“For my new piece, No idea, no media, no construction, no movement, no form, no originality, no development, no taste, that’s what I thought.”
This is a quote from Suzushi Hanayagi, a choreographer whom avant garde creator Robert Wilson calls simply his ‘teacher’. Her movement is like a skeleton without flesh, a frame without color. There is no meaning but it is full of meaning, inviting you to bring into it your own interpretation. Nothing particular, it’s everything and nothing.
In “The Space in Back of You” directed by brilliant Richard Rutkowski, Mr. Wilson tries to find Suzushi, from whom he hasn’t heard in a while. In the journey of searching for her, he contacts her son who tells him that Suzushi is not so well; she is in an advanced state of Alzheimer’s disease, living in a nursing home in Osaka. Mr. Wilson sets out to Japan to find his teacher and collaborator.
Our consciousness is most likely focused on things in front of us, what’s ahead of us. Also, that’s how today’s society has been built. However, Suzushi was speaking about an idea of time and space construction that is shared by Mr. Wilson, “Feel the space in back of you, space in back of you is more important than space in front of you.” So, your consciousness becomes spherical, your movement becomes full of time, and you feel life moving through you.
COOL interviewed the director Richard Rutkowski to discuss “The Space in Back of You”
You were an assistant to Robert in the 1980s.Yeah, beginning in 1985.
How did that happen?I was cast as a cast member in “The CIVIL warS” at the American Repertory Theater. The casting was done in late-1984, which was also my freshman year at Harvard. Then in the spring of 1985, the play “CIVIL warS” opened at the American Repertory Theater. It ran for a couple of months, then it extended and ran for even longer. It was a big success in Boston at that time. We would rehearse at night because that was when there were no classes and the younger performers could be there. One of the evenings, Bob asked if someone could help him build and architectural model. So, someone with drafting skills and could build a model from foamcore, and I said I could. And gradually over time, I came to realize that it really wasn’t a model-maker that he wanted; he wanted an assistant, someone to be with him into the evenings to talk about things with and to review the day and to plan another project. For about three-and-a-half years I became his assistant both in Cambridge and, during the summers, in New York City. After that, we remained in touch and I wound up shooting video projects for him, including some of the Voom Portraits, these now famous, much-traveled, video HD portraits for Voom. I shot a lot of those, including the iconographic Brad Pitt image of Brad Pitt on the front of Vanity Fair. Then I got involved with this project when Bob asked if I would help him to make the video material for the tribute to Suzushi. And then, it also morphed into, “Could we make a short film for French television based on the work he was doing to make a piece about her?” And so we created the short film almost at the same time that I was creating the video materials for the projection at the Guggenheim.
You were working in theater, and you’ve worked with many well-known films. How did you get into film from theater?
I was in theater in Harvard, and I got into that thing with Bob. I met Suzushi because she came in 1986 to Cambridge, and she was helping with a project called “Alcestis”. That’s when I met her and it was wonderful, she was a really wonderful person. Of course, she was around Bob a lot in those days. They were starting to work together more intensely. But my specialty, as soon as I was out of school, became film. I started as an assistant cameraman, and then I became a cameraman.
You directed “KOOL: I’m Dancing in My Mind” in 2009. How did you get on board for “The Space in Back of You”? “The Space in Back of You” is essentially an extension of the short “KOOL: I’m Dancing in My Mind.” Both grew out of a stage tribute to Suzushi. So, the concept to do a piece at the Guggenheim that would be in tribute to Suzushi, using younger dancers, and using Carla Blank who had worked with Suzushi, as well as Bob, as well as a young choreographer named Jonah Bokaer, and they would recreate some of Suzushi’s work for the stage. That project for the stage was the genesis for the short film. The short film, once it turned out as well as it did, people really liked it and came to say that what we needed to do was make a longer film in which you could learn more about Suzushi, her life, her background, and the type of dances she’d done, and, quite frankly, why she was interesting and important. That was not fully possible to cover in the short film, so we made the longer film. I’ve been involved since day one. Since the first research day, I’ve been involved in crafting, collecting and archiving the video, and using it and creating the different multiple imagery that we put on screen, and the way it’s oriented. That was all my work.
Besides the two figures of Robert and Suzushi, the use of archival photos was very playful in the film. Could you talk about how you choose what to use from the archives and the quality of playfulness?
I was very thorough with the help of Carla Blank and Robert Wilson. We were able to research and thoroughly gather as many images as possible, and then, with the help of my associate producer Brandon Russell, we took each photo and maximized its beauty. We tried to fix it, make it look really good. And then we started to look at what things looked like next to each other. Not just one image onscreen, but sometimes next to each other, or in a rapid progression, or in a way that is evocative rather than just informative. That led to being playful with imagery. It also allowed us to move out of subjects and on to other subjects using music or soundscapes as a transition piece. It focuses the audience’s mind on the fact that she is a visual artist. As a dancer she challenged what you want to refer to as “dance.” Is this dance? Is that dance? Is a standard gesture dance? Is a person performing a classical dance really performing an old dance, or are they performing a new dance? She was quite specifically challenging of these easy concepts. So I wanted to do the same with imagery. I wanted imagery to have many functions, and not just be information; it could move you on the inside if it was handled correctly.
Could you talk about what you were aware of the most to tell the story about Robert and Suzushi in terms of the structure of the film? It’s really short, but has so much quality.I thought that it would not be good to make a straightforward documentary in the classic example of just interviews and old footage. I thought that it should be something a bit more creative and, if possible, it should talk about the fact that Suzushi is losing her memory. And that Bob too is a seventy year-old man; he’s becoming older. So you have this feeling of the arc of a long, creative relationship the two have had told in that way that when you grow older you think back. So we structured the film around cycles of thinking back on things. So you go forward into the present day and you see them rehearsing and preparing the project for the stage, then something, be it a visual cue, a sound cue, a theme, something someone talks about, sends you back in time again and you start to see the older images of her, the stills and archival video. It’s that circularity, that going back and forward in time and going back and forward in time from the present project to the past that, I think, brings a lot of her knowledge and what she has to give forward in the piece because, frankly, she can’t talk. We are unable to sit her down and have a straightforward interview. And people in Japan seemed reticent to talk about Suzushi as a friend or relative mostly because there’s a certain stigma to the feeling of “well, we’ve now put our mother, our sister, in a home.” There’s a certain stigma there that I couldn’t overcome. I couldn’t get people to speak candidly on tape. Even the Inoue Yachiyo V, who I think is very good on camera, is also very political and safe in what she has to say. She’s incredibly reserved in her commentary and does not reveal anything personal. She doesn’t speak from a personal or a candid place. She measures what she says. And I just thought if that was the way that was going to be, I was not going to be able to speak to Suzushi directly nor get the candid interviews about her in Japan, then I would structure what I knew about her out of quotes. And these quotes would come from articles about her, things she had written, letters she had written. So once you make those bigger decisions, once you know that you’re not going to proceed from just childhood to old age in a direct fashion, once you know you’re going to use the metaphor of memory loss to be part of what the film is about – it’s not just about a creative person, it’s also about the loss of a creative person and the loss of a collaboration and a partner – then the film started to solve itself.
Hans Peter Kuhn talks about the movement of Suzushi’s hands, then when the clip of Japanese people walking on the street shows, I thought the movement came out of what Suzushi learned but also what Japanese have already. You visited Japan to shoot the film. What kind of quality did you find in the country?
Well, I’ll be honest. My time in Japan was very short. I went with Bob and we spent maybe four days there. I was very impressed by Japan, but it was a bit of a whirlwind and we had a lot of work to do. Later my producer returned, and working with local crew, filmed the interview with Inoue Yachiyo V. I was not there for that because I was working on another project that I was filming. The overriding memory I have of Japan is that it is a very mechanized and industrial society which somehow seemingly also has a great appreciation for Nature. And I find that duality interesting. As people will tell you, the Japanese were unfailingly polite and welcoming. And as people will tell you it can be hard as a Westerner to understand what they are really thinking about you and wanting from you. We were very fortunate to be able to film in her care facility the way we were. And I was very happy to see Suzushi again. Those are my main memories. The black-and-white footage of people walking on the streets was something that Suzushi had created a dance with. It was filmed in the 1960s. What I liked about it was that she had a feeling, along with Carla Blank, that you would make everyday movement become the dance itself, that you didn’t need to have the skill of a ballerina, a jazz dancer, or a kabuki master to be able to make dance that could be moving, interesting, and even important, and that everyday movement could contribute. I thought the choreography that human beings naturally use to just get through a crowded street was equally interesting to watch than to watching her dance movements, and that the two were tied together. It also is helpful that it’s clearly a vintage street scene because we’re talking about her in the context of a history. It’s interesting to see Japan in the ‘60s; we see America in the ‘60s; we see Bob Wilson in the late-60s, early-70s; we see images of Suzushi throughout her life, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s. It was tying into a theme of circularity of time in the whole film.
It’s not easy to search for Suzushi online, and I think she is a choreographer who did not go to the frontline of choreography. What is your opinion about that?Well, if I may say, I think she’s from a generation of Japanese women for whom being in the spotlight was not always the most comfortable position. I think she also knew that she’d been trained in this classical family, and that her livelihood was somewhat based on her ability to continue to dance the traditional dances and teach traditional dances to students. So for her to have attempted to become a very big modern dancer, like a Trisha Brown or something like that, would have gone against something that was already inside her, which was to honor the tradition of her Japanese traditional dance. And I think with the collaboration with Bob Wilson she received a lot of acclaim and she received a lot of opportunities to work on a big scale. But she very interestingly enough always kept herself two steps behind Robert. It was very much the idea that the man comes first and that it’s his vision and that she’s supporting. I think the film reveals that it was a much closer collaboration than that, and that she was giving a lot as much as receiving a lot.
Suzushi was embracing the space in back of you. I believe that’s what we need in this society, which is always trying to keep the same structure; what’s in front of us is important. What is your opinion about that, or how do you think her philosophy applies to our lives everyday?
When we see footage of Inoue Yachiyo IV in her nineties teaching her granddaughter, she says the same thing as Suzushi does. This is an ancient way of looking at movement on a Japanese stage. And what’s interesting about it is the line that you draw as you move on the stage becomes a more continuous line if you don’t think of your movements discretely, but as one piece. Similarly, the space you create around yourself is not created solely from forward movement. You can also create space from aware, a simple mental awareness of what’s happening behind you. And it’s that push-pull, moving forward while creating more space behind, is more dynamic than simply saying “I’m moving forward.” These are basic things; these are things Martha Graham talked about and these are things that most dancers discover. But with Suzushi and her work, it’s so clear that she took this lesson so well in hand as to be able to do dynamic work in all formats. In any format she was in, in Café La Mama: simple, no fancy dress, nothing electronic, violin music; or in the National Theater in Tokyo with an orchestra, with all the pomp and circumstance of that; she creates the same movement and tempo around her. That’s why we sometimes put her onscreen twice: one side of the screen in a modern piece, and on the other, a more traditional piece. So that comparison can be viewed very directly. But Bob also understands that space around the person, space around the performer is created dynamically not just through movement but through stillness, and that you are architecturally shifting the stage as you move on it. So I don’t think that she would have considered this to be new information or new work. She was adopting a traditional learning and applying it to modern work, but it still remained a traditional knowledge. Of course, it’s a metaphor for time as well. We like to think motion as simply the kinetic movement of a human being on stage, but your also working with time because a movement can have various speeds. The change of speed when you go from doing something very quick to doing nothing. I love watching her dance because she will do something very fast and land very solidly on her feet and, for a moment, not move at all. It’s that not moving moment that actually grabs your attention, maybe more than when she was moving rapidly or doing something athletic. That’s an important part of the space in back of you, it’s time as well as space. And, of course, how perfect for Bob Wilson’s work. Bob works with those two elements more than any other director of the twentieth century.
There is a quote of Suzushi’s, “I would like to transcend myself.” What do you think it is?She was studying Zen Buddhism and that is a tenant of Zen Buddhism. To remove your ego from yourself and to just be, that’s the hardest achievement of a human being, so she was clearly working on herself spiritually. As regards to what we try to show in the film is that she often wanted to transcend the limitations of her own physicality. She sometimes covers her hands and feet and body totally in an almost shroud-like outfit so you can only see little parts of her sticking out. That’s a sort of self-negation in a way. She quite often is looking for the thing that makes it less her dance and the dance of everything she’s learned all in one. It’s not for her own glory or something that she is trying to “achieve,” it’s a realization of everything that’s been brought to her before and it’s in alignment with a framework that she enjoys. I don’t think it’s possible to separate her spiritual outlook on life from her outlook on her dance work. Also, as a person gets older, a lot of the work she was doing later in life was in response to the aging of the body and what the body can do. It’s proven when you see Inoue IV dance at 98 years, that you can still dance at that age, but you’ve refined your movements to the minimum. You’ve made them the most minimum poetic movements, first of all, because it’s been what you’ve been looking to achieve your whole life and, second of all, because it’s how you will still be able to perform. I find that very moving and very interesting, ultimately, to be what Suzushi was talking about in some of those quotes.
You said Suzushi was a wonderful person. What was she like when she was not performing?
When she was not performing she was quite often observing. She was a great listener and a great viewer of things. She always had something to contribute to a conversation about what she’d seen and what its importance was. She sort of collected her feelings, and instead of speaking off the top of her head, she would sift through the information and tell you something which was usually quite profound. She would have seen into something in a way that I wouldn’t have, but then again, I was quite young, she’s almost 40 years older than I am. She was up to date: she had seen Pina Bausch, she had seen the work at Judson Church, she had seen modern and traditional of multiple cultures so she had a lot to contribute in terms of her analysis of things. Bob appreciated that as well. Certainly she was an authority on dance from Japan and what she liked and didn’t like in it. What I remember especially about her personality was that she was quiet and diminutive, but when she came forward you felt that she was really something else. The type of person who didn’t have to own the room to impress you; she could be very quiet, very much in the background and then would come on and impress you thereafter with how, from nowhere, she came with sometimes the most interesting thing to say or would show you something that you’d never seen.
You’ve worked with a lot of acclaimed filmmakers and you’ve directed documentary films. Could you talk about your passion as an artist?Oh, thanks, I just like making films. I especially enjoyed making this about two people who were meaningful to me and gave me good guidance early on. It was very special to contribute to something, especially since Bob and Suzushi grow older and there will be a time when we don’t get to see them onstage. Already we can no longer see Suzushi perform onstage; there will be a time when Bob’s ability to perform on stage will not be there anymore. I’m just very happy to be able to work with them both and create something meaningful that also talks about this dynamic passing from a vibrancy in life to legacy. I don’t view documentary and narrative filmmaking so differently. In narrative filmmaking you are often documenting a performance, you’re still a filmmaker looking for something with your eye and finding it and exploiting it. It just happens also to be something that an actor learned to do and you’re going to record how well the actor does that or what’s interesting about the way the actor’s doing that. It’s similar to making a documentary, where you have to look around, see what’s happening, and create a narrative out of that. Working on doc has been very liberating in how I then think about working on narrative. And, similarly, when I work on narrative films, it makes me appreciate when you’re able to just film life as a doc and not have to conform to an idea of illusion. In my view, time is a little more realistic in a documentary because you can jump around it, just the way your mind jumps around. If I think of Bob and Suzushi, my mind jumps around to many different encounters with them over many different years. In narrative we try to simplify that and make it something an audience pretend to be watching in real time. I think one can inform the other. I’m primarily a cinematographer but it was a great honor and joy to do with Bob and to be able to make something for Suzushi because it felt like it needed to be made.
text by Taiyo Okamoto & Joseph Reid
