Ōno Kazuo

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Ōno, 1986

Ōno Kazuo , often transcribed as Ohno Kazuo , ( Japanese 大野 一 雄 ; * October 27, 1906 in Hakodate , Hokkaidō ; † June 1, 2010 in Yokohama , Kanagawa Prefecture ), was a Japanese dancer and co-founder of the contemporary expressive dance Butoh and has many international choreographers inspired.

Life

Kazuo Ōno was born on the northern island of Hokkaidō as the son of a fisherman who also ran the Hakodate fishing cooperative. His father spoke Russian and his mother was a connoisseur of European cuisine who also played the Japanese zither koto and organ.

Ōno studied at a Japanese sports college and was initially a successful athlete. After a school employee took him to a dance evening with the Spanish dancer Antonia Mercé (La Argentina), he changed his career aspirations. In 1933 he began his dance training. After graduating from college, he first sports teacher at the secondary school Kanto Gakuin High School, a private Christian school in Yokohama . There he saw a performance by Harald Kreutzberg , a student of the German expression dancer Mary Wigman . He decided to study choreography with the two Japanese modern dance pioneers Ishii Baku and Eguchi Takaya , a fellow student of Wigman .

Another profound influence besides Wigman's expressive dance was the horror of World War II on Ōno's life's work . In 1938 he was drafted into the Japanese army and served there for nine years, ending up as a prisoner of war in New Guinea .

He made his first public dance performance at the age of 43 in 1949 in Tokyo with Mitsuko Andō. In the audience there was also Hijikata Tatsumi , the father of Butoh or Ankoku Butoh (Dance of Darkness). Hijikata invited Ōno to his dance community. In the same year Ōno Kazuo founded his own studio in Japan.

From 1959 to 1966 worked Hijikata and Kazuo together dance performances, which also influences from works Mishima s and European writers such as Jean Genet and Comte de Lautréamont had. In addition to Hijikata, he also performed with other butoh and modern dance dancers. From 1969 to 1973 he starred in three feature films by director Nagano Chiaki. In 1977 he dedicated the piece Admiring La Argentina to his inspirer Antonia Mercé , which is now considered a classic Butoh piece.

From 1980 he started his international appearances. The titles of his main works are My Mother , Water Lilies and The Road in Heaven, the Road on Earth . Ōno represented fragile and at the same time strong characters, often dressed up and made up as a woman.

The Hamburg filmmaker and photographer Peter Sempel has accompanied Ōno Kazuo with his camera for almost a quarter of a century, and in 2004 the poetic film portrait Kazuo Ohno: I Dance Into the Light was created .

He made his last appearance in 2007 when he was one hundred years old. Despite physical limitations, he made movements with his hands and on his stomach with arms and legs, which one New York Times dance aficionado considered to be perhaps the best metaphor for the dark art of butoh .

Ōno Kazuo died on June 1, 2010 in Yokohama at the age of 103.

The photographer Hosoe Eikō published the illustrated book Kochō no Yume / The Butterfly Dream ( 胡蝶 の 夢 ) in his honor in 2006 . Antony and the Johnsons dedicated the CD The Crying Light to him in 2009 .

The Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio in Tokyo is run by his son and butoh dancer Ōno Yoshito, and the Ōno archive is also kept there.

further reading

  • Kazuo Ohno / Yoshito Ohno: Kazuo Ohno's World from Without and Within. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Connecticut, 2004. ISBN 0-8195-6694-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d e f g Jennifer Dunning: "Kazuo Ohno, a founder of Japanese Butoh, this at 103" , New York Times , June 1, 2010
  2. 細 江英公 人間 写真 集 舞 踏 家 ・ 大野 一 雄 『胡蝶 の 夢』 好評 発 売 中! . Seigensha, archived from the original on March 25, 2010 ; Retrieved May 6, 2010 (Japanese).