Having coloured my hair since my twenties, I decided to let my hair going grey from the end of 2019 due to getting sick of colouring my hair.  I went to a local hairdresser to dye my hair, so that it would grow out and blend in with a greyish blonde colour.

Then came the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and the authorities in the state of Victoria where I live has taken one of the most stringent restrictions in the world.  The first lockdown came mid-March.  Then the second wave of infection came around mid-June and the state imposed a Stage 4 lockdown in July, complete with curfews where I enjoyed some silence at night and had been sleeping quite well.  We weren't allowed to go out except to get food and necessities, to exercise and to work only with a permit.  So, I've been homebound since July, basically.

As my hair kept growing, and with hairdressers weren't allowed to open, I decided to grow it long – something I've never thought of in the last two decades of wearing very short hair.  With thick texture, I started to have to manage it – combing it through with oil or cream, fastening it with hair clips and hair bands. This reminded me of when I was in secondary school, and as a ballet student, I pulled my hair tight.  Then and now, I feel pinches in my scalp when I let my hair down as if the scalp has been stretched.  I pondered a solution to this scalp-stretching problem: braiding.

As my hair is not even shoulder-length, my braids have to be sectioned into 3-4 on each side of my head.  The process of braiding involves several hair ties and clips.  The front section of my hair is cut into a fringe, so most of the hair to be braided is at the back of my heard.  To braid, I divide hair into 3-4 sections on each side of my head.  Each section is twisted and pinned until its turn to be braided.  Once each section of hair is braided, I then pin it at the back of my head.

Steve Paxton, a renowned post-modern dance improviser, mentions somewhere that his improvisation happens pretty much every moment in his waking life.  I didn't completely agree with him until three months into the lockdown.  As I'm thinking about my research, a little dance suddenly happens at the moment when I heat up my lunch in the kitchen at home.  True enough, braiding my hair requires a sensory-motor knowledge of being able to locate the hair sections, braiding them and pin them back.  As the braiding process happens at the back of my head, I adopt a practice from Nō called riken noken 離見の見 – the practice of observing ourselves from the outside when we practice or perform a dance.

My Noh teacher, the late Udaka Michishige, the founder of International Nō Institute, calls the practice of riken noken "self-separation".  Looking at the etymology of the term, 離 (ri) or 離れる (hanareru) means detached or separation.  見 (ken or mi) means see, idea, look at, visible.  Michiko Yusa, an assistant professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and the Center for East Asian Studies, Western Washington University, translates riken noken as "the seeing of attached perception"[1].  I draw the similarity of Yusa's translation with Michishige-sensei's in a sense that perception is an embodied activity of the self.  The founder of Nō, Zeami Motokiyo, regards perception as the function of  the mind through his teaching of riken noken which largely pertains to the notion of seeing with the mind.  In the 1420 treatise Kakyō (花鏡), Zeami writes, "...in Dance, eyes ahead, mind behind.  That is, 'look to the front with your eyes; put your mind to the back."[2]   To see my back body, or the back of my head, that I cannot see with my eyes.  Riken noken is a practice for developing an awareness to encapsulate the whole of performer's body, as Zeami claims, to be as close as what the audience see as possible.

Zeami goes further to contrast riken noken with "ego-perception"[3] or gaken (我見).  While gaken denotes a self-centric vision where I will myself to generate a determinate form of braids, practically I need to adopt riken noken, a detached mode of seeing, or, to get an exact result, I would have to use a mirror to reflect the view of the back of my head from another mirror.  I don't have enough hands to do that.  As I adopt riken noken, I leave my ego-bound mode of braiding behind, and allow an emergent mode of forming for the braids.  Taking the 'backforming' selfie, my braids look different from what I expect, but then again, what I see from my eyeballs is understood as an "attached mode of seeing"[4], tainted with what I project upon myself, which, I have to admit, coming from those YouTube tutorial videos.  My hair is not anywhere near the models' hair in the videos – not that blonde and that long.  So in a way braiding with riken noken gives me a mental picture that actually as close as I possibly can to assist me with the braiding.

The moral of the story: if I practice my improvisation with riken noken, it is likely that I get a clearer picture of what I look like than I thought.  It's important to emphasise the verb 'thought' here as I can't foresee what my improvisation would be until it happens.  I could only perceive it as it happens, and only realise what happened retrospectively.  Ah... the paradox of an arrow...  Brian Massumi writes, "It is only after the arrow hits the mark that its real trajectory may be plotted."[5]  I can't realise my movement as movement until it has happened.

REFERENCES

[1] Michiko Yusa. ‘Riken No Ken. Zeami’s Theory of Acting and Theatrical Appreciation’. Monumenta Nipponica 42, no. 3 (Autumn 1987): 331–45., 331.

[2] Motokiyo Zeami. Zeami’s Performance Notes. Translated by Tom Hare. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2008, 103.

[3] Yusa, "Riken noken", 335.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Brian Massumi, quoted in Bleeker, Maaike. ‘Thinking No-One’s Thought’. In Dance Dramaturgy: Modes of Agency, Awareness and Engagement, edited by Pil Hansen and Darcey Callison, 67–83. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.