In the tenth edition of Oriente Occidente, Kazuo Ohno, the historical father of Buto dance, returns after six years. Buto established itself in the mid-1960s as a phenomenon of rupture and innovation with respect to the traditional forms of Japanese theatre, No and Kabuki. The body is the protagonist of a new dramaturgy in which movement, reduced to the bare minimum, is a refined and extreme sign of the unexplored areas of the self. Decadent and introverted, the dance proceeds through very slow gestures, savoured in the subtlest details, deeply linked to a ritual dimension, absolute to the point of excess. In a culture of writing such as the Japanese one, defined by Roland Barthes as “The Empire of Signs”, Buto represents the exasperation of an aesthetic, of a way of being, the artistic response to the Hiroshima bomb and its speed of destruction. In the dilated and disturbing gestures of Kazuo Ohno, the origins of this expressive form are already anticipated in the 1950s. Born in 1906 in Hokkaido, Ohno graduated in 1929 from the Japan Athletic College in Tokyo. In the same year he attended a performance by the Spanish dancer Antonia Mercè (La Argentina) at the Imperial Theater in the capital. It was a decisive experience for Ohno, who from then on wanted to become a dancer. “La Argentina’s dance invited people to a sea of excitement. She was the personification of dance, literature, music and art, and even more of the love and pain of current life” (Ohno). After seeing Harold Kreutzberg, a disciple of Mary Wigman, dance, he attended the school of Takaya Eguchi, one of the pioneers of modern Japanese dance. Ohno’s first dance concerts and solo recitals were in 1949. In the early 1950s he met Tatsumi Hijikata, who, following the master’s teaching, founded the Ankoku Buto Ha, the group of the dance of darkness, in 1957. Since then, Buto has become a real form, later developed by artists such as Ko Morobuschi, Ushio Amagatsu, Carlotta Ikeda. Ohno began to be known in the West at the end of the 70s. In 80 he was invited to the Nancy International Festival in France, where he danced “Admiring la Argentina” and “A Dream of a Foetus”. London, Paris, Montreal, Toronto, New York and in Italy Venice, Bari, Rome, Cremona are some of the cities that have hosted him in recent years. Among his most famous works are the aforementioned “Admiring la Argentina”, “The Dead Sea” (’85) and “Walter Liles” (’87) and the most recent “Ka Cho Fu Getsu”, on stage for Oriente Occidente on September 5. Typical of the artist are the female disguises, in which the clear demarcation between man and woman is overcome by a more labile and ambiguous vision in which male and female are part of the same universe of sensations.
