October 19, 2006
UW dance makes an impression in Japan
Come January, Dance Professor Hannah Wiley and some of her dancers will be appearing on Japanese TV. The occasion is the airing of a documentary on the late Japanese modern dancer and choreographer Michio Ito — whose work was performed by the UW’s Chamber Dance Company a few years ago.
“This is one of the very few places in the United States where people are interested in Michio Ito’s dance,” said Hiromi Sakamoto, a member of the team working on the documentary who came to campus last week. “We thought, ‘My God, even in Tokyo it’s not done that often or by many people.’ So we thought we should come here and document this work.”
Ito was born in Japan but began his dance career in Europe, where he lived before World War I. But at the start of that war he was forced to move to London, where he was “discovered” by high society and subsequently came to the United States. He had a successful career here until Pearl Harbor, after which he was sent to an internment camp and finally deported.
Wiley never met Ito; he died in 1961, when she was still a kid learning ballet. But after she became interested in dance history and began, in the 1990s, to reconstruct important dances of the past, she said she “kept coming across Ito’s name.”
Ito’s work is not that available, however, and she wasn’t able to learn about it as readily as she could someone like Isadora Duncan or Doris Humphrey. Finally, in 2000, an assistant of hers managed to locate Ito’s granddaughter in Los Angeles, and Wiley was able to see videos of his work. She was instantly fascinated, and decided to include his Five Dance Poems in the 2001 Chamber Dance Company concert.
Ito’s dance is sparse and ritualistic. The male dancers who performed his work in the concert look almost like martial artists in slow motion. The experience was especially powerful for those dancers, Wiley said. So when she was granted some funding from Tools for Transformation to make DVDs about choreographers of the past, Ito was one of the three she decided to do.
“His work is almost lost in this country,” she said. “I wanted to help preserve it.”
In addition to the CDC performance of the Ito dance, the DVD includes interviews with two of the dancers and with people — mostly in Japan — who knew or worked with Ito.
Wiley’s efforts did not go unnoticed in Ito’s home country. When a production company decided to do a documentary on Ito and began to seek out contacts in this country, the University of Washington came up immediately as a place where his work was being performed. So Sakamoto naturally wanted to talk to Wiley.
When he got in touch with her, Wiley told him a CDC graduate who danced in the concert would be leading a master class on Ito last weekend, so Sakamoto decided to film that and also interview Wiley.
Sakamoto was especially interested in the UW Dance Program’s work because of the way Ito’s choreography was taught. “You have to see the basis,” he said. “Ito has created steps and gestures that will lead to choreography, and this department is looking at both the choreography and the foundation of it.”
As she does with many of the historic dances the CDC re-creates, Wiley didn’t just teach the dance; she brought an expert in to teach the technique upon which the dance is based. In this case, a former dancer in Ito’s company came from Japan to teach the CDC dancers.
Ito, Wiley explained, developed a technique based on “scales” with 10 movements each. Each movement can be done in a masculine or a feminine “voice” by changing from an inhalation to an exhalation.
“Learning the scales,” Wiley said, “was key to learning how to dance the piece.”
The Ito family was appreciative of the way his work was handled and has given Wiley permission to perform it again in next year’s CDC concert. Meanwhile, the Japanese will be learning more about their countryman through the documentary that includes information from the UW program.
It’s not the first time Wiley has indirectly helped the Japanese. “When I was making the DVD, I sent one of our alums to interview some of Ito’s disciples, who have a group in Tokyo,” Wiley said. “Then when the head disciple died, they used our interview in the funeral service.”
