© Hans Rinderknecht Photographs of the Kobe rehearsals 'Seven Days from Several Months at the Mariinsky' In 2003 Kenneth Archer and Millicent Hodson kept a diary for Ballet.co during their staging of The Rite of Spring with the Kirov in St Petersburg. A wonderful companion piece to this one. From 2002 Millicent Hodson Interview Rite of Spring reviews

In coach of a 747 traversing a far-east Russian peninsula one Sunday in mid October this year, I found myself trying to explain in my fairly rudimentary Japanese how I came to be spending a month in Kobe to the middle-aged Japanese couple sitting next to me. This was not easy: my year of education in the language has been intense, but certain technical words—choreography, assistant, reconstruction—had not been in the curriculum; and they did not know Nijinsky’s name, if I even had the Japanese pronunciation right. So I said ‘bale-e,’ and they nodded with recognition, if with a look of surprise. In their probable dance naiveté my fellow travelers likely imagined me frolicking in tights, or perhaps on point, and they required no more explanation. This, I reflected, gave them something of an edge over me. Looking out the window at the world’s sunset halo over the mountains of Hokkaido, I began to realize how little a clue I had of what I had gotten myself into.

You should know that my story and I are atypical in almost every respect. Asked by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, reconstructors of Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring from the riot-inducing Ballets Russes premier of 1913, I joined them in Kobe as a rehearsal assistant and dancer for the latest production of the piece: an opening ballet gala for Hyogo prefecture’s brilliant new Performing Arts Center.

However, I had never before performed—nor seen live—the piece. I have not studied ballet history, and barely know the names of choreographers or pieces or famous schools. I am in no dance company, prestigious or otherwise. I hardly know ballet—I took my first ballet barre class in August of 2005, about four months ago as I write this. No: I am a 3rd year undergraduate physics major on leave from Princeton University, a student of math and Japanese; an actor during high school, slowly turned modern dancer from a background of group stage movement, Pilobolus style partnering, yoga, capoeira, acrobatic play, free running, and now two spotty years of Princeton’s excellent contemporary dance department. Having taken a year off from Princeton to travel to Japan and take part in the Kobe Sacre project, I now consider myself a dancer as well.

Surprised? Confused? Me too. I met Millicent during Princeton’s production of Prokofiev’s Le Pas d’Acier, based on the 1925 designs and scenario of Georgi Yakoulov, during the spring of 2005. I danced in the project, revitalizing my body after a semester without dance (but with multivariable calculus). Millicent Hodson had been brought in as a choreographer, given her expertise in the period and persons of the Ballets Russes, for whom the dance had been originally intended. My interest in Japan came up several times during conversations with her: drawing kanji with her brush pen, or leaving rehearsal early for a Japanese exam. So on her last day in class, when she mentioned she would be in Kobe for a week in July to audition dancers for the Sacre project, I responded that I was going to Japan in the summer to live with a host family and study at an intensive language program. In that case, said Millicent, a spark in her eyes, why don’t you come down and audition for the ballet? Aha, said I, playing along, well, yes, why not? A week after she had left for London, I received a copy of a fax recommending me as a dancer to Nobuhito Furuya, project manager at the new Center.

The Hyogo Performing Arts Center

Thus I found myself on a bullet train heading south towards Kobe during a short break in my summer language program, the first week of July. Armed with directions and a rice ball, I found my way to the still-under-construction, fresh and new Performing Arts Center, where I met Nobuhito Furuya-san for the first time. Fluent in three languages at least, and described laughingly by our translator Sachi as a “professional worrier,” I knew Nobuhito from the subtly crafted e-mails I had received during May, sounding me out and selling my position to the trustees. His round, carefully smiling face at once welcomed and tested me. I believe I saw relief sink into his expression after that first conversation, as he became convinced that my inclusion might not have been a mistake after all. Not that he ever stopped worrying, not until the final curtain dropped on the final performance. The success or failure of the whole gala hinged largely on his ability to organize from the first planning three years ago, and my involvement was not the greatest difficulty by a long shot.

According to Nobuhito, in the Kobe region ballet had become jealously divided between schools: a feudal system, as Millicent described it, in which schools own their dancers’ loyalty and guard against infringements on their territory. In such an atmosphere the presence of a grand but neutral performance space could easily have been a nonevent: for how could the Center audition its own company in such an atmosphere, or even open itself for use by the competing schools? Add to the picture a music director and board of trustees not particularly interested in dance, and the new stage seemed set for a tragic dancing anticlimax. However, Nobuhito felt compelled to fight for the fledgling dance program. One of the few conversations I wheedled out of his busy schedule revealed that his devotion to the project originated with Kenji Usui, The Sage in our production.

Kenji Usui-sensei—collector, teacher, historian, and instigator of ballet projects in Japan, a man whose great energy belies his age, and professional friend for many years of Millicent and Kenneth—would require a full article to do his story and works justice, and I know only the least of it. I know that he was a force behind the creation of the new Performing Arts Center, and behind the presence of ballet performances in its glorious, triple-tiered mahogany-and-eucalyptus Large Hall. His selection determined the pieces to be performed in the opening Gala, and on his proposal Millicent and Kenneth were brought to stage Sacre for that concert. His love of ballet is tangible, and I imagine Nobuhito using that love as his inspiration, and dedicating himself to Kenji’s dream of invigorating ballet in the Land of the Rising Sun.

I will never know how Nobuhito and his staff managed to pull the disparate performers from their post-Shogunate turf wars, bring in the production team from England, Finland, America, Rumania, and Russia, hire the necessary translators, and get it all approved by the trustees, but he did. If Kenji was looking for someone who could navigate the intricacies of Japanese business and politics to carry the development of the dance world at this wonderful new theater into the future, he could have found no one more apt than Nobuhito Furuya-san. Nobuhito called the production a string of miracles in his final speech, and claimed in typical Japanese self-effacement that he was a failure in general and the project succeeded in spite of him. If, as he wished out loud in that speech, he learns from this experience to better produce dance performances, then I believe the Hyogo region dance scene will be in excellent hands for a long time to come.

Roles in Nijinsky’s Rite

For those of you unfamiliar with Nijinsky’s version of Le Sacre du Printemps, I will give a brief sketch of the characters and scenario. The rite of the title is carried out by an ancient Russian tribe to prepare the earth for spring after the long hard winter in the Russian north. Wearing brightly colored, intricate costumes painstakingly recreated by Kenneth from the designs of Nicholas Roerich, the tribe contains an assortment of groups: males are divided into bearded Young Men, aggressive Young People and bare-faced Youths as well as Elders; females are divided into noble Mauves, proper Blues and flirtatious Reds. Nijinsky seems to have represented Slavic antiquity through an inversion of classical ballet technique. Turned-in feet, clawed hands and slanted backs shape the neutral pose, while the ballet’s movement is universally weighted. Besides the small but central roles of the 300-Year-Old-Woman and the Sage, there are no soloists in act one, if one excepts the explosive culmination of the first act ceremonies in which all forty-four characters on stage dance solos simultaneously. However in act two, one of thirteen maidens is selected by fate, and this Chosen One dances herself to death in an exhausting ritualistic solo performed under the eyes of grey-bearded ancestors and bearskin-covered ancients. After Nijinsky’s solo, which contains over one hundred jumps, some of which are quite impossible to perform correctly, as well as severe spinning, flailing, and trembling, her death is quite realistic.

I had met some of the dancers at the July auditions and rehearsals, but in October most of the cast was new to me. I was originally cast as one of the pointy-hatted and animal-skinned Young People; I learned their movement for half of act one, and so knew my four comrade Young People already. But during our last late-night choreography session that summer week, in an out-of-the-way corner of the hotel lobby’s balcony, I displayed to Millicent and Kenneth my heretofore unknown ability of flinging myself into a flying break-fall and landing without too much damage. This fragment of acrobatics bought me a one-way ticket to recasting as a Youth; for they perform just such a display of recklessness amidst the 44 concurrent solos. So after one October night back in Japan, jet lagged and struggling to remember the Japanese I had crammed over the summer, we went in to pick up teaching where we had left off in July. I started my rehearsal assistantship as a student: trying to catch up as a dancer with the five other Youths, and struggling to get to know them and the rest of the cast.

The Japanese Dancers

Physically, our dancers defied some of my presumptions about Japanese people: for instance, though I stood a head taller than both my host-parents over the summer, I was on the short end of the male dancers in the company, some towering far over me. This may be the result of taller dancers succeeding better in ballet companies, but people on the street in Kobe also were surprisingly long-shanked. Socially, the dancers seemed to me more average Japanese: they sported the inevitable brown or orange highlights in their genetically jet-black hair, and cameras and camera-phones flashed out at the barest suggestion of a photo-op. The women made great efforts with their appearance, emerging after rehearsal metamorphosed from sweaty dancers to beautifully arrayed, elegant ladies. I was most impressed by several of the younger women’s determination, touching up their makeup during the lunch break between morning and afternoon rehearsals. The men and women seemed to relate well professionally but remarkably little socially. Almost never did I see a mixed gender table in the cantina, or groups of both sexes warming up together before a rehearsal. The dancers were all extremely dedicated to the performance: the much vaunted Japanese work ethic and commitment to the corporation came through across the board—perhaps most continuously in the guise of Hironori, the first Young Person I worked with, who haunted the studio for hours after the end of rehearsal going over material new and old, asking occasionally if his counts were right.

From my observation of the Japanese, their dedication towards physical ideals makes dance seem natural within the culture. The Shinto religion that pervades the country seems to have no central scripture or theology; everything is ritual, and one’s movement is part of a prayer. In traditional arts, perfection in movement is sought continually, from the sure practice of a Kendo fencing master to the infinitely meticulous craft of the Tea Ceremony. When learning sumie ink-painting, a room full of students tries to replicate exactly the work of their sensei, and the method is as important as the final result. It seemed to me that the classical ballet model, in which teachers pass a specific and historically developed structure and ideal down to students, could easily fit in Japan. Though I can comment only a little on the dancers’ ballet training, the high skill level these dancers had acquired was evident from their warm-ups and non-rehearsal-time work. The fact that we pulled excellent dancers from several schools in the region demonstrates the strength of classical ballet training in the area.

I was left to wonder about the dance scene beyond classical ballet in the Kobe region. With the exception of our soloist Motoko Hirayama, only one of the cast that I know of was a self-professed contemporary artist. Motoko, the first modern dancer ever to perform the role of Chosen One, comes from the Tokyo dance scene, and is a riveting, amazing mover: I could never help but watch her as she flowed like quicksilver through her private modern warm-ups/improvs. Her compositions, of which I unfortunately saw only a few, were dynamic and emotionally provocative, invoking a peculiarly Japanese mythic pathos. She has recently been invited to the Bolshoi Ballet to set one of her contemporary solos on Svetlana Zaharova, which Millicent noted as a first passing of material from Japan to Russia. If dancers and choreographers like Motoko Hirayama continue to be received and recognized for their talent, both at home and abroad, I hope and expect we will be hearing more about Japanese dance in the wider world soon.

Dancing over the Divide

The gap to overcome between the worlds of English-speaking directors and Japanese native dancers was more than lingual, though that was hard enough. The dancers initially wore large, paper nametags pinned to their bellies, their first names written in our alphabet for the sake of Millicent, Kenneth and me. We did our best to learn quickly, but keeping distinct Ruriko, Rumiko, and Yuriko was slippery business—or any of the sixty percent of the women whose names ended in -ko, for that matter. I needed three weeks to get the men straight, and even then the elder Hiro became Kuma-san for simplicity—Mr. Bear, after his second-act role. But I imagine all this was surreal for the Japanese dancers, for whom only family use the first name. My role, sometimes as dancer, sometimes as teacher, always as the paradoxical foreigner who speaks a little of their language, also made for an odd relationship with the dancers. But in Japan, where ninety nine percent of people are native Japanese, the many foreign connections and contributors for this ballet must have been strange. Perhaps all this international surrealism helped them to bond as a company despite their disparate origins.

I suspect they never entirely knew what to make of me as a dancer. Diving into rehearsals under a very tight schedule, my history was never explained fully, but my lack of even a tenth of the ballet training even the youngest of them had (Yayoi, 14, one of two girls dancing the Old Woman) was clear. When the guys got together for their daily after-rehearsal ballet stunts, pulling gigantic leaps and multiple tour-en-l’aires, I would work on my single bumbling pirouettes meekly before switching to capoeira and stretching in shame. Luckily my modern and very eclectic training proved plenty serviceable for most of the Sacre style: flat-footed stomping jumps, clawed hands, the peculiar hunch and inevitably forgotten, eternal turn-in. These elements of Nijinsky’s torturing brilliance became as much mine as any dancer in the cast. Or at least we all came to them with equal difficulty, for in the last week before the premier I received as much of an earful from Millicent’s choreographic assistant, Maki Nakagawa, for letting my turn-in drift as did the whole cast. Even her native Japanese patience came close to breaking that week.

The Dream Team

Millicent, Maki, one or more of our entourage of translators and I would meet daily in the lobby of our hotel at eight in the morning. I do not mean to diminish our translators by referring to them en masse; for they were each as talented, dedicated, and friendly as they were numerous. They considered their job to extend beyond the studio, to calculating the distribution of the tab at restaurants, navigating train networks, searching out and helping organize activities for our sparse days off; in general, taking care of Millicent and Kenneth (and to lesser degree, me) as much as possible. Maki was on leave from the Finnish National Ballet to come help with this project. She had danced the role of The Chosen One in the Finnish production to critical acclaim; rooted in that experience and natively Japanese, she showed herself to be an optimal choreographic assistant for this production. I first met her during the summer; a week after we all left Kobe in July she married Juha Kirjonen, a gigantic, guitar-strumming Finnish National Ballet soloist. But in Finland Maki had learned only her roles as a Maiden in Red and Sacrificial Victim, and I was a blank slate. It was Millicent’s task to teach us the material of the ballet, and its meaning, before any of us could begin to teach the dancers.

After our daily train ride (and morning coffee) we would arrive at the Nishinomiya station with just enough time to make our nine o’clock meeting with our ballet masters. Michiko-sensei officially held the role: a sharp, feisty woman, she would jump on a misstep like a cat on a wounded bird—she came closest of any Japanese person I’ve met to being blunt. But I say ‘ballet masters’ because we had two other sensei dancing in the cast: thin, jolly Toshiyuki-sensei (Toshi for short) in the first act performing a bearded elder, and the quiet and slightly mysterious Paul-sensei both as an Elder in the first act and as a bearskin-toting ancestor in the second. These two men also attended our daily morning meetings and worked directly with the dancers in teaching each day’s new material. Our meetings had the potential to get quite lively: even with translators the language gap from movement to English to Japanese to movement is a wide one, and on one memorable occasion, Millicent, in her explicative need, began demonstrating a partnering move on our translator-of-the-day Kimie while she continued to interpret. Usually the use of visual tools, such as manipulating Toshi-sensei’s many gifts of brightly wrapped chocolate as dancers on a white paper stage, would suffice.

On final count, Millicent had a grand total of ten people working directly with her on teaching the choreography of the ballet to the dancers. This was an unprecedented number: the tales she and Kenneth would tell on the train ride home or over dinner about other productions of the ballet in Italy or Russia or Finland rarely mentioned a ‘team’ beyond themselves and the ballet master. In particular their stories from the Kirov ballet described a distinctive sense of organization. In contrast to these well-established companies, the new Hyogo theater lacked a preexisting hierarchy, leaving a vacuum of artistic leadership that Millicent and Kenneth were challenged to fill. In reference to our production’s unique demands, Kenneth began calling our crew, along with Nobuhito and our maestro Christian Orosanu, the “Dream Team.”

To work as a member of such a group was both very energizing and humbling. Time on-the-job was intense and exciting: waving arms around and gesticulating wildly to learn tomorrow’s choreography at a local Starbucks, we would almost draw stares from a polite Japanese public. But once work lulled and the stories began to come out, I was floating in waters beyond my fathoming. A week into rehearsals I realized I could not begin to remember or relate all the fantastical tales I heard of Kenneth and Millicent’s life: jetting around the globe, living in rundown Parisian apartments and five-star hotels, working in ballets worldwide, studying martial arts who knows where. And when talking about dance in this group, untold assumptions about the ballet world, dancers and choreography flew over my head, bewildering me into silence and highlighting just how foreign a foreigner I was.

Improvising Rehearsal

But as rehearsals surged onwards, we never had too much extra time for storytelling. I discovered that my most useful role, also the one for which I was best suited, was as what Millicent called her ‘man on the inside.’ I helped to figure out and communicate in English what the dancers were confused about and what they needed from her. This was a job of being able to ask the right questions, and was usually straightforward since, as a performer, I needed the answers too. But holding auditions without an established company had required us to plan around the dancers’ other jobs and school, thus creating a situation where we had to work with who we had when we had them. Recognizing and filling in choreographic gaps for busy part-time performers could have been very trying, both for an overworked Millicent and her assistants outside and in. Luckily, the dancers showed themselves to be adept at keeping their absent fellows up to date, and the necessary re-teaching was not too painful.

Being involved primarily with the men, I usually had a day off Sundays; but on days when all dancers were present, if Millicent and Maki were busy working with the women, the men were sometimes left in my uncertain hands. Act one’s focus on the movements of the full group across the stage, and their interactions with each other, mostly required me to dance, keep my ears open, ask questions, and coach only a little. But in act two, the dances of the male ancestors and female maidens are almost entirely isolated. So in the sparseness of time a week before stage run-throughs, I was set the task, along with Michiko-sensei, of teaching and drilling the men on their ancestral dances.

As my ‘sensei’ role for the Japan Sacre developed, it achieved a quality similar to the experience of sprinting through crowded hallways in high school. One is forced to react without thinking about the situation: by time you stop for that millisecond conscious consideration of path, you have already collided with a large, angry senior. Rehearsals came in a barrage of instantaneous choreographic necessities impelled by the approaching deadlines. With the obstacles of a rotating core of available dancers, I was forced to enter rehearsal daily knowing only what little I had learned from Millicent the night before, and find a way to teach the new items to a crew of dancers with whom I shared but little common vocabulary. With diligence, insistence, a few lingual tricks, and luck, we were able to find ways to do this, though in retrospect I seem to have leapt over many barriers of age, experience, and culture. The difficulties could have been insurmountably daunting. And certainly all did not go smoothly: Michiko-sensei would often assume I understood her fully and instruct while I struggled to catch up; questions would be asked and asked again and a third time and sometimes I still did not understand. But nevertheless, it seems in the end our communications got across well enough. I earned my first ‘sensei’ two weeks into rehearsals from dancers far more experienced than me.

Physics and Nijinsky

At one point during act two, we needed to synchronize the rotation of two circles of seven people each; so I deconstructed the problem mathematically. I think it was at this point that I began to deeply appreciate Nijinsky’s choreographic brilliance. Though I botched the analysis at first, the problem bothered me, and revisiting it, I discovered something wondrous. Carried through Millicent and Kenneth’s long years of research and reconstruction there was an answer, a simple answer, a teachable answer. It was buried in the counts of the music and the number of dancers, such fundamental elements of the dance. If the number of dancers had been five, or eight, or any number but seven or a multiple of seven, the analysis would have resulted in a very ugly speed of rotation: no matter how many times the circle rotates, dancers would have to move fractions of places along the circle. Only with seven dancers do the fractions disappear and the rotations become elegant. I do not believe the result is luck or coincidence, but rather that it is a mark of how this choreography and this music were made for each other, a fossil of the original production buried in the numbers.

I know most of you are not mathematicians, but I hope you will trust my instincts as a physicist-dancer who rejoices at a beautiful answer, especially with unusual numbers. The choreography and score are filled with strange counts—Stravinsky seems to revel in fluidity of meters and beats, which Nijinsky compounded by creating several ridiculously difficult-to-remember moments in the choreography. The ancestors’ walking circle around the Chosen One during her solo is one of the hardest parts of the entire work due to its almost entirely patternless progression of counts. With the help of a pseudo-choral form Millicent and Kenneth had painstakingly deciphered for this ostinato, the Japanese men stolidly memorized the whole thing, in their practice during breaks and long after rehearsal ended. I commend them for this: it is far too tempting to write the whole on one’s hand for reference. Given more time, I would have liked to delve further into the intimate interplay of choreography and music with Millicent, and perhaps unearth a few more mathematical clues that I suspect lie below the surface. But for the moment it was performance, not research, that concerned us.

Life and Work in Kobe

Life outside of the theater came quite literally as a breath of fresh air, as on our rare days off I tended to roam the mountains north of the city. The city of Sannomiya, where our hotel stood overlooking the port, is a mile thick of intense shopping sandwiched between mountains to the north and the Pacific to the south. The late fall weather was beautiful, and though we stayed into November, the trees on the mountains had hardly begun to change. Despite the beauty of the surrounds and magnetism of the city, the ballet consumed us all: even in a chance meeting with Millicent and Kenneth wandering the portside park, questions of choreography and organization arose. On only one occasion were we able to mentally leave Sacre for an afternoon, when Maki, Millicent, three translators Nao, Keiko and Kimie, and I held a sunny picnic on Wind Hill overlooking the city. The rest of our five weeks in Kobe was devoted entirely to the dance.

That atmosphere of intense involvement pervaded the new Center—dancers stayed long hours after rehearsal had ended to study minutiae of choreography, the Center’s staff insisted on staying as long as we did, even if that were past one o’clock in the morning, as when I joined Kenneth and Millicent’s night vigils with the lighting designer. A tendency towards workaholism is well noted in cultural studies of Japan, but from the inside I better understood the drive: a real dedication to the unity of the greater project, an ability to overwhelm selfish considerations for the sake of contributing to something perceived as larger than oneself. One can see the miraculous effects on stage of strong people giving themselves to further the cause without needing to waste time and energy on showing themselves off.

A Spirit of New Life

As we neared the performance, the dancers disappeared behind Kenneth’s reconstructed shroud of scraggly beards and long braided wigs rented from the Finnish National Ballet. Despite Roerich’s bold geometric makeup and costumes dense with symbolism, I could recognize each dancer through the extreme depersonalization of the costuming. Over a month of rehearsals, chance encounters, brief conversations over stretching or convenient-store lunch in the plaza outside, I had begun to get to know a few of them; and they, more importantly, had bridged some of the feudal gaps between ballet schools. Pulled from all over the region, when the dancers donned Sacre garb they danced as if all were members of the same Russian tribe in ancient times—which linked us as a family here and now in Japan. After all, we did share a common language, despite differences in technique and vocabulary: Nijinsky’s dance itself.

Much has been written regarding the reconstructed Sacre, and as I have still never seen the piece live I will not add my critique, biased as it is by my unusual experience. The audience responded to our performance with great energy, shouting and clapping, after a long act of Swan Lake and several pas de deux. Nobuhito looked relaxed and even genuinely happy for the first time since I had met him: his miracle had come through. The dancers gave two performances, an unfortunately short run for all the work involved. Between beer and pictures at the after-closing party, Motoko gave an elegant speech, of which I caught only a little. I may never see some of you again, she said, or work with you for years. But The Rite of Spring is about new life beginning, and we have brought that spirit of newness here to this theater. The spirit will live on, as our collective spirit will live on here in this wonderful new cultural center. The ever-ready cameras stopped clicking for a few moments, before starting up again with the presentation of gifts to Millicent and Kenneth. The stage crew had already deconstructed the sets, the décor and costumes were being packed for shipping back to Finland. We said goodbye to the cast.

I am not one who feels the impact of a finished performance as soon as it is over, and so the dancers’ tears surprised me. But it was clear that our Sacre had left quite a mark not only on the Kobe dance scene, but also on the lives of the dancers who performed it. Yusuke-san, a Youth, continued asking Millicent questions about Nijinsky and his intentions even after the show was over. He seemed to take inspiration from the story of seclusion and exhaustion in the Chosen One’s solo, perhaps Nijinsky’s comment on the life of a soloist. Several dancers told us they viewed their involvement in Sacre as a turning point in their dancing lives, and that it made them re-envision the art of choreography itself. Ayako, the lone contemporary dancer in the ensemble, specifically asked, if Millicent should do Sacre in Japan again, that she could act as an assistant, and would work on her English in hope of such a chance.

It was on the cold train ride departing Nishinomiya the last night there that the magnitude of the endeavor caught up with me. The Hyogo Performing Arts Center is a miraculous place: its existence despite the crushing earthquake ten years ago, and the excellence and majesty of its halls astound me. An opening Gala with ballet classics like Swan Lake and soloists brought from overseas was grand and enjoyable. Performing Nijinsky’s jarring, symbolic The Rite of Spring in that concert was revolutionary. To do so with an all-Japanese cast created for that purpose was mind-boggling, and marvelous, and beautiful. The performance placed its blessing on the theater, saying: ballet is not old and foreign, but vibrant, and our own art. The Classics are not complete, and Japan can and will contribute. The Center may become a true locus for the dance world in Japan, bringing Hyogo’s dancers together and to the world stage. If so, we will have helped to herald a bright new dawn for dance in a land where movement itself can be holy. This is my hope.