Flower: Breaking the Patterns
It was a week ago that I saw *Flower*, a butoh performance with Yoshito Ohno and Lucie Grégoire, part of this year’s "Vancouver International Dance Festival":http://www.vidf.ca/. I am still carrying the memory of this experience and can’t resist writing about it anymore. As time has passed so have the details however, and what I am left with are more general impressions.
As we filed into the risers and found our seats, Ohno was at center stage, his back to us, hunched over. His head shaven and butoh white. He was wearing what looked like a suit but later I saw it was more like a silky skin because I could see every single vertebrae and muscle of his back in motion.
Sitting and watching his stillness I was trying to ready myself for the endurance that was to come. Having been to a few butoh performances I knew what to expect, and it looked like this was probably going to be a little on the serious side. I was only able to make one performance at VIDF and was wondering why I had chosen this one because I really wasn’t feeling up to the challenge. Why couldn’t I have gone to something a little lighter and uplifting?
Once the performance started my fears quickly subsided. Lucie Grégoire entered in an exuberant dance from the side, as Ohno maintained his stillness. She reminded me of an older mother who is showing off her dancing skills to her family. She was showing her chops. Her showy performance contrasted to the extreme with Ohno’s dedication to integrity. The contrast between the two seemed utterly hilarious to me. I almost laughed but felt that was probably not the thing to do during a butoh performance.
So many contrasts: man and woman; black and white; old and young; austere and expressive; real and showy; desire and acceptance; circles and spirals vs solid stillness.
As Grégoire’s dance evolved it moved into something new and different. I began to notice a quality which was much more interesting. She was connecting with me and with her own self in a way that drew me in to her. I suddenly felt a real emotional connection to her.
As she moved in this direction Ohno came out of his paralyzed stance and developed movement of his own. It seemed that his integrity had drawn her into her center, and that her centeredness allowed him to find his own freedom of movement.
The whole middle part of the dance evolved from there into many different directions and dimensions which I forget right now.
At the end of the piece Grégoire was alone on stage. She seemed to be dancing in similar circles and the same variations in speed as we saw at the beginning but with an entirely different quality. Something filled with integrity. And now Ohno was off stage. They had returned to the beginning but with the roles changed.
Ohno came back wearing dance pants, with his upper body all butoh-white and wearing this hilarious headband with a flower stuck out of it. He had become a clown. The laughter now was just too much to hold back for the entire audience. He left the stage and came back again with an even funnier headband, a pinwheel and bunny ears. Totally broke me up.
It seemed that Grégoire’s movement towards total integrity inspired by Ohno’s initial stillness had allowed Ohno to break entirely with his butoh pattern. And. in fact he was enabled to move towards another extreme: the state of the clown.
During the standing ovation Ohno produced a little puppet in the image of Grégoire’s character. He reproduced her dance with the puppet to further laughter and applause.
I simply loved this production. Loved it. Together these two amazing dancers were able to reveal, expose and deconstruct and all the patterns of performance dance: both modern and butoh. They then proceeded to put it all back together again according to basic principles of integrity and emotional honesty.
It seems to me that the purpose of butoh from its beginnings (which includes Ohno’s father amongst its pioneers) has been to combat and resist the patterns in society. What Ohno and Grégoire have been able to do is demonstrate and teach this basic principle through their own example. They have identified their own patterns, exposed them and gone past them.
_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 wander_ "here":http://www.vidf.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=30&Itemid=25
For another take on Flower check this "out":http://plankmagazine.com/review/flower-list-making-face-absurdity
For an interview with Ohno, go "here":http://plankmagazine.com/review/dance/yoshito-ohno-delicate-awareness