aruku / 歩く

Last week, I joined the workshop by the experimental art group from Tokyo. The workshop was two days intensive and I was totally warned out by the end of the workshop. The first day of the workshop was organized by Takumi Harada, who was the Butoh practitioner. His workshop begun with how to remain high energy inside the body while your physical body stays still. The second step was to empty your thought and mind and give yourself totally to the time and the space. In other words, any movement we make should be the reaction to our surroundings. It required listening, trust and "not doing". He began his workshop by showing us how he exercise his body and that was seriously.... boots camp! The detail of this body movements sometimes communicated pain, sorrow, and agony.

The second day of the workshop was ran by Hiroshi Ohashi who was the founder of the DA-M Theatre. He took us to the journey of walking. (Aruku) He took the universal human action of "walking" in ordinary life to another level. After several exercises of understanding the sense of gravity, we worked on improvisation of group walking. All of the sudden the simple action of walking became sense of building community. The participant had some choices of "stop" , "turn", "walk" with various speed. It was amazing how many stories or strong moments of human connection that we created by just responding to one another. We also had some opportunities to observe others and it was breath taking to watch the individual energy and collective energy. And it is a simple thing sometime we need to create a beautiful human drama on stage.

At the end of the workshop, we had a chance to be the audience to see DA-M Theatre's performance on stage. It is hard to describe with words, but I learned how important it is to be alert and willing, though we may feel our individual input in the world seems so small.