We were a ragtag bunch at the KyoRyuKan theatre in the year 2000, all washed up there for different reasons. One man had been a master kimono maker before his building burned down and he lost everything, including all of his precious silks. Another man arrived promptly at nine every morning to ride out the work day – he had lost his job and wasn’t ready to tell his family. The Butoh teacher was an outlier in her post-Hiroshima dance discipline. While Butoh hard-liners stripped naked and painted themselves white, pulling grotesque faces of agony, she preferred to prowl beautifully like a cat.
But the reason we were all there was Peter Golightly. Arrived in Japan a decade previously, the American had picked up polio in India but recovered unexpectedly and decided to become a dancer and generalized entertainer. What he lacked in elite training he made up in enthusiasm. The same amateur passion inspired the community he led, and this was liberating for me, who had neither experience nor aptitude for anything artistic.
“If, for example, I say that ‘the train arrives here at 7 o’clock,’ that means, more or less, ‘the pointing of the small hand of my clock to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events.'” –Albert Einstein
