the loneliness of the lonely performer
10 june
Few days ago, a japanese fencing friend gave a demonstration to our group. He is preparing for a coming exam, which will be that, a demonstration. In Iaido, the form of fencing I practice, one performs on its own, to be evaluated by more experienced practitioners. So he gave one to us. Talking about it later, the person I was hearing told me “that performance was the highlight of my day. This guy created a whole scenario by being there, I could even see drops of rain falling in his tired head, I could see how he gave himself up to us, and I could see how he thought he failed, knowingly and yet proudly”
I have not asked the performer what was he trying to give us, and anyhow an evaluation as I heard and the performance that we saw are well beyond my own capacities. But the whole episode made me realize once again that Iaido is, also, a form of performance. And we don’t perform to ourselves, do we now?
This last thing has been made harshly evident by this time of living under an ongoing pandemic. Our practices have been cancelled, since they do imply groups of people coming together and us beginners learning from the more advanced. All came to a stop in the winter of 2019-2020, had a rebirth for a little while in the past summer, and were cancelled again in the fall, under the second COVID19 wave. Past tuesday was the first true class, and we will see how it goes, meanwhile the percentages of vaccinated people increase. All the same, my group leaders invented different things to keep us in contact and practicing. Zoom lessons, online quiz and drink events, zoom Q&A from experienced teachers, and past year even a a planking challenge, where we posted short videos of ourselves improving our core muscles in increasingly longer, difficult and sillier planking exercises. Right now we are busy with “The one million suburi challenge”
From wikipedia I learned that suburi means naked cut in japanese. Iaido performances are predefined sets of cuts that are made in response to a previously defined, and imagined, attack. So cutting is a skill that an Iaidoka needs to have. Just like in that silly old movie, the karate kid, one might practice at least some Iaido by repeatingly doing cuts on our own, i.e. doing suburi. Just like Ralph Machio endlessly cleaning those windshields, we cut the air with our swords, hoping that when performing the whole sequence we will have improved, at least some. The one million suburi challenge is about doing some suburi on your own, and register the number in a online community counter, up to the moment that we all together have done a full million.
Improving I have. Or so I thought.
The thing with me is that it is not so difficult to do suburi at home. I am my own boss, so I have time. I have a garden, so I have space. My family already know my silly ways, so they stay out of the reach of my sword when I get to the garden. And now is summer so I can use the garden, instead of destroying my wife beloved lamps in the living room (a sad episode of my budo career best left forgotten). So suburi’s I have done, and improvement I have experienced. Till practice together started again, that is.
All these great cuts that I manage to perform at home, for myself, I can’t reproduce at the shared practice.
And so I realize, once again, that Iaido is a performance art. Because in the practice, I am performing indeed, and I can’t get out of it, or in it, depending how you see it. My mind, peaceful and stable meanwhile at my garden, is talking all sorts of nonsense when in the lesson. “look, they are looking at you” “hey, how can you do such bad turn, what will the person at the right think?” “wow, this person at the left, wow… he can really cut, can’t he?” and so on and so on, ad nausea. I can’t get my chill and my concentration back.
And I guess that this is, after all, why I like it. Because this whole Iaido thing is not some form of onanistic self satisfaction by repeated movement. It is the learning, the hard learning, of regaining a quantum of solace under the sight of your fellows, and still be able to tell them something, and to learn something from them. It is difficult, it is very difficult for me. And so I love it, and so I will go on doing suburi.
Who knows, maybe some day I will be able to tell others something by performing. Not quite yet, though.