18 Jun 2024
Posted by Kelly Fleck 
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Emiko Agatsuma and Miya Turnbull will perform Ladder at Bus Stop Theatre in Halifax on June 28 and 29. Photo credit: Annaka Gale.
HALIFAX — A new cross-cultural and cross-discipline collaborative project is connecting two artists from Canada and Japan, multi-disciplinary artist Miya Turnbull in Halifax and butoh dancer Emiko Agatsuma in Tokyo.
After a long process of collaborating online, the two artists are currently working together in Halifax to create a 20-minute performance that combines butoh dance and handmade sculptural masks. The collaboration will culminate in a work-in-progress performance at the Bus Stop Theatre in Halifax on June 28 and 29. Called Ladder, the project has received support from the Arts Council Tokyo, Arts Nova Scotia, and Canada Council for the Arts.
Their collaboration expands a step further, and the two will perform with Edmonton-based musician Hitoshi Sugiyama (Gozu Mezu), who will play the taiko, flute, and electronic music. The performance is a rare opportunity for the Halifax community to experience a butoh performance from a professional and award-winning butoh dancer.
“I think this is such an amazing opportunity for Halifax to experience this. It’s so rare, so I feel really happy that we can bring this here,” Turnbull tells Nikkei Voice in an interview.
“[The performance will] introduce parts of Japanese culture too, which we don’t get much here either…I’m excited to rock the boat a little bit in that way, but also to bring in such an interesting art form.”
Turnbull is a Yonsei multi-disciplinary visual artist from Halifax who grew up in Alberta. She has created hundreds of masks, which are three-dimensional self-portraits and explorations of her identity and self-image. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Recently, Turnbull has expanded her practice to explore photography, videography, and performance.
Part of that expansion included taking online butoh dance classes during the pandemic, which is how Turnbull first met her new collaborator, Emiko Agatsuma. During Agatsuma’s online classes, Turnbull would join fellow students signing in from around the world. To accommodate the 12-hour time difference, Agatsuma began offering Turnbull private lessons, and their collaboration began.
Agatsuma is an award-winning professional butoh dancer, choreographer, and artistic director of AGAXART, a platform dedicated to nurturing butoh talent in Japan. Agatsuma also comes from two decades of experience with Dairakudakan dance group, one of Japan’s largest butoh companies.
Emiko Agatsuma (right) and Miya Turnbull (left) will perform Ladder at Bus Stop Theatre in Halifax on June 28 and 29. Photo credit: Annaka Gale.
Butoh is a Japanese interpretative dance born in the 60s, an avant-garde movement reacting to Western dance styles becoming dominant in Japan after the war. The dance style emphasizes the connection between the body and the subconscious to explore the human condition. Performers strip themselves of their identity, gender, nationality, and age to imagine themselves as an empty vessel for a deeper and introspective exploration of the inner self. Dancers often paint themselves white as another way to separate from their identity.
“In butoh dance, we think this body is an empty bag or an empty container. It means I try to remove my name, nationality, gender, age, and societal position to think [my body] is just an empty bag. It is a rethinking, of what is human beings. Usually, our movement and our attitude are regulated by our culture [and surroundings],” explains Agatsuma.
“We try to remove this kind of influence. So I think this is just an empty bag, I’m not Emiko anymore. Thinking like this our body and our mind become totally free.”
During Agatsuma’s visit to Halifax, she has been offering butoh workshops open to people of all skill levels and experiences interested in learning about the dance. The response to the workshops has been very positive, bringing out participants from Halifax and the surrounding areas. Some participants have dance and theatre backgrounds, but many are just curious about learning about a completely new dance form and the movement and philosophy behind it.
“I’m happy that mostly they are not professional dancers, but they don’t hesitate to move their bodies and express their feelings and emotions in front of the people. I really am proud of them,” says Agatsuma.
A still image of Miya Turnbull and Emiko Agatsuma in Ladder. Photo credit: Annaka Gale.
Through exercises and practices, Agatsuma encourages participants to become empty vessels and connect to their inner selves. Participants have responded particularly well to emotion exercises, where they are encouraged to react to different situations and scenarios with increasingly exaggerated emotions. Participants act out emotions without the limitations of everyday life. In everyday life, we are told to mask our emotions—don’t cry in public, express your anger, or laugh too loudly, says Agatsuma.
“You can make a grotesque face, and it doesn’t matter because it’s not you. It just helps you remove a lot of that self-consciousness. When done successfully, it’s so striking, and I want to get to that point where I can let go of a lot of worries about my body or how I look and just really try to use movement as another tool for creating. I find it really inspiring,” adds Turnbull.
Turnbull has also been participating in the workshops, which she has found inspiring for her mask-making process. Following even her first lesson with Agatsuma, she felt inspired to create new masks, emotive with big expressive features. Some of these masks are now featured and used in the upcoming performance.
In the performance, Turnbull and Agatsuma explore themes of cultural identity, immigration, and generation differences through the history of Japanese Canadians. The piece aims to shed light on the often-overlooked history of Japanese Canadians.
The creative process was also an opportunity to share and teach each other about their cultures and backgrounds and promote cross-cultural understanding, respect, and collaboration.
While Agatsuma has taught Turnbull about butoh, movement, and Japanese culture, Turnbull has also taught Agatsuma about Japanese Canadian history. Starting with a family history book written by Turnbull’s mother, she has been sharing stories about her family’s experiences immigrating to Canada, wartime displacement and internment, and rebuilding their lives after the war.
Miya Turnbull and Emiko Agatsuma pose with masks of Miya’s face. Photo courtesy of the artists.
While exploring themes of cultural identity and immigration rooted in Turnbull’s family history, the performance is quite abstract, and leaves room for audiences to make their own interpretations, connections, and conclusions, says Agatsuma.
“Of course, we have a story when we dance, but the audience also creates new stories by watching the performance…We don’t have only one answer. We only have the point of the performance, so we have different visions and different ideas about how we watch, how we feel,” says Agatsuma.
For audiences that may be experiencing butoh for the first time, Agatsuma encourages them to not be scared but to let go and enjoy. The performance can be surreal at times, like watching someone else’s dream, she says.
“I hope we can create like a really kind of surreal experience for them and they just turn off and if they imagine this face is real, like how bizarre and unusual. It’s really magical. I hope [we can] kind of sweep them away,” adds Turnbull.
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Emiko Agatsuma and Miya Turnbull will perform Ladder at Bus Stop Theatre in Halifax on June 28 and 29. For tickets and more information, visit www.agaxart.com/ladder.
