….quote from “In a Cup of Tea”: a Kwaidan fragment adapted by Lafcadio Hearn / Koizumi Yakumo

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There is a deep sense of placing, space, silence and rhythm in all decisions and actions taken by the Japanese. This is shared communally. Impossible to imagine it happening any more in the multi-ethnic, rationalist and individualist brew of our Western cities and even countrysides.

Mobile phones cannot be used in any carriages in Japan to communicate beyond the present place and moment. Except, I suppose, to imaginary worlds.

The great shrines and temples are there because the landscape calls for them to be there: by decree of hill-allignment, water flow, mountain peak or volcanic action. And all the old things placed upon the earth or in the old houses are made of things of the earth: wood, metals, bamboo, hemp, grasses, paper and rice stalks. The sense of design harmony from micro- to macrocosm is constantly breathtaking and deeply moving.

I arrived with the impression Japan must have been irrevocably violated, its harmony shattered several times over, by the 18 & 19^th century Western trading invasions and the 20th century nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – and finally buried by the most vicious of all gods: Mammon and his capitalist concrete footprint.

But I feel from day two in captivating Matsue that the heart and soul of Japan are untouched by these things. No house, no garden, no street, no town, no rice-paddy or graveyard (with only ghosts in the graves – or outside them – the Japanese Shinto way is cremation) is without its flowering of shrines. The core of whatever it is to be Japanese has been protected, hidden personally and communally, is what I feel: cloaked by the guardian spirits as the cloak of Jizo protects the ghosts of children while they rebuild the stone shapes of their old life forms.

It may be because we barely touch Tokyo (only to arrive and leave and for one day in the middle, to meet Butoh sensei Yoshito Ohno and theatre producer Alex Rutter), but ‘westernised’ civilisation as we saw it is just a string of concrete islands in the vast acres of paddy fields (those rice fields of gold, always a currency in Japan) – and forested hillsides. Moving by train and boat and plane, fluidity has a permanence all its own – ask the oceans – and not even the horrendous 2011 tsunami has succeeded in breaking Japan’s heart. We visited the area, and it heals, it replants, it recovers, it accepts such things happen and will happen again. It tells stories over and around it. Thrives.

It takes great skill to use the brush when writing kanji – and great wisdom to let go from the head and follow where the brush leads the hand and heart and feet.

When I get home I dream I don’t know where I am. Partly jetlag. Partly exhaustion. Also: a sense of two cultures, two houses, two worlds now overlaid in my consciousness as I sleep.

Ghosts are slipping out and in through doors of space and the shadows behind and between them.

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Sunday 21 May – MATSUE

En route from the wooden castle on the hill, there is a rainbow aura round the hot sun and we stumble accidentally on the Shinto Shrine of foxes: Hearn’s favourite and so close to where he lived. It is yesterday’s epic Izumo Taisha Shinto Shrine in miniature. And full of fox cubs.

We meet at the Hearn Museum with Shoko Koizumi, museum co-ordinator and Bon Koizumi, great grandson of Yakumo Koizumi (Lafcadio Hearn – our core project interest).

The museum has recently re-opened after extensive and hugely impressive refurbishment. It also features a Kwaidan section in its new exhibition space.

We watch a neat and informative video about Hearn’s life, listen to ghost stories from the exhibition and discuss our ideas and plans with Shoko and Bon.

We introduce them, via our gifts, to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, a place they haven’t heard of but which has so many similarities to their own literary shrine. Both museums are featuring the Irish background of their stories in the near future (regarding Hearn himself and Patrick Brontë). Links will be made.

We are then permitted total access for as long as we want to Lafcadio Hearn’s old Samurai house – or the half which is left to the museum – and spend two hours photographing and sitting, absorbing the beauty of its balance between indoor and out, learning the simplicity of its lines and enjoying the comfort of its tatami mats.

In the tiny pond the frogs and dragon flies eye each other. From the castle hill, ravens wheel.

Tuesday 23 May – KYOTO

First, the Camelia Tea Ceremony at “old Japanese house in Kiyomizu” with Ayaka Morimoto (45 minutes).

As usual we arrive only just in time, and as usual, only thanks to the endless kindness of strangers. In this case an old lady sweeping outside her home just behind the tourist chaos of the tiny streets of Ninzen-zaka, who rushes us to a shopkeeper who knows a little English. She compensates for the map. Ayaka introduces herself and takes us up to a tiny tatami and sliding walls room to demonstrate her skills with Macha tea and how to serve it. Her equal skill is with the English language which she tells us is self-taught from TV and films. But now, she says, she is going to the UK on some sort of scholarship to study business and languages for a year in Edinburgh. So she is invited to come to Yorkshire too. A real tea ceremony in Haworth in 2018 perhaps?

Then: a meeting with Mami Katsuya, director of Kyoto Art Centre – no translator needed. But that also proves hard to locate. Again, we ask help in the streets and scrape into the doors of a vast converted educational building with seconds to spare. Mami shows us three large venues, many artist studios and community spaces and a glorious untouched schoolroom which I crave as our possible venue, schoolrooms being entirely appropriate for the Brontës and for Hearn.

She tells us about possible funding sources – fellowships – we might apply for and offers any assistance for the future.

That same evening, Stacey meets with Keiko Yamaguchi performer and associate artist of Kyoto Arts Centre, then proceeds to a Butoh workshop with Ima Tenko at her studio. She (Stacey) is the first to brave the Kyoto underground.

Wednesday 24 May – KYOTO

Get up early enough to walk through Imperial Gardens (where we are mobbed with delightful politeness by school children conducting foreigner surveys) to Doshisha Women’s College and our key host for the trip: Juliet Winters-Carpenter. We take lunch and discuss our project with her, and with her guests Sensei Natsumi Wakamoto, Chair of the College, and performer and director of the college Shakespeare course and production, Tim Medlock.

Tim has eased in The Winter’s Tale as his current play of choice for the students, which leads to a happy discussion about the penalties of ignoring the redemptive second generational aspects of the story, as with Wuthering Heights.

All are keen to assist in any way they can with links to students and professionals in Japan.

Thursday 25 May – KOBE / KYOTO

We meet with Hiroko Okamoto – our translator supplied by Juliet – at Kyoto Station Main Gate, Karasuma side, and take a train to Kobe where we meet with calligrapher Misuzu Kosaka for a very long Japanese lunch in our own (business) restaurant room. She is in kimono, and looks and is as we imagined her: of another, floating world.

The three-way flow through an interpreter, and the intensely exciting moments when we connect directly without, though body language, is fascinating. Hiroko does an amazingly heroic job of transmuting my intense answers to Misuzu’s intense questions and we part hoping we can share the project together in the UK as well as Japan.

Misuzu has removed her ink box during the talking and makes Kanji (“things”) in a small and lovely book, which she passes on to me. I promise to send her words, via Hiroko, to make into Kanji when I begin to make the show text and seek further funding.

That evening at the Kyoto Butoh-Kan we watch a performance of Hisoku by Ima Tenko. It has an intimacy and power, packed into the tiny preserved grain store venue, that we have never witnessed before. Our photographer starts to read about Butoh and its connections with landscape….

Friday 26 May – KYOTO

Fushimi Inari Shinto Shrine with Florentyna Leow, of Walk Japan, our mentor, adviser and now friend in Japan. 8am.

“As it is late May, I think it should be less peopled than usual, and in my experience most visitors tend to only walk the first 200 metres before turning back. The view is best halfway up the hill”.

Florentyna has suggested and negotiated a trek for me with her company-with-an-environmental-conscience which amounts to a financial contribution to our chosen trip extension.

Saturday 27 May – TOKYO

Lunch with Alexandra Rutter, director of Whole Hog Theatre who went to Japan on a Daiwa scholarship and seems to be staying.

A mine of information about theatre possibilities and Anglo-Japanese exchanges.

Sunday 28 May – YOKOHAMA

Stacey – Butoh workshop with Yoshito Ohno 13.00 – 15.30, with Simon spectating.

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Thoughts after walking round Osorezan (Shimokita peninsula)
It would be hard not to be moved coming here and walking among small piles of stones along the riverbed  (Sai no Kawara), placed there by dead children trying to get across the river to the other side. Through the night, under the protection of Jizo, part Shinto Deity, adopted popular bodhisattva of Japanese Buddhism, the souls of children rebuild these whilst evil demons try and knock them back down.  Surrounding their stones, parents of dead children lay offerings of food & drink, and toys are left in the Octagon Shrine.

Emotionally and imaginatively it is hard to detach from the belief that souls could be trapped here and that many are repeatedly travelling from another world into the present and back again.  This reminds me of one of the principles of a recent Butoh workshop in which I was instructed to always be aware of the past and of looking behind: north, east, south, west.

Here, remembering the past is more connected to nurturing living beings than simply leaving respectful gestures like flowers. For example toys, food/drink and shoes/cloths are left for the souls to use and consume.

It’s this  kind of respect and care for their child’s soul, the child ghost, that makes me feel a connection between this earth we experience and that which we experience when one sense of us is lost (a literal sense such as hearing, sight or a person who you feel made up so much of who you are now).  Here, the souls of these children feel very much present and in places like Tono (another region of Tohuko celebrated for its folk beliefs, that we visited a couple of days later) a child ghost plays a pivotal role in a house, helping to preserve and maintain the home.

Trying to Sleep
Genuinely the lights flicker as I am writing this and I hear something or someone bang. It all feels unnerving. It might be just the people in the next room settling in. Maybe there are too many souls trapped outside our window, maybe my imagination is running wild, maybe the children are.  With no one to reason with, I silence myself as I attempt to fall asleep (or so I thought).

‘Let me go, if you want me to let you in!’ The fingers relaxed, I snatched mine through the hole, hurriedly piled the books up in a pyramid against it, and stopped my ears to exclude the lamentable prayer. I seemed to keep them closed above a quarter of an hour; yet, the instant I listened again, there was the doleful cry moaning on! ‘Begone!’ I shouted. ‘I’ll never let you in, not if you beg for twenty years.’ ‘It is twenty years,’ mourned the voice: ‘twenty years. I’ve been a waif for twenty years!’  (Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Chapter 3)

        Maybe I should slide back the shutters and let them in.

I’m all too aware of the feeling that although there   is no one with me to speak to, I’m not alone.

Waking
Its morning now as I finish this entry and in the night I woke once again to the sounds of something or someone banging a constant rhythm.  Only I can’t grasp if it’s in this world or in my dreams (it could always be a place in between).

On the shore of Lake Usori, Osorezan

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Speaking of religious landscapes (see my first blog) there can be few more striking than Fushimi Inari on the edge of Kyoto. This is a ‘No.1 attraction in Japan’ sort of place with hordes of visitors, but as it is open all the time we managed to get there at 8am before the crowds. The main Shinto shrine sits at the foot of Mt Inari (233 metres/765 feet) and is dedicated to Inari, the god of rice. However since rice was the original currency in Japan he is also god of commerce and prosperity generally. The 10,000 Torii that form a vermilion avenue to the summit have been subscribed by companies, institutions and wealthy individuals. To walk up the mountain along this route is an extraordinary experience.

Half way up the line of Torii gives way momentarily to reveal a panoramic view of Kyoto, but the summit itself is given over completely to a cafe and gift shop complex, surrounded by the dense cedar woodland that covers the whole mountain.

Tea house on way to summit

Much of Mt Inari is owned by the shrine, but not all of it, and many of the extremely welcome tea houses and other enterprises are owner occupied, adding to the mountain’s air of informality. Numerous ‘desire line’ paths lead off the main route, most terminating at small satellite shrines of greater or lesser importance within the mysteries of Shintoism.

A 1997 paper by Karen A. Smyers [citation needed] stresses the individual nature of pilgrimages to Fushimi Inari. The shrine offers many opportunities for worship, but there is no established rule for the various austerities and purifications that people come to practice. A visitor may stay for the day, or for several weeks, but the idea of collective worship is largely absent here.

From the landscape point of view how do you interpret a site like this whose purpose is entirely religious? In Prospect-Refuge terms (see my first blog) you could say that the multiple shrines, semi-enclosed walkway and ‘concealed ‘ summit produce a landscape completely given over to the idea of Refuge. The shelter offered naturally by the woodland is reduplicated and reinforced by the protecting arches of the constructed avenue and the enclosures of the wayside shrines. The mountain cocoons its human visitors, allowing them a single Prospect of the great world beyond (from the viewing platform) before taking them back under her wing.

It’s also worth pointing out that Mt Inari provides an immersive pilgrimage experience without the need to reach a linear goal, unlike (say) the Camino de Santiago in Spain. You climb and descend the mountain, but all points on the trail offer equivalent possibilities for worship and contemplation.

Nature coexists with the constant stream of visitors and pilgrims. Although the foxes are made of stone (Inari’s messengers), there are wild boars to beware of, large nocturnal spiders and myriad birds of the forest.

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A tea ceremony soon rooted me in Kyoto  and I find a new love for macha tea, perfect for a long day of meetings and workshops.

We sure needed it as we paced through misinterpreted (by me) Google map directions. But we find the Kyoto Arts Centre after a bit and albeit flustered, we are again greeted with the coolest of welcomes, namely a cup of chilled green tea.

The Arts Centre, housed in an elegant old elementary school, offers free space to artists for rehearsals as well as providing performance and installation/gallery spaces. We are taken into a couple of studio spaces and whilst each could house what could be our performance/installation, it is a classroom that captures the imagination. It remains as if untouched since a child placed their chair under a desk for the last time. I notice the chalky residue of many lessons past on the black chalk board… ghostlike and yet if you were to brush water on the surface it would be as reflective as calligraphy ink and as alluring/frightful as the blackened teeth of a Butoh dancer (this is known as Ohaguro).

Keeping within the ethos of what I believe teaching (and indeed creative processes) to be, KAC appear:

Open (with their spaces and ideas)
Supportive (to artists and young people in the community)
Aware (of preserving the building and being progressive)

It is a home for artists in training, artists making and the community in which the building itself resides. While I wait in the KAC cafe for a meeting with performer/artist Keiko Yamaguchi, I look around and see local residents coming in for late afternoon cake; such as an old couple, leaning on each other in support as they walk forwards towards many sweet treats (they look at me equally engaged and with the act of a simple nod, I feel that they accept me in their space). The gesture allows us to acknowledge each other whilst not having to enter into superfluous dialogue. Small, simple, significant.

Maple tree shadow, KAC

When Keiko arrives to meet me prior to her rehearsal she expresses the role that the KAC plays for artists here as it provides the space to experiment, explore and perform work that is difficult to access in a city like Tokyo. She gives me insight into what it is to be an artist here and we find commonalities, discuss differences, share experiences and connect though describing our projects. Keiko has already opened up new experiences to me, having recommended I work with and see Butoh dancer Ima Tenko, clearly proud of the cultural heritage of Kyoto. She tells me that Kyoto prides itself on preserving the culture of Japan and community plays a large part in this and its growth. I’d be proud too if I was part of the culture here. I want to know and experience more than our 16 days allows. However, although it’s only been 5 days, I feel so grateful that my creative community is growing in a country that I might have never explored without this project – without recognising myself in relation to such an incredible “other”.

We part at the subway station as she directs me to my workshop with Ima Tenko and we don’t close with goodbye but with a sort of “see you later”…maybe this week…maybe in years to come in a studio.

I had planned to get a taxi from my meeting to the Butoh workshop but Keiko insists that the tube is a much better idea (internally I sigh, panic, stress) but she is clear and I turn off google maps, trusting her direction. Three stops on from our “see you later”, past the ‘Daily Shop’, taking the first right, I come across a written paper trail of instructions attached to walls in the backstreets, leading me to the door of Ima Tenko’s studio. She stands and welcomes me with such a joyous, mischievous smile. I know immediately that the the next two hours will go too fast.

The workshop starts making one-to-one physical contact and I know that although I didn’t know where to go this morning, tonight I couldn’t be less lost in this space. An experience that can never be repeated. I had the opportunity to use my “beginners body” and experience my first ghost walk (originating from Noh theatre ) ..moving forwards with an eye on what has gone before.

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Arriving at Izumo Taisha Shrine from Matsue I was struck by how nature is regarded by those around me and their awareness of space, each individual moving within their own sphere.  They are uninterrupted except when I stand and get in the way, too busy looking at the considered aspects of every day objects, like sculpted birds on a stainless steel water pipe.  I walk down the path to a small pond, still thinking too about the image of stillness and solidarity I felt the night before in my first experience of an onsen.

“Go at the pace of the place that you are in”, Judith tells me and it’s a good reminder that although we have a full itinerary, we don’t have to race to complete it.  Slowing down, each moment has the capacity to contain more and I adapt to the slower pace of the movements of those around us – each one performed like a scored gesture.  I observe a young boy looking into a pond full of coy carp big enough to swallow him whole, a group of children trying to buy sushi with too little change, and find the space to experience  being moved body and soul after bowing twice, clapping four times, bowing twice again.

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Often working from a place of tiredness can reap as many rewards as being full of energy exploding aimlessly in a space

Shuffling through immigration at Narita airport, I felt exhausted but accepting of what the still long journey had to bring. I knew that we had another 8 hours to travel – however for once, that fateful “are we nearly there yet” didn’t enter my mind…more like, “can we lose more of a sense of time?” …Taking in the views from our four connecting trains whilst falling in and out of sleep, waking to new worlds contained in each rice field accompanied by shrines overlooking the growth of plentiful new crops. All close to homes up until now I have only ever experienced in pictures and movies… Japanese of course.

We arrive, thanks to a kind employee at Narita JR station who booked us all seats on our four connecting trains, labelling in the corners of each ticket the order we should take. I’m happy for this order and assertiveness he showed when we very politely said “we will be fine”. I think he saw through our English reserve and quite rightly made us submit and take help.

We accept the tiredness, the assistance, following those who have been here before – like the two ladies we meet who hear our accents and so clearly want to initiate discussion as they turn round too many times to count. All of these our choices. However, when arriving at our destination, Matsue, we had to accept that we were in a place even the Japanese deem a far away place (or so the young man at tonight’s sushi bar told us as he translated our requests to the chef) where we have a lack of the ability to communicate via spoken language and even physically there are evident ways in which we hold ourselves and gesture.

After a more complicated than planned arrival at Hotel Gyokusen we enter our traditional tatami room and at the midnight snack bar a cheerful woman shares her choice of meal. This was also a great opportunity to learn how to pronounce our first key words, sitting in our Kimonos. Repeat, respond, repeat, respond, all words of polite exchanges that will help us in the conversations to come. I feel I have arrived.

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Both had a superb renaissance recently and both look to celebrate Ireland in the future, to name but two things in common. Lafcadio’s and Emily’s Celtic heritages have profound mutual resonances – though he liked her sister’s Villette far more than Wuthering Heights. He excuses this – though it needs no excuse – by saying he shared the same experiences of a French lycee education. In fact, his biography has an uncanny resemblance to Lucy Snowe’s, Jane Eyre’s and Charlotte’s: locked in a dark room as a child – acute short-sightedness and physical self-consciousness – compulsive desire for travel.

The museums might also share this project in common. Hearn and his vision of the east needs a voice in the west and Emily’s genius needs a voice in the east (west of where, east of where, exactly? where is the line drawn on a globe?)

Einstein was influenced by Hearn. Hearn by Japanese art and culture. Between the two is quantum mechanics, say I – the first bit of universal science that made sense to me – and what Einstein grumpily called “spooky action at a distance”: science in a form that shares more with the mirroring of mythology and poetry than most branches of the scientific edifice.

“As certain as colour / Passes from the petal/ Irrevocable as flesh / The gazing eye falls through the world.”

Ono No Komachi, waka poet (f)

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We went to the castle and left our shoes at the bottom of the tower. Matsue-jo is a wooden tower on a hill nesting over the town. Around it is a moat full of turtles as overfed as ducks are in Ilkley. Its floors and stairs are polished like glass with the feet of centuries, but I find my own splinter. Outside, three Samurai, a Geisha and a ninja pose for photos.  A raptor hovers. The swallows are busy and there’s a rainbow halo round the sun. Stacey wanders round the hill and finds a path down the Lafcadio Hearn / Koizumi Yakumo Memorial Museum side of town where there’s still a line of Samurai houses running along the woods. We follow it and find his favourite temple. His personal temple, guarded by foxes, messengers of the gods. Jozan-Inari-jinja Shinto Shrine.

There’s a tiny green dragon looking after the hand washing trough. Fantastic Creatures and where to find them…

The foxes have many children. There’s the same warmth of humanity about this as there was at Izumo Taisha Grand Shrine, and somehow the reduced scale of a like shrine complex pleases even more. It has a personality modest and momentous at once. The smaller something is, the better – as Koizumi Shoko later says, showing us the museum’s exquisite compactness?

And it’s the same with Lafcadio Hearn’s family home below:

Do houses make great writers, or writers make great houses?

Even more mysteriously: when half of his home has been taken away – as a private semi – why is it still so exquisitely magical? Does a ghostly mirror exist down the centre to double its impact? The mirror of souls? It moves me as much as the temples do.

Our houses are our teachers. I think I read that somewhere, in an essay about Japan.

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It’s red – the hat – and must have felt hot on Saturday. Every day gets hotter. We don’t have time to travel up and down the Ichibata Railway Company’s Electric Line, that potters between the paddy fields and stone-eyed shrines, to sample all the onsen and hot spring footbaths that pepper the route. But we do stumble, weary, into the Footbath of our Lady of the Woolly Hat in Matsue.

Every new pilgrim groans in shock and delight at the heat of the water. Blood heat from Mother Earth. As we’re about to depart, reluctantly, one man paddles out and walks onto the stone in front of the goddess. Hunkers like a frog. With a tiny bamboo scoop that lies there, he scoops up water and bathes her tiny stone feet. She’s been standing there some time. Much time. Beyond time. Her feet must really ache. Someone has to think of her comfort and ease. Our feet are reborn. Good for miles yet.

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There is always a moment when we lose it. And then a guardian angel materialises. There was a man in Zurich in a white van outside our Manchester plane who whisked the three of us with luggage to the waiting airbus to Tokyo Narida.  Now he’s appeared as a man of Japan in a suit who stops me crossing the line to go the wrong way, and directs us to the place we should be.

When we get there it’s emotional. People worship here. They visit and worship like homing swallows. As we might visit and picnic. It is so simple and so moving and so easy to learn we worship too. Wait. Move onward in your turn. Make an offering. Bow. Clap 4 times for Amaterasu. Bow. Retreat. And feel heartache for something we’ve lost that this nation hasn’t. It’s communal heart perhaps. It’s deep connection to the earth.

Most moving of all, the temple and all its offspring exist here, living and breathing in wood and tatami, bamboo and rope because here is an achingly beautiful site. A walkway as long as Stowe House from horizon the horizon, but without Capability Brown’s earth movers.

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The ‘8 Sceneries of Ohmi’ and ’36 Sceneries of Mt Fuji’ are wonderful things, but show a concern with establishing a hierarchy of beautiful scenes not unlike the slightly earlier (mid-18th century) attempts by William Gilpin in England to codify ‘The Picturesque’.

We returned to our accommodation along a verdant riverside walk free from rubbish, dogs or blemish, that turned out to be in a Beautification Enforcement Area, with drastic penalties for anyone littering, ‘regardless of nationality or status’.

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We sit in the middle, on a magic carpet, watching Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, eyeless over Europe, Russia, Mongolia and North Korea until sunrise and the Alps of Honshu, still snowy. Or was that Hokkaido? Mountains of the moon? No one revealed. And yet, when we are finally able to see outside, they are open to the sun’s burning eye and to our gaze and are glorious.

We have planned and planned, but Japan has done its own planning, quietly, minutely and inscrutably. What we thought was just a large hotel just outside Matsue with “Japanese- style rooms”, should you choose them, is in fact our first-born day of breath and instant immersion in Japan-ness.

They speak no English, we only sometimes remember six words of Japanese, and it cannot matter less. Suddenly, we have to immerse ourselves, breathe and live in an environment needing language as fish need gills, in spite of jet-lagged light-headedness, tried by a terrifying late connection in Zurich (heart of western precision) and exercised by 8 minute connections on four Honshu trains which are truly precise in a very real way. And also send us spinning through time, back into the past. (It is a delicious fact that among all the other men of ideas Hearn influenced and inspired to come to Japan, Albert Einstein was one. but I have hurtled into the future now: that is tomorrow, Day Three, day of magic and wonder at the Lafcadio Hearn Museum and Home).

For now we ride straight though time and connections and find our bumpy Koizumi Line from south to north, from conurbation to rural life and Matsue. Nothing is ever going to be simple here. Train number 4 is a ghost train, or a space ship, blinking in and out of the darkness along a route of great-limestone industry, tunnels and tiny Shinto shrines in village gardens, with flag irises and white egrets, concrete river banks and wild gorges. It takes us to a place where we enter a parallel universe.

The hotel shuttle never appears at our station but declares it was there. Because, it later transpires, three stations are recognised as “Matsue” – ghosts of each other, as elusive as Japanese identity, lost through an endless changing of names and the perfect camouflage of a language based on clouds and streams and sunsets.
The hotel spirits give no clear sign regarding which station we should have arrived at, but greet our taxi with smiling calm. We sign papers, hand over our passports, are told to wait.

Then a lovely man and kimono’d lady take us courteously to our destiny: our own room of old Japan where we must live its way. Simply. And cluttered with stuff, the unbearable luggage of being, we blunder into a brave new world.

Midnight chopsticks, the sweet, smiling lady at the bar whose meal we copy, the men laying out our soft beds on yielding tatami mats across our day world. The onsen where the room of scrub-up is even more wonderful than the baths themselves, except for that still moment when all the women in the outside space are still and silent at once and the voices of the water speak. In these voices of the spirits now much amused and kindly, we are stripped naked and begin to learn to walk a new way.

Day Three will be our own Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: the swallows and frogs and ravens, trees and stones and herons and healing books of Koizumi Yakumo – the man with two names and many countries who found his place here and opened a way between two cultures, two houses both alike in dignity, fierce in war.

“All things are better when they are smaller” Shoko Koizumi will say as she takes us round the superb new exhibitions of the museum.

Today, our second day in a new world, the inn’s small onsen is for a few moments a great ocean of peace, innocent of all language but the sound of water.

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Cotton grass, Haworth Moor, May 2017

I like to think I inherited a love of landscape from my mother, who came to England from South Africa in her twenties and completely fell for the lush greenness of the Cotswolds and the Lake District. I suspect she had an experience similar to Sylvia Plath visiting Haworth Moor in her twenties and writing home to her mother in America:

How can I tell you how wonderful it is. Imagine yourself on top of the world, with all the purplish hills curving away […] black walls of stone, clear streams from which we drank; and, at last, a lonely, deserted black–stone house, broken down, clinging to the windy side of a hill.

One tends to be reticent about maternal influence in these matters, so it has been very interesting to read Augustin Berque’s Nature, Artifice and Japanese Culture (1993) and its matter-of-fact identification of landscape with nostalgia for the womb. The author points out how metaphors of envelopment run through countless Japanese essays on landscape, and how the Japanese garden makes great play of curvature, hollows and nestling. The mountain (as maternal bosom) is brought into the garden by the arrangement of stones and viewpoints, and it seems to be the depths, the shadows that remain favoured spaces. Proof of this trait in the Japanese character can apparently be found in the mass internal migration that takes place at the annual commemoration of the dead, and at New Year, when tens of millions return ‘home’ to the sato from the city, many of them travelling on special kisei ressha (‘returning home’) trains.

We shall see whether this theory is borne out by our explorations, but there is undoubtedly a different attitude to nature in Japan.

 Western ideas of landscape were fundamentally changed by the Romantic revolution from the 1790s onwards, but it looks as though in Japan an unbroken tradition of landscape appreciation goes back to the 10^th or 11^th century and continues today. The dichotomy can perhaps be explained by religion: Christianity has generally been suspicious of nature; with notable exceptions like St Augustine and Hildegard of Bingen it has been considered pagan, something for humans to overcome in their pursuit of a kingdom ‘not of this world’. At the same time the wilderness was feared and deplored as genuinely dangerous and hostile.

The Romantics turned all that on its head: nature became a source of wisdom and nourishment in itself, and insofar as nature is ‘something we have lost’ since the industrial revolution this has made it even more a touchstone for modern urban populations, whilst they continue to destroy this same nature in pursuit of progress and civilization.

So for us in the West nature is a contested area, with ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, ‘city’ and ‘country’ being terms in continual debate. An approach to ‘landscape’ can take varied forms, and once you add the ingredient of landscape art the whole topic can become quite a challenge. Malcolm Andrews, at the beginning of Landscape and Western Art problematises the subject quite well:

A landscape, cultivated or wild, is already artifice before it has become the subject of a work of art. Even when we simply look we are already shaping and interpreting.

 As an exercise I listed some different headings under which landscape can be discussed. There are:

Cultural landscapes, such as Haworth Moor with its deeply rooted Brontë connections and the Lake District landscapes minutely described by William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Places and milieux undergo a change of state once they have been written about, or incorporated into imaginative work because they accrue successive layers of meaning and significance from the creative visitors who follow in the footsteps of the first ones. A landscape like Haworth Moor is being continually re-imagined. And even the poet Basho, establishing a great poetic tradition in 17^th century Japan, made a point of visiting already iconic places on his travels to see if they lived up to their reputations.

Political landscapes, in the sense that nothing really happens to the land without an economic imperative and political motivation. The 18^th and 19^th century parkland landscape, as pioneered by Capability Brown, is now the popular style but originates in agricultural improvement:

Brown and Repton worked to make the country estate sit within its grounds as if within a natural arcadia. …the fashion now was to join the house to its surroundings as if in a seamless continuity with the natural. The aggressive work of enclosing common fields and extending a capitalist network of property relations across the countryside was thus masked by the illusion of non-capitalist, non-exploitative integration with the natural, an aesthetic form of the scientific understanding of nature which lay at the base of improving economic yields. Greek and Roman and British motifs were consciously mixed into the production of environments that sublimated the economic reality which funded their construction.

Amanda Gilroy, Green and Pleasant Land – English Culture and the Romantic Countryside 2004

Artistic landscapes.

I like this pen & ink sketch by John Constable (c.1830) because it’s got the energy I find in moving image work, and because it’s not abstract yet wholly to do with wind and weather. And somehow oriental…. Since the Romantic movement artists have staked a claim to the land, and nowhere is this expressed more directly than in the painter Paul Nash’s biographical memoir Outline (1949):

As I began to draw, I warmed to my task. For the first time, perhaps, I was tasting fully the savour of my own pursuit. The life of a landscape painter. What better life could there be – to work in the open air, to go hunting far afield over the wild country, to get my living out of the land as much as my ancestors ever had done

Evolutionary landscapes. Prominent among approaches to landscape is Jay Appleton’s Prospect-Refuge theory of landscape appreciation (The Experience of Landscape, 1975). Taking a Darwinian view, he made the original claim that modern humans have an intrinsic predisposition towards open views because of primitive, hunter-gatherer survival instincts for vantage and shelter, which have evolved into feelings of pleasure when we view a scene that would provide a good habitat if we had to depend on it. Working with Prof Appleton I made his theory the subject of the exhibition Landscape as sign language that has toured in England and Scotland since 2014.

Ecological landscapes. Whether evolutionary or political, there is an assumption that countryside, landscape and landscape art feeds us – it is always anthropocentric. The writer Robert Macfarlane for example takes a very literary approach to landscape, perhaps really offering a psychology of landscape appreciation, skirting round problems of habitat loss etc in favour of the idea that landscape sustains us, and that epiphanies can be found in micro-encounters with the land as well as in unlikely survivals from past.

But more radical environmental approaches stress the autonomy and independence of biodiverse areas – mankind is an intrusion. The world doesn’t need us to keep itself going. It wasn’t made for us, we are merely one element of the ecosphere, and if we can support nature’s suppleness and resilience then all is well. But in practice we have upset the balance. Landscape is not about looking at views.

Philosophical landscapes. This is where my belated discovery of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology seems interesting. He stresses our ‘being caught up in the fabric of the world’. We are woven into what we call our ‘surroundings’ but which are in fact our conditions for survival. This shift of emphasis has led to an artistic trend away from representations and images of landscape to the idea of ‘landscaping’ as a practice – where performance, land art, artistic walking are all rooted in a physical relationship with the land.

Religious landscapes. In terms of natural heritage, Japan has destroyed its environment every bit as much as other countries, particularly in the years of the economic miracle. And it has been particularly prone to natural and industrial disasters. But underlying attitudes seem different. The persistence of Shintoism produces a view of nature as an active, sacred realm with a constant to-ing and fro-ing between the human, natural and supernatural. The gods are immanent. For example rice growing is the ecological foundation of the civilization, so the transplanting of rice into the paddy fields has been considered a sacred act. Mountain gods come down in spring to be gods of the paddy field, and then go back to the mountains, and their shrines are moved accordingly.

The wilderness has been particularly sacred, with uncultivated areas (neither forest nor mountain) chosen as the sites of games held to re-establish contact with nature in its infancy. The idea of the Japanese garden is rooted in the sacredness of wilderness and in the earliest times the garden is the place where rites brought together religion and government.

Above all perhaps, Nature in Japan is seen as refuge. It succours those in distress, and from the oldest Japanese poems in 8^th century it has been depicted in familiar terms as a friend and companion. This is not only the antithesis of the Christian tradition, but also of the secular Romantic tradition where nature contends with culture, or with the political status quo, or with human nature itself. Despite the huge influence of Western ideas since 1860, landscape in Japan seems somehow to be beyond dispute.

I am indebted to Augustin Berque’s book (above) for many of these later ideas, and it remains to be seen if our visit will bear any of them out.

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Above our farm (Whitestone Arts Research Centre) signposts on Haworth Moor are in English and Japanese…..

Like the hapless main character in Koizumi Yakumo (Lafcadio Hearn)’s translated story fragment In a Cup of Tea, (adapted for the 1965 Kwaidan film by Masaki Kobayashi), dreaming Lockwood swallows a soul right at the beginning of Emily Brontë’s stand-alone novel of unique genius, Wuthering Heights.

I’ve long wanted to find a way in to Lockwood’s extra-ordinary journey through the book and make it the main focus for a reinterpretation. I’ve dreamed (since I first came to live near Haworth Moor in the 1980s) of making a cross-art form exploration of Wuthering Heights that escapes the dominant and actually non-existent romantic/sexual relationship of its other two main protagonists much favoured by dramatists and readers alike.

Japan’s ghost tradition, physical performance and calligraphy traditions and Shinto instincts for the sanctity of landscape have unexpectedly revealed themselves as my beautifully adorned Torii (鳥居, literally ‘bird abodes’) into the novel: gateways for flights into unknown space.

The book will always evade every individual reading. Emily herself, maker of the text that carves the grass and flesh, brook, stone and narratives for us to tread among, remains dumb as the wind; yet she wrote it for our exploration, perhaps even for her own. As we journey around her imaginary landscape built from supple and operatic language, our compass needle will point, always, to Cathy’s ghost. She speaks of, and shows us, things other than the visible or readable, other than the actions described by all the other narrators, and it is poor Lockwood alone who has seen her – touched her – swallowed her. He’s haunted right from the start, like the victim of a vampire, and has become, for me, our true, though unwitting, guide out of cultural ignorance into a glimpse of Emily’s private and primal universe. In much the same way Lafcadio Hearn, splitting himself in two to become half Japanese by deliberately swallowing the soul of another culture, is our best, though imperfect, guide to the ghost world of early Japan (with much help from his Japanese wife’s acting out).

Wuthering Heights is not a book about “true romance” or unrealistic expectations or the need to grow up, choose and choose ‘wisely”. Nor is it a fantastical escape into gothic indulgence. It is a uniquely heretical book about identity, a woman’s identity, riven in two by loss and contradiction and a sense of the birth of her artistic genius being disallowed and invalidated by religion, society and culture because she is “other”. Female. Not in god’s image like Adam, yet “childishly” playing god when women should always be ghosts in the shadows: even – or especially – ghosts in their own houses. Home is where woman hides and bleeds and the homely becomes a thing of male terror. As Tanizaki points out, nervously: “our ancestors made of women an object inseparable from darkness” (In Praise of Shadows).

In that matter at least, East and West share very common ground, to the great detriment of a woman’s right not just for equality, but for existence itself in a world designed by a male god and his lookalikes.

Emotional tsunamis, earthquakes and terrible wars beat across Emily’s fictional moors, as actual terrors have torn and beaten Japan. Like dark matter from black holes or rent volcanoes, the landscape seems to emerge out of the fissures of this human strife in speeded astronomical / geological time. The identities of the characters, split between conscious and unconscious, birth ghostly selves to people it. The dead walk, most of them lost women and children, as the ghosts of Japan do, among the living: in broad daylight and outside our dreams. There is a unique nesting circularity (‘bird abodes’?) about the narratives in Wuthering Heights, circles within circles making a precise galaxy of its own. Cathy and her ghostchild alone take us on a quantum journey, reaching through this spacetime and across matter (like the spooky action at a distance of quantum particles) so the narrative collapses through itself, like a dying star.

(Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris has the same ideas of human actions and dreams as sources both of narrative and fleshly matter. That book, too, seems cursed with a romantic reading – see notes below).

Emily Brontë lives still in her haunted house. Two haunted houses, if we listen to her great admirer and namesake, Emily Dickinson: “One need not be a chamber to be haunted,/One need not be a house;/The brain has corridors surpassing/Material place”.

Wuthering Heights is a book about freedom from prison – the Palaces of Instruction – release not only from the tyranny of male culture, but from fecund nature too. It may well be a book, ironically, about not writing a book at all, about staying alive only if freedom to be true to one’s self, and one’s other self – to be and not do – is bestowed. Otherwise, better to die. One critic has suggested it is Emily Bronte’s suicide note. That can’t be biographically proved, but the narrative does have the detached imperiousness of a wrathful deity, a Child Genii who observes all, aloof. It is also propelled (literally) and self-haunted by the buried rage and grief of that same child abandoned, looking on, helpless; a child who is angry, and terrified of that anger: what it might be capable of, when the lost, dearest embrace can never return to hold her, and she, like all of us in the end “lies alone”.

The book is a unique alchemical collision of life and death in a crucible of ruthless energy. I would say passion, but the word’s been degraded to mean childish temper, sexual love (something Cathy herself would in the end identify as “sickly”) or religious fanaticism (something even Nelly ruffles her feathers over). Sex (loving or not), like war and religion, is a serial killer of women in the book, and in Emily’s world and in our world, still.

To explore this, I have decided that the islanded world of Wuthering Heights has a twin in that Gondal for “Grown-ups”, an archipelago that Childe Emily spookily locates in the North Pacific: In Ghostly Japan.

We are making a piece about the northern hemisphere’s twinned cultures, twinned houses and twinned psyches (one ‘real’, one ‘imaginary’). Childe Lockwood (the only other character in the book, apart from Heathcliff, with a single name), like Childe Hearn, is put out upon the moor to live or die in a culture wholly “other”. We journey with them. Surely they, not Cathy and Heathcliff, are our alter egos.

East and West – separate or together? – forever divided or uncanny attendant ghosts to each others’ identities?
Time to clutch our compasses and walk ‘where our own natures would be leading’. Both here – and there.

Traveller in the Snow by Takahashi Hiroaki

Notes:

Victoria Nelson: The Secret Life of Puppets:
...the classic post-Colonialist argument: if the western imagination does no more than project its own psychic Terra Incognita onto the rest of the Earth, then we correctly regard such accounts of these regions as portraits of an alter ego, not an alter orbis. The colonialist’s psycho-topographic presumption is to seek the Other and find only his own reflection. Solaris presents the exquisite joke that, for once, rejected contents of the psyche are projected onto an Other who is having none of it and – to the total psychological undoing of the projectors – reflects these contents right back to them….Solaris is found to contain, Chinese-box like, its own alter orbis………the two polar fundamental principles of the universe are form as the light principle, coming from above, and matter as the dark principle, dwelling on earth…In the middle, the sphere of the sun, where these opposing principles just counterbalance each other, there is engendered in the mystery of the chymic wedding, the infans Solaris, which is at the same time Great Child and the liberated world-soul.” 

Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo): In Yokohama, Out of the East:
I began to think the unthinkable. That the ghost in each one of us must have passed through the burning of a million suns, must survive the awful vanishing of countless future universes. Eternally the swarms of suns and worlds are born; eternally they die. And after each tremendous integration the flaming spheres cool down and ripen into life; life ripens into thought. May not Memory somehow, somewhere, also survive? As infinite vision. Remembrance of the future in the past. Dreams of all that has been and can ever be are being perpetually dreamed.

 Cathy Earnshaw, Wuthering Heights pg 79
“I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.”

The post The possible consequences of swallowing a soul… Wuthering Heights In a Cup of Tea? JA. 4/5/17 appeared first on Whitestone Arts.

A month ago I felt lucky to have happened across the Butoh workshop with Yoshiko Ohno at the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio, especially as it is running on our last day altogether in Tokyo.  I feel this workshop will provide the “other”  to my learnt/experienced practice and be a gateway into another way in which to physically interpret the experiences to come as we head North into rural Japanese landscape.

A few weeks on and another gate has opened as the connections that we have made in Kyoto so kindly and generously offer their suggestions of additional places,  workshops and artists we should meet.  Already I get a strong sense of a rich community of artists in Kyoto who are open to sharing their experience and resources.  This mirrors my relationship to collaboration and how I first encountered working at Whitestone Arts.

Keiko Yamaguchi, an actor and director based in Kyoto we are meeting with at Kyoto Arts Centre recommended that I see Ima Tenko, Butoh Dancer, Choreographer, Butoh Company Kiraza Artistic Director, Director of Ima Tenko Butoh Studio.  So, we have booked to see Ima Tenko’s performance of Hisoku at the Kyoto Butoh-kan: 

“Kyoto Butoh-kan is devoted to showing authentic Japanese Butoh every week as a special project to share the depth of this unique dance. Performances are in a resonant traditional Japanese building dating from 1862.With only eight seats per show, this is an intimate and unforgettable experience of true Butoh dance in the ancient capital of Kyoto. We feature Butoh veterans Ima Tenko and Yurabe Masami in two unforgettable works…”  (www.butohkan.jp/p_01.html)

Not one to not miss the possibility of attending a workshop in the first week of the trip, I found that Ima Tenko is running a workshop at her studio,   Ima Tenko Butoh Studio and despite our itinerary making the most of each day, the time allows for me to also attend her 2 hour class.   Therefore, my gateway into another way to experience performance and landscape will come earlier than first planned….who likes a first plan anyway, especially when you read phrases such as this in her biography:

“Her activities are wide-ranging, and she is involved in creating a haunted house for children, additionally creating rural theatre and community-based art projects”. 

Ima Tenko 

A founding member of Byakkosha—one of the most acclaimed Butoh groups, performing with distinct recognition both abroad and locally. She also designed and produced costumes for them. With their breakup in 1994, she became an independent dancer. In 2000, she started her own dance workshops and created the Butoh company Kiraza.  Through the exploration of the avant-garde form of Butoh, supported by the Shinto practice of Tamafuri, “reinvigorating the soul,” a practice seen at the heart of Japanese performing arts, Ima Tenko explores the frontiers of her own art and self. As an inheritor of Butoh, Ima Tenko uses Kyoto as a base to breathe new life and vigor into the form.

In 2005, her company conducted a tour of Europe, performing in Spain, France, and Germany, receiving success and acclaim in each country.

Every year since 2007, they have been performing to sold-out houses at the historical Gojo Kaikan Theatre in Kyoto. In 2012 and 2013, they also were chosen to perform in the National Arts Festival, sponsored by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan.

At the Culture Venture Competition in Kyoto 2010, her work was headlined in the Kyoto Newspaper as “In traditional Japanese theatre, Butoh performance brings fresh poetry to Kyoto City!” and was awarded the Kyoto Newspaper Prize.  She is a board member of the the “Question of Butoh” forum, producing and giving workshops and lectures in 2015 and 2016.

Limited not to just performing, in recent years she has been nurturing and coaching the next generation of Butoh dancers, producing many performers from her studio in Kyoto.

“This earthen storehouse—the Butoh-kan, survived the upheavals of 150 years ago, escaping pristine from the fires of the riots as if it were sacred ground protected by the divinity of water. Following the aspirations of this generation, I would like to present Butoh which offers the pure bright energy of water—the great source of all life and healer of beings.”

Links:

http://www.kazuoohnodancestudio.com/english/

http://brdg-ing.tumblr.com/aboutus

http://imakiraza.wixsite.com/kirabutoh

http://www.butohkan.jp

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Arashi no ie Project Research, Japan (Honshu) 18 May – 3 June 2017 Itinerary:

Thursday 18 May
Depart Manchester 8.45am, Swissair to Tokyo via Zürich

Friday 19 May
Arrive Tokyo Narita airport 7.50am
JR Narita Express to Shinagawa (within Tokyo) changing to Shinkansen Hikari for a long ride to Matsue, on the west coast of Honshu

Saturday 20 May
Visit Izumu Tasha – important Shinto shrine, a short train journey out of Matsue

Sunday 21 May
Explore Matsue, visit the Hearn Museum and meet its director, Bon Koizumi, great-grandson of Lafcadio Hearn. View their current exhibition Kwaidan: Eternity of Literature of Retold Stories

Monday 22 May
Visit Adachi Museum and gardens, 20km east of Matsue, then take the train to Kyoto

Tuesday 23 May
10am attend Camelia Tea Ceremony
2pm meet Mami Katsuya, director of Kyoto Art Centre
Meet Keiko Yamaguchi, performer and associate artist of Kyoto Arts Centre for evening meal.

Wednesday 24 May
Get up early enough to walk through Imperial Gardens, on way to 10.30 meeting with Juliet Winters Carpenter, academic, writer and translator

Thursday 25 May
Take train to Kobe to meet contemporary calligrapher Misuzu Kosaka at 12.30pm, and converse with her through interpreter Hiroko Okamoto.
Watch Butoh performance in Kyoto, evening.

Friday 26 May
Things to do in Kyoto:

• Sanjusangen-Do Temple
• Fushimi Inari (Shinto) Shrine
• Bamboo Grove
• Jakko-In – ‘Hoichi the Earless’ story connection

Saturday 27 May
Train to Tokyo

• Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
• Tokyo National Museum

Sunday 28 May
Stacey – Butoh workshop with Yoshito Ohno. Simon & Judith attend as spectators.

Then: split  travels.

Judith:
Steps of Basho: Narrow Road to Deep North, (Walk Japan supported):
Monday 29 May
Tokyo – Nikko/Uramino-taki waterfall, Toshugu Shrine.
Tuesday 30 May
Nikko – Matsushima/ Taga-Jo Castle/Shiogama
Wednesday 31 May
Matsushima – Hiraizumi / Zuigan Temple and caves / Entsu-in gardens/Chuson-ji/Motsu-ji gardens /Konijiki-do
Thursday 1 June
Hiraizumi – Akakura Onsen
Friday 2 June
Akakura Onsen – Mt. Haguro-san / Natagiri Pass / pilgrim’s lodgings
Saturday 3 June
Haguro-san – Takasaki and train to Tokyo / Narita Airport

Stacey & Simon:
Peregrine Falcon Shinkansen on Sunday afternoon to Shimokita
Stay Sunday night in Mutsu
[The Shimokita-Hanto peninsula sports a volcanic wasteland surrounding the terrible mountain Osore-zan with its fearsome temple of Osorezan-bodaiji where dead souls gather by the shore of a silvery crater lake. Osore-zan is one of Japan’s 3 most sacred places (Buddhist).]

Monday 29 May
Bus to Osore-zan mountain, sulphur lake and shrine
Stay night at Bodaiji Temple

Tuesday 30 May
Bus back to Shimokita station
Train to Tono
[Tono is regarded as the birthplace of Japanese folktales, collected as the Tono Monogatari by Yanagita Kunio in 1909. The town of Tono has a Folktale Museum and the valley north-east of Tono displays rolling hills, thatched farms and secretive-shrines-related-to-primitive-cults, ideal for exploration by bike. There is a folk village at Denshoen.]

Wednesday 31 May
Explore Tono valley (bikes?)

Thursday 1 June
5 trains from Tono to Numata, then a bus to Tokura

Friday 2 June
Shuttle bus to Oze National Park trailhead at Hatomachitoge
4-5 hour circular walk to and through Oze marsh, much of it on boardwalk via flowering skunk cabbages.
Shuttle bus return to Tokura

Saturday 3 June
Bus to Numata, then train to Tokyo to meet Judith for final train journey to airport hotel

Sunday 4 June
Flight departs 11.00 (Lufthansa via Düsseldorf)

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Stacey – Following the Brush with Butoh 10/4/17

“Do not fight with a difficult sentence, but take it outside for a walk. Nature and the movement of your body will resolve the matter”. Constantin Heger: Emily and Charlotte Brontë’s tutor in Brussels

Remembering the route of one’s process is vital and so easily forgotten or indeed, lost. I had lost my way in the mid-planning stages of the trip and barely noticed. But Why Am I going to Japan? stopped me in my tracks and called into question the direction I was taking, against my natural instinct as a performer/maker. What can I, myself, take from the experience of Japan in relation to the ‘other’ (this project, my collaborators, another culture and landscape)? What are my opportunities beyond this project which this research trip will open up?

Trying to accommodate others, the self loses its way so effortlessly. I knew I had to follow my own brush – create a movement of researching and recording similar to my usual practice, where to play/explore/discover/express is my generating force.

I had been looking at traditional (‘male’) forms of Japanese performance, layering on top of my own culturally constructed self a culturally constructed other. Our project is a meeting between the north of Japan and the north of England to ask what imaginary world might lie between them, this I knew. Now I realised I needed my own routes and practice to criss-cross both landscapes, finding ways of “unmasking the culturally mannered body” (Sondra Horton Fraleigh) – both my own body, and those of Japan’s masculine performative arts, Noh and Kabuki (though Kabuki began with a women’s group).

I find in Fraleigh’s book about Butoh a link to the theatre that excites me most: Tanztheater Wuppertal and Théâtre de Soleil. Fraleigh has become a source of inspiration and excitement and a new bridge in my own thoughts during the planning of our research trip:

“When we experience ourselves through another cultural lens, we are enriched. When we interpret another culture through our own lens, we bring the difference the other can bring – sometimes the same things that insiders see, but more often aspects that bridge the known with the strange. And it is the strangeness of the unknown (how it can rearrange our perceptual field) that calls us to travel across the bridge of difference, after all. Then, when the familiar territory is given up, the traveller can stand in a new, unfamiliar, place where worlds (and they are whole worlds) meet.” (Dancing into Darkness, Fraleigh)

Like Emily, I’ve begun “looking oppositely /For the site of the Kingdom of Heaven” (Emily Dickinson) –  towards a physical language that will explore the attractions and repulsions between East and West and the generation of a third world and language expressing a child’s culture – a Gondal – a ghost land – on the borders between the two. “She should have been a man (sic)….a great navigator” (Heger re. Emily).

Emily found creativity in walking these moors. The root of Butoh is walking. My own personal practice in the last five years as a psychophysical performer is to walk, responding to landscape, improvising with the experience of the walk, and then interpreting both physical and mental action through the journey in performance.

…. the landscape helped me react to the here and now essential in improvisation; to remember to listen beyond the habitual, culturally constructed self. To attend to the architecture of the land and then apply this level of looking and listening to the improvisations in the evening enabled me to remain immersed and responsive. (SJ, practice diary “Fifty Steps”for ACE)

So: before we leave, I am working with Margie Gillis, international Canadian dance legend, on Butoh skills at our Whitestone studio. I have booked to see Ima Tenko’s Butoh performance of Hisoku at Kyoto Butoh Kan, and will attend a Butoh workshop at the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio in Tokyo, lead by Yoshito Ohno. Then we head to the far North to Mount Osore (恐山 Osore-zan) on the remote Shimokita Peninsula, to explore and record the entrance to the other world of an afterlife sacred to dead children; then to Tono, to experience rural farming rhythms and the art of storytelling and folklore.

Each day of the trip I intend to produce short physical/dance reflections alongside written responses as part of the process of research and professional development that will also influence whatever will become our Arashi no Ie.

(I’m hoping Simon will video some of them for the blog).

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The last work of Pina Bausch, Como el musguito (“Like Moss on a Stone”) is said to have had a sense of the stage feeling haunted with her presence for more reasons than the piece  premiering the same month as we lost this great force in the nature of expression.

“Como el musguito, en la piedra, ay si si si …,”

The second image is of Yukio Waguri  (b. 1952). He was the principle male dancer at Tatsumi Hijikata’s Asbestos-Kan from 1972 to 1978. From this period, he kept notes of the words Hijikata spoke in order to stimulate dancers movement while choreographing. These words are called Butoh-fu, a unique method for choreography. Waguri has made his own interpretation of these words and continues to use them as a method for his own choreography and teaching.

“Journey of Spirit”

Butoh dance, was created by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, in response to the westernization of Japanese culture after WWII .  During this era,  rebellious artists entered into a process of finding new forms to address the changing world around them.

The post Movement towards Expression. SJ 21/03/17 appeared first on Whitestone Arts.

A project painting Japanese houses and ghosts over the house and ghosts of Wuthering Heights, and currently under construction, Following the Brush…

Japan Research Trip Meeting 16th/17th February: Judith, Stacey, Simon

Posted by Judith: 22/02/17

© Bradford Countryside Service

Why go to Japan? Simon asks right in the middle of our planning stage. This question so late in the day – with the funds raised, Japan experts tracked and lured,  the flights booked, the appointments almost booked and accommodation websites papering our computers – is so alarming and so infuriating it has to be the right one to ask.

So I ignore it. Briefly.

And then –

Why in Deed? given that the Brontë children created entire worlds over which they ruled violently and omnipotently in the bowels of the Parsonage cellar, flying on the unclipped wings of their  own imaginations? Given that, as instigator and future composer / compositor of this score, whatever it is going to be after two and a half (and in some ways forty) years’ gestation, I repudiate the so-called “real world” as a ball jerked into an unfortunate groove of the roulette wheel by the patriarchal hand pulling a lever under the table at the worst possible moment? Given that Japan is violent, tender, ineffable, inscrutable, patriarchal, opaque and gloriously, terrifyingly other, and would never yield an inch to 14 days probing by the colossal ignorance of three Occidental mono-linguists (two of them feminist and the third post-feminist)?

We all share a passion for landscape and the earth though, and it then occurs to me to remember Amaterasu: Shinto Goddess of the Sun. Though neither we nor She have ever met, and at least one of us has never heard of her.

I had, I suddenly remember.

My Ur-Play in 2003, Sweet Fanny Adams in Eden (made with Leo Warner and Rob Sharp of 59 Productions and Stellar Quines) practised freeing up male structures with quantum mechanics (before it was the fashion) all over an unfinished garden in Pitlochry. Natsume Soseki, Japan’s Shakespeare I have now discovered while researching this strange project, once identified Pitlochry as Eden and London as Hell, so his research trip to the UK (1900-1902) had sorted out some really important stuff, in just the style we hope to employ in Japan.

It’s a strange and spooky bit of Action at a Distance (as Einstein gloomily described quanta spinning together, against all logic, through time and distance either side of the globe) that back in 2003 I buried Amaterasu the raging goddess of destruction and life underneath Pitlochry Theatre’s unfinished Plant Collectors’ Garden, pinned down at  all her joints by Buddhist Temples. In my play, her child Avatar, Lily – a red Riding Hood childmonster that could have birthed from the head of Angela Carter – runs around the spinning script modules being reshuffled at the various temple sites, knocking them on different trajectories until the six other main protagonists Showman (God), Architect (Jesus) and Gardener (Adam), Bumps (Gertrude Jekyll), Cory (Vita Sackville-West) and Mina (Marianne North) discover exactly which fairy tale loop they are in, and which one they could be in.

Consigned on each loop to die horribly many times and cheerily resurrect, Lily finally places her hand against the incident tent of her latest dismemberment and a giant hand raises from the ground to touch her fingers.

The goddess rises through her Avatar girlchild, through the Scots pines, in a great earthquake to remake the world another Way.

Dig deep enough, or rise high enough, and the world is Other than we think – or than the capitalists thought and still think. It is and has always been Quantum. Things. Flesh. Matter passing through, and being, time and space.

That is the story.

I think.

Time to tell it over then; and over and over – and in order to tell it over, time to go to Japan and pay Amaterasu and her sacred landscape and the yaoyorozu (eight million Shinto gods) of its natural world a visit in the flesh. There, she still lives under all the concrete and cherry blossom, nuclear reactors ( + possibly US or North Korean missiles) and onsen, sushi and capsule hotels, perfect gardens and stunted trees. Amazingly:

“According to the data collected by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs and recorded in their Religious Annual, 100.6 million Japanese people, nearly the entire country, count themselves as being a supporters/worshippers of the Shinto faith. Although, just what they mean by stating that they believe in Shinto is somewhat unclear….”

A religion no-one quite understands and everyone shares with no sacred text is a miracle indeed. It is a book  scrawled in the margins of what is left of the world’s natural resources, like Cathy’s diary in the margins of the family Bible: her message in a bottle to Lockwood before she smashes his window and bleeds on his bed.

A ghost bleeds. This is very Japanese. Why Japan? To explore why so many Japanese see Emily as a case for Manga.

Why Japan? Emily Brontë set her imaginary childhood queendom, Gondal, in the North Pacific, I remember.
If that’s not a quantum leap say I, what is?

Her heart, however, lies in the moors of Haworth – outside my window now as I type. In the cotton grass and wind and good earth, where I walk daily.

I need to tread a place in the earth and wind of Japan truly liminal in the same way.

Can we find it, and where can we? Hokkaido? Northern Honshu? Matsue – in Lockwood/Lafcadio’s study? On a  Noh stage in Kyoto? Soaking in onsen? I hope the last….because then, it is everywhere and nowhere. Like water.

We’re going to Japan to ask it a question. One we haven’t formulated yet – or many questions. To visit the places Lafcadio Hearn, also an outsider, also a Celtic pagan at heart, dug to unearth the unearthly ghost tales his wife acted out for him. To sensitise ourselves to the feel of another side to our double helix story, passing through the globe that is a two-way cloud-mirror (Ungaikyou*) of many souls, from East to West, cancelling the Otherness into One. To find a world created between them, perhaps. Third and as real.

*”Originally a mirror used to drive off youkai, it gradually built up youkai energy until it became a youkai itself. Clouds constantly flow out of it and surround it, giving it the power of flight. This youkai can transfer itself between mirrors, allowing it to answer people who ask questions to the mirror or show them distant scenery. Especially powerful Ungaikyou are said to have the ability to connect to mirrors in the future. Maybe you could find your soulmate in one?” Onigiri Wiki

or

I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

Emily Brontë.

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