I've been in Japan for 9 days now and this is my first blog. I have been awarded a Churchill Travelling Fellowship to research older people and dance in Japan. I'm travelling with my partner, Jacky Lansley, who has received funding from two Japanese foundations to research interdisciplinary performance in Japan. Our interests co-incide at some points - we are editing a book of interviews with 'older' dancers we have conducted over the past 10 years and want to add one or two Japanese dancers to the list of interviewees. In both traditional and contemporary performing arts, older performers are almost the norm in Japan, which has the highest life xpectancy of any country in the world.
Arrived in Tokyo late on a Sunday night. On Monday visited Ueno Park, near where we're staying and was amazed to find the park thronging with thousands of people. After a while realised that this was the start of the Cherry Blossom Festival even though the cherry blossom was barely out. I was charmed by a delightful performance n the side of a path by a young man with a diabolo, accokpanied by a young woman playing the accordion. Both moved as dancers and blended skill with a light and humorous manner. Visited the National Gallery and saw paintings (portraits, long narrative cartoon-like sagas, battles), panels, kimonos, swords, statues of buddhas, shrines. Struck that there were very few Westerners anywhere - I suppose it is not anybody's holiday time right now and tourists are few.
Later that week we had a tortuous journey to find the studio of Yoshito Ohno. Yoshito is the son of Kazuo Ohno, one of the founders of Butoh dance - the particular manifestation of contemporary dance thatre that developed in Japan in the 50s and 60s and still has many practitioners of different kinds. Kazuo Ohno is still alive, though quite ill, at 103 (he was dancing well into his 90s) and Yoshito has kept his tradition alive and is a formidable performer and teacher in his own right. He must now be in is 70s. Having found the right train we got out at the wrong stop nd followed a rudimentary map that was psted on the studio's website deep into the heart of Yokohama suurbia. It was pouring with rain. With the almost inexplicable generosity of spirit that seems to be a feature of Japanese towards helpless foreigners, a man we asked the way of walked around the area with us for nearly an hour in the pouring rain. In fact he failed, but somehow, 5 minutes later, someone else took us to the door of the studio.
We found Yoshito conducting a small class, giving the participants each a piece of raw, unspun silk to improvise with, drawing out the different qualities of tensile strength and extreme softness. His own demonstrations were minimal, but moving and extraordinary. As the dancers worked, he played different musics and altered the lighting to bring a moment of total theatre to this small studio in a suburb of Yokohama. At the end of class, we joined him and the daners in eating garlic bread and drinking tea. Yoshito agreed to be nterviewed by us when we returned to Tokyo at the end of April.
The following day we visited Yuko Ajichi in her office in Tokyo. Yuko has been a pioneer in the development of community dance in Japan and has brought over such artists as Wolfgang Stange and Adam Benjamin, as wel as commissioning established Japanese choreographers to make work for integrated groups. With Yuko and two other artists, Aki and Hiromi, we spent several hours talking, eating and drinking. We made an arrangement to watch some classes that \aki regularly gives in a ay centre r people wth learning iabilities.
We rounded of an exhausting week (just negotiating Tokyo's transport system is a major test of endurance and ingenuity - it is n fact superb, but difficult to penetrate as an outsider) by going to see a production Henry VI, directed by Yukio Ninagawa, at he Saitama |Theatre on the outskirts of Tokyo. It was superb - the direction was a sort of choreography, played on a traverse stage with endless 'alarms and excursions' of fighting men hurtling from one side to the other. The physicality of the Japanese actors was striking and seemed t b second nature them. The following day we went back to the Saitama Theatre to talk to two of the producers about the work Ninagawa has been doing with the 'Golden Thjeatre of Saitama - a project now several years old of a non-professional company of older performers. They come from all over Japan and were selected by audition. There are 42 of them and new work is written for hem by playwrights. They rehearse for a month each year and perform for a month. Some of them have the opportunity to perform in other productions at the theatre - several of them were part of the 'mob' in Henry VI. It is obviously a very well-funded initiative and has a working practice that those of us who work with older people's theatre or dance groups might envy. Unfortunately, the group is not in rehearsal or performance right now, so we could not watch them.
