by Anna Kunnecke
I took dance lessons,
like many little girls, at the unassuming studio in my neighborhood. My
family was living in Ichigao, perched precariously on a dinky train line
between Yokohama and Tokyo. Two afternoons a week I would stop in at my
train station for fried chicken sustenance and walk down the block to
class. With the other girls I would pull on my clingy pink tights and
black leotard, dip my slippered toes into the crunchy rosin, and start
stretching.
But that's where the similarity
to most childhood ballet classes ended. My teacher, by chance, was the
distinguished dancer Kuniko Kisanuki. My parents had no idea who
she was; they had just signed me up for a local class so that I would stop tap
dancing on the kitchen table. And to me, she was simply Sensei:
beautiful, beloved, feared--she was incredibly thin, wore long black wide
pants, was graceful and strong and fast.
No toe shoes for us; she
said they ruined dancers' feet. We went through the preliminary ballet
plies and turns, but then she encouraged us to stomp, leap, writhe; we danced
trees and walls and animals; we danced ugly and wild and thrilling. It
dawned on my parents that this was no ordinary dance class when the annual
concert rolled around. While other girls tried on pink tutus, we were
handed nude body stockings with tatters hanging off them. All over Japan,
little ballerinas danced scenes from The Nutcracker and Gisele, while we
marched barefoot in military formation to Joan Baez peace ballads. We
fought, died, were reborn, and then the dance morphed into an enormous rolling
cycle depicting the turning, twisting, churning evolution of the human
race. I went back and watched the scratchy video a few years ago,
and my heart raced to see a throng of little girls turned into a work of art so
wild and powerful.
My mother, brave soul,
took me downtown to see my teacher dance solo. It was like nothing I had
ever seen before. Kisanuki-sensei, she of the lithe body and sharp voice,
quivered onstage as a caterpillar. Slowly, slowly, so slowly that I could
hardly stand it, she inched her way into a tight little cocoon; then she
crawled her way out in a dramatic rebirth. Tefu-tefu, the dance was called. I later learned that the title is a
classic literary reference, but I imagined that tefu-tefu was the sound
that butterflies made when they beat their wings for the first time. In a
simple white dress, on a bare stage before hundreds of people, she danced death
and rebirth in all its raw, naked urgency.
When the caterpillar died, and my teacher's body was limp on the stage, my mother clasped my hand so that I wouldn't be afraid. But it was the rebirth that took my breath, the violent rending of it, the joy that made me want to cry, my familiar teacher transformed into something leaping and flying. Instead of taking our flowers straight backstage, I had to run to the bathroom to weep in private when it was over, unclasping my mother's hand, sensing that something new was starting, something that had steps I'd never imagined, something I would learn to count out on my own.
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