Dear Mr. Ryuro Mori,
Although I was fully aware that you are a professional in ballet, ten years have passed since I first asked you to teach me ballet, since I felt that ballet shares the same elegance as Nihon Buyo. When I first started taking lessons with you and continued my training, I realized that my kimono and tabi socks had already given me the strength to dance ballet without having to use my body consciously.
You always mentioned that “Dance is the refinement daily life”, and trained me to cultivate the eyes to examine my own body. I don’t know how many times I said, “I can’t do this, Sensei”, because I couldn’t keep up with your kind explanations and examples you gave me across the bar.
If I leave “Nihon Buyo” aside, and focus just on the word “dance” for now, there are so many things that I am learning from you from your lessons, although I haven’t been able to do so well.
You mentioned before that you were the jury chairperson of the Dance Division of the Agency of Cultural Affairs Arts Festival. I assume that you are also quite familiar with other kinds of art and entertainment. When you look at Nihon Buyo from your wide knowledge, how does it appear to you?
Yuko Nishikawa
Dear Yuko Sensei,
Ever since you asked me that you wanted to learn how to use the body, I said I would happily help, but we made a promise to immediately quit if we start seeing a bad impact of ballet on your Nihon Buyo dance. And so you started coming to my rehearsal space in Matsugaoka, and I had thought only three, or four days had passed, but am surprised to learn that ten years have passed.
One will probably think that if you have been taking ballet with me for ten years, your legs would be turned out wide, raising your legs high, and leaping, turning, gliding, doing battements – but since we haven’t practiced these techniques, you luckily and unluckily failed to become a ballerina. You continue to be the dignified Nihon Buyo dancer, Yuko Nishikawa.
I think now is a good time for us to look back at what we have learned about dance over the past ten years. As I recall, we learned how to walk on the floor and space with four feet, how to put our weight on both right and left feet, how to stand on one leg and use the upper body, how to look at yourself and your own body parts, how to let air flow through the body. Through these lessons we wished to reaffirm and return to the classical nature of Japanese dance, search for ways techniques hidden in the hand and body movements, with the hope that this will lead to a future of Japanese dance that suits people living in today’s society. Perhaps I have been too ambitious, as I struggled to search for the physical origin that theatrical dance demands.
You continue to hold on to any issues that arise and keep them inside of you, so even if a problem is not solved on that day, your wonderful dancing abilities later unveil the secret to solve the issue with the help of time. This is a very important ability, and it makes me very happy.
In answer to your difficult question, I can say that perhaps in comparison to ballet, which is not accompanied by words, Nihon Buyo is too dependent on lyrics and does not have enough independent expression coming from the body itself. Of course, the conditions of the kimono, or the difficulty in interpreting gestures could also be a factor for this – but perhaps in Nihon Buyo, the “mai”(subtle movement) element, which uses the upper body, arms, and hands to evoke meaning and situations, is more prominent than the “odori”(dance) element, which shifts weight between two legs to move.
The expression of dance with the upper body is based on the legs and pelvis, and the “mai” is supported by “odori”. In Japanese, the word “Buyo” consist of the characters “mai (bu)” and “odori(yo)”. Judging from the word order too, the “subtle movements” are supported by the “dance”, so I plan to just watch Nihon Buyo with that in mind.
This is how Nihon Buyo appears to the eyes of an amateur – but perhaps I have failed.
Ryuro Mori