On Stage Alone: Soloists and the Modern Dance Canon

ONE: Michio Ito’s Shadow: Searching for the Transnational in Solo Dance

7 one Michio Ito’s Shadow Searching for the Transnational in Solo Dance Carrie J. Preston Michio Ito (1893–1961) included more than two hundred dancers in his Pageant of Lights at the Rose Bowl, but the Pasadena Star News of September 21, 1929, claimed that the massive ensemble was overshadowedbyhisninety -five-secondclosingsolo,PizzicatiorShadow Dance.1 The audience demanded an encore of Ito’s signature solo to a section of Delibes ’s ballet Sylvia, as had the audience for his first concert in the United States in December 1916. The New York Sun review complained that music by Delibes and other “Occidentals” undermined the “national peculiarities” of the Tokyo-born performer’s so-called “Japanese Dancing.”2 Ito’s Pizzicati demonstrates few “national peculiarities,” and a spectator not looking for the advertized “Japaneseness ” might have recognized the choreography as an example of the “music visualizations” common in Euro-American modern dance of that period.3 The feet remain planted in a wide second position while the arms and hands thrust and circle with flicking wrists to the vigorous and playful Carrie J. Preston 8 rhythms. As the music shifts to a more melodious and legato section, the armssweepacrossthebodyandthetorsotwistsandlifts.Ito’sstudentKyoko Ryutani reported that Ito taught dancers to imagine a “marionette” moved by strings attached to fingers.4 The plucked strings of the pizzicato section figuratively control the body, which falls as the music ends like a puppet when the lines are cut. At the Rose Bowl, Ito was lit from below so that his shadow loomed over the stage; a solo, or perhaps a dancer’s duet with his shadow, eclipsed the Pageant of Lights. Early reviews of Ito’s work were preoccupied with his “Japaneseness” or “Orientaldance”andtherelativevalueofhissolosandensemblepieces.Current critics have not resolved these tensions in discussions of a career that traveled from Japan to Germany, Britain, and the United States and included Hollywood films, versions of Japanese noh and kyogen dramas, and orientalist revues. Ito produced many of the latter for the United States military afterhewasimprisonedasaspy(althoughnevercriminallycharged)anddeported in 1943 to Japan, where he was hired to entertain postwar occupying forces. After long neglect, Ito’s choreography, but primarily his solos, began to be reintroduced to the United States in the late 1970s. Reviews of this “rediscovery” celebrate Ito as an expressive soloist and insist that his choreography is not “ethnic” but “a marriage of East and West.”5 This construction of Ito’s career fulfills two critical desires related to anxiety about culture, nationality, and ethnicity: as a soloist, Ito fits comfortably into the standard narrative that American modern dance originated as a solo genre; second, his solos are more easily understood as choreographies of cultural fusion or transnationalism than as dances employing exoticism and orientalism. Edward Said’s classic study, Orientalism (1978), describes “a style of thought” in which academics, artists, and politicians define the so-called West against a generic East in a manner that supports Western imperialism .6 Transnationalism is thought to designate a very different engagement with cultural diversity, one that examines how cultural forms cross borders to reveal affiliations transcending national identities; it is one of the most exciting and productive methodologies for studies of dance and modernism more generally.7 While it is tempting to suggest that Ito’s dance theories anticipated current models of transnationalism, such claims often suppress Michio Ito’s Shadow: Searching for the Transnational in Solo Dance 9 the ways in which his choreography both adopted orientalist tropes and troubled our pieties about “bad” orientalism and “good” multiculturalism. Ito’s desire for cultural fusion coexisted with his orientalism. His career suggests that transnational approaches can be usefully applied to cultural representations that do not comply with current standards of sensitivity, including the many orientalist dances that were at the center of American modern dance innovation. As my discussion of Ito’s current critical reception reveals, standards have not changed since his first performances to the degree we might wish. I do not intend to provoke shame about our struggles to approach global cultures or propose a new “good” diversity. I suggest that transnational perspectives are problematic but necessary, shaped by misunderstanding and, as Ito demonstrates, remarkable creativity. Ito is often described as the “all-but-forgotten pioneer of American modern dance,” but his choreography is beginning to be remembered after several reconstructions and important critical assessments by Mary-Jean Cowell , Midori Takeishi, and Yutian Wong...