Culture Club
So what is “ankoku”? This is a very difficult topic to tackle. It is like trying to explain and understand the black-hole in the universe. I am neither a scholar nor a researcher. I am simply a living dancer. But I will have to struggle on with this… …I can only try to share with you my deep personal experience of Ankoku Butoh through my clumsy use of language.
In some sense, I feel that we can replace the word “ankoku” with “spirituality”. When I examine in retrospect, my path over the past thirty years, I feel that I did not take up dance in particular, but rather, I have borrowed the “field of the body” to go on a spiritual journey. Usually when we talk about spiritual inquiry, we think of the topics of Psychology, Philosophy, Literature, Anthropology, or even Theology. All of these investigate “spirituality” in a linguistic and sociological domain. But where is the inquiry into individual spirituality?
If we move along the line of dualism in Occidental culture, we see that in order to look into spirituality, we examine the mind. Occidental dualism does not allow us to explore spirituality in the field of the body. For myself, my inquiry into spirituality did not happen in academia, it happened in the field of the body. This is full of contradictions if we approach it from the point of view of Occidental dualism, but this is precisely the unique feature of Ankoku Butoh. I am bewitched, not by the spiritual quest in the field of language, but rather, by learning in the field of the body. But what is this field of the body? Learning and seeking into that constitutes my Ankoku Butoh journey.
When Japanese people are asked where the position of the mind is, most of them will point not to the brain, but to the heart. I wonder if mind is equivalent to brain for Occidentals.
There was an interesting incident that happened in Ohno Kazuo’s rehearsal studio. Many foreigners come to his studio, and he would begin by giving them a phrase to dance on. For example, “Dance in the heavens. Dance in hell. Dance in the heart.” He would ask them to dance in different “fields”. Most of the foreigners could cope with this and they would feel that it had been a wonderful rehearsal. But when Ohno said, dance in the “konpaku”, all of a sudden they would not know how to move. “Konpaku” is a word that even the Japanese have forgotten and would be startled by. Where is the field of “konpaku”? If there is a field of “konpaku” it would neither be in the “heavens” nor in “hell”. It is a term that describes the riverbanks where the dead and the living come and go, very much at peace with themselves. I have the impression that the essential difference, between “konpaku” and western concepts of “soul“ and “spirit” is that these words have connotations of heaven but not hell. In Japan, we use Buddhist terms like “higan” –the far side of the riverbank, the world of the dead, and “shigan” –the near side of the riverbank, the world of the living. “Konpaku” belongs to the world of the dead. The dead come and go several times a year crossing the river to their ancestral homes. It is not about being called up to the heavens. “Heaven” and “hell” have a rigid vertical relationship in Occidental society. “Higan” and “shigan” have a horizontal relationship. In other words, the heavens and “shigan” are not places but “nowhere out there”.
Whatever you may call it, darkness, spirituality, or even something formless, something that cannot be put into words, or simply, the unconscious, the inexplicable, the destroyed and disappeared… we are actually talking about something that cannot be seen. Something that Hijikata called “ankoku”. Hijikata liked to use the word “yami” (shadowy darkness). It gives the feeling of something that is full of contradiction and irrationality, somewhere like the “chaos of eternal beginning”.
When Butoh is talked about as a kind of shamanism or a form of therapy, it’s like dissecting ones own body into pieces. To deconstruct Ankoku Butoh with “language” is moving further and further away from the joy of early Ankoku Butoh’s integral quest for “the body as the scene of fulfilled life”.
In some sense, Hijikata hated the word “spirituality”. He preferred to talk about “yami”, (shadowy darkness). When seen from the point of view of Occidental dualism, spirituality appears to be superior to the flesh. Ankoku Butoh is fundamentally in conflict with this because it is based on the eastern belief of body-mind/body-heart unity. We hold the belief of the total body, and the view of “body as the scene of a full life”.