The act of meandering—at once mindless and mindful—informs and infuses Tatsunari Ota’s ISHI GA ARU, guiding the collection of gestures and fleeting moments that populate its runtime. In it, anchored in the randomness of encounter, an unnamed woman (An Ogawa) wanders around an unidentified town; at first she attempts to orient herself by way of scenery, asking a stranger for “local attraction”, inquiring after an allegedly nearby Kawamura castle and some ruins. But she soon abandons the effort to instead go with the flow.
As a wandering species, travelling lies at the root of our human experience and evolution. In a larger historical canvas, it gave birth to our modernities—now plural—as etched and embodied in our collective memories, wounds, and even traumas. Over the past few years we have been forced to reconsider the way we move in and through the world—whether a small step or a long voyage—and in the process, realise the virtue of movement in the minutiae of our daily life. Movement, we remember, enables encounters.
For this very reason, to me at least, movement is indeed sacral. Within the realm of yogic/ Indic knowledge, movement is at the core of the secondchakra (one of the seven energy centres identified inside the human body). It is called Svadhisthana in Sanskrit and is indeed often translated as “sacral chakra”. Its element is water, and it is considered the location of our creativity, strategically flanked between the first chakra, Muladhara, our sense of home and groundedness, as well as the third chakra, Manipura, our projection of self and desire. Movement is often contrasted with stillness but we have increasingly come to understand them as inextricably related, just two sides of a coin. There is always stillness in movement, and vice versa.
Tatsunari Ota’s wanderer roams around and across different terrains in the span of her day. She’s casually invited to play football with a bunch of kids, and accepts. Treading along a shallow river, she meets a stranger skimming stones on the water. For an afternoon, they engage in a sense of childlike play, stacking and skimming stones, balancing a wooden branch so it won’t fall to the ground. She finds a particularly well-shaped stone which he accidentally throws in the water; it disappears. She drifts, he follows, she moves further along. He insists on finding her stone, she shrugs it off. Eventually they part. In our advanced and layered experience of modernities, we must at times be reminded to surrender to what is.
Nature is omnipresent here, but rather than simply a stunning, beautiful backdrop, it carries a subdued, intertwined energy between features and forms. It is there, less a breathtaking vista than an immersive surrounding. Clear, shallow river with its sandy terrain interchanges with grassy soil. It’s summer.
As daylight gives way to darkness envelopes, the protagonist arrives in an unmarked structure, finding an empty, unlocked room to charge her phone before soon dozing off on the sofa. It’s a progression that feels as natural as one’s body, as rhythmic as the seasons; the woman drifts off following a departure only to wake upon another encounter, this time a four-legged being, the only character in the film with a name.
ISHI GA ARU floats between movement and stillness, grounded in a flow of inner and outer being and beingness. It suggests the state we were forced to collectively inhabit over three years ago—that fateful March—but also the recklessness of forgetting.
The collection of fleeting movements in ISHI GA ARU echoes the Taoist principle of wu wei (non-doing, non-forcing). This act of “being natural” reflects the understanding that we are all nature ourselves, not just a part of it. From my own corner of the universe, working as curator/dramaturg within the scope of choreographic practice, ISHI GA ARU somehow finds resonances with the two short films I watched a while ago in an exhibition in Surakarta, Central Java. The presentation was to commemorate1000 days since the passing of the movement teacher Suprapto Suryodarmo (1945-2019). Both films feature Suprapto as captured by artist Karolina Nieduza, being and moving—for all that we can distinguish the two—throughout the natural locations of a beach and a rocky mountain.1The films are MOVING WITH NYAI RORO KIDUL (2014) and I WILL MEET YOU THERE (2022), the latter was recently premiered in Pool Movement Art Film Berlin. As in the flesh, on each screen, Suprapto blurs the boundary of the self and the surrounding nature, a beingness that flows from a deep consciousness of oneness.
To just be, we need to re-member.
Helly Minarti is slowly realising that the way she moves and wanders is more akin to a nomad.
