April 6, 2020 Issue
Sharon Stern devoted herself to Butoh. Did her mentor lead her down a dangerous path?
Rachel Aviv
The New Yorker
March 30, 2020
Sharon Stern arrived at Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired university in America, with a portfolio of glamorous head shots. She had a heart-shaped face and a guileless smile. She was twenty-eight and had recently married Todd Siegel, whom her friends all described as the perfect husband. Naropa, which was founded in Boulder, Colorado, in 1974, by a former Buddhist monk, has three meditation halls that students visit throughout the day. "You are encouraged to let go of habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and action and to continually refresh your experience, viewing yourself and the world anew," read the welcome letter from the dean of students. Sharon, who was in the master's program in contemporary performance, had spent several years acting in community theatre in Miami, but she wasn't sure where the work was leading. In her journal and notes, she assessed her flaws: she was "overly excitable"; her work could be "cheesy"; she was "not enough of a leader"; her sense of self was "defined by who wants me."
She had grown up in a high-rise in a part of North Miami where people dress for the beach even when they are miles away. Her father, Tibor, an Israeli diamond dealer, had teased her on the rare occasions when she didn't get all A's. "You disturbed the straight line," he told her. She went to a Jewish day school, where her drama teacher, Lillian Andron, described her as "Ms. Popularity, Ms. Congeniality." Her nickname was Sharoni, and when she wrote it she dotted the "i" by sketching a tiny flower. She had thrived in a culture that by her mid-twenties she saw as shallow and spiritually arid.
Benjamin Stuber, a classmate at Naropa, told me, "For the more ambitious, type-A students in the class—and I include Sharoni in that group—the spiritual side of Naropa kind of snuck up on us. I don't think we expected to be as moved as we were." The M.F.A. program existed, he said, at the intersection of postmodernism and Buddhism. "It was about saying, 'We are going to kill off these old dualisms, like light and dark, good and bad, dirty and clean, and start to sit with things as they really are.' "
At Naropa, Sharon became self-conscious about the ways in which she had always used her strengths—charisma, warmth, an intuitive capacity to please—as crutches. She had once felt that the ingredients of a fulfilling life were fairly straightforward. "All I wanted is to be married to Todd and be a mother," she said. But that path felt increasingly stale. She was working on "re-integrating, re-patterning, re-structuring," she wrote to a high-school friend. In her school notebook, she instructed herself to "contemplate uncertainty" every morning. She wondered if she should project a quieter presence. "Maybe I have the need to talk so much in class and offer so much of my opinion because I don't actually take the time to process things on my own," she wrote. In the margins of "The Essential Chögyam Trungpa," a book of teachings by the founder of Naropa, she wrote, "Can we practice meditation w/o being afraid of the foreignness?"
In her first semester, in 2007, she took a class with Katsura Kan, a guest artist at Naropa and one of the world's most prominent choreographers and instructors of Butoh, a postmodern Japanese dance form. A sinewy, youthful fifty-nine-year-old with a shaved head, Kan was polite and somewhat remote. He had studied Zen Buddhism for three decades, and he gave clipped, heavily accented instructions that sounded like koans. "To seek the door to the neutral is to approach transformation," he told the students. Stuber, in his notebook, wrote, "Butoh begins with the abandonment of self."
Kan is based in Japan, where he studied with Tatsumi Hijikata, one of two choreographers credited with establishing Butoh as a distinct art form, in the nineteen-fifties. It was originally called ankoku butoh, the "dance of darkness." Hijikata's choreography was asymmetrical, erotic, and halting, requiring intense muscular control, and it often had an undertone of dread. In one of his most famous performances, "Story of Smallpox," Hijikata appeared onstage hunched over, looking feeble and diseased. He made barely perceptible movements. The audience heard the sound of wind and the cawing of crows.
Hijikata, who was influenced by French Surrealism, taught his apprentices to understand Butoh as inseparable from daily life. According to the Butoh scholar Caitlin Coker, he and his students ate together—"There was even Butoh in eating a meal," one dancer said—and he trained them to relinquish the idea of individual expression. One former apprentice, Waguri Yukio, said that Hijikata received phone calls from parents saying, "Give me back my daughter." But Hijikata used to say, "The person who is kidnapped will become the most skilled."
One of Sharon's classmates said that he remembers the day that "Butoh suddenly made sense to her." Kan asked the students to imagine that ants were crawling up their limbs and taking over their bodies, an exercise designed to help them find new vocabularies for physical expression. After the class, Sharon curled up on the floor and began crying. "Until then, it was as if there had only been this small corner of her own psychology that she felt comfortable with—the weather was always sunny there," the classmate said. "In actor training, we think of that as blockage. But from then she stopped fighting it. She was willing to transform."
At the end of the semester, Kan chose six students to perform a work he had choreographed. Like nearly all Butoh dances, the movement was slow, meditative, and quiet, close to the floor. The students wore white paint on their bodies and faces. Sharon performed a duet with Stuber, who recalled, "There was a lot of rolling and twisting, and our bodies kept going round and round like we were some sort of ball. It was about being in this place where identity is still mutable." After the performance, he remembers, Todd Siegel told him, "I couldn't tell which one of you was my wife."
For her thesis project, Sharon decided to create a Butoh-inspired piece "about the road to emptiness," as she described it in her journal. She wanted to work on "entering the darker places of myself, fearlessly." She asked Kan for guidance on Buddhist views of aging, disease, and death. "I want to have a serious conversation with you about this," she told him.
Stuber said that it wouldn't have surprised him if Sharon had developed a crush on Kan. "I had a little crush on him, too," he said. "We talked a lot about mentorship in the arts, about transference and counter-transference." He was impressed by Sharon's openness to new experience, which, he said, reminded him of the "tender heart of the warrior" that Chögyam Trungpa, Naropa's founder, describes in one of his teachings. "The strongest warrior is not the one who wears layers of armor," Stuber said, "but the one who puts down her sword and shield, takes off her armor, and opens her heart—she is the brave one."
All artistic mentorship requires a certain level of devotion and imitation, but in choreography the influence tends to be more literal. One body is taking direction from another. The critic André Lepecki describes choreography as "a body snatcher." The dancer, he writes, is "nothing more than a faithful executor of the designs of the absent, remote, perhaps dead, yet haunting power of the master's will."
Barbara Dilley, Sharon's adviser at Naropa and the founder of the school's dance-and-movement program, often spoke with students about the importance of questioning the role of the guru, in both Buddhism and art. "She didn't want us to fall into the trap of trying to please someone, of losing ourselves on the path," Sharon's friend Kathryn Ross said. In class, Dilley asked her students to experiment with taking different degrees of influence from one another. "You learn to become aware of the other person's power in the room," Dilley told me. "And, rather than mirroring, to make choices."
The Japanese tradition of artistic mentorship doesn't easily translate to American culture. Because of Kan's status in Butoh circles, he was referred to as a sensei, or master. "If you are a sensei, you have a responsibility that is more communal or familial than a teacher would take on in the United States," Heyward Bracey, an American dancer who studied with Kan in Japan, said. "It requires a deeper level of trust, a more evolved bond." The teacher's guidance often extends beyond the level of craft. Vangeline, the director of the New York Butoh Institute and the author of a forthcoming book about Butoh, told me, "When a Japanese Butoh teacher comes to the West, they may start emphasizing that the student needs to be less egocentric, less individualistic. When an admired teacher suggests that the student's values are in question, how does that affect her sense of identity? What happens in that cognitive dissonance?"
Sharon worried that her movements weren't authentic enough. "Am I really a butoh dancer or is this the ultimate in seeking validation and support from the outside?" she wrote in her journal. She asked for Kan's help in trying to "escape this father mother voice inside." Although he encouraged her to be less competitive, she couldn't shake the desire to be the best—his "number one student."
After Sharon graduated, in 2009, she helped Kan stage a performance called "Luminous Emptiness," an adaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, created by Naropa students. She was so committed to the work—"This is what I expect from you," she e‑mailed him, "to take up all my time!"—that he asked her to be an assistant choreographer of his dance company, Katsura Kan & Saltimbanques. She taught his choreography to the other performers and danced with him. In an interview with the Boulder Daily Camera, she said, "I haven't found any other form so far in my life that I feel so connected to in a profound, cuts-across-cultures-and-boundaries way."
When her parents came to see her dance in Boulder, they were taken aback. Sharon's mother, Hana, is an Israeli immigrant who has her own diamond-jewelry line and radiates "protective feminine energy," as Sharon once wrote. When I met Hana, she was wearing a diamond ring about the size of a quarter, and a diamond Star of David around her neck; her blond hair was in a white scrunchie. I asked Hana if she considered Sharon a seeker, and she told me, "Of course she was seeking—for more perfection." But Butoh struck Hana as a wrong turn. "I don't see where the art is here," she told Sharon. Tibor said, "It was a terrible shock. The dancers were crawling on the floor and suffering." Sharon told her parents, "We are not here to please the audience."
In early 2011, Kan invited Sharon to join him as his dancing partner on a tour through the U.S. and South America. When she performed a duet with Kan in Seattle, the Seattle Times observed, "The two performers did indeed seem to be on a voyage." She told a friend that she and Kan, who was married, "fit together like a hand in a glove." They shared a room together during the tour, as Kan sometimes did with other dancers. Kan said that their relationship was never sexual, but Sheri Brown, who danced in Kan's company and became close with Sharon, said that it seemed clear there was a sexual element to their dynamic. She told me, "Dancers will say, 'O.K., the body is a canvas, and it doesn't have to be sexual—how do we view it from other perspectives?' But, basically, in a lot of Kan's choreography, especially with Sharoni, the dancers were topless." Brown told Sharon, " 'I know you are attracted to him and that's beautiful, but I think it would be really messy if anything happens.' Sharoni pretty much promised that she wouldn't sleep with him." But, later, Sharon suggested to Brown that this promise had been broken.
Just seeing Kan's handwriting on a scrap of paper, Sharon told him in an e-mail, made her realize "I have not yet mastered my attachments in life." She pulled away from Todd, who had been supportive of her career; by the end of the year, they had separated. Kan wrote Sharon, "Let's keep seeking together till end of life? Or more?"
In most contemporary art, it can seem a little regressive, or at least unfashionable, to associate art with spiritual practice, but in Butoh mastery of the dance is often contingent on being able to surrender parts of the self. Sharon told Kan that she was working to find "the strength to reject society and the past and everything that I think has been real until now." She had an excellent work ethic, which she applied to the paradoxical ambition of freeing herself from the grip of the self. "Just stay empty," she wrote in her journal. "Believe in nothing / emptiness / void."
When another Butoh dancer, Jeremy Williams, saw Sharon in New York in February, 2011, he was struck by how deeply she had become immersed in the form. "Sharoni was enamored of Butoh not just as an aesthetic but as a perceptual shift," he said. "I remember her asking me, 'Don't you just want to stay in that Butoh space all the time?' And I was, like, 'No, I don't. When I'm doing Butoh, it disrupts my relationship to the everyday, material world, and I can't move through the world that way.' "
Butoh performers often describe the necessity of becoming empty vessels. In an essay in the "Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance," Shinichi Iova-Koga wrote that he learned to "erase myself so that I could dance." Butoh, he said, "yanked the 'me' out of me." The Swedish Butoh performer Susanna Åkerlund described how the dance brought her into an altered state of consciousness. "My hands are not hands, my face not face, my feet not feet," she wrote. "The space inside of me and the space around me are one and the same."
Through Butoh, some dancers come to see their sense of self as illusory, an understanding that reflects the Buddhist ideas intrinsic in Japanese culture. Buddhist religious texts acknowledge that this awareness can invite psychic distress—a state that some Buddhist masters have called "falling into emptiness." The person may become disconnected from her identity, which suddenly seems false, a cultural construction. According to traditional Buddhist doctrine, recognizing the insipidness of our existence is a step toward liberation; in confronting the vanity of ordinary life, we gain the resolve to relinquish our attachment to worldly things. But, in the past fifty years, as Buddhism has been decontextualized in the West, this insight has often been overlooked. Instead, meditative practices have been repackaged as a road to wellness.
Willoughby Britton, a professor of psychiatry at Brown University, believes that the popular representations of meditation as a "warm bath," a universally salutary activity, don't encompass the broad range of reactions to meditation. For the past decade, as part of a research project called the Varieties of Contemplative Experience, Britton and her husband, Jared Lindahl, also a professor at Brown, have been cataloguing the challenges that people experience in the process. In a recent paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, they document the ways meditation can lead to changes in sense of self, including the "dissolution of the personality structures that support the 'story of me' "—an experience that many found distressing and even disabling. One meditator told them, "It basically felt like whatever personality I thought I had before just disintegrated. And it wasn't an expansive disintegration into unity or bliss or anything like that. It was a disintegration into dust." Another said, "I would look at other people and interact with people, and they would say regular things, like 'Oh, I like that type of ice cream' or 'Oh, I like that thing.' And I remember hearing that, and I'm, like, 'Wait, how do you know that? How do you know what you like and dislike? How do you know who you are?' " Others explained that the boundary between themselves and their surroundings dissolved. A person who felt as if he no longer existed kept asking his teacher, "Tell me what I look like."
These sorts of selfless states might be likened to what Western psychiatrists call depersonalization, a condition in which people feel that they have become observers, detached from their own body and thoughts. 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."
Mauricio Sierra-Siegert, a psychiatrist who spent fifteen years working in the Depersonalisation Research Unit at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, told me that a frequent topic of conversation among colleagues was whether "spiritual enlightenment resembled the state of depersonalization." Sierra-Siegert, who has practiced Zen Buddhism for thirty years and is now a professor at Colegiatura Colombiana, in Medellín, has observed that cultural expectations appear to shape the degree to which people experience depersonalization as a source of distress. When he moved from London to Colombia, he said, he was surprised to discover that although some of his patients felt that their selves weren't real, they did not seem to be suffering from this observation the way that his London patients were. "They didn't experience it as a symptom—it was not why they had come to me," he said. He believes that the disparity arises from the fact that Colombian culture is less individualistic. "If you feel like you are your own island—if you are entirely identified with your own story and image—then the experience of becoming depersonalized will be more threatening," he said.
Britton told me that she had assumed that meditators with a history of psychiatric troubles would be the ones in her study most vulnerable to breakdown. Instead, she found that those most likely to become distressed were people like Sharon, overachievers with a high level of ambition and drive. "In the transmission of Buddhism to the contemporary West, we are not starting from similar baselines," Lindahl said. "When you are trying to undercut certain features of selfhood, because you've been told that those are the source of suffering, it can require a much greater change, and be more destabilizing, for someone from a very goal-oriented, identity-oriented society." Britton added, "I think that people underestimate how difficult it is to change your culture in terms of lived experience. You can't just decide 'I am going to reform my psyche and being according to another culture's definition.' "
In the summer of 2011, Sharon performed in São Paulo with Kan and his company. Thabatta Mizrahi, a close childhood friend who lives in Brazil, came to the performance. Sharon danced alone, topless, with her long brown hair so wild that it looked like a tent. She repeatedly started to lift herself off the floor, only to fall back again. "When I used to watch her perform, there was always a little bit of Sharon in the characters she would play," Mizrahi told me. "But this time I couldn't find her."
Mizrahi and Sharon spent three days together, and Mizrahi found her friend disconnected and emotionally blunted. She was thinner than Mizrahi had ever seen her. She had been fasting. Sharon felt she was too large, Kan said, compared with the other dancers. He urged her to eat more, telling her that in Butoh "you make your weakness into dance."
Maureen Momo Freehill, an American Butoh dancer, told me that when she trained for several years in Japan, she, too, found herself restricting what she ate. Her size, she said, came to feel like yet another imposing aspect of her American identity. "My self-referencing just became so obvious," she said. "It was: what do I want, I'm the one, it's about me."
Mizrahi was troubled by the way that Sharon spoke about Kan. "Admiration is good, it's healthy, it's motivating," she later wrote her in an e-mail, but not when we "lose sight of who we are." Mizrahi sensed that it wasn't Kan's personality to which Sharon was drawn but the fact that he "embodied this art form, and she had to make sacrifices to continue gaining knowledge from her mentor." At the end of the visit, as Sharon stood at Mizrahi's door, she suddenly took a lighter tone. "I know you think I look too skinny, but do I look good?" Sharon asked.
"I was, like, of all the things, that's what you're worried about?" Mizrahi said. Later, she wondered if what Sharon had really been asking was "Do you still see me?"
Sharon's parents also expressed concern that her personality was changing. "Since you met him and follow his teaching, you have lost your identity," Tibor wrote in an e‑mail. Tibor is jovial, outgoing, and commanding; one has the sense, when talking to him, of being slightly, though not unpleasantly, pummelled. He wrote Sharon impetuous e-mails ("all this for a sick dance, that hardly anyone shows interest"), followed by apologies and expressions of love.
Kan cautioned Sharon about adopting his life style. "I think this is a bit too much for you I apologize because you have your history your world your family," he wrote. He explained that, since he had become a Butoh dancer, in 1979, he'd resigned himself to the possibility of ending up "lying stone dead somewhere by the side of the road." His goal was modest: to survive as an avant-garde artist. Sharon often went swing dancing at night, and Kan seemed puzzled by her attraction to "social dance—dance that is entertainment." He told me, "Creation is not about entertaining. Creation is very painful."
Sharon was not dissuaded. "Do you think I have more respect for money and 'comfort' than for love and art?" she wrote him. "Butoh is my journey . . . through you. Big ship, small ship, stormy sea or quiet sea. I was never so clear about something in my life."
In August, 2011, a month after the trip to Brazil, Sharon went to Copenhagen with Kan for a performance called "100 Dancers." Artists from around the world took over the public spaces of the city. Kan said that, after the performance, Sharon disappeared. Hours later, she was found in a church shouting, "Coming up! A hundred dancers!" She seemed not to realize that the dance had ended. She was so disruptive that the police were called, and she was admitted to the psychiatric ward of Bispebjerg Hospital. When Kan came to the hospital, he said, two police officers told him that Sharon's parents had reported that he had kidnapped her. "I will go out with all my strength to make sure that you come back to your country and family," Tibor wrote Sharon in an e-mail. "I have no other choice, but to go after your master and his reputation." To Kan, he wrote, "I will hunt you down if you stay in touch with my daughter."
Sharon's parents flew to Copenhagen and took her back to Miami. A few weeks later, Kan wrote Sharon an e-mail clarifying the terms of their relationship: "My love has limitation, we only can share the creation on the stage." In Miami, Sharon saw a psychiatrist, who gave her a diagnosis of depression and prescribed her an antidepressant and an antipsychotic, but she took the medications inconsistently. Although Sharon's family and childhood friends said that she'd never previously shown signs of depression, her Butoh colleagues said that she'd spoken about her struggles with it. She began seeing a psychologist, Eli Levy, who knew her family. It was clear to Levy that finding Butoh had been Sharon's "eureka moment," he said. "I think she believed the dance itself was a release from the ills of society."
When she wasn't dancing, though, she seemed to absorb the world's sorrows too completely. Her friend Tracey-Ann Jarrett-Peña, who knew Sharon from swing dancing, said that, when they discussed acts of police brutality in Egypt, Sharon seemed physically pained; it was as if there were no protective boundary between herself and others. Sharon began to ask Jarrett-Peña, who is black, about her experiences of racism. Jarrett-Peña's husband, Martin Peña, said, "We kept telling her, 'Sharon, you can't feel this guilty for other people's acts of violence.' "
Sharon's acting teacher, Lillian Andron, said that when Sharon visited her she seemed like an "automaton." Andron and her husband, Michael, run a Jewish community theatre in North Miami Beach where Sharon had performed after college. Having directed her for years, they were acquainted with all her facial expressions, but on this visit they didn't recognize her gestures. It was clear to them that Sharon had been reaching for that creative and spiritual space in which "you cross over into a different dimension, and you're not sure if you're playing the instrument or the instrument is playing you," Lillian said. "That's what all of us want. But we hope we do it in a way that is healthy."
Sharon's father demanded that she cut off contact with Kan, but she continued communicating with him. Kan joked, "I will be your personal psychotherapist." He seemed to believe that dancing could be her medicine. He liked to imagine the day, he told me, when ill people might seek help from a choreographer. If a married couple had a crisis in their relationship, he said, "they can go to the choreographer and make a duet," rather than getting divorced. Just as the Sterns supposed that a form of art was the problem, Kan assumed that it could be the solution.
Kan told Sharon that she needed to focus on her recovery and could not perform with him until she was stable. "If you don't want me anymore—on any level, don't feel you owe me anything," she wrote him in an e-mail. "You've given me so much already." In her journal, she wrote that she needed to "accept the inevitable truth that nothing lasts."
But in February, 2012, she went to San Francisco for one of Kan's workshops, though she had not been explicitly invited. She was able to dance for periods of time with intense concentration, but then her focus abruptly broke. Once, she was in the middle of a conversation with Kan when she saw a bus out of the corner of her eye; she ran away and jumped onto it. A dancer at the workshop said that previously she'd had probing conversations with Sharon about trying to push beyond the limits of identity and ego. Now the dancer wondered if Sharon had "gone under the radar, in terms of her deterioration." She noticed that Sharon had "started to talk in faltering English, almost like she was Japanese. My guess is she was merging with Kan."
In e-mails, Sharon began referring to herself in the third person. "What is advice, like used to give to Sharoni," she asked Kan. "I am only trying to find out the 'way' for Sharoni." She envied Japanese dancers who were closer to "the original Butoh essence," she wrote. She began learning Japanese; she told Kan that she was trying to be less expressive and wordy. She found it essential to work on "killing off" "old ways of seeing"—a process she approached with a kind of violence. "It felt like she was frantically running toward it," Lisa Adeva Samoy, a Naropa classmate, said.
Sharon seemed to have a disrupted sense of what is known in philosophical literature as "ipseity"—the taken-for-granted feeling that we inhabit our own experiences. The psychologist Louis Sass, the author of "Madness and Modernism," told me that he has become increasingly attentive to the possibility that meditative and contemplative experiences might have the potential, for some vulnerable people, to foster an erosion of the first-person perspective. Of course, biology and a history of trauma can predispose people to breakdowns, but he believes that certain kinds of meditation can sometimes be a trigger, disembedding people from the social frameworks integral to daily existence. A person becomes unhinged from "the cultural surround—not only from mythic and religious meanings," he writes, "but also from the habits and tacit framework assumptions that normally guide our everyday cognitive activity and ways of behaving." (One of the meditators interviewed in Britton and Lindahl's Varieties of Contemplative Experience project told them that, after reading a paper by Sass about ipseity and schizophrenia, he thought, Fuck, I have schizophrenia.)
In April, 2012, Sharon decided at the last minute to fly alone to Fortaleza, Brazil, for a Butoh workshop, though Kan had urged her not to go without a friend. Once there, she wrote Kan with a question: "Yesterday came up with the idea that butoh is about deconstructing body/ego, etc." She added, "So the question arises what happens after the deconstruction of your body/mind/ego?" Kan responded by telling her that "Butoh is not just simply deconstruction body/ego, etc." He suggested that she revisit the teachings of Hijikata, the co-founder of Butoh, who had described Butoh as "human rehabilitation," a form for protecting oneself from and protesting the alienation of contemporary society.
A week later, Kan learned that Sharon had killed herself in Florida by using a helium kit. At first, Kan was convinced that her suicide was merely a rumor. When he finally understood that it was true, he took a vow of silence for forty-nine days, the amount of time, according to some Buddhists, required for the deceased to transition from one life to the next. After Sharon's death, Sheri Brown, the Butoh dancer from Kan's company, said that she revisited notes she had taken while studying with him. "One quote I had written down was 'You must suicide yourself.' I think what he meant was kill your ego. Let go." But, she said, she began to wonder, "Without a guiding star, to what end are we losing the ego? There has to be a path, some rules to hold on to." On social media, the Sterns and some of Sharon's friends accused Kan of being complicit in her death. "Your devotee is gone," Lisa Adeva Samoy wrote on Kan's Facebook page. "Did you take everything she gave?"
In May, 2014, Kan was walking into an arts studio in Bangkok when a man holding a thick manila folder asked for his signature. Kan signed, assuming it was a package delivery. Then the man told him, "This is a complaint against you pending in the Broward County Circuit Court," in Florida.
The complaint had been filed by Tibor Stern, alleging that Kan was the "direct proximate, legal cause of Stern's death." Tibor accused him of "exploiting his superior position as Stern's teacher, by stripping Stern of her free will, under the pretense that such degradation was necessary in order to allow her to attain levels of enlightenment which would allow Stern to become a great Butoh performance artist."
Kan has never been to Florida. At first, he tried to ignore the case. But, he said, other Butoh dancers told him, "You need to fight this. It's not good for the art form."
He hired a lawyer, until he saw the invoice. Then he represented himself. In a motion written with the help of the Butoh dancer Heyward Bracey, he argued that "having a skill which warrants admiration hardly makes one the master of another adult." To challenge Tibor's allegations, he compiled hundreds of e-mails between him and Sharon, but, not understanding the U.S. court system, he missed deadlines and failed to follow proper procedure for submitting evidence. At a hearing in 2017, Kan participated by telephone. A Japanese translator was in the courtroom, but he couldn't keep up with Kan. "He's saying a lot," the judge, Mily Rodriguez-Powell, said. "What is he saying?"
Kan said that he wanted to testify, but Rodriguez-Powell told him he would need a notary, to swear him in.
"Right now?" Kan asked.
"Right now," Rodriguez-Powell said. "This is the hearing now."
"Right now it's 1 a.m. in Japan," Kan said. "I'm the only one person in the room."
Kan was not allowed to testify. When he had the chance to cross-examine Tibor Stern, the only question he could come up with was "Why do you lie?"
"Sir, that's not an appropriate question," Rodriguez-Powell told him. "Do you have any practical question concerning this case to ask Mr. Stern?"
He asked Stern why he let Sharon travel to Brazil, shortly before her death. "You are the one who protect her, not me."
"We tried to avoid travelling," Stern said, "but the constant force of his influence on my daughter . . . overcame every effort." He characterized Butoh as a "conception of body and mind, lose your ego, your identity." He added, "It is a cult."
Kan tried to argue that Broward County had no jurisdiction over a Japanese citizen who had never been there. But in April, 2018, Rodriguez-Powell ruled against him, because, she wrote, when Sharon was in Florida Kan had Skyped with her and sent her numerous e-mails "with knowledge that he was interfering with her care." She singled out an e-mail in which Kan had responded to a despairing message from Sharon when she was in Brazil by telling her to "continue her research 'in another world.' " (In fact, in the e‑mail, Kan commended her for teaching Brazilian students and said, "Continue your research who you are in another world can be more deep than USA.")
Throughout the case, Kan rejected Tibor's characterization of Butoh as a dance that teaches people to "wallow in the darkness of their soul." He explained that darkness has different connotations in Japan than it does in Judeo-Christian traditions, in which darkness is equated with sin. His definition of dark, he said, was "nobody knows yet." William Marotti, a professor of modern Japanese history at U.C.L.A., said that, in the context of postmodern Japanese art, references to darkness should be understood as part of an "argument about art and the state." He went on, "Art is in a zone of darkness and indeterminacy, and then there is light, which is basically the government: prosecutors, police, bureaucrats. They try to nail down and define the creative unknown and in that process kill it."
Wrongful-death cases often turn into a battle between experts, and Kan didn't have the money to challenge the testimony of Tibor's expert, Eli Levy, the psychologist who treated Sharon before she died. Levy, who had seen Sharon for fourteen sessions, acknowledged that, initially, Kan had helped her to "believe in herself, to express herself . . . to see how beautiful she was in the inside and outside." But, over time, he said, Sharon "essentially stopped being who she was and became a full imitation of what he wanted her to be."
In March, 2019, after Tibor filed a motion for partial summary judgment, there was a final hearing. For fourteen minutes, Kan said, he repeatedly called the number for the court—he had evidence from other Butoh dancers that he intended to present—but no one picked up. When he eventually got through, the hearing was over and the ruling had already been made: Kan was liable for the suicide of his student. (Tibor Stern decided not to pursue damages. "He doesn't have a dollar to his name," he said.) Kan told me that the ruling showed that "the court doesn't understand avant-garde art—the judge believes that art must be in pursuit of something beautiful." But, he said, "an artist is looking for the next day's beauty, not this day's beauty."
Bracey, the Butoh dancer who helped Kan draft his responses to the lawsuit, characterized the case as "this strange male power struggle between one patriarch, Sharoni's father, and another patriarch, Kan. Sharoni, the person, was never really acknowledged in that space."
Historically, suicide has been one of the few kinds of death for which someone else cannot be blamed. It didn't matter what provoked a person's despair—committing suicide was seen as a crime, a self-contained and autonomous decision that eclipsed whatever wrongful acts had led to it. The suicidal person was guilty of "invading the prerogative of the Almighty, and rushing into his immediate presence uncalled for," the eighteenth-century English jurist Sir William Blackstone wrote. Carried into the American colonies, this view of suicide has had a lingering influence on U.S. law. As late as the nineteen-sixties, several states listed suicide as a crime.
In recent years, though, courts have begun accepting that people are more interconnected than the laws surrounding suicide acknowledge. In 2017, Michelle Carter, a Massachusetts woman, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for sending text messages and making a phone call to her boyfriend urging him to kill himself; not long afterward, a Boston College student was indicted for the same crime, because prosecutors said she sent her boyfriend abusive text messages that prompted his suicide. Criminal courts are increasingly willing to see suicide as a kind of social process, and the suicidal person as a victim. Civil courts, too, have been taking more seriously the argument that people in positions of power—prison and school officials, psychiatrists, coercive partners—can be responsible for the deaths of those who need guidance or protection. The impulse to commit suicide does not always manifest like a germ in the body—it can also be shaped by teachers, by belief systems, by communities.
The writer Andrew Solomon observes that the catastrophe of suicide is "not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect." The lawsuit against Kan took that loss and enlarged it into a kind of evil fairy tale. Tibor Stern has founded an organization called Families Against Cult Teachings (fact), which he runs out of a one-story brick office building near the Sterns' house. Whenever Kan is invited to perform somewhere, Stern e-mails the organizers of the event saying that Kan killed his daughter. "I never thought that it was possible to lose a child to a hostile outside force like this," he told me. But mental illness can look like a hostile outside force, too. Brainwashing may be a fitting metaphor for what it feels like to become profoundly depressed.
In the past two decades, the suicide rate in America has increased by thirty-three per cent—the rate is the highest since the Second World War—but there have been few advances in understanding how to prevent this sort of death. A review of forty years of studies in the journal PLOS One, in 2016, concluded that a reliable method of identifying who might commit suicide "remains elusive." Ninety-five per cent of people who had been identified in studies as most likely to kill themselves did not do so. Half of the people who committed suicide had been classified as low risk. The authors wrote, "The extent of this uncertainty is profound." In "The Savage God," a book about suicide, the English writer A. Alvarez observed that explanations for suicide are almost never sufficient. They are "like a trivial border incident which triggers off a major war. The real motives which impel a man to take his own life are elsewhere; they belong to the internal world, devious, contradictory, labyrinthine."
Perhaps it is a category error to place the burden of solving suicide on psychiatry; the wish to end one's life can be as much a spiritual, social, or existential crisis as a medical one. 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.
Kan's career in the United States appears to be over. fact was so successful in its campaign against him that he is rarely invited to perform in American theatres and schools. He still travels to other parts of the world, but the accusations trail him. "This Butoh 'teacher' uses his position for his own personal selfish gain and pleasure," Tibor wrote to a performance space in Kyoto, in 2018. "It is incumbent upon your company to terminate any involvement with Katsura Kan," a "support specialist" from fact wrote to the directors of a venue in Finland. When the director of a performance space in Cuernavaca, Mexico, didn't respond to messages, in 2017, another fact representative wrote, "If we don't hear from you soon, we will be contacting the ministry and all related gov agencies." In most of its correspondence, fact attached two anonymous "victim letters," as they were titled, from Butoh dancers. But the letters were vague. One described the difficulty of finding trustworthy mentors. The other referred to Kan as a monster and said she identified with Sharon: "We both desired the same thing. Creative fulfillment."
Vangeline, the founder of the New York Butoh Institute, said that after Sharon's death she reëxamined encounters earlier in her career. She'd studied with a Butoh master who "dispensed personal and spiritual advice as though he were an authority on the subject of life itself," she wrote in an essay on her Web site. At the time, she interpreted her resistance to him as a personal failure. But, she told me, "Kan was not one of those teachers whom I felt was posing as a spiritual master. I personally never saw that behavior with him." In an affidavit submitted to the Broward County court, in 2018, she had characterized Tibor Stern's attacks on Kan as a "modern-day witch hunt" that preyed on "prejudices and fear of the unknown."
Nathan Montgomery, a Butoh teacher with whom Sharon studied in Boulder, said that her death, and the family's response, contributed to his decision to leave Boulder and to take a break from teaching Butoh. "It stopped me in my tracks," he said. "If I guide people into dark new places that they hadn't explored before—which is a big part of the work that I do—what is my responsibility as a teacher?" He wondered "whether Japanese Butoh can ever really even happen in a Western body," he said. "As dancers, we physically redefine ourselves through our teachers, but what's tricky is when we take on a form that is so deeply rooted in a different cultural tradition, and the narrative is not our narrative."
Butoh is easy to scapegoat: it explores the "very roots of anguish," as a French critic once put it. But a few dancers thought that Sharon would have deteriorated no matter what genre of dance she had chosen. "Have you seen 'Black Swan'?" a Butoh dancer asked me. The heroine, a ballerina with a feverish level of ambition, inhabits her role too deeply and has a nervous breakdown. (Tibor Stern, too, occasionally invoked the themes of "Black Swan." "I don't blame you," he wrote Sharon a few months before she died. "You just wanted to dance to perfection.")
When I spoke with Kathryn Ross, Sharon's friend from Naropa, she remarked that she was staring at a small gold enamelled treasure box that Sharon had given her. A few days earlier, when I first e-mailed Ross, she had realized that she was wearing Sharon's red hooded wool coat. It occurred to her that for years Sharon had been giving away her belongings—a warning sign of suicide.
Ross wishes that Sharon had had a more nurturing mentor who could have reminded her, "As part of this Butoh process, you are questioning everything about yourself, but remember that you need some basic sense of self." She wondered if Sharon would have taken a different path had she devoted herself to Barbara Dilley, her thesis adviser, rather than Kan. Dilley told me she recommends that "students hang out on the outskirts of a practice or devotional community for five or ten years and really observe what is going on before they commit to becoming a student." Ross remembers Dilley instructing her students to walk across the room carrying water in silver spoons, to help them internalize the Buddhist concept "not too tight, not too loose." Ross interpreted the lesson as "If you are grasping something too tightly, you will destroy it."
The first time Kan and I spoke, on Skype, he told me, "I'm not expecting only good things about me. You can criticize me. Just make good work." He spent hours systematically forwarding me the contents of his Yahoo in-box. I asked him by e-mail if he'd come closer to understanding the reasons for Sharon's death, and he wrote me, "I reply your answer took more than 6 hours as my English is not skillful" and enclosed a numbered list of possible reasons for her suicide, including her fasting, the collapse of her marriage, and the death of her dog—a car ran over the dog three weeks before Sharon died. He did not shy away from pointing out Sharon's weaknesses. "One side of Sharoni is too egoistic," he told me, adding that Sharon struggled as she tried to distance herself from a family that was "attracted to the diamond."
When I asked him if he regretted crossing professional boundaries with her, the language barrier felt insurmountable; he had trouble with the word "boundary," interpreting it in terms of movement and the importance of pushing one's body and mind to the edge and beyond. He also said, "In a sense I love her," adding that "she's a very lovely woman, and she's very attractive, and she has a very nice instinct for creation." But he explained that he usually had a few disciples at a time and shared this kind of intimacy with all of them. "In Japan the teaching style is face to face, hand to hand," he told me. He had discouraged Sharon from separating from Todd, he said: "I think he is actually the perfect man."
In two different conversations, Kan told the same story, unprompted, about a train conductor in Japan who was so ashamed that his train arrived five minutes late that he killed himself. "This is very much Japanese society," he told me. "It's very tight. Responsibility is very strong." He also told me that when he was a child he had decided to kill himself, after he was caught shoplifting from a store. He pressed a knife to his stomach—but it hurt, so he put the knife down. The way he told stories gave me the sense that there was an important truth to be gleaned, if I thought about his words carefully enough, but after a while I realized that he was more or less cycling through various thoughts he'd had about suicide over the years. He didn't understand, but he was trying to be helpful. There was almost a kind of nobility in his encyclopedic candidness.
He said he wanted to gain more clarity by going to Sharon's grave. He had been avoiding Florida during the court proceedings—visiting the state would undermine his argument that Broward County didn't have jurisdiction over him—but, he told me, "now that I can step in Florida, I want to accuse her, actually. Without permission, how can you suicide? I'm not comfortable. I want to just yell, 'You are an egoist.' "
I asked if he meant for his comment to sound cold. "How can I say, 'Rest in peace,' and give the flowers on the grave?" he responded. "This is acting. I don't like acting." Usually, people suppress their anger, or disguise it in the form of more palatable emotions, but his disregard for social convention appeared to be a point of personal pride as well as an aesthetic value. And yet, when he elaborated on his anger—"It's a very complex emotion, I think," he told me—his tone felt compassionate. "I hope the truth from my heart can reach her," he went on. "Because I couldn't help her. I should have more strongly cared about her. This emotion of anger is not only to her. It is to myself—to myself."
Days before Sharon died, she wrote Kan, "Thank you for all your important lessons, even when they were wrong." She was "escaping," she wrote, and might find more beauty in "another lifetime if it exists at all." Only later, Kan told me, did he realize that she was saying goodbye. "This is my real regret and my sadness," he said. "I regret not being able to notice the loneliness inside of her mind."
Sharon's colleagues worried that her death could prevent young dancers from finding an art form that might be life-affirming for them—an outcome that they felt was in conflict with Sharon's wishes. In some ways, suicide is the antithesis of the lessons she was absorbing: it requires the belief that the present moment, and all the excruciating emotions it contains, is permanent; that the story of one's identity is fixed. "Most stories I create in my mind are untrue," Sharon had once reminded herself in her journal. "Pain can be transmitted instead of obliterated." ♦
Published in the print edition of the April 6, 2020, issue, with the headline "Dancer in the Dark."
Rachel Aviv is a staff writer at The New Yorker and was a 2019 national fellow at New America.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/06/the-unravelling-of-a-dancer
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