The Unknown Dancer

"The Unknown Dancer in the Neighborhood"
Written and Directed by Suguru Yamamoto
Japan Society, New York
January 10, 2020

-- By Tom Phillips

Wataru Kitao as the Unknown Dancer.

                                      
Mayday! Mayday! Is a cry that comes up repeatedly in Suguru Yamamoto’s dance/drama “The Unknown Dancer in the Neighborhood.” It means “help me” in French, but it seems to fall on deaf ears in Tokyo, the setting for this theater piece by and for a new generation of Japanese artists.

Despairing dramas about alienated people were a staple of the last century.  What makes this fresh is that it suggests alienation is actually the flip side of community. We feel disconnected only because we're connected.



“The Unknown Dancer” is a whole cast of characters, played by one brilliant young dancer-actor, Wataru Kitao, equally at home with hip-hop and ballet, in male and female roles, as a child or an old person, as a human being or an animal. The ability to cross so many lines is a feat of acting empathy – the very opposite of disconnecting. 

Pinker's Paradise

-- By Tom Phillips

Harvard professor Steven Pinker is out with another of his weighty books about how the world is getting better all the time. This one's called "Enlightenment Now." Readers should appreciate his contrarianism; his mass of statistics about the world's rising prosperity, improving health, reduced violence and increasing personal satisfaction is a welcome antidote to studies that show humans growing more lonely, pessimistic and frightened.

There's a fly in the cream, though. While Pinker's global stats generally show that happiness rises along with income, here in the United States, the pursuit of happiness has ground to a halt.  In recent decades, Pinker reports, American men have gotten no happier, while women have actually grown less happy. This could simply reflect the stagnation in middle-class incomes since the 1970s.  But happiness is not an isolated phenomenon -- it reflects much broader societal trends.

Advice to Millennials

-- By Tom Phillips

Many years ago, when I was 17, I remember telling my girlfriend in a panicked tone – I’ve gotta figure out something I can be great at – the world’s best.    It was beginning to sink in that my pro basketball dreams were going nowhere, and I needed a substitute.  What could it be?  Acting?  No, she said, not acting.  

A few years later I took my confusion to a favorite professor, who must have been feeling cynical that day.  What can I be, I pleaded.  His advice was to become the world’s leading expert in a field not many people were interested in – Spanish cookery, for example.  I scoffed at that.  Soon, I set out for San Francisco, where I hoped to launch my career as an idolized folk-singer. 

Fast-forward thirty years or so to middle age, when a colleague of mine, a celebrated TV journalist, asked me what I was doing with myself.   I described my modest position as a newswriter, and he looked at me in alarm.  “That’s a wasted life!” he said.   

Wounded, I rallied.  Wait a minute – That’s not all I do.  I play music, I teach, I’m a minister’s spouse, a father of many.  He quickly apologized, but I could see where his values lay.  He felt that anyone with any talent should use it to the utmost – and not let other, lesser goals stand in his way. This fellow had dropped out of college to pursue journalism, his health was awful and his personal life was an unholy mess.  But he loved his work, and he was very famous, and rich. 

I think of these exchanges because recently a 16-year-old granddaughter of mine repeated, almost verbatim, my teenage panic speech:  I have to find something I’m great at!  Volunteering in a hospital had soured her on the medical field, so she needed a substitute.  What could it be?  Acting? 

The world is awash in bad advice these days, and has been for some time -- maybe since the dawn of the industrial revolution, when the one-trick pony entered the ring, and people began to hear that they should decide early what they want to “be,” and narrow their focus.  The new role models were industrial tycoons, or scientists in search of a cure, or mad artists, or fabulously wealthy financiers. Today we admire relentless entrepreneurs like Mark Zukerberg, pasty zillionaires like Warren Buffett, super-athletes like Tom Brady and Tiger Woods, and actors and rock stars who barely went to high school.  They’re all great at something.  

It was not always thus.   Back in ancient times, the goal of education was “mens sana in corpore sano” -- a sound mind in a sound body -- and learning was physical as well as mental.  And the ideal was not greatness or “expertise” in one subject, but a broad competency – the ability to recognize the soundness of an idea in almost any field of knowledge.  Up until modern times an educated person was able to move between fields of endeavor – applying knowledge of the arts and sciences to create, to invent, to do battle, to think and act across the whole range of human activity.   Such “renaissance men” are rare today, but they still exist.