Noh
Project II
An
intercultural dance/music/poetry performance installation
Headlands
Center for the Arts
Sunday, August 3
by
Ann Murphy
The
first Sunday of August was one of those Northern California
afternoons that became spellbinding as I neared the
Pacific Ocean. The dun brown hills of Marin County glimmered
a soft, pale gold. The air blew alternately hot and
cool, stinging with light then suddenly getting shadowy.
As I rounded a corner I saw a cluster of roan horses,
snouts lifted, ears pricked. I turned left and wound
my way up a hill away from beach and the old WW II army
barracks, climbing toward a scatter of large, clapboard
buildings peacefully suspended in sunlight—the
Headlands Art Center. For a few seconds I let myself
be blinded by a utopian picture of this corner of the
world as I imagined it 80 years ago, an Imogen Cunningham
place of eccentric charm, rugged beauty, independence
and adventure.Then I came to my senses—women had what
then? Life lasted how long?—and I pressed on,
reconciling myself to the fact that utopias are best
left as ideas. Life was a bittersweet line between longing
and disappointment, fantasy and what was real, and I
was having a bumpy ride.
 Although
none of this small reverie was stage-managed by choreographer
June Watanabe, 15 minutes later the 63-year-old artist
and Mills College dance professor confronted me with
an interdisciplinary work-in-progress called Noh Project
II that willingly embraced and even sought out puzzles
of how things seem as opposed to what they are. That
made this was one of the most demanding and provocative
collaborations I’ve seen in years, where form and content
fused with sinuous delicacy. I only wish more completed
local work was as rigorously inventive and daring as
this.
To
begin with, the Marin Headlands is a place of beautiful
incongruity; Watanabe knows that, and chose to present
her evolving work there because of it. Lurching out
into the ocean north of San Francisco, this stretch
of what is now glorious parkland is one of the region’s
physical treasures. It was also a crucial lookout station
during World War II after Pearl Harbor when the U.S.
feared Japan might attack the mainland. The hills of
the Headland, which rise above the breakers, are still
dotted with the crumbling remains of bunkers, tunnels
and steel vaults, all part of the Army’s old defense
system. Today we go there to throw frisbees on the beach,
to travel over paths looking for hawks or wildflowers,
or to simply marvel at the cerulean expanse of ocean.
Sometimes we even have holidays there.* But because
of the Headland’s part in the war, Watanabe has a built-in
reminder there that she and her family were pulled from
their California home to an internment camp as part
of the state-wide round-up of Japanese Americans by
the US government.
"I
have in the past decade created works-in-progress primarily
because I was trying a new kind of work, and, in a number
of cases, I was doing it at the Headlands. I love that
place more than any other performance space….The work-in-progress
sites are critical in that they lend themselves to the
content and nature of the work. I also want the audience
to be physically closer, a part of the piece."
It
wasn’t until somewhere about a third of the way into
the performance, though, that I understood with a big
"ah-ha" that the setting, both natural and
human, was inseparable from the conceptual bones of
the dance. If I’d briefly struggled with the impulse
to regard the Headlands Art Center as a kind of Walden
Pond manqué, here was Watanabe addressing the
contradiction and paradox of the place, along with many
other layers of experience, with a Buddhist mind. The
targets were big: peace and war, optimism and despair,
beauty and beastliness, ancient tradition and the modern,
light and dark, and what we call things versus what
we know them, "through a glass darkly," to
be. She was struggling with dualism with a philosophical
grasp that seemed rugged, brave and adventuresome. Even
her choice to treat a work-in-progress as a bona fide
work of art in its own right was part of that Buddha
mind.
This
is how the piece took form: The artists came into the
room. A seat was waiting for each one—seven chairs,
the last seven in the room to be filled, the four musicians
against a wall with many windows through which we could
see golden grasses move. Once they entered the space,
the performers sat in silence awhile, a ritual emptiness
on their faces, as though following generalized instructions
rather than exact choreography. Noh Master Anshin Uchida,
(Intangible Cultural Asset of Japan), projected the
deepest silence, his very still body encased in a black
kimono with a beautiful gold skirt. When he began his
dance, I felt he rose up out of his silence like a bird
that solitarily traverses a mythic flight pattern. Watanabe,
in her chair, settled into a lighter, softer calm. Pauline
Oliveros, avant garde composer and creator of Deep Listening,
holding her accordian (yes, an accordian), looked as
though she might break out into a polka, but Oliveros’
sage face bore no polka traces. The audience, too, grew
deeply silent, as theater audiences rarely do. But this
was a house filled with dancers, friends, and Noh aficionados,
a house of believers committed to the experience.
"Work-in-progress
allows me to experiment without being concerned about
whether it all "fits" or works…. The interesting
aspect is that, because I am less concerned about formal
structure, it takes on its own organic form. Works-in-progress
have themselves always turned into a very special work,
simply because the focus of the feeling is on the environmental
space and the raw materials."
The
fine cast, including musicians Philip Gelb on shakuhachi,
Shoko Hikage on koto, and Touoji Tomita on trombone,
performed with a delicate and allusive simplicity. They
all came to seem like artist metaphysicians collectively
wrangling with the idea of experience as something intrinsically
provisional and experimental, shaped yet repeatedly
falling into shapelessness. Thanks in large measure
to Scalapino’s rhythmically jagged poem called "Can’t
is ‘Night," the whole event was anchored with a
series of deft philosophical landmarks about duality
and its negation in what otherwise easily might have
been a free-floating and ambiguous improvisation.
Scalapino
held her scripted text in both hands and walked with
ritualized, thinking slowness from stage right to stage
left in dramatic fragments, the way the sun moved through
the space. While Can’t didn’t narratively define the
piece per se, it asked both rhythmically and conceptually
the question that the entire production was asking:
how to penetrate duality, how to lurch through, both
linguistically and musically, the opacity of experience
so as to penetrate to a lucidity beyond language. How
to know what is real in a political world fueled by
illusion, lies and inversion?
This
was one of two major "texts" that intersected
and made a loose net to hold the performance. The other
was Uchida’s exquisite dance quotes from three different
Noh oshimai dances—Unodan/Hagoromo, Tandanori, and Aoi
no Ue—with live and recorded Noh songs sung by
Uchida. This "text," for the non-Japanese
speaking audience, was visual and symbolic, vaguely
knowable yet impenetrable, which, when people later
complained about the lack of translation, is how Watanabe
said she wanted it. For those fluent in Japanese, the
juxtaposition of a tale about a Tennin, or celestial
dancer, another about aristocratic jealousies, and another
about the spirit of a warrior poet was strange, even
baffling.
For
the English speakers in the audience, it was Scalapino’s
poem, (which took the recent wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq and our current culture of disinformation as her
philosophical trope), that laid out the intellectual
and aesthetic parameters of the performance. "They’ve
destroyed language so we have to destroy it—in
it," she said. Or: "Our language is to reverse
night." And: "Our movement is before language—and
later." As she verbally juggled the conundrum of
duality in search of oneness, or walked the knife-edge
between truth and lies in the quest for truth, a responsive
chorus of haunting, ruptured, lyrical and squawking
music joined her. Then Uchida, on an altogether different
plane, danced his floating dance, arms held in a diamond
shape in front of the body, white socked feet flexing
into every step like the paddles of a paddle boat. He
came to embody yugen; Scalapino alluded to it, sought
it and, in seeking it, created it.
Yugen,
or a sense of mystery and depth, beauty and suggestiveness,
is at the heart of the Noh dramas that playwright Kan'ami
(1333-1384) and his son Zeami (1363-1443) wrote, according
to Thomas Rimer, professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Zen philosopher Alan Watts wrote that yugen means "the
sudden perception of something mysterious and strange,
hinting at an unknown never to be discovered."
"I
loved the desperateness of all of it and by providing
a structure that was about evolution, it evolved."
While
neither Scalapino nor Uchida improvised their work,
Watanabe and the musicians did. Although a few of Watanabe’s
movements looked clichéd, and once in awhile
the music seemed too desultory, I had a palpable sense
of the piece being created in the moment around a poetic
core. As Oliveros later during the q and a said: "The
form of the piece is quite clear. The music is a response
to that…. One very important thing was to play in such
a way that you’d hear the rhythm of the word….I understood
it [the poem] as music and feeling….The real challenge
is not to waste any sound at all." She didn’t.
Watanabe,
who echoed Uchida like a protegé echoing a mentor,
poignantly traced many of the same spatial patterns
as Uchida—especially the overlapping diagonal ellipses
that looked like angel wings. She also picked up his
ritually restrained use of a fan. Although I think she
could push these parallels further, her movements, with
the keen edge of their modern line, had a glinting contemporary
freshness. Watanabe also used the simultaneous performance
of her work and Noh to evoke past dances she has made
about internment: Uchida represented Japanese life before
America, the life Japanese Americans, for good and bad,
gave up. She also suggested through juxtaposition and
movement echoes that her relation to Noh and Japanese
movement colors her modernism, and, conversely, that
modernism hauls classic Japanese dance into the present.
Uchida, we later learned, would never extract Noh excerpts
at home and use them as he was doing here.
By
6 pm, after the artists led a vigorous question and
answer session with the impassioned audience, I thought:
this is as good as it gets—an artistic experience that
sets life on its edge and illuminates it, then projects
back to us with poignant clarity the conundrums that
consume us both as Americans and as human beings.
When
the piece opens at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in
May, I hope that the artists can figure out a way to
keep the edge of exploration and discovery alive. Even
more, I hope they can do something to shape the space
so that it is as alive and intrusive as the Marin Headlands
was that first Sunday in August.
* A few years ago I had a Thanksgiving dinner picnic
on the beach, and on the sand nearby twenty people had
a large, formal dinner party, everyone dressed in black,
the table replete with linens, candlelabra, china and
silver. After the festive and stylish meal was over,
one diner sat the rental china in its mesh plastic cube
at the shoreline, to rinse. A wave washed over the lot
and suddenly plates were floating out to sea. As though
choreographed by Fellini, the man in his beautiful Italian
loafers and pressed black trousers galloped desperately
into the water after them. He salvaged one plate; the
ocean claimed the rest. That is the Headlands.
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