Archive for butoh
October 22, 2007 at 12:23 am · Filed under dance, dance event, DAVID, dance and technology, butoh, apple, brooklyn academy of music, david hallberg, dance theater workshop, dance culture, dance companies, ohad naharin, jeroma bel
After reading Kristin’s questions about performances and the aspect of relevance in dance to today’s Apple audience, I thought I would take a moment to tell you all what has been inspiring me lately…
And hope this sheds some light on curious readers to get out and see some performances.
Jerome Bel
Bel’s “Show Must Go On”
This choreographer is coming to Dance Theatre Workshop on Nov 7-11.
I caught his “Show Must Go On” two years ago here in NYC and LOVED it. He does such a great job of showing the audience a real part of performance, not just lights and tutu’s.
Japan Society’s Butoh Festival
October 9-27
Butoh is another form of dance that transcends classical ballet and brings you into another form of understanding of movement. It takes some patience but rewards the viewer with a new understanding of movement.
Ohad Naharin
Brooklyn Academy of Music November 13-17
This choreographer from Israel, whom I’ve written about before, is action packed and always takes such advantage of the aspect of theater. Never shy of the physical side of dance, I have always left the theater from his shows completely inspired and in pain from what I saw!
What have you seen that you loved lately?
Shows, Movies, Etc.?
Recent Posts by david hallberg
June 28, 2007 at 10:38 pm · Filed under dance, butoh, MAIA, south africa, acty tang, physical theatre, sifiso majola, heike gehring, dance umdudo
Posted by Maia Jordaan
The Silent Wail of Melisande
Photo by Cuepix/Christiaan Louw
I recently had the pleasure of meeting up with Acty Tang, recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Choreography (South Africa) to talk about his new work, Chaste. Emotions surrounding this work are running high as performers are dealing with highly relevant and personal issues of love and the repressed unconscious. This Butoh-inspired physical theatre work is an iconoclastic interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. Acty believes this work is about the awakening of desire that has the potential to conquer the repression of law, patriarchy and religion. Performed by Acty himself, a dancer Sifiso Majola, an actress Heike Gehring and two singers this work is bound to provoke stereotypical renditions of what constitutes dance. The politics of dance has been inherent to Acty’s work since he presented his first butoh-inspired dance work at the Dance Umdudo in 1999. Last year Apology for a Stranger questioned why dancers make work and what audiences desire to see. In this work he apologized for his inability to dance and asked “What is there left to make work about, except the act of making work?”
AmaQueerKwere
Photo by Suzy Bernstein
In terms of content, Acty keeps going back to the theme of love. Thematically it involves politics because he looks at the homoerotic on stage in a country where it is still not acceptable at a very basic level. For him, love and desire are very closely related. In AmaQueerKwere (2005) he explored desire across time and space through Sontag’s notion of the erotic, approaching meaning through the sensual. And in Beloved (2004), even though the title refers to love there is no exact love object in the work. Some of his other works include And the Empty Space of His Shadow (1999), Ndilinde - Wait for me (2004), Apology for a Stranger (2006) and The Silent Wail of Melisande (2006). Thematically, it is about the
politics of LOVE. Acty sees love and justice as very much linked: he believes there will be healing and community love but born through huge amounts of trauma, struggle and injustice.
The Silent Wail of Melisande - Studio Shot
Photo by Chipo Laba
At a very basic level Butoh takes the body out of the social realm (which is filled with trauma and resistance) into the extraordinary and spiritual realm. The white painted body classically used in Butoh also relates to South African Xhosa initiation rituals, where black Xhosa boys paint themselves white and live in the bush to exit as young men. This happy
coincidence is very similar to the original context in that it refers to a making other and a link to the spiritual. It also speaks to a local audience who might not be aware of butoh and immediately transports the work to a spiritual realm.
The Beloved
The Beloved
Photo by Elsabé van Tonder
More about Acty …
http://www.artslink.co.za/dance.htm
Recent Posts by maia jordaan
October 30, 2006 at 6:01 pm · Filed under dance, dance event, culture, recommendations, DAVID, art, japan, butoh, france
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| Posted by David
Sankai Juku anyone? No I didn’t sneeze…
I have put this Paris-based Japanese butoh group on one of the top five performances I have seen… ever..
Now, that is quite a bold statement I agree, but I wish you all could have seen this performance of “Kagemi, beyond the metaphors of mirrors”.
Butoh I believe is best described as momentary meditative movement, therefore the artist is completely in the moment of the performace and looks as though they are in a trance, which then brings the audience in with them. These aritists all have their heads shaved and paint their whole body in white chalk, which comes off in a powder as they move.
What made the performance so compelling for me was not only the visual aspect (as you can see in these pictures) but the complete dedication of the aritsts to what they believed. The director of Sankai Juku, Ushio Amagatsu, had clearly spent his lifes work evolving this form of butoh. And the result of it, as an audience member, was almost a voyeuristic approach to seeing him in their habitat.
The piece opened with dozens of Lotus flowers hanging on the floor of the stage, only to rise to the ceiling once the performance started. Seeing these flowers gradually rise, made me feel as though the whole show was underwater.
It is art like this that motivates me to be an artist. Performers like these inspire not only fellow dancers and artists but the general public as well. The whole audience around me was captivated and entranced… Entranced with this movement that seems so hard to put into words.
Photo Credit: Jacques Denarnaud
Recent Posts by david hallberg
