butoh dance performance
Hiroko Komiya and Atsushi Takenouchi
presented as a part of the project
“Auto-biography. 45 years of Kana”
The sky of body is out of limit.
The swaying of the soul at the border of a certain area.
Limit is the division, the heartbeat of competing lives.
The limit-point is life and death, to the edge of steep peak.
Compassion, do all in one’s power to love.
This is the final moment of life, creatures at the extreme point.
Soul just get the critical point,
where prayer is born.
The creation of the universe has just begun.
A drop of Water.
Atsushi Takenouchi is a Japanese dancer and choreographer. He discovered his original dance style: jinen butoh (the name comes from Japanese fields called Jinen) while he was visiting Japanese villages, remains of forgotten Buddhist temples and sanctuaries during his travels in 1996-99. As a resulted he created new performances: currently, he pursues the idea of “dance with places”. He visited over a dozen countries where he lead workshops, accomplished performances and big, international, outdoor, artistic projects. He has his own butoh dance school in Pontedera (Italy).
Hiroko Komiya makes experimental music using sounds taken from the nature. She operates with a collection of objects with a magical sound such as seashells, bells, knockers, rattles, cyan dishes, carefully selected traditional instruments. She also successfully uses her own, limited voice. As a result she builds inharmonious music improvisations reaching archetypes of eastern culture posing as an unique accompaniment to performances, improvisations, and workshops.
For me, the most important part of butoh is “jinen”. Not only does it mean Nature but is more like: “dance with everything”. Through wind, darkness, and various life situations. If I am an animal in dance, then I’m looking for it within myself: I ask what kind of movement is that? Something like a transformation happens. “Jinen butoh” means that I encounter different life situations and I dance with them. I dance with everything. With darkness and weakness as well. Butoh dance is like shattering a wall. It’s an authentic feeling of your own. (Atsushi Takenouchi in “Voices of the times. Kana Theatre 25 years
Butoh is a form of a Japanese dance theatre created by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno at the turn of 1950s and 1960s. At that time it was a shocking and radical artistic movement built in opposition to codified stage plays – rapid, unexpected, emotional, aesthetic and custom taboo breaking. Currently its being developed and marked by individual and personal style of many artists around the world. Attractiveness of butoh mostly lays in its amorphism – its core is based on intangibleness directly connected with personality and experience of a dancer. The basic indicator of butoh is a courage to honesty towards stimulus coming from mind-body. Butoh is a peculiar “body archeology”, an attempt to reach your own imagination through movement. It’s a provocative crossing, constantly reviving, built somewhere outside the consciousness and based on impulses improvisation, but also remarkably precise, accumulating energy movement structure. Butoh is a dance that listens to an internal impulses, finding some kind of difficult harmony through deformity and disintegration.
“Atsushi Takenouchi Jinen Butoh” book released in November by Pompka Foundation in collaboration with National Institute of Music and Dance as a part of the 2021 Editorial Program. Paper version is sold out but for anyone interested we have good news as there is a digital version is available:
HERE
