The Discovery Of Movement As Own Language

The "Basic Training" is the foundation of the workshops, where the participant becomes acquainted with "hanging", which Minako Seki terms "Universal Position".
Besides she is teaching "relaxation", that means to be relaxed while you are "hanging" and the technic of movement through the physical, kinetic principle and his theory, furthermore the translation of own, very personally imagination, also the translation of emotion into conscious and impression pictures in order to get dancing. The participant is also learning to work with the basic energy of his body, this is the "Tian-Den". With this energy he is learning also in contact with partners or the whole group to create dance. .




My dance-language

My basic setting of dancing is to be hanging instead of standing. Metaphorically I'm hanging on a thread, which on one side is connected with the centre of the earth and on the other side with the universe. We are all hanging with our heads downunder. This is how I receive all the vibrations and influences which I transmit to my body. This is how I can be impressed by a piece of material which hangs in a tree and is moved by the wind.
My choreography is the result of the personally developed, intuitiv picture-worlds and not (as in classical european theatre) from a given rational methodology. The metamorphosis, the magical transformation of themself', is a key term for my dance. This is the first challenge on myself, with full concentration to give absolute freedom to my fantasy and senses.



Notice About A Workshop Of Minako Seki
in November 2004
by Tanya Calamoneri


Hanging

The dancer stands with her knees slightly bent, weight centered between right and left. She imagines a string holding her up from the top of her head, and her body dangling from the end of the string. Her feet are lightly placed on the floor, because the weight is carried by the string, as opposed to the legs and spine holding her up against gravity.

Breathing in, the dancer gathers air and inflated her lungs. Breathing out, she squeezes the air out of her body, up her neck, behind her nose, and through the top of her head.

I experience the air coming out the top of my head as light. There is a slit down the center of my head from front to back, and yellow light beams shoot through like a door that's open just a crack at night, letting light into my bedroom from the next room.


Falling Point

The dancer rises from the hanging position on an exhale, being pulled up by the imaginary string. Suddenly the string is cut and her body drops, free falling for a second. A second hand catches the string before she falls completely to the ground. She inhales, and then rises again on the exhale.

I experience this exercise as a stone dropping through the top of my head into a muddy basin in my pelvis. The weight of the stone makes me drop. It's a shock. The three joints of my legs bend to catch me and keep the weight in the center.

I also have the image of an elevator falling too fast, and then stopping suddenly and my stomach catches up.


Water Bag

One dancer lies on her back on the floor, arms and legs extended. The second holds her big toes together and rocks the feet side to side. The vibration snakes up the legs an into the spine, causing the head to wag back and forth.

Water bag helps me relax my front body into my back body. My brain feels softer and less rational afterwords, more able to make oblique associations. My thoughts are like tadpoles that float past my peripheral vision. I see them go by but I am not able to hold on to them.


Pillar and Wind

One half of the body serves as an anchor, the other half rotates outward, peeling from the center with the hand crossing the chest and extending outward sequentially joint by joint. The center rotating causes the hip joint to rotate as well. The body half (including half the face, neck, chest, arm, half the torso, pelvis, and one leg), that is open should feel the sensation of fabric or the pages of a book fluttering in the wind. The open body half should drag in to the center with the effort of that wind pressing against it. Once closed, the wind causes the entire body to turn, and then a wind from the other direction opens the opposite body half (the one that was previously stable) with the same effect, and the cycle continues.

The anchoring body half can be filled with images of solid substances such as metal, wood, stone, or hard plastic. The open side could use the image of anything that will flutter and tear in the wind, such as the pages of a book, fabric as in clothing or a flag, a person's hair, a plastic bag.

Cypress tree on the cliffs of California…


Water Bag Improvisation

We start standing in an upright position, bending the three major leg joints in rapid succession, shaking the torso and the arms flop along the sides. The head bobbles on top of the spine. We make sounds and tones and they echo, resonate in our bodies. Gradually the shaking becomes bigger and randomly moves throughout the body. As the water moves, the fixed points and free points in the body shift.

It is very difficult to quiet the water today. I am totally carried away by the music today.

Water Bag is like Steve Paxton's "Small Dance" - the dancer stands still, closes the eyes, and witnesses the dance that happens inside, watching the little shifts in weight and the body maintains it upright position. The dancer realizes there is no such thing as stillness, there is only movement. Even things that are in a stasis have the potential for movement (stiff muscles, ice) and given the right conditions, they will move.

Water Bag begins with releasing the tissues of the body - the muscles and tendons from the bones, the fluid inside the cells - turning everything into liquid.

For me, the bag feels like it is made of some rubbery substance, like a stretchy hide (which in fact it is).

Also like sand, small grains which are round and not stable, always moving. The ripples of impulse make patterns in the sand.

Also like the heat mirage on a hot road on a hot hot day.

Water moves by currents. Bones are driftwood jostled about in the waves.


Hanging and Falling Point

Today I am a spider. I started with the desert landscape in Utah. I tried balancing a spear on the top of my head because I was looking to have a sharp point going in to the top so I could feel it. It became a radio antenna (I also placed one of these in each of my hands in place of the straw that Minako had suggested) and the antenna broadcast in all directions. The antenna became a horn, and I added two more horns to open the windows above each eye. I still didn't feel like I was hanging so I imagined I was jumping up like a seal to catch the spear of it in my head, and then was being lowered down. It still felt too stiff and I couldn't feel my back space so I attached a spider web to my head and lowered myself down. Once I landed on the sand I checked in all directions before sucking my web back up into my head, and then dropping down again to make the next stitch.

Martina says spider is the tanden all by itself.

Minako has a very thin line like an arrow that comes from darkness above, and then shoots through her.


Body Points

With this exercise we focused on the fours points of the hip, opening awareness to the diagonals. The shape our hips make viewed from above is that of an hourglass (two triangles touching at the top points), accenting each point.

I have the sensation of being one of those wooden toys that you push on the bottom of their pedestal and they fall, and then rebound back up to center.


Through the Heavens (The Beyond - from Noguchi)

Bending the knees and dropping the center, the dancer lets her torso spiral to one side and her arms open out, one to the back and one to the front. Her pelvis rises slightly and her legs extend a little at the top of each swing. She drops her pelvis again and swings her torso in a spiral in the other direction, and the arms follow opening out in the opposite direction. Gradually the swings get bigger until her hands meet at the top of the suspension. The sensation of suspension Noguchi called through the heavens, the Germans call it something that translates to The Beyond. I call it hang time, like Michael Jordan sailing through the air to shoot a basket. It's also the sensation I had when bungey jumping, after I had rebounded from the bottom of the cord and arched back upwards, there was a long moment of suspension in which time stopped. I had no idea whether I was going up or down. My stomach was in my throat. I probably swallowed a screamed in a moment of panic. When I started to fall again, I wanted to go back into this perfectly calm weightless space.

Minako said that the action happened from the tanden - the arms just go along for the ride.


Haramu (Sail)

This feels a little like the sirens, calling the sailors to shipwreck.

Martina says it feels like getting lots of energy, and then packing it all in (osame).


Jump and Catch

Feels like holding a wild animal between my knees.

Side to side tilt (almost falling) and then flower (hana) growing out of the hips.


Gravity

Gravity and rebound (hang time, the sweet spot, float) are inextricably connected. Every force has an equal and opposite force, and one doesn't exist without the other. What goes up must come down, and what goes down must come up.

I got so concentrated on going up while practicing hanging that I forgot about the down. During our hanging practice on Thursday, I imagined I was hanging upside down from a jungle gym, with my feet wrapped around the bars. I had a long point hat on that hung from my head with the tassel dangling at the end.

Then I imagined two of my best friends holding me by my feet over some giant abyss while I laughed and laughed. I think there might have been the crater of a volcano below. I remember the top of my head feeling warm. I also remember the feeling of them gripping my ankles.

Anyway, up was interesting too. I imagined I had huge butterfly wings that supported my shoulder blades. I saw myself hovering in a moss-covered forest. Suddenly I saw the tops of the trees, like the canopy of a rainforest. I kept going upwards in the blue sky until I was above the clouds, supported by their soft down feathers. The sky kept getting darker and darker blue until I was among the stars, and then I fell from a shooting star, the tail blazing behind. There was a star piercing through my center line, a point sticking out of my head, a point on the front and back of my chest, and one angling downward from the front and back of my pelvis.

I do think that the physical form is limited in certain ways - like we can't really levitate (unless you're a real yogi maybe). But the point of the imagination is to realize that there is so much more than what we can see and feel going on with our five senses in the present moment. Poetry has been the language of this knowledge thus far. Noguchi's language seems to have provided some really specific images for sensing these more abstract experiences, but it's poetry nonetheless. Perhaps this is the work of somatic education - Body Mind Centering and the like - to clarify subjective experiences with concrete physical terms, almost scientific language. (For example, the organs rotate this way. The cerebral spinal fluid has this rhythm.)


Wave

Wave is the pattern that results out of chaos. Matter bumps into matter, and re-directs to a degree depending on the force of impact. Water particles are round, and they swirl around each other and bump into the hide sack that is my skin.

When the faucets are turned on in my feet the water shoots up my legs and makes my pelvis drop as it pools up in the pelvic bowl. Then my knees fill up more and pull me forward, tipping my pelvis backwards. When I am about halfway full, my upper back, arms and head just hang. As the water rises up into my head, it tips the top of my spine backwards and this movement reverberates down through my body to my feet, and then ripples back upwards to bring me up to full standing for one moment, before the water travels in a figure 8 down the front of my skull, through the back of my throat, pouring into my chest, and I fall again.

It's amazing that I do so much work to stand up when it would be easier to do less and just give in to gravity more often. Actually I do too much in general. And I use too much effort. Isn't it easier to use my imagination to think light, or think soft, or fast for that matter? Isn't it that I've just over-trained my body and under-trained my mind? Is Butoh supposed to be difficult? Is it supposed to hurt? Was this the point Hijikata was trying to make with his experiments with physical pain? That the human body can withstand tremendous amounts of physical pain, that it actually serves to redirect the mind and give it an entirely different experience? What is hallucination really, and why does time seem to elongate in moments of trauma?


Body Point

I imagine a small coal bouncing around my insides, and I keep moving to keep it from burning one spot too much. It's not the most effective image because the coal always cools down too quickly. I like the firework image because it's something else being done to me, as opposed to me doing the work. I also think of poprock candy that fizzes and crackles when you put it in your mouth, although this also dissipates too quickly. I need to think of an image that goes on for a long time, or how to extend an image in time so that it can go on forever.