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3 History Lessons Joan Laage in New York (1994) David Grenke in New York (1998) Scratch butoh, and you will find the original modern dance movement underneath . We have already observed that butoh founders Ohno Kazuo and Hijikata Tatsumi both studied modern forms, especially as represented in German Expressionism. Although they departed considerably from this early source of their dance training, it nevertheless informed their work. If one looks carefully at the aging photographs of Harald Kreutzberg, the German dancer who inspired Ohno Kazuo to take up dancing, one will see the inner calm and flow of Ohno himself as well as his special flare for the dramatic. Ohno didn’t study directly with Kreutzberg, but seeing him dance provided the example he needed. There is a difference between Ohno and Kreutzberg, however, between butoh and Expressionism. The Expressionist modern dance of the 1920s and 1930s conceived of space and time solidly in concrete terms. In contrast, butoh condenses and evaporates and is not so clearly defined spatially. Historic modern dance conveyed time, space, and force through the influential movement theories of Rudolph von Laban originating in Germany. Images in the mind and heart found their way out in the spatially dramatic forms of dancers Mary Wigman, her student Harald Kreutzberg, and American Martha Graham. The gestalt in space, the form in space, defined modern dance for the eye, and the outer vision was determined by the inner. In Germany and America, the emerging modern dancers of the 1920s and 1930s cultivated individualism through externalization of inner dances as they sought to validate personal experience and contempo- History Lessons 103 rary life. Their themes were drawn from around the world as trade and travel advanced cultural sharing and tempered individual conscience. Joan Laage’s Nothing Lasts but Memory also moves from the inside out, but it choreographs the body in the metamorphic and spatially ambiguous terms of butoh. Her dance travels back historically to Germany as it comments on World War II, and it bridges between Expressionism and butoh, though not necessarily by design. Laage, who has studied Laban’s theories and is certified to teach Laban Movement Analysis, has long been intrigued by early German modern dance and the connection between Ohno and Wigman, she told me, but her art takes another turn. With its hanging motifs, surreal costuming, and verisimilitude of solidity—withholding as much emotion as it supplies—her dance provides a prime example of butoh through the surrealistic prototype. André Breton defines this model in his famous surrealist manifesto of 1924: Surrealism is “a pure psychic automatism by which it is proposed to express, verbally, in writing, or in any other way, the real function of thought.”1 Martin Esslin writes that although in Germany the impulse behind Dadaism and Expressionism had flagged by the middle 1920s and the whole modern movement was swallowed up in the intellectual quicksands of the Nazi period in the 1930s, the line of development continued unbroken in France.2 As we have seen, it was to France that Hijikata turned for inspiration beyond his study of Expressionism, especially to the work of Jean Genet, who gave voice to those on the margins of society, and Antonin Artaud, who envisioned a theater of conscience that would reveal the physicality of life. As it probes limits, butoh from its beginnings in Hijikata until now is often surreal and displays elements of physical theater and the theater of the absurd. But most originally, it presents a physical and subtle poetry of telling images continuously transforming. One doesn’t know what might happen next in the exaggerations and stylizations of butoh. Its emotions, however raw, are nevertheless objectified in their dramatic context, and butoh styles may be as tender as they are tough, like the beautifully still faces that appear in Min Tanaka’s dances, just as the early Kabuki finally cultivated a refined soft-style wagoto, the flip side of its rough-stuff aragoto, and was closer to the folk than later styles. Butoh and butohinfluenced dance represent a wide range of expressive possibility, continuing a long line of socially responsive surrealist work. Although he wouldn’t necessarily be classified as butoh, the Japanese theater director Shimizu Shinjin uses butoh’s surreal physical techniques in spare dramas for his company Gekidan Kaitaisha (Theater of Deconstruction). Along with Japanese Obsessional Art and European theater of the absurd, Shimizu uses movement to address social conditioning and cruelty. He is critical of what he sees as...

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