A traditional Japanese dancer - Iori Kolar

Kyoto path

Encountering Nona Orbach and her world of art therapy has frankly had many ripple effects on me – her love of Kyoto and Japanese culture became a caressing container for me to develop my dance career at that time.

I first met Nona at the bullet train station back from Tokyo when I took the examination of Natori, a title that is given to those who earn a professional name as a Japanese traditional dancer, or Nihon Buyo-ka. 

It may sound strange to those ears that are unfamiliar with these types of Japanese customs; by earning the title, the dancers share the same family name which is the same with the name of the school. By becoming Natori, you officially are part of the family, a sort of clan that inherits and teaches their own style and interpretation of the Japanese dance, Nihon Buyo.

At that time, after two years of staying in Okinawa working as a dance therapist, my husband and I were moving to Kyoto.  

My husband, Rudolph Kolar, since he first meditated in Aikido class during his college years, has found meditation as his life path ever since. He went to India and even published his book about meditation, The Emptiness is Not Empty. Thanks to him, who learned the meditation technique and its philosophy from masters of the East, I also could delve deep into my exploring cultural roots from a somewhat therapeutic perspective. To me the goal was concrete: healing.

Why do I say “therapeutic”? What is the point in my saying “healing”?

I guess that the therapeutic point of view was a way to achieve integrity in my own confused being in the world. Growing up in a Catholic kindergarten and elementary school, my initial pillar of life philosophy was very Christian, more than I thought, I guess. Encountering Christian philosophy again in Seattle University while I took the graduate course to earn the Master’s degree in Art Leadership was funny and helpful. Later to find a wonderful dancer, choreographer and educator, Anna Halprin, and to learn her method of healing through dance and art was a natural course for me.

“Bomb and Hope”, a dance performed at an annual commemoration event, from Hiroshima to Hope at Greenlake, Seattle, WA, USA.

Wouldn’t it be the same theme that we cultivated in our hearts when we co-organized an event in a temple in Kyoto several years ago? We put Nona’s photo works of the moon that were shot, reflected in a mirror in Israel, on tatami floors of the same temple. We were to mimic the tradition of moon-viewing reflected on a pond, as described in old Japanese poems. That happened between dances of myself, accompanied by my aunt’s shamisen playing.

Nona Orbach, talking with the audience at the Jikkoin Temple in Kyoto. On the tatami floor her photograph works of the moon are displayed.

Looking back on Nona’s idea to “mirror” the Japanese custom of viewing the moon reflected on water, it really makes sense now as people do not draw Japanese paintings on walls like Western paintings done on canvas. I am aghast to notice that she really mirrored the culture to sit, eat, sleep and think on tatami by replacing the moon on water with the photographed moon, reflected in a mirror in Israel.      

Now, as a token of gratitude for my dance career that I retired from a year ago (20 years altogether, to my surprise), my husband and I are living in the northern Kyoto where you can see mountains and the ocean. It is also the house that my grandmother built as a summer house when I was born. She was also a person of Japanese traditional dance.

Iori Kolar:

chrysanthemumcoronarium@gmail.com

The Good Enough Studio In Japanese:

https://thegoodenoughstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Good-Enough-Studio-Japanese.pdf