COMPLETING A DANCE THAT BEGAN 20 YEARS AGO
Established in 1986, Kokoro Dance has become one of Canada’s most esteemed butoh dance companies.
For Embryotrophic Cavatina, co-directors and award-winning dance artists Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi began putting Kokoro’s latest work together nearly 20 years ago. The finished piece, which features Bourget, Hirabayashi, Billy Marchenski and Molly McDermott, will have its world premiere in Vancouver later this month. We talked to Hirabayashi about the inspiration behind Embryotrophic Cavatina. Q: The new work is apparently inspired by composer Zbigniew Preisner’s orchestral composition, Requiem For My Friend. Is that right? A: In 1998, we did the first version of this piece with jazz musicians. Just after that performance, that album (Requiem For My Friend) came out. We listened to it and really loved the music. Because it’s difficult to keep performing with a live ensemble, we thought we would rework the piece to the music from that album. We began with the first half of the album in 1999 that we premiered in the Dancing on the Edge Festival. We thought we would continue and finish the second half of the album but we got busy with other pieces, and put it on the backburner.
In November of last year, we went to Havana and decided that we would set that first half on 20 dancers from the company that we were doing a residency with. We remembered then that we hadn’t finished the second half.
Q: What were the difficulties in picking up where you left off after all that time?
A: We’ve grown and evolved and changed in how we choreograph. But the basic first section, the requiem part, seemed to stand the test of time. It seemed to be as strong as when we originally choreographed it. We were happy to leave that part as it is. In the first part, except for one small section, it’s a quartet where everybody does the same movement. It’s Preisner’s farewell to his friend, Krzysztof Kieślowski (the film director died in 1996).
The second half we took as how you feel after a great loss and how you return to living. We wanted to address the difference between the first half and the second half. So we wanted to add more colour. In the first half, we’re just in the butoh singular loincloth and white body paint. For the second half, we commissioned Tsuneko Kokubo to create costumes for it, and we use her paintings. So it’s going to have a dramatic difference from the look of the first half. We also wanted to make the choreography more complex. Q: Embryotrophic Cavatina is described as expressing “the rawness of humanity and transcending all superficial layers of persona and ego.” Is that something you want audiences to come away with? A: Our esthetic is butoh, which has a contrasting point of view from most contemporary dance. It really is about expressing one’s humanity without a lot of artifice, about using the body as the instrument of expression. We find that we are better able to express ourselves with all of our body visible rather than masked, or to adopt characters like you might see in a story ballet like Swan Lake.
Our interest is in reflecting something of humanity that our audiences can see in themselves. They may not initially recognize themselves from the outward appearance of our bodies, but through our movement we evoke emotional responses that everybody has and can feel, and sometimes don’t allow themselves to feel. Live butoh dance is an opportunity where people can sit, reflect on what they’re seeing, and feel it in their bodies from what our bodies are expressing.