HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Kim Itoh

Kim Itoh + The Glorious Future
Photo: Nobutoshi Takagi

Kim Itoh

Kim Itoh
lives and works in Japan

Before starting his solo career in 1990, Japanese choreographer Kim Itoh studied with world-renowned Butoh master Anzu Furukawa. In a few short years, he has become an acknowledged leader in the next generation of post-Butoh and postmodern dance in Japan, forming the nine-member company The Glorious Future in 1995. He is known for his manic, ghostly, and occasionally disturbing balance of ballet, post-Butoh aesthetics, and striking theatricality. Itoh combines a ferocious punk energy with the sparseness and grace of many traditional Japanese art forms. I Want to Hold You addresses the fragility of human relationships in modern times, focusing on gender relations in contemporary Japanese society. Real physical contact vividly describes these relationships; couples hug, men and women cling to one another even as they are abandoned by their partners, but all are treated with Itoh's sense of discipline, humor, and irony.

--Diana Kim

Musings on Globalism and Institutional Change
Vishakha N. Desai, Kathy Halbreich

useful, and all of the curators took notice and began to inculcate sensitivities and knowledge, if not exquisitely detailed expertise, into their daily practice. As that project, and others, evolved, the thinking that was put on the table and the arguments we had and the questions we posed to one another became part of our daily practice. That questioning--the process of testing our daily assumptions--spilled into every other area. And, I confess, it can be exhausting.

But to get back to your question, no, I didn't have a precise tableau in my mind of what this institution would look like in ten years. Sometimes, I think that's a weakness because I really am profoundly interested in the discussion and I can't imagine where the process is going to take me until I'm at least partly on the way.

VND: The reason I asked is because if you had asked me the same question in 1991-1992, I could not have imagined the answer either. One thing I was clear about from the start was not wanting, ten years later, for the effort to be seen as "Vishakha's project." I wanted this to be the Asia Society's mandate. That's all I could imagine, just that much, in whatever way I could get there. It was not just about me. Even as late as 1996, I might not have been able to tell you that we were there yet. Today, I can.

KH: My experience has been similar, at least partially, in that I realized early on that my approach in trying to frame these larger questions was aimed at eventually shaping an institutional mission. That's really what we're talking about: institutional missions, institutional commitments. Maybe the three adjectives that appeared in our mission statement when we first rewrote it about a year after I came here are useful in the sense that they pointed the way: multidisciplinary, diverse, and international.

Even though we collectively, as staff and board, arrived at those three words by kind of intellectually duking it out, the struggle was fairly contained within theoretical arguments. I've come to realize that theory can be very scary to people because they miss the pleasure of seeing what the change looks like and feels like. Theoretical discussions of why we should become a more diverse institution or why, in fact, we needed to shift from using the word international to using the term global--a word we're now equally struggling with--always felt to some as a construct that embodied loss rather than opening up a bigger picture of the world. Once they began to see the rewards of the actions--the new audiences, artists, colleagues, conversations--they began to rest easier. It became exhilarating, full of openings rather than closure. But both trustees and staff need to be willing, and curious enough, to accept some diminution of their own authority.

VND: I want to come back to the multidisciplinary part of your mission. When you first started talking about the multidisciplinary imperative, was it out of a sense that all of these diverse creative endeavors needed to be represented, or was it that you wanted them to interconnect in ways that they hadn't before? Increasingly I'm much more interested in finding ways of connecting these worlds. It's not enough that all of them exist, but how do they coexist? What is the greater goal? Why should an institution have all the disciplines? And I'm taking about not only creative disciplines, but also policy-making, administrative, and educational responsibilities. Are there ways to articulate something that actually is much bigger than any one of these parts and to truly interconnect them?

KH: I've always watched artists very closely, maybe because I know how difficult it is, at least how difficult it was for me, to think and act as an artist, a practice that I found extremely lonely and gave up many, many years ago. But I never gave up the extraordinary revelations I found working with artists and being in artists' studios. Part of why I wanted to recalibrate the balance among multiple disciplines, which have been housed at the Walker for decades, had to do with watching how artists themselves were working. Artists increasingly became less interested in defining themselves as visual artists, moving-picture artists, or performing artists. They were interested in areas of convergence, which seems to me another way of looking at notions of hybrid-ity. Even though I wanted to provide a fertile laboratory setting for artists, I was equally interested in creating opportunities for audiences, which still, by and large, define their interests by discipline. I wanted to encourage them to move out of those disciplinary silos toward a larger set of ideas about what the work means, where it comes from, how it is framed, and how the disciplinary boundaries are shifting in the twenty-first century. So it had to do with my commitment to both artists and audiences.

Content, Context, and Cultural Commitment: Curating the Performing Arts
Philip Bither, Baraka Sele

PB: That approach to traveling is also connected to the emotional experience of performance, of seeing live artists performing in the same space in real time. We often talk about the essential need for contextualization, but there is something about being in the moment of a live performance, an appreciation for the work that transcends all the historical background, all the critical performance theory that you might gather. In fact, you appreciate it on a completely different level. That may be something that differentiates our work, perhaps, from the visual arts. There is that fine line between contextualizing and overpreparing an audience.

BS: It's completely experiential. Sometimes I love just experiencing the work and not having the burden of trying to tell someone what it means.

PB: Or why they should like it.

BS: What does it mean? Where does it come from? What is its history?

PB: There are times when too much information undercuts the power of the live theatrical experience. There's a balance that curators need to strike in terms of when the information is best delivered and in what format.

BS: And when that contextual information weighs the performance down.

PB: Sometimes we choose not to have anything happen in the performance space itself right after the event. There's a magic, a sacredness to that space, which the didacticism of a quick informational exchange or a question-and-answer session immediately following a performance can sometimes destroy.

BS: We often talk about the afterlife of a performance. How can it live on and not become ephemeral? In my opinion, that is more of a concern from the visual arts perspective; I don't have a problem with the performing arts being ephemeral art forms.

PB: It lives in the spirit and in memory.

BS: In the here and now. There is an appropriate time for archiving and documentation, or seeing that the work tours and has an ongoing life. But nothing compares to being in the moment; it's like meditation.

PB: It's perhaps part of what drove avant-garde visual artists to start performative practice in the first place. There was such a focus on the object and, often, the commercial value of the object. The Dada and Fluxus movements, Joseph Beuys and the tradition that he spawned, Happenings, and many other early performance art practices were attempting, in part, to create the spontaneous moment, were realizing that art didn't need to have permanence. It could be of the moment and about our lives and our everyday ephemeral existence. But it's still challenging for institutions that have been, for much of their histories, built around the collection of objects and the permanence of those objects. There certainly are some interesting ways to combine the practices--creating art exhibitions out of the sets, scores, videos, costumes, writings, and sound of time-based performances.[3] Also, digital documentation and performing arts projects translated onto the Web offer new bridges between worlds.

The Walker's framework for presenting work is quite specific. It's about contemporary and experimental work, work that in some way is challenging the norm. How you define those terms becomes very complex when you are operating in a global context. What is the avant-garde? Is there an avant-garde? What are the distinctly different forms of modernism? As we have discussed many times during this initiative, there is not just one story of modernism.

BS: And sometimes, modernism is not even the story at all.

3 For example, the Walker presented in 1998 the exhibition Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham, Bill T. Jones, and Meredith Monk, co-curated by Philippe Vergne, Siri Engberg, and Kellie Jones.

Revolt, Dysfunction, Dementia: Toward the Body of “Empire”
Otori Hidenaga

If we continue to engage ourselves in such an endeavor--to awaken a "not-conscious knowledge"--we may be able to acquire the possibility of connecting to otherness, even in this drastic transition toward total homogeneity that is the process of globalization. In order for us to start engaging in such an endeavor, the analysis of what is currently happening is indispensable. And if we are to participate in such a project, speaking here specifically in terms of theater and dance practices, which situate the body in its representational center, the notion of dementia must become our shared theme. We must soberly accept the situation and articulate it clearly. We must live the state of dementia in our own selves.

The fact that, after 1995, artists such as Pina Bausch and Sasha Waltz started to express a sense of jouissance and "the body of dementia" in their work shows that they had anticipated, and now certainly fully understand, the coming of a new phase. In Japanese performing arts, collectives such as Gekidan Kaitaisha, through the negotiation of bodies in a state of war on stage, were able to present us with images of "war bodies," and they are now trying to connect with the notion of "the body of dementia." If we go back to the origins of theater and think in terms of Greek tragedy, it is worth noting that heroes of Greek tragedy who tried to revolt against the order of the gods invariably lost the battle because of their sheer powerlessness. Perhaps the same fate awaits Kaitaisha's actors in their battle against globalization and Empire. But at least, like the heroes of Greek tragedy, they resist the order of the gods and seek new ways of resisting, all of which is continuously enacted on the stage. We might do well to remember that in ancient Greece genius (meaning linguistic spirit as opposed to mythology) was inscribed within Greek tragedy. As we begin to witness the first attempts at negotiating with the body of dementia, we should remain hopeful.

In theater, where still very few attempts are being made to create a new kind of representation, critics such as Uchino (I would also include Unakami Hiromi, a theater director, who attempts to analyze contemporary Japanese culture through a critical lens) are starting to develop a detailed discussion of what is going on, referring to wider contexts of contemporary visual art and literary practices. This shows, however feeble it may be at the moment, that there is a connected response to globalization between performative and discursive practices. To move from the proliferation of noncritical J-theater practices to serious responses to globalization means to negotiate with the world, to move from a self-inflictive, self-affirmative practice to a realistic art practice. To support such a movement is my motivation to keep working as a critic. Rather than continuing to ignore the issue of globalization, we need to collapse the mythological order of Empire from within and inscribe a new antimythological genius, a linguistic spirit, within our culture. Active criticism may at least be able to open up avenues to lead us there.

Translated from the Japanese by Uchino Tadashi

Kim Itoh

Artists increasingly became less interested in defining themselves as visual artists, moving-picture artists, or performing artists. They were interested in areas of convergence, . . .

I don’t have a problem with the performing arts being ephemeral art forms.

. . . there is a connected response to globalization between performative and discursive practices. To move from the proliferation of noncritical J-theater practices to serious responses to globalization means to negotiate with the world, to move from a self-inflictive, self-affirmative practice to a realistic art practice.