Butoh Film Series

This film series is an incredible immersion into butoh’s world of potent physicality and poetic imagery. The series features short and full-length films: two documentaries that showcase Kazuo Ohno, the founder of the form; and two experimental films – made by artists featured in the festival – that use the expressionistic movement of butoh dancers to tell surreal stories of death and inner demons. The various films – shot in locations throughout Japan and Europe and featuring an array of international butoh artists – are representative of butoh’s worldwide scope.

The films featured in the screenings were:

Kazuo Ohno by Daniel Schmid, 1995
14 minutes, color, video.

From the famed director of La Paloma and Tosca’s Kiss comes a short but riveting documentary on legendary butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno. Set in Tokyo’s Harumi Pier, the film is an intimate portrait of the founder of this radical dance form. The graceful camerawork of renowned cinematographer Renato Berta captures the playful atmosphere created onstage by Ohno and ushers one right into the depths of Ohno’s universe.

“This work goes beyond the ‘documentary’ and into the territory of art films which explore the themes of ‘life and death’ and ‘a man and a woman’.” – Takashi Echigoya

O, Kind God! by Gianni Di Capua
2003, 79 minutes, video.

Butoh founder Kazuo Ohno was once known for his impressive physicality. When filming O, Kind God! Ohno was 97 years old, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and could hardly walk – yet he still had an intense desire to dance. Through a series of performances at his home in Yokohama in 2001, this moving documentary powerfully demonstrates that Ohno’s dance embodies life in all its aspects. His very presence continues to exude emotion: it overflows with facial expressions and delicate hand movements that are fluid as water and changeable as the sky.

Vermillion Souls by Masaki Iwana
A work-in-progress, 109 minutes, 35mm, b&w.

Set in Tokyo seven years after the end of WWII, this surreal story revolves around the dreams and realities of a young boy who, while out chasing fliers dropped by a small airplane, strays into a strange mansion. Confined inside are four adults suffering from an unnamed incurable disease, which prevents them from having exposure to the sun. Shot in France and Japan, and featuring a cast of butoh dancers rather than ‘actors’, the story unfolds to reveal that life becomes true only when one is conscious of death. Written and directed by festival artist Masaki Iwana, Vermillion Souls is his first film.

The Duchess by Eric S. Koziol and inkBoat
2002, 15 minutes, color, video.

The Duchess is a visually exquisite and surreally poetic film. Based on a performance by the San Francisco-based butoh group inkBoat, it was filmed in Germany inside the opulent Prussian palaces of Sans Souci and the textured ruins of the Fabrik Potsdam. The film is a haunting psychological portrait of a lonely and demented aristocrat filled with long repressed memories and conjured demons. Eric S. Koziol’s experimental film and video work has been showcased at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Rotterdam International Film Festival, American Dance Film Festival and others.

Just Visiting This Planet by Peter Sempel
1991, 103 minutes, color, 35mm.

Just Visiting This Planet is a devastatingly beautiful and poetic film shot around the world (in Berlin, India, Madrid, New York, Tokyo and Venice) by Berlin-based filmmaker Peter Sempel. It is a documentation-meditation on Kazuo Ohno that collages scenes of the then 86-year old dancer with punk legends Nina Hagen and Blixa Bargeld (of Einstürzende Neubauten) as well as other butoh dancers such as Ko Murobushi. All of this is gorgeously mixed with music by Schubert, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and Einstürzende Neubauten.

The 2nd biennial CAVE New York Butoh Festival was a three-week festival celebrating 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 and is now created worldwide. Fusing the traditional with the avant-garde, complex choreography with improvisation, wild physicality with meditative illness, butoh defies easy definition and embraces paradox. The 2005 festival showcased Japan, Germany, France, Colombia, San Francisco and New York. Because we were the only festival in the United States presenting butoh’s international spectrum, it was a rare chance to see a number of these legendary dancers perform, some for the first time in New York.

The festival was presented by CAVE Organization. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Shige Moriya, CAVE has produced more than 300 visual art exhibitions, multi-media installations, workshops and performances throughout the last nine years. In 2003 CAVE became a not-for-profit organization and received a Ford Foundation grant to launch a year long Vietnamese Artist-in-Residence Program. The New York Butoh Festival is a natural outgrowth of CAVE’s ongoing commitment to presenting international art and to promoting interdisciplinary and multicultural exchange.