These days, Ondrej’s relaxation/exploration exercise was more like a review on every thing we did for the last nine days. Although there were still a little variation within the exercises, the central part on where we should focus on was pretty much similar. I feel a bit ashamed of myself for not being able to control my body well enough to maintain in the position, training our core muscle. I raise my weight on my training routine in gym since from Monday. My muscle (especially core, thighs, and arms part) soreness was completely not eased; instead, I felt it grew even more painful today. I really want to push myself to a greater limit. It has been a long time that I did not feel this ache. I am proud of pushing myself away from the comfort zone, but also regret on doing this due to the reason that I could not participate fully during the class. I am perfectly fine with Ondrej pointing me out while performing the exercise. I would considered it as a caring from him. But, if this action somehow shows that I am weak… then probably it is not the impression that I want others feel about me. Besides this, I really love the composition that Ondrej taught us. From the first day learning it until now, I could balance my body weight pretty well and not fall to any direction other than the original moves. Adding a bit walking/jumping elements into the piece, the whole process seemed to be more energetic and exciting for me. As Ondrej said today (Professor Trajal has said before as well), sometimes the move that we are familiar with the most, is often the one that is most difficult to learn. As we are used to the “normal” way, any adjustment occurred on that certain may make the movement harder.

I remembered Morica has introduced herself, saying that she is a performer of “Butoh” in the first class. After that, I went on YouTube and did some research about it. I was so shocked and surprised that this dance has an official name. For the first time watching it, I had literally no words to describe if someone asks me what did I just see. A sort of feeling of death and desperation, this has somehow popped into my mind when I was trying to figure out how to explain it. A few days ago, Professor Trajal assigned a work to us— archive the Kazuo Ohno’s “Admiring La Argentina.” I could not believe that we are actually going to “archive” a Butoh work in this class as I thought it will be extremely difficult for us to reach to that state of dancing spirit. Doing two days of research and discussing the concept about it with my friends, Anna and I decided to work on this piece together. We spent about three to four hours today in the studio after class and thought about how will we deliver our “archive” piece, struggling in the question of “does it work” constantly in the brainstorming process. Nevertheless, we figured it out finally. People who shared their ideas on how they are going to present were really interesting in a way that I have never thought about it before. For the whole concept on our piece, and why we present it like this, I would keep it as a secret from now and leave it to tomorrow’s journal. Like we said in the class, everyone is unique, so do our work.