The Endless Search for Individual Method
Iwana was born in Tokyo in February of 1945. He was a sickly child,
bothered by rides in trains and cars. His mother studied noh, and he saw
many performances of this classically Japanese theatrical art, eventually
becoming adept at yo-kyoku or noh chanting. In 1960, he enrolled at the
Shiki High School run by Keio Gijuku University, a prestigious private
university. As part of his studies there, he became acquainted with agriculture,
which spawned a love of working with the earth. Three years later he matriculated
to the parent university, where he majored in economics at his father's
behest, instead of his own choice, literature. Upon graduation in 1967,
he joined the flagship station of TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System) but soon
tired of Japan's mammoth corporate world, leaving the television industry
to become an actor in 1969.
During the next seven years as a struggling thespian he began
questioning the need for dialogue. For him, words seemed a disturbing distraction.
He had wanted to dance since leaving TBS, but, in the Japan of that day,
dance was simply something that men did not do.
In this period he met Tatsumi Hijikata, now generally acknowledged
as butoh's spiritual founder. In 1971, he acted in a collaborative effort
between a theater company and practitioners of Hijikata's ankoku butoh
(dance of darkness). He found Hijikata eccentric, but was nevertheless
impressed with several of the butoh dancers, most notably Yoko Ashikawa.
Iwana finally decided to become a dancer in 1975 at the relatively
ripe age of 30. After arduously studying ballet, modern dance and gymnastics,
he began experimenting with his own bodily movements. He hesitated to characterize
his movements as 'dance,' let alone 'butoh.' And for lack of any titular
form or common classification, decided to invent his own entirely new method
of bodily expression.
At first, he imitated others, but soon discovered that no matter
how much he tried he could not improve upon the originals. The next five
years were frustrating. He did, however, discover a methodology of restricting
his own movements and rigidly controlling the surrounding space. In the
end, he postulated that standing still in a limited space was a valid expression,
despite being diametrically opposed to the concept of dance as movement.
From this realization, he developed a number of solo dances,
performed as a series under the marquee 'Masaki Iwana Dance Performance.'
In 1979, he began dancing nude. Though his dance was improvisational in
the extreme, he made a conscious effort to metamorphose his naked body
into an 'object' devoid of sense and emotion. In his mind, he was not merely
shedding his costume; he wanted the audience to see the naked body as an
object sculpted by nature.
In a parade of five monthly, experimental performances called
'Invisible' danced at the turn of the decade at Tokyo's Kid-Eye-Luck Hall,
he stood naked under the changing illumination from a skylight. As the
hour of each installment passed, the changing sunlight changed the hue,
tone and shading of his skin. To him, this was akin to changing his 'human
skin' to 'the skin of dance'; from becoming totally exposed to completely
invisible.
In 1983, 12 years after their first meeting, Hijikata asked Iwana
to join his company in performing 'Plan-B-Ji-Mosha' that Hijikata choreographed
and produced. Iwana never formally became a member of the troupe as he
is not by nature a joiner. He did, however, learn much from Hijikata's
pioneering concepts of butoh before this legend died in 1986.
Right after dancing for Hijikata, Iwana was invited to Festival
La Chartreuse Villeneuve les Avignon in France. There he danced 'Hasu no
Kuni' (Lotus Land), a 50-minute performance sans music that won high critical
acclaim. This was a major turning point. At this time, he began enunciating
his idea that unless he thought of a human body as a human being, he would
not be himself. This gave rise to the thought that a costume should not
be a decoration but a means of personal betrayal and a way to turn oneself
inside out. From this, he went on to realize the possibility of both sexes
existing in a single body, followed by the recognition that both male and
female were coexisting within himself.
He gave performing life to this duality in his 1985 'Namanari'
(Half Demon), considered another milestone in his career. In this particular
piece, he wore the feminine dress of Europe's 19th-century haut monde to
explore aspects of his female side. While strong and content in his masculinity,
he wanted to understand the woman that he felt had lived inside him since
childhood.
This performance also marked the first time he referred to his
movements as 'butoh,' although admitting he still did not feel that butoh
could serve as a generic description. 'I called it butoh to widen the definition
and to make the definition obscure,' he recalls. He also remembers this
dance as a fork on his path of self-discovery, where he moved away from
his earlier belief of the body as an object to the body as an entity accompanying
spirit and emotion. He continued to dance in this vein until 1992, when
he first performed 'Mizuhiki ni Kocho' (Papillon en Offrande).
From this point onward, he began focusing on the directionally
moral dichotomy between 'highness' and 'lowness' that also existed within
both the male and female sides of himself. None of the factors, he says,
exist separately. For example, by recognizing one's individual lowness,
'lowness' is automatically transformed into the 'highness' of enlightenment.
Some of this derives from the texts of Jodo Buddhism that he studied and
could relate to, even as an ardently non-religious person.
Wisdom from the Old Healing Arts
Iwana's family gives his career mixed reviews. His father, a strong-willed,
self-made man, disapproved of his son's abbreviated television career.
He had wanted him to use his economics degree as a springboard to success
in commerce or politics. He was even angrier when his son became an actor,
one time pointedly switching off the television while the rest of the family
was watching a drama Iwana was in. Far from being offended himself, the
offending son felt only that his father simply did not understand.
Iwana recalls his mother was even worse. A traditional Japanese
housewife since her marriage, she sees his dance as something not quite
right. 'Even after two decades,' he relates with a bitter smile, 'she still
keeps telling me to return to a normal, practical life.'
Without a regular paycheck either as an actor or dancer, Iwana
once supported himself by practicing the traditional healing arts of yoga
and acupressure. Besides putting food on the table, they provided food
for thought about movement and dance.
From yoga, he learned to open his own body to others. To Iwana,
those who heal others through the sort of transference of energy characteristic
of the traditional healing arts either use their own internal reserves
or channel external energy from their surroundings. When he was studying
yoga meditation, Iwana himself experienced this channeling of external
energy. He believes that this experience has led to subjecting himself
to the forces of external energy and turning his body into an object in
his dance. In doing so, he melds his own existential body in the space
surrounding him, calling this technique the 'dance of non-existence.'
Acupressure, which involves manipulating the body's pressure
points, also influenced his dance. While most believe that all humans have
the same pressure points, Iwana discovered that these points differ from
person to person and from time to time. This realization impacted on his
thoughts about form and movement. He came to believe the impact of the
obvious and the shades of subtlety can best be embodied through how he
carries his body during movement rather than the assumption of external
forms or positions. At this juncture, his conceptual approach to dance
shifted away from creating shapes to creating movement.
1995 'The Secret Agreement with Matter,'Tokyo; photo
by Shigetada Takahashi'
'I Never Expected to Feed Myself by Dancing...'
The need to feed himself by teaching yoga and practicing acupressure
was frustrating, eating away the time he could devote to dancing. At 43,
he became divorced and decided on a yearlong sojourn in France starting
in 1988. He intended to return to Japan as soon as his meager savings were
spent, looking at the move as a mere break, to which no one objected.
But shortly after arriving, he started getting invitations for
paid performances. 'This was something unimaginable,' he says. 'I never
believed I could actually feed myself through dance.' Even now, after a
decade of earning a living through performances and holding workshops,
he finds it hard to believe that ephemeral dance can be translated into
hard cash.
He also opened his own atelier after his arrival, calling it
La Maison du Buto Blanc, the French equivalent of Hakuto-Kan, the name
of his Tokyo studio he had built in his house in 1985. La Maison du Buto
Blanc has since evolved into an officially registered business.
Iwana claims no disciples, although many of the same people regularly
attend his workshops. He explains that in dance in general and in butoh
in particular, one must dance from one's own motivation, to develop one's
own individual method by oneself. Hijikata was famous for his admonition
not to feed on another's legacy (to dance with another's methods). In looking
at those many who attend his workshops, Iwana calls them simply 'friends,'
studiously avoiding the appellations 'student' and 'disciple.'
Japan's Industrially Structured Culture
Iwana has an annual habit of returning to Japan once or twice with
the aim of spending two months altogether. While appreciating butoh's acceptance
in Europe, he is nagged by the suspicion that it might stem from the dance's
seeming exoticism and that there exists a latent danger that a dancer can
be spoiled by this sort of adulation. He says that since butoh originated
in Japan, many there have a critical eye for it. His returns, he says,
are to showcase what he has been doing overseas.
But Iwana has become troubled about his native culture. Today,
he sees it dominated by young people; something unhealthily non-contaminated
yet industrially structured. He sees in Europe a cultural sturdiness, tempered
by war, revolution, civil discord and other more or less cataclysmic happenings
that serve to renew and force adaptability to the new. Japan, contrarily,
suffers from a refined fragility formed by accumulated layers of isolated
and inherited traditions. He is also concerned by a modern Japan whose
youths have become prey to an adult-dictated consumerism. He believes that
such a mindless capitalistic abuse is infecting the entirety of Japan's
culture and economy. 'Our culture was built on oral traditions passed from
one generation to the next but this no longer is emphasized,' he decries.
'Today, in its stead, Japan is emphasizing things that require no risk,
things that are almost entirely commercial. All of this creates a horrible
nexus that is the opposite of culture; merely a situation.' This situation
masquerading as culture Iwana finds peculiarly vexing.
In all of this, Iwana says butoh dancers are seen as anti-social.
'This is not so,' he says. 'A far better definition would be "beyond social"
in that they stand on the side of life. In Japan, the life of the individual
is constrained by community and larger social pressures. Life therefore
becomes a tool to execute social goals and ceases to be something existing
of and by itself. We butoh dancers want to exist on a broader plane, one
that encompasses a side of a universe that is also the home of insects,
animals, plants and all the rest of nature.'
Iwana is similarly critical of Japan's current choreographers.
'It seems,' he laments, 'that their primary motivation is to impress the
audience. Not that this is entirely wrong, but being too concerned with
what others see, feel and think involves a loss of perspective toward the
all-important questions of what dance actually is and why dancers dance.'
He is fond of recalling Hijikata's advice about dance, encapsulated
in the coinage Han-Gi-Tai-To-Kan which loosely translated means 'burn yourself,
sacrifice yourself, criticize yourself, maintain your honesty and retain
nature as your guide to all things.' Iwana himself says that Mother Nature
is all-embracing and all-accepting and that this recognition is intimately
connected to his concept of dance.
Today, the 53-year-old Iwana sheds 20 years when he dances. Iwana
claims he forgets his age while performing. Nevertheless, as a solo dancer
without disciples or a troupe, age must be a practical consideration physically
and financially. As a remedy, he has recently begun a 10-year workshop
program at his Normandy home. The program gives him a goal to fulfill,
supports him mentally and manifests his desire to keep dancing.
Meanwhile, he continues to open himself through deep concentration
and the widening of an already amazingly broad mind in his self-set and
self-absorbing quest for an ultimate richness in dance. |