When Okada Toshiki challenged the Toyota Choreography Award with his piece "Air Conditioner/Cooler" five years ago, no one including the judges was prepared for a face-to-face examination of the fine line between theatre and dance. I commented on this earlier on this page (in OoT 126), and as there wasn't really much dispute going on after that, I was intrigued to hear that Okada was going to appear at a talk event titled "Shaberu Dance? Odoru Engeki?" (Spoken Dance or Danced Theatre?) at SNAC, a new spot in Kiyosumishirakawa (on 4/29).
The conversation, however, didn't go well, and unfortunately it was anything but clear and comprehensible. Okada’s talk partners were choreographer/dancer Kamimura Megumi, and Momonga Complex director, choreographer Shiraga Momoko. Even after being joined by SNAC co-operator, dance critic and Azumabashi Dance Crossing organizer, Sakurai Keisuke, the conversation went along the lines of "exciting things are exciting, and it doesn't make sense to talk about differences between genres." Shiraga’s Alice-in-Wonderland way of talking was fun to listen to (and I kind of became a fan that evening), but in general, two hours for four speakers on a topic as large as this was probably just too short a time frame.
What was lacking in my view was a historical perspective. Today we have of course no way of knowing everything about the origins of music and dance. However, it isn't hard to imagine how intimately "theatre" and "dance" (and probably also "music", and in some cases even "narration") have originally been connected. After a long process of differentiation, upon entering the modern age they had eventually been divided into different genres. There were of course factors of reason and inevitability involved in the process, which is why this categorization still applies today. As long as a discussion is not based on the understanding of this fact, it simply cannot become a meaningful one.
For example, try and imagine that performing arts were originally something like a child’s ball game. What began as a simple game was then refined, rules were added, and from there the game developed in two different directions, becoming football and handball. Then, at once point, a young football player began to find it inconvenient and unreasonable to use his feet only, and when he ventured to use his hands during a match, it was the birth of rugby.
This "legend" is apparently not a true story, but as this column is not about the history of sports, I'll just continue to use it as a metaphor. As you will have guessed by now, football here is a replacement for dance, while handball is theatre. The name Pina Bausch was mentioned in the talk session, so she would have to be the young rule-breaking football player. Pina used words that had been as taboo in dance as the hand was in football, and the rugby she invented in the realm of performing arts was called "Tanztheater".
I'd like to stress here that Tanztheater emerged from dance, and that the result was an interesting one thanks to a foul committed against the rules of dance. Ignoring for the moment that Pia’s achievements were the exceptionally miraculous products of a brilliant mind, this is in fact the most elemental point in the above outrageous metaphor. Playing foul by using the hand resulted in the most exciting (football) match. Likewise, when Pina’s Tanztheater Wuppertal introduced words and staged a "spoken dance", the result was the most exciting (dance) performance.
Okada was having similar things in mind. Nevertheless, his background is different from that of Pina Bausch. Chelfitsch is originally a theatre company, so what they staged wasn't "spoken dance" but "danced theatre". When "Cooler" was performed at the Toyota Award (and also when it was first shown at the We Love Dance Festival in 2004), the organizers' intention was perhaps something like "inviting a handball team who play with their feet to participate in a football tournament". That team, however, contributed first and foremost to a revolution of handball rather than introducing new techniques to football. There was no point in watching it as football, so I wonder, what’s wrong about enjoying it as an exciting handball match?
Okada is recently using (in an interview with REALTOKYO/Realkyoto, "Konsepushon" (Conception), etc.) such keywords as "representation/image" and "concrete/body" when talking about what is possible in theatre but not in dance. "Naturalism and realism is what they call the method of hiding what is actually being done.[…] What I was doing was being involved in such concealment activities. […] (Now) I'm trying to show that it is unnecessary to make efforts to remove the feeling of pigment from artists' paint." The things he says are remarkably similar to art critic Clement Greenberg’s interpretation of modernism: "It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium. Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art… The limitations that constitute the medium of painting — the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment — were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Under Modernism these same limitations came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged openly." (From "Modernist Painting", in "Clement Greenberg: Selected Writings")
In this respect, Okada can be called a modernist as well. Or rather, no one on earth has probably managed to escape the paradigm of the modern age as a framework that is still in progress. If this is so, to thoroughly explore "all that is unique in the nature of the medium" has to be the very first point on the agendas of Okada and all those who produce art and host events to show it today. The revolution of a genre is something that is done within that genre, by someone who has mastered the essence of it. I personally consider it as arrogant and negligent to rely on artists from other, as yet unexplored genres.
Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO