Mastery and Training for the Arts

Kodo: ”Strong Past”.

STEPHEN ATKINS [Vancouver] This month we have been reading Kodo: Ancient Ways, by Kensho Furuya. It is a collection of editorial columns from a martial arts training publication. Furuya is an aikido master and a Zen Buddhist priest centered in Los Angeles. Even though the writings are on the discipline of martial arts, they really are a treatise on a method for approaching training of any discipline. In reading the columns, one can draw many comparisons between the place of education, the role of the student, the responsibility of the teacher and what it means to train, in both worlds of martial arts and performance.

One of the most impacting comparisons can be found in the articles concerned with “why we train”. The articles advocate an approach to training with the “everyday mind”; meaning that the time spent in the training room is not special, it is an everyday activity like brushing your teeth. If you allow it to become an element of your everyday practice as a human being, the training augments every facet of your life, nit just your life on the boards. Theatre practitioners are especially guilty of not maintaining their peak performance levels. Why? I don’t know, maybe it is because naturalism and realism in film and on the stage have made it necessary for the artist to make things look effortless, as if they’re drawn from life. Somewhere along the way we started believing what we want our audience to believe.

Would a dancer or an athlete do 3-4 years of training and then say to herself “Done that, I’m all trained up now” and expect to be in competitive condition? Probably not, but the truth is a lot of stage/film actors do. One can point to examples of performers who make a decent living without maintaining their studio time, but why point to exceptions when it is possible to be both exceptional and well-trained?

I approached reading this book with a bit of scepticism, wondering if I would be made subject to commercialised eastern philosophy, but was pleasantly surprised and eventually inspired to include this book as reading for the second year curriculum in our Voice and Creative Movement courses.

The posts under the category “Book Discussion” are a collection of notes and correspondences I had with my students. I am very pleased to read that people are using them as a source of study. They are opinions only and are not to be taken as a replacement for reading the primary source. I hope you find them to be a good starting point. Thanks for reading!
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