butoh

11 Things: Butoh

Thursday, August 14, 2008

To celebrate Bare Bones Butoh Presents 11, we invited artistic director Robert Webb to present 11 Things about Butoh:

1. Historical: "In May, 1959, Butoh pioneer Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986) premiered his seminal work, 'Kinjiki' ('Forbidden Colors'). It is considered the first public Butoh performance. The more spiritually inclined Kazuo Ohno is considered the co-founder."

2. Arrival: "Butoh came to the United States with Koichi and Hiroko Tamano's arrival in Berkeley in 1978. Koichi was Hijikata's protege, and the Tamanos have maintained his legacy."

3. Conceptual: "The darkness of Butoh isn't necessarily a scary, apocalyptic or negative place (although it can be)."

4. Primal: "A viewer once said after seeing a Butoh performance that she had no idea what was going on during the show ... but that night and for several nights thereafter, she dreamed about it."

5. Communal: "Butoh is as much about the audience as what the performer is doing. One reason performers often paint their entire bodies white is to 'erase themselves,' so they can literally become a 'tabula rasa,' a blank slate on which the viewer can write anything she or he wants."

6. Transformational: "Butoh is not a prescribed set of movements in time. It is a departure from expression bounding toward transformation."

7. Spiritual: "As a living entity, Butoh is a force from below, reminding us to pay attention and homage to the dead and listen to the wind as they speak through us. It's an angelic demon seeking home."

8. Radical: "Bare Bones Butoh Presents (BBBP) thrives on change and pushes boundaries. We've presented works from Butoh-identified artists, street-type performance artists, sex-radical performance artists, ritual performers, burlesque dancers, dance-theater artists, hip-hoppers and performers that simply defy categorization."

9. Improvisational: "BBBP is a place where artists can try out ideas, redo/revisit material they wish to continue exploring, hone their improvisational chops, or even bring out a favorite piece they just enjoy doing."

10. International: "As internationally known performance styles go, Butoh is young. It's still discovering what it is. And given the foundations laid by Hijikata and Ohno, it will probably always be in a state of discovery. It started in Japan, has gone around the world, and now looks back at Japan."

11. Local: "Every BBBP show benefits someone in the Butoh community. We've been doing this every three months or so for over three years now. BBBP 11 carries on this tradition by helping to bring Butoh masters from around the world to San Francisco."

Bare Bones Butoh Presents 11, 8 p.m. Fri.- Sat. $5-$20 sliding scale. Studio 210, 3435 Cesar Chavez St., San Francisco. (415) 821-7124.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/14/NS0M128UVK.DTL

This article appeared on page G - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle