I think that the living and the dead are inseparable from each other.  I think that we feed off of each other.  Somehow I have come to believe that the dead don’t really disappear from life…  Their bodily form may be gone but who they were from the beginning was never that form just as you and I who live now in these bodies are not only these bodies.  Each of us knows in his being that he is eternal.  We never really feel like we are going to die…  This is because we know we are immortal.  The spark of life inside us is a pure drop thrown into the air from the great ocean of eternity, which is nothing but love, constant and unchanging.  Though we exist for a brief moment we are still always and forever also that great sea.

 

And so the dead never really go anywhere.  And likewise the living never really arrive anywhere either.  This I think is at the core of the mystery of art.  Art is regeneration… It is the soul of life constantly renewing itself in ever changing forms and expressions of love and ecstasy.  Dance is this drama played out immediately in real time with nothing but the body and the space it inhabits and the earth upon which it dances.  And this is precisely why we can establish connection with those who have gone before us.  Not only that but furthermore I think it is essential that we do so if we wish to be worthy and become a vehicle for the logos in it’s birth upon the shore of the present.  We build upon each other.  Rodin is alive in my dance.  Pina Bausch lives on in the dances of a thousand choreographers.  Picasso manifests himself daily into multiple hands of genius.  They are all here with us.  Of this I am sure.

Is it possible to move in such a way where there are no lies?  Where every action, every gesture, impulse and kinetic nuance fulfills its cycle from birth to maturity to death and the inevitable transformation into something new?  In this kind of dance there could be no room for doubt, hesitation or lack of conviction.  This dance would express a total harmony between person, nature and ideal…  In short it would express the total fulfillment of one’s destiny (in whatever moment it is danced).  If anything, this is the dance I am seeking.

Should not we artists express the beauty of the world around us, of things greater than ourselves?  To stop at the boundaries of our personal, human drama is like setting out in a great ship rigged and worthy of a trans-oceanic journey and yet stopping at the edge of the harbor, and there sitting smugly thinking we have made a great journey already!  What of the sea?  What of the vast ocean of uncharted beauty?  This is what I want to express!  Something larger than myself!  This idea of modern art that the stories of the personal self are adequate material for great art is highly questionable.  Although I fear I may not have much genius, or even any decent store of talent, I do have a will; A will to set course beyond the harbor of my limitations and express the beauty of the world and its manifold truths.

 

9/15/09

In Salvador Dali’s painting “Archeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus” there is expressed something very close to what I experienced on my last day in Tokyo.  Upon looking at Dali’s painting one has a feeling of great time, as if ages have passed and the buildings of some great empire have slowly crumbled and eroded until now in their final days they assume this humble posture.  And, of course, it is a posture of prayer.  There is something so human and full of care in the way they stand.  And it is this human care, so beautifully expressed in Millet’s original painting and through Dali stretched with nostalgia to a more universal dimension, which speaks poignantly to my heart.

I spent the afternoon of my last day in Tokyo in the Meji Shrine forest between Shibuya and Shinjuku.  The sky was dark with clouds but not raining.  The weather seemed suspended on a course towards a storm but all was still.  This made for a dreamy quality in the park.  The old trees and the dark sky made Tokyo seem a world away from where I wandered.  However at one point I emerged into a field where I could see the buildings of downtown Shinjuku towering above the trees.  There wasn’t a soul in the park as I found out later it was past closing time, but I lingered in my ignorance of this fact and absorbed the strange view for a while.  Due to the presence of the forest only a handful of skyscrapers could be seen above the treetops.  And with the dark sky behind it looked like a scene from the future, unreal almost, as if I wasn’t seeing the actual Tokyo before me but instead an abstraction, an artistic representation of reality that made reality even more vivid for me in that moment.  I was seeing an archeological reminiscence of Tokyo’s heart.  The sky was full of crows and I was alone in this forest with seething masses of the city around me seemingly gone and only the skeletons of a culture, a humanity, and a dream remaining.

Of course the reality of present day Tokyo soon returned when a policeman arrived and told me to leave the park as it had closed already.  I eventually made my way out of the park and slowly entered the throngs of people all moving towards Shinjuku station at 6pm rush hour.  I have been told this is the busiest train station in the world, seeing over a million people a day pass through its turnstiles.  The sky continued to be dark and ominous adding to the dramatic effect of dusk and the lights of downtown Tokyo emerging in the gloom.  By the time I got to the station I was in a sea of human bodies all headed somewhere.  I was going to Yokohama for my last class with Yoshito and made my way to the Shonan-Shinjuku train line.  The Shonan-Shinjuku is an express train line to Yokohama and it is so crowded during rush hour that JR literally hires white gloved workers to help push the people onto the train.  I made my way into this sardine can transportation service and headed for Yokohama an hour away.

Just a few minutes into the ride I noticed a slight tickle on my arm and discovered there a small ant crawling on my skin.  He had come from the park!  I remember upon seeing him I literally said out loud “oh honey that was a bad idea!”  I couldn’t believe he had ended up here on the train with me.  He was doomed of course, but I felt some immediate connection with him.  And it seemed so absurd to me because I was vividly aware of both his perspective and the human perspective all around me.  The scene should be described in more detail to be fully appreciated.  There I was standing squished together with hoards of people all oblivious to anything but their cell phones, video games and I-pods, so tight that I could feel the breathing of the man next to me through our bodies and I was trying to protect and understand this little ant who had unknowingly ended up in this dangerous situation.  Very absurd! 

So, for the next forty-five minutes the ant and I rode together to Yokohama.  I simply let him crawl up and down my arm.  At one point he actually fell and I thought for sure he was a goner.  But after a few minutes of staring at the floor he re-appeared on the backpack resting at my feet and I picked him up again.  We eventually arrived in Yokohama station and I parted ways with my new friend at the station platform where I left him crawling on a beam towards the ceiling.  Of course, being separated from his colony he didn’t have long to live.  But still, it seemed like a better place to be then stuck between a hundred or more shoes on the train.

It wasn’t until later that evening at Yoshito’s class when he asked us to dance the “smallest” dance that I started to understand how much that little ant had affected me.  And now, after many days have passed and I am back in my own country I can see what a profound story it really was.  I actually became that ant while I was with him on the train.  I saw in that short time together how I am no different from him.  The world is so vast and we are all so small.  On whatever dimension we choose to look we will see this truth Be it an ant, a human being, a mountain or even the earth itself, we all swim in something much larger than ourselves.  And it was this honesty between God and myself that struck me so deeply upon meeting this ant. 

So again, I think of Dali’s Reminiscence.  It is this humility in the face of something greater than us that makes his painting so powerful.  This is the essence and the beauty of prayer and was it not Dali’s own humility in the face of Millet’s great work Angelus that enabled him to create something new?  I believe more and more that the best art is only prayer.  It is a way to come to terms with and honor both our own smallness and the greatness that surrounds and sustains us.

The word Syzygy comes from the Greek σύζῠγος (syzygos), "yoked together."    The essence of this word means “not-one-not-two” or a non-dual way to say no-duality.  It is the dance between the particular and the universal where one becomes the other in an endless play of suchness.  The personal is a gateway into the universal.  In fact this may be the point of the personal.  How else could we actually come to terms with the immensity of our universe than through a personal doorway?  This our bodies can do.  They are the gateways into vast perception and compassion because through them we can actually experience the infinitude we call the manifest world.  The trillions of cells that live in our bodies have no conception of us.  The thing we call the personal self is such a fragile perception and it is my belief that the true dancer should learn to move beyond this narrow veneer.  This is the goal of Syzygy Butoh.