In the tenth edition of Oriente Occidente, Kazuo Ohno, the historical father of Buto dance, returns six years later. Buto established itself in the mid-1960s as a phenomenon of rupture and innovation compared to the traditional forms of Japanese theatre, the No and the Kabuki. The body is the protagonist of a new dramaturgy in which movement, reduced to the minimum, is a refined and extreme sign of the unexplored zones of the ego. Decadent and introverted, the dance proceeds through a very slow gestuality, savoured in the most subtle details, profoundly linked to a ritual dimension, absolute to the point of excess.
In a culture of writing such as the Japanese, defined by Roland Barthes as 'The Empire of Signs', Buto represents the exasperation of an aesthetic, a way of being, the artistic response to the Hiroshima bomb and its speed of destruction. In Kazuo Ohno's dilated and disturbing gestures, the beginnings of this form of expression are anticipated as early as the 1950s.
Born in 1906 in Hokkaido, Ohno graduated from the Japan Athletic College in Tokyo in 1929. In the same year he attended a performance by Spanish dancer Antonia Mercè (La Argentina) at the Imperial Theatre in the capital. It was a defining experience for Ohno, who has wanted to become a dancer ever since.
"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 present-day life' (Ohno).
After seeing Harold Kreutzberg, a disciple of Mary Wigman, dance, she attended the school of Takaya Eguchi, one of the pioneers of Japanese modern 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 dance group of darkness, in '57. From then on, Buto became a true form, later developed by artists such as Ko Morobuschi, Ushio Amagatsu and Carlotta Ikeda.
In the West, Ohno began to be known in the late 1970s. In 1980 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 more recent 'Ka Cho Fu Getsu', staged for Oriente Occidente on 5 September.
Typical of the artist are the female disguises, in which the sharp 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.
