Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance, and: Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo (review)

Two new publications on Japanese dance, one on nihon buyo, a traditional Japanese dance form, and the other on butoh, an avant-garde Japanese dance form, share a common theme of dance as transformation through deep bodily training. Whereas ideas of body-mind dualism prevail here in the West, these Japanese forms engage in the effort to think through the body, to act through the body, to reach a unity of body and mind as a way, somewhat paradoxically, to escape the mundanity of flesh and thought. The result for highly trained practitioners of both nihon buyo and butoh is transfiguration in the moment of performance. Both books discuss the ways in which the greatest artists in their respective forms transmogrify on stage—that is, the way in which they embody and in fact become a kind of spiritual presence.

Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance, by Tomie Hahn, approaches dance as transformation by looking at the learned processes through which dancers achieve unity of body and mind. Hahn's work is an auto-ethnographic study of the traditional Japanese dance form, nihon buyo. The book is concerned with the contemporary practice of teaching and learning this art form, particularly how nihon buyo is transmitted through direct corporeal communication through the senses: visual, tactile, and oral/aural. In studying how nihon buyo is taught, Hahn shows us more broadly the ways in which forms of cultural transmission reveal cultural and aesthetic values and, alternatively, how cultural and aesthetic values determine forms of transmission.

Hahn bases her study on her thirty-plus years of training in nihon buyo, shaping her analysis through her embodied experience of learning the form. This firsthand perspective, conveyed in thoughtful, careful, and evocative writing, is itself the primary evidence for her formulations about how Japanese dance is transmitted through the body, and, as a result, transforms the individual. Hahn uses the image of the Japanese fan, sensu, to describe the way her book unfolds in small vignettes that can be viewed either separately or unfurled as a whole to reveal a larger picture of embodied cultural awareness as represented by a Japanese dance community. Dedicated to the importance of corporeal knowledge in understanding nihon buyo, Hahn intersperses the five chapters of the book with "Orientations"; these short sections invite readers to participate in guided activities meant to help them approach the subject matter sensorially and thus bring a visceral mindfulness to the reading of the text. Body and mind are at work together.

The first three chapters of the book provide a history of nihon buyo and introduce the hierarchical, familial structure of nihon buyo pedagogy, called the "iemoto system," where students are initiated into a school's "family" and a single patriarch or matriarch presides over all teaching and operations in the school. After laying out this terrain, Hahn discusses how nihon buyo honors four aesthetic approaches shared across many Japanese art forms: simplicity, irregularity, suggestion, and impermanence. Hahn demonstrates how nihon buyo is squarely "Japanese" in its faithfulness to these Japanese artistic ideals.

In chapter 4 Hahn presents the bulk of her ethnographic fieldwork as well as the core of her argument. She describes a typical day at the Hatchobori dance studio and provides a geographic layout of the studio space, including the ways in which hierarchical relationships of viewing and dancing are regulated spatially. This chapter is then divided into four subsequent sections, each focusing on the communication of nihon buyo from teacher to student through a particular sensory medium: visual, tactile, oral/aural, and, finally, through the mediating assistance of notation and electronic recording. Hahn provides a very careful study of each of these forms of transmission...