Voice of Taiju Matsumoto
Taiju Matsumoto, who has taught dance classes at Session House for many years and has sometimes choreographed and danced works there, offers a passionate message to those who will continue learning and dancing.
What I Learn While Teaching Classes Director, Session House Planning Office, General Incorporated Association Taiju Matsumoto
We can each work at a different pace; what we are particular about may change. What matters is trying to move toward something. It is all the more welcome if we can work in an environment surrounded by bodies concentrating in the same way. That is how I, too, used to take classes. I make and teach things that I felt benefited me or that I understood from taking classes, but even then, more discoveries come later: making movement phrases has great depth. As I keep making phrases, there are times when I feel I might assemble an appealing connection that combines function and beauty—I can sense it—and can create “a pleasure you understand by moving.” I might shift the flow of the body parts used from the arms to the area around the neck, or twist before taking a step, then move forward and change direction. As a student, I fell in love with the beauty of the movement combinations my teacher created, immersed myself in release technique, and, when I danced the sequences of combinations, was so moved that I became unable to move during class. Watching the moving students from the side, I grasped, with deep emotion, the novelty of the arranged phrases. That dance experience is engraved in me as an aesthetic sense for creating movement.
How did that teacher keep making such new combinations week after week while also living a life? How lucky I was to encounter that sensibility in a land I had traveled to without knowing it, and to be allowed to bathe in it repeatedly. It is precisely those who say they have never danced whom I want to come to class: by passing physically through sequences / chains of movement they have never moved through before, I want them to make time to listen to the words and sensations with which the body speaks. We can each have a different pace and be particular about different things. And those things may change again. A class is a place where you can turn toward yourself, surrounded by bodies concentrating in the same way.
When I teach, I am allowed to witness the growth and discoveries of those taking the class. I think their parents or families, who care about them, would want to see them growing like this. Precious, valuable, stimulating experiences are always happening in a class, even for someone watching. About two years after graduating from dance school and beginning to teach, I stumbled in my role of leading classes and visited the Laban Centre because I wanted to observe that teacher's class again. I was able to express my gratitude, saying that the movements the teacher created saved me, and that was good. But my feelings about my stumbling did not clear up, and I brought them home as unresolved homework that seemed quite difficult. I remember this when someone who often came to my class many years ago casually appears, concentrates on their body, and leaves. Through dancing and moving, we are led to think, to know, and to reach questions we cannot put into words. By dancing and entrusting the body to sound, we may be sorting out, in the way sleep does, a reality that the mind cannot immediately organize. Both dancing and watching dance have that power. The homework I brought home from revisiting the Laban Centre probably seemed difficult because I was embarrassed and could not bear the discomfort of conducting a class as a teacher, as a guide, without that power having become deeply familiar to me. Now I have come to think that each person who gathers may have their own pace and concentration, and that there is no need to feel embarrassed like that.
Speaking of the power of watching dance, Session House has a performance program called Theater 21 Fes. It is a long-running, successful project that started in 1997 and, I hear, was named from the idea of watching dance from 21:00 on Fridays. Today it includes challenges, restagings because people have gone to the trouble of making a work, and a genre-free variety of experiments and undertakings. Performances now take place on weekends, allowing time to watch properly. When I watch 21, I can receive its varied ingenuity and each person's awareness. Appreciation is a mirror reflecting the extent of one's experience, and the fact that everyone's impressions differ is, if anything, reassuring. Normally we would have no way of knowing what someone devised and how, or what they were conscious of when creating, unless an after-talk were arranged or they were a friend. But if I had taken a dance class and experienced looking at myself, thinking for myself, and searching, that experience might help me imagine, in my own way, the ideas and struggles of the choreographer who made this dance work I am seeing for the first time, and, as I watch, arrive at the intention of the experiment and the choreographer's awareness. Precisely because of experiences of struggling and trying things in class, we may develop the ability to imagine the awareness involved in creating as a dancer. The passion to search, to move toward something, may, from an unexpected perspective and at an unexpected moment, give form to a future no one has yet seen. That, too, is a manifestation of the power to arrive at and receive something through dancing and watching.
For me, too, Session House has gently prepared projects and proposals necessary for dancing and living day by day, like messages from the future. At the time, all I did was eat the nourishment prepared for me. Later, sometimes I notice things, sometimes I do not, and sometimes they begin to take effect; day by day, I can dance on the nutrients I received, in some cases taking years and years to correct myself. These are days of being taught, finding inspiration, and communicating again, while watching dance and teaching classes.
Taiju Matsumoto
Excerpt from Voice of Session House 2023
