In the times of social media, I become nostalgic when I see young people talking about their experiences. Today, it is very easy to gain access to all kinds of information: textual, visual, and it is easy to obtain various material goods from the shops all around the globe, regardless of where you are. When I was a young girl, such possibilites did not exist, and when you had an interest that piqued your curiosity, you had to try hard to get hold of the information about it.
When I discovered Japanese dance sometime in 2002, there was no such thing as a “dance video” that you could see online. Actually, my first discovery came through a text: I was reading such a beautiful description in a book, that I immediately got curios, what kind of dance it is? There were no photos, let alone videos, it was just plain text, black on white. From this text, I had to imagine in my head what kind of dance it could be, so it was all about my imagination. Of course, in those times, you cannot simply go online and watch video like young people can do today. First of all, there was no YouTube. Second, even if there were some similar websites, like video directories or yellow pages dedicated to video clips, the connection was only a dial-up, meaning that downloading few megabytes (yes, megabytes) could last several hours (and be irreversibly broken any time when your family had to use a phone!). So, my second insight about dance was through a photo. Of course, you could find photos more easily, so I was admiring various poses and their aesthetics on the minuscule, low-resolution pictures that I could find online. My very first video I received on a video tape (VHS) from Japan. It came by post one day while I was at school and it was so exotic at the time (the dance, not the VHS :D), that my whole family watched it even though they never heard about Japanese dance before! On the tape, there were only three short dances, so for the next several years I replayed those dances over and over again as it was my only source of information. I could have easily become a “master” of only three dances, judging by the amount of times that I replayed that tape 😂 (but, of course, it is too difficult to learn by video).
Books remained my main source of imagination for many years. But, there were no books about Japanese dance in the bookstores in my city (or country), and ordering online was very expensive. Not only that, it required inputing credit card details, which my parents refused to do due to security concerns (Internet was still a novelty in those days and most people were afraid to use credit cards online). Sometime around 2002 or 2003, my cousin went to the USA to pursue doctoral studies, so I could finally ask her to bring me a book (in America, you could always find so many things!), so when she returned, I finally got my first book about Japanese dance. It doesn’t contain much text, but it has beautiful high-quality pictures, that you could not find on the internet. Out of all these pictures, the most memorable one for me was a photo of the book author’s dance teacher and his dance pose, in which his face had a very soft and melancholic expression. I remember that I thought at that time, that a dance that can evoke such profound feelings has to be something important to know more about!
Even though I am not old, I don’t feel particularly young either. My early experiences and memories are quite different than those of young people today, but I would never trade places despite perceived conveniences . I think in today’s age that is exclusively visual, there is no space for your own imagination. I did not know anything about the dance I wanted to learn, but the fact that I could imagine it just from the text was enough for me, so whatever I saw or experienced afterwards did not change my initial perception.
The beauty of growing up in times before “visual turn” lies precisely in the importance of text, which used to be the norm of experiencing, forming and expanding one’s own imaginary landscape. Nowadays, when realities are constructed, determined and pre-mediated by all kinds of visual output, it becomes more and more difficult to understand how a simple passage of text can invoke different kinds of invisible experiences. Those are left unshown and unspoken, but often remain with us longer than visually generated narratives of today…
