An era ended before our international travels were fully restored as before. Thus, the Seiji Frostfield Workshop was the longest prepared but latest program to be finalized since the start of Night School. The workshop was the longest prepared since the start of “Thick Garden Thoughts”, and the latest to be confirmed due to visa constraints. Despite this, the workshop was filled to capacity within a short period of time, with some performance art enthusiasts traveling to Chengdu from other provinces.
Overview of the workshop:
Unlike most performance artist workshops, which impose strict limits on the number of participants and their personal artistic backgrounds, Seiji Shimoda gave the broadest number and requirements. As a result, the workshop was attended by participants from a wide variety of backgrounds, including poets, healers, curators, modern dancers, students, and many others, in addition to artists who are already creating performance art. Despite the large number of participants and their diverse backgrounds, the workshop lasted only two days, and excluding the final performance, there were only nine hours of face-to-face learning and communication with Seiji Shimoda. During the nine hours, Seiji Shimoda’s theoretical/historical narrative of performance art only took up a very small portion of the time; more time was spent immersing himself in the interaction of the participants, doing some propositional exercises and discussions together. Seiji Shimoda says that workshop teaching is personalized, there is no standard textbook, creativity is stimulated in a more free state, and he enjoys the process of creating with his students.
Feelings of some participants of Seiji Shimoda’s workshop:
Gan Zhipeng:
During the short two-day performance workshop with Mr. Shimoda, I realized the charm of the body as a material medium for performance art expression. On the first day, Mr. Shimoda talked about the three elements of performance: one is time, the second is space, and the third is the body. As an important carrier, the body can be divided into two coordinates, vertical and horizontal, from our skeletal muscles, and we should pay attention to the interaction between the front and back of the body, the left and right of the body, and the lifting and sinking of the body when we express ourselves. The first body proposition exercise teacher gave two key points: first, the body to express the relationship between space and time, as an expression, to pinpoint the accuracy of the expression of time, that is, to have the concept of time, the time to pinpoint, the expression of the strength and depth of emotion will be very accurate. This very important awareness became a very important part of the two-day workshop, throughout the entire core; secondly, to give an abstract concept (what is love) to express.
Ou Tingting:
Mr. Shimoda is very gentle and fraternal, with a kind of charisma that only comes from a lifetime in the art industry. Mr. Shimoda uses his own stories, his own actions and his own body to guide us to think about: what is important in life? What do we create for? In my own case, the Academy taught us how to flesh out both the form and the content of our work, how to create like a professional artist. When we are accustomed to using contemporary art as a technical tool, the works become a bit scratchy and float above real life. But in Mr. Frostfield’s workshop, I felt a powerful humanistic concern. He spoke slowly, just like my grandfather, asking us to think about our relatives and friends, and the blue sky and white clouds. It’s not about art, it’s just for us to learn to listen to every joint and every muscle of our being. A wise old man, just speaking the simplest of truths, pierced through the dilemmas encountered by young people.
Li Chao Liu:
From Xi’an to Chengdu, the friendship with SHIMODA Sang grew thicker and thicker, I thought of him as my grandfather, and like a self-involved host, I hoped he would have the best memories in China. I automatically felt that he was tired, although he looked nothing like a 70 year old man, the first day of the workshop after dinner to send him back to his room in the Thick Garden, not a single light was open on the road, and it took a long time of searching by the light of a cell phone for him to recognize the staircase going up to his room on the second floor; I wanted to see the environment in which he was living, and I don’t know whether it was courteous or not, but I was shocked and exasperated when I probed and peered into the interior of his room, the quilts were spread out on the floor , backpack thrown in the corner, two steamed buns and a bowl of unfinished porridge on the table. He slept on the floor, he said it was his habit. Help him buy shampoo, I feel deeply, if it is me, I sleep where it does not matter, but he is almost 70, the heart is inevitably a little sad. The good thing is that SHIMODA always seems to be energetic and the workshop is well organized. I truly felt that he was very tired, but two days and nine hours is really too short, I don’t think it’s enough for me to understand his thoughts and methods, let alone imagine out of thin air the ultimate propositions he was considering at that stage of his life. So basically, it was like improvisation, moving my body with my feelings.
Li Rui:
A few years ago, as an audience member, I saw Seiji Shimoda’s live works at the UP-ON Up International Live Art Festival, and this time I had the opportunity to participate in Seiji Shimoda’s workshop, and I am very grateful for the preparation of the UP-ON Up Performance Art Archive. I am very grateful for the preparation of UP-ON Up Performance Art Archive. It was very kind to see Mr. Seiji Shimoda again. In the workshop, Mr. Shimoda briefly shared with us an overview of the development of avant-garde art in Japan after World War II, as well as the history of performance art and his personal artistic journey. We did not do a lot of physical exercises, but rather constantly inspired us to try to find ways of expression that closely match our personal experiences, and in his verbal exchanges, he revealed his extremely pious attitude towards art and his love of life. As a former artist, he encourages us young artists to try more and to make art as a continuous work. Thank you, Mr. Shimoda, and salute you!
Li Yao Yao:
Frost Field’s white ipad can’t contain the continuously compressed and prolonged music inside. Suddenly, I feel like the waking moment in Inception, because of its existence, everyone’s body has a common “that one”, or everyone has a “common body”, like a line with many dots, and each dot is searching for its own seemingly solid support, and each dot is searching for its own seemingly solid support. Each point is looking for its own seemingly solid support, whether it is bending, vertical, falling, or still, and at the end a part of it remains in the dream, not very clear, but the music is still there. It feels like it’s a good long story, and Frostfield drops some things in, and focuses them some more, and you can hear them falling to the ground.
Liu Zheli:
When I went to Frost Field’s workshop, on the first morning, he kept emphasizing that no one can judge your life, and it’s the same with performance art. Although Frostfield spoke English most of the time, I couldn’t quite understand all of it. But no matter what you do or how you do it, his eyes are always calm……. When we hadn’t met yet, I saw that he retweeted a short video taken by a student from the last workshop of him walking in Frostfield’s clogs. When we met, I had a hard time not noticing his feet. The teeth underneath his clogs, the edges of which rubbed against the ground in an almost rounded fashion, would land on his heels when he stood. His feet were a little big, a little red, a little swollen, like a rusty kitchen knife. For the first time I wanted to be a whetstone and touch his feet, even if I couldn’t plane them for him. Later when I was practicing I asked for his help, but he laughed and shook his head. I actually expected this to be the case, and always felt that he was exploring individuality, that he made things inwardly, but many young people in China don’t, and people try to build relationships to get understanding to find a place. And when Frostfield does his summaries, he doesn’t suggest how you should do it or how to do it better.
MingYi Wei:
The biggest feeling I got from Mr. Shumata’s workshop is that I started to really pay attention to my body. The body is the external bearer of the brain, the body is the embodiment of the state, when you start to stretch and open your limbs, when the body first action, it will be better than excessive brain thinking after the behavior, to quickly enter a state of physical presence, so that I forget too many flashes of distractions, a behavior of solidification brings a sense of full power. In the afternoon before the act of workshop participants began the next night, I lay on my back on the grass, burying my face as far as I could in the grass in a comfortable yet contorted position, the smells, touches, and sights hitting me, I could see the bugs crawling close by, the smell of the earth and the touch of the wet grass, the sun rolling down my back, the sounds of everything around me. I’m not doing anything, just feeling the slow flow.
Wei Zhen:
Seiji Frostfield keeps bringing up the occurrence and background of performance art in Eastern Europe in his three or four talks; history and the human condition inspire these kinds of performance art festivals, and a kind of pioneering nature takes place here. However, for more specific time and place, and for individuals, what they are facing may not be the same as the Eastern Europe of the other time and place. Just as revolutions cannot happen in different times and places. More than once, I have talked about the fact that it is cheap to be an artist, and that I can keep doing it. But my feelings at the moment seem to point to a fundamental aspect of performance art, or art in general: the more universal capitalized human being. Boris, Alastair and Seiji Shimoda are all from different regions, but they are all willing to spend their time and lives to conduct free teaching and workshops, and all of them use their lives time and time again to draw out what this vanguard of performance art is facing: the fate of the whole human race and one of the directions to move forward in the plight of the individual.
Yi Ran:
If the works generated at the performance site must be called performance, it is because of its own inexorable lack, which ultimately dilutes the intensity of life, and life is the action itself. In the class, Frost Field asked: How to express love through behavior? This is close to what I think about on a daily basis: how to construct a revolution in life with love? It was a state of detachment from habit, in some subtleties, nearest to inspiration, never disappearing, the same as breathing, sleeping, it became an instinct, in which we practiced over and over again how to live, survive, grow, think about our life as it presents itself in society, inspiring us to love and act positively even when we are in a desperate situation. After leaving Chengdu, I had several whitish, silent dreams, in which my falling, dragged, used body accompanied recently met people in different spaces, who were both spectators and participants in the action. The immediate experience is everything. Behavior can slip through the cracks of everyday life as a brief and esoteric thought.
Yang Ran:
If learning is a choice, then I choose to learn about the various possibilities of “life posture” – with this in mind, I signed up for Seiji Shimoda’s workshop. A few years ago, I saw him at UP-ON, where he used a “posture” to remain motionless for about half an hour, until time completely divested him of his individual presence. From the time he stood until the time he finished, I was with him, not moving until I finished my own pose. It wasn’t a teaching session, but he had given so much already. Those few minutes of silence removed individual history and so-called meaning. I think this is a kind of chance.
You Zhengyu:
It is possible to move from the body as understood in modern dance to theater and performance, although each of them (the three) uses the body as a material or a medium with a different emphasis and degree, or in a different order of priority. The three: modern dance, theater, and performance, can be infused and intersected. We say that a person who dances retraces mountains and rivers, and a person who enters theater or performance regains life. I have participated in more than 80 modern dance studies, 3 modern dance performances and several private modern dance improvisation SOLOs, 1 theatre workshop, and then on the 25th and 26th of last month, I participated in the Seiji Frostfield performance art workshop organized by UP-ON in Chengdu’s Thick Garden. On the first day of the workshop, I felt these three key words: friendly, calm and enjoyment. On the second day of the workshop, he said that the three key words of performance art are: time, space and body.
Coconut:
I love the Thick Garden, where there are big banyan trees to climb, walk barefoot on the grass, and swing on the swings. During the two-day workshop, I met Mr. Shimoda and made many friends. I like Mr. Shimada’s concept of creation, he always goes back to love, back to the body, back to the process of birth, growth and death of life, back to the most fundamental human experience. As I write this paragraph, I am reminiscing about how I felt when I was in the nature, playing and doing performance art with you. Mr. Frost seems to have a kind of magic, able to adjust the whole field to a comfortable, warm and tolerant frequency. I like how he said that there is no need to judge, and that everyone’s work is a cohesion of his or her own perception and experience of life. This is my first attempt at performance art, and I’m grateful to Mr. Shumada and everyone else for bringing me this experience.
Zhang Lu:
When I met with Mr. Shumada in Xi’an and saw his work for the first time, it was very spontaneous and hard to summarize with my existing words. I felt that it was a very different way of creation, with no obvious narrative, and I had to give up on reading the logic of it, and only felt it. The first physical exercise we did in Chengdu after the workshop was “Love”, which centered around the theme of love, imagining a certain state of being loved or being in love. It was an interesting proposition, and unlike my previous improvisations where I started with the material, this approach seemed to suggest to me that what you want to express, what you are saying, is what is important.
Perhaps out of the desire for international art exchange after the end of the sealing control, or perhaps as a tribute to Seiji Shioda’s 30 years of continuous participation in the global exchange and promotion of performance art, in short, we thank all the participants for their enthusiastic response to the performance art workshop. Last but not least, the Thick Garden Art Center, as the co-organizer of the workshop, provided Seiji Shioda with full board and lodging, and fully supported the details of the workshop, for which we would like to express our gratitude.
Performance art is a way to think about everything about our lives, an enjoyable way to think. ——Seiji Shimoda
Seiji Shimoda
Artist、poet、director and founder of NIPAF, born and living in Nagano, Japan.
Born in Nagano in 1953, he was involved in a movement with Japanese students at his high school in 1969, took a year off from school in 1971, and then traveled throughout Japan by hitchhiking. He then began writing poetry and publishing his own small poetry magazine, and one night in 1973, while trying to write a poem, he discovered a new form of expression, physical expression, and in 1975 he began organizing some experimental live performances in Osaka with friends, and in 1977 he moved to Tokyo and began to use other spaces for his solo performances, which in Japan are called “live house”. “live house.”
“We initiated this throughout Japan, not only in Tokyo but also in local towns and cities, and almost every weekend there were a lot of events taking place in the space known as live housed, not only music but also experimental dance, theater, poetry readings, and so on, all of which developed widely in Japan.” From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, he traveled around Japan with his own performances, poetry recitations, powerful body movements, singing, and painting.In 1982, he went to Paris for three months. Upon his return to Japan, he began to organize alternative art festivals (or alternate art festivals) with many of his young artist friends.In 1986, he again had the opportunity to go to Europe, where he was young, avant-garde, and became recognized as an outstanding artist. Since then, he has been invited to Western Europe almost every year.
In 1993, he founded the Japan Performance Art Festival (NIPAF). He now teaches performance art at two universities in Tokyo (Musashino Art University and Quiff University). He also regularly organizes performance art workshops internationally. Many performance art festivals in Asia are also under his influence.
