danceview
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Commentary

Hagamora Comes to Earth
The Art of Shizumi

by Heather Tod Mitchell
copyright © 1999 Heather Tod Mitchell
Winter 1999

Azuma’s graceful dances
In number many
Dancing for all mortal kind
… Heaven’s divine gift to man

From the noh play Hagoromo
Translation by David Crandall: Adaptation by Richard Emmert

When I watch Shizumi Shigeto Manale dance, I feel very much like the simple fisherman in the noh play Hagoromo who has the good fortune to stumble across an angel, temporarily come down to earth. She performs a celestial dance just for him.

When I ask Shizumi which character in the 600-year-old play she relates to—the simple fisherman or the radiant angel—she laughs at what she considers an extravagant comparison, but is quite clear in her answer: both! She identifies with the female qualities of the angel, but not her divinity. But because Shizumi’s focus as a dancer is always on human emotion, she also relates to the mortal fisherman as he stands, mouth agape, trying to comprehend the beauty he experiences. “I feel for the fisherman … he is the human; she is the divine.”

The duality of the play—man and woman, human and divine, simple and elaborate—clearly appeals to the Japanese-born dancer, now residing in Washington, D.C., who has created dance and theater works for over thirty years. Primarily a solo dance artist, duality is present in most of her work. Whether she depicts a character, an animal, a force of nature, or just improvises with a bunch of broccoli, Shizumi fuses the Japanese aesthetic of compression and stillness with a Western sense of expression, producing an emotional line as clear and lovely as a fine ballerina’s ports de bras.

Although her early training included ballet and modern dance, Shizumi’s attraction to the theater—both traditional Japanese forms like kyogen and noh, as well as Western- style theater—resulted in a fascination with words and their rhythm. Waltz With the Moon, for example, which premiered in spring 1997, is a collection of music, dance and recitation based on poetic meditations on the moon. During the piece, the dancer transforms herself into several characters: an ancient, masked shaman, an elderly lover and others, finally ending as the spirit of the moon. The verses were spoken by performers on- and offstage and in taped voice-overs in both English and Japanese. Shizumi’s movement vocabulary is clearly rooted in modern dance, but the rhythm and careful diligence she gives to the flow, the transition from one movement to the other, demonstrates her study of Japanese traditional forms.

Conversely, when interpreting Busu (Sweet Poison) a traditional kyogen piece, she manages to remain true to the original, but the modern dance influences unpin the feet from the floor (Instead of wearing the traditional tabi [split-toe socks], Shizumi dances barefoot), and free the upper body, adding a pleasant American sparkle to an already bright—but very Japanese—ditty.

As well as providing the basis for her art, Shizumi’s yin and yang background in east/west dance and theater forms has resulted in a number of artist-in-residences, workshops, and teaching assignments. Of special note is her work with the Young Scholars Program at Gallaudet University where she developed a full-length dance-play Kakurenbo (Hide and Seek), featuring a cast of hearing-impaired students that toured Japan for two weeks. She is also the co-founder, along with Yuriko Doi, of Theatre Yugan, a theatre company in San Francisco that fuses elements of Japanese and Western theatre techniques (a noh-kyogen treatment of A Christmas Carol, for example), which celebrated its 20th anniversary this May.

This interest in contrasts and combinations, and her drive to plumb our emotional life might seem at odds with her Japanese heritage, where skill in reigning-in one’s thoughts is both an art and an obligation, and following the status-quo is the recommended way to achieve success. But Shizumi grew up in post-war Osaka in a house that was only a few blocks away from Michio Ito’s brother, in a family that counts a former geisha, and Japanese modern dance pioneer Toshiko Nobuzane, who studied with Martha Graham, in its background. Although Shizumi’s parents were academic types, they were also musicians.

In the early 1950s, things American were very popular with young Japanese. “To me, many things from Western culture were so beautiful. And exciting!” Shizumi remembers. Instead of nihon buyo, the traditional dance form that little Japanese girls would usually (and still do) study, Shizumi insisted on ballet instead. At the same time, she took private modern dance lessons from her grandaunt Toshiko. “She was my idol. Everything she had; how she dressed, her behavior …very Westernized. We called her akanuke means ‘Western style,’ but very … elegant, or polished.”

But, in sharp contrast to many artists who credit seeing their first, live dance concert as the inspiration for them to pursue a career in dance, Shizumi stopped ballet, cold, after seeing the Royal Ballet for the first time. “It was the first time I ever saw real Western people in the ballet. And I was just shocked to see how beautiful they were. For the first time, I looked at myself in the mirror and I looked at (my) teacher (who) was Japanese. And I see the physical difference: long legs, long arms, small heads …And I was very upset, because my legs are very short compared to them! And the dancing style was so different. So, I stopped. Completely. Because I thought; I cannot (be) that. And I don’t want to be a third-level dancer. I already knew at a young age I wanted to be … the top! So I began to dance more with my grandaunt in modern dance, and became very interested in Western theater.”

Proud of their daughter, but nervous about her future, Shizumi’s parents insisted she study something other than dance, so she got her accreditation as a kindergarten teacher. But influenced by imported American fashion magazines such as Elle and Vogue, she went on to study fashion design at college. Both pieces of education have proven useful: although she now collaborates with professional designers, early in her career Shizumi designed her own costumes, sets and props herself; and she is constantly in demand as a teacher.

After graduation at the tender age of 20, she became an “underground artist,”—anybody who was not mainstream at that time was dubbed “underground.” Already experimenting with words and movements, she called herself a “poet-dancer.” An appearance on Yomiuri TV led to more performing opportunities and, eventually, some notoriety. This led to some odd, but high-profile opportunities such as training Japan’s Miss Universe contestant, choreographing fashion shows at the toney Takashimaya Department store; even judging beauty contests! “I was the unique young woman in the Osaka area.” she laughs. “I was twenty … I made some pretty good money. I was … hot!”

But fame and Miss Universe did not hold Shizumi’s attention for long. Determined to study in either Europe or the U.S., she was accepted into an International Exchange Program at U.C. Berkley in California, where she fell firmly in love with America and a young American biochemist. After some back and forth between Japan and America, she finally married and moved to California.

Initially eager to join the Martha Graham Company—“Everybody said Martha always likes Japanese dancers.”—Shizumi was warned by former Graham dancers, and by artists and teachers she respected, not to audition. “They told me ‘She eats you!’ …They told me I have lots of different knowledge. Don’t give (it) to her. Just keep it yourself and do (it) yourself.”

After looking at several different types of dance companies, she decided to remain a soloist. Most modern dance companies did not interest her because she found they the lacked the emotional dimension she wanted: “(Just) physical dance (that has) no feeling. I want to express human emotion, not just with the body. For purely physical expression, you can go to the circus, or gymnastics—they do much better than just regular dancers in physical expression!”

For Shizumi, that depth of feeling is always best expressed first in poetry. Although many choreographers and dancers are inspired by music, Shizumi finds deeper meaning in poetry. The first thing she does when she has an idea for a piece is to write a poem. “As I write the poem, I visualize the movement. So my poem is very visual.” The choreography only emerges after the idea is shaped in verse. This poem is then shared with her artistic collaborators—designers, musicians, and the musical composer. “When I write the poem, I have music in my mind, but I don’t know how to make it music you can hear.” For her performances, the person who does make it music you can hear is usually Joseph MacIntyre, a principal timpanist with the Maryland Symphony and composer Shizumi has worked with for almost ten years now.

In addition to giving MacIntyre the poem, Shizumi “designs” the music, creating a music script for the composer to follow. “I say, I have a ten-minute piece, a five-minute piece…And then: I need percussion here, flute there, …I need a bell, wind, a child’s voice. We really do an exchange—we inspire each other” The result is usually a haunting abstract soundscape rather than a nice tune, which is exactly what the dancemaker is after.

Like many dance artists, she uses a video camera and the eyes of her collaborators and trusted friends and family to view her work in progress. (Just prior to their marriage, her husband asked Shizumi what she wanted for a wedding present: a wedding ring, or something else? The sensitive poet-dancer replied “…something else—a video camera!” proving even the most romantic artist has a practical side.)

Although her work can have a dark, introspective feel, Shizumi sees her dances as making mostly positive statements about the human condition. “Because human emotion is dark and light, however, I need to explore both.” Butoh, for example “…comes from darkness; I come from lightness. That’s the difference, where we begin, start from. I come from brightness, from beauty.”

The definition of beauty is a deeply considered concept in Japanese arts. In noh, there are three kinds of beauty: hana (flower), apparent or obvious beauty; yugen (profound sublimity), invisible, mysterious, beauty; and rojaku (quiet beauty), the slow, declining beauty of old age. In noh, the almost untranslatable concept of yugen is central to the form. For Shizumi, her concept of yugen is quite personal “It is when you get beyond the human life. Beyond human emotion; something beyond the human experience.”

When she began working with hearing-impaired students, she found another layer of yugen in their silent world. “Silence doesn’t mean nothing; sometimes, it means something is deeper inside. Silence is very mysterious to me …these kids have incredible expression inside themselves. It is the power of that silence. I don’t sign very well, but I can communicate with them—that is the yugen.”

It is that yugen she is always striving for with her work. When I ask her what she wants people to take away from her dances, she says, “I want them not to analyze what I’m doing, or watch like looking at art in a museum. I hope they will feel something, beyond thinking. I hope they will feel peace and beauty. Peace. And beauty.”

Poem

My ears are the East wind.
I dance with the yellow buds of the field.
This moment, the moon is pure,
Like the face of a sleeping baby.

My ears are the West wind.
I sing with the ripe blossoms of the land.
This moment, the sun is open,
Like the mouth of an elegant flower.
Poetic interpretation by Shizumi Manale

Note:

Definitions of yugan from The Noh Theater, Principles and Perspectives, by Kunio Komparu, published by John Weatherhill, Inc., New York and Tokyo, 1980, 1983.