Voice of Session House 2020 — Facing the Calamity of the Novel Coronavirus
Here is a photograph. It appeared in a newspaper at the end of March, when the novel coronavirus began spreading to different parts of the world. It is an unremarkable picture of a square in Paris, with the Eiffel Tower visible in the distance and just one man jogging. Yet when I saw it, I was seized by the thought that this was the very world the coronavirus had created, and overcome by a bleak, chilling feeling. It was not a photograph of medical workers caring day and night for seriously ill patients in hospitals, nor of the many coffins brought into a square and buried in the earth. Nevertheless, the photograph of just one human being in a square left me feeling that I had been made to realize how, under the call for “social distance,” we each stand immobilized in a world that has separated us from one another.
Several years ago, after the nuclear accident in Fukushima, we hosted at Session House’s gallery a touring exhibition of photographs taken by Korean photographer Jeong Joo-ha (鄭周河) on visits to the affected areas. Most of the photographs were not desolate scenes of a power station collapsed by explosions or towns destroyed by the tsunami, but beautiful landscapes of hills and fields, with flowers blooming and birds flying, such as one could see anywhere. Yet those beautiful landscapes were contaminated by radiation, and refused to be viewed as mere landscape photographs. The exhibition took its title, “Does Spring Come to the Stolen Fields?”, from words in a poem written by the Korean poet Yi Sang-hwa (李相和) under Japanese colonial rule. The works asked precisely this question: even with flowers blooming, fruit growing, and little birds flying, “Can we say that spring has come here?”
The coronavirus, like radiation, is invisible. For that very reason, it never ceases to threaten us as something drifting through the unassuming scenes of everyday life. There is a theory that viruses, having lost their habitats through humanity’s destruction of nature—as seen in the accelerating global warming of recent years—have wandered out in search of people as places to parasitize. Regardless of whether that argument is right or wrong, I think it is undeniable that this novel coronavirus is asking, “Is this really all right?” of the way our society has been and the way human beings live. It is a hard question pressing down upon us, human beings steeped in desire.
Amid all this, scientists, philosophers, and writers around the world have begun expressing a variety of thoughts. In his essay “Facing Calamity,” Chinese writer Yan Lianke (閻連科) says that a writer cannot become a mask or protective clothing for medical workers. Feeling “the powerlessness and helplessness of literature,” he asks himself the anguished question, “What can literature do?” Perhaps behind his thoughts lies a wish: in a society where an atmosphere of pressure to conform hangs everywhere, what each of us should do is not to shrink back in fear, wrapped in a padded coat within our hearts, but to keep giving voice to our own thoroughly considered words—“different sounds”—and to face the world calmly through our own forms of expression. It seems to me that he is saying that, even as writers are caught in feelings of powerlessness, in a situation where people harbor a bleak chill in their hearts despite the intense summer heat, the future of literature depends on whether we can find the courage to take off one of those padded coats worn within. If we replace Yan Lianke’s “literature” with “dance” or “art,” I think we too find ourselves facing the same question. Surviving in a world afflicted by the coronavirus, what messages have we tried to send, and what messages will we send? Let us have people report on what they have thought about and attempted in the fields of dance and art over this past year.
(Written by Takashi Ito, Session House Planning Office)
