Hiroshima Dance Company
1984 New York City visit ...
Hideo Kimura survived from within six miles from the epicenter of the Hiroshima blast on August 6, 1945. As it was for all the other survivors from that ghastly event he had a life long concern over possibly developing cancer down the road.
He was a client of mine. He and his dance company came to New York City for performances. It was 1984 and I was in the early years of my practice. A dancer client recommended me to them for Rolfing® sessions; for Kimura San and some of the dancers in the troupe.
Kimura San spoke no English. We communicated through his secretary, and by gestures. The nature of Rolf Structural Integration is tactile. The client gets the main message through the sense of received touch. From my own personal experience I would share that the tactile manipulation feels ... right. Right, sensed from a deep knowing place. [Unlike a lot of other therapeutic methods where you are passive to the process and wonder if anything is happening.]
Kimura San did well with the work. Strong and centered like a true Buddha. I remarked that after his Rolfing series he "looked more Japanese." Sounds glib, but it was so from my seeing. Japanese, in the sense of embodying the best of his ancestral nature: deeply serene, strong, centered, effective, present.
I also vividly recall working with one of his staff and seeing a deep powerful inscrutable face. A "persona" not unlike a Kabuki character. Awesome. Warriorlike.
His lead dancer was also a client. After they had traveled back to Japan I received a letter from her saying she wanted to come and visit New York for more sessions with me. Something about having a "strong spiritual connection." While I was flattered and impressed that she thought so much of the work — and me — I realized I had a larger responsibility in that situation. Truth is I ain't got anything that anyone needs, much less travelling half way around the world for. So I gently suggesting she see someone local, and left the other business take care of itself. Whew!
Today August 6, 2020 marks the anniversary of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. in 1945. I've had this idea for a post in draft for a while. Hope this brings things up to speed.
From the New York Times May 25, 1984 ...
HIROSHIMA BALLET COMES TO HUNTER
By Clyde Haberman
TOKYO In 1952, on a stage in Hiroshima, a Japanese dance troupe performed a new ballet based on a blunt antinuclear theme. The message was not unusual, certainly, in the first city to have an atomic bomb dropped on it. But the dance company was hardly typical. Everyone - the dancers, the producer, the choreographer, the arranger - had survived the blast that destroyed Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. By 1952, some were dying from the aftereffects, even if they did not know it.
The dance, ''No More Hiroshimas - A Lone Star Shining,'' was performed 11 times in Japan through the mid-1950's and was then quietly retired. The performers wished to get on with their lives. Besides, like many other Hiroshima survivors, they no longer cared for steady reminders of what they had gone through.
But in the nuclear-conscious 1980's, ''No More Hiroshimas'' has found new life. After 27 years on the shelf, it was performed once last year in Hiroshima, and now it is leaving Japan for the first time, for four performances this weekend - tonight through Sunday - at the Hunter College Playhouse in Manhattan. Many of the original Hiroshima dancers are dead. But some of their children have banded together to perform in New York, joined by four men and women from the 1952 production. Any profits from the four performances at Hunter will go to the United Nations World Disarmament Campaign.
'Shadowed by Prosperity'
''I think it's important to raise nuclear awareness, especially among young people,'' the producer, Hideo Kimura, said, explaining the ballet's revival. ''In Japan, the attention paid to the nuclear crisis is low, shadowed by the prosperity we have these days.'' Referring to Hiroshima's baseball team, he added, ''People probably pay more attention to the Carp.''
How the ballet will be received in New York is a question, Mr. Kimura acknowledged; not even many Japanese have had an opportunity to see it. But after last year's performance, the reviewer for Ballet and Dance, a small Japanese magazine, wrote: ''The full-house audience, including foreign tourists who had been to the atom-bomb museum, did not move long after the fall of the curtain. Some of them were in tears.''
The dance is set in Hiroshima 10 years after the war, but it contains a 15-minute flashback to the events of that clear Aug. 6 morning that suddenly turned to fury. How vividly Mr. Kimura should show the bomb's immediate effects was a problem, he said.
Originally, the segment dealing with the explosion was longer and more graphic. ''After the first performance, people asked me to make it more 'artistic,' less detailed,'' said Mr. Kimura, who was 29 years old when the blast occurred, about half a mile from the room in which he was sitting. ''I also thought maybe it was too cruel. I hurt myself too much showing the effects.''
Project for the Family
For the producer, ''No More Hiroshimas'' has been a family project. His wife, Sumiko Furutsuki, and her sister Mineko did the choreography in 1952. Mineko died from bomb-related illnesses in 1970, and Miss Furutsuki last year. Now Mr. Kimura's daughter, Kimiko Furutsuki, who has adopted her mother's family name for professional purposes, is responsible for the dance arrangements.
Mr. Kimura wrote the basic story, he said, in the late 1940's. It came to him during one of his frequent meditations at the so-called Atomic Bomb Dome, a gutted building capped by a circular shell, which is the only structure from 1945 still standing in central Hiroshima. However, he could not translate his idea to the stage until 1952 because of restrictions placed on material of that sort during the United States occupation of Japan.
After 1956, Mr. Kimura retired his ballet and turned his attention to forming the International Artists Center, a Tokyo-based company that promotes cultural exchanges with other countries.
The death of Mr. Kimura's wife last year triggered his desire to revive ''No More Hiroshimas,'' but actually, he said, he had already begun to consider it. ''The relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States has been getting worse and worse,'' he said. ''I felt the earth was in a sorry state, just as in the cold war days when I staged the ballet the first time. So I started thinking about doing it again.''
'Not Quite Strong Enough' His main problem, the producer said, was that the new dancers, lacking the experiences of their parents, ''did not seem quite strong enough'' in their performance. So he took them to Hiroshima's Peace Museum, showing them the photographs of the nuclear disaster and emphasizing little details, such as the way the victims walked on Aug. 6 with their arms stretched out in front because of the pain.
''For the younger generation,'' Mr. Kimura said, ''the fate that is theirs from Hiroshima may be good. Because without that tension they will - as I said - just enjoy the Carp, just lead the easy life.''
Performances at the Hunter College Playhouse, Lexington Avenue and 68th Street, are tonight at 8; tomorrow at 2 and 8 P.M., and Sunday at 2. Tickets are $10 to $30; to charge, 724-9500. Information: 581-3644 or 333- 5096.
[A version of this article appears in print on May 25, 1984, Section C, Page 3 of the National edition with the headline: HIROSHIMA BALLET COMES TO HUNTER.]
Also from the New York Times May 27, 1984 ...
DANCE: HIROSHIMA STORY
By Jennifer Dunning
A young Hiroshima Maiden's scarred face drives other young people away. A woman plays sadly with her little daughter, years after the bombing. Death is still in the air and she dies suddenly from ''the atomic bomb disease,'' as program notes put it, her desperate child clawing at her body.
They are the sister and niece, respectively, of the Hiroshima Maiden, who recalls the cataclysm in frightening detail. She then returns to the one structure left standing after the bomb, in reconstructed Hiroshima. And the dead rise up to pray with her for peace.
''No More Hiroshimas'' is a dance-drama of childlike simplicity, written by Hideo Kimura and set to music by Shigeo Tohno, which was played by the orchestra of the Manhattan School of Music, conducted by John Miner. The dance is rudimentary and the music rhetorical. The acting, however, has great dignity, particularly that of the little girl and her mother, unidentified in the program, and of Kimiko Furutsuki, artistic director of the company, who played the Hiroshima Maiden.
Based on the story of Mr. Kimura's wife and sister-in-law, who helped to create the work before dying of bombrelated illnesses, ''No More Hiroshimas'' is moving despite--or possibly because of--its innocence as art and propaganda. The women were also mother and aunt to Miss Furutsuki, a survivor of the bombing who played the child in the original 1952 production in Japan. Many others in the cast are first- and second-generation survivors. And the company's tour, its American debut, is financed by the Hiroshima Citizens Committee and the dancers themselves, with proceeds to go to the United Nations Disarmament Campaign.
The message of ''No More Hiroshimas'' is simply that atomic warfare is a very real part of the performers' history--and our own. But they perform with hope. ''My city! Rise up green again,'' are the words of a poem by Atsuo Ohki that was projected on the auditorium wall during the performance. ''If you must sow crops in sadness, then harvest fruits in hope.''
[A version of this article appears in print on May 27, 1984, Section 1, Page 62 of the National edition with the headline: DANCE: HIROSHIMA STORY.]
The term Rolfing® is a service mark of the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute [originally, the Rolf Institute of Structural Integration].
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