The Unraveling of a Dancer By Rachel Aviv March 30 2020 New Yorker
"But Robert Sharf, a professor of Buddhist studies at the University of California, Berkeley, told me, “The depersonalization to which Buddhists aspire is not supposed to result in dysfunctional alienation. The dissolution of the ego is meant to occur within an institutional and ideological framework that helps one make sense of the experience. Nowadays, people who become depressed or depersonalized through secularized meditation practices don’t have access to the conceptual resources and social structures to help them handle what is happening to them.”"
This is a fascinating article about Butoh dance, a Japanese teacher who taught at Naropa, and a woman named Sharon Stern who eventually committed suicide. The family sued the Butoh dance teacher Katsura Kan.
"The study of suicide is still defined, to a great degree, by the sociologist Émile Durkheim, who argued, in “Suicide,” from 1897, that the most prevalent type of suicide in Western society was “anomic suicide”—a response to social upheavals that caused people to become disconnected from their community’s values and norms. Their desires and aspirations go unchecked, and they suffer from “overweening ambition,” creating a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. “Inextinguishable thirst is constantly renewed torture,” Durkheim wrote. Durkheim’s insight is perhaps not so far from the Buddha’s teaching that our striving is the cause of suffering."
You can see a brief video of them dancing here.
A fascinating intersection between Japanese Butoh and American-Israeli culture, and meditation on suicide. It's always sad when someone commits suicide. People hide the signs and usually people who are seen as suicidal don't commit suicide according to the article.
For me there is an interest in building in the supports to pursue Buddhist practice. Decontextualized and without a community, a spiritual practice can be dangerous. Combining a spiritual practice with art is also dodgy business. Of course a spiritual practice will inform art, but for me they seem like very different things. Thoughts? Please comment.
"But Robert Sharf, a professor of Buddhist studies at the University of California, Berkeley, told me, “The depersonalization to which Buddhists aspire is not supposed to result in dysfunctional alienation. The dissolution of the ego is meant to occur within an institutional and ideological framework that helps one make sense of the experience. Nowadays, people who become depressed or depersonalized through secularized meditation practices don’t have access to the conceptual resources and social structures to help them handle what is happening to them.”"
This is a fascinating article about Butoh dance, a Japanese teacher who taught at Naropa, and a woman named Sharon Stern who eventually committed suicide. The family sued the Butoh dance teacher Katsura Kan.
"The study of suicide is still defined, to a great degree, by the sociologist Émile Durkheim, who argued, in “Suicide,” from 1897, that the most prevalent type of suicide in Western society was “anomic suicide”—a response to social upheavals that caused people to become disconnected from their community’s values and norms. Their desires and aspirations go unchecked, and they suffer from “overweening ambition,” creating a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. “Inextinguishable thirst is constantly renewed torture,” Durkheim wrote. Durkheim’s insight is perhaps not so far from the Buddha’s teaching that our striving is the cause of suffering."
You can see a brief video of them dancing here.
A fascinating intersection between Japanese Butoh and American-Israeli culture, and meditation on suicide. It's always sad when someone commits suicide. People hide the signs and usually people who are seen as suicidal don't commit suicide according to the article.
For me there is an interest in building in the supports to pursue Buddhist practice. Decontextualized and without a community, a spiritual practice can be dangerous. Combining a spiritual practice with art is also dodgy business. Of course a spiritual practice will inform art, but for me they seem like very different things. Thoughts? Please comment.
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1 comment:
I haven't seen any analysis yet on what Naropa's responsibility is in this case of Sharoni Stern. Surely Naropa had responsibility towards the wellbeing of it's students and control of the behavior of it's teachers.
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