The Gestures of Tea
Photo by Ron Nicolaysen
When something is always present in everyday life, it is often overlooked or underestimated. This is often the case with food. As is the case with our bodies and the ways that they move.
Performance artist Maho Ogawa studies and documents exactly that. With a formal education in ballet, traditional Japanese dance, and Butoh, Ogawa is more than familiar with movement.
Even though I was born and raised in Japan, I didn’t study a lot of Japanese traditional culture. It’s a global concept that you must learn Western pop culture and Eurocentric body language. So, as a normal Japanese girl, I studied ballet for my first form of dance education. I did that for more than ten years.
It was the 2010’s.
A lot of dancers and artists came to New York, which was typical. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go myself, but as I watched more contemporary and experimental dance—I began realizing my passion for more experimental dance instead of traditional modern dance. I decided to relocate from Japan to New York. I was 33.
After I moved to New York, western body language felt more uncomfortable in my body. I saw a lot of “Japanese-ness” in my body language. So, I started looking into what that was. I researched gestures in Japanese films, kabuki, and traditional Japanese movement. I was able to relearn a part of my culture and heritage after I had already grown up. I formed a relationship to traditional Japanese movement, and it felt comfortable.
Maho began a project called the Minimum Movement Catalog.
“It started as research about [Ogawa’s] Japanese-ness through body language, by archiving movements from the West and East, examining the kinetic and symbolic meaning of each movement language.”
She created a lexicon of abstract movements, that when placed in their original setting, contained vast social and cultural meaning.
For instance, when we harvest rice, we tend to bring the pelvis lower. But when you abstract those movements, it’s bending knees and going down. Yet still, I see my cultural body language in the abstracted movement.
However, through her work, Maho realized that the meaning of movement and its interpretation depended on the perspective of those watching.
In a previous performance, there was one movement called “Dropping Elbow.” I was curious to know how other people saw this movement. So, in that performance, while one performer was doing that dropping elbow motion, I asked the audience “What do you imagine from this very abstract movement?” One audience member said, “This is like a train conductor, pulling on something.” Then another said, “It looks like heaviness, as though their working with a weight.” While another member said “This shows the revolution is dead. It’s dropping like it’s kind of defeated.”
So, I'm intrigued by the movement of daily life.
But what does this have to do with food?
Gesturing while speaking, holding our bodies a certain way- I think this is all a natural dance.
That's what I'm most excited about, watching people moving. I'm not choreographing but pulling inspirations from natural reactions. So then, of course, eating is very interesting. When you eat, your hand’s movement, the tilt of your posture, and all other gestures are very communicative. In the exchanging of movement, you’re sharing your internal mindset.
In one of Maho Ogawa’s latest performances, The Japanese Gesture Archive: Tea Ceremony she delved into the traditional movements of the Japanese tea ceremony.
I wanted to pay respect to how we Japanese people treated food and drink in our history. The traditional Japanese tea ceremony is based on Zen philosophy and Zen meditation, so it's very profound. It is also very beautiful, and I wanted to show all this in the choreography.
I was totally new to the ceremony. When I was researching about gestures, I learned that the Japanese tea ceremony has a lot of codified movement and rules, which were not familiar for me. To prepare, the dancers and I attended an actual tea ceremony with a tea master here in New York. We had a very interesting and profound experience. Usually, it takes place in a beautiful minimal setting with no sound, but while we were having the ceremony, there was a thunderstorm.
This is an example of a traditional Japanese Tea Ceremony.
In the quiet room, the performers senses were heightened. The sounds of the storm mixed with that of their actions, pairing well with the pouring of water and the whisking of matcha. This experience would influence their final performance, with a sound engineer and performer dedicated to producing sounds original to tea making.
The basic tasks are actually very simple. You wash your hands, you purify yourself, and you eat sweets and drink tea together. That's it. But with these simple methods, you are waiting, observing yourself, and taking in the atmosphere. In those simple tasks, there is a lot of space for us to meditate, observe, or imagine. That's the core method of the tea ceremony.
Despite being unfamiliar with the rules of traditional tea ceremonies, Maho felt akin to the experience.
At our first lesson from the Japanese tea master, I felt so comfortable. As if it was in my DNA. I felt like an insider, but an outsider as well. It was interesting realigning with my Japanese culture from an outsider perspective.
Also, looking back, it was my mother’s custom to put the tea set out after every dinner. So, this is me trying to understand what that custom meant to my mother. So, there are a lot of layers in this ceremony project.
It was also a moment of community gathering. The audience was invited to partake in the performance. At the start of Maho’s tea ceremony, members washed their hands. They were then served candy during the performance and fresh matcha tea afterwards.
In the traditional tea ceremony, the host and the guests are equal relationship wise. They both have responsibilities. The tea is for guests, but the act of making tea is for the host. The gesture of tea making tea should be to fulfill yourself.
That's a very big concept for me. As performance artists, we’re trained to please the audience and show them our best. But with this philosophy of the tea ceremony, I asked my performers and myself to do these gestures for us and to be vulnerable. That was one of the biggest challenges.
This was very different from my dance education. We treated ourselves as the first audience members and that concept changed the entire movement.
Their gestures in the Tea Ceremony performance were not to make pretty movements for the audience but to look and feel nice for the performers.
It looks very simple, but then you see the subtle elegance that goes into the gestures, so you don't need to make it pretty. By doing all the movement and gestures, it naturally looks elegant, pretty, and functional. I'm not making pretty or make-up performances. But instead, I'm finding that natural beauty in simple body movement.
"The Japanese Gesture Archive: Tea Ceremony”
Choreography by Maho Ogawa • Performed by Ursula Eagly, Carolyn Hall, Annie Wang, and Maho Ogawa • Sound by Tomoko Hojo • Visual Design by Sayoko Kojima • Video Documentation by Iki Nakagawa • Still Pictures by Ron Nicolaysen • Venue at The Invisible Dog Art Center
For more on Maho Ogawa’s work, visit her site: https://www.suisoco.com/