Kazuo Ohno 1906-2010

I first saw Kazuo Ohno perform in Tokyo in 1985, when he was nearly 79 years old. I was in Japan that summer to conduct research for an anthology of contemporary Japanese plays. The playwright/director Shôgo Ohta (1939-2009) invited me to a gala evening at his T2 Studio headlined by his company, Tenkei Gekijô (Transformation Theatre), and Kazuo Ohno performing his signature piece, Ra Aruhenchîna Shô (Admiring La Argentina).

I had known of Ohno for several years and of his pivotal partnership with Tatsumi Hijikata from 1954 to develop what they called butoh, meaning "dance" (a critic later coined the term ankoku butoh, or "Dance of Utter Darkness"), but I was not sure what to expect. Then this elderly gentleman awkwardly shuffled onstage, wearing a smock-like dress and haywire hair adorned with an artificial flower. His face, arms, and legs were painted white, his movements slow and creaky, his hands claw-like, his mouth now and again in a silent Edvard Munch scream. It crossed my mind that this grotesque creature must be the denizen of some asylum or maybe, given otherworldly presences in traditional Japanese performance, a ghost of someone driven mad by untold tragedy. Suddenly, he fell to the stage. Was it part of the performance? It was frightfully hot and humid that July evening and sweat was streaking his white body paint. Then, with remarkable agility, he sprang up without a hitch in rhythm. I was impressed more at that moment with what remained of a gifted athlete, which Ohno had been in his younger days, than with the aesthetics of his dance.

Figure 1.

Kazuo Ohno performing Suiren (Water Lilies) at the Asia Society in New York City, 28-30 June 1988. (Photo by Ronit Leora)

Yet, I couldn't stop thinking about what I had seen. Here was the progenitor of butoh who had trained or otherwise influenced hundreds of dancers, and not only in Japan. I had seen performances by several of Ohno's disciples, including Ushio Amagatsu (leader of the Paris-based troupe Sankai Juku), Min Tanaka, and the American Maureen Fleming, who, in part because they were younger and also athletic (Tanaka, for example, was on Japan's 1964 Olympic basketball team), rendered for me performances far more appealing than Ohno's, at his advanced age, possibly could.

Or so I initially thought. With the tangle of thoughts about Ohno's performance swirling in my head, it suddenly struck me that one should never do anything so hasty as to discount a performer's context. Ohno was, after all, Japanese. Traditional Japanese performance, as with gagaku (court music and dance) or noh, is invariably slow and stylized. I recall my students years ago complaining that, with such forms, "nothing happens." Yet, as the French director Jean-Louis Barrault discovered when he first encountered noh in 1960, if one did not pay close attention at every moment, suddenly so much was happening that one could easily lose the thread. And Paul Claudel, an accomplished playwright who was French Ambassador to Japan in the early 1920s, concluded that in noh it was not just an event that happened; rather, he wrote, "someone happened."

Although Ohno was not trained in noh movement, wasn't he fully within this Japanese ethos? Wasn't he creating a character materializing—"happening"—right there in front of us? And, later, as Ohno's rhythms began to filter through my consciousness, it became obvious that each moment of his performance was turned in on itself, crystallizing an intensely felt kairotic moment beyond mundane time, brimming with possibilities.

So different was Ohno's style of movement that I at first discerned few clues as to what else might be at work. He was on the ground a lot, not soaring and leaping—as often happened in Western ballet or in the kind of dance pioneered by Isadora Duncan. I thought of the contrast between Western churches, bathed in light, steeples reaching for the heavens, and Japanese temples, casting shadows, roofs low-slung and of the earth; the one conducive...