"Only
when, despite having a normal, healthy body, you come to wish that you
were disabled or had been born disabled, do you take your first step
in butoh," wrote Tatsumi Hijikata, who developed the Japanese post-war
performance art of butoh with Kazuo Ohno. He meant, I think, to challenge
conventional ideas about dance and the dancing body, looking instead
to the depths of the unknown for movement material. Given this view,
it seems especially apt for Manri Kim, who lost the use of her legs
after getting polio at three, to embrace butoh as a source of creativity
and expression.
Since starting the group TAIHEN in 1983, the Japanese dancer of Korean
descent has been making a case for physically disabled performers like
herself: dance is for all, including those for whom normal locomotion
is impossible. Along the way, she found a mentor in Ohno, and the two
hour-long solos she staged at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival recall
butoh's gnarly physicality and intense inward focus. Directed
by Ohno's son Yoshito, who has often performed with his father,
they evoke the emotional burdens of women across cultures. In a string
of jaggedly paced episodes, Kim for the most part succeeded in expressing
their doubts, grief and guilt.
To make up for her limited mobility, stagehands are integrated into
the action. They facilitate Kim's movements on and off stage,
help her change costumes between scenes, introduce and remove props
at specific points in time. Like their counterparts in other forms of
Japanese traditional theatre, members of this black-clad crew or kuroko
are considered invisible but you admire how they work silently in the
shadows to keep things running smoothly. They are as vital to a TAIHEN
performance as the dancers.
I imagine that movement styles in the troupe vary from performer to
performer, since different physical handicaps call for different means
of getting around. The way Kim moves is thus unique to the limitations
of her body. Pushing her forearms against the floor, she inches forward
with her legs folded under her. Her fingers curl and flex awkwardly
in spare gestures. And perhaps because it takes a lot of effort for
her to travel from one point to another, her dancing proceeds gradually,
punctuated by periods of stillness.
Kim premiered My Mother in 1998 as a tribute to her mother,
a noted Korean classical dancer in her time, who had died that year.
I liked how it evoked the elder Kim's personal struggles (she
had to shift to Japan after World War II) and artistry (she was said
to be known for dancing the seungmu, a monk-inspired piece rooted in
Buddhist ritual, which Kim tried to enact), though I couldn't
see the mother-daughter conflict that Kim mentioned in the post-show
talkback.
Still, it had a clarity that 2005's Howl Under The Moon seemed
to lack. Kim played four different roles, but little in the movement
distinguished one character from the other: a "mother wolf"
who eats her child to live, a "witch who abandons her past",
a black-suited figure at odds with her female identity, and a lovelorn
girl from an Indonesian folktale. In one scene, however, she wore a
quietly forceful gaze that softened and hardened as though reacting
to textured memories. It was a startling moment. Perhaps this was what
Kim meant by dancing with her tamashi, her soul.
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"Since starting the group TAIHEN in 1983, [Manri Kim] the Japanese
dancer of Korean descent has been making a case for physically disabled
performers like herself: dance is for all, including those for whom
normal locomotion is impossible."
Credits
Supervisor: Yoshito Ohno
Choreographer: Yoshito Ohno (My Mother)
Costume and make-up advisor: Etsuko Ohno (Howl Under The Moon)
Costume: Mikiko Mera, Tomoko Yoshinari (Howl Under The Moon)
Make-up: Ayako Kawakita
Backstage crew: Yuriko Ohno, Natsumi Moriya, Ayako Kawakita
Lighting operator: Miyuki Ebisawa
Sound operator: Tamako Katsufuji
General manager: Makoto Senjo
Performer: Manri Kim
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