Voice of Session House 2020 — Naoko Ito
Naoko Ito: “Living Through the Pandemic”
April and May 2020: we felt crushed by an experience in which everyone in the world became directly involved. Many dancers must have been hurt when our lives, our very way of living, were dismissed as nonessential and nonurgent. Even that hurt was marked by inequality, and the world became deeply divided.
While I was thinking about my own situation—how those of us who dance could survive—my entire view of the world abruptly changed as I realized that this was a situation we had no choice but to recognize as a crisis for the Earth and for humanity.
But first, we have our today, and we have our tomorrow. At Session House, the energy of young staff members and dancers suddenly sprang into action. We decided to hold online performances, acquired cameras and equipment for transmitting them, recruited dancers, and boldly carried out our first stream on May 17. At that first performance, the moment a single dancer stood onstage and one light came on, the joy we felt inspired our resolve to continue. We streamed online every week through July, reaching far more viewers than could attend a stage performance and interacting through chat. I became convinced that this new kind of relationship could be a useful tool for dance. We then decided to stream all nine performances of our independently produced 2020 “Dance Bridge” program online, reducing the concentration of people. To make up for the loss of admission income, we appealed through crowdfunding, received a great deal of help, and set out to discover new forms of expression.
What we gained was a new way for the staff to work. It was also an expanding body—the dancer dancing with faith in something unseen—and a transformation in the power of imagination. Through “online sharing of the present,” dancers and staff alike shared an experience of changes in how we understood video and in our awareness.
Even in 2021, our prayers have been in vain: infections are spreading, individual lives are being invaded, families’ happiness is being destroyed, and we are confronted with a reality in which we cannot feel that things will return to how they were. As a theater, Session House continues to face cancellation after cancellation, just as last year, and, with no clear outlook, our difficulties are deepening still further. Within this reality, protecting the environment for dance = protecting our own livelihoods = protecting dancers will be what we must do today and the tomorrow toward which we should move.
How far can we, as a private organization, support performances by students who cannot even attend university? We will do everything we can. We will do everything we can to sustain places where dancers who have continued dancing steadily, through their own efforts, can present their work. We will keep sharing the dance of Japan’s leading experimental artists so that they can once again engage with the world.
In this age of pandemic, dancers for whom dancing is living and people for whom providing food and drink is living are experiencing the same lonely suffering amid hardship. The values discovered through the pandemic will differ from person to person. I want to live my today to the fullest, and, if that tomorrow leads to a future for dance, I want to keep hold of the courage to get through this year, Session House’s 30th anniversary, as a one-of-a-kind place for dance, even without a sense of celebration.
Naoko Ito
Excerpt from Voice of Session House 2020
Session Online Theater
