Stray Birds
Wrinkled Codpieces, Butoh and Becoming Bird
Notes From the Aboveground in
London, Paris, Tokyo, Pittsburgh,
Bennington, Middletown,
Easton, Mt. Tremper
Michael Pestel
2000-16
•
Stray
b i r d s,
Taketeru Kudo
and Michael Pestel,
are unpredictably caged
or uncaged. They are also un
mercifully cunning and perfectly
capable of hamming it up, three wings
to the wind, when the moment is right. Most
of the time, though, they are fluttering aimlessly,
continents apart. When they do meet sometimes, in
their vast, lateral migrations between East & West, there is
little choice but to start at the beginning from the ground up.
Even their title,“Stray Birds,”lifted from Rabindranath Tagore’s 1916
collection of dreamy aphorisms, must be rethought each time they meet.
Writing now in early Spring, as I wait for my stray counterpart to return after a
too long absence , Tagore’s poetic gems illuminate my thoughts in sudden, phos-
phorescent bursts. They are at turns f i r e f l i e s, f l y c a t c h e r s, f i r e b i r d s .
Taketeru Kudo may be the most sublime master of the new generation of Japanese Butoh dancers. His movements are unusually fluid and quick for Butoh, more like those of a songbird, a hawk or a hummingbird, than the chalk-white zombie whose slomo kinesthetic has become the cliché of Butoh’s netherworld. “I am not a Butoh dancer,” he once said, trying to disavow the label and set the record straight. “I am nothing. Just becoming. Becoming bird.” But labels stick. What really counts for Kudo, and for me, is the performance itself as a blank slate whose writing happens only in the dance. It appears spontaneously and unhyphenated. Walkingcrawling. Flyingfalling. Gatheringscattering. Whisperingshouting. Dialectics like these can cut through the onion strata of an audience’s bitter heart.
Thoughts pass in my mind like flocks of ducks in the sky.
I hear the voice of their wings.
Working with an avian ghost is not easy. Just because I play the Birdmachine and other syrinx-inspired instruments, doesn’t give me a leg up on the emotional demands of Butoh. The truth is, I have to conjure up at least three M’s – musician, magician, mortician, to say nothing of a murder of crows – to get through a performance with Kudo. To do so requires deadly concentration and a touch of whimsy, as well as nearly scatological outbursts of sound woven thick with silence. 4’33 meets 7- Eleven.
Silence will carry your voice like the nest that holds the sleeping birds.
How any of this happens, or can happen at all, is a mystery. Kudo and I rehearse diligently, but nothing is ever planned except to observe a meticulous absence of planning. Instead, decisions emerge on stage in situ et extempore via animi motus – from the GUT! Kudo and I are both Cancers with Leo rising, moonchildren in reciprocal orbits, though I’m a teetotaler and he’s a master sake drinker. It’s an alchemical formula for perfect lunacy and double trouble eclipses. That’s why, at the start of a performance, we play a gentle form of hide and seek to test the waters before plunging in to search the depths full tilt. Soon enough, the raging humanimal sounds and movements will erupt like hashtag revelations – #Gutwrenchinglaughing #Birdsingingcrying #Satyrprancingcrawling #Licescratchingsoothing – whose tears will trend to laughter, then revert to tears, and twitter back to laughter in the blink of an owl. Or when the cloak-swept motion of a cod-pieced king becomes a sudden beggar’s hobble, and just as suddenly returns to royalty… and just as quickly buckles back to crippling terror. Or flies hard against caged bars and windows, and then takes flight once more. When speaking Butoh, Kudo is death resuscitated from life.
We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.
Such dialectical forces are at the heart of an island culture forged by seismic faults and lava flows, which is to say by primordial nuptials, Izanami and Izanagi, those who invite life to take root. Add to such substrata under constant pressure, two explosions followed by the ashes of an emperor’s surrender, and the matter is conspicuously intensified. That was August 15, 1945. The explosion of capitalism followed quickly thereafter. And not long after that, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, the postwar founders of Butoh, began pushing back against the modern world. One could say Hijikata took over from where Hirohito’s military left off. He reshaped Bushido – the Way of the Warrior – into primal dance and zombie power. Hijikata was Butoh’s Dionysian aspect. Ohno was its Apollonian cross-dresser. In 1961, he officially titled his new dance form Ankoku Butoh – The Dance of Darkness – and gave the world its most radical form of dance. Call it what you will – Butoh, Unballet, Choreogravity, Ballroomcrawling, Wrinkledcodpieces, L’argentinadresses. It turned the world of dance upside down. Ohno was fifty-five at the time and was still dancing at a hundred when he gave his last public performance in Tokyo in 2006. He did little more than crawl across the stage that night, but what an extraordinary crawl. He brought an audience to its feet in tears. The tears were shed for the end of an era and a man crawling toward oblivion.
I think of other ages that floated upon the stream of life and love and death and are forgotten, and I feel the freedom of passing away.
The question of when and how to end a performance with Kudo is far more difficult than starting one. In some cases, the finale will arrive slowly in fluttering waves of exhaustion, and fade out incrementally. In others, a swan song will plummet suddenly, spasmodically, and writhe out excrementally. Or… it might take a lawn tractor at full throttle to pull both audience and performers across the finish line. That’s what happened on a freezing October day in Connecticut when Kudo danced with my quartet – Neely Bruce on trombone and piano, Amy Cimini on viola, Katie Young on bassoon, Michael Pestel on flutes and contralto clarinet – on and around and above the forest stage at Prout Hill Farm. Initially, the guests followed Kudo in slow motion as he crawled codpiece-naked in the streambed and back uphill to the large octagonal stage. The ensemble, which had dispersed at great distances throughout the landscape before the start of the performance, sounded forth while gradually making their way toward the stage. They reassembled just as Kudo emerged from the stream and disappeared under the stage for a wardrobe change.
What you are you do not see, what you see is your shadow.
As sulfurous plumes of multi-colored smoke rose up through the floorboards of the stage, Kudo reappeared in white body makeup, a beggar’s cloak, and later, a blood red scarf for climbing trees, pianos, musicians’ gazebo, and darting through the forest. When he’d had enough, he sensibly flew the coop. His performance was breathtaking, but the musicians went on too long, and no one seemed to know how to settle the score and call it a day. In exasperation, I set my contralto down, bounded across the stage and bolted toward the John Deere parked nearby. Saddling up I turned the key, engaged the 52” screaming blade, and popped the transmission into drive. Barreling straight ahead, I cut a grassy path through the undergrowth toward the frog pond’s wild rose thicket, and disappeared from view. I stopped at the pond, turned the machine off, and breathed a sigh of relief. An unplanned ending had broken the impasse. Pitch-perfect Butoh. For a moment, the world was swallowed up in combustion, then in silence, and finally, after the audience’s long ovation, in leaves blowing up in gusts off the ground back into the trees.
Stray birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away. And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh.
Becoming Bird – Some Straybird History
Early on, while majoring in French literature at Keio University, Kudo studied Butoh with Akiko Motofuji, Hijikata’s widow. Later, he also studied with Koichi Tamano, Hijikata’s first student. In the 90’s, he toured with Sankai Juku, the company that had put Butoh on the world map in 1985. That’s when a dancer’s fatal fall from a Seattle life insurance building made international headlines. “Butoh is a dialogue with gravity,” Amagatsu Ushio, Sankai Juku’s founder, had said years earlier.
The dust of the dead words clings to you. Your soul is washed with silence.
In the late 90’s, Kudo went mostly solo and founded his own school, Tokyo Gui-En-Kan. Since that time, he has performed frequently in Russia, Israel, Brazil, Mexico, Holland, and throughout the United States and Europe. Recently, on stage in Moscow, he was the solo dancer in The Full Moon, which won the Golden Mask, Russia’s most prestigious national theater award. Kudo is a prodigious reader of dark Russian novels and a master vodka drinker. Audiences in Vladivostok adore him!
If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.
Before April 21, 1991, the day I first played flute with birds at an art opening in Pittsburgh’s National Aviary, music was for me a strictly human activity. After that, it became an interspecies conversation, indoors and out. For the performance that day, I read aloud the names and dates of 165 bird species we humans have eradicated since 1600. I improvised a short riff for each name as a stand-in for sounds we can no longer hear, and listened in amazement when a toucan and other birds in the room mimicked me with uncanny regularity during the forty-minute litany.
The echo mocks her origin to prove she is the original.
By the end of the performance, an avian avant-garde had taken hold of me. Lark, stork and sparrow. I was hooked. I returned most every Sunday throughout the 90’s to join in the morning chorus. The birds became my teachers in timbre, phrasing, and multiphonic splendor. They transformed my playing, my listening, and sense of musical place, which is to say, the place in which extinction is both remembered and transformed into living sentiment and sound. Throughout those years, I brought musicians, composers, dancers, artists, poets, Zen monks, and of course, Kudo to perform at the National Aviary. Becoming bird became the story that was telling me out loud and from within.
Birdsong is the echo of the morning light back from the earth.
Beyond my collection of woodwind instruments, I began acquiring bird whistles and other avian sounders, and attached them to my flutes, recorders, hands, feet, and especially to my nose. I invented avian instruments, mostly hybrid combinations such as the Birdmachine (bass recorder and bird whistles), Violaire (violin and slide whistle), and Broominette (extended shop broom with contrabass clarinet mouthpiece). The National Aviary’s orchestra included Inca terns, greater flamingos, sun bitterns, ruddy ducks, crested oropendolas, snowy egrets, scarlet ibises, blue-winged kookaburras, red lorries, golden conures, roseate spoonbills, hooded mergansers, and many others. They perched, floated, nested and swooped throughout their vast and resonant glass-steel prison. I responded to them, not in mimicry or as their maestro, but in the spirit of blending in beyond recognition. The keepers insisted I was their Johnny Cash, the birds’ winsome, Folsom savior. But I was just becoming bird, not quite one of them… but definitely no one’s jailbird savior.
O troupe of little vagrants of the world, leave your footprints in my words.
In the past twenty-five years, avian reverie has increasingly defined the arc of my travels. I spent one long summer night exchanging Aeolian riffs with a solitary Sprosser thrush on the edge of the Mueggelsee in Berlin. Then the following Spring, I was hidden away in the grotto of a small Buddhist temple in Kita Kamakura performing with a nojiko, a Japanese yellow bunting. A year later, an uguisu, a Japanese nightingale, accompanied me every night for two weeks in a dense forest on the edge of Mt. Asama, a not so dormant, smoldering volcano looming over Karuizawa. On the Canary Island of Lanzarote, I practiced glissandos with a flock of lesser short-toed larks on a high cliff overlooking the ocean toward Africa. Their sound in flight rose and fell along the thermal gusts of sand coming off the Saharan coast. Neither flutes nor faces are particularly fond of windswept sand, but here…
…the poet wind is out over the sea…to seek his own voice.
For years, back home in Connecticut, not far from Wallace Steven’s nesting grounds, I’ve played a redwing flute, contralto clarinet, and eleven other instruments with blackbirds nesting in the frog pond’s autumn olive bushes, birch and cedar trees, and wild, white roses. The blackbirds' lyricism blends with three varieties of syncopated frogs – peepers, green, and bull (treble, alto, bass) – that fiercely raise their decibels by end of June. Then they’re fodder for great blue herons, hawks, and foxes.
Thought feeds itself with its own words and grows.
Butoh in Paris and Tokyo – Two Straybird Stories
I first met Kudo on the cusp of Y2K under a large, black umbrella in front of a London hotel. I was there as music director for a troupe of dancers from Tokyo performing at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and then in Paris at the Maison de la Culture du Japon. As fate would have it, we shared both a hotel room and an utter lack of enthusiasm for the troupe’s choreographer. None of the performances were memorable, but the last night in Paris changed everything.
You smiled and talked to me of nothing and I felt that for this I had been waiting long.
That’s when Kudo’s friend, Joni Waka, the ubiquitous art impresario and Jean Genet lookalike from Tokyo, invited us to a party for Paloma Picasso. Would we like to perform for her? The question was unnecessary, of course, though Kudo, once we arrived at the party, required some plying with a glass of Joni Waka’s namesake. Once plied, he went to work pulling down a heavy velvet curtain from a high parlor window and wrapped himself in its maroon royalty. Then he commenced a slow procession, trailing a long train through the vast 19th century apartment. As he trailed and mused, buckled and crawled, I wove woofs of French Baroque into warps of avian voices through my hybrid flute – half Pan, half Boehm, half growling Metro-Gnöme. Soon Kudo’s impromptu robe dropped off midstride to reveal a body ripped gaunt down to a single, wrinkled codpiece. The audience gazed in awe as if at someone slightly overdressed, which must have spurned him on to leap with vulture swoops along the backs of sofas filled with lounging guests. As they alternately sipped their wine and sucked wild caviar out of pastry shells, Kudo hovered spread-wing over them and held their lives in check. I cawed and mewled an avian sonata with transverse nostrils flared, while the assembled haute couture shuddered with delight. Suddenly, Kudo jumped onto the Turkish carpet and collapsed into a writhing mass of chitinous mayhem. Like Gregor Samsa, some eighty-five years earlier, Kudo’s arthropodic limbs pawed manically at the ceiling. I marked the transformation with gut-wrenching mantras of bird sound while shooting spit wads at him through the flute.
That which ends in exhaustion is death, but the perfect ending is in the endless.
As Kudo’s exoskeleton heaved its last breath, I froze mid-flight and locked my gaze. The audience of Parisian A-listers remained spellbound and ruminant well past the normal span of wondering when to clap. At last their silence broke with shouts of “bravo, bravo bravo…” and a hailstorm of applesauce and approbation. Above the din, Joni’s voice crowed “long live the avant-garde, long live the avant-garde” over and over again at the top of his lungs. In the midst of it all, I caught Paloma’s eyes near the back of the room. She beamed her approval and moved delicately in our direction, along with Joni, who introduced us as “the great American flutist and Japan’s premier Butoh dancer.” As I plucked her hand aloft for a straybird kiss, the room grew still, all ears bent in her direction. She purred: “You are magnifique! I luv ze krayahtif weigh you play ze floot, and Monsieur Kudo muves vis such majestie and unpredeaktabealité! I hope u weel pairform offen een Pairee! I em luking fourwerd!” It was undoubtedly the deepest brush with history I will ever have… and surely the deepest blush. According to Joni, Paloma still raves about us.
Her wistful face haunts my dreams like the rain at night.
Whatever else one could say about him – and someone should write the book – Joni Waka has always kept the magic going. He seems to know everyone and everyone him wherever he happens to be. When Kudo and I performed at Die Pratze, an avant dance venue in Shinjuku, he arranged for us to entertain the legendary French actress Isabelle Huppert at the French ambassador’s residence. Mademoiselle Huppert was the subject of a superstar photo exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum. There were hundreds of portraits of her by dozens of well-known photographers, but I only remember the video installation by Robert Wilson. In it, he slowly – excruciatingly slowly – transformed Huppert into Greta Garbo as she appeared in an Edward Steichen photo on the 1929 cover of Vanity Fair. The effect was chilling. Huppert is a thoroughbred chameleon.
The stars are not afraid to appear like fireflies.
After the opening, two hundred guests from the museum and film worlds, along with governmental dignitaries and attendant gadflies, clinked their champagne flutes and devoured a mountain of sushi and sashimi at the French ambassador’s residence high on a hill above Ebisu, not a lonely goatherd in sight. Just before twilight, Joni struck an enormous Korean gong and announced our impending performance. He gathered the guests around a factory-fresh Yamaha concert grand where I had installed myself with a fastidiously arranged line-up of bird whistles and flutes reflecting on the piano’s black lacquer surface. Without warning, I launched in unceremoniously with a gash of angular, syncopated chords and an auk call blasting from my mouth. Kudo, zigzagged dangerously through the crowd removing his clothing one piece at a time. Before I knew it, he vaulted onto the piano and executed a handstand in full codpiece glory. Then he flipped right side up and bounced up and down as if on a trampoline, his arms reaching high toward the ceiling lights. The audience gasped as my bird whistles scattered to kingdom come inside and off the grand piano, but by then Kudo had leapt down and made for the veranda. It led to the royal garden on the hillside overlooking the lights of Tokyo twinkling far below.
The hills are like shouts of children who raise their arms, trying to catch stars.
As I squeezed through throngs of guests straining to catch up with Kudo’s movements, his faun was already scampering menacingly in the hedgerows. Finding a perch on the edge of a fountain whose urina puerorum aimed a plump stream of water into a resonant basin, I began to play Syrinx, Debussy’s canonic flute solo. In counterpoint to his chromatic lyricism, I interjected flocks of snorting pigs, squalls of buzzards, and a gattling of mallards jammed up my nose. Debussy and Louis Fleury, the renowned flutist for whom the piece had been written, must have turned in their graves that evening. But no matter, the applause at the end was as thunderous as Joni’s trademark crowing, “Long live the avant-garde!” over and over and over again.
Listen, my heart, to the whispers of the world with which it makes love to you.
When the panda’s ammonia had died down, Joni brought the ambassador and Mademoiselle Huppert over to us. To say I was star struck would be to say the sun shines and the moon glimmers. There she was in the flesh, the elfin and quixotic actress whose luminosity I’d admired at twenty four frames a second (plus popcorn) over the past forty-two years! To my surprise, she echoed my sentiment and professed, “Extraordinaire! Formidable! C'était qu'un rêve. Je suis profondément ému!” For a moment in eternity – cela a duré une éternité – we stared into each other’s eyes as if we were the only ones in that vast, open room. Cliché, perhaps, but the ambassador must have sensed a rift in the fabric of time. He moved forward quickly to break the spell. But before he could intervene, I took Isabelle’s Straybird hand and lifted it to my lips whispering, “Enchanté, Mademoiselle! Tout le plaisir est pour moi! Mon coeur a effectué le vol! – My heart has taken wing!”
Once we dreamt that we were strangers. We wake up to find that we were dear to each other.
*****
In the years that followed, I brought Kudo to Chatham University in Pittsburgh several times to lead Butoh workshops. During those visits, we performed at Carnegie Mellon University, at the Mattress Factory Art Museum, and at Pittsburgh’s National Aviary. In Bennington, Vermont, we performed at night around a sixteen-foot bonfire, and once under bursting cherry blossoms at a Shinto Shrine in Shibuya together with Joni’s Rhodesian Razorback. In Roppongi, we performed at Super Deluxe with the Golden Rooster of Japanese saxophonists, Yasuaki Shimizu. We appeared on stage at Lafayette College, and then at Zen Mountain Monastery in the Catskills. In the wake of that performance under the late autumnal shadow of Mt. Tremper, an ayahuasca scandal sent a beloved and brilliant abbot into permanent exile. Straybirds Butoh, as it turned out, was his monastic coup de grâce.
Your voice, my friend, wanders in my heart,
like the muffled sound of the sea among these listening pines.
S w a n s o n g
Be
fore C
age & Cun
ningham, not
many had ever
questioned the sacro
sanct relationship between
dance & music. It could be said
that Kudo and I, like Cage and Cun
ningham a half century earlier, define
ourselves as equal-but-separate partners
bent on annulling the lockstep marriage of music
and dance. But to Kudo, a performer who must evis
cerate himself from the bottom up and pursue a new path
with each performance, such thoughts are all but meaningless.
The bird wishes it were a cloud.
The cloud wishes it were a bird.
For Kudo, the path of most resistance is the one that finds its way back home.
The oscillating body, pushed along by cemetery winds, rattles through
whistling piles of bones long ago picked dry of dreams. The gol
den body scampers cloven-hoofed in stuttering zigzags within
the heated scrutiny and avarice of audience eyes. It is true,
I have seen it from the musician’s side of things, that
an audience’s gluttony for entertainment can melt
the body’s loneliness into ingots of despair. But
that is its prerogative. In the end, no matter
the path of resistance, the body must
let go altogether, and dissolve for
ever into the black, fat air of
nothing and nowhere.
Such are the require
ments of Butoh
and becom
ing bir
d .