Densho Digital Archive - Martha Nishitani Interview (denshovh-nmartha-01-0037)

<Begin Segment 37>

SY: And yet in this day and age, people accept contemporary dance, modern dance, as easily as ballet, if not more so now.

MN: Yeah. More so. But it's not the same thing. It's, most of the dance, well, some of it has meaning and feeling, but a lot of it is a spectacle or to entertain, not exactly to say anything profound. (Technique has developed greatly over the year.)

SY: Oh. So today's dancing is quite, are you saying it's quite different from the dancing you did?

MN: Well, it's more for entertainment, like on TV and generally speaking, they do fun things.

SY: Like, like what would be a fun thing?

MN: Well, it's a rhythmic thing or a popular song, and dancing to it. There isn't the seriousness of (...) the modern musician or the modern artist, the modern dancer.

SY: When you say serious, do you mean in that it's not conveying a message?

MN: No. It's that the subject matter is not -- just entertaining and saying something for fun. When, they don't go home with something to think about.

SY: Well, for you then, would you say that emotions were very important to inspire your choreography?

MN: Well, you're emotion, emotionally involved in your choreography, I think. And it depends upon the subject, how intense you're involved. Now, right now, I'm very interested in the welfare of domestic and wild animals, as well as ecology, trees, and things like that. But I, though I'm really involved in these things and donate a lot to these two causes, I can't see it in dance yet. I don't know whether I ever will, but I do have a profound feeling for these two subjects that a lot of other people do, too. And a lot more people are getting involved. Now this idea of, well, you know, in Bellevue a horse got killed? There was a horse that was brutally killed, and they're trying to find out who did it. And it's just quite a, quite a shocking thing, and quite a big group that are working on this, and it's on TV. And so, so what, way back when, so somebody killed a horse? That would be the end of it, but not now, because, and...

SY: And if this were, if you, if this had occurred in the '50s, would you have been inspired then to choreograph a piece about it?

MN: (...) My interest in animals and ecology started probably in the '60s or so when it was becoming noticeable. But I (...) think they're big subjects, and I don't know how you could choreograph it.