CUNY Butoh Film Program

This program is the first of two parts of the New York Butoh Festival Film Series and features extremely rare footage of performances by Kazuo Ohno and his son,Yoshito Ohno. Brief remarks and an audience Q&A with John Solt will follow each video. Moderated by Festival co-founder, Jeff Janisheski.

The films featured in this series are:

Selections from Mandala of Mr. O (1971; 15 min) and Mr O’s Book of the Dead (1973; 90 min)
Selections from Mandala of Mr. O (1971; 15 min) and Mr O’s Book of the Dead (1973; 90 min)
These are selections from the second and third films in the legendary and rarely seen trilogy of M. O films featuring Kazuo Ohno and directed by Chiaki Nagano. Filmed during a period in which Ohno had retired from public performance, these experimental films focus on Ohno’s improvisational dance and are a fascinating portrait of the Japanese avant-garde art movements that were flowering in the 1970s.

Kazuo Ohno (1982; 55 min)
Excerpts from a documentary made for the Swiss television, with French narration. This video contains the only extant footage of the flamenco dancer La Argentina (who inspired Ohno to create his signature piece, Admiring La Argentina). It has clips of her dancing in 1930, interspersed with Ohno’s interpretation of her.

Ishikari ho hanamagari: Michiyuki (1991;65 min)
(The Hook-nosed Salmon of Ishikari)
Filmed by Kazu Tanabe, this video documents Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno’s 1991 outdoor performances in Hokkaido, Japan. The subtitle of this duet is “michiyuki” which, in Kabuki theatre, refers to the danced, journey scene: the emotional climax when a couple goes one-way towards a double suicide. Buddhist gesture of compassion.

Butoh: Ohno Kazuo no sekai (1996; 30 min)
(The World of Kazuo Ohno: From Divinarianes by Jean Genet)
Video of site-specific performances by Ohno. Beautifully shot and featuring Ravel’s “Bolero” score.

Selection from Irie Hirozen saiten (1995; 37 min)
Ohno is seen working with Toshio Mizohata, his lighting and music designer, manager and archivist. In a small gallery, Ohno dances with various objects, including the items on exhibit. He dances to Elvis Presley’s gospel music, showing his versatility and humor.

Kaidan wo oriru tsuru (1990; 37 min)
(The Crane Descending the Stairs)
Filmed by Kazu Tanabe, this video documents Ohno improvising in a rural mental hospital in Japan.

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.