Portrait of a contemporary artist or performer (super work in progress due in 10 hours oy)
A Dialogue with Gravity
In the promotional images for a photographic exhibit celebrating Kazuo Ohno’s 100th birthday, he appears in a pond, sopping wet and clutching a wooden tray painted red. His skin, powdered white with rice-powder, sinks inwards, clinging to his prominent bones no more substantially than does his soaked shirt. Yet despite the struggle to stay afloat, his vermillion lips present the smallest of smiles. It’s an appropriate image to advertise the work of the man who helped to pioneer Butoh; as a solo performer, he has spent his career exploring and embracing just such struggle and all its physical manifestations.
I first encountered Kazuo Ohno when a friend sent me a clip of one of his performances. In it, Ohno, only 80 at the time of its recording, shuffled across an empty stage wearing only a white loin cloth. Eerie chanting and the whining notes of some unrecognizable string instrument underscored his shaky, flinching movements. He moved from the knees. He bent and moaned. Finally, he lifted his head, and from behind a mass of frizzy black hair, I caught a glimpse of Ohno’s face. It was contorted beyond recognition: jaw extended; tongue thrusting outward between rows of bared, uneven teeth; nostrils floating between his whitened cheeks; and the tiny black dots of his eyes erupting, unnaturally exposed, beneath his forehead. He leaned backwards, letting his head roll towards the ground, and a line of drool trickled across his face. I closed the window.
Butoh was created in the 1960s by Ohno and his artistic partner, Hijikata Tatsumi, amidst the cultural transformation in Japan that followed World War II and the atomic bomb. It can be translated roughly as “stomp dance,” though more often as “dance of darkness.” Mark Holborn calls it a “dangerous, subversive form of dance theater”; Dance Magazine deems the dancers’ bodies “the physical equivalent of songs- broken, dissonant, and often hilarious.” Yet my favorite description of the work comes from one of its current performers, Amagatsu Ushio: “Butoh,” he says, “is a dialogue with gravity.”
Ohno and Hijikata started their artistic partnership with forays into street theater. Their work became increasingly movement oriented, drawing from both Japanese tradition and the nascent field of modern dance, and eventually evolved into Butoh. It was not well-received; the pair was banned from dance festivals in Japan for many years after presenting an early work. Critical discomfort arose in part because Butoh actively engages and flouts aesthetic convention: it embraces the grotesque. A butoh piece appears nothing like typical dance. It denies grace and elegance and any unnatural or culturally imposed gesture. It exists to interrogate all aspects of Japanese culture and everyday life, engaging tradition in order to transcend it, reaching for movement so organic as to approach the involuntary.
To unleash basic impulses within the body, performers put their bodies through extreme deprivation, starving or avoiding sleep for days until any external stimulus would provoke power physical reactions. This method is most associated with the darker and more troubled Hijikata, however. Ohno approaches the art differently: though he often embraces struggle and pain, what levity or joy might be seen in modern Butoh can be attributed to his influence.
Unlike Hijikata, Ohno is a devout Christian. On and off the stage he has a saint-like presence, commanding attention with stillness rather than chaos. Though his work is still enormously provocative, it reaches for something less dark or terrible than ultimately elusive. In any performance the concentration and control he pours into every motion is immediately apparent. Individual body parts are isolated and exhaustively explored. Even now, at the age of 103 and confined to a wheelchair, he spends hours developing the expressiveness of his hands. According to Edin Velez, it is “a way back to fetal purity.”
After my first encounter with Butoh, Ohno’s terrifying face remained in mind for weeks. Finally, deciding to share my distress if I couldn’t just forget it, I went in search of the video clip to send to my friends. Instead, I found “My Mother:”
Ohno wears a large flowered hat and tiptoes about the stage to the sound of crashing waves, playing with his sleeves. Each of his arm movements rolls outward from the place where his ribs meet his sternum. His eyes flick upward, his chin strains forward, his legs buckle. He gathers his robes around him, and strokes their scarlet interior slowly. As his shoulders collapse inward, with a grey wig and exaggerated, feminine eye-makeup he is suddenly an old woman, bending against the wind. And then he stands, as the music quiets, and tilts his head upwards, breathing. It’s enough to take a single step.