Jo-Ha-Kyu and the Discordant Aesthetic

As a young man in my early twenties I spent a year living in Japan. What brought me to live there was my determination to deepen my training in a Zen sword discipline called Iaido. At the time my Japanese language was quite poor, only surviving with rudimentary phrases. Luckily, the philosophy of Japanese martial art training was observation and practice. Hardly anything was explained, its theory, philosophy and execution…

I was going to write this article on the use of Viewpoints in the creation of performance. For those of you who may not be familiar with the technique, the Viewpoints is an improvisational performance tool, which evolved from postmodern dance. Its founder, Mary Overlie, took the two main elements used in stage performance, - time and space -…

Border are created for organization, for protection, for control, to simplify understanding. Borders are indicative in how people create identity, for example this is where I end and YOU begin. Borders can create something like barriers they can be indicative of a beginning and an ending, they can be an illusion. People create borders based on a myriad of different reasons. It's almost a human instinct. Borders can even be created within oneself, for everyone is made of a…

Borders are a symbol of consciousness.  Of our attempts to understand.  To draw a border is to define something, by clearly delineating it from what its not.…