I participated in Dance Hakushu Festival last summer in Hakushu, Japan. As I was reading some of the e-mail exchanges amongst the staff members, I ran into one of this year's participants' blog. He was someone I had known from almost 19 years ago in Japan. At that time, he and dance seemed inseparable. I firmly believed that he was going to dance until the end of his life. I myself was just starting to make a serious commitment to the 'act of dance' and 'performance' without thinking too much about motivation or meaning. I clearly remember the time he faced me and asked me this question in a serious manner: "why do you have to dance?" He told me how 'he could not live without dancing". Dance was a proof of his existence. I didn't understand what he had meant at that time. Now I'm slowly starting to understand it. When asked, "what do you dance for?" after one of his performances at PS 1 in November 2007, Min Tanaka answered, "first for myself, then for others, but I'm always in need of others's eyes." When I cast that same question onto myself, do I have an answer now? I dance to explore. What is possible? Where is the boundary? Limit? How does inside and outside co-exist? How does past, present, and future co-exist in my body, through my body? How can I disappear and exist at the same time? How can I transcend this body? What is self? How do you reach ego-less body? Can I go there or am I staying here?
Dance is a quest to find the answers to myself. Answers to my existence. My existence in relation to the universe. The existence of the universe. It is a way to investigate what it means to exist. For me, it is a way to examine what this whole thing means, not to prove it.
In the blog, this dancer mentioned that he hadn't danced for quite a while since his ways of proving his existence has been shifted to his other business. After calling this opportunity his 'last time to dance', he casts a question, 'I wonder what might happen if I dance now. Would this really become the last time or not?" I wonder if this occasion is going to become a trigger to shake and move his existence and if that's the case, I wonder if the reason for him to dance might now be to find himself, not to prove himself.