Following videos of Butoh 舞踏 performance, the postwar avant-garde Japanese form of the movement expression of life/death, dark/light, inexpressible expression of angst and pain and hope, mystery and disorder, normal/abnormal, deep and disfigured–that I posted earlier, the most famous Butoh performer Kazuo Ohno 大野一雄, left legacies of expression that are unequaled.
Modern western forms of dance and movement almost always developed and focused on aspects and expressions of western interpretations of “beauty.” Butoh, on the other hand, is perhaps the expression of angst, death, darkness, disfigurement, complexity, subtly and the in-between places of life/death. It has its own “beauty” precisely because the “grotesque” and the “horrible” and “scary” are present, developed into form.
Butoh has expanded to a worldwide phenomenon. It speaks particularly to audiences connected to recent war, violence and the questioning of life. Below are further modern examples of present-day Butoh.
One of the most famous and well-known troupes from Japan that performs Butoh today, is the Sankai Juku group. I have included two performances by them below, followed by others.
Sankai Juku: excerpts from ‘TOBARI’
Sankai Juku: Excerpts from: ‘KAGEMI’
Hisako Horirkawa and Min Tanaka: Excerpt from a performance in 1988 in Czechoslovakia
Brattelboro Butoh
Co-Production of Compañía Cuerpo Transitorio (Barcelona, Spain) and La Compañía Slurp (Buenos Aires, Argentina) performing: “Penélope.”
Kazuo Ohno 大野一雄 is considered the founder of modern euro-Japanese Butoh 舞踏artistic expression. Butoh is an art form that many consider to be Japan’s contribution to modern dance. For Kazuo Ohno and his students and those who study him, understand his ‘art’ to be far more than dancing and acting. Kazuo Ohno died on June 1, 2010.
He was born in the northern big island of Japan- Hokkaido, in the city of Hakodate in 1906. His childhood with a Russian-speaking father who was a fisherman, and a mother who was well-known for her expertise as a chef of European cuisine, and his early experiences being an athlete at a Christian college in Japan, also led him to become interested in dance and begin teaching modern dance in Japan. In 1938, he was drafted into the Japanese army when Japan began its intense quest to colonize Asia. Kazuo was an intelligence officer who served in China and New Guinea. He was captured by the Australian military during the war and was in an Australian POW camp for nine years.
Following the war, he immediately began dancing. He met Tatsumi Hijikata and learned Butoh arts and how it is connected to Japan’s postwar resistance to cultural devastation and depression. Hijikata rejected Western dance and anything ‘western’ at the time and with Ohno, developed what is considered to be the beginnings of the modern Butoh expression-forms that we know of today. Butoh arose as a resistance to Westernization in Japan after the war. As few people think about it as they read the word ‘war,’ Japan was devastated after being bombed by the allied forces, mainly the US. Its people were starving and there were no places to live. Trauma walked the streets, some in a daze. Many took up drugs and crime, eating rats to survive. Hundreds of thousands were orphaned children, as their families were melted and/or blown away by the bombs. Japanese people reacted in many ways. The Butoh arts was one which is informed by Japanese traditional arts such as Noh and Kabuki, but focused on ugliness, death, and ambiguity and the trauma that must now work to save oneself. In the 1960s, as Ohno studied with Hijikata, he wanted to develop more o his own style and began creating them, premeiring his first works in the late 70s.
I feel a kinship with Butoh because Butoh artists do not want to make us ‘understand’ as we watch. It begs for feeling and being present, as the some-would-call ‘strange’ and morbid movements and expressions along with the colors and the sets bring up things that most of us do not want to feel, or feel but not in such ways. It is Butoh’s way of making its way into the universe. Kazuo Ohno has said to all us who would listen: “To know the universe, one must examine its garbage or refuse.”
There is an excellent article in the London Times at this link:
A devout Baptist since his christening as a child, his themes of heaven and redemption were always present, yet infused with the cultural aspects of Kabuki, existentialism and European expressionist art philosophies and always through alternating humor and morbidity, looking at trauma and love.
His son Yoshito Ohno, carries his father’s tradition forward. Their wonderful website is worth a visit and honoring:
AI NO KO 