remodel–to reclaim.

The Grave Song: Gentle, Strange Marvels will be performed in Prescott, Arizona on December 16th and 17th at 7:30p.m. at the Granite Performing Arts Center (218 N. Granite st. ) The piece runs for approximately 20 minutes exploring themes of foreclosure, illusion, and renewal with colleague Nikki Kokotovich’s senior performance, Enter Thine Kingdom Once Washed of Sinful Deed, following directly after.

I physically feel new additions to my body–additions as obvious as a limb sprouting from the top of my head or a tail from my nose.  When I am asked to voice an explanation for these estranged growth patterns I quiver with fear and choke on my words, releasing only remarks buried beneath undecipherable codes.

Funny enough these conversations are mostly with myself–”Ashley, why are you pacing back and forth, scratching at flesh that isn’t yours and grooming a tail dangling from out of your nose?”

How the fuck do you expect me to respond to such grief. My nervous reactions to each inhalation have not yet prepared me for this.

What I would like to do is bask in my experiences until my skin is tanned, or prehaps singed to the bone.

Presently I am stranded on this island striving to express as deprived as I am of resources while at the same time surrendering to thoughts petrified into glass marbles, rolling and scattering beneath carpets and a top mountains, to be rediscovered at a later time.

It is like the way in which we allow ourselves to love the rain on certain days but are overcome by its burdens on others. On my days of content I sit and contemplate the metamorphosis from camel to child, and on my tough days I do the same, only my perceptions are less protected by drops of dew and the enhanced state of greenery, but in fact are more prone to the soggy mud trenches swallowing my ankles alive.

To say the least I am silenced by what I have managed to create for myself along my pilgrimage to the source of Butoh, and prehaps this is the most evident sign that it is not yet over. Although I have left one strange land to find myself back in another, I sense that I have become more of a knot for fate to cling to.

“Unutterable and nameless is that which torments and delights my soul and is also the hunger of my belly”

“Let your virtue be too exalted for the familiarity of names: and if you have to speak of it, do not be ashamed to stammer”

“I do not want it as a law of God, I do not want it as a human statute: let it be no sign-post to superearths and paradises. It is an earthly virtue that I love: there is little prudence in it, and least of all common wisdom.”

“I am a railing beside the stream: he who can grasp me, let him grasp me! I am not, however, your crutch.”

“I have learned to walk: since then I have run. I have learned to fly: since then I do not have to be pushed in order to move. Now I  am nimble, now I fly, now I see myself under myself, now god dances within me.”

 “And should I not with utmost yearning seek, to bring to life that creature most unique?”

“Form is going to lay down to life”–Kazuo Ohno

“Life is going to lay down to form” –Hijikata Tatsumi

I spent an undesirable amount of time in Japan attempting to figure how all the form and technique I was being exposed to in Butoh classes fit into my impression of a ‘formless form’. It felt wrong in my body to lay down personal exploration for technique development, in a practice where everything and anything had previously been accepted and encouraged through movement and philosophy. Before traveling to Japan to study Butoh I believe I was expecting to encounter more of what I have touched on in the West–personal confrontation, collective consciousness, dancing of demons, imagery, and a ton of physicality. Instead I found that we were revisiting postures, rehearsing movements, hardly interacting with one another, and spending very little time on elements such as improvisation (not to say that there wasn’t any, because there certainly was, yet the balance was surprising).

My last week in Japan was spent training with the professional Butoh dance company, Dairakudakan, founded by Maro Akaji in the late seventies.  From day one of the seven-day intensive my perspective on form was continuously challenged which at times led to straight-up frustration. When we spent an entire afternoon session attempting to prefect a Mambo sequence for our final performance, I caught myself struggling to find traces of Butoh buried beneath the layers of choreography that had clearly been rooted else where.

As the intensive continued I began searching for  my connection with this branch of Butoh which I later coined Orthodox, ha.  Dairakudakan is undoubtably inspiring to watch and their technique is immaculate. I had to remind myself of the fact that I was there to train with a professional company who is responsible for bringing Butoh acts to big stages both nationally and internationally. Therefore the training was far different than anything I would ever expect from Diego because here there were technically defined fundamentals.

I was thoroughly enjoying the training from the beginning but it took me up until mid-week to soften to the philosophies of the company. Maro Akaji gave about five lectures  throughout the week during our night class and one night in particular he answered a few of my questions regarding the place of form in Butoh.

Putting life into the form (or form into life) and keeping it restrained there is essential. By placing life into the form we can offer it a new life there, inside of a container.  It is up to the dancer to become that container through such efficiency to better care for and tend to what is being expressed through the work.  I can connect a personal meaning to this response. This answer to me stresses the importance of responsibility in dancing Butoh, by conditioning, strengthening, and maturing the body to better equip the dancer for this degree of otherworldly communication.  Anybody can toss a lite match into a dry forest and watch it burn, but if we can tame fire to dance in a ring we have truly become magicians. And in short, this is what I have learned from dancing with Dairkakudakan.

Now my heart is wrenching. It feels as though the strings that have been lightly pulling me along my pilgrimage have tangled their essence around my heart. The strings are tangled too tightly and the excess pulling from the skies have been cut and my heart is being hugged by tight threads. As uncomfortable as a heart throbbing amidst tight cords may seem, I am happy to acknowledge that the very cords now strangling my organs are the same cords that have been charging, learning, experiencing, breathing, and guiding my pilgrimage. So what I am currently wrapped in is a combination of the sensations and energies these strings have touched, along with an outer layer of highly determined passion and desire to continue dancing Butoh….and more excitingly a personally evolved Butoh.

I had the privilege of being offered a temporary artist residency in Shimane-Ken at a place known as Pasar-Moon. I was graced with the challenge of creating a Butoh piece in 2 1/2 days, for an unknown audience in honor of Kazuo Ohno`s life and passing. The vast openness of the ocean and time spent stretching and meditating supported a genuine gateway for me to process sensations surfacing around Kazuo`s death, and blessed it be, I had the opportunity to be witnessed.

This is what I believe happened during my performance-offering:

When entering the space I was blinded, no vision, inhaling and exhaling the life and death around me, attempting to touch the spaces in between. Here I was searching for the presence of Kazuo Ohno, and lay to rest on a grave covered in grasses, feeling a welcoming to enter. Once inside my blindness was relieved. What I saw was flowers and water and felt the sensation one gets when a child expresses a smile of innocence. The sensation of the child came with the question of whether it was good or bad to be where I was– some place between life and death? or was it life? or was it death?. Was it scary or safe here? Pleasurable or painful? The exploration lasted all by 20 minutes and upon returning into the conventional world the questions from the child continued. How was this world also scary or safe? Good or bad? Pleasurable or painful?

Fairly enough the piece was well received and I was even interviewed for an article to be written about the piece and my work in Butoh.

Images from shimane-ken performance 7.10.10

Fuji-San

When I stop to think and feel the influences of Mt.Fuji in my body, it feels similar to a connection with a person who has deeply touched me in conversation or simply in essence. In a very real way I feel like I received a blessing of some kind from Fuji-San, one that I am striving to understand fully.

The trek to the summit took about five hours which essentially had to do with racing the status of freezing temperatures. The ascent was quite enjoyable actually until the last 400meters and standing at the top. At this point it was difficult to see a few feet in front of the face or behind because the extremes in the rain and fog was at its fullest. The terrain was full on with the mandatory use of all four limbs. Occasionally the fog would clear a bit to the sides which lent a view of the enormously vertical slopes patched with snow and hardened lava. There was no room for pausing–pausing meant freezing.

It was more surreal than I could ever describe and the energy from that mountain kept me feeling strong–almost like strings had been connected to my limbs to support my way to the summit.I have no other way to explain why I felt no exertion or physical burdens. 400meters from the top though, my strings were seemingly cut, or prehaps the weather was just too bad for me to feel the gentle tugging any longer. I felt like I had suddenly dropped into the extremes of the situation. At the summit it was a full on whirl pool of wind, snow, rain, and fog. I can only relate it to being hundreds of miles lost at sea in the middle of the perfect storm. Extremes coming from unknown angles, limited vision, loose of control over the situation, and the final–no immediate or even semi-immediate way out.

This was the moment I realized the extent of how cold it was. I turned to look behind me and a man with a pale face and shocked expression, who I had not noticed until this point, commented `It is too fucking cold`, and disappeared. The walk to the crater looked like the entrance into a void and by walking into it you were risking the choice of not being able to walk out. I felt like I was inside of a barrel that was being vicious shaken so I headed down the descending path. The descending path freaked me out. I couldn’t see anything and it was screaming with all things unfamiliar. I made the decision to go back up and hike down from the trail I came up.  I was freezing so I was hiking a lot faster than I should have been at that altitude (13,000 feet) and started to hyperventilate.

When I reached the trail head there was this big Irish man whose face was so pale and lips so purple he looked like a transvestite.He looked right at me and said `I am as good as dead, they are going to have to carry me out of here dead!`The conviction in his voice assured me that the situation was not an exaggeration built-up in my head–I sprinted down in Chacos and my ankles are still processing that experience, ha.

Fuji-San in a verse

This piece speaks to my experience up Fuji:

Shadow from the Future Zone by Kenji Miyazawa

This blizzard is dreadful and

Again today a cave-in has come with a vengeance

…why are they playing that frozen whistle so incessantly…

A person staggers forward pale as a ghost

From the shadow and the terrifying smoke

It`s no less than my own bloodcurdling shadow

Cast off from the future zone of ice

I am presently residing in the country side of Hiroshima, and feel it very very appropriate that my pilgrimage has led me to this location. Essentially I came to Japan with no itinerary, I knew I`d be in Tokyo with plenty of time to figure it out. I`ve been riding the waves of what comes, and each place that I have ended up thus far has been booming with fresh insights and revelations for both the self and for my understanding of Butoh. Hiroshima bares one of the deepest scars our planet has ever attempted to recover from. As a first time visitor to this land the effects of the 1945 Atomic Bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the USA during WWII, I am seemingly living this experience as though it happened yesterday. The unspeakable pain and ever lasting damage of the A-bomb has penetrated the extents to which pain is capable. I am at a lose as to how the world moved from that state of screaming, ever to present itself as healed again.

For whatever sanity is worth after such a disaster I guess moving on for sanity`s sake becomes the alternative to acknowledging the screams that I am still able to hear. During my last meeting with Yoshito Ohno he could not stress enough the importance of remembering Hiroshima, and how Kazou Ohno continuously emphasized the same through out his life. Standing in the exact location of the explosion 55-years later, I am struck by my vulnerability to this pain, like scars left by the grafting of part-bodies, and no matter how many times history attempts to fold over on this event, the howling of a monster lives here.

After leaving the city and arriving in Oasa, Hiroshima I follow my path to a small apple farm run by two extraordinary Japanese women. At the time of my arrival I could feel my personal demons returning in reaction to the confrontation of the A-bomb. For perhaps the first time I was able to acknowledge my reoccurring pains as simply demons that regularly check-in as opposed to  an actually part of me that remains as loyal as an arm or a leg and less of a living part of my daily existence. Literally speaking my personal demons are very much a part of my daily existence, however this is only because my demons truly aspire to be so involved. Although by no true comparison, my demons attempt to create Hiroshima sized suffering in my pain-body, coating my daily existence with a hard shell of crust and immobility. The conviction of my pain-body is profound enough to make me a devoted follower of its screaming--it has me believe that to suffer daily is being honest with the state of the world–almost as though it is my role to process tiny amounts of the earths suffering every day. In this way I create stories that become mantras telling me I am undeserving of this thing called happiness because happiness is not a realistic state of reality. There is too much suffering for me to take happiness seriously and therefore I coined the pursuit of happiness to be selfish; I had chosen to join the pool of collective suffering instead because I felt a solid ground there.

The women that I am living with protrude a quality of happiness that I was previously unfamiliar with. They spoke with me in great detail about their philosophy surrounding happiness and how it fits into their spiritual practice, Deeksha.  I respectively challenged their insights with my own and expressed to them my burdens with happiness as ignorance ( all in Japanese! haha just kidding, they speak almost perfect English). I took a stance on the lines of my anger for the Atomic Bomb, homelessness, and the empty stomachs of innocent children and how my self serving happiness does nothing to change these unfortunate realities, but rather continues to further bury the trust of horrifying global pains.

Over the course of several days these women began to patiently open me to the same ignorance I have concerning happiness. They brought me back to memories I have of my personal demons disguising themselves as holistic well-being and happiness when in fact they were soar fragments of my suffering. I used spirituality and holistic wellness to further discipline my relationship with myself, in turn only becoming harder on myself in light of what I think I deserve. When I came out of that phase I left with more of a desire to acknowledge the aliveness in the pain-body and a developed a resistance to spiritual self-benefit of more kinds.

Now here comes the reality of re-configuring my conception of honest happiness, happiness that doesn`t lie or forget, but rather connects to a greater good. `A light never passed through you` are the words I felt after the whole left side of my body ignited and recycled waves of energy in the left side of my stomach and ended at the crown of my head–returning again to my stomach and always making an impressionable stop at my heart. A light never passed through you. Does this imply that the light ever left or never came? It never left.

I end my bit on the cycles of the pain-body with this…how ever relevant or irrelevant.

My head is floating crown-up in a calm smooth lake. My body is most likely attached, aligned vertically under my neck, but it is too light to notice, maybe it isn’t really there. My head is unimaginably still, physically and mentally. Slowly the sides of my skull begin to expand–it feels like gentle water is filling the inside of my skull and pushing the sides wide open, so open that it is difficult to know if there is any end points to the expansion. The same process begins to occur with the front and back of my skull–expanding to widths unknown. Inside my skull I wonder what this must look like because there is no way for me to look. What does a floating head with all four of its dimensions spread over the temperament of a smooth lake look like? Perhaps it simply looks like the calm smooth lake that it is. Perhaps I am that lake.

For my pilgrimage and through the constant journeying involved in understanding the depths of Butoh, I believe it to be highly important to return to the country side and pay homage to the life of the farmer. Essentially the farmer`s mind set and body is responsible for the cultivation of Ankoku Butoh, the dance of utter darkness. The cultural coding of physical daily labor has and still does initiate a strong degree of bodily tension and disfiguration. In 1959, Hijikata began to open a space for communal cultural protest and revolt, especially in regards to Western cultural domination and the insistence of rationality and capital. Here birthed the original intention of Ankoku Butoh, to strive to empty the body of expected and recognizable cultural restrictions in order to let a new body or bodies emerge.

Butoh still continues to provide a container for humanity to encounter personal and cultural ghosts. The constant folding and unfolding, opening and confronting numerous internal bodies and body parts goes to express the body at the edge of breakdown in the attempts to reconfigure accordingly.

In my conversations with Natsu-San we came to an acknowledgement that we are now in a time of mental tension and disharmony–quite different from Butoh`s orgins–but still a representation of struggle and darkness both seen and unseen. Being in the country side I am able to witness the physical tension of the Japanese farmer-body. The elders suffer from extreme hunched-backs and disfigured physical ailments of many kinds. There is a clear fight between the limitations of the body and keeping up with the daily life–they do it and their bodes become destroyed. It is the same in modern society in regards to the strain on the mind and the disharmony that results from the pushing and demanding from the cultural.

Bodily refrigeration, both mental and physical represents a soundless cry that erupts into and out of meaning, leaving behind the daily sensibility by entering into the ruptures of the past and of the future. There is a tension alive in all of us that is constantly resting between the act of screaming and the utter emptiness we face at the moments of trauma. Rarely do we allow the howl of our screaming to arrive at its point of origin. Butoh offers a way of passing through in the attempts to revise our distortion and to acknowledge the transformative potential of the body.

I am currently living on a farm on the island of Shidoshima, revisiting the life of physical tension alive in the Japanese farmer. It is important not to forget this body–to listen to it attentively and encounter the howling of the physical body from the past, present, and future.

There is a quote from the Parisian military hospital of Val-De-Grace:`Only when, despite having a normal healthy body, you come to wise that you were disabled or had been born disabled, do you take your first step in Butoh. A person who dances Butoh has just such a fervent desire, like a child longing to be crippled.`

Limping along the streets in a fashioned corpse filled with the pains, traumas, and lack of freedom from contemporary living, it is important to shift terrain and acknowledge for as long as possible the invisible screaming, and attempt to arrive at the other shores of visibility, in complete understanding with a chance to re-fold and re-configure.

Shikoku Farm; Shodoshima Island

On the day of his death I arrived at the space very late–everyone had already gone to bed, and I was terrified of the energy. How could death be so charged? By standing frozen in place my heart rate was well above average and all I could do was feel.

This container of feeling may just be the condensed version of all the instruction I`ve received in actual classes–here I witness the organic blurring of where and how we receive our lessons. It is rare to enter a space with a crisp twenty, anticipate a revelation, and leave with one; with that being stated, entering a studio for a lesson in Butoh is a bit of an oxymoron. This is not to say that my hours in the studio have not served me process, and I see the great importance of guidance from a guru, but it has been my experience to simply directly experience.

Direct experience can not be scheduled, you can`t always get it when you want/need it, but it will come because it always does, and this is the lesson of Butoh that I will be taking with me from my studies here. You cannot fake direct experience, no way in hell.

Here`s the bullet and the target again, because direct experience lives in the present, but how could anybody ever really teach presence? The individual has to want it and the individual has to get it. The pilgrimage to the source of Butoh has not been about the classes, and however important it is to go to the classes it is equally wise to leave. My conversations with Natsu-san encourage me to simply continue misunderstanding until I understand, and the heart of Yoshito offers the gentle hand I feel pressed on my back, pushing me forward, but slow enough to brush against all that live in-between the points of inception.

This pilgrimage is to the self. I leave for the country side tomorrow for another month and a half. I will be ending my journey at the Daridukakan intensive in Nagano on August 8th. I will be checking in casually, with love.