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On October 27, Japaneses choreographer Kazuo Ohno celebrates his 103th birthday. In tribute to the date and the importance of Ohno`s work – he is one of the founders of buto – idança brings two texts originally published in Obscena magazine, our partner. The first one, written by John Barret, brings an interesting biography and the second, by Tiago Manaia, deals with the choreographer`s influence in the work of the band Antony & the Johnsons. Check out both perspectives.

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Owner of a rare, graceful and also misleadingly simple movement style, Kazuo Ohno symbolizes, beyond dance, a philosophy about the limits of the body. A portrait of a man nicknamed ‘Tree’.

Text by John Barret

Kazuo Ohno, Japanese butoh artist, is a few months away from celebrating his one hundredth and third birthday, on October 27th. As a citizen and artist, Ohno was contemporary to the events that most deeply marked Japan’s recent history: the Kanto earthquake (1923), the Pacific War (1937-45), the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki , the American occupation (1945-51), the highs and lows that followed the economic miracle of the 1960´s.

Until 2004, the year he retired from the stages, each of his appearances pushed the limits of the human body. Today, despite the Alzheimer haze, Ohno is still a true son of the theater. Maybe his last wish is to die on stage, surrounded by the ghosts of his dear friends, his mother and La Argentina. Born on October 27, 1906, in Hokkaido, the most northern island in Japan, Ohno is the oldest son of a fisherman and a mother he was particularly attached to. Despite having great artistic sensibility, his mother had little time to develop her talents, dedicating herself to the upbringing of ten children. Although professionally he was a physical education teacher, Ohno started his dance classes when he moved to Tokyo, in the beginning of the 1930’s. He was baptized in 1931 and became an active member of the Anabaptist church and has been a devout Christian ever since. After being drafted in 1938, he spent the next seven years in different war fronts, where he served as Captain in charge of provisions and was faced with inhumanity and carnage on a daily basis. In the aftermath of the Japanese surrender in the end of the Pacific War, he was held by Australian forces in New Guinea. Upon his repatriation in 1946, he resumed his position as gymnastics teacher in the Soshin Anabaptist Feminine School, in Yokohama, remaining there until his retirement in 1980.

Parallel to his teaching career , Ohno created a series of performances that had a seismic effect on the Japanese dance world. During the 1960`s he was an active part of the prosperous Butoh movement, collaborating regularly with Tatsumi Hijikata, another proeminent figure in the Japanese avant-guard. At this point, he also started to teach “open workshops” in the rehearsal studio he built with his own hands in the Yokohama suburb in Kamihoshikawa. In some aspects, Ohno was more of a philosopher than a dance teacher and his workshops summoned people from different backgrounds. It wasn’t unsual for students to have more questions after leaving the classes than they did before they set foot in the studio.

Curiously for a dancer, Ohno`s stage career only took off in the end of the 1940`s, when he was already in the beginning of his 40`s – an age in which dancers usually start thinking about reterement in Western dance circles. In Japan it’s not vulgar for a traditional dance artist to keep performing until his 80`s. His first public solo recital in Tokyo, in 1949, launched a career that continued without interruption until the late 1960`s.

A ten year hiatus followed, as he wandered through the desert of luck, a period in which he went through deep transformation, in his approach both to life and dance. His comeback took place in 1977 with a performance entitled Admiring la Argentina, which combined private history and phantasmagoric episodes in an unforgetable structure of great pain, cleverness and joy. Until then, Ohno had not been a target of universal ackowlegmet, but in 1980, when he performed it for a huge and welcoming audience in the Nancy International Festival, the world became aware Ohno`s reckless genius. It was the first of a series of creations dedicated to those he felt he was in debt with. As the title suggests, this piece is a tribute to Antonia Mercê y Luque (1890-1936), better known as La Argentina, probably the most celebrated Spanish dancer of the 20th century and who Ohno saw dancing in 1929. At the same time, and to some extent , Admiring La Argentina can be considered a powerful portrait of his personal muse, it is also highly confessional and marks his spiritual regeneration after a decade of solitude.

Owner of rare, gracious and also misleadingly simple movement style, Kazuo Ohno relentlessly pursued truth and atonement in his stage improvisations and his conversations with students during the workshops. His perfomances are famous for their spontaneity, humor and dark qualities and, sometimes, even for the coldness of their intensity. He doesn’t demand a vast space, neither does he propose the creation of a universe, he does it by simply remaining still, never seeming to belong to a specific space or time. Time and space become alive with the sheer strength of his presence. Some dancers, such as Ohno, become tenacious with fear and slavery, frailty, love and flaws. In all his performances, Ohno seeks to provoke an emotional U-turn in the way the audience respond to life, death and those around them. A central principle in his work is the idea that dance should conduct, in the same way, the dancer and spectator to question themselves about the way they conduct their life, individually and collectivelly.

A human dance

In no other piece is Ohno’s life philosophy more apparent than in My Mother (1981). He opens a tunnel under the conventional idea of dance as choreographic exercise. Existing somewhere in the interior of an imaginary universe, the brilliant atmosphere of this play, full of moments of nostalgia and melancholy, offers Ohno a platform to bare his soul, a soul tortured by many layers of guilt. His mother comes back to life as he graces the stage with a small serving table. All his creations are designed upon his personal experience. His life is the subject of his dance. Underlying a deep feeling of loss, what permeated this piece is the fact that he was no stranger to tragedy: his mother witnessed the death of two of her children before they reached adult age, Ohno`s younger sister died on the street run over by a car and his baby brother died in his arms. Loss is again the subject of another memorable piece, The Dead Sea (1985), about his father.

Within Ohno`s seeming madness and theatrical eccentricity lies a great humanity. Contrary to many contemporary artists, Ohno hardly worries about the drama of the isolated individual. From his perspective, we are born in and from this universe and, as such, there are unrelenting limits between one and the other. He passionately believes that mutual bonds between the individuality of the human being and the animal world are invincible. Ohno is an artist of symbiosis. Likewise, in a strong contrast with many of his contemporaries, either butoh dancers and others, Ohno happily conducts the members of the audience towards a rediscovery of their common humanity. His utmost preoccupation is that the spectator leaves the performance feeling actually happy to be alive.

He is not embarrassingly emotional nor does mock sentimentalism. His approach is straightfoward, his art is clever; no stranger to every day tribulations, Ohno doesn`t try to mask his vulnerabilities. In any case, he highlights his flaws. Ohno`s stage costumes are made of the same fabric as his mother`s clothes. And Midori Ohno and La Argentina are positive figures, affimative characters, whose mission in life was to give and share.

In order to fully appreciate Ohno`s body work, we must consider them within the ample context of his evolution as a human being, in a way that everything is interconnected in his work. There are no borders between the stage and everyday life. Kazuo Ohno does not commute between his home and the stage. Intensifying his wings on stage, Ohno invariably carries the luggage of everyday life, the war fronts he fought, his personal tragedies and joys. Nothing changes and, however, nothing stays the same. His white make-up doesn’t mask a face marked by the years and his costumes don’t hide a less vigourous or less youthful body.

This article was adapted from the text published at Ballettanz XX, who we thank.

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Text by Tiago Manaia

The other day I used the expression “comeback” to refer to Japanese choreograpger Kazuo Ohno and someone reproached me. They said: “Such expression does not apply in his case, because he never actually left”. I used it because in the beginning of the year, the four corners of the world were invaded by images of the choreographer.

Antony Hegarty, leader of the band Antony and the Johnsons chose an image of Kazuo Ohno for the cover of the album The Crying Light. His choice was explained as a search for a long artistic and spiritual path. With Kazuo Ohno, he told the magazine Les Inrockuptibles, he learned how to face life`s stages as an eternal first time. Antony thus defended himself from the expectation that surrounded his return after the success he found with the album I am a bird now. Ohno was his teenage idol.

The image used in the Antony & the Johnsons is from 1977, when Ohno still danced. The images used in this page are recent, they were taken in November 2008 by French fashion photographer and designer Jacques Le Corre. In them, Ohno is in bed, “dans son lit de mort”, as they say in French.

Le Corre had tried for years to photograph the choreographer. In 2008 while travelling through Japan, he got in touch with Ohno`s family and was authorized to advance in the project of immortalizing the people he admires. He didn’t think he would find the choreographer in the state he did.

He had imagined a special make-up for the photos, he had flowers and a crown to place on his hair. In the garden of Ohno`s house he found small tiles made by his grandchildren and photographed them to later superimpose the images (that’s the effect that can be seen in Ohno`s face in the first picture).

Jacques Le Corre became famous for designing hats, that`s why he naturally tought about making a hat with some of the elements que brought to the photo shoot. He gave up on this idea, due to Ohno`s fragile state and used only the crown. Now he realizes the crown would denote something of a mortuary, but at that moment he said he felt something else, “it was life that went on” – he told us over the phone from Paris – “death that was mixed with life and made it unreal”.

Kazuo Ohno was conscious during the whole shoot.

The choreographer lived the highlight of his career later in life, between his 70`s and 90`s. He said he would like be able to die on stage.

The term “comeback” doesn’t apply to Ohno. “Forever” does.