And then we had friends living upstate near Catskill, and then we found this house, which had a lot of land, extremely inexpensive. It turned out the house was like really failing, it was an older house, where they had a stream and mountains, and it was kind of amazing coming from Japan, where the land is sold by 4×8, kind of plywood, whereas like now the land is being sold by acres. So, it was an experiment. We had no idea what it is. I mean Koma grew up in a smaller city, I grew up in Tokyo. I mean country style living was very new to us. We failed in many ways, because we couldn’t really keep up, and we didn’t really like some part of the aspect of the country living, and in the political conservatism and so forth. And we came back.

But during the two years we were there, two and a half years we were there, we created our first Naked piece. We also created Grain, which is a piece that toured very widely, and really made us be able to grapple with the fact that we actually are making significant work. Later on, after we came back to the city, we came — we used to just keep going back to Catskill, because of course we made friends there. And for creative residency, every summer we went to this particular place called Art Awareness in Lexington, and this is where we also made the piece called River. So, many — no, I wouldn’t say many, but several very significant pieces were created in Catskills. And we are quite grateful.

What it is, is a no distraction from the city life. ((Black Faced Sheep)) What it is, is a darkness in the night. What it is, is like having lots of time. You go out in the dark, and then you start to see things that in the first few minutes you couldn’t see. Without distraction from the city life, you kind of see how the movement of the landscape is. And I think we became quite aware, and it was a transformative experience, especially Night Tide, which is our first naked piece. It’s like a 17 minute piece, but in which we really do a very simple movement of the buttocks. And it’s like two mountains courting each other, and we have a rendezvous in a stage center, and then we leave again. But the fact it is so low key, the fact it is we are pure naked, like nothing, wearing nothing. And it was really clearly a landscape piece. And audience came with us, I mean audience were very much with us, and really strengthened our sense of taking certain time no more than necessary, but still taking certain time to do the certain movement, and not making it too busy by adding this or adding that. It was a very simple piece that performing it, we felt we were onto something. And I think that kind of continues to the way how we constructed the piece River, which is a piece that we perform in a stream or a river, in a running water, where the audience watch us in the water. ((Summer Cottage))