Today I felt the difference between a classroom and a studio, due to the fact that in the first 20 minutes we were free to rehearse our piece, do research, or watch Kazuo Ohno’s work. It was like the ‘jumping’ mentioned at the beginning of the course, that in the end proves to be more efficient. I chose to dig deeper into Ohno and Hijikata’s signature work, Admiring La Argentina (1977) and how it almost becomes sort of a chain of ‘archiving’, given the fact that Ohno was archiving the Spanish dancer’s performance and Trajal is archiving Ohno’s ‘archiving’ on that. I wonder if this chained process has a name, and if it has, where it is going. Can it go on forever?

I left the class inspired by seeing my peers perform and how each had such a different interpretation of ‘a dancer from the Voguing tradition coming down to Judson Church in 1963’, the proposition that stuck up in my head over the past two days. Whether if it was in producing sound and then being led by it, using objects, setting different places for the audience, or setting the mirrors in order to create a performative space. Tori used the sound of the heels almost like a metronome and her movements were synchronizing with them. Auguste decided a place for the audience in the middle of the studio, in an open space, where our participation, observation, and concentration were entirely based on her and Yuky’s movement in space, thus looking becoming inseparable from walking. The essential difference was not only the act of continuously turning your head as a viewer, but the fact that we and our relationship to the figures perceived become the subject of perception; the movement of the gaze became an integral part of the performance.

Sharon ‘built’ an almost closed form. I was quite interested about it because usually if you close a form and there is a void on the inside, it quickly degenerates into revealed vs. concealed, and that suited the character she wanted to portray. The way of placing the mirrors in a sculptural manner and building a performative space out of it is similar to what I had in mind for my own piece, being inspired by the works of Richard Serra, a visual artist heavily concerned of humanity’s relationship with physical space.

As an audience, you can feel the experience of transformation that is about to take place: Sharon leaves with her left foot the inner diamond-shape formed by the mirrors—her body has left the inner space, rigidly walking in the outer space with the neutral body alignment. This formal transgression of limits is codified as an experience through the narrative she had in mind, of Medea’s internal struggles, but we as an audience, not knowing the meaning beforehand, abstracted the performance in our minds somehow as Trajal pointed out; and this is not necessarily a bad thing.
I also remember what Trajal said about us having a different approach than the students who go through years of dance practice. You don’t need to be educated in dance to do this, because the understanding is basically behavioral and experiential. Even though everyone’s experience is different given what they bring to it, on a very basic level those experiences have the potential of connecting and understanding. The performance of each individual was exactly what they needed to portray – It was rigid, then vibrant, it was sassy then austere. I can’t wait to see what the butoh archiving will bring.