名人推薦：Foreword/ What’s in a Name?

John TAIN



Unlike the visual arts, the performing arts has always enjoyed a much more ephemeral existence. While a painting or a sculpture generally enjoys a stable existence once completed, a piece of theater, dance, or music occupies space only during the course of a certain duration of time. Once over, it continues to exist, but only in the mind of its viewers and participants.

And yet, somewhat improbably, something lasting seems to have taken hold ...

The Archive and Repertoire of Butoh: Takao Kawaguchi’s About Kazuo Ohno

Nanako NAKAJIMA

Archive fever

Known for its shocking, contorted body gestures and dedication to breaking taboos, Butoh is a contemporary art form that draws on both Euro-American and native Japanese sources. Butoh originated from new dance movements presented in the late 1950s, in the works of two founders, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, both of whom rejected contemporary Japanese modern dance’s strict adherence to Western styles. Hijikata called this movement Ankoku Butoh, meaning dance of darkness or blackness, until he passed away in 1986.

Butoh is difficult to define, and its definition is highly controversial. In terms of its theory and practice, Hijikata’s ideas were so influential that they are regarded as the source of all Butoh practice. One critic has explained that nudity, shaved heads, white-plaster makeup, and transvestism are considered essential elements of Butoh; however, Hijikata believed that Butoh consisted of a peculiarly Japanese quality of physical action and that it emphasized the spiritual climate of Asia, especially that of Japan. Whether one accepts his essentialism or not, a tentative understanding of Butoh is that it is an innovative attitude toward the body in dance that does not produce the shaped body.  

After the Butoh legend Kazuo Ohno passed away in 2010, we then heard about the sudden death of his son Yoshito Ohno, in 2020. The legacy of Butoh has now been transformed into a kind of archival knowledge available to the public. Along with the Hijikata Tatsumi archive, the archives of the Ohnos have been published online for free use. The various approaches to Butoh are made possible through this recent effort at sharing materials.

Dancers outside of the Butoh community started experiencing this artform which produced no visibly shaped movement but legitimated the spiritual discipline, and the genre of Butoh embraced the notion of archiving. For a long time, nobody knew what Butoh was. Now everyone inductively knows Butoh from the archival legacy.

The discipline of Butoh is, however, strict. It could become so intense to the limit of physical torture and continuous verbal assaults by masters. This tradition is the rite of passage to becoming a member of the Butoh community. Some still subject newcomers to these rituals. Archiving Butoh, therefore, does not only democratize Butoh for outsiders, it also emancipates insiders from restrictions, freeing them from an age-old curse.

About Kazuo Ohno by Takao Kawaguchi

Takao Kawaguchi clearly states that he has neither learned Butoh nor had a chance to watch Kazuo Ohno on stage. Rather, Kawaguchi established his career in the field of media art performance as a member of the well-known artist collective, Dumb Type, from 1996 to 2008. In his performance titled About Kazuo Ohno – Reliving the Butoh Diva’s Masterpieces, which is a re-enactment of selected works by Butoh legend Kazuo Ohno, Kawaguchi, in collaboration with his dramaturg Naoto Iina and supported by the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio, has literally copied the dances from video recordings of Ohno’s masterpieces, including the film The Portrait of Mr. O (1969, dir. Chiaki Nagano), as well as the performances Admiring La Argentina (1977), My Mother (1981) and The Dead Sea (1985). While Ohno had practiced dance almost his entire life, he only established his own improvisatory style later in his career and became known internationally after his retirement from his day-job. The last three of these works are characteristic of Ohno’s eclectic and willowy Butoh style after he experienced the training backgrounds of modern dance and gymnastics.

Since its premiere in 2013 at Tokyo’s d-Soko Theater, this piece has continuously evolved. I first saw it at the Yokohama BankART Studio NYK, in the program of Kazuo Ohno Festival 2013. Together with the familiar members of the Tokyo experimental dance community, I had the chance to see the original version. At the beginning of the piece, Kawaguchi strangled himself with litter and played with a fan and a mop. The audience were left standing to watch him in the entrance space which was next to the photo exhibition of Ohno. The performance area was not fixed, so Kawaguchi often crossed into the space where we were standing or sitting. What he was doing was not at all a dance to the music, but a series of spontaneous actions: throwing blue sheets at a fan, hanging up banners in the venue, and changing out of his clothes into shreds of blue tarp… This part was a homage to The Portrait of Mr. O, in which Ohno attempted to explore potentials of his performance by carrying out absurd actions.

When Kawaguchi wrapped his body in the pile of litter, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor was heard. That was the cue for Divine – the aging male prostitute created by Jean Genet, presented in Ohno’s Admiring La Argentina – to appear. In Genet’s novel Our Lady of the Flowers, Divine contracts pulmonary tuberculosis and eventually meets his end vomiting blood. With this music, Ohno, in dress as Divine, first appeared from the auditorium in the crowd and walked up to the stage as if embarking on a death journey. In similar fashion, the debris-clad Kawaguchi stood up and invited the audience to the space behind to take their assigned seats in the black box theater.



After this opening sequence, Kawaguchi presented various scenes from three works in Ohno’s repertoire. Most of the time, the titles of the pieces and scenes were projected on the wall next to him. All the costumes were hung and exhibited on stage, and Kawaguchi showed us the process of changing into and out of them in a Brechtian way. While preparing for the next piece, Kawaguchi’s own physicality was inserted, which constantly changed my perception. Because storytelling was often done in dance, role-play is a part of dance in Japan. As Ohno played Divine, Kawaguchi played Ohno: this line is our cultural tradition.

This performance was, from the way it was presented, a study of Ohno: the scenes are carefully chosen and performed by Kawaguchi, while his movement quality was far harder and sharper than Ohno’s. He was carefully following the outline of Ohno’s movement. I recognized some of Ohno’s signature movements such as the opening up of the arms toward the sky with open hands while taking one step toward the front stage. This was an amazing project, which was never possible in the Butoh community. Because this idea of copying Ohno was too foreign a concept within the discipline, it would never be conceivable to Butoh performers. Kawaguchi was able to do this because he was outside of the Butoh community.

Kawaguchi’s controversial approach of copying Ohno’s dances from archival materials actually follows in the very footsteps of Ohno’s soul searching, artistic trajectory. The Portrait of Mr. O was created during Ohno’s slump. Ohno and Hijikata had been presenting their works continuously until 1967, by which time Ohno felt he could no longer perform in front of an audience – a sentiment that would linger for 10 whole years. Away from the public eye, Ohno began working with experimental filmmaker Chiaki Nagano, making the Trilogy of Mr. O. Without this inner voyage, Ohno would never have danced in public again, and so this work prepared him to take his next big artistic step toward his masterpiece, Admiring La Argentina, in 1977.

The medium of film was able to supply a mirror image not only for Kawaguchi, but also for Ohno in his soul-searching phase. Ohno continuously watched these films by himself to look for an alternative way of creating his own style of dance. For Ohno, the process of negating his body, which had been trained in modern dance techniques, and seeking an alternative, prenatal image of the dancing body was a way of returning to what was inherent in his body. Because Kawaguchi followed the same observational process that Ohno did with film and copied the external form of his body, he reversed the order to re-experience Ohno’s artistic quest within his (Kawaguchi’s) own body. Ohno’s dance was often improvisational, made up of movement drawn from the interior, so this reversal from exterior to interior, from the present to the past, is an effective, filmic approach for Kawaguchi in studying Ohno’s ‘dance of the soul.’

When the performance in Yokohama in 2013 finished, I saw Yoshito Ohno, Kazuo’s son, entering the stage with a bouquet for Kawaguchi. Yoshito was one of the organizers assigned to congratulate Kawaguchi on his performance. Offering a flower to Kawaguchi, Yoshito started dancing with his finger puppet made in the image of his father. Later, I heard from Yoshito that he received a gift box from his student in Mexico after Kazuo Ohno’s death. In this box, he found this finger puppet which was made from the stage figure of Kazuo Ohno in a black dress. I was somehow struck by this moment because the encounter was so dramatic as well as complicated. Yoshito Ohno had long lived with, supported, and contributed to the success of his legendary father. However, as a dancer, he was always in his father’s shadow. His performances were often criticized and compared to those of his genius father. How did Yoshito feel about Kawaguchi’s performance which imitated Kazuo Ohno far quicker than his own? While I applauded Kawaguchi’s project, I also cared about Yoshito.

Beyond the copy and the original

After seeing this show by Kawaguchi, I have met people who reacted differently to his approach. Some admire Kawaguchi for his innovation, while others in the Butoh community declined to see his show. Kawaguchi embarked on an international tour before returning to Japan for his national tour. Throughout the process, the content of this piece continuously evolved, gaining more recognition from the audience with the passage of time.

Kawaguchi used to run the Tokyo International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Along with his work as part of Dumb Type, which has dealt with various identity politics, he is familiar with the rhetoric and approaches in queer culture that involve different bodies.

Filmmaker Chikako Yamashiro has documented the process of Kawaguchi emulating Kazuo Ohno. In The Beginning of Creation: Abduction/A Child (2015, 18 minutes), she presents the creative process behind About Kazuo Ohno. Kawaguchi captures Ohno’s movements and choreography from video documentations of his legendary performances, replicating the actions with his own body. The filmmaker’s gaze clings to the enigmatic exposed figure that emerges as she chronicles how the artist inherits the experience of others with his own body.

In this film, Kawaguchi’s solitary and sincere dialogue with the absent Ohno is portrayed. Kawaguchi drew thousands of sketches of Ohno’s gestures and movements before he even started dancing. Pausing each shot of the archival footage of Ohno, he traced the legend’s poses and adjusted his own to match. Through this process, Kawaguchi came to realize how complex his choreographic sequences were. The more he tried to imitate Ohno’s actions, the more he ended up erasing his own identity, according to Kawaguchi. What has become apparent is the difference between Ohno and himself.

In 2017, Kawaguchi organized a ‘body sculpture workshop’ at Saitama Arts Theater together with his performance of About Kazuo Ohno. In this workshop, he revealed and transmitted his creative process to the participants. Also, since 2017, Kawaguchi has begun working with a modern ballet coach to correct his imitated movements during rehearsals. In the words of Keiko Okamura, the ex-curator of Tokyo Photographic Museum who observed this process, About Kazuo Ohno was not about the entanglement between the copy and the original anymore. Kawaguchi’s project is more detailed and careful: rather, this is a continuous project to inherit the experience of others.

The legacy of Butoh is, however, homosocial. Katherine Mezur criticizes this closed lineage: Butoh scholars and critics left the female performers unnamed, obscuring their distinctive contributions and labor by not considering the collective characters as central to Butoh’s corporeal politics and radicalism, while they celebrate the legacy of Butoh founders Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. If the choreography of female performers like Yoko Ashikawa and Anzu Furukawa are integrated into the legacy of Butoh, one recognizes the process of transfer to other bodies while still maintaining differences. While Butoh’s lineage is free from the myth of the original, Takao Kawaguchi is also free from ‘copying’ the ‘original’ Kazuo Ohno.

For the sake of others

In 2017, I had a chance to see About Kazuo Ohno again in Berlin. It was presented by the Tanz im August festival with a focus on Butoh reconstructions juxtaposed with works by American and Brazilian choreographers. About Kazuo Ohno was performed at the black box theatre of HAU 3. Kawaguchi unveiled the performance outside of this redbrick building. I carefully watched the performance and acknowledged various alterations.

After resetting his costume and props, Kawaguchi began putting on white make-up, iconic of Ohno’s Butoh, on stage – this was new. During the scene “Dream of Love” from My Mother, I was surprised that his dance flowed smoother than the first time I saw it. From time to time, his postures even reminded me of certain documentary photos of Ohno performing this piece. The ultimate revision I noticed was the new scene featuring Yoshito Ohno embedded in the intermission of the work. In this scene, the face of Yoshito Ohno in close-up was projected against the back wall, and he danced with a finger puppet of Kazuo Ohno to Elvis Presley’s Can't Help Falling in Love at the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio in Kamihoshikawa. Yoshito’s eyes were so fixated on the puppet that I felt an intense emotional attachment between the two, even though they were two different entities.

Presley’s Can't Help Falling in Love was Kazuo Ohno’s favorite song. Yoshito was looking for someone who was inhabiting within him. I was unexpectedly moved to tears by this touching scene. Yoshito inherited his father’s legacy. He was another mimesis of Kazuo Ohno within Kawaguchi’s context. This emotional scene transformed the whole perception of this performance thereafter. Kawaguchi emptied the theater space, inviting those who were not present physically – in other words, moving images, spirits, ghosts, ancestors, or the departed – to enter. This offered another dimension to Kawaguchi’s attempt, which made the rest of the piece considerably moving and re-spirited.

According to a dance critic, the power of narrative distinguishes Kazuo Ohno from Kawaguchi. The Ohnos lived side by side with spirits and stories. They had a close affinity with the spirits of other people such as La Argentina and Tatsumi Hijikata, as well as other forms of life. Kazuo Ohno consistently stressed the importance of expanding one’s physical awareness beyond the limits of one’s deeply ingrained human sensibility. When Yoshito had technical problems during his class, he told his students that Hijikata might have visited his studio. This brings the Ohnos the power of creation, whereas their spectators, the purpose of salvation. Their audiences were often emotional and started crying even before Kazuo Ohno performed. On the other hand, Kawaguchi’s project astonished us with his critical approach, albeit without the emotional drive. Nonetheless, Yoshito’s daughter once told me that Kawaguchi had become her grandfather’s doppelganger when he came out of his rehearsal at the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio.

The lines between process and presentation are extremely blurred for Kazuo Ohno. As Kawaguchi states, Ohno is so charismatic that the boundary between choreography, his physicality and personal habits is not binary (interview from dancedition 2017). In the Japanese context, dancers’ daily lives and the stage are inextricable. The work just transmits the product of their daily circumstances. Also, dancers keep dancing until a mature age, changing the choreography to suit their conditions. Consequently, there is no proper archive of ‘original’ dance but repertoires, which themselves are continuously evolving.

Ohno used his dance as a bridge between himself and nature and spirituality. He felt he was surrounded and inhabited by the dead who took the form of ghosts. We cherish both our own lives and those of others around us with painstaking care. Others have sacrificed their lives so that we could enter this world, and Ohno explains this idea as a mother’s pain or suffering. If a child becomes ill, their mother would do anything, even going so far as to surrender her own life for that of her offspring. Ohno needed to feel such heartache emanating from dance. He said that the suffering of others has, without our ever fully realizing it, been engraved in us. We have survived only because others died in our place. We owe our experiences to the sacrifices made on our behalf.

Kawaguchi has carefully simulated these visible movements of Ohno based on the legend’s archival materials, thereby embodying the invisible pain or suffering of others. In the very meaning of suffering, Kawaguchi offers his body for that of Ohno, entering the world to become Kazuo Ohno for us. After Kawaguchi’s performance in Berlin, a German friend of mine wrote to me emotionally that she would never have known how beautifully Kazuo Ohno performed without Kawaguchi’s work. The story goes on. Just as Ohno used to merge with the spirits of the departed, Kawaguchi tries to reach out to those with whom he shares his body. He is touching the whole universe of the past for the sake of us in the present.　

A great many people are constantly coming to life in me. Aren’t they reaching out to me in my day-to-day life as their souls permeate my body? That’s not inconceivable. Since each and every one of us is born in and of this universe, we’re linked to every single thing in it. There’s nothing to stop us from reaching out and touching the entire universe.

Performance Space- Kazuo Ohno

The Archive and Repertoire of Butoh: Takao Kawaguchi’s About Kazuo Ohno

Nanako NAKAJIMA

Archive fever

Known for its shocking, contorted body gestures and dedication to breaking taboos, Butoh is a contemporary art form that draws on both Euro-American and native Japanese sources. Butoh originated from new dance movements presented in the late 1950s, in the works of two founders, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, both of whom rejected contemporary Japanese modern dance’s strict adherence to We...

sts from across the Asia-Pacific region and beyond who have worked with performance as a medium, form and method during the 2017-2021 editions of ADAM (Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance). It proposes or questions work-in-progress modes of knowledge production in the glocal context of contemporary performance. This publication documents the trajectory of ADAM, and further expands the discursive process for the problematique related to issues such as geopolitics, community and social engagement, cross-cultural studies, and interdisciplinary art. As the curator of ADAM, my work is to continuously explore and stir these speculations with artists, and stage how they choreograph, sculpt, concoct and circulate their thoughts and findings performatively.  

Through a point-line-plane approach, Networked Bodies: The Culture and Ecosystem of Contemporary Performance looks at the performance process in three aspects: the individual practices of artists, collaborations between artists, and the art ecosystem. This composition presents how contemporary art, society and culture have intertwined into an intricate network (alas, this publication explores only a part of it).

The first chapter, “The Artist’s Bodies and Research,” examines the creative research and development behind live works and actions of performance, dance, theatre, new media and visual artists. The specific histories, social progresses and contemporary cosmoses connected to the inner recesses of their bodies enlighten us on how the body can be used as a language and instrument of fieldwork, as well as how artistic research is replete with process-oriented performativity. “Working Collaboratively in Transcultural Practices,” meanwhile, is a collection of artists’ firsthand experiences of collaborations and back-and-forth dialogues. The various exchanges and reflections between them catalyze experimental discourses of cross-cultural practices beyond theoretical frameworks. The third chapter, “Mapping the Art Ecosystem”, depicts the intersections of the artist community, contemporary society and the institutional realm in the 21st century context. It charts where we are presently and stimulates our understanding of how different hues of cultural and art practitioners have together colored the ecosystem, including all the contributors to this book: artists, curators, academics, art critics, producers, members of cultural institutions and the like.

There is, however, no single understanding or consensus of ‘Asia as method’ in these networked bodies. The way a piece is situated and associated with other pieces in the same or another chapter of this publication suggests how discourses could be questioned, rather than being installed. It invites readers and arts practitioners to reflexively rethink about ‘who’ is perceiving and rehearsing the notions of ‘Asia,’ ‘inter-Asianness’ and ‘contemporaneity’ – for ‘what,’ from ‘where’ and ‘how’ – as well as what cultural imaginations have arguably been articulated or withdrawn amidst it all.

ADAM was initiated in a bid to build a cultural infrastructure that is open-minded and heterogeneous, as well as to seek a decentralized and non-binary discourse on contemporary performance culture through the research and practices of artists. As a publication that transforms on-site happenings, making-of processes and echoes into knowledge production, this book also responds to the social and arts ecosystem impacted by COVID-19. With the opening of Taipei Performing Arts Center in 2022, ADAM continues to investigate the networks and bodies of Asian and global contemporary art and performance through this book.

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River Lin

River Lin is a Paris-based Taiwanese performance artist working across dance, visual art and queer culture contexts through making, researching and curating. His work has been presented by international institutions including Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Lafayette Anticipations, Centre National de la Danse (Paris), M+ (Hong Kong), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai) and Taipei Fine Arts Museum among others. Since 2017, he has directed ADAM with and by Taipei Performing Arts Center. He has also recently co-curated festivals in Austria, Indonesia and Australia. Lin is a Shortlisted Artist for the 2022 Live Art Prize in Europe.

sts from across the Asia-Pacific region and beyond who have worked with performance as a medium, form and method during the 2017-2021 editions of ADAM (Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance). It proposes or questions work-in-progress modes of knowledge production in the glocal context of contemporary performance. This publication documents the trajectory of ADAM, and further expands the discursive process for the problematique related to issues such as geopolitics, community a...