Rss

So You’re the Dance Guy? Remembering Robert Thurman

Robert Thurman in 2006. From wikimedia.org

I had the good fortune to meet Robert Thurman in 2002 or 2003—I can’t remember the exact year—in New York City. To my great surprise he called me at my home in Chicago. These were days before the widespread use of the Internet, and smartphones as we know them today didn’t yet exist. We’d never met, but I was not unknown in New York, having performed there on any number of occasions, even being reviewed in the The New York Times twice—once by Jennifer Dunning, something I am proud of. I moved in dance circles and in the world of Asian art, but not in Buddhist circles. To this day, I don’t how he heard of me, or Core of Culture, or how he found my number, although I was listed in the telephone directory.

Robert told me he had heard of my non-profit organization, Core of Culture, which I had only just established after working with monks at Lamayuru Monastery in Ladakh, thanks to my wonderful teacher Sonam Kunga Rinpoche. I still direct Core of Culture today, and recently embarked on a five-year project with Drikung Kagyu monasteries in Ladakh. Core of Culture is dedicated to safeguarding intangible culture, with an emphasis on endangered dances, and movement traditions in healing, meditation, and martial arts.

Robert asked if we could meet at Tibet House US during my next trip to New York City, and I said yes, of course. I knew who he was, and everyone pretty much knew about Tibet House, a fixture of the downtown Manhattan scene.

The day came and I went to Tibet House to meet him. Robert walked out to greet me. I am surprised, after reading any number of tributes to him and his extraordinary life, that no one mentioned what a mountain of a man he was: charismatic, kind, and huge. He reached out to shake my hand, and I stopped in my tracks. I had never seen such magnificent hands: enormous, masculine hands. He saw my astonishment and smiled. I took my left hand and held his fifth finger, and my right hand took his thumb, and I just marveled for a minute.

Then he said, “So, you’re the dance guy?”

I laughed a bit and replied, “Yeah, I suppose I am.”

“No,” he said firmly, “You’re the dance guy.”

This seemed a bit a strange, but he was very kind, and I answered, “Okay, I’m the dance guy.”

“No,” he insisted, his voice quite direct. He took his two enormous hands, and wrapped my small, folded hands in his. Holding them, he said more strongly, “You’re the Dance Guy.” He was still holding my hands in his, and we were looking eye-to-eye. This meant he was looking down and I was looking up.

He continued, “You’re the Dance Guy. You’re not the Dalai Lama guy, you’re not the Free Tibet guy, you’re not the government-in-exile guy, you’re not the humanitarian guy, you’re not the academic guy. You’re the Dance Guy. Be the Dance Guy.”

Still looking intently at each other, I said, “I will. I’ll be the Dance Guy.”

He let go of my hands and said, “Good. We need one. We don’t have one.”

He then went on to deliver his scheduled talk that day, and I had a chance to hear his legendary ability to speak, and teach, and captivate an audience.

I have never forgotten what he directed me to do, in such an offbeat way, well-suited to my own offbeat character. It was so wise and necessary. I still conduct my work according to his great guidance in bringing total focus to what I do best, undistracted by anything else. This little encounter is the merest footnote to his outsized life, but I am sure that I am not to only one to whom he provided guidance and clarity.

Why would he even care to reach out to meet me to tell me this? It was a great act of kindness and concern. I will never forget it. I will never forget him and his enormous hands. Robert Thurman clarified the direction my life’s work. I am so grateful to him.

The Dance Guy (Joseph Houseal). Once I was a Willow, Full moon performance, East Hampton, New York, 1998. Image courtesy of the author

Core of Culture

Related features from BDG

The Acrobat Family‘Tis a Gift to Be SimplePerforming a Noh Dance for Merce Cunningham

The Acrobat Family

La famille de Saltimbanques, “Acrobat Family.” 1905, oil on canvas. Picasso. Image courtesy of the author

Human beings continually create small worlds to sustain impossible arts. One of my close friends is August Tye. She is Ballet Mistress at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Her parents are sculptors. Her husband is an operatic baritone. She has three children. The eldest, Georgia, I have known since she was a baby. Now 25, she is a choreographer and photographer. Her husband is a Peruvian magician. Of course he is. They are a family of artists and performers. The kids are doing what mom and dad do. Their lives are unimaginable to most people, carried out upholding the arts of ballet, opera, magic, and music.

Dancers and musicians at Dorje Drak Monastery in Simla. 2020. Their demonstration for us was superb, and we told them so. As this photo so sweetly shows, these monks are shy and not accustomed to praise and acknowledgement. Photo by Jonathan Greet for Core of Culture

I have always been drawn to Picasso’s several paintings of the La famille de Saltimbanques, otherwise known as The Acrobat Family. The name saltimbanque includes all traveling performers, itinerant acrobats, fortunetellers, dancers, circus folk, freaks, and their ilk. A kind of tribe that has always walked the earth for as long as recorded history can tell. Shaolin monks and Vajrayana Buddhist monks very much share this organization—a dedicated community at the edge of society, not living by the usual social norms, but having a way of life specifically designed to master and transmit sophisticated mental and body practices that result in amazing physical and psychic feats such as tantric yoga, gong fu, and Buddhist cham dance. The gallery of images offered with this article shows grand similarities among dedicated distinct artist societies. They are meant to provide a warm feeling, an intimate look at the stewards of secrets.

Kashmiri Bhand Pather clan at a garden performance, 2016. Photo by Gerard Houghton for Core of Culture

These performers aren’t produced in colleges or institutions, but in communities of people living according to a way of life that defines them. Monks are always on the move between monasteries, religious events, and staying connected to their families. Monks also travel the world. It is their whole way of life, which sustains precious ancient teachings of body and mind over hundreds, even thousands of years. These performers occupy a mythic zone between ordinary life and another reality. They live unordinary lives.

Shaolin monks, fresh from the monastery, in a theatrical performance in Dubai, 2017. From timeoutdubai.com

Kashmiri Bhand performers are traveling artists dating to the Mughal Empire. Very few remain. They dance, sing, recite poetry, tell jokes, play music. They are all men, and female roles are played en travesti. Bhand Pather performers are hereditary. They have also been bone-setters and dentists, and they delivered services available only when they were performing in a town. They can be bawdy and hilarious, or somber and spiritual. They know Arabian Nights by heart and can enact many scenes from the book of extravagant fables. They are a small society within society, once with a more integrated relationship to popular culture.

The Ballet Class, 1875, oil on canvas, Edgar Degas. Musee D’Orsay. From wikimedia.org

These acrobats and monks are not merely “dance communities”—which they are—but hereditary or liminal orders of embodied transmission; people who preserve difficult arts by living partially outside ordinary society. When I talk about Buddhist dances such as cham, I emphasize that is it different from the prevalent notions of dance in the West. One difference is that the monk-dancers live a different kind of life. An old lama once told me, “If you want a good monk-dancer, start with a good monk.” Monks are made in monasteries, living according to a monastic code. They are a family. They perform mystical dances in the same place where they live, and sleep, and eat, and play, and meditate, and grow up, and grow old.

A traveling Noh family performs Ikarikazuki. Woodblock print. Tsukioka Kogyu, from “100 Noh Plays,” 1897. Image courtesy of the Lavenberg Collection

Picasso’s La famille de Saltimbanques is a powerful entry point into the liminal lives depicted because the painting shows moods at the same time tender yet melancholy, the raw trappings of a poor, itinerant community of highly disciplined performers, keepers of amazing feats, but aloof and spiritually estranged from bourgeois society. It shows a family. Indeed, a completely other society and way of life. They belong. Picasso sees this belonging. Life is organized around the transmission of the arts. In one version sits a monkey. The monkey is perfect, a plain fact, a companion in the circus life.

A young monk watches a cham dance ceremony in anticipation of dancing one day, 2001. Photo by Gerard Houghton for Core of Culture

This gallery of images is not merely portraits of performers, but revelations of enclosed worlds of transmission. Certain arts survive because entire human communities organize themselves around preserving them. Magic isn’t just entertainment; it sparks something ancient within us. These marginalized performers keep secrets. Old secrets. Sometimes initiate secrets. The monastery is not merely a place where dances are occasionally performed. It is an entire ecosystem that protects rituals, dances, mudra, music, and costumes. It sustains oral transmission and a behavioral disciple of daily monastic movement. It preserves techniques of sculpting and painting, and above all, preserves ancient techniques of meditation.

Traveling performances, circus folk, freak shows, and the earliest forms of drama usually included something paranormal: spirit possessions, ghost stories, seances, psychics, mind-reading, fortunetellers, people in trances, blessing from the ancestors. It made for a richer variety show, appealing to people’s superstitions and fascination with workings of the unknown and the afterlife. No doubt some of these performers were capable of mental, physical, and psychic actions not available to most people. Monks certainly have minds trained beyond the imagination of most people. Noh actors as well, have advanced mental capacities, in part by performing in states of sensory limitation.

Commedia dell’arte troupe, 1710, oil on canvas, Franck Baptiste Paris. Pierrot on the left. Harlequin on the right, and fair Columbine in the center. From wikimedia.org

The same is true of circus folks, commedia dell’arte families, traveling Noh troupes, and Kashmiri Bhand Pather clansmen. Shaolin monks have always routinely performed in Chinese opera performances, and in modern performances, still living the elevated life of a Shaolin monk. Even with classical ballet, the painter Degas shows us an ancient style of master-disciple teaching; a highly disciplined artisan training within a larger bourgeois society. The lives of ballerinas haven’t always been ones of respect and honor, but they have always been vessels of one of the most beautiful arts known to man. They appear superhuman, doing incredibly beautiful things most humans can’t do. You can’t go to college to become a ballerina. You must go to a ballet academy, a privileged type of archaic training unto itself. A lifestyle.

Young monks support their friend, who is dancing for the first time. Obstacle Clearing Ritual, Dorje Drak Monastery, Simla, 2020. Photo by Jonathan Greet for Core of Culture

Cham is performed in important Buddhist religious ceremonies. But it survives in the spaces between performances; in the very lives of the monks, who are intentionally outsiders to mainstream society, highly disciplined, meditation adepts. Picasso understood something similar about acrobats: his real subject is not their astonishing tricks, but the life required to sustain the impossible art. Itinerant, poor, humble, disciplined vessels of ancient transmission at the edge of society. Everything about it is precious.

Kashmiri Bhand Pather. A young man en travesti dances the roles of a woman and a snake, 2015. Photo by Gerard Houghton for Core of Culture

In closing this meditation on those who live lives designed for the transmission of ancient practices, I leave you two more paintings by Picasso, titled the same as the lead image above, La famille de Saltimbanques, all painted the same year, 1905.

La famille de Saltimbanques, “Acrobat Family.” 1905, oil on canvas. Picasso. Image courtesy of the author

La famille de Saltimbanques with a monkey, 1905, collage, gouache, watercolor, pastel, India ink on cardboard. Picasso. Image courtesy of the author

Core of Culture

Related features from BDG

Dance Is Evidence: Rethinking History Through the Moving Body – Gandhara, Buddhism, and The Greeks‘Tis a Gift to Be SimplePerforming a Noh Dance for Merce Cunningham
The post The Acrobat Family appeared first on Buddhistdoor Global.

The Snow Lion’s Attributes

Cover of The Snow Lion’s Attributes. Image courtesy of the author

Among the ritual dance traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, the Vajra dances of the Drikung Kagyu order are legendary for their length, meditative intensity, and spiritual ambition. Some last more than two hours, unfolding over several days of annual ceremonies. According to an important Drikung dance treatise, “dance is the apotheosis of mystical attainment.” This rare treatise is The Snow Lion’s Attributes, An Introduction to the Essence of the Drikung Kagyu Vajra Dances, with material dating to the 12th century. This treatise is finding new currency today.

The Drikung Kagyu is a sub-order of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. Their dances, and their unique history, are commemorated by this volume, which has had three printings to date: the original, then in 1992, and a revised edition in 2016. A second printing of the revised edition is in progress now. The Snow Lion’s Attributes is in both Tibetan and English.

Unique characteristics distinguish the Drikung Kagyu dances. They are longest dances among the Tibetan Buddhist orders. Beyond their length, dances are understood to be analogs of the meditative experience itself: a great danced metaphor for meditating, performed in a trance-like state, including advanced visualization and tantric meditation techniques.

The English text of this dance treatise is an adaptation of a Tibetan original by His Holiness Chetsang Rinpoche, head of the Drikung Kagyu order. Based on ancient texts, it was prepared especially for the guests of the inaugural ceremonies of the Drikung Kagyu Institute, Jangchubling Monastery, in November 1992. Jangchubling Monastery is the main seat-in-exile of the Drikung Kagyu order.

This inaugural event recreated another from 1669, when the Drikung Kagyu monks performed all of their dances for the Dalai Lama, who wished to see before him the most authoritative ritual dance traditions of Tibet as he consolidated the ceremonial culture of the Gelug order within his newly established political and religious sphere. In fact, the Gelug order—a later school of Tibetan Buddhism associated with the Dalai Lamas—may have only introduced cham during the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama in the 17th century. The other orders had been dancing cham for many hundreds of years. The Cham Yig of the Gelug order, probably begun around 1647, was completed and published in 1712, only after the Fifth Dalai Lama witnessed all the dances of the Drikung Kagyu.

In 1992, His Holiness Chetsang Rinpoche sought to consecrate this new moment in political and religious reality, by inviting the 14th Dalai Lama to Dehradun, India, as a guest, not as a host, to witness in front of him the entire repertory of the Drikung Vajra dances. The 1992 act was a mirror image of the 1669 act; reversed. It was a gracious, creative, and sustaining act, in a time of turmoil, highlighting the fundamental role of dance as a protective energy. Traditional teaching among the Kagyu order, tells that early after the establishment of Tantric Buddhism in Tibet, lamas and yogis ensconced cham dance as a protective energetic forcefield around Tantric Buddhism. Circular movements and trance-like pacing transform the consciousness of the dancer and the atmosphere of experience.

Mandala dance diagrams for the Heruka deity cham. Image courtesy of the author

In our own time, a project has recently begun to fortify the illustrious tradition of Drikung Kagyu cham. Called The Cham Yig Project, it is the brainchild of an eminent Buddhist scholar, Khenpo Choswang, who has overseen authoritative research and publications to provide monks with the scriptural and manuscript resources required by monastic life. Khenpo is an outstanding and original researcher who, after preparing so many sacred manuscripts, is devoting his attention to restoring the full manuscript of the Drikung Kagyu dances, the Cham Yig. A Cham Yig is a dance manual: essentially, a ritual yogic dance instructional manual for monasteries.

In the Drikung Kagyu order, at least 32 monk dancers are required in order to perform all the dances correctly. Khenpo Choswang is also an excellent dancer, and this is where the organization I direct, Core of Culture, (CoC) comes in. Together with Ladakh CoC director Dr. Thinles Dorje, we will assist Khenpo Choswang in the monumental task of reconstructing a new Cham Yig from centuries of surviving remnants; scattered folios, fragmented and damaged dance manuscripts. The late explorer-linguist Rene de Nebsky-Wojkowitz, who, in the 1950s before the occupation of Tibet by China, translated the Cham Yig of the Gelug order, claimed that the tradition of comprehensive written instructions for the dance rituals accounted for the astonishing purity of transmission of Vajrayana monks for more than a thousand years. Many dances remain fundamentally unchanged after transmission over succeeding generations. Today, the scriptural rudder of the exalted dance tradition of the Drikung Kagyu is being rebuilt, and the dances themselves revived.

A monk dancer rehearses in winter. Photo by Nathan Whitmont

Cham is next level meditation, moving meditation, a whole mind-body embodiment of a deity in a danced, trance-like state. Accordingly, the Cham Yig provides instruction in dance, music, meditation, and ritual design. The purity of motivation among all involved in The Cham Yig Project is a pleasure to experience, and a high-minded way of working. Scholars and dancers from three Ladakhi monasteries—Lamayuru, Phyang, and Shachukul—have committed to a five-year collaboration to rebuild the document. Centuries of orally transmitted choreography will help restore sections where manuscripts are incomplete or lost. Many of the scholars can dance, many of the dancers are scholars. All of them practice meditation.

The Cham Yig Project is produced by Core of Culture, with lead funding from the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global, and with support from the Kipper Family Foundation and Jeffrey R. Costello. The project is carried out in close cooperation with academic director Khenpo Choswang, implementation director Thinles Dorje, and monks from three monasteries. It is a five-year project dedicated to reconstructing and transmitting the Cham Yig of the Drikung Kagyu lineage in Ladakh. Cham Yigs, dance manuals that encode choreography, ritual meaning, and lineage continuity, are essential to the performance of monastic dances, cham.

An example of monastic music notation. Image courtesy of Khenpo Choswang

The aim of this project is to create, for the first time in living memory, a complete Drikung Kagyu Cham Yig through a process that unites living dance transmission with scholarship. The project brings together monks of different generations, scholars, dancers, musicians, and senior ritual leaders to reconstruct, document, and disseminate a new, complete Cham Yig. The result will be both a practical manual for performance within the Drikung Kagyu tradition and a model for how lost ritual traditions might be revived in other Buddhist lineages. Over five years, this collaborative effort will reconstruct the text, confirm its ritual accuracy through performance and teaching, and publish it for both internal and wider audiences. The new Cham Yig becomes an historical record that will stand the test of time.

For the opening of this five-year project, in June 2026, a ceremony will be held at Lamyuru Monastery, acknowledging everyone involved in this monumental endeavor. The 15 scholars will receive new monk robes. The 96 dancers—32 from each monastery—will receive new shoes as well as robes. Everyone will be given a copy of The Snow Lions Attributes, a rare Tantric Buddhist dance treatise, now, remarkably, in its third printing. In an age when many ritual traditions struggle simply to survive, the Drikung Kagyu dances are entering a new cycle of transmission. Ancient manuscripts are returning to life through memory, scholarship, meditation, and movement itself.

Khenpo Choswang shares some of the nearly 500 pages of a pecha manuscript volume. It is the gathered dance research of several decades, covering hundreds of years of dance manuscript documents and fragments. These ancient documents contain archaic scripts, various types of Tibetan grammar and syntax, and whole vocabularies for dance and its instruction that are not used today. The next task will be to transliterate the entire 484 pages here into universal Tibetan, which anyone can read, making the ancient documents available for the first time. Video courtesy of Khenpo Choswang

Core of Culture

Related features from BDG

Early Explorers and Their Encounter with Buddhism, Part Three: Dance InsightPadmasambhava’s Buddha-field of Tantric Dances: Re-establishing Dance in the Narrative of Guru RinpocheThe AttanTantric TransformationMonastic Dance Courtyards in Ladakh and Zanskar

More from Ancient Dances by Joseph Houseal
The post The Snow Lion’s Attributes appeared first on Buddhistdoor Global.

25,000 Bhutanese Masks: A Conversation with Graham Shackell

A Bhutanese Atsara mask for a ceremonial jester, pre-painting, by Yeshe Dorji, Thimphu, Bhutan. Image courtesy of Graham Shackell

Graham Shackell is trained in masked performance styles, including the Renaissance form, Commedia dell’arte, by Antonio Fava at his international school in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and in Japanese Noh performance by Kita master Matsui Akira. He is also a seasoned experimental theater performer, and he teaches stage combat. He is currently choreographing the stage combat for a timely production of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Graham has a degree in Archaeology and Anthropology, specializing in the archaeology of performance. He is also a professional field archaeologist working with the leading independent heritage organization Oxford Archaeology, as well as teaching at Southampton University. He explores: “What can we learn from our ancient past and ways of representing ourselves?”

Graham is a performer, a scholar, a theorist, and a mask-maker who has crafted traditional Noh masks under the guidance of Sensei Kitasawa Hideta. He has researched the great antiquity of mask use and representation worldwide, and perhaps believes more in their ephemeral animated performance power than in their abstract study, but is trained in both.

As a prelude to this interview, I spoke with Graham about a public mask-making course he offers to those healing from grief and trauma. I share the excerpt here as his explanation reveals much about the holism of his person and practice:

The course came about because . . . I was making a stone mask based on the 9,000-year-old “Levantine Pre-Pottery Neolithic B culture.” I was using flint tools (they weren’t really proper tools just some bits of worked flint I had found on archaeological sites that no one wanted), and they kept breaking and so did the stone. After my father died, I inherited his chisels, and tool bag—which it turns out has a much deeper family history—and while they were only carpenter’s chisels and not really for stone, they were enough to finish the mask. In the process, I found that making the mask, transforming the stone, was having a transformative effect on me also.

There is a kind of conversation between carver and source material. The material, whether wood or stone, quite often tells you what it wants to be, or in my case I can often “hear” it shouting at me: “What are you doing?! What do you want me to do?! Just tell me and I will help you!.” So we transform the material, and it transforms us—a mutual intersection and transformation, and then of course because it’s a mask, when you wear it, when you perform it, there is another transformation.

Added to this, we participants in the mask-making course, go for walks together to look at some “Places of Significance” throughout time, and through this, the course looks at the creation of Place within a “Landscape of Places” (human interaction—or intersection—with terrain being a mnemonic database of significance), and how Place/Landscape also transforms over time. So basically whatever difficulties you are having right now, its only temporary because, as the Persian poet said, “This too shall pass.” And this personhood of Place (a particular Place that has meaning to someone) is embedded in the mask.

Anyway, the short version is that I realized mask-making was helping me in my grief, and thought it might do the same for others. . . .

A mask in progress from the current round of “Face about the Place” mask-making project for folks living with depression, anxiety, and/or persistent grief complex. Image courtesy of Graham Shackell

BDG: You work in both practical and theoretical aspects of mask-making and mask research. How do these complement each other in your study of masks?

Graham Shackell: I spoke with a group of digital future artists. That was in the evening, and in the daytime I’d been excavating a Saxon cemetery. So I’d come back from being covered in bone dust to talk about masks, and in a very theoretical way. It’s quite an interesting kind of dichotomy, really: you have this very practical aspect, literally people’s DNA under my fingertips; and then talking about the theory of masks and how that might relate to people’s performances in the past and even in the present.

For me, it’s always been about both—a dual pathway as a performance archaeologist; there are very few of us. I don’t know if we have an advantage or a disadvantage, but we have something different to other people: we have an understanding of performance on a practical level as well as a theoretical level.

Putting the two together is quite a difficult path to tread in some ways, because performance is ephemeral. It exists in a certain temporality and then it’s gone. So you can’t even capture performance, because even a recording or a cave painting or a soundtrack of a performance is not the performance. It’s a way of recording it, but it isn’t the thing itself. Once the thing has happened it’s gone forever, you know?

But you can try to decode a performance from its surviving materiality, such as mask. Or if you’re looking at the ground, you might be able to determine a dance platform or a dance ground, where the earth is very compressed. You can’t prove something conclusively; you’re having to use interpretation, which is all archaeology is anyway: interpretation.

Kokushiki-Jo has a sad, thoughtful moment perambulating around Hollingbury Iron Age hill fort, from The Perambulations of Kokushiki-Jo Project’. Character and mask by Graham Shackell. This is one of the oldest masks in Noh, based on one of the oldest masks in the world, emanating from Siberia. The split jaw, tied by strings, indicates great antiquity in masks.* Image courtesy of Graham Shackell

Of the different projects that I’m focusing on, one is returning to Bhutan.

There is a cultural risk in Bhutan now. It’s changing fast. And it’s going to change even faster when GMC (Gelephu Mindfulness City) comes online. That’s going to open the doors to all sorts of things. A lot of international culture coming in. Already in the rural areas there are a lot of smartphones, and so there’s a lot of young people looking at cultures from outside Bhutan.

There is a huge amount of rural migration to the city. The demographic that this mostly hits is between 15 and 65 years old. This is partly for training, partly for work. But it impacts the primary group of participants in the rural festivals and dance rituals.

They’re losing the rituals by losing the ritual participants. They’re losing the numbers. Some villages are already unable to put on dances because they don’t have enough people to do so. People were losing interest a bit, you know?

Levantine Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Stone Mask 1; practical performance test. Image courtesy of Graham Shackell

BDG: I had this time-transcending medieval experience in Bhutan, before it was a democracy, start to finish. Bhutan was always held up as a pristine environment of cultural expression, and this was when Core of Culture worked there from 2003–08. Few roads, and bad ones at that.

I believe this is why the Fourth King wanted a dance survey and documentation conducted during the final five years of the monarchy, while dance was still comfortably ensconced in villages all over the kingdom—a theocracy and true kingdom.

Now, you would say that Bhutan’s social and, therefore, ritual cohesion is really under threat?

GS: Yes. Although they are working hard; I think the government and the king are quite keen to protect their identity. But they are also keen to give a lot of opportunity to international ways of doing business, let’s say. So I think there will be social and cultural fallout.

Opportunities are coming up and I think there are going to be a lot of people going abroad, encountering other cultures and bringing that back, and it’s also coming in through smartphones. So, yes, I think that rural traditions are seriously at risk.

Some villages can’t put on dances anymore. And at the moment, they are storing the masks; they’re still keeping the masks, but it’s tenuous. This depends on individual village leaders, and monks, and villagers.

A mask from the Fighting with Ghosts Project, embodying the personhood of place of Hollingbury Woods, Brighton, UK—specifically Elm disease, Ash dieback, and graffiti carved over many years onto Hollingbury Woods trees. Image courtesy of Graham Shackell

BDG: In the countryside, really every village has a set of masks. Very often in the countryside, the dancers are not monks, they’re gomchen—farmers who take on the roles of monks—and they’re often very good dancers.

As you’ve said, this is the precise age group that either goes to school or doesn’t, goes to college or doesn’t, wants a job as a farmer or doesn’t, upholds rituals or doesn’t, moves to the city or doesn’t. But as far as masks go, almost every little village will have a set of dance masks, often very old.

GS: Yes, and I think that’s what’s at risk. That’s my concern.

BDG: Of being sold, or being taken away, or being stolen and put on the art market . . . ?

GS: Or just lost, mislaid, if they’re not being used. It depends on the locals. If they have an interest in maintaining the masks, then they’re fine. But otherwise, there’s potential for them to be lost one way or another.

Unlike Core of Culture’s Bhutan dance survey and dance database, the masks are not registered or recorded in any kind a countrywide system of analyzing the masks. There is no data on these masks. And I think there must be at least, probably, 25,000 masks in Bhutan.

BDG: I would agree, and hearing that from a mask specialist, an expert, is interesting. Adding it up, there are more than 200 dance festivals in monasteries and village temples in Bhutan. You noted between 32–80 masks at each village, and the large state monasteries have hundreds of masks, so 25,000 masks is a good estimate for the total number in Bhutan.

GS: And then there is variation in masks, different lineages, and also very individual masks, such as local deities. About those masks, there is nothing—there is no detail. No one is looking at them, no one is making records.

BDG: Do you want to do that?

GS: Yes, I’m trying to secure the funding to do it.

It will be gone, you know? And some of these masks, like the local deity masks, we will have no idea. If we don’t act now, the people that danced in those masks will also be gone—they’re all moving away, or, if they’re older, they’re dying. So it feels like in the next five years or so, things will be really different for dancers and masks in Bhutan.

Levantine Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Stone Mask 2; practical performance test. Image courtesy of Graham Shackell

The Zhabdrung unified Bhutan in 1616, going back more than 400 years, with much of the dance and mask culture older, some going back to the eighth century. That’s a long time for a performative code to be more or less intact. As a performance archaeologist, that is really interesting, and rare, and coupled with a parallel mask tradition that can be studied and possibly decoded.

Masks enable us to look backwards in time, into the past, through looking at an object in the present. And there’s a generation after another that goes into the masks, and then suddenly, there isn’t a generation that goes into the masks. Then there’s no longer the integration of the mask with the person who’s part of it, who animates it, who is shaped by it, who uses it a vehicle of metamorphosis. This is one example of a process where culture becomes extinct.

BDG: Thank you, Graham, for your illuminating and urgent observations on vanishing Buddhist culture, seen through the lens of masks. Your words are a call to action.

A treasure dance or tercham. Bhutanese cham and protector deity mask, from Buddhist Dances, Movement & Mind by Joseph Houseal. Motilal Banarsidass, 2025, Delhi. Image courtesy of the author

* See: Okina, an Endless Blessing from Long Ago (BDG) and The Very Long Life of Bugaku (BDG)

Core of Culture

Related features from BDG

Ancient Dances TodayMessengers of Mind, Cultural Explorers and the Encounter with Buddhism, Part One: A Gallery of ExplorersMystical Dances in the Kingdom of Bhutan, Part 1: A Black Magic Dance at the Core of Bhutan’s FoundingTantric Bodies, Tantric Dance

More from Ancient Dances by Joseph Houseal
The post 25,000 Bhutanese Masks: A Conversation with Graham Shackell appeared first on Buddhistdoor Global.

Scattering Petals, Falling Leaves: Spring in Noh and the Japanese Sense of Transience

Scattering cherry blossom petals, Japan. Image courtesy of the author

A Zen question was once posed to Zeami Motokiyo, the 14th-century founder of Noh, playwright, poet, actor, and theorist:

“What is the essence of transience?”He answered, “Scattering petals, falling leaves.”Then he was asked, “What is the essence of eternity?”He replied, “Scattering petals, falling leaves.”

This Zen exchange distills something essential in Japanese aesthetics. Spring is not merely a season. It is a revelation of time itself. The falling cherry blossom is both the most fragile and the most enduring image in Japanese culture. In its falling, it embodies impermanence; in its annual return, it suggests continuity beyond the human span. Nowhere is this paradox more fully realized than in the classical arts of Noh, poetry, and seasonal ritual, where beauty and sadness unite nature and emotion.

Yuya in her blossom-viewing carriage, woodblock print. Image courtesy the National Noh Theater

Among the most refined treatments of spring in Noh is the play Yuya. The story is simple, almost delicate in its emotional architecture. Yuya, a courtesan dancer in the service of Taira no Munemori, a samurai of the Heike clan, is summoned to attend a cherry-blossom viewing at Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto, and be carried about and along the way in a beautiful carriage. Yet she has received news that her mother is gravely ill. Duty compels her toward the cherry blossoms, a natural spectacle of impermanence. The entrancing scenery along the way reflects Yuya’s changing emotions. Filial love pulls her toward an impermanence of a more intimate kind.

This parallel of nature’s impermanence with human life itself, enriches the seemingly simple story and poetry to become a profound expression of the human condition. In many traditional Japanese performing arts, there is no “technical training” apart from learning the art itself. The beginner student begins with a simple dance, a simple chant—an actual Noh play, not practicing steps and singing scales. Yuya is often the first Noh dance a student learns. Yuya is fundamental as formal art and essential to the rarified character of Noh. This play is so popular it is said that the play Yuya, the play Matzukaze, and cooked rice are the same: you never grow tired of them.*

The tension of the play is not dramatic in a modern sense. There is no outburst, no confrontation. Instead, we celebrate beauty and sadness, witness the refinement of feeling—what the Japanese call kokoro, heart-mind—under seasonal pressure, this time, the briefness of the season of cherry blossom viewing, an art in itself, called hanami.

Sitting with her samurai, as the blossoms scatter, Yuya composes a poem:

If I must leaveThe blossoms at their height,Let them scatter—For in this worldNothing remains.

Noh performance, Yuya. Here Yuya reads her poem to Taira no Munemori. Photo by Moita Toshiro. From the-noh.com

The blossoms become mirror and measure. Their falling reflects the mother’s impending death, Yuya’s own sorrow, and the evanescence of worldly attractions. Yet the scene is not tragic. It is luminous, cosmic, inviting wisdom, and in its subtlety speaks to her warrior lord, as compassion carries the day and he releases her to go to her mother. Yuya travels to her mother in a blossom-viewing carriage. It is a beautiful scene, and the beauty is quietly powerful. Loss does not break the spirit, loss awakens it. Wisdom tempers, beauty emerges.

Noh mask, ko-omote, young woman, often used for Yuya, as well as masks of women who are beautiful and older, such as Zo-Onna. This mask is a faithful early Edo period (1600s) copy of a famous mask from the late Momoyama period. (early 1500s). From wikimedia.org

In Noh, movement is minimal but charged. Yuya is the simplest of dances. A slow turn beneath imagined blossoms; a sleeve lifted as if catching falling petals; a step that traces the arc of descent; a hand that catches shedding tears in the face of nature’s cascade. The body does not imitate nature—it becomes a vessel for its rhythm. Scattering petals are not props; they become a temporal atmosphere. This is Zen aesthetics at work; Buddhism transforming art forms. Emotion as poetry couched in nature. Spring here is not youthfulness or rebirth; It is poignancy, an awareness of transience, mono no aware. Spring is the scenery for compassion.

Noh performance, Yuya. Here Yuya is in her blossom-viewing carriage on a Noh stage under blooming cherry trees. Photo by Morita Toshiro. From the-noh.com

Hanami, the custom of viewing cherry blossoms, is both festive and philosophical. Families and colleagues gather beneath blooming trees; sake flows; laughter rises. Yet everyone knows the blossoms will last only days. Wind or rain may strip them overnight. Some cherry trees are very old and are revered as kami, nature divinities.

This fleeting nature is not accidental to the pleasure—it is the source of it. The Heian court poets, whose sensibilities shaped classical aesthetics, wrote of spring not as an object but as a visitation. Blossoms are guests. One receives them fully, knowing they will depart. This cultivated awareness matured into the aesthetic principle called mono no aware—the sadness of things, the suchness of things. The Heian poet Ki no Tsurayuki (872–945 CE) wrote a poem found in a great anthology, the Kokinshu:

In the tranquil lightOf a spring day—Why do blossomsScatter so restlessly?

Later, the term mono no aware was famously re-articulated by Edo period scholar Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), who saw in classical literature that a deep emotional connection to the ephemeral was the highest refinement of feeling. Aware is not sadness alone. It is the pure recognition that beauty and loss are inseparable. To sit beneath falling blossoms in a park or temple is to experience that collectively. The petals brush one’s sleeve; they gather in the hair; they drift across sake cups, they cover the ground. Yuya is aware that soon, petals will cover her mother in the ground. Sometimes the falling petals are so many they are called haru no yuki, or spring snow, causing a flurry, then vanishing as quickly as snowflakes.

Zeami’s double answer—that transience and eternity are both revealed in scattering petals—echoes through his treatises. In works such as the actor’s notebook Fushikaden, he speaks of the “flower” (hana) of performance: the fleeting moment of beauty and awareness that appears and disappears in the actor’s art. Hana is the essence of Noh, the creation and bringing-to-be of a distilled and expanded moment: transience as form; eternity as pattern. The flower cannot be held. It is not technique alone. It arises when timing, season, audience, and performer align. It is experiential and vanishing, particular to a moment in time, unrepeatable. But Zeami also writes of cultivating “true flower” that deepens with age. Youthful beauty—waka no hana—fades; mature beauty ripens. The performer, like the cherry tree, participates in cycles.

Here the Japanese sense of time differs from linear Western tragedy. In Noh, death often leads not to annihilation but to transformation. Spirits linger; memories condense into presence. The past becomes audible. Spring, then, is not naïve renewal. It carries winter within it. Blossoms emerge from bare branches. Ancient stories are recalled to mind with each year’s blooms. The beauty is intensified because it follows austerity. Yuya’s poem about the transience of life and nature, becomes time-transcending, immortal.

In Yuya, the samurai, Taira no Munemori, ultimately releases her from her duty so that she can visit her dying mother. The granting of permission is as important as the sorrow itself. Buddhist compassion enters the social order, as transience takes on a more subtle and spiritual context. The blossoms scatter as Yuya departs. The stage image is spare: the pine backdrop, the bridge-way, the rhythm of drum and flute. Yet in that restraint lies profundity. The audience completes the scene inwardly. Petals fall in the imagination. In Noh, sorrow is not painted on the face. It resides in the angle of a mask; the perception of the audience, the inner reality of the Noh actor; the abstraction of the forms.

The pine tree backdrop painting of a Noh stage, evoking the great Yogo pine tree at Kasuga Shine in Nara, where Noh’s first performances took place. It symbolizes the eternal evergreen nature of the art of Noh. Image courtesy of the author

What we witness in Yuya is not simply a woman torn between obligations. We witness spring as an ethical atmosphere. The awareness of impermanence softens authority. It couches death. It tempers command with mercy. This may be why cherry blossoms have also served martial and samurai symbolism in Japan. Impermanence—death—was always around the corner for samurai, and hence the “Chrysanthemum Warrior” was an ideal. Noh was popular among samurai, who studied and performed it. Yet in the earlier classical arts, the meaning of mono no aware is gentler. It reminds rulers and dancers alike that grace and power, too, will scatter.

For those who work with dance traditions, spring in Noh offers something especially subtle. The scattering petal is a kinetic idea. It is a downward spiral, a wavering descent. It is asymmetrical. It is light yet irrevocable. In Noh choreography, sleeves trace arcs that suggest drifting. Steps are measured but not rigid. The tempo breathes. Silence is active; pregnant. If eternity is present here, it is not permanence of form but recurrence and animation of pattern. Petals fall; leaves fall; generations of people fall. The cyclic pattern continues. The abstract dances of Noh are proper structures to contain and convey this realization of the transience of life.

To feel mono no aware is not to despair. It is to awaken. It is an enlightenment. In Buddhist thought, impermanence is a fundamental mark of existence. But in Japanese aesthetics, this insight is not presented intellectually. It is embodied in seasonal phenomena, as well embodied in the performing Noh actor. The falling blossoms teach without speaking, and the Noh play Yuya, through poetry and dancing, presents spring as a contemplative practice. This is the genius, the high art, of Zeami and Noh.

Cherry blossoms in bloom along Kyoto’s famous Philosopher’s Path. Image courtesy of the author

* Matsukaze: Wind in the Pines (BDG)

Core of Culture

Related features from BDG

Performing a Noh Dance for Merce CunninghamThe Ancient Noh Stages of Sado, the Isle of ExileNoh NowPure Land Buddhism in Noh: The Shuramono Plays of ZeamiBeauty and Sadness: Reflections on a Japanese Noh Play

More from Ancient Dances by Joseph Houseal
The post Scattering Petals, Falling Leaves: Spring in Noh and the Japanese Sense of Transience appeared first on Buddhistdoor Global.

Dance Is Evidence: Rethinking History Through the Moving Body – Gandhara, Buddhism, and The Greeks

This article is adapted from a talk I will give at the Third International Academic Conference on the Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan, in Peshawar and Islamabad, on 27–31 March 2026, where I will present as the Chief Dance Advisor to Dr. Ijlal Hussain, Director of the Silk Road Centre in Islamabad.

Image courtesy of the author

Dionysian Bacchanalia, Gandhara, first century CE. Schist. Image courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art

Histories of Buddhism are usually written with texts, monuments, and philosophies. Movement, despite being ubiquitous in Buddhist life, has rarely been granted the same status. Dance, when it appears at all, is often treated as ornament, performance, or cultural byproduct rather than as a source of knowledge.

Yet, what if dance is not a mere embellishment of Buddhist history, but one of its most precise forms of evidence?

This question arises with particular force in Gandhara, the ancient cultural region centered in what is now northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. Gandhara is perhaps best known for its striking Buddhist sculpture, its monastic complexes, and its role as a cultural and commercial crossroads for South and Central Asia. It is also the homeland of two major Buddhist thinkers—Asanga (fl. fourth century CE) and his half brother Vasubandhu (4th–5th century CE)—whose work would shape Buddhism across Asia for centuries. Gandhara also contains Swat, home of the legendary dancing wizard, Padmasambhava, who established Tantric Buddhism in Tibet.

Yet Gandhara was not only a landscape of texts and stone. It was a region alive with disciplined movement: ritual walking, formal postures, hand gestures (mudra), processions, circumambulation, warrior dances, and sophisticated theatrical forms, all shaped by centuries of cultural exchange across vast distances. When we look at Gandhara through the lens of movement, a different history begins to come into focus

Buddhism as a practice of the body

A helpful way to approach this is to set aside, for a moment, the idea of Buddhism as a “religion” in the Western sense. As the scholar and classical dancer Vena Ramphal has observed: “Buddhism is more accessible when understood as a practice of mind and body—as a movement practice—than as a system of belief; religion is probably the wrong word.”

This perspective aligns closely with the Yogacara school of Buddhism, also known as the Cittamatra school, developed in the fourth and fifth centuries by Asanga and Vasubandhu. Yogacara—often translated as “practice of yoga,” while Cittamatra translates as “mind-only”—is deeply concerned with how perception is formed, conditioned, and transformed. Reality, in this view, is not passively received but actively constructed through habitual patterns of structured cognition.

What is often overlooked is that Yogacara’s insights are inseparable from embodied discipline. Sitting postures, controlled breathing, walking meditation, circumambulation around stupas, and the precise use of gesture were not peripheral to Buddhist life; they were foundational. The body was trained so that perception itself could change.

In this sense, Yogacara does not give us dance manuals or choreographic notation. Instead, it gives us something more fundamental: a grammar of metaphysical movement. It establishes that liberation—understood here not as salvation, but as a transformation of how reality is apprehended—is procedural, conditioned, and enacted through practice. Once that is recognized, ritualized movement becomes not optional but inevitable. It is interesting to consider the mind-only teachings of the Yogacara school as the inner condition for later Vajrayana Buddhism’s outward tantric expressions, such as cham. The inner dance is primary, generative, and remains as an outer dance takes shape in a vortex.

Gandhara as a culture of movement

Gandhara was uniquely positioned for such developments. From at least the fourth century BCE onward, the region absorbed Hellenistic influences following the campaigns of Alexander the Great and the subsequent Indo-Greek kingdoms. Greek artistic and theatrical traditions did not vanish quickly; they persisted, adapted, and mingled with local forms for centuries.

Greek culture, often mischaracterized as purely intellectual, was in fact deeply somatic. The Greek exaltation of the human form in art is unparalleled. Philosophy was paired with bodily discipline (Gr: askesis), ethics with habituation (Gr: hexis), and metaphysical insight with ritual enactment. The Greek gymnasium was where the body was trained, cleaned, fed; and where the mind was exercised through philosophical debate, and where teachers taught. The human form was a manifestation and embodiment of Greek ideals and virtues. Famously, the Greeks exercised naked in the same place where they debated philosophy.

Greek tragedy relied on the chorus: a collective body with no individual identities moving rhythmically through space and mythic history to make cosmology, ethics, and human suffering intelligible; to deliver moral teaching. They danced to chanted poetry. The first great tragic poet, Aeschylus (c. 524–456 BCE), was a general in the army. The annual performances of tragedy was a contest in honor of Dionysus. The Greek god Dionysus appears in multiple art forms and places within Gandhara. The ancient ritual Dithyramb, upon which tragedy was developed, was practiced and depicted in stone reliefs in Gandhara. Dancing Bacchic ecstatic rites, called Bacchanalia, are depicted in multiple places in Gandhara.

These Greek ideas of the mind-body complex did not arrive in Gandhara as abstract doctrines. They arrived as ritualized drama. These ideas arrived in the bodies of trained performers—as ways of standing, walking, gesturing, dancing, and occupying architectural space; ways of chanting, singing, shouting, and acting. Gandharan Buddhist sculpture bears this out: contrapposto stances, flowing drapery, rhythmic groupings of figures, and processional compositions all reveal a visual logic rooted in Greek ritual movement, and notions of the body. The Buddha is a muscular hero in Gandharan sculpture.

At the same time, the region was home to indigenous traditions of martial and ecstatic dance, including Pashtun warrior dances such as the Attan, characterized by rhythmic stamping, circling, spinning, and collective intensity. These Afghan dances were not entertainment; they trained martial skills—endurance, focus, cohesion, courage—and the experience of moving powerfully with an elevated consciousness. The Attan is still performed today. It is nearly 3,000 years old. It is a culturally foundational movement expression that has not lost its relevance or power. The longevity of certain ancient dances is worth investgating.

In Gandhara, then, indigenous ancient mountain dance traditions, Buddhist monastic practice, and Greek theatrical embodiment of myth coexisted within the same cultural milieu. The story is not simply influence in one direction, but convergence: a shared understanding among different cultural traditions that the body is a primary instrument of knowledge. This is a story of ongoing cultural interaction and integration among movement practices over a long period.

Standing Bodhisattva, Gandhara, 2nd–3rd century CE. Schist. Private Collection. Image courtesy of the author

Reading Gandharan art as a movement archive

When viewed through this lens, Gandharan art reveals new dimensions. A standing Buddha image with a raised hand is not merely an icon; it preserves a repeatable bodily configuration—balanced weight, upright spine, deliberate gesture—designed to organize attention in both practitioner and viewer. A seated Buddha in meditation depicts choreography reduced to stillness, where internal movement replaces external motion. It has been claimed that the image of the Buddha seated with crossed-legs in meditation—showing his calm body as vessel of enlightenment—originated in Gandhara.

Narrative panels showing devotees circumambulating stupas capture cognition in motion: structured walking, rhythmic repetition, cosmic parallels, and spatialized thought. Even Buddhist guardian figures such as the Bodhisattva Vajrapaṇi—often modeled on the Greek Herakles (Hercules) in Gandharan sculptures—display coiled energy and controlled force, anticipating later ritual dynamism. The interaction of these separate movement cultures developed mind-body training to endow the body to mean; to take on and embody profound meaning.

Cham dancer, protective deity, Punakha, Bhutan, 2005. Photo by Gerard Houghton

From Yogacara to Vajrayana to cham

Seen this way, the later emergence of Vajrayana Buddhism appears not as a rupture, but as an intensification; a material manifestation of inner reality. The eighth-century master Padmasambhava, traditionally associated with the Swat region of Gandhara, brought together Yogacara’s analysis of perception with explicit ritual technologies of embodiment taken from traditions of dance, magic, tantra, and wizardry from throughout Central Asia and the Himalayas. Greek ritual dance and cosmology were integrated with local artistic patterns. It was a cosmopolitan milieu of mind-body techniques.

Visualization practices became performative. Gestures and postures became empowered. Movement itself became a means of transforming reality—not symbolically, but operationally, for both the dancer and the devoted observer.

The masked ritual dances known as cham—attributed to Padmasambhava and which flourish in Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist cultures—represent the completion of this arc. Cham makes cosmology visible, ethics kinetic, and metaphysics communal. Doctrine is no longer only studied or contemplated; it is enacted, remembered through the body, and renewed in public space.

Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley offers a later and still-living example of such a milieu: an urban pilgrimage landscape where ancient yogic ritual, Tantric Buddhism, and daily embodied practice have long been interwoven. Read alongside Gandhara, it suggests that the transmission of Buddhist thought has often depended less on linear dissemination than on the emergence of fertile social ecologies of practice. From this dance perspective, figures such as Padmasambhava appear not as solitary innovators moving through empty space, but as catalysts working within—and between—places already primed for yogic and ritual synthesis.

Padmasambhava did not invent movement in Buddhism. He completes a long historical process in which the body—in its true power—gradually comes fully into view. Padmasambhava’s historical significance lies not only in what he taught but where he taught. It helps sometimes to think of Padmasambhava not as an historical person embarked on mythic wanderings, but as a connective intelligence, a situational intelligence at thresholds of creativity. Moving from Gandhara to Kathmandu and then to Samye in Tibet, is Padmasambhava moving among hotbeds of yogic evolution. Nothing random; self-selecting perhaps. Dance is a manifestation of that evolution, from Swat to Kathmandu to Samye. Miracle of miracles: these dances still exist.

Curatorial ethics and the present moment

Treating dance as evidence carries responsibilities. When living traditions are presented to the public—whether on festival stages, in museums, or in scholarly writing—choices must be made about naming, framing, and alteration.

Calling dances by their proper names, resisting the urge to simplify or aestheticize them for international audiences, and allowing forms to speak on their own terms are not political gestures. Dances should be shown for what they are, not as mascots for globalist tropes like “world peace.” For example, call the dance Attan, not Pakistani folk dance. Don’t change the way the Attan is performed when showing it to foreigners to try to suit their taste. Show the Attan for what it is. Rearrange the audience, not the dancers. These are methodological commitments. If movement is a historical source, it deserves the same care we give to texts or artifacts. We don’t change them to make them simpler; we learn how to read and appreciate them. This approach might be called curatorial ethics: an awareness that how we present embodied knowledge shapes what can be known about it.

Recognizing dance as evidence does more than add a new topic to Buddhist studies. It shifts the ground of inquiry. It reminds us that history is not only written—it is walked, gestured, rehearsed, and remembered through the body as dance. For Gandhara, this perspective restores a missing dimension. It allows us to see the region not only as a crossroads of ideas, but to see Gandhara as a laboratory of embodied knowledge, the influence of which continues to move—quite literally—across Asia. Dance, in this sense, is not an accessory to history. It is one of its most articulate witnesses.

A dancing maenad, in a trance, in a Dionysian ecstatic ritual, c. 325 BCE, at Paestan, Greece. From wikimedia.org

Core of Culture

Related features from BDG

Ancient Dances TodayEarly Explorers and Their Encounter with Buddhism, Part Three: Dance InsightThe Attan

‘Tis a Gift to Be Simple

Screenshot from A Shaker Worship Service by Salli Terri. From youtube.com

Who will bow and bend like a willowWho will turn and twist and reelIn the gale of simple freedom . . .— Shaker spiritual

From the Shaker religious community in the United States, founded in the mid- to late 18th century, emerged an extraordinarily transformative ritual dance tradition. Shaker dance is an original and powerful form of sacred movement, bearing uncanny parallels to tantric ritual dances, Sufi whirling, and other ecstatic devotional traditions around the world.

Officially known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, the Shakers held beliefs that were radically progressive for their time. Among their most controversial teachings was the conviction that Christ could reappear in female form—that a woman could serve as a religious and ritual leader. Many Shakers believed that their founder, Ann Lee, embodied this second appearance of Christ, although Lee herself never explicitly made such a claim.

For those of us working to understand Buddhist ritual dance—particularly cham—Shaker dance offers a surprising and illuminating parallel. To see this clearly, however, we must recognize how sacred dance traditions evolve over time. What most people encounter today in Buddhist dance is its late form: disciplined, meditative, carefully structured. What often goes unrecognized is that such traditions frequently emerge from earlier, more spontaneous and ecstatic phases.

Shaker practice followed this same arc. The earliest Shaker worship was marked by trembling, shaking, crying out, and spontaneous movement—the very behavior that earned them their name. This was not “dance” in a formal sense but a somatic response, structuring a religious intensity into way of life. Over time, however, Shaker movement evolved into a replicable and disciplined system of communal ritual.

Engraving, c.1840, Shaker dance worship service. From Getty Images

This later form of Shaker dance was guided by revealed manuscripts known as “Gift Sheets”—spiritual gifts believed to come from divine sources rather than human authorship. These sheets are not choreographic instructions in the modern sense. Instead, they encode an implicit choreography: sacred geometry, spatial symmetry, and moral injunctions that shape how bodies move together without prescribing specific steps.

When I first encountered these Gift Sheets, I was struck by their deep resemblance to the mandalas of Tantric Buddhism. They function in much the same way. In Buddhist dance traditions, especially those guided by Cham Yig manuscripts, movement is not recorded as step-by-step choreography. A Cham Yig may include mandalas, rhythmic structures, mantra texts, musical cues, and ritual notes—together forming a kind of “danced theology.” In both Shaker and Buddhist contexts, geometry and symbolism govern the movement. The dance emerges not from personal expression but from submission to a sacred order; a multi-dimensional architecture. This is very similar to Buddhism and its material record.

A dance “Gift Sheet,” holding the communal dance’s guidance in geometric and natural forms. Choreography is not by steps, but collective spiritual transport through repetition of form and song. The dances, also the music, are relayed and recorded as Dance Gift Sheets, and Later Music Gift Sheets. The “treasure dances” of Tantric Buddhism are similar, both performing and transmitting dances with mystical origins. In Buddhism, those who discover such otherworldly artifacts as mystical, unwritten dance manuscripts, are called treasure-revealers. The Shakers say with admirable simplicity that the Gifts are dances and songs given by the Spirit. Image courtesy of the author

Dance Gift Sheets, mystical representations of a Shaker dance used as instruction. Image courtesy of the author

For the Shakers, dance was never ornamental—little in their culture was. It was an embodied form of belief, a disciplined technology of alignment with Spirit, community, and daily life. Shaker Dance was not expressive in the modern sense: it was not about individuals displaying emotion or personality. It was about dissolving the self into a collective pattern of devotion.

The Shakers are better known today for their exquisitely simple furniture and utilitarian design than for their ritual movement. Only one living Shaker community remains, in Maine, with just three members. Other historic Shaker sites survive as museums. Because the Shakers are celibate, the question of fragile continuity has always existed.

Historically, the Shakers emerged from a milieu of radical Protestant experimentation. In 17th-century England, Quakers—now known for silent worship—were once derisively called “Quaking Shakers.” From this environment, an eight-person group led by Mother Ann Lee broke away and eventually emigrated from Liverpool to North America. What they carried with them was a form of worship that included shaking, trembling, and spontaneous movement.

“Shaking” reveals a state of consciousness recognized worldwide: ecstatic religious experience expressed through the body—visions, vocalizations, dancing, and song. Over time, however, this raw ecstasy was transformed into disciplined, ordered ritual movement. In this evolution we see a familiar pattern: revelation giving way to form; spontaneity yielding to transmission.

Shaker dance at its mature stage is a ritual communal movement without individual display; music designed to align the body with belief, and a contemplative visual logic guiding space and timing. Where have we seen this before? In cham, in mandala practice, in other forms of embodied sacred discipline. Shaker dance can be understood as embodied theology—a communal practice that aligns movement with ethical and spiritual order. Shaker dance is not folk dance.

Religious exercises at the Meeting House, Becker, New York. From the New York State Museum

Like the dances of Isadora Duncan or Vaslav Nijinsky, Shaker dance exists today without any filmed documentation and minimal photographic record. There are only engravings, drawings, paintings, and the remarkable Gift Sheets themselves—visual documents that encode movement through geometry rather than notation. This makes Shaker dance a rare example of dance knowledge preserved not through steps, but through symbolic form.

To appreciate how easily such practices can be misunderstood, we can look to another well-known example of ecstatic worship: Black Gospel Church dance in the United States. This form of movement is communal, repetitive, emotionally charged, and unchoreographed—and yet it is safe, disciplined by shared belief, and deeply meaningful to practitioners. Without cultural context, however, outsiders often misinterpret what they see.

Storefront Holy Ghost Praise Break. From youtube.com

The same dynamic played out with the Shakers. Many hostile accounts of their dances came from outsiders peering through windows, projecting fear onto what they did not understand. Shakers were accused of witchcraft, heresy, and moral corruption—especially because they insisted on the spiritual equality of men and women and elevated women as ritual leaders.

These attacks echo Western responses to Buddhist cham, which was long derided as “Devil Dance” or “Demon Dance.” The 19th-century Tibetologist Laurence Waddell dismissed cham as “wanton mummery,” reflecting a colonial mindset that misunderstood embodied religious practice. Shakers, too, were vilified—some of their communal houses were burned and members were violently attacked. Ann Lee herself ultimately died from brutal injuries sustained during such persecution.

Today, Shaker culture and dance are finally being reconsidered with respect. Yet with only three living Shakers remaining, no community can now perform a full traditional dance. There are no historical films or photographs, just material culture, manuscripts, and a legacy of implicit choreography.

One remarkable reconstruction deserves mention. From 1979–93, the Choristers of the University of Kentucky performed annually in a Shaker communal house, presenting a carefully researched and reverent reconstruction of a Shaker worship service, arranged by Terri Valli with Shaker advisers. This was not invention, but restoration—bringing together song, geometry, architecture, and movement in a way that honored Shaker discipline. A filmed version of this work remains one of the most accurate windows into what Shaker dance may have been.

Beautiful in every way. I encourage you to spend the 20 minutes watching this dance film. This annual performance lasted 14 years, becoming a tradition on its own.

Screenshot from A Shaker Worship Service by Salli Terri. From youtube.com

Watching it, one understands how repetition, song, and simple movement can induce a quiet form of ritual absorption. It is not unlike walking the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral or performing the Stations of the Cross: no special training is required, no intention to meditate is necessary. You walk the labyrinth, the labyrinth walks you. You dance the mandala, the mandala dances you.

This is the genius of implicit choreography. Whether in Shaker Gift Sheets or Buddhist Cham Yig mandalas, movement is shaped by structure rather than self. Dance becomes not expression, but practice; not display, but devotion.

It’s a gift to be simple.

Image courtesy of the author

A new feature film about the founder of the Shakers, The Testament of Ann Lee, has recently been released worldwide. I encourage you see this rapturous and savage film if you can. It is rare document that treats a religious dance tradition with respect and insight.

Core of Culture

Related features from BDG

Dance Is the Complete PracticeI Sing the Body ElectricIsadora Duncan, Prajwal Vajracharya, and the Dancers of Huai-nanCodes of Conduct, Ways of Life

More from Ancient Dances by Joseph Houseal
The post ‘Tis a Gift to Be Simple appeared first on Buddhistdoor Global.

Performing a Noh Dance for Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham in Changeling, 1958. Image courtesy of the Merce Cunningham Trust and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library

My backstory with Merce Cunningham

I was fortunate to meet the world-famous modern dance choreographer Merce Cunningham (b. 1919), in Kyoto in 1988, and to spend an entire day together among the beautiful shrines and temples of Higashiyama, the eastern hills of Kyoto. We remained friends and kept up an occasional correspondence with written letters, until his death in 2009. I saw and spoke with him several weeks before his death, and we reminisced about our happy time together in Kyoto.

It so happened in 1988 that I was living in Kyoto and working as artistic director of Parnassus Dancetheatre, a company I founded with expert dance artists from traditions East and West. We’d been preparing our debut show, Mid-Hell Smoke, an English Noh play by poet Michael Fournier, based on a scene from Dante’s Inferno. After a year’s work, we’d used all our available funds and secured an excellent theater, the Kyoto Geijitsu Bunka Kaikan, for the opening night of a three-night run, hoping to entice and invite the dance audience of the Kyoto and Osaka area. Three weeks before our debut, posters appeared all over Kyoto: “Merce Cunningham Dance Company in Kyoto, One Night Only!” Guess which night? Yes, the same date as our debut performance.

So, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to Merce in New York City, asking, “How far does a choreographer have to be from New York City to get a chance to show their work without being overshadowed by one of the Greats?” To my astonishment, Merce wrote back with a beautiful and witty three-page letter, saying if he could, he’d change the date. He asked if we could please spend a day together in Kyoto, enjoying the sites related to Zen and Noh, in which he had a keen interest. I was delighted and agreed in the letter that I mailed back to him.

When the day came, I met Merce at his hotel. He was beaming and friendly, and obviously arthritic. He walked without a cane, but with some difficulty. He wanted to walk in places where you could only walk—no cars, no bikes. I asked him what he wanted to see? He answered, “Nothing. Isn’t that what Japan is famous for?” So, we went to a rock garden with no rocks and to a Shinto Shrine on the top of Yoshida Mountain, where stood an outdoor Noh stage, more than 500 years old. It was there I performed a Noh dance for Merce Cunningham.

Performing a Noh dance for Merce Cunningham

On that fateful day in Kyoto, 1988, when I met Merce Cunningham and spent the day with him, he made it clear he not only wanted to see a Noh dance but knowing that I was studying Noh with a great master, Udaka Michishige, he wanted to see me perform a Noh dance. So I packed a Noh folding fan, the only prop needed for a basic dance, and carried it with me as we went through our day.

When I noticed that he walked with some difficulty, I offered to modify the plans. My intention, after visiting Zen and Shinto gardens, was to ascend to the top of Mount Yoshida, a small mountain within Kyoto itself offering splendid views. At the top, after passing through 100 vermillion gates that adorned a cobbled path, was the hushed Munetada Shrine, an ancient Shinto shrine with a simple raked gravel garden and, remarkably, an archaic outdoor Noh stage on the pinnacle of the peak. The priests knew me well as my home was nearby, and they allowed me to practice on the stage. I was always impeccably respectful. In any case, I’d hoped to take Merce there and perform a Noh dance for him. He thought it was a great idea, and the ascent and performance were the core of our day together.

Walking with care, our slow hike uphill became a pilgrimage, as sunlight darted through the many orange-red gates. Ascending through all the gates was performance art in itself, a transformed walkway of shimmering light, in which we talked about Noh, moving from the belly (Jp: tanden), floating by sliding, and painting with energy.

Vermillion torii gates ascending a mountain. Image courtesy Core of Culture

Once we arrived, Merce took a seat on the stairs of the mountain shrine, as I explained that I would dance Kokaji, about a sword-smith and the Fox god Inari, who comes to assist him in making a sword of divine protection. I was a bit concerned—not that Merce would be unable to take in the dance, but concerned because Noh, in all its inner and outer techniques, is very slow form of movement, too slow for most people. I took out my Noh fan, did the preliminary chanting, and went on to perform a 10-minute dance atop the lovely old Noh stage among the pine trees for an audience of one. I knew he was observing it carefully, taking in everything.

My performance was slow and dignified. I did a fine Noh dance for Merce. When I finished, he said, “I thought it seemed fast?” I explained that I was not wearing an inhibiting mask or large costume, and that I was probably a bit nervous, and that this ancient stage is in fact a bit smaller than a standard Noh stage today. He understood.

Then he asked me, “Would you do it again for me? Three times slower?” And so, I did. The 10-minute dance dilated into a 30-minute shared dance experience with Merce Cunningham, as we together explored the form and energy in a most quiet, intense, open, intimate, artistic way. He was sage. He was friendly. Just as the audience at a Noh play is essential to its moments of meaning and insight, so Merce was completely a part of my performance, the object of his concentration. When the dance was over, half an hour later, neither of us said anything.

Joseph Houseal performing Kokaji on the Gion Shrine Noh stage, 1986. Image courtesy Core of Culture

This article is an excerpt from Buddhist Dances, Movement & Mind, by Joseph Houseal, Motilal Banarsidass, 2025.

Core of Culture

Related features from BDG

Ma: The Art of Empty SpaceMatsukaze: Wind in the PinesThe Ancient Noh Stages of Sado, the Isle of ExileNoh NowPure Land Buddhism in Noh: The Shuramono Plays of ZeamiBeauty and Sadness: Reflections on a Japanese Noh Play

More from Ancient Dances by Joseph Houseal
The post Performing a Noh Dance for Merce Cunningham appeared first on Buddhistdoor Global.

Performing a Noh Dance for Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham in Changeling, 1958. Image courtesy of the Merce Cunningham Trust and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library

My backstory with Merce Cunningham

Performing a Noh dance for Merce Cunningham

Vermillion torii gates ascending a mountain. Image courtesy Core of Culture

Joseph Houseal performing Kokaji on the Gion Shrine Noh stage, 1986. Image courtesy Core of Culture

This article is an excerpt from Buddhist Dances, Movement & Mind, by Joseph Houseal, Motilal Banarsidass, 2025.

Core of Culture

Related features from BDG

More from Ancient Dances by Joseph Houseal
The post Performing a Noh Dance for Merce Cunningham appeared first on Buddhistdoor Global.

Ma: The Art of Empty Space

Itsukushima Shrine Gate, Miyajima Island, Japan. From miyajima.or.jp

“Ma,” the Japanese concept of “space,” is much more than mere physical distance. It’s a nuanced and multifaceted idea that profoundly influences various cultural disciplines in Japan, shaping aesthetics, the sense of time, communication and expectation, even social interactions. When the late singer David Bowie saw—and heard—a Japanese Noh play for the first time, he couldn’t quite sense the rhythms of the music. He called it “variable time flow” and “found rhythm.” After asking the musicians what the rhythm was, they told him it was in eight counts, Bowie looked puzzled. Then they told him, “It’s eight counts . . . with holes in it.” The holes in the rhythm, stretching out the silences between drum strikes, creating distended and dilated theatrical moments, are ma. Emptiness at work, creating an open gateway to embracing deeper thinking and personal experience for the performer and the audience alike.

Zen meditation rock garden, Kyoto. Image courtesy of the author

Ma is an ordinary word too. Anyone familiar with the London Underground will know the common announcement when a subway car stops at a station: “MIND THE GAP between the train and the platform.” The gap is ma: space, interval, active emptiness. The Japanese aesthetic term ma often refers to the intentional creation of space or emptiness as an active element in artistic performance and audience perception. A Shinto shrine in Japan, very much like a Noh stage, is little more than framed space. A Noh stage is essentially an empty cube, elevated and roofed. What is sacred at a Shinto shrine is the space, not the wooden beams. In a Zen rock garden, considered an expression of Buddhist philosophy and aesthetics, the stones are placed to create ma, space, into which the meditating observer can pour their own mind and spirit, traversing transcendent realms of inner meaning by means of the activated ma—emptiness, nothing-ness—as a tool and technique of consciousness cultivation. Pure gestalt: ma within ma, encountering ma; emptiness flowing and stillness active.

Nashiki Shrine, Japan, looking from the shrine stage toward inner shrine. Image courtesy of the author

Ma connects deeply to notions of minimalism and the artistic function of clean lines, whether in architecture or performing arts such as Japanese Noh. There is no real “set” on a Noh stage, rather the main performer, in an elaborate costume and wearing a mask, is the locus and focus: the moving center of the whole. A pine tree, representing the site of the earliest Noh plays, is painted on the back wall. The stage is essentially a box of empty space, filled not only by the physical actor but with vital space, volume, energy, atmosphere, and nothing but the spiritual reality of the main character. And so, the space of a Noh stage is full of memory, poetry, spiritual crisis, and the openness of the aesthetics of emptiness. This allows the perceptions and sensations of the audience to join the performers in the emptiness out of which a Noh play arises, which in fact is intended to be that same emptiness at the core of being—the same emptiness experienced by a Zen monk in meditation or a miko, a Shinto priestess, tracing the abstract patterns of her accumulated spiritual possession.

Noh play Izutsu, from Arthur Waley, The Noh Plays of Japan, 1922, Alfred A. Knopf, New York. Image courtesy of the author

In the Noh play, Izutsu, the ghost of a lover of the poet Narihira, wearing his clothes, peers into a well where they met as children. The decrepit well is a mirror of memories, heartbreak, and madness. Alone in the empty space of a Noh stage, the actor looks into an empty, framed space, and the climax of the drama is emptiness upon emptiness, the very nature of reality. There is space for the audience to participate in the creation of meaning. Ma—the empty space, its framing, and its artistic manipulation create the dynamic interplay of flow and stillness, enabling fluid transitions into non-material dimensions of existence. Physical, rhythmic, and aural space are the essence of Noh performance and of Shinto Miko Mai dances. The dancer glides, turns, and pauses, allowing the empty spaces to become integral parts of the choreography. These pauses aren’t mere breaks or stops. Rather, they are empowered energetic emanations created to amplify the grace and precision of the movements, inviting contemplation and connection with deities, characters, and inner realities.

Ma becomes a canvas for interpretation. The late ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev observed: “If you want to make something more beautiful, do it more slowly.” This aptly describes Japanese Noh’s very slow manner of performing, featuring its beauty. Instead of becoming boring, the slowness highlights the figure in space, trance-like, inviting the audience into a calm, concentrated artistic experience.

This manner of highlighting movement, slowly, in empty space is a universal quality of ma applied to performing arts. Please enjoy here a remarkable short film from the National Ballet of Canada, featuring choreographer-dancer Guillaume Côte, and the cinematography of Jeremy Benning. Emptiness and slowness are used to great effect, finally opening to a new and different emptiness; a quantum flow of open spaces, not negative spaces, defined by the dancer in the dimension of nothing. Dance itself is rarely so well displayed.

Lost in Motion, directed by Ben Shrinian, choreography and dancing by Guillaum Cǒte, director of photography Jeremy Benning. Image courtesy of the National Ballet of Canada

Core of Culture

Related features from BDG

Matsukaze: Wind in the PinesThe Ancient Noh Stages of Sado, the Isle of ExileNoh NowPure Land Buddhism in Noh: The Shuramono Plays of ZeamiBeauty and Sadness: Reflections on a Japanese Noh Play

More from Ancient Dances by Joseph Houseal
The post <i>Ma</i>: The Art of Empty Space appeared first on Buddhistdoor Global.