Comprising historic archive footage and texts this DVD box enlightens us greatly about Yoshito Ohno's here and now. Butoh has a distinct starting point, namely, in 1959, with Kinjiki , a duet featuring Tatsumi Hijikata and Yoshito Ohno. His father, the legendary Kazuo Ohno created another epoch-making opus in 1977 Admiring La Argentina, with Yoshito Ohno as production manager. These links are no mere coincidence. To date, we've tended to overlook Yoshito Ohno, barely granting him the recognition he merits. Just as dance requires a lengthy gestation period in which to evolve, his dance has finally come into our field of vision, in all its freshness and stark-nakedness, linking Butoh's origins to its zenith, to a point where he now stands at a crossroads.
A cultural film documenting Butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata as he is taken out of his stage space and dances in the streets. 16mm.
Ankoku Butoh is a style of avant-garde dance that established itself in the counter culture experimental arts scene of post WWII Japan. The dance form is thought to have been founded by Tatsumi Hijikata, who both created and performed in butoh pieces from the late 1950’s - through the early 1970’s. In butoh, the style of movement is extremely stylized and deliberate, vacillating between slow and sharp, expressing feelings of dread, sexualization, violence, calmness, birth and “creatureness” among other things. This performance of Summer Storm was originally recorded in 1973 at Westside Auditorium, Kyoto University, Japan, and was Hijikata’s last public performance before his death in 1986 with Butoh of Dark Spirit School. Video version produced in 2003.
"Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis" is a visually striking film portrait shot on location in Japan with the participation of the major Butoh choreographers and their companies. Although Butoh is often viewed as Japan's equivalent of modern dance, in actuality it has little to do with the rational principles of modernism. Butoh is a theater of improvisation which places the personal experiences of the dancer on center-stage. By reestablishing the ancient Japanese connection of dance, music, and masks, and by recalling the Buddhist death dances of rural Japan, Butoh incorporates much traditional theater. At the same time, it is a movement of resistance against the abandonment of traditional culture to a highly organized consumer-oriented society.
The movie compiles footage taken by Ogawa Production for a period of more than ten years after the collective moved to Magino village. Unique to this film are fictional reenactments of the history of the village in the sections titled "The Tale of Horikiri Goddess" and "The Origins of Itsutsudomoe Shrine". Ogawa combines all the techniques that were developed in his previous films to simultaneously express multiple layers of time—the temporality of rice growing and of human life, personal life histories, the history of the village, the time of the Gods, and new time created through theatrical reenactment—bring them into a unified whole. The faces of the Magino villagers appear in numerous roles transcending time and space—sometimes as individuals, sometimes as people who carry the history of the village in their memories, sometimes as storytellers reciting myths, and even as members of the crowd in the fictional sequences.
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