Butoh
Butoh ( Japanese. 舞 踏 , butō ), actually: Ankoku Butō ( 暗 黒 舞 踏 , dt. "Dance of Darkness"), is a dance theater without a fixed form that originated in Japan after the Second World War . It was started by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ōno .
overview
The first performance was Hijikatas Kinjiki in 1959. The piece was based on the novel of the same name (English: Forbidden Colors ) by Yukio Mishima and dealt with homosexuality . Perhaps because the subject was too risky, or because viewers thought a chicken was being killed on stage, viewers stopped allowing Hijakata and his staff to play at the festival where it premiered.
The roots of Butoh go back to the twenties to modern German expressive dance. Similar to the German dancers Valeska Gert , Harald Kreutzberg or Mary Wigman in the pre-war period, the Butoh dancer breaks with the rational principles of modernity . Instead, he tries to express a different term, a different experience, and thus declares Butoh to be a contemporary theater of resistance against modern society, which reads in the footsteps of ancient Japan and at the same time speaks to us across the globe and across cultures.
It is also a resistance “... against the mere import of Western modernism into dance and theater”, with the aim of “... wanting to create a new, contemporary and self-reflective Japanese art”. What emerged can be described poetically as “the discovery of the dark body”.
The strange, alienated, alienated body was and is painted white, (almost) naked, and the dancer shows contortions and movements that you would never find in a ballet such as Swan Lake by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky . Such a performance becomes a mirror of the time, it turns against a "... terrifying artificial harmlessness and honesty" and makes use of the absurd and the grotesque, which can and should evoke horror and defensiveness in the audience.
A program of the Tanz- und Theaterzentrum kampnagel , Hamburg, provides a summary of the intentions of this dance : “Butô was created in the late 1960s at the height of the anti-American wave of protests in Japan. A 'dance of revolt' against the Americanization of Japanese culture through musicals and music halls. At the same time, he rebels against the rigid technical codification in classical Japanese dance and seeks new traditions in German expressive dance, shamanic practices and modern dance techniques. Butô creates its own heretical processing of Japanese traditions from the combination of Nō , Kabuki and Western dance theater. "
Parallels to the situation in post-war Germany can also be found in other artists, such as Joseph Beuys .
Another internationally known artist is Anzu Furukawa , who died in 2001.
Butoh in Europe
Butoh was first known to a larger audience in Europe through Sankai Juku . The company, founded in Tokyo in 1975 by the choreographer Ushio Amagatsu , was invited to the Nancy International Dance Festival in France in 1980 . This performance was such a sensational success that Sankai Juku performed at the Avignon Festival that same year . The company stayed in Europe for the next four years and performed at many international dance and theater festivals.
The company Ariadone by the choreographer Carlotta Ikeda (1941–2014), based in Bordeaux , also belongs to the European scene .
Butoh has also been performed in the United States and Germany since the 1980s.
Some key data and protagonists from Germany:
- In 1986, as part of the Berlin Theatertreffen and in collaboration with the Berliner Festspiele GmbH, an extensive series of Butoh guest performances was shown at Künstlerhaus Bethanien .
- In 1987 , Minako Seki , Yumiko Yoshioka and Delta 'Rai founded the first Japanese-German Butoh dance theater in Germany: tatoeba Danse Grotesque .
- Later, on the one hand, the Ten Pen Chii art labor developed from this - with its headquarters at that time at Schloss Bröllin , Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania ; Joachim Manger creates the set, Zam Johnson composes the music and plays live during the performances - and the Minako Seki Company in Berlin .
- Butoh is also registered at the presentation of contemporary dance: Tadashi Endo and Stafan Maria Marb are invited to BRDance in 1990 , the forerunner of the German dance platform , a presentation opportunity for many choreographers.
- Tadashi Endo founded the MAMU Butoh Center and the festival of the same name in Göttingen, which still exists today.
- Various dancers and choreographers can be assigned primarily to the Butoh scene, e.g. B. Sabine Seume from Düsseldorf or Yvonne Pouget and Stefan Maria Marb from Munich.
- In the German feature film Cherry Blossoms - Hanami , the butoh dance plays an important role.
Individual evidence
- ^ Butoh, Tanz, 2004 p. 32
- ↑ See Butoh, Tanz, 2004 p. 34
- ↑ See Butoh, Tanz, 2004 p. 38
- ↑ Program for the SOMMERTHEATER HAMBURG '85, on the occasion of a performance by the Ariadone company . Without ISBN.
- ↑ See Butoh, Tanz, 2004 pp. 34–39
- ^ Website of the Cie. Ariadone. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on September 23, 2018 ; Retrieved January 5, 2014 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Website of Tadashi Endo. Retrieved January 5, 2014 .
literature
- The rebellion of the body. BUTOH. A dance from Japan. Michael Haertder, Sumie Kawai (Ed.) Alexander Verlag , Berlin, 1998, third edition. ISBN 3-923854-22-6
- Bruce Baird: Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2012. ISBN 9780230120402
- Butoh. Dance of darkness. Tatsumi Hijikata. Exhibition and catalog of the ifa gallery, Stuttgart, 2004. Direction: Iris Lenz, Stefanie Alber. Curator: Dr. Johannes Meinhardt. Without publisher and ISBN.
- Susan Blekeley Klein: Ankoku Butō. The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Darkness. In: East Asia Program, Cornell University. Ithaca, New York, 1993. ISBN 0-939657-49-X or ISSN 1050-2955
