Kazuo Ohno, the great master of Japanese modern dance, the inventor of Buto, is returning to Europe. This will be - according to Kazuo Ohno's statement to his European representative, publisher Mario Guaraldi - his last appearance outside Japan.
Always very active on the Japanese scene from the 1950s onwards (his first modern dance concert dates back to 1949), Kazuo Ohno was only ‘discovered’ by Western audiences in the early 1980s (1982 for Italy), when he was well into his seventies.
Those who have had the opportunity to attend one of this dance legend's performances will not have missed the ‘other culture’ that his art expresses: the culture of the bombshell that characterised an entire generation of Japanese artists and theatre people. A culture that, behind the devastating effect of the bomb, tends to rethink everything in a cosmic key before being political, sociological or aesthetic. Kazuo Ohno's dance is contracted, shrunken, like the human figures crumpled by the immense blast of Hiroshima. And it is certainly no coincidence that it is from him that the now countless groups practising Buto dance, the dance of darkness, descend: the naked bodies, white and calcified, the shaven skulls, refer with brutal clarity to the theme of the bomb, of the primordial disaster; and so do the themes of the performances, the confusion of the sexes, the rejection of the ‘ascent to heaven’, supplanted by a sort of ‘descent into hell’.
