Traveling off-road in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan means leaving behind modern modes of transportation—even wheels. “Off-road means traveling on yak, horse, or foot” through windswept mountain passes and isolated valleys, says Joseph Houseal (A84). A gifted athlete who once held the half-mile track record in Michigan and was a professional dancer, Houseal says that even he gets weary traveling this rugged terrain on his quest to find sacred rituals and dance festivals. He travels in Bhutan for up to seven months at a time as part of a five-year project to document Bhutan’s ancient dance forms before they are lost to modern culture.

When Houseal is in Bhutan—some 7,600 miles from his home in Chicago—he is closer than ever to the rural roots of his youth in St. Joseph, Michigan, where his father is a blueberry farmer. The Bhutanese, a majority of whom practice Tantric Buddhism, recognize in Houseal a fellow farmer, a man on “a divine mission,” says Houseal. “Everything in my life has come together into this work of dancers preserving dance,” he says. “I am alive because I have this purpose.”

Over the decades that he has devoted himself to dance, Houseal has attained the Eastern ideal of integrating body, mind, and spirit. He trained rigorously for his first career in professional ballet companies such as the Washington Ballet, made his choreographic debut on the Quad at St. John’s with Aeschylus’ Choephori. He later moved to Kyoto to study the ancient Japanese Noh Theater and there formed a dance company that attracted critical acclaim. Today, as executive director of the Chicago-based Core of Culture, Houseal leads a project to videotape and preserve the dances of Bhutan. In 2008 this ethnographic record, funded by the Core of Culture and the Honolulu Academy of the Arts, will become part of a traveling exhibition, “The Arts of Bhutan,” which will appear in several U.S. cities, and in Europe and Asia before finding a permanent home in the New York Public Library’s Performing Arts Dance Collection.

Landlocked in the eastern Himalayas, between China and India, the Kingdom of Bhutan is an isolated sanctuary of nature and ancient culture, where dance is integrated into every aspect of life. The Bhutanese practice monastic dances, lay religious dances, masked dances, and other sacred dance rituals. Dance is a form of meditation, communication, and information. “Dance in Bhutan is not the same thing as it is here in the states. We have one word for dance. In Bhutan, they have over 20 words for dance,” says Houseal. Dance in Bhutan is also endangered, as centuries-old forms of feudalism meet the 21st century. “Today the Bhutanese are on the brink of creating a generation that will have young people who cannot dance,” says Houseal.

In Bhutan, Houseal travels ancient mountain paths with his British associate, Gerard Houghton, and Bhutanese film director Karma Tshering, who speaks 14 of the 22 Bhutanese languages. Last spring, for instance, they had three months to shoot 125 hours of film, but it took up to five days each way trekking off-road to reach each of the six festivals they recorded. A festival can last up to five days, and dances last all day. “It can take a lifetime for a deep spiritual transformation, linked closely to Tantric Buddhism, to take place,” says Houseal.

Houseal’s journeys often lead him to encounters with the mysterious and mystical. In one such encounter he saw exactly what is endangered in Bhutan. “We met a monk named Lopon Sangay. He has been a monk since he was eight years old. When we met him, he had been awake for 16 days, dancing five-and-a-half hours a day in an elaborate three-week ritual. He couldn’t understand why we thought that was amazing. In his mind he was simply acting out the Dharma, his practice as a monk—this is a way of life in Bhutan, dancing as a practice. And it is these internal teachings that are endangered,” says Houseal. “Movement can be preserved and taped, but the internal eachings—training the body and the mind, the organs, using visualization, projectory movement, and energy awareness—cannot. When Lopon dances, his body, mind, and spirit are transformed.”

The audience or observer is also transformed. “It is a fusion of mind, body, and spirit that leaves a karmic, compassionate imprint on the audience,” says Houseal. “In Bhutan, you don’t applaud after a dance is performed; you absorb the energy—so you can’t help but be transformed and take something away from it with you.”

The ambitious scope of Houseal’s work in Bhutan is characteristic of someone with his perseverance, passion—and, he admits, luck. Growing up in rural Michigan, with eight siblings, Houseal had little time or money for dance. As karma would have it, a 92-year-old ballet teacher, classically trained by Russian immigrants, lived within driving distance. “She taught me the total art of ballet: character, music, plot, costumes,” says Houseal. After high school, he successfully auditioned for the School of the Washington Ballet and began as a scholarship student. Then in the late 1970s, the touring New York City Ballet needed performers to dance as extras in Coppelia, with Baryshnikov in the lead; Houseal was chosen from among hundreds who auditioned. “I saw how Baryshnikov lived and worked—in the dressing room, with the press, dancing the ballet—but I didn’t see myself living his life.”

Houseal, the valedictorian of his high school class, wanted intellectual fulfillment, so he left the world of dance for St. John’s—where he also learned to take himself seriously as a dancer. “I was trained as a performer, but my tutors, especially Chaninah Maschler, got me to explore the profundity of being a dancer,” Houseal recalls. “This was my first serious probe for four years into the question: ‘What is the nature of dance?’ ” Houseal also discovered what has become a lifelong love of ancient dance. He took 600 lines of ancient Greek and choreographed a dance to be performed on the Quad. “The Greek plays were meant to be spectacles, meant to have a civic purpose, a theatrical purpose. Where else can you recreate such a spectacle but at St. John’s?”

In Annapolis Houseal was also influenced by Barry Talley, then musical director at the Naval Academy, for whom he worked as a choreographer. Houseal learned how to reconstruct baroque operas, ballets, colonial dances, and ballad operas. And it was Houseal’s friend at St. John’s, Grady Harris (A84), who introduced Houseal to ancient theater forms and gave Houseal translated Noh plays to read. Houseal was also influenced by Francis Mason, Jr. (A43), editor of The Ballet Review, who encouraged him to “go to the source and find out what dancers are teaching.”

Inspired by ancient dance of Greece and drawn to an Eastern sensibility, Houseal moved to Kyoto after graduation to study Noh Theater under Master Matsui Akira. Houseal later formed the Parnassus Dancetheatre, which showcased dancers from all over the world performing Houseal’s avante garde choreography. During the seven years he lived in Kyoto, Houseal watched the city evolve into a cultural Mecca. But by the early ’90s, the cultural renaissance in Kyoto was devastated by the city’s economic downturn and AIDS. Houseal, a fortunate survivor of the disease, pursued his life’s work with renewed passion and studied for a graduate degree at the Laban Center for Movement and Dance in London.

He returned to Chicago, where he says he found the “bald eagerness for money off-putting,” While meditating one day in his lakefront apartment, Houseal spotted a monk walking by on the beach and invited him in for tea. The monk told him to go to Ladakh, a region in the Himalayas. Soon Houseal found himself at a monastery in Ladakh, where he was “transformed to accept Fate’s call and recognized the need to preserve ancient dance.”

As Houseal considers the transformations in his life—from a farming youth to professional dancer, from a college student to choreographer, and now as a dance preservationist, he observes that it can take 30 years of meditation and practice in Bhutan to become a monk. “I look at myself and see how it took only four years at St. John’s to cultivate what has become a deep part of my being,” he says. “At St. John’s I developed my mind after I had already trained my body. And look where it took me—to the source, the Himalayas—where I can reach my life’s purpose.”

For more information on the Core of Culture’s dance preservation project in Bhutan, visit: www.coreofculture.org.

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