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Out of the Fog, 12-1: Butoh or not Butoh
Blissed Off with Sankai Juku
By Aimee Ts’ao
Copyright 2006 Aimee Ts’ao
SAN FRANCISCO -- The world-acclaimed Butoh ensemble
Sankai Juku, presented by San Francisco Performances,
sold out its shows November 14 and 15 at the Yerba
Buena Center for the Arts Theater months in advance.
That left a lot of people, including many of my
friends, out in the cold. But in the end, I can't say
that it really mattered.
Earlier in the evening of the 14th in the YBCA
screening room, the Dance/Screen series, co-presented
by the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and
Museum (SFPALM), SF Performances and YBCA, shows the Butoh documentary
"Dance of Darkness" by Edin Velez. (The term Butoh is
short for "Ankoku Butoh," literally dance of
darkness.) While there is a lot of archival footage
of Butoh originators Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno,
Velez includes Akaji Mori's Dai Rakuda Kan, Isamu
Ohsuga's Byakko Sha and Yoko Ashikawa's Hakutoboh
among other artists and companies to show the
diversity of styles that evolved in the first 30 years
of Butoh's existence. (Butoh started in 1959 and this
documentary was made in 1989.)
Sankai Juku is not among the companies featured.
Since 1982, this company, founded in 1975 by Ushio
Amagatsu, has received 11 commissions from the Theatre
de la Ville in Paris and has toured those works
extensively throughout the world. Narrator Mark
Holborn says that if you see it at Lincoln Center,
then it's not Butoh. (Of course, some of us laugh
since we will shortly be at Sankai Juku's show in the
theater next door.) There are those who believe that
Butoh is necessarily subversive, transgressive and
could only be found in underground performance venues,
not mainstream theaters.
Less then half an hour later, I walk in to find my
seat in the theater. The curtain is already up and
the stage is filled with giant floating flowers,
two-foot wide white lotus-like blossoms atop
three-foot long white stems. I turn to fellow dance
critic Ann Murphy and ask her if the abundance of
blooms makes her think of Pina Bausch's "Nelken" (in
English, "Carnations"), and whether she thinks they
will also be trampled underfoot in the course of the
performance. We both agree that they are too
exquisite for such a fate.
The lights fade and director, choreographer and
designer Agamatsu's "Kagemi -- Beyond the Metaphor of
Mirrors" begins. When the lights come up we see a
half-dozen bodies lying or squatting among the
stalks. Stage left, standing on a round platform, a
lone man, costumed in a simple robe with his skin
powdered completely white in the typical Butoh
fashion, begins a series of slow contemplative arm and
head gestures to spare Japanese-like music. He exits,
the flowers rise to hover like a canopy above the
stage, and the six men slowly unfold their bodies and
begin passages of movement that are quite ritualistic,
at times evoking a feeling of ancient Egypt. Except
for this company's performance of "Hiyomeki" in
Berkeley in 1999, what I am witnessing now is
certainly the antithesis of everything I have ever
encountered in all my not inconsiderable Butoh
experience. No primal spasms, no rebelling against
the crushingly restrictive Japanese cultural
prescriptions and proscriptions, no darkness. Indeed,
at this point the lights are intensely bright, and the
aesthetic of purity and simplicity seems the direct
descendent of all the traditional Japanese theater
forms, Kabuki, Noh, and Kyogen, not the repudiation of
them. While the choreography may send small ripples
gently outward, nothing so much as even suggests
rocking the boat. Even the actual movements appear to
be generated superficially, the arms, legs and heads
moving separately, not as the result of unified
impulses from the torso. The only exception is a
short segment in which four men in dark costumes with
white paint spatters are quite playful with each other
and use red paint to mark each other's ultra-white
faces.
I reflect on Tolstoy: "All happy families are alike.
Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own
way." At the end of the evening (an hour and 25
minutes without intermission) I am totally benumbed by
beauty and utterly gorged on gorgeous scenic design
that leaves me hungry for depth, for a slice of
reality stewed in turmoil. My heart, unmoved, beats
steadily under my ribs; my feelings lie frozen beneath
the skin of my face.
A few nights later I interview Shinichi Iova-Koga by
telephone from London, where he's teaching.
Iova-Koga founded inkBoat, a San Francisco-based
collaborative Butoh group, and also works frequently
in Europe. We discuss the state of Butoh past and
present, and if it is really possible to define the
form. He says that even Butoh's fathers, Hijikata and
Ohno, changed their ideas about it over the course of
their careers. Hijikata, toward the end of his life,
thought of his work as a new Kabuki and stopped using
the term Butoh, replacing it with Tohoku Kabuki. (He
was from the Tohoku region of Japan.) So maybe one
true aspect of Butoh is that of embracing change.
Iova-Koga also says one of the problems is that Butoh
has spread to so many countries and so many people
have formed their own personal interpretations of it
that there really is no single authority that can say
what is or is not Butoh.
Amagatsu's journey has been vastly different from most
of the other Japanese Butoh artists. He had studied
ballet and modern dance and was a founding member of
Dai Rakuda Kan, leaving in 1975 to pursue his own
artistic vision with the formation of Sankai Juku, now
the most widely known Butoh troupe. While most Butoh
companies were struggling to survive in Japan, Sankai
Juku was receiving support from the Theatre de la
Ville in Paris, allowing Amagatsu to create an
evening-length work every two years. But how Butoh is
Sankai Juku really? It has achieved an exceptionally
high level of aesthetic excellence, but, as Iova-Koga
says, "Perfection is not interesting."
For information on advertising on Out of the Fog, Aimee Ts'ao's new column from San Francisco, e-mail Dance Insider publisher Paul Ben-Itzak.
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