Performance: The Reluctant Wanderer

The Reluctant Wanderer is inspired by the work of Isamu Noguchi and by thoughts he expressed about not really feeling at home anywhere, being both Japanese and American. The piece is a journey through the landscape of his garden and sculpture studio. It will have a feeling of “yugen” (ghostliness) as the movements create dialogue with abstractions of the work as a timeless and mysterious character. A mask, created by Ralph Lee, is abstract and evokes a face that coexists in this environment. Daniel Carter’s playing on flute and saxophone adds a further layer of texture.

The 3rd biennial New York Butoh Festival celebrated the origins, and international evolution of butoh in a series of performances, workshops, films and lectures. Butoh is a contemporary dance form that emerged in Japan. Fusing the traditional with the avant-garde, complex choreography with improvisation, wild physicality with meditative stillness, butoh defies easy definition and embraces paradox. After almost half a century since Hijikata’s Ankoku Butch Project, butoh dancers have been appearing like mushrooms across the world taking myriad forms and paths; some retain the butoh label as a marketing strategy, or to declare affiliation with original butoh artists. Others continue the teachings of their masters, make crucial discoveries, and perhaps later become susceptible to stagnation in these once-vital realization till others have gained great inspiration from their studies, evolved their learning and art process to create their own butoh. This Festival celebrates the life-work of dancers whose bodies demonstrate the pursuit of honesty, going beyond found styles or forms. Butoh is born and dies with every dancer; that is its fundamental power.

NYBF 2007 showcased over 60 emerging and established local and international artists. Because are currently the only festival in the United States presenting butoh’s international spectrum, and was a rare chance to see a number of these legendary dancers perform, many for the first time in New York. In this year’s Festival we were pleased to open our programming to US-based dancers at Japan Society and CAVE.

This festival was presented at CAVE Organization, a nonprofit artist collective, founded in 1996. CAVE’s produced more than 300 visual art exhibitions, multi-media installations, workshops and performances throughout the last eleven years. The New York Butch Festival is a natural outgrowth of CAVE’s ongoing commitment to presenting international art and to promoting interdisciplinary and multicultural exchange.