Two years ago, I travelled to Japan for the first time and fell in love with this country. Not only for its beauty, but also because of the incredible inspiration you sense everywhere around. During my stay in Tokyo, I went to the Mori Art Museum and in the museum shop I found a dvd that triggered me. The pictures on the cover are mystique and somehow I felt, I needed to buy it. Later, back home, I googled the dvd (I couldn’t read the Japanese text on the cover) and it is called: An Offering To Heaven. The two documentaries (2 discs) are such an inspiration!

The main person in the two documentaries is Kazuo Ohno, one of the most famous dancers of Japan and inspirator/developer of the dance style butoh, a dance with very slow movements. He studied athletics at university, started working as a sport-teacher and kept on teaching till he was 86 years old. After he saw a performance of Spanish dancer La Argentina in 1926, he also started studying modern dance. In 1949 Ohno opened his first dance studio and worked together with Tatsumi Hijikata,with whom he developed the butoh dance style. In 1977 Ohno travelled the world, performing solo ‘La Argentina Sho’,a butoh classic.

He stayed devoted to dance, even in his late nineties. Although he could no longer dance with his legs, he kept on dancing with his upper body, sitting on a chair or supported by an assistant. The first dvd ‘Flower’ contains footage of Ohno’s last performance in 2001 (he was 95 years old). A most touching performance…

On the second disc a documentary filmed in 2002, based around the life and work as  Ikebana master (Japanese art in flower arrangements)  Yukio Nakagawa, like Ohno a genius in his art, who devoted his life to flowers. Being kindred spirits, Ohno and Nakagawa collaborated numerous times. Both man were outsiders in their art and only in their later years did they get recognition. When, in the documentary, both men met again at a performance of Ohno, it’s moving to see the geniuses meet and feel so humble in each others presence…

Their last collaboration is a breathtaking performance in open air in  May 2002 on the Shinano riverbed, where Nakagawa builds a dream with millions of multi-coloured tulips, thrown out of a helicopter, as the wheelchair bound Ohno dances under the swirling shower of petals in the rain…

When I bought the album ‘The Crying Light’ by Antony and the Johnsons, I did not only love the music, but also the black&white picture on the cover. Later, when I was preparing for this post, I dicovered it’s a portrait of Kazuo Ohno on the cover of the album. Anhony Hegarty (singer-songwriter of Antony and the Johnsons) says Kazuo Ohno is his largest source of inspiration in  life and work. Spring 2010, a few months before Ohno died, Hegarty visited Ohno and his son Yoshito, a master dancer too, in their studio and gave a concert in Tokyo in honor of Kazuo Ohno, in collaboration with Yoshito…

 ‘An Offering To Heaven’ inspires me very much!!!  You can order it at:  www.kazuoohnodancestudio.com

Being a hopeless romantic, I love stories and movies about the Marie Antoinette period in history. Not only because they lived in castles and dined at candlelight, but also because (the rich) people  were beautifully overdressed and overcoiffed. Reading a lot about those days and their habits, rudely disturb my dream of life during those days…. To write a post about the famous hairdo’s, I had to dig into the way these hairdo’s were made and stayed well for days or weeks..

The specific hairdo I love is called ‘Á la Belle Poule’, which means an exact replica of a ship called Belle Poule was placed on top of an already ridiculously high hairdo. It was designed by Léon-Michel Guignace, as a tribute to the victory of this French ship over an English ship.

To create this hairstyle, a woman’s long hair was pulled up over a frame or a bundle of horsehair and topped of with the replica of Belle Poule. Other toppings were flowers, birds, houses or whatever was in fashion. To keep the hairdo in shape, it was necessary to use large amounts of hair pomade, made of beef fat (!!) and then covered with powder, usually from wheat or white rice, sometimes scented and dyed blue, pink or violet.

You can imagine what was happening inside these masses of hair, beef fat and flour, which of course couldn’t be washed and cleaned. Lice and other little insects had a ball in there. The men, who were also wearing large wigs, shaved their heads and could take of the wigs, which were than often cleaned by baking them in the oven! But the women preserved their hairdo’s for months and were therefore hosts for lots of lice and other pesticides. At diner tables often long-handled silver claws were laid out with the silverware, so guests could scratch the itches inside their coiffure!

But this was not the biggest problem of the French court… In those days there was a huge shortage of food and peasants could barely afford a loaf of bread, while at court, the hairdo’s of nobleman and women were dusted by servants with enormous quantities of flour. The poor, already angry about the extravagant lifestyle of the wealthy, finely exploded with anger about the waste of perfectly good food and started the French Revolution (1789-99).

Beautiful and inspiring movies about this period are Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola and Madame Pompadour, The Kings Favourite, but the best is Il Casanova by Federico Fellini. In this movie the costumes are even more lavishing and over the top, with fantastic details!

A few years ago, I was asked to do hair and make-up by a photo shoot for ELLE. The theme was Sailor Girl and for the portrait I painted a little wooden ship white and attached a white ribbon. My interpretation of á la belle poule….

Last year, the photographer got an email from a design academy student, who summoned her to take the portret of the girl with the boat on her hair of the internet, because she had stolen the idea from this student, who also made a photograph of a girl with a boat on her hair…!? The student claimed the idea and therefore had the right to tell the photographer to remove her picture…. Sweety, our picture was taken years before and the only person to claim the idea is Léon-Michel Guignace, who is long gone and buried!