Oliver and New Year plans....

So we're off to Yamagata. Oliver's persuaded me. Oliver is my partner in new-year travelling. He is an English grad from St Anne's and every inch of it. He wears ties in causual settings. He wears t-shirts with blazers. When he was young "actors and dancers were in and out of my house every day" He sticks up for Morris Dancing (most of it is shit, but I'm telling you there's powerful stuff out there, that would make people shut up) Actually I remember one of our first conversations...

"Have you heard of Butoh?" Ollie asks.
"No, what's that?" I reply.
"It's a Japanese dance."
"Odori?" The normal word for dance. Then, after consulting electronic dictionary, "Hanemawaru"? Some Japanese girls who are also with us, admittedly of the rather brain-dead variety, have not heard of it either. "What's it like then?" I ask.
"Well ... it's very avant-garde."
[?]
"Very dark. Very powerful. I don' t know very much about it, but it was very avant garde in the 60s."
"Is there music?" beginning my search for concrete adjectives, "is is happy? Is it sad? Are there words? What happens? ..."
Ollie looks at me as if to say you don't quite get it.
"Maybe it's like Kabuki or No?" I ask, both well known famous traditional Japanese theatrical pieces, both of which I've mangaged to avoid since coming here.
"Often it's performed without clothes," Ollie concedes - which to me is a crucial piece of information. This is where I would have started in my description. If you saw a group of people dancing naked, I'd say most people would make note of this fact first. "Fuck! They're naked!", something like that. In fact, one'd probably notice the fact they were naked, before noticing (if at all) that they were dancing.
"Oh! So it's naked dancing."
I can see from the expression on Ollie's face that I'm getting excited about the wrong aspect of this particular art-form.
"It's not about them being naked. ... It's very elemental, and wild. And very dramatic."
"And they're naked? They are sans-clothes-?" I thought this dash of French suitably metropolitan.
Ollie groans. "The lack of clothes is ...."
"It's about getting to see some tits?"
I could have continued in this vein. Like one of the quick-to-josh plumbers or hair-dressers I live in fear of engaging in conversation with: Oh naked dancing! I know that kind of dance, me ol' mate. Down the club. As long as they have a nice pair, and I ain't talking about her shoes either, heh-heh-heh - and so on, and so on, in class stereo-typing fashion.

I should confess that, after watching a few videos I was pretty shocked/moved/impressed (in that it made an impression on me) so anyway if you want to get a eye-full, check it out here.

Having conceded all that. It is weird. Here are some lines of poetry from the Su-en Butoh dance company.

self-cannibalism and beauty at the same time
where the biting into the flesh
is an act of love
an act of life

So that's Ollie. Or it's not. You can't take a friend and categorize them, like in Guess Who. Ollie is not a type, anything but. However, as most of you don't know him, you need something to go on. And there it is. If you know that Oliver is an arty type who gets naked on weekends with Japanese people to dance in a very avant-garde way, you have a starting point.

Anyway I'm quite sure Ollie would not mind the adjective "weird", though he might opt for interesting. With Ollie, a lot of things seem to come down to "interesting". And indeed our New Year Plan's are definitely that (we hope).

We're off to Yamagata. It's northern, bleak, and full of snow. There one can find a mountain so special and unique that anyone who goes there is sworn to secrecy about what they've seen there.

I reckon that's a pretty good ploy for somewhere cold, bleak and full of snow. They should try that with various English Crap Towns (not that we have snow - snow's interesting in England). Somewhere bleak like Wolverhampton, or Milton Keynes. Imagine that... Following the trail of the M25 towards the roof of the world, I reached a small town consisting of nothing but roundabouts and out of town shopping centres. Making my way through the dark B&Q car-park I reached the central and final roundabout. In the centre I found - no you have to go there and see for yourself. £50 day trip from Kings Cross.

Anyway around there, or somewhere near there is also the site of New Year festival that happens - well, every year. Apparently ascetic monks braving the snows make a 30 day pilgrimage from mountain to mountain arriving on New Years Day (at presumably another mountain) to drink hot sake, dance like ravens (and with fire involved somehow) and argue about whose village is better until dawn.

After that who knows? Ollie wanted us to go to some island as well. Its meant to be really bleak and reflective of the Japanese esthetic of wilderness. Apparently a percussion band used it as a retreat, drummed for 10 years together, reached cosmic levels of excellence and emerged back into the world, only to become instantly recognised as genius and became world famous. Like most cultural things Ollie mentions I've never heard of them. Anyway, I managed to convince him that staying somewhere really bleak, cold and which makes people want to hit things - might not be the best use of a two week trip.

My instincts are more basic. Warm, dry, bed, steak, beer...- things that are Interesting, like someone famous once wrote, ate, topped himself here, follow after these other things. My hierarchy of need is very hierarchical, if you will. I don't care that this is where Genji lost his tail, or that these monks walk five miles every day on their knees, if I can't eat something tasty and go to bed somewhere warm at the end of it. However, I know that this homeboy needs moving out of his comfort zone sometimes, and so maybe that's why I've headed off to this bizarre destination with Ollie. I'm a limpit and he's the Dawn-Treder; or, I'm Dr Watson, and he's Sherlock Holmes; but then both of those make me kind of lame. I was reaching for something cooler - maybe Sam and Frodo. Who knows? Anyway, off I go.