Feedback 

First of all, Lee, thank you, thank you so much.

Thank you for your time, your attention and your teaching. For your patience especially, for the freedom and creativity you challenge us to. I feel very thankful.

Thank you as well for these mountains, for the trees and the bugs, for the others students, for the birds and the rain. Thank you for gathering all this life around you, and thank you for welcoming me around...

 Half year feedback... I will try to make it as short, clear and honest as possible.

 I have read in one book I have borrowed from you :

« In everything the sage sees the good,

where there is no good, the sage still sees the good

This is called creating the good. »

I thought of you when I read this...

 Here's my feedback... The critics I suggest are from my humble point of view of the arrogant young man I am...

 The Quiet School

 I really enjoyed the beginning, the first month and a half. I don't know if enjoying is the good word. I got to sink in my body as I was wanting to.

Then I feel the sinking process slowed. The first chapter of the Quiet House was amazing, it was new. Afterwards I feel we have lost a lot of time and energy in the words of another person.

The part-whole-subtle, the chimera body, jumping wild, and all these very interesting things you extract from the Quiet House you can teach them alone, without going back to the text again and again. And we would get more practice...

I know you love Hijikata. But we are compromised with the creative impulses of the people we admire and not with what they have created. Life is creation... created is already death, past, even if it's the piece of a genious.

Around me I felt that some students were getting lazy, desmotived, uninterested while we were working with the Quiet House. You were teaching lots of things together and there was no time to deepen into.

I feel we didn't go to the big moves I like but neither sink into subtle moves I also love. We stayed in the middle, playing.

I came here to work hard, not only to play. I would like to do Ash walk, three meters one hour. I would like to make subtle moves but for me subtle is deeper than what you teach us.

I would like a lot more precise anatomical work. To go in the hands, open one hand in 8 minutes, in 16 minutes, in 32 minutes, in 64 minutes... Then we would discover powerful things in our body. To sink in the jaw, to really explore the spine for hours and hours and days. One day you talked about the five sacrum and the way each sacrum move the legs. I want to learn not how to move but to let my body move naturally. I want to explore more deeper these five sacrums.

For me your method is too light and I think you don't get the best out of us. You find the good in us but you don't get the best. You don't challenge, you make almost no exigence. I think I understand why, but I also think I don't agree.

I would like to know what you see in us, in me. What part of my body do I forget ? Which patterns repeat ? Where's the density, the tension that resist the resonance ?

What I feel resonance is is a way more deep state of mind than the « just resonate » people repeat a lot in school. I am thinking of this melting with reality I have experienced a few times at school, some times with LSD and others psychodelic drugs, and for some moments in the Vipassana. To enter this state we have to break with ourselves and not only calm down the mind. We need to break it, to open it.

They say that a good yoga teacher doesn't teach the posture itself but the way to the posture. Sometime I feel you are wanting to share this place where you got to but you skip the way. When you say calm down the mind it's like if you ask our mind to calm down itself. The same with the ego. Let go of your ego... but that's our ego that is listening and I am not quite sure the ego is willing to let go of himself by himself.

Personnally I want to think and live escaping from dualism. Nonetheless, I think that MIND / NO MIND or DUALISM VS ONENESS are both dualistic views of reality. I follow the taoist way of the open mind (« the mind as the perception of all things » Tao Te Ching), or the quantum mind and creative thought which are very different from no mind. And I want to live in the multiplicity, away from both dualism and unity. The rhizome, says Deleuze, means to start to count from 2.

So maybe you have got to a place, to the dreamlore, to the dissolution into reality, I don't know. Maybe you can calm down the mind just by saying calm down the mind... I doubt it is everybody's case. But if you want us to resonate away from dualism, I think that the invitations to the mind and to the ego to let go of themselves are not enough.  

The festival

 I am not very happy with the last months. For some reasons...

One day in the morning you made a hard critic on my piece. I think you were right. I had executed the piece without putting my life in it. I think you were wrong about the causes.

I think big moves and especially those who break the mind can be very useful to enter the subbody, the dreambody. If I would go to a shaolin monastery for four months I don't think I would get less resonance than the one I got here. And I would do big moves... I like to feel the blood running in my veins, I like to go out of breath to really feel the breath of life and especially I enjoy vitality and health. I like the research with the weaken body but I think you must counterbalance it with the cultivation of vitality and health.

Everybody got sick at school... because we were weak and lazy and sinking not into our subbodies but into the realm of amorphous life.

So, going back to the festival... That day I presented my piece without life because I was angry and upset about everything. I am happy that you criticized me strongly, honoured that you finally show some agressivity in your teachings.

I was angry at the other students and at you a little bit to put us in this situation. I want to break free. You said that Hijikata had a breaking period before coming to weaken body. I feel that the roots of butoh still feed the dance from this rebellion. We can go to another way of living only if we are willing to leave the way of living society force us to.

Butoh is becoming fashion in today's world and dance community. The festival we organized I think it was not bullshit but a very great cultural event... of a dead culture. The festival was great but in a bullshit framework.

I wanted silence and I ended up having discussion about money ! Amazing...

I wanted to break with myself and I end up with my photo all over the town... Amazing... We dedicate the same amount of efforts to publicize ourselves that to create our piece. Amazing...

Where's the resonance ? What happen with this become a secret you write about butoh ?

Let's create a big maelstrom of energy and people that need will come... Why do I need to make publicity of myself ? To get money to pay for the panel of publicity ?

You were talking a little bit then you were going to your room and left us with all the organization and all the unsopportable discussions of me, myself and I.

For the next festival, I can perform all the nights that you want, two times each night. But I won't participate in the organization... You should pay us for that ! That's a work !... With extra hours... And it is a very good publicity for your school... you should sponsor, not only the material that you keep...

I have ended with my room in big disorder, with dirty clothes and dishes, with no food at home, eating quickly and badly... This way of life I don't want. I know clearly... I want to sleep enough, to eat well and with time, I want silence and tranquility.

I am also not happy with the fact that we ask money. We are already paying the school. And we are no professional to ask money for what we do. If it is free then we make a gift. If we ask money then we are exposed to judgement and expectatives.

I think the school should cover all the expenses of the festival. If you don't have enough money then ask 2850 instead of 2800 per year. These economical discussions where we heard a lot of stupidities (if you don't ask money you don't value what you are... my god... this person dances butoh!?) for me have nothing to do with butoh.

I have learned a lot and enjoyed and suffered the festival but it is an experience I am not willing to repeat. I could got one month with Romesh and learn electricity, and cooking, and being a father, and... I would learn a lot of thing but I am not at a butoh school for that. If I want to organize festival I go to business school and make a cultural management class... I want to perform, to perform life.

 Pieces...

 I am very happy with the talk & dance experiment. I am done I think. I agree with you : you can go way deeper into your body when you don't talk. Now I know it from within. I have learned a lot of things about the place from where I talk, about the disconnexion between body and mind and so on... It was very interesting...

 And for the pieces... I don't know... I want to explore something more experimental, less fixed but prepared more deeply. More strange... more abyssal... 

In summary, thank you, thank you a lot... I hope you receive the critics I suggest as constructive.

Have a good summer, enjoy the sea, the sun, the mountains and the bodies on the way...

See you in september...