Dancing Ground - Dark Mountain

I learned about dance on a farm.

By the time I arrived in rural Japan in my early 20s, I had studied ballet, modern, postmodern, contact improvisation, capoeira, Butoh and several other obscure forms, but it wasn’t until the farm that I understood what it means to dance. With calloused hands and muddy feet, I practised while bent over a flooded rice paddy in the spring, plugging baby rice shoots into the mud; while weeding that same paddy under the blanket of summer heat quilted with cicada song, bare arms and legs sliced by the verdant green blades; while collecting bundles of the golden stalks in autumn and latticing them across wooden frames to dry their plumes of dripping ripe seed.

I learned while threshing a mountain of soybeans, several of us around a pile, whacking handfuls of stalks against the ground until the pods released their pearls to bounce around the mat beneath us. The dancing was done while crouching down to tie a tomato to its bamboo trellis, while on a ladder, considering which apple branches to prune, while smashing soybean paste into a massive vat for making miso, while digging potatoes, while stoking the fire to cook on.

Together we danced while we cut bamboo, and carried bamboo, and bent bamboo and split bamboo and tied bamboo. We danced as we cut firewood, and bundled firewood, and carried firewood and stacked firewood.

Days and weeks on end we danced the dance of firewood. We planted tea and harvested tea and processed the tea in an old abandoned tea
factory. You might expect an abandoned factory to be covered in dust, and this one was, but the dust was electric green; matcha dust. It got in our nose, into our skin. Stimulated and inspired, we danced.

We danced in the chicken house, our fingers tap-tap-tapping each egg to make sure it was sound before sending them to market. In the wintertime we did the very delicate dance of repairing the shoji screens – glueing the rice paper where it was torn using a paste made also from rice. Rice repairing rice.

The dance was in the timing, the rhythm, the positions in which we placed ourselves in order to feel and understand the other bodies with which we were moving

The dance wasn’t expressed in the motions our bodies made. We weren’t pirouetting while we worked, or decorating our gestures. The dance was in the timing, the rhythm, the positions in which we placed ourselves in order to feel and understand the other bodies with which we were moving – each other, yes, but also the bodies of rice, soybeans, bamboo, shoji screens, chickens. It was in the task of bringing our attention to the space, the in-betweenness, the animate togetherness of human, non-human, the weather.

No, there was nothing remarkable about our movements. We laboured like anonymous farmers, and to anyone passing by there would have been nothing outstanding about our bent backs and ceaselessly moving hands.

You could say our dance was a state of mind, but that would only be partly true. The dancing was a state of body, and the state was awake and attentive. We attended to the world as if it were our place to learn about dance – and so it was. The act of noticing was what enabled us to dance and what we noticed was the material we danced with.

While most of our activities were done in the company of crows and stony mountain faces, we did also perform for audience. The dance we were training for wasn’t merely metaphorical, or spiritual in nature. We were training to dance for the people. Without offering ourselves to be witnessed, a vital piece of reciprocity would have been missing, and it would have been easy to be lulled into a sense of false comfort.
We sought neither glory nor comfort.

The dance we offered, that we laboured for and exhausted ourselves for, wasn’t for the sake of entertaining, or to showcase beautiful, fit bodies, performing choreographed phrases of counted steps. Ours was a dance that featured the odd, the twisted, the dark, the ugly, the sick, the old, the infirm. We danced as bodies coming from the earth, eating the earth, becoming the earth. We grimaced and fell, we spasmed and shook and contorted. We moved at times so slowly as to appear immobile, at other times in rapid, stuttering shifts. We were animal, human, elemental, sometimes all at once.

We would bring onstage with us what we had attended to during our working hours: an insect with a broken wing; the hopeful bud of a camellia; the old farmer woman from down the road, bent in half and a smile cracking open her face; the clouds – always the clouds – wispy, heavy with rain, fleeting, threatening, calm. Countless clouds could form and dissolve in our bodies, sometimes entire skyscapes unfurled in a single joint. We would bring these images through our body, piece by piece. Broken insect walking across our arm, camellia bud growing from our knee, the old farmer woman momentarily filling our body, her smile cracking open our face. Unrecognisable to the audience, these visitors resided as poems in indecipherable script within our structures.

We rarely stood up straight onstage. We didn’t study straight. With the exception of some of the tools we worked with, nothing we touched, nothing we moved with was straight. Not the curl of a sweet potato tendril, not the spread of a plum tree, not the waving blossoms of buckwheat.

Nothing we moved with was straight. Not the curl of a sweet potato tendril, not the spread of a plum tree, not the waving blossoms of buckwheat.

Our dance was, in part, protesting the righteousness of the upright. Our director would often have us perform on a slanted stage; he railed against flattened ground as others might revolt against a fascist regime. He would tie thin, unbelievably fragile pieces of bamboo charcoal to our bodies, underneath our costumes, and we would perform with them, black corsets hidden from the audience. If we broke one while performing we failed the test of attention, the test of sensitivity.

Most of our performances occurred in a tiny basement cave of a space in Tokyo, a few hours’ drive from the farm. The audience sat packed together; we shared the air. There was no hiding the quality of our breathing or our sweat; there were no wings to disappear into.

We asked a great deal of our audience. We asked them to patiently observe our transformations, to stay with the grotesque and the uncomfortable.

We asked them to stretch open their definition of dance, to join us in our endless search for the truest thing, to meet us in the place where longing and shadow and distortion and radiance meet and wrestle and reflect back our filth and our splendour. Yes, we gave them beauty too, all the more potent because we offered it rarely – rarely simply, anyway. It might have been delivered in the gentle, continuous passage of a body rolling downstage like a twisted root. Or in a face upturned to the light, rapturous for an unknown cause.

After the performances in the Tokyo cave we would quickly change out of our costumes, tie scarves around our hair, don aprons, and start to cook.

We would prepare food for the audience members, who were gathered in the equally tiny lobby, seated at tables. Red-faced drunk, smoking endlessly, they would loudly comment on our work – sometimes praise but just as often blunt criticism, passionate and honest, their raucous commentary as loud as their attention in the audience had been quiet and respectful. While they had heated philosophical debates about art and existence, we served them; usually something we had grown ourselves – pickled vegetables,
boiled potatoes.

(Once, after a show, Mr G, ancient Mr G, a respected dance writer who was revered by all of us, said of me: ‘Her dance is starting to smell like the land.’ I realise that this might not sound like praise, might sound in fact like the opposite, but he didn’t mean that I stank. He meant that from my dance he could feel a landscape. It remains one of the highest compliments I have ever received.)

Once the kitchen was cleaned, the sake bottles emptied, costumes re-packed, the stage struck and swept, we would drive back home to the farm, arriving in time to catch a few hours of sleep before waking for another day of farming. The performances took on the quality of another cyclical task, like seeding or pruning or weeding or harvesting; each performance piece was a tiny growth cycle, yielding a singular, bizarre and ephemeral fruit. The taste would linger for a day or two, sometimes sweet like the flavour of purpose, but just as often the bitter bite of failing to touch an object of great longing. Whatever the taste that remained after a performance, the life of the farm
demanded that we return immediately to anonymous service, demanded us to set aside the small stories of our personal aspirations and failures, and once again take up our sickles and hoes: to bow our heads, bend our backs, and humbly participate in the dance unfolding all around us. Full of melancholy. Full of magnificence.

IMAGE

Paul Hammacott
Arcadian Refractions
Digital C-Print
My art draws upon the pioneering studies of Roger S. Ulrich, showing the healing effects of nature upon the mind and body (on blood pressure, anxiety, stress, depression, pain reduction, etc.) and which further demonstrate how this effect is achieved equally by visual representations of the natural world. These studies show identical results, across all cultural, gender, age, educational and racial lines.

Paul Hammacott is a British-born, US-based multimedia artist. Dealing with themes of travel, nature and healing, Paul’s work can be found in the permanent collections of MOMA, the Whitney, the Tate Gallery, the Smithsonian, the V&A, New York Public Library, the
Museum of Indology, the Design Museum, New York University and numerous private collections.