Yoshito Ohno: A delicate awareness

Pinning down the meaning of butoh is as slippery a task as chasing after a translated metaphor on ice skates. However, in an hour and a half conversation with "Yoshito Ohno":http://www.kazuoohnodancestudio.com/english/yoshito_desc/ and "Lucie Grégoire":http://www.luciegregoire.ca/htm/index.html whose work, *Flower*, was performed at the "Vancouver International Dance Festival":http://www.vidf.ca/, I managed to glean some insights, many of which caused me to toss my previous conceptions out my own small window in the tower of intellect.

Perhaps this is fitting, as Ohno explained through his translator, Yayoi Hirano, everything in life, including life itself is temporary, only a shadow dancing between darkness and light.

I started with questions about artistic process, politics and the aesthetics of spirituality and ended with questions about the inclusion of strangled chickens and bunny ears as part of the oeuvre that is Ohno’s life in butoh. Still, in spite of the conversation’s ranginess, all the words that I attempt to use to dress butoh simply slip off and land in a heap like so many ideas that die by trying too hard. So, I clean my mental slate and try once again to understand.

Asking Yoshito Ohno about the origins of butoh is like having the chance to ask whoever created this planet about the Big Bang. He was there from the beginning. Still, although he is both part of and heir to this legacy, he defers frequently to butoh’s older originators Tatsumi Hijikata and his father, Kazuo Ohno. There is a humility and a playful levity about Ohno that belies the fact that this agile 70-something dancer is a living archive of the history of Japanese performing arts in the 20th century.

I first encountered butoh on a video shown by a somewhat eccentric professor who left in the middle of the semester (permanently) for Japan, some time after the January 1995 earthquake in Kobe. The earthquake was followed by the March 1995 Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system; while I was taking this class in Japanese Theatre, Japan was high on the radar for me, and it seemed to be a land of many apocalypses. Something about these events, along with my knowledge of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, led me to develop a belief that butoh was a uniquely Japanese expression of the pain that resulted from the events of 1945. Moreover, I saw it as a political and an aesthetic reaction against the encroaching Americanization of Japan as a result of the US occupation after World War II and the eventual signing, in 1960, of the Mutual Security Treaty that caused mass protests amongst Japanese students. So I felt confident when I asked Ohno about these political origins of butoh, an art form that first hit the stage in 1959. To my surprise, however, he tells me, simply, butoh was not about agitation; he tells me that his father and Hijikata and he were just doing dance, nothing political. Just dancing.

Okay, I think, even if it’s not political, it must have a relationship to the spirit world that has something to do with those who died in 1945. This time I’m not completely wrong, but it’s not nearly so literal. Lucie Grégoire steps in to help me out. I’m trying to pin down the spiritual component of what they do, and Grégoire explains that when she works with Ohno, she can reach another dimension. She feels that Ohno helps her to deepen the physical, spiritual, and emotional dimensions of her dance. However, when I ask Ohno about the spiritual dimension of his work, he reflects for a moment and then explains, but with a different take on the question than I intended. He and Grégoire met at Kazuo Ohno’s studio in 2003 so, he muses, it is the spirit of his father (who at 102 is still alive, though no longer dancing) that leads both of them in their collaboration.

I press on, asking why Ohno believes that Hijikata referred to butoh as the “dance of utter darkness”. The answer I get is itself a kind of verbal butoh. Ohno tells me that Hijikata saw himself as the darkness and Kazuo Ohno as a dancer of the light. Like his father, Yoshito took on this lightness, and together with the darkness (Hijikata) they created a shadow, a dance brought to life by the interaction of darkness and light. Ohno then compares the meeting of the darkness and the light to the two parts of a gingko leaf. Two parts, one leaf, he says, two separate ones become one, or one separates into two but together they make the whole. After saying all this, Ohno tells me, with a laughing twinkle in his eye “I’m not insane”.

Considering the idea of Ohno as light, I think back to his performance of the previous night. Together with Grégoire, he brought to the stage a gentle intensity, indeed a luminosity, that was utterly engaging in its warmth. Grégoire’s presence on the stage also had a quality that was completely focused and beautifully intense; however, she was, in some sense the shadow to his light as was suggested by the darkness of her robe, and the near whiteness of his attire. Building on this dynamic, there was a gorgeous moment in the performance when Grégoire danced while Ohno moved around her with a full-length mirror reflecting her expressions and her gestural language back to her as well as to the audience. This beautiful sequence suggests so many things; it suggests Grégoire looking at her future 70-year old self; it suggests Ohno’s identity being hidden by the mirror and then subsumed by his younger dance partner and co-creator, hinting at the merging of their two spirits. Finally, it could suggest the inclusion of the audience in the performance as both subject and object, blurring the lines between performer and spectator, implicating all of us in the dance.

[img_assist|nid=779|title=Yoshito Ohno, the lightness against the dark|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=193|height=288]All of this talk of politics and spirit could lead one to believe that butoh occupies a rarefied world of ghosts and metaphorical gymnastics, but it is a world that is not without humour. In fact, from what I’ve seen and studied of butoh, injection of levity can add to the surreal adventure that artists such as Grégoire and Ohno go on. So I ask Ohno about the rabbit ears he donned towards the end of *Flower*, while fluttering around the stage holding a pinwheel and saying, in what could only be described as a sweetly diminutive voice, “spring come”. His response is as delightful as the rabbit ears themselves. Deferring once more to his father, he tells me that Kazuo Ohno taught him that if you have something funny, like a pig nose or bunny ears, you will relax and have confidence, whereas going out on stage just as yourself, you might feel ashamed. He also tells me that children in Japan are taught that there is a rabbit living in the moon, and since the moon was full on the night of the performance, he wanted to be the rabbit living in the moon.

If he is a rabbit in his 70s, it should be noted that when Ohno first danced on the butoh stage in 1959, part of his role was to strangle a live chicken on stage. Towards the end of the interview I can’t resist asking Ohno about the meaning of this and he tells me, laughing, that this was Hijikata’s idea. Hijikata told him that the chicken symbolized the friendship between men. Through his laughter, Ohno continues by saying that he was so young and impressionable that he believed Hijikata, but even today he’s not sure what it meant. He also tells me that they didn’t kill the chicken; chickens were too expensive at the time, so the bird was kept and it even produced eggs. With this information, Ohno lightly disabuses me of yet another butoh myth; everything I’d read had led me to believe that there was a flurry of feathers and a dramatic end to the chicken’s life. But this was only another well-preserved illusion; the symbolically loaded dead chicken of my imagination actually had an afterlife as a laying hen. And I think I’m beginning to get it. The subversion that is apparent on the stage is all the more subversive because it is illusory. Is butoh really the comical subversion of subversion? A kind of meta-subversion? Or am I thinking too hard again?

There is a word in Japanese that describes the delicately sorrowful feeling that one experiences upon realizing the ephemeral nature of something beautiful or moving. I love what this word, _aware_ – pronounced something like “awareh” - expresses. It might be used, for example to relate the tender sadness that can be associated with the cherry blossom season; it is so lovely and all the more affecting because it lasts for a preciously short time. I don’t think there is a word in English for this particular kind of ache, and I ask Ohno if butoh contains the theme of _aware_. Finally, I have wandered into territory where Ohno affirms my ideas. Performance, he says, is temporary thus creating _aware_. All of nature, all of life itself is _aware_, a flower blooms and then it’s gone, friends disappear, spring, autumn, snow, people’s lives, they all disappear. Like a dancer slipping off the stage, everything fades out or vanishes. Before his death, Hijikata instructed Ohno to preserve his work for 200 years, but Ohno tells me that he knows that even butoh may one day disappear. Having watched Hijikata pass away, and seeing his father decline, Ohno can only be too aware of the inevitable disappearance of everything living, yet he carries this knowledge gently, with a light acceptance, even, perhaps a joyfulness, immersing himself in the beauty before it passes.

I end the interview with a personal question about my own butoh teacher that I studied with in Tokyo. His stage name was Bishop Yamada, and he was one of the most enigmatic and interesting people I met during my year in Japan as an English teacher. Since I left Japan, I’ve tried to track him down many times, but with no success. Butoh circles are small, so I figure Ohno, who lives in Tokyo’s neighbouring city of Yokohama, would know his whereabouts. One last time, I’m wrong. After I left Japan, Yamada went to Germany and then to Russia to dance, and, Ohno tells me, something happened in Russia that made Yamada disappear. Apparently his daughter sometimes takes classes with Ohno, but Ohno avoids asking her about her father. He muses, “there are so many ways to disappear”. And with that I relinquish my dream of one day finding my teacher from Tokyo. A small death, a moment of personal regret for a time in my life that has definitively passed. _Aware._

Leaving the interview behind, I have to laugh at all of the things I thought about butoh, and how so much of what I thought was my own intellectual imposition on an art form that is, after all, fluid and evolving rather than rigid and pedantic in its origins, aesthetics and ideologies. I’m sure that things like political upheaval, natural disasters and human-made catastrophes affected the artists who were at the helm at butoh’s beginnings; these things must have been a significant part of the Japanese gestalt at the time, but as I have learned, butoh is lighter, more transcendent than all that. Time passes, circumstances change, but according to Ohno, that which makes people human does not change, and it is that universal spirit of humanness that butoh embodies, in all of its fullness, temporary as a cherry blossom, enduring as the return of the full moon each month.

_Lucie Gregoire and Yoshito Ohno performed Flower as part of this year’s Vancouver International Dance Festival and presented by the 2010 Cultural Olympiad; performances were March 10-11, 2009. For more information butoh yourself_ "here":http://www.vidf.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=30&Itemid=25