I have reached a milestone on the journey of my artistic research. In academic terms, I am now officially a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne Faculty of Fine Arts and Music. In artistic terms, this is the anniversary of the 10-year journey since I ventured into the world of Noh.

In August 2009, I traveled to Kyoto to study Noh with Master-actor Udaka Michishige, without knowing what would come out of the study. On reflection, it was a life-changing trip. Ten years on, it has led to an investigation that profoundly enriches my artistic practice. It has been an immense privilege to have an opportunity to study with Udaka-sensei, be immersed in the community of practitioners who study Noh, and bring practices and ideas from Noh into my improvisation practice.

More specifically, my Noh study has opened up a line of research enquiry that has boggled most contemporary performers: how to articulate time before an audience. There is so much to unpack in the topic — what is time anyway? What comes first and what comes next? Is time linear or circular in our experience? Or both? Does the improviser experience time passing as she is moving or just when she pauses? Does the audience feel this temporal experience too? Do they feel time as linear or circular? How long should things be? What does it depend on? How fast or slow should things be?

See how slippery this topic is? Practice-as-research has given me an opportunity to grapple with these questions before concluding one way or the other, if at all. And having studied and practiced Noh is handy to establish a conceptual framework of my artistic exploration. My research involves two overarching concepts in Noh, jo-ha-kyū 序破急 and ma 間. I began blogging about jo-ha-kyū in 2014. At this point, jo-ha-kyū can occupy several dimensions all at once in my practice.

What interests me at the moment is how I could link Noh to improvisation. We can talk about it in terms of ideas and concepts, but I feel strongly that the link between two practices is through my kinaesthetic experience. I continually attain embodied knowledge of jo-ha-kyū and ma through practicing Noh repertoire. Despite the limited numbers of the repertoire, I have uncovered how I can implicitly grasp the nuance of the concepts in practice. My body that practices Noh is the same body that practices dance improvisation. My body understands how each step of Noh walk is shaped through jo-ha-kyū, just as in improvisation the nexus of my body parts are connected together and shaped through jo-ha-kyū. The moments of pauses in Noh repertoire feel really similar to pauses in improvisation where my attention is intensified internally and externally at once.

One of the important tools that unites jo-ha-kyū is the language in which I use to describe and query about jo-ha-kyū. I enquire about the Noh concepts through kinaesthetic experience, but language is what frames my thinking and exploration physically. To research improvisational movement in the studio, I ask something like...

What if jo-ha-kyū is a mode of time perception which is predicated on my awareness of time and the gaze of the audience simultaneously, to bring about an articulation of movement?

What if jo-ha-kyū behaves like wave? Could the jo-ha-kyū in each movement can be circular–it begins in jo, swells up and takes over in ha, and recedes or discontinues in kyū?  Or, could jo-ha-kyū be perceived as linear in the larger and longer units as it shapes the composition of the improvisation? Could this be analogised as one observing the beach and seeing each wave beginning, swelling and receding, as well as a series of waves coming to the shore? As I am dancing, could I perceive jo-ha-kyū simultaneously as lived experience and as an observer of my own dance?

To borrow the words of Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, who has researched the subject of time in the past 30 years, could jo-ha-kyū be considered “as kisses rather than stones” (Rovelli 2018,98)? Kisses are metaphors of processes or assemblages of events, stones a collection of objects and material. In generating improvisational material, these metaphors help my consideration not only of movement outcome, but also of my attention in the invisible process in which movement is generated. Rovelli’s metaphor for time concurs with Zen teaching which does not discriminate what is visible and what is not. Similarly, Zeami’s teaching on jo-ha-kyū of vocalisation in Nō encourages the performer to be attentive to the internal process yet to be visible to the spectator, as much as the vocal output. And so, jo-ha-kyū in improvisation should be considered in the process of generating movement eventhough such process is yet to manifest as movement, shouldn't it?

At this point, I'm happy to leave my exploration of jo-ha-kyū as questions, and even happier for my dancing body to be a transitory place between Noh and dance improvisation. As for ma, the process of jo-ha-kyū leaves residues of sensations in my improvising body, could ma simply be a welcome respite, or there is something more profound yet to be discovered? No doubt, I will write about ma in the near future. Stay tuned.

Thank you for reading.

Update: September 25, 2024

In my studio practice, analogising jo-ha-kyū as waves yielded the same result, had I not embodied jo-ha-kyū. In addition, what was often missing in embodying jo-ha-kyū as wave was the kyū part of the movement. If I embodied a full arc of jo-ha-kyū––particularly by emphasising kyū––there was a gap between movements or phrases.

On a closer reading of Rovelli's thesis of time, he argues that an event (a kiss, a process) is limited in duration (2018,98). That is, it doesn't last forever as it inevitably comes to an end. Rovelli theorises that what we experience as time emerges from the interaction between quanta of space, trickling up from the elemental (quantum) level to our quotidian experience (2018,124).

If jo-ha-kyū were to be embodied as a 'symbolic animation' of processes as Zeami intended, its ending or kyū is crucial (Ramirez-Christensen 2008,61,original emphasis). My practice to bring attention to the full arc of jo-ha-kyū was consequential to the temporality of my improvisation. Accentuating kyū means that I created 'an arc of event' out of a movement with a small gap between movement. My improvisation and embodied time no longer flowed smoothly. However, while my improvisation lacked 'flow', I gained time for attentiveness.

My article on the granularity of time in my improvisation published in the Critical Dialogue Journal can be viewed here.

References

Rovelli, Carlo. 2018. The Order of Time (New York: Riverhead Books)

Ramirez-Christensen, Esperanza. 2008. Emptiness and Temporality: Buddhism and Medieval Japanese Poetics (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press)