To dance is to journey into the secrets of intuition, memory, dreams; to encounter and express the mysteries of human nature as they are manifest in the body, before words. i believe in the ability of art to move people, to change people, to put people in touch with the best part of their humanity, to remind people of the complexity of their humanity and to cultivate compassion.
—Denise Fujiwara
Sumida River is a haunting dance created especially for Denise Fujiwara of To-ronto by choreographer Nakajima Natsu of Tokyo, one of the core founders of butoh in close association with Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. Based on a popular Noh drama, Sumida River could be called Butoh-Noh, so clearly does it articulate the synthesis of classical Noh with contemporary butoh. In it we see how boundaries both ethnic and aesthetic are crossed. Fujiwara’s performance of this work has been featured in dance festivals in Seattle, Washington, DC, Vancouver, Calgary, and Copenhagen and seen on tour in Ecuador and India. In March 2008, it was the featured performance of the Third International Festival of Dance Anthropology in Kraków, Poland.
From her first butoh choreography, Niwa (The Garden, 1982), to Sumida River (2000), Nakajima pursued a personal and Japanese vision of intimate space known as ma, or “the space between.” This is the subjective, transformative inter-val where space fades as entity and reappears through identity. Fujiwara dances a woman’s spiritual transfiguration in Nakajima’s Niwa. The dance transforms through the deliberate use of ma in a contractive spatial poetics, condensing mental anguish in floods of gesture that coalesce and dissolve in seconds, like ripples in a pool. Nakajima has given Fujiwara a special vehicle for her talent in this classically inspired dance drama, and rare challenges as well. For in Naka-jima’s butoh, the face and psyche live an intensity that vibrates with ma.
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I saw Nakajima’s North American premier of Niwa at the Festival of New Dance in Montreal in 1986 and started to write about butoh from that time on.
Fourteen years later in November 2000, I saw Fujiwara dance the premier of Na-kajima’s Sumida River at Buddies in Bad Times Theater in Toronto and marveled at the choreographer’s extension of the still-evolving post–World War II butoh aesthetic, turned further back toward Noh on the verge of a new century.
Fujiwara lends a simple glowing anima to this dance. Her performance, based on the Noh story Sumidagawa (Sumida River) and a mother’s agonizing search for her lost child, brings to life a universal tragedy of separation. The son has been kidnapped and taken away to the north by a merchant who hopes to sell him, evidently a popular profession in the fifteenth century when Motomasa created Sumidagawa for Noh theater. The boy sickens and dies along the way.
But one year later, the local people gather along the banks of the Sumida River in Tokyo where he is buried and perform a ceremonial dance in his memory. At just this moment, the boy’s mother, driven to distraction by a prolonged search for her son, arrives at the Sumida River where she asks a boatman to ferry her across. The sorrowful experience of travel has deranged her mind. Once aboard the boat, she asks the boatman about the people gathered on the other shore.
He tells her the story of the death of a boy, a stranger, exactly one year ago.
From the story, the woman recognizes the boy as her son. She is taken to the grave and joins in prayers for his salvation. Her son’s voice can be heard chanting in the background as she is reunited with his spirit and her madness is trans-formed into deep, transformative sorrow. The play closes with the merged voices of mother, the onstage chorus, and the ghost of the boy:
Is it you, my child?
Is it you, my mother?
And as she seeks to grasp it by the hand, The shape begins to fade away;
Sadness and tender pity fill all hearts, Sadness and tender pity fill all hearts!
Nakajima has not attempted to narrate the story but has sought to approach the core of the dance, the Mai, in a contemporary way. Mai in Noh is a sacred internal dance emphasizing upper body and arm movement rather than Odori, the more common word for dance. Strictly speaking, a Noh play is not acted but danced. Noh dance is not of the expansive leaping variety but is a sedate dance
The Sounding Bell 125 of the soul, related to the floor of the stage and expressed through the medita-tive groundedness of the dancer.
As a guest backstage at a Noh performance in Tokyo in June 1990, I observed the all-day preparation for a performance, including a luncheon for the actor-dancers, and how the mind of the main performer is prepared as she is sewn into her costume and enters into a final meditation. A man traditionally plays the central female character, but in this case, a female student of Noh performed the main role. After the elaborate costuming ritual, she was led into a small room for preperformance meditation. This was described to me most charmingly as
“a room for changing your mind,” perhaps the nearest English translation, even as it carries a humorous connotation and makes me think twice about what “a change of mind” can mean. Now when I meditate, I feel the room change along with my mind.
Fujiwara performs in this mind-clearing space that Noh prepares. For its Japa-nese audiences, the Noh drama of Sumidagawa is so well known that a few simple references—to the place, cherry trees in springtime, the boat, the boatman, and the distraught mother—are sufficient to clue them into what they are seeing. The performer carrying long strips of bamboo signals her anguished state of mind.
Contemporary urban planning in Tokyo ensures that the Sumida River still threads its way through the great city as part of a revivified waterway system.1 In the spring you can enjoy a magnificent boat ride along the river, cherry trees in bloom on both banks near Asakusa.
The river is the main anchor for Nakajima’s butoh for Fujiwara. In the begin-ning, we see her inching along the floor under a large wrinkled cloth that will later open into a rough, earthy costume resembling the angular kimono. Fujiwara could be moving along the river’s muddy bank or emerging from its depths. She rises up from her belly slowly in smooth increments until she reaches a crawl.
We do not see her yet, just her drag of earth and body, slogging up in a mound from the river. Fujiwara moves at a snail’s pace under the cloth. It is intriguing how she manages to slip the material across the floor—gliding bonelessly along without inflection. She moves from the downstage right corner to pass through center stage, rising ever more vertically in space until her head appears and the large cloth eventually drapes her with its weight.
As she lifts her arms, her cover becomes a square costume of neutral beige tinged with muddy brown, blurred and fading up from the bottom edges. This opening image of the dance develops deliberate and painstaking steps, walking and turn-ing smoothly in space, often shiftturn-ing sideways then recedturn-ing from the audience.
Finally, with her back to us, she walks and then turns, slowly showing her face.
Her character materializes through this tensional build, then glides as though on water, and runs in sporadic release. Stopping in the powerful center established from the beginning crawl, the mother of Sumida River backs up toward us as her arms extend to the sides, turning her garment into a wide, wrinkled canvas.
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This beginning continues to unravel a visual dance, tactile and emotional but distanced through carefully drawn stylization that tests reality. Fujiwara is set apart in bright relief from the deep black background through cleanly honed, softly delineated costumes, designed by the choreographer to integrate with the dance.
But the genesis of the dance is not in costume; it wells up in the face as drawn through history and distilled in gesture. The dancer’s face is curiously intensified even as it is blanked out in white rice powder makeup. Fujiwara’s delicate features are not painted back into the stark white of her face. The lips are pale, not red, and the cheeks are not shaded; the eyes alone are rimed darkly so they will carry their expressiveness across the space. Fujiwara’s eyes often blink in rapid succes-sion as they look without seeing, allowing an alternative seeing “in-between” to occur. I am aware of how her half-seeing eyes create a state of limbo, suspending me there with her as she conjures the ghostly state of Sumidagawa.
Black fans facing each other perch on her head like a regal hat. She takes one fan off and touches it to the floor, walking it along beside her. In the image of the fan, she has a child by the hand and carefully leads him toward us. Her face is serene at first but changes dramatically over time; opening her mouth in a silent scream, she crumples into the canvas of the painting she has been creating.
In the next episode, Fujiwara lifts herself up and enters a new phase of an-guish. She runs holding her ears and our hearts, her canvas cloth now a heavy dress swaying with momentum. As her arms appear from under the heavy costume, they are covered with white gauze in several layers, crisscrossed with heavy black string. And as she sheds more of the canvas, we see a rustic apron covering her chest. She slows as her desperation begins to cool and she discov-ers four long, thin bamboo strips, lifting them into the dark space overhead.
They look electric as she waves them in elegant willowy arcs to catch the light.
Do they offer hope? Are they magic? They shimmer and undulate in her hands.
Their bending and breathing is a pliant extension of her movement, her dance a pensive architecture of body and bamboo.
As the mother, Fujiwara comes to sit and face the audience. The bamboo strips are spread out on the floor. She picks them up, hits and drops them like a woman in a trance. Her eyes blink and lower so that the audience sees the half-moon rims of her eyelids, darkly traced in the white of her face. Gradually, she makes her way up and enters into an exhausting sequence, her black hair gathered in a long tail—trailing, whipping, and wafting. She creates a ritual with the sticks.
She skates on them across the floor, along the river, seeking in vain, and stag-gering through the voyage of a story more lived than narrated.
Blackness covers the stage, and the mother disappears for a time as haunting howls of a lone wolf fill the darkness. She reappears with a chalky gold counte-nance and off-white fabric gathered around her in a long skirt. She seems to float.
Her arms flow and lead the dance obliquely forward, her feet feeling their way carefully, one after the other, first with the toes pulling the forward foot along,
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FiGUrE 14. Denise Fujiwara in Sumida River (2000).
Photograph by Cylla von Tiedemann, © 2000. Used by permission of Cylla von Tiedemann.
the back foot never catching up. She leans away from the ventured foot as she glides slowly along. Before this painfully slow line of motion is completed, she begins to pull something from her mouth, as though from the puckered “O” of it her innermost being could unravel. When she stills and gains composure, her thumb and first finger touch in a Buddhist mudra. Serenity and “suchness” settle in through the gesture. Nothingness supersedes occurrence in time, and as in Noh, the meditative intention becomes clear. I drift into this subtle atmosphere.
Then as the dance returns with a lift of the shoulders, I do also.
The dancer’s head is covered with deftly arranged dried weeds that feather to the side, creating a reference to nature, its rawness manicured as often in Japan.
Fujiwara maintains a concentrated composure, searching and reaching. In one striking episode, she traces figures in the sky with an imaginary kite. This play-ful interlude takes us back to the connection with the child as she draws the kite down into her body.
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Dreamlike, her hands create pictorial shorthand for the soul in an exchange of gestures. She sends them as light emanating from hand flutters and facial trans-formations, moving into the darkness beyond her material body. The mother’s grimace seeps into anguish; her grinning falls into choking, falls still farther, collapsing her chest. The dance drops to a crouch at times and conjures the lost baby. Fujiwara embodies the dance and the infant as she curls up choking in frenzy, scratching the space. She comes back to herself with emotions that seethe inside, morph, and leave on the breath.
• • •
Part of the interest of the butoh aesthetic is how in a short space of time and re-stricted space onstage an entire lifetime can be exposed. Space is often measured in extremely slow footfalls that stretch time and lengthen the breath. Time is condensed in concentrated steps and gestures, not thrown forward. Sumida River distills an imagistic world tuned to human emotions, but it doesn’t focus on the bright ones; rather (like Buddhism), it recognizes the universals of suffering.
Fujiwara recovers her pathfinding walk, a motif that returns with variations. Her head vibrates, and her arms undulate as though borne on water; they flow along, and then finally still. The yoga asana of “I Am” coalesces from the floating visage with hands and palms pressed together. Fujiwara gestures from within a contained and ghostly figure, trembling. Her body weeps and kneels as her hands close to her sides flutter like a bird in the white and blinding light. It seems the dancer’s soul in flight, her ordeal lifting to another level; then blackness consumes the stage.
When the light returns, Fujiwara in Sumidagawa Butoh is pulling a life-size boat made of white paper stretched over a frame built of sticks (a reference to the Japanese festival of Obon). The boat is light and looks weightless. The dancer and the boat are one as they float in golden light. In the ease and emptiness of the image, butoh is joined with Zen through Noh. Fujiwara traces a great circle that has no end. The theatrical device is amazingly simple, meditatively smooth, and single pointed. There is nothing added or subtracted from the circling of the boat and the mother.
Toward the end, Fujiwara wears a simple silk kimono with no ornamenta-tion. Its light tea color is caught in the sandy-gold light. The music and the dance disappear in the circling arc of the boat. Darkness once again covers the stage.
And as we wait for a renewal of the dance, a brass hand bell sounds offstage. We wait, and a higher tinkling chimes. Mother and child communicate at the burial mound in the call-and-response of the bells—like a call to meditation in the dark-ness. When the lights come up, the stage is empty. The dance and dancer have vanished into the sound of the bell. Fujiwara, as performer, enters the lighted stage in silence and takes her bow kneeling in a formal Japanese position with hands touching the floor and the head bowed low in respect.