Walks (Upd. Sep 26, ’22)

“From a closed room to the open air, from the open air to prison-that will inevitably be my path. My naked body will be carried without any pretext of inconvenience. It will be allowed to pass without any inspection of my personal effects, and.I will get another look at dance that can be narrated by bare hands and by walking.” – Tatsumi Hijikata¹⁵

Neutral Counterbalance Walk

Understanding the neutral counterbalance walk is a good place to start before we begin to break the rules.

Standard Walk

More importantly than anything, the neutral counterbalance walk should be effortless. Any extraneous movements (especially that of swagger) is to be avoided. Like alignment, which the walk is to travel with, it is a starting place from which to discover and/or engage other movement. Bari Rolfe says of Jacques Lecoq’s use of neutrality, “The two words, ‘appropriate’ and ‘economical’ together almost add up to the term ‘neutral.’ The student executes any action, like walking, with only the expenditure of energy and rhythm, in space and in time, that the action requires.”¹

This walk is also good to use as a transitioning movement between exercises in order to keep the energy flowing.

Counterbalances

Neutral counterbalance walking generally uses two different forms of counterbalance. The first is only the upper extremities or only the lower extremities. Above the transverse plane, the isolated upper extremities counterbalance like pulling a bow and arrow. The same happens below the transverse plane with the lower extremities. A limited walk like ash walk generally uses only the isolated lower extremity counterbalance.

The second form of counterbalance is the whole body counterbalance, forming an X connection with the extremities (for instance, the right upper extremity is connected to the left lower extremity and vise versa). With a neutral counterbalance walk, the engagement might begin at the lower Dan tien (core area), else it begins below the feet, sending a cascade of instructions either up or down the body, affecting the extremities in natural counterbalance. Without a keen eye to timing, one might believe the counterbalance begins at the same time. In fact, there is a ripple effect.

If you can imagine that the lower extremity is suddenly the upper extremity, then the point of engagement may change such as the Dan tien. Naturally, when people begin to practice quadrupedal movement, their point of engagement generally seems to appear at the middle Dan Tien, hence the upper or front extremities begin and provoke the lower or hind extremities. The walking handstand will also use this modified form of counterbalance.

If both of these areas of initiation (middle and lower Dan tien) engage simultaneously, we may notice a forced X counterbalance between the upper and lower extremities. There will be no ripple effect, but a mirroring effect between the upper and lower half of the transverse plane much like with a head-tail curve. This form of walk will appear artificial.

Nanba Walk

This is a same arm, same leg type of walking also found in Noh and Kabuki, which was a traditional mode of Japanese walking. Walking in this way gave little arm movement. The right shoulder is always on top of the right hip and vise-versa. ¹² The ash walk (see below) automatically implies this type of walk.

Exercises

Exercise 1: Pushing & Disappearing Partner

This exercise was done in one of the day’s Anna Barth’s 4 day intensive in Berlin (5/21/18). The exercise is a simple but powerful one for building awareness of posture and the forces that should be working when we engage in walking.

While we walk slowly, one partner is in front of us pushing, so that we have to work against the force. We must, however, make sure that we are not leaning forward too much or back. Our spine is aligned and perpendicular the floor. Feel what goes on in the body. Do we have to engage our core to be able to keep all this? What is happening with the feet on our ground? They have to dig into the ground more or do we have to possess a larger string from between our legs to the floor that grounds us?

Eventually, the partner disappears and we walk as if there were still a partner there. All muscles that have been engaged with partner. Do not stop engaging them. At the same time, remain light.

Exercise 2: X Half Alternation

This exercise mixes both the X counterbalance with the unnatural body half walk (same arm, same leg). Begin with one counterbalance X natural step then hold your arm in place, so that you step into body half, then step yet again to return to the counterbalance X.
Try to move your arms in a flow. You will notice that the feet are travelling at a quicker rate than the arms. You can even increase the amount of steps while keeping the arms at the single cycle.

Exercise 3: Walk, Jog, Run Critical Thresholds

In this exercise, we are interested in the line that divides walking from jogging or jogging from running. We want to resonate with staying in the critical threshold, the moment of transition from one part of the locomotion to the other.

Perhaps we can even call them jwalging and jruning. Especially notice the different muscle groups.

Prison Walk

“A criminal on death row made to walk to the guillotine is already a dead person even as he clings, to the very end, to life. The fierce antagonism between life and death is pushed to the extreme and cohesively expressed in this lone miserable being who, in the name of the law, is forced into an unjust condition. A person not walking but made to walk; a person not living but made to live; a person not dead but made to be dead must, in spite of such total passivity, paradoxically expose the radical vitality of human nature.” – Tatsumi Hijikata¹⁶

Taking inspiration from Hijikata’s quote above, what is it like to walk like a death row inmate?

Ash Walk (Hokotai)

Walk as if you were a pillar of ash. Any sudden movement, and you will dissipate. Be very gentle with your feet. Kayo Mikami regarding the ash walk states that “the ‘ash column’ is ‘standing’, being ‘suspended’ and ready to ‘collapse’ at any moment. The ‘way of standing’ like this should be ‘standing’ in Butoh or the ‘appearance of inevitability'”.² Regarding the walk, Sondra Fraleigh states, “Because of its smooth continuity and floating lightness, hokotai [the basic Butoh walk] creates a sense of timelessness: ‘How can you find eternity in the present,’ this walk seems to ask?”³

This is automatically a nanba walk, which is same arm, same leg walking also practiced in Noh and Kabuki theatre. The right shoulder is always on top of the right hip and vise-versa. There is no counterbalance.¹²

In ash walk, you must feel, but also be unattached.

Exercise: Pebble Sole

Tape a pebble to the sole of the feet and resonate while engaging in the ash walk. This will help develop the light body.

Stone Walk

Walk as if you were completely stone. Your entire body is rock hard as if with rigor mortis. Unless you are as a stone on a slippery surface, your feet are hard to the ground and it is difficult to go forward. Another force may move you forward in the effect that your feet might move only in sudden spurts.

Exercise: Pebbles in Crevices

Stone Walk while holding pebbles between various body parts, e.g. thighs, armpits, between fingers, between neck and chin.

Gravity Walk

Begin by standing very, very still. Notice that with even the best efforts, the body still moves in order to accommodate for balance. Balance exists because of gravity. Imagine there is a pen at the top of the head. What is the pen drawing? The pen is drawing scribbles. These are not only seemingly random scribbles, but scribbles that utilize butoh time like that of a butterfly. Resonate with these scribbles.

Then after a time, make the scribbles bigger and gradually bigger. In turn, you feel more of an effortless sway. With all this now in your body, begin your walk. During your walk, via your body, have a conversation with Gravity himself.

It may also help to think of muscles in the following way proposed by Naguchi Taiso: “Muscles do not exist for resisting and governing the gravity. Muscles are the ears for listening to the words of the god of gravity.”⁶

Ghost Walk

This walk has a subtle floating quality to it. You may even smoothly lift up from the balls of the feet to give a floating illusion. Entire body is relaxed or lifeless, but flowing. Hijikata said of the ghost walk:

Why do ghosts have no legs? Nevertheless they are standing upright. What is it that holds them upright like that?[…] It is air that supports ghosts. Dandelions are not supported by legs. They are supported by countless number of death. […] There’s neither directions, nor top or bottom, nor right or left. The human body will float up and start drifting.⁴

Weak Walk

You walk as if there were only the tiniest string of life left. You somehow manage to walk but are in a perpetual state of collapse. Your body may even take on a stumbling quality. A trauma may have suddenly happened to you and you have only seconds left to live. You may even have feelings such as: not me, not today, how could this happen? This is essentially like Hijikata’s Walking of a Condemned Criminal. Hijikata says of the convict:

A convict who is forced to walk toward the scaffold is one who is already dead while he is trying to continue to live. Within him we can see a fierce battle between death and life. He is compelled to fall into an unjust situation under the law. The antagonism is extremely condensed and expressed in this miserable man. He is not walking. He is forced to walk against his will. He is not living but forced to continue to live. He is not dead but forced to die. He is in the state of a perfect passiveness. Paradoxically, however, we can see in him the fundamental vitality of a human being as endowed by nature.⁵

Slow Walk

This is a human walk but slow.

Exercise 1: Left/Right Deviation

Slow Walk with closed eyes in what we feel to be straight. Usually, by the time we reach the end of the space, we will see a curve to either the left or right or both. Depending on where the curve is, we may be able to know where to place more awareness in the opposite direction in life in order to compensate.

Exercise 2: Blindfold

Perform a slow walk while blindfolded. Make sure to increase the difficulty of the walking space, granted with safety. Using anything that also tests your balance is recommended such as the perimeter of a hot tub.

Space Walk

Walk as if there were little gravity. Like the ghost walk, you have a floating sensation, but can take it even further with Space Walk.

Toddler Walk

Feel your large body and a torso with four limbs. Torso will have a tendency to move forward while the rest of the body struggles to catch up. You move as if you just have awareness of the four limbs and they are not at all yet differentiated into the ankle and specific surfaces of the sole of the feet. Feel eventually that your entire arms are being used for balance and your legs have a multidirectional form of getting from one place to the next.

Sleep Walk

With closed eyes, you walk but the rest of your body is sleeping. Your head is either already bent forward or to the side or you catch yourself dozing off.

Elements Walk

Walk through all four elements. First, you can walk through a shallow stream followed by fog, then a mountain trail followed by a pathway of coals. Also create your own scenarios.

Beyond Walk

Slow walk with the embodied feeling of your feet below hell and head above heaven. Feel power and lightning.

Ego Walk

Any number of human walks or swagger that accentuate self-importance. Take into complete exaggeration.

Clown Walk

Drawing upon your own history, exploit or exaggerate your own past walking tendencies that have not necessarily been viewed as average or correct. See section clown for further inspiration.

Zombie Walk

Go into your personal embodiment of that which is a zombie. Increase your personalization of this form.

Fractal Walk

Slow walk as you control the head string of a miniature version of yourself who is also slow walking. A larger version of yourself who is also slow walking controls you by the head string. Hence, there are three difference sizes of you walking, one in the 3d world and two in the multi-dimensional vaporized world.

Android Walk

This is the walk of a cyborg. Play with robotic, repetitive movements and system failures of particular parts.

Collapsed Walk

Warp your body that resonates with you, and this will be the position for the walk. Resonate with the shape of the deformed, stuck in one position.

World Walk

In Rhizome Lee’s own words:

Walk with the dead, the injured, the handicapped, and the insane. Walk towards the audience with all the unhappiness of this planet. Why do you walk with these difficult walks? Because I have no other gifts than my butoh dance. We will all dance together at the carnival of the dead, with crazy, and with the handicapped people of the world.¹¹

Stutter Walk

The following is inspired by Tatsumi Hijikata’s quote in Wind Daruma

In the midst of grasping something a hand becomes senile. It happens a lot to old people. And a hand ends up going for something and never coming back. On the way it flickers out. A hand straddles something; a hand disappears.¹⁷

Like stuttering where words trip over themselves, this is a walk that walks into itself, creating a problem in walking as too much walking is being done to get the job done.

Butoh-Fu Walks

Yukio Waguri Translations:⁸

The Girl Who Walks On Monet’s Water Lilies

Walking Just As Pure Measurement

Yoko Ashikawa Translations:

Walking of Measure⁹

Walking Through the Woods of Bresdin¹⁰

Swagger & Secret Butoh

The swagger can be viewed as dancing and walking at the same time, which can also be used to disguise a dance if one wishes not to be necessarily noticed or to remain backstage. The concept is inspired by Augusto Boal and Panagiotis Assimakopoulos’s concept of Invisible Theatre where the spectators feel your act is an unstaged, non-performative event.¹³

Forward Motion & Contemporary Metaphor Theory

To Lakoff, a conceptual metaphor for the progress of external events can be forward motion: THE PROGRESS OF EXTERNAL EVENTS IS FORWARD MOTION.

The source of the metaphor (source domain: forward motion) is mapped onto progress itself (target domain: the progress of external events). Examples given by George Lakoff: “(1) Things came to a halt; (2) Things hit a brick wall; (3) Let’s get things/the ball/the wheels moving.”¹⁴

The very act of moving forward with the body can provoke a psychological feeling of progress or going into the future. On the contrary, walking backward might provoke the past, while being still may provoke neither past nor future but possibly the now moment, presence, the feeling of being stuck, or even boredom.

De/Reterritorialized Walk

When the walk is deterritorialized, it leaves the sphere of the human and gets reterritorialized somewhere else in the body. This means, that no longer do we use the feet to walk, anything but! The butt, torso, shoulder become the reterritorialized legs that do the walking.

¹ Rolfe, Bari, “The Mime of Jacques Lecoq,” Drama Review 16, 1:34-8. 1972.

² Mikami, Kayo, Tatsumi Hijikata: An Analysis of Ankoku Butoh Techniques, 1991, p.91.

³ Fraleigh, Sondra. Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy, Illinois, University of Illinois. 2010. Page 48.

⁴ Hijikata, Tatsumi, W-Notation, no.2, 7.

⁵ Hijikata, Tatsumi, Inu no Jômyaku ni Shitto suru koto kara, Bibou no Aozora, 3.

⁶ Esposito, P., & Kasai, T.(2017-10-26). Butoh Dance, Noguchi Taiso, and Healing. In

⁷ The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Wellbeing. : Oxford University Press. 2018. Page 260.

⁸ Waguri, Yukio, Butoh-Fu CD-Rom. 2006.

⁹ Mikami, Kayo. “Tatsumi Hijikata: An Analysis of Ankoko Butoh Techniques” 1997. Tokyo. Page. 100, 101, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113.

¹⁰ “The Human Body as a Vessel－an approach to Tatsumi Hijikata’s Ankoku Butoh” 1992. ANZ Publishers.

¹¹ Lee, Rhizome. Behind The Mirror: A Butoh Manual For Students. First Edition. 2010. Page 161.

¹² Asai Shotokan Association International. What is Nanba Walking? Web. http://asaikarate.com/what-is-nanba-walking. 2019.

¹³ Boal, Augusto. 2000. Theatre of the Oppressed. 3rd ed. London: Pluto.

¹⁴Lakoff, George. Aspects Of The Self Are Distinct Individuals. Conceptual Metaphor Home Page. 1994. http://www.lang.osaka-u.ac.jp/~sugimoto/MasterMetaphorList/metaphors/The_Progress_Of_External_Events_Is_Forward_Motion.html