Love the meaning of life for Pappa Tarahumara

Love the meaning of life for Pappa Tarahumara

By Mehru Jaffer

JAKARTA (JP): Hiroshi Koike is a Japanese but the 45-year-old
artistic director of Pappa Tarahumara is no island. For Koike
needs to get out of his island all the time to be able to
experience as much of the world as possible. This is the only way
he can keep not only his art inspired, but himself alive.

Participating in the ongoing Third Art Summit Indonesia 2001
International Festival on Contemporary Performing Arts at Graha
Bakti Budaya Taman Ismail Marzuki, it seems timely to have Koike
from the crescent shaped island country off the coast of East
Asia perform here.

Koike said that a life without love is quite meaningless. Yet
human beings also find it difficult to live in harmony with each
other. What he does in his own life is to keep trying to build as
many bridges as possible, without ever giving up hope.

Koike may look like the typical Japanese, famous for being shy
and uncommunicative, but to witness the mild mannered artiste on
stage is to see the seemingly reticent Japanese tear his heart
open and offer it in the form of uninhibited songs, dance, music
and other theatricals to whoever is interested in lending a ear.

His lifeline seems to lie in maximum communication with as
many people as possible.

For Koike there is no wall in the world that is so sacred that
it cannot be pulled down if all it does is to keep people and
societies apart from each other. He tackles the language barrier
by allowing his actors to use pristine sound instead. He uses
lights, props and will bathe the stage in different hues to
create a particular mood for his audience so that it is able to
feel what his motivations are.

In the absence of written text he makes maximum use of the
body language so that his actors and dancers, the set and costume
designers, too, are able to transcend stifling conventions and
traditions, making it possible to still be able to speak to
different audiences anywhere in the world.

To conquer other contentious crisis over sex, caste, race and
religion he makes his male characters wear a blouse and a skirt
while the women may appear in loose trousers and a shirt. For him
no rite, ritual or tradition is more important than the human
being itself. He has named his dance troupe after a tribe in
Mexico that lives in a remote mountain area called the land of
Tarahumara and which inspires him immensely with its colorful
lifestyle and customs bringing much joy to Koike.

It is now two decades that he has been on the road, traveling
around with Pappa Tarahumara sharing the wonder he feels for this
world of ours through poems, sculptor and painting
created on stage, not necessarily with words and in the hope of
making that precious connection with the other.

To Jakarta, Koike has brought Love Letter from the series
Island, staged for the first time in 1997. The Island is used as
a symbol as people have over millenniums crawled into their own
little world to create barriers, often not even knowing whether
they do so out of loathing or love.

Love Letter is the draft of the second chapter of the four
piece performance taken from Dostoevski's The Demons that is
a review of the failures and accomplishments of the century. The
four-chapter extravaganza -- including I was Born, So What and
The Sound of Future Emptiness -- is to be staged in its entirety
later this year and will also convey the expectations human
beings have of the 21st century.

The two men and three women performing in Love Letter appear
to use all the creative energy in their power to try and iron out
extreme positions taken by men or women, people like me or you,
in times of peace or war. During the one-hour performance, what
they do on stage makes ample sense, but often it does not.

That, by the way, is no problem, assures Koike, as his sole
intention is that the performance be seen by as many as possible,
and above all that it be felt.

Whether it succeeds in baffling or bewitching is of least
importance to Koike.