Kokoro Dance: butoh bodies, time and space

It’s windy, golden July morning in Vancouver, and I’m standing in a grotty doorway next to Dressew Supply Ltd. on West Hastings. On the steel door, a notice explains that the marijuana dealers, who used to work from the second floor moved out in February 2004.

Further, “(t)hey did not leave a forwarding address.” And as for tagging… “It is a waste of your talent and paint and a waste of our time.”

I buzz and climb the precipitous linoleum stairs.

Jay Hirabayashi – who shares the roles of choreographer and executive director of Kokoro Dance with Barbara Bourget, also his wife – rises from a couch in the Company’s office to greet me. Frankly, for a moment, I’m stunned. He’s a surprisingly youthful 61-year-old with a gentle smile and a mane of salt and pepper hair. Two weeks ago, during a performance of Kokoro’s newest production Ghosts, he was painted white and savagely channelling the dead.

Now – cradling a camera – Hirabayashi explains that he’s reviewing photographs from the past weekend’s butoh performance, which capped a workshop with students at Victoria’s Lynda Raino Dance. Later, he tells me that the piece was originally entitled Mystic Beach Butoh but that it had to renamed Malahat Farm Butoh hurriedly when the provincial park’s administration refused to permit the performance, based on a statute of the park regulations that prohibits “deliberate or unnecessary disturbance.” It was then relocated to Malahat Farm.

While he has sent a letter questioning the park’s interpretation of the word “disturbance,” Hirabayashi imagines the dancers’ nudity was probably more the issue and the root of the controversy.

This edgy Vancouver company, which has been pushing the envelope of social appropriateness and definitions of dance for more than 20 years, were disappointed but took the venue change in stride. Just as they did Victoria’s response to the production. A third to a half of the audience left at intermission, while those who remained rewarded the dancers with a standing ovation.

Since its first full-length production in 1987 of Rage – an examination of the internment of Japanese Canadians during WWII – there has been a harsh divide between those who admire Kokoro’s work and those who shy away. People who love Kokoro, love it a lot. And honestly, I’m one of them. But those who don’t appreciate their work might agree with a Toronto dance critic who likened the experience of watching one of their performances to observing cauliflower rot in a vegetable crisper.

These vastly different reactions undoubtedly find their origins in ‘the stamping dance of darkness’ (or Ankoku Butoh’s) intentions and its expectations of audiences. The first butoh performance in 1959 tackled the then-taboo subject of homosexuality and featured a live chicken. Since then, its practitioners have continued purposefully to push their audiences’ emotional buttons.

If you have never seen butoh, which mixes staccato – often flailing – movements with the breath-slow postures of martial arts, it can be difficult to envision a performance. And it might also be virtually impossible to imagine that an art form, which seems so conventionally hideous, can be a meditation that aims to change the relationship between time and space (or Ma). Yet, that is its ultimate purpose.

According to Hirabayashi, Western dance emphasizes movement “and there is very little time, actually, to think about anything until it’s all over. Whereas in butoh, sometimes it’s fast, but often there is time for you to reflect. And, in fact, what you’re reflecting on is yourself.

“It’s like holding up this mirror that exposes parts of you that you don’t ordinarily think about. In a good butoh performance, that’s what happens. You get to know yourself better and address parts of yourself that you haven’t been thinking about.”

In their 2006 book Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo, which profiles the careers of butoh’s two creators, university professors and choreographers Sondra Fraleigh and Tamah Nakamura maintain that it originated as a profoundly individualistic dance form that rebelled against “the encroachment of the West [particularly the United States] after World War II.” And that as “a postmodern and primal form of dance with therapeutic potential,” it eschewed the comfortable lexicons and techniques of both Western and Classical Asian dance.

For example, Hijikata incorporated the slow, crouched postures of the farmers he had seen working the land in the impoverished Northern prefecture of Akita during his childhood. And in notes on a dance lesson, published in Butoh shades of darkness by Jean Viala, Kazuo Ohno wrote, “I feel that dance must grow out of the gravity of human life, out of the confusion of life itself. Dance begins with daily gestures… and the body itself [must] be situated at the heart of the dilemma.”

Thus, butoh fundamentally aims to shock and stir the audience. It questions conventional wisdom and refutes standard definitions of beauty. Consequently, it engenders tension and whispers revolution.

So, how did an iconoclastic Japanese dance form find its way to Canada’s Lotusland and how did it change on the journey?

In 1980, Bourget and Hirabayashi saw a performance of butoh at the Robson Square Media Centre. “It burned itself into us,” Hirabayashi explains. And the couple read essays and studied the form.

“[Our work] was somewhat imitative in the beginning,” Hirabayashi admits, “but in the process… we were discovering our own directions… So we haven’t ignored the fact, Barbara hasn’t ignored the fact, that she has been a ballet dancer for most of her life… We decided that we would use whatever information that we had in our bodies and allow that to filter through this butoh body.”

In 1986, after four years as founding members of Experimental Dance and Music (EDAM) and honing their choreography and arts administration skills, Bourget and Hirabayashi (who were married in 1982) struck out on their own and formed Kokoro Dance Theatre Society.

Kokoro's name – which means heart, spirit or soul – was inspired by Vancouver Sun dance critic Max Wyman’s review of Bourget’s dance that said she “danced with her heart on her sleeve and her body on red alert.” And yet, despite the couple’s prior recognition and a significant body of work, Kokoro’s first six years, Hirabayashi wryly acknowledges, were a struggle: “At that time, there was no culturally diverse dance that was funded by the Canada Council. In fact, there was no company that didn’t have an English or French name.”

This early absence of ready cash is the foundation of the Company’s trademark outreach initiatives and thus its hold on a non-traditional dance audience. As a way to give the dancers they were training (but couldn’t afford to pay) performance experience, Kokoro “never turned [a chance to perform] down.” Kokoro appeared at benefits, the Jazz Festival, the Folk Festival and Under the Volcano – while mounting numerous site-specific and school shows.

Hirabayashi maintains that site-specific and school shows are “great training” as the dancers must grab and hold the attention of either a brutally honest teenage audience or of passersby, who will only stay if the piece is “interesting and compelling.”

Certainly, Kokoro’s newest site-specific work Ghosts, which premiered at this year’s Dancing on the Edge Festival, is both. Funded by Dancing on the Edge, The Powell Street Festival and the Japanese Community Redress Anniversary Committee, Ghosts – which features 12 dancers, three bagpipers, and one drummer – fuses cultural heritages. And many of the dancers’ characterisations recall current or past residents of the Downtown Eastside. Laura Bartlett’s costumes, composed of dismantled wedding gowns, are direct references to a local who favours the same attire when panhandling.

The piece is horrific and transcendent by turns. It exemplifies the social criticism at butoh’s heart, and – like freeform jazz – asks audiences to work hard to catch and mesh improvisation and structure. It is risky.

And between 200 and 250 people saw each of the three performances. “It’s very exciting,” says Dancing on the Edge festival producer Donna Spencer, “to see an audience of all different ages and backgrounds pulled in and wondering ‘what is this?’… I love the fact that [Kokoro plays] around quite irreverently with the form. I mean… bagpipes and butoh.”

It’s not surprising, then, that a company that practises this type of highwire art should also find itself in the role of dance producer. In 2000, Kokoro decided to launch the Vancouver International Dance Festival. The decision was just as risky as the Company’s inception but as Hirabayashi explains, by the late 1990s, high touring costs had chipped away at the number of Canadian dance companies coming to Vancouver. And he quips, “my daughter had a shirt that said If it’s to be, it’s up to me” and so Kokoro jumped.

The first year, work featured was primarily butoh. But in 2001, the Festival’s repertoire expanded. The goal was to bring more Canadian dance companies to Vancouver to cross-pollinate local dance and to offer the opportunity for full-length performances by local groups.

In 2008, the VIDF is still being run and administered by Kokoro – although it is Bourget’s and Hirabayashi’s intention that the organisations will become two separate entities when finances allow. Both Bourget and Hirabayashi hope that the VIDF will be “some sort of legacy” to the local dance community.

As to the future of butoh in Vancouver, Kokoro is working to bring Kazuo Ohno’s son, Yoshito Ohno, who performed in the first butoh dance in 1959, to Vancouver next year to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the dance form.

As to why he has dedicated his life to dance, which is among the most strenuous and economically impoverished of the arts, Hirabayashi answers, “When you are excited about life, you move… Dancers keep stoking the fires of that vitality.”

Undoubtedly, this is a point he made to the provincial park’s administrators in his letter concerning the cancellation of the Mystic Beach performance as he questioned the phrase “deliberate or unnecessary disturbance.”

“Deliberate, maybe.” Hirabayashi admits, and then says without noticeable irony “But I’m trying to figure out why dancing is considered a disturbance.

“Certainly it’s necessary, not unnecessary.”