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Performance
Ana Rita Teodoro’s Your Teacher, Please

 
Ana Rita Teodoro
A Portuguese artist with a master's degree from the National Center of Contemporary Dance (CNDC) and the Université Paris 8. She has also studied anatomy, palaeontology, philosophy and qigong. Recent works include a lecture performance Your Teacher, Please (2018) based her experiences in workshops with Ohno Yoshito, and FoFo (2019) inspired by Japanese cute culture.
 
 

Text by Mizohata Mina
 
The Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio is located on a hill in the suburbs of Yokohama. A single storey white building, it was built in 1961 using scrap wood from the girls’ school Ohno Kazuo worked at at the time as a physical education teacher. It can be found on the right hand side of a flight of 100 or so stairs next to the Ohno family home. Although it has undergone renovations, the window frames and other parts of the building remain as they were when it was first built.
 
The space has been visited by numerous artists, including Hijikata Tatsumi, Hosoe Eikoh, Pina Bausch and Daniel Schmidt, and has witnessed the creation of several works including Ohno Kazuo’s masterpiece Admiring La Argentina. At the same time, the space has been home to decades of workshops, first by Ohno Kazuo and later by his son the butoh dancer Ohno Yoshito. These classes were open to all, with no age, nationality or dance skill requirements. They were held twice a week by Ohno Kazuo in the 1970s, and three times a week from 1983. In the 1990s Ohno Yoshito began by first taking over one of the classes, then as Kazuo’s health began to deteriorate, he took over all three. In 2012 practice was once again reduced to twice a week. Except when he was on oversea tours, Ohno Yoshito continued to conduct these workshops until his death in 2020.
 
As there was no condition to the number of times people had to participate in the practices, there were some who took part only once, while others attended for several years. There were days where there were only international participants, days where there were babies. Sometimes only three people came, sometimes over thirty. Every class was different. Some of the participants were dancers, but there were also photographers, teachers, doctors, actors, poets and people from all walks of life. Ohno Kazuo and Ohno Yoshito would usually begin the session with some kind of talk, then put on some music to which participants would dance on a given theme. Inspired by the dance, Kazuo or Yoshito would speak again, and put on more music for participants to dance to. Apparently some classes in the early days were conducted without Ohno Kazuo uttering a single word, but this was the general flow of the practice from the late 1970s onwards.
 
Watching Ohno Kazuo’s practice, and the way he passionately demanded participants “go beyond any unnecessary limits!”, it seems that Yoshito felt ideas should be presented more concretely. He sometimes mentioned that he began using props such as artificial roses, silk, hand towels and tissue paper in order to convey what he had learnt from Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo in a way that could be easily understood. The idea was to use real objects to study what should be felt inside the body.
 
Ana Rita Teodoro visited Japan to study with Ohno Yoshito in 2008, 2015 and 2016. Let me share with you an outline of the class on Tuesday 7th April 2015, which she also attended:
Practice happens between 8pm and 10pm, as it did back in Ohno Kazuo’s day. There are 13 participants, including three new participants, and two who have come to observe. In these sessions everyone practices together, whether they have come for the first time or for many years. Including Ana Rita from Portugal, there are five international participants; the others are from Singapore, Australia, Turkey and Belgium. As there are a lot of international participants, one of the long-standing members who can speak English provides interpretation. On this day, Yoshito first talks about how Hijikata Tatsumi had not set out to create “butoh”, but had pursued his own unique dance form, which was later named “butoh”. He often spoke about the history of butoh and its characteristics, particularly when there were new members in attendance.
 
The first theme for the dance is “meet the space”. At the time, practice after the initial speech often began this way irrespective of the day. The first step is to the meet the space of the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio. There is no set movement. Music is played and everyone tries to “meet the space” in their own way. At times new members appear to want to cry out “I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do!”. If Yoshito felt the participants were missing a point, he would call something out. On this day, he calls out “there is also a corner!”. After the first song he elaborates that space needs to be created, and the next theme is to meet the wider space beyond the walls of the studio, to meet countries far away, to meet countries far below the feet on the other side of the planet, to meet space stations far above. He starts “hai [okay/yes], let’s begin”, then at times interrupts the dance with another “hai”, stopping the music to add further explanations.

On this day he focuses on fundamentals, following the first practice with “meet the body” using silk. Experimenting with the strength of the silk when pulled taught as well as its softness, participants experience the strength and softness of their own bodies.
Next Ohno Yoshito chooses to practice “creating a vertical line”, which also inspired Ana Rita. The theme of each workshop varies depending on the state and movements of the participants. The “vertical line” practice is essentially a practice to “create the body”, and each participant selects an artificial rose as Yoshito explains that the flower reaches up towards the sun (light) whilst its roots reach down into the ground (darkness). Participants are told to “become the rose” as they walk, creating the “vertical line” with their body. The song often played for this practice was Amazing Grace. Yoshito frequently said that his butoh was a form of prayer, and incorporated in this practice was his belief that “to walk is to pray”.
By this time they have danced for around ten songs, and it is close to the finishing time. On this day Yoshito ends using tissue paper as “sensei”, for the participants to practice delicacy. Practice often ended with experiencing the slight space of a single tissue paper, so that participants could leave with a sense of softness, but on this day he ended with “create the flower within yourself”. Using the tissue paper to make a flower as they walked, the final point was to “pray for the world”. It was unusual for any more than four key themes to be explores in a single session, but this class became a deep exploration of a single theme. As he sometimes did after a particularly rich dance, the final dance this day ended with Yoshito turning off the lights for a blackout.

After 10pm, it was customary for everyone to drink tea together, a tradition carried over from Ohno Kazuo’s day. Tea, sweets and, in the past, sometimes soup made by Kazuo himself were served after practice, giving participants time to socialise. In 2015 Ohno Yoshito often brought inari sushi, which he bought near the train station. Other common snacks were rice crackers and hatosabure biscuits. Sometimes participants danced or sang, and occasionally Yoshito himself would dance. Participants left in groups according to their train times, with a few continuing to talk until gone 11pm.

Ohno Yoshito generously continued to conduct these classes without a break, wanting to share all he had learnt. The seeds he sowed during these workshops are now blossoming all over the world.

The photograph shown at the end of Ana Rita’s interview is the tunnel one has to pass in order to get to the studio from the train station. In spring, the petals of cherry blossom dance as they fall at the entrance. Although the lighting in the tunnel was changed to white soon after Ohno Yoshito’s death, at the time a warm orange glow would always wait for us to pass through it, like a birthing canal from which we would emerge newborn.

 
Mizohata Mina
Began attending the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio in 1996, where she studied under Ohno Kazuo and Ohno Yoshito. Although she stopped participating in workshops to focus on raising a family, she continued to engage in the creation of publications, DVDs and archive work as a member of staff. From 2013 she helped run Ohno Yoshito’s workshops, which she documented, in addition to providing interpretation for private sessions.
 
 

Ana Rita Teodoro’s Your Teacher, Please
Performance video provided by Ana Rita Teodoro
Interview Interpreter: Mai Burns
Interview, Film Production & Editing: iina naoto
Japanese Subtitles: Mizohata Mina