Interviews with Shinichi Iova-Koga
2005: Jenny Schaffer talks with Butoh artist Shinichi Iova-Koga about how Action Theater has influenced his work and what Butoh and Action Theater practitioners have to teach each other.
JS: What drew you to study Action Theater?
SI-K: It was a friend who started looking at my work and said I'm moving
in the direction of Action Theater. She brought me to an Action Theater
performance. The performance that I saw (by Etiquette) really impressed
me because a lot of the other things I’d been seeing were “bullshit”
(in the sense of "you're bullshitting me.")
JS: Can you elaborate?
SI-K: In general, I feel like a lot of the dance and theater performers
and the performances themselves are liars. When I saw the Action Theater
performance, I felt like I wasn’t seeing a lie.
JS: What was it about it that felt like the truth?
SI-K: Everything was immediate. I could see the performers responding
to situations as they arose. They were playful, I enjoyed the playfulness.
JS: So before you saw this, you had been discovering the value of that
immediacy and playfulness in your own work?
SI-K: I suppose so. I was starting to create work through improvisations
and with a playful attitude. It was during the first incarnation of Onion
that I’d been working on in 1999.
JS: What do Butoh and Action Theater share?
SI-K: That connection to the moment. Butoh dance, if it’s not connected
to the moment,. can be about the worst piece of c-—on earth. And
because Butoh dance has so many exterior markings—the twisted grimace
or monk-like white body as opposite images—people will oftentimes
imitate these exteriors and not have any connection to the moment. Whereas
Action Theater, by contrast, doesn’t have any marked exterior forms
associated with it. I certainly notice tendencies with Action Theater
practitioners, but these tendencies are not what define Action Theater.
JS: What does practicing Action Theater teach you about Butoh?
SI-K: What I take most strongly from Action Theater that teaches me more
about Butoh is that I’m listening far more now to small impulses
and going with those small impulses and staying with and developing them.
Sometimes, that’s just a feeling I have in a muscle in a finger
and then everything starts to develop from there. Butoh has more forms
in it, such as body shape that are distinctly Butoh where Action Theater
doesn’t have that. But because of what I learn in Action Theater,
I can bring a new and different kind of life into these forms that exist
in the Butoh vocabulary.
JS: When I watch Butoh, I’m struck by how much time is given to
letting something develop, it requires a kind of patience and trust on
the part of the audience. As an AT practitioner and teacher, I find myself
emphasizing more and more, the importance of staying with things for along
time in order for mysteries to reveal themselves. Is this part of Butoh
as well?
SI-K: It’s typical of Butoh, but not by definition. It’s very
common that a Butoh dancer will slow things down because that allows things
to fill a lot more. In general, the mind is not advanced enough to really
fill fast moments in the way that it can fill slow moments.
JS: And it’s when we let things fill that mystery or magic or surprise
can happen?
SI-K: I’m wrestling with those words: mystery , magic and surprise.
If you mean by these that you’re allowing the unconscious—personal
or genetic memories—to inhabit or come forth, then yes.
JS: What does it mean to fill a moment, in Butoh?
SI-K: In Butoh, there’s a clearly stated premise that you also want
to empty your moments. So fill moments, empty moments…in a certain
sense they can be saying the same thing. Because if I make myself so empty
that then I’m automatically becoming filled.
JS: What can Action Theater practitioners take from Butoh?
SI-K: I’ll tell you a common thing I see in Action Theater performances.
The performers are typically basing what they do on their anxiety. And
so what they could take from Butoh is to be comfortable with quiet, silence
and empty moments.
JS: Do you think this has anything to do with Action Theater being more
a Western form and Butoh an Eastern one? I thinkof the West as a fairly
anxious culture and the East as more calm.
SI-K: I want to take the discussion out of East and West and get it more
specific : America and Japan. Because that’s basically the origins
of these two forms. The Japanese have a stoic quality. I think of the
modern, urban Japanese as oftentimes being extremely anxious. They hide
this anxiousness under a veneer of stoicism. At the same time, the Japanese
do culturally value time, that is to say there is a value placed on taking
time with a large process so there is also a very high degree of patience
that exists in Japanese culture. So while modern Japanese have this anxiety,
it is combined with a long-term sense of development.
JS: Thank you.
SI-K: You’re welcome.
DEC 2003
Destruction, Creation, and the In-between
Interview with Shinichi Iova-Koga by Alaska Yamada
I recently saw “Heaven’s Radio,” performed by inkboat,
a Butoh based theater group founded and led by Shinichi Iova-Koga, and
although thoroughly engaging, provocative and dark it was also funny,
frenetic, and ultimately uplifting. But what about it was Butoh? Was Butoh
just an aesthetic tag meant to inform the mood of a piece, or were there
specific techniques or movements that came from Butoh?
Like many dancers, Shinichi became a dancer almost by default rather than
design. While pursuing a degree in Film Production at SF State, he studied
briefly under Akeno Ashikawa and Bishop Yamada, then began intensive study
with Hiroko and Kôichi Tamano (members in Butoh founder Tatsumi
Hijikata's company). These teachers would deeply influence, teach, and
help Shinichi to identify himself as a dancer using Butoh as the “point
between theater and dance.”
Alaska: What is Butoh? Is it a style, a tradition,
an ideal?
Shinichi: Hijikata had become frustrated
because he wanted to find a new dance. He tried German Neue Tanz and other
European types of modern dance, but had failed as THAT kind of dancer.
So he shifted gears [mid 1950’s] wanting to find a new dance specifically
for the Japanese body. He grew up in the Tôhoko region of Japan,
and the Tôhoko region is very cold and hard. [He took] directly
from his childhood experiences in this harsh climate to help create the
Butoh body. In the process, from the time he started to the time he died
(1986), Hijikata dramatically changed the texture, nature, feeling and
quality of his Butoh. Hijikata said to his primary student Yôko
Ashikawa, “You must throw my method onto the fire, you must destroy
everything I’ve created in order to continue making Butoh.”
A: Was that because he saw Butoh as a particularly personal expression?
S: Only through destruction can creation happen. Through death, life comes.
If nothing dies, nothing is destroyed. If everything is permanent then
everything is really dead because nothing can change. But change is irresistable,
so why pretend we can set anything? There’s a certain mentality,
which I associate with the "Western" nations, that doesn’t
wish to accept death or destruction. If I’m too adherent to the
way my teachers taught, then I will be stale and lose my life. I have
no life if I am only a pale imitation of my teacher, and I have no intention
of being that. I intend to be myself. So the food I eat, the air I breathe,
everything that comes into my body transmutes. Whatever I learn transmutes,
so I have to destroy my teacher’s teachings to really be true to
their teachings. That’s a destruction of ideas, but it’s the
real creation of ideas.
A: What would you say is at the core of butoh? What’s the constant
element that needs to exist within your own interpretation in order for
it to be Butoh?
S: The form can keep changing, but in Butoh it is essential to go into
the most deep, dark place – and not stay there. You must also find
the lightest, most bright place. If you go to the darkest place and just
wallow there, I’m bored. I don’t want to see someone JUST
suffering. Hijikata’s own works had much humor, but most people
only pick up on his dark points or images.
A: The darkness is often what people relate to Butoh. When you mention
butoh, people think it’s that really dark, difficult Japanese stuff.
S: Butoh (and I think all forms should be like this) must come back to
that baby place where you’re not LYING anymore. You’re not
lying with your body, you’re not lying with your voice. Performance
is all artifice; we’re creating something on a stage whether that
stage is the street or a theater stage. It is meant to be seen. But within
the artifice exists truth. Anything that’s stylized is not necessarily
the way people act on the street, but stylization is sometimes more true
than plain speech.
A: Why do you think people only take away the hard aspects of Butoh over
the more joyful? Do you think it’s because people want to identify
with the “deeper” side?
S: The truth is because people have simple minds. People need that extreme
image to describe what they have seen. Butoh dance, because it goes into
the darkness, is different from other forms in it's approach, but in the
end it's just life. My hope is that people see things as they are –
positive and negative. Honesty makes people uncomfortable. It’s
a scary thing to be really honest. We have to be OPEN and all the vulnerabilities
we try so hard to protect are on display.
2002
Email Interview with Paul Roquet:
Paul
Roquet:
What
interests me still about Butoh is the use of an array of techniques to
thwart all attempts at intellectual interpretation. The grotesque, the
androgenous, the lack of binary tensions, the emphasis on cycles... And
what this means for audience response: my experience is that watching
Butoh dance (when sucessful) elicits a type of meditative state: the mind
calms, focuses, and drops the intellectual constructs that seperates one
individual from another. I am very curious what your ideas on these matters
are. I have a hard time gauging how central Hijikata's philosophy is to
today's butoh dancers. Do Butoh creators ever deliberately aim for this
non-dualistic, meditative response in creating their dance? Or are Hijikata's
philosophical foundations for Butoh just the distant underpinnings of
what is now a more aestheticly-driven art form?
Shinichi:
In 1999, 12 Butoh dancers from Japan, North America and Europe convened
in Broellin, Germany (EX-it 99). I was one of the dancers. After all the
workshops, performances and discussions, we ended up with more questions
that answers. There were arguments from some that Butoh could be used
for therapy, and there was passionate response that Butoh is NOT therapy.
Some said that Butoh is very new and there was response (also passionate)
that Butoh was very old and not to be mixed with the "avant garde."
Any position anyone could take, there was an opposite response. There
is the essential spirit of revolt and dissolution of reason. Do we live
in the age of reason? If so, all the more reason to be un-reasonable.
Personally, I have been experimenting with bringing in elements of conventional
storytelling into performances. But this just leads me to rip it all apart
again. Action, reaction. Create only to destroy. To define a thing like
Butoh in the end is to kill the spirit of it. That is partly why it changes
form so drastically. There is no room for becoming comfortable. At the
same time, I am very much in favor of deepening essential training which
focuses on the body being danced, not dancing. The body exists at the
whim of nature. To mentally construct a choreography that ignores this
is to create a false dance. The very act of construction is dangerous.
As we sat in Vipassana, we spent our time trying to know the reality of
our bodies. Don't try to control the breath. Don't imagine or visualize.
In my training, there is breath control and there is imagery. But in the
end, we cannot keep the breath control and the imagery and remain true.
But these are tools to use because as a human I need a focusing device,
a seed to hold on to, to avoid drifting into some abstract and vague cloud.
I haven't discovered how teach without these tools. Finding truth is a
goal rarely reached (can I ever say that I've EVER found truth?).
It's easy for Butoh to become an aesthetically driven art form. I have
fallen victim to this trap many times. But if Butoh then becomes aesthetics,
then it's like a statue of a meditator in the living room of a person
who does not practice meditation. If I see the evidence of my aesthetic
sense over-riding an honest dance, then I fail.
And about Hijikata, he remains the most inspirational historical person
on me and my dancer life. If I read his life, his words, I am filled with
the determination to keep living.
