Body Weather is a comprehensive performance training originated in Japan by Min Tanaka. Tanaka founded the Body Weather farm in the village Hakushu nearby Tokyo in 1985, a space dedicated to common land farming, communal living and dance creations. The bodies were trained by farming life, living practicalities and dance laboratories Tanaka was conducting in the form of workshops. In 2000 the farm workshop was closed for participants and since then the work has been further developed and circulated by members of Tanaka’s dance company Maijuku. The essence of Body Weather lies in the fact that it is not merely a systematic training method but an embodied philosophical approach, a life stance, a way of arriving to training, performance and daily life.
I have been practicing Body Weather since 2009 with Katerina Bakatsaki, Frank van de Ven, Hisako Horikawa and the rest of the community, and took part in the annual Body Weather research laboratory led by Frank and/or Katerina in Amsterdam in 2015 and 2016. The curiosity how to bring Body Weather back into agricultural context led me to embrace it as my own practice and method for my artistic work. I currently transmit, unfold and evolve this work in the frame of my own expanded performance practice and roaming teaching, usually as a response to an invitation for a residency, workshop, laboratory, creation or joining forces in grassroots movement projects and think alike research gatherings. Questions such as how to keep nourishing the intersection of training, making and performing, how to hold space for a physical practice that resists conditioning, hierarchization, formalisation, aestheticization, commodification, how to challenge the suspension of physical agency in order to enhance listening and learning from the place, are always present and reflected differently in every project.
The transmittance of this practice entails the entanglement of dance/somatic training, performance and composition. If Body Weather is the embodied philosophy of the bodywork, what can be the content of the artwork? I approach this difficult question by looking at choreography as the constructive practice of thirdness; an intersubjective mental and physical space, a joined horizon of mutual recognition and coexistence. Bodies treated as subjects that meet other subjects in game like scores designed to make space for dialogue. This kind of choreography makes unavoidably use of agreements, rules, patterns, landmarks and significants. On the other hand, dance is like a floating lightness than manifests in the body and has little to do with all the above. Body Weather has been an exact practice for me to be able to physically understand and disseminate such conception of weight.
St. Dennis urban farm, Zone Sensible, 2018, Paris, FR