Dance as a Gift

Abstract

This conversation was held on 19 February 2020 at the International Research Center ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’ in Berlin shortly after Nanako Nakajima’s final presentation of her Valeska Gert Professorship. ¹Nanako Nakajima developed the Berlin version of the project Dance Archive Box with Dance Studies students from the Freie Universität Berlin. Initially proposed by theatre maker Ong Keng Sen, and conceived and facilitated by him, Daisuke Muto and Nanako Nakajima – and later Margie Medlin together with seven dance artists – the Dance Archive Box was initially launched with the Saison Foundation, Tokyo, in 2014, and exchanged and further developed in Japan and Singapore with artists of contemporary and traditional dance from the Asia-Pacific region. In the previous project, seven contemporary dance makers from Japan archived their works through their respective methods, each creating an archive box and then handing it over to another artist from a different background for re-performance. This time, Dance Studies students from the Freie Universität Berlin received these archive boxes from Japan and investigated how they could be used for recreation. There they found traces and documents of unknown dance movements: notes and drawings, pieces from costumes, sound recordings, or just one short letter. Dance Archive Box Berlin – a practical investigation into the archiving and reconstruction of movement – has been created through dramaturgical and performative explorations of the boxed material. In the field of Japanese contemporary dance, which has emancipated itself from the familial master-student relationship that long governed the Japanese system of passing on an art tradition, the project posed the following questions: how is it possible to separate a dance from the communal histories of the dance maker and to produce a Dance Archive Box as a creative common ground for all people? what does it mean to share a dance without sharing time with the dance makers themselves? how do we reconstruct whose histories for whom? what aspects of dance in the past should be passed on as an archive for the future?

Notes

1 The Valeska Gert Visiting Professorship is hosted in collaboration with the Institute of Theater Studies at Freie Universitat Berlin, the German Academic Exchange Service and the Akademie der Kunste (Academy of Arts). The position has existed since 2006 and every semester a dance or performance artist from abroad is invited to come and work artistically with students of Dance Studies. This exchange is publicly presented in a lecture at the start of the visit and a closing presentation at the end.

2 In Japanese traditional arts, such as Noh, Kabuki and other dance forms in the performing arts, members consist of extended family members by blood and often protect the hereditary tradition. This traditional education process is not institutionalized in the academy or public university system.

3 Choreographer and dancer Saburo Teshigawara, representative of the international contemporary dance scene, began his career in 1981 in Tokyo after studying plastic arts and classical ballet. In 1985, he founded a company named KARAS with Kei Miyata and started group choreography and their own activities. He has been commissioned by many international ballet companies such as the Paris Opera to create repertoire pieces for the company.

4 The Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) is an annual arts festival held in Singapore. It is organised by Arts Festival Limited for the National Arts Council.

5 The Saison Foundation is a private grant-making foundation established by Seiji Tsutsumi. The foundation has supported contemporary Japanese theatre and dance since 1987.

6 The Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunka-chō) is a part of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). It was set up in 1968 to promote Japanese arts and culture.

7 Based in New Delhi, established in 2007, The Gati Forum is a pioneering arts initiative that works in the field of contemporary dance.

8 Based in Bengaluru, established in 1992, the Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts is a registered, public charitable trust formed by artistes from different disciplines to help create contexts for contemporary movement arts.

9 In terms of an archive box, there is no clear idea of ‘original’: Zan Yamashita’s box is missing and Natsuko Tezuka’s is reproduced; Chieko Ito’s box is always updated and another two have no form: the box is the form of a website in Tsuyoshi Shirai’s case; and in Yukio Suzuki’s case, all the materials are transferred through a zip file and I restored a few items in Berlin, etc.; Mikuni Yanaihara’s box and Ikuyo Kuroda’s box are more or less original but I bought and added the new urn in Berlin for Ikuyo. There are almost always updates and changes to the archive boxes.

10 In Japanese mythology, Amenouzume No Mikoto is the celestial goddess who performed a dance enticing the sun goddess Amaterasu out of the cave in which she had secluded herself (thus depriving the world of light). Amenouzume No Mikoto is the patron goddess of dancers. The classical music and dancing used in Shintō religious ceremonies, kagura, is said to have originated with her performance.

11 Bon dance is danced by all the local people in the midsummer festival for spirits of the dead. Bon is one of the most popular annual festivals in Japan, honouring the spirits of deceased family ancestors and of the dead generally.

12 The Takarazuka Revue is a Japanese all-female musical theatre troupe based in Takarazuka, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. The troupe was established in 1913 by Ichizo Kobayashi.

13 Pina Bausch created the piece called Wiesenland in 2000 and this repertoire was presented in 2019 in Wupperthal by her original, ageing company of dancers, along with the new, younger dancers who replace their movement parts.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nanako Nakajima

Nanako Nakajima is a scholar and a pioneer of dance dramaturgy, and a certifi ed traditional Japanese dance master, Kannae Fujima. She has been a Valeska Gert Visiting Professor 2019/20 at Freie Universität Berlin. She explores her continuous life process through dance in the form of dramaturgy and research, which has evolved into the topic of ageing bodies in dance. For her, frustration, anger and reluctance are by-products of a certain work process and bespeak a concerning imbalance in the collaboration. To transform her emotional knowledge into theoretical knowledge and refl ect it back on the working process is for her to engage dance dramaturgy.

Her dramaturgy includes luciana achugar's Exhausting Love at Danspace Project (2006-07 New York Dance and Performance Awards, The Bessies), Osamu Jareo's mixed-abled dance project Thikwa plus Junkan Project (2008-12), and Mengfan Wang's When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer at the Wuzhen Theatre Festival, Beijing/Shanghai (2019-20).

Nanako's curatorial direction includes Dance Archive Boxes @TPAM2016 at the Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama, Yvonne Rainer Performative Exhibition at Kyoto Art Theater Shunju-za in 2017. Nanako received a Special Commendation from the 2017 Elliott Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy (established by the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas).

Her publications include: Dance Dramaturgy: Modes of agency, awareness and engagement (Palgrave, 2015); The Aging Body in Dance: A cross-cultural perspective coedited with Gabriele Brandstetter (Routledge, 2017); Oi to Odori co-edited with K. Toyama (Keiso-Shobo, 2019); Performance Research 24(3): ‘On Ageing (& Beyond)’ co-edited with Richard Gough, 2019.