Performance/Installation by Sharon Alward
Rachel Browne Theatre, Winnipeg, Canada. May 16-24, 2008
A Commissioned Work for Video Pool Media Art Centre's 25th Anniversary.
BUSHI is about transformation through the use of ritual and technology in a nature based projected video environment.
The project BUSHI is a performance/installation that took place over a six-day period. Each day, during regular gallery hours there was a schedule of martial arts practice and meditation.
There were 6 video projectors, a bridge, a tea house a water feature and 2 flat screen monitors.
The impetus for the Bushi installation evolved from my background as a western artist and my exposure to eastern ideas about aesthetics. While the western worldview of aesthetics is concerned with concepts of beauty as they relate to the arts; the primary aesthetic concept at the heart of traditional Japanese culture is harmony in all things. The Japanese worldview is nature-based and concerned with the beauty of studied simplicity and harmony with nature.
BUSHI as a concept is a combination of a Confucian approach reflecting honesty and fairness, and Zen Buddhism, which promoted austerity, detachment and "no-mind"; concentration as an ultimate approach to combat situations as well as daily life, and considered martial arts as a way to self-realization and to the expression of one's Buddha-nature.
Warriors lived by Bushido (the way of the warrior); it was a way of life. Bushi includes: a life of humility; a life of labor; a life of service; a life of prayer and gratitude; and a life of meditation. The key is daily regularity.
The Bushido and its ties to Zen claim the path to enlightenment is through the practice of physical rituals. This research led me to an interest in the warrior mindset of both martial training and daily life or martial arts; in my search for the soul of the modern warrior.
My daily rituals incorporated Goju Ryu Karate (the way of hard and soft), and Iaido, the art of cutting and drawing the sword to develop awareness, centeredness, sincerity and a calm mind, and mastery of the sword. Iai-do encompasses a modern day reflection of the morals of the classic warrior and is a unique blend of the Confucianism, Zen, Taoism and the harshness of Bushido.
My research into the bodily dimension of knowledge has always explored concepts of ritual. I have examined ritual gestures in an attempt to reassert the connectedness of things and to examine the concept "leading with the body and the mind follows "(C. Levi-Strauss). My performances and video projects have examined rituals based on Orthodox Jewish prayers and the rituals of Christian ascetics and martyrs. While most of my earlier work examined Judeo- Christian expressions of compassion and mercy, i.e.: Jewish mystics (August 2002) the Hebrew Bible (Covenant 2001), Christianity's seven deadly sins and gothic text (Christian Woman of Virtue 2000), western notions of abjection and redemption, (Pneuma 2006), the Christian New Testament (St. John the Baptist 1998, Receiving 2001) mercy and grace (Reconciliation 2002) I am now interested in expanding into other cultural ideas of art and spirituality.
The project BUSHI explores diverse cultural practices to reconstitute ideas and rituals in new ways. Bushi is a retrieval of various cultural resources to challenge ethics, meaning and the role of the artist in the current plural realities.
