Organic Harmony
From January 2017, the beginning of Exploring Practices module, I have kept researching “organic harmony”. Through the process of making performance to explore “organic harmony”, the definition of ‘organic harmony’ was slightly changed. However, ‘organic harmony’ is still something intrigues me, even though I cannot see or touch.
The reason why I started researching organic harmony was all CG movie KINGSGLAIVE Final Fantasy XV.
I had never seen all CG movie except Toy Story series, so hardly imagined this rapid evolution of CG technology. My friend who worked for that all CG movie as a CG creator predicted future that the budget for all CG movie will be much cheaper than one for live-action movies. It will happens near future. Near future does not mean 10 years later. My friend said ‘maybe in a couple of years, at least in several years.’
From that day, I had kept thinking the way to live as a performer with an organic body. My body is far from perfect, and what is worse, my body is getting older and less flexible every day, while CG characters become more human day by day. They may move into theatre industry in the near future. How can I compete them?
Thinking about that, what crossed my mind was the image of Japanese festival. At a Japanese festival, which is traditional, local and not commercialized, often gave me a sense of harmony. That is organic harmony between performers, between performers and audience, between human and nature, which leads us to a state of complete mental absorption with blissful pleasure. My instinct told me that must be something I should bring to my performance in order to survive as a performer with an organic body. At that moment, ‘organic harmony’ seemed clear and tangible. However, during Exploring Practices module, I gradually realized the difficulty of explaining what organic harmony is. I know organic harmony, I experienced that several times. Although when I talked about organic harmony, some of my friends looked at me as if I claimed to see ghosts or UFO.
Really fortunately, my understanding cohorts helped me to explore organic harmony. Using extracts of Japanese traditional song and dance as catalyst, we tried to find the moment of organic harmony. I believed that there was the moment when we could find organic harmony between us. Performers could feel that, and observers described that moment as ‘mesmerizing’. Having said that, organic harmony was still mystery to us all.
From June 2017, I have retried to explore organic harmony, using PaR methodology. As a need to close and constant observation, I planed to have a solo performance, although, fortunately, receiving two collaborators during this PaR. Having collaborators was very beneficial for this project in many aspects. To site a case, they made me realise the importance of warming up. There was a huge difference in their bodies and minds between when they did warming up properly and when they did not. Our warming up routine aims actually warm ‘down’. In every rehearsal, we tried to do the routine bellow.
1, meditation
2, stretch (the point is not to push, just feel the wait of own body)
3, walking in 3 different ways (Japanese traditional, Ballet and my original)
I kept improving the routine, to get our body and mind ready to have organic harmony. Through Exploring Practices, I realized that usual warming up routine which I learnt in Ballet and Jazz dance class did not make sense when we explore organic harmony. If we move our body up and down quickly, our body become hotter and slightly insensitive. This sort of dance warming up routine also effects on mind and make it energetic and positive. Too much energy and positivity tend to prevent performers to be neutral and mindful, which are essential status for creating organic harmony.
As well as working in rehearsal room, I went to performances as much as possible. And some great solo performance, such as Akram Khan’s DESH taught me the fact that organic harmony can exist even on the solo stage.
Organic harmony can exists between performer and audience, between performer’s body and mind, between body and space, between time and space and etc.. Creating organic harmony by one or a few performers seems more difficult than ensemble. And also the quality of organic harmony seems slightly different either.
The former type of quality can be found also in Noh theatre, Jazz flow and baroque music ensemble, while we can find the latter one at traditional regional festivals in Japan and rock/pop concerts. Compering those, the former one seems more fragile and requires more training to acquire. To research and capture the sense of organic harmony which is fragile and intangible, I set some task to our performance.
The first task is rolling-up movement.
(edit and upload video of this movement on website)
When organic harmony exists between performers, we can rolling-up at the same time, even though we can not see each others movement.
The second task is Japanese style and my original style of walking (we call it is as ‘spirit’s walking’ because it seems like walking in the air), after rolling-up movement. It was quite obvious that when we could not have organic harmony and synchronise rolling-up movement, we also could not start to walk at the same time. Additionally, walking tends to be off balanced or too quick. Especially ‘spirit’s walk’ requires right way of breathing, concentration to keep body control.
The third task is Ariel’s fan dance which I combined Japanese traditional dance and contemporary dance together. Using fan as a dance prop means using aerodynamic for own performance. Once organic harmony is created between me and space, a fan become the extension of my body, and I can plat with air. However once I fail to find organic harmony, air takes my fan away from my hand.
The fourth task is stick fighting. I got inspiration from my experience of Aikido practice. As well as Kun-fu, Karate, and other traditional martial arts, Aikido has semi-contact performance. And it highly requires the sense of organic harmony. So I thought it was good idea to employ technics related to martial arts. However It took more than 3 months until finding organic harmony between performers, I and my collaborator Shu. Using simple stick as a combat tool as well as an instrument to make rhythm demands us a variety of skills and a lot of training. Eventually we spent more than 4 months for practice stick, and we captured the senses of organic harmony just a couple of times. Performing stick fighting without mistakes does not mean that we can create organic harmony. We could find organic harmony when we forgot about all choreograph and technique but dis everything precisely.
The last task is choreograph which describes a kind of a duel between two genius magician; a metaphor of cyber battle between two genius hackers. In this choreograph, I use a fan and my collaborator Victor uses two fans with long veils, so it was not easy at all. We could not appreciate full of organic harmony through this task, although we had a very short moment that we confirmed the existence of organic harmony. This choreograph has movement which Victor and I come closer without seeing each other and sit down and stand up together, back to back, using each others weight.
So it is very easy to distinguish whether we have organic harmony or not. When we could not find organic harmony, simply we could not do this movement.
Through most of all the performance, I did not use music with beat. I wanted find the rhythm which generates inside us. Everyone has different body and every body has own rhythm. In an interview with Josephine Machon, Akram Khan mentions ‘…body is like a museum but an evolving museum so it’s constantly muting’ (2009). He describes body as a museum which carries history, and cultural, educational religious and political information that passes generation to generation. Fortunately, I could work with two performers having different cultural backgrounds of mine. I wanted to see how our museum mute and what kind of new museum appears. I wanted to explore the rhythm in organic harmony, which was generated by museums from Romania (Shu), Poland (Victor), and Japan, instead of having fixed beat. And I believe that dancing/moving without beat is contemporary idea. I learnt that from many beautiful contemporary dance performances without beat, such as Darren Johnston's Zero Point (2017). And interestingly, Noh performers also dance without beat. Furthermore, The art style which I can find organic harmony easily, for instance, free style jazz improvisation, baroque music ensemble, do not have fixed beat either. They perform using pulse inside them.
I realised that. However, I could not explain what is organic harmony yet, at that moment.
Yesterday (5th October 2017), I found that article that choreographer Rosemary Lee examines ‘intuition’. She expresses intuition as ‘hard to talk about, by making it concrete I feel it’s harder to find. The problem is partly semantic. I’m not sure I know what intuition any more’. (2006) Her feeling is very similar to my feeling for organic harmony. So I decided to read that book ‘NAVIGATING THE UNKNOWN’ more. In that book, many artist talks about intuition, and when I saw the word ‘subconscious’ in Guy Clayton’s article, I thought that I finally found the keyword to explain ‘what is organic harmony’.
I could not explain what is organic harmony by words, because organic harmony is highly related to subconscious which prefers to recognise things in the non verbal way. Words are the domain of our conscious and logical mind. When I was a BA student, I studied psychology, especially relaxation hypnosis technique which is related to research of subconscious. A Dictionary of Psychology defines subconscious as ‘operating or existing outside of conscious.’ (2006) This word was coined by French psychologist, philosopher and psychotherapist Pierre Janet. Subconscious mind lays underneath the layer of critical-thought functions of the conscious mind and contains an enormous amount of knowledge and memories that even one’s conscious already discarded. So it was not mystery that we performers could move together without watching each other. When we could do it, we had organic harmony, and in organic harmony, our subconscious is activated to deal with huge amount of data including memories of past practices, information from our eyes , ears, and nose, which our conscious decided not to recognise.
A part of our rehearsal routine meditation is also considered to related to subconscious. Moore and Malinowski argued the possibility of mindfulness in meditation which accesses to subconscious and leads greater cognitive flexibility (Meditation, mindfulness and cognitive flexibility, 2009).
Noh theatre performance, Jazz improvisation, and baroque music ensemble, all of them related to subconscious. William B Yeats’ research mention attraction of subconscious factors in Noh, Lung and Prowant argued ‘Noh speaks more to the subconscious.’ in their book (2009). And also Dr. Menon (professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of neurosciences) claims that their study shows a moment when individual brains respond in a tightly synchronized manner to the transition point between movements in baroque music, under subconscious status (2007). I could not find any firm evidence of relationship between jazz improvisation and subconscious mind, however considering the main aspect of Jazz improvisation ’call and response’ requires players a huge musical vocabulary and realisation in milliseconds what new notes will fit, listening hard to interact properly with what others in the band are playing, Jazz improvisation definitely needs help of subconscious mind.
Now I will define organic harmony as the subconscious state which is generated between different factors and links and fuses together those factors.
From now on, I will address future challenges ‘How to improve the ability of making organic harmony’. I would like to research training methods of contemporary theatre makers. For instance, Eugenio Barba’s concept of “presence” and Grzegorz Bral’s (Song of The Goat Theatre) Coordination Technique seem to helpful to find organic harmony. Those theatre makers criticise the modern western way of theatre making, which values logical analysis of texts rather than performers’ individual body and mind, and employ technics and aesthetics of minorities’ traditional/ritual performances (Please refer to the brief explanation of Barba and Bral’s training methods). Until I came to the U.K., I was not familiar with contemporary methodologies in theatre. So Barba and Bral helped me to develop organic harmony from another perspective.