Butoh Fu
In collaboration with Butoh dancer Caroline Haydon
This style of interpretive dance coined “dance of darkness” was pioneered in Japan by masters Kazou Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata and seeks to undermine streamline theater performance with slowed movements and a sense of decaying morbidity. The grotesque and gorgeous views of human physicality Butoh embodies feel spontaneous and unskilled, however Butoh Fu points at the camp of performance itself.
Each piece was crafted to partially destroy the singular movement that photographs so often protect. Repetition of self can destroy oneself. Therefore this series is breaking down the dance form to a visual language that the photograph controls, encasing the dance in a glyphic prism of movement folding on itself.
This series of photographs has been exhibited as prints and as a small edition zine in 2019. It has also been featured in a book published by Kazou Ohno Studio in Tokyo in 2020, which is a survey of dancers practice globally.
4.5” x 6”
This hand-made saddle stitched photography book
contains thirty two full-color pages and eleven full spread photographs.
This book is published as a report on worldwide Butoh surveys conducted by the Dance Archive Network from 2017 to 2019 supported by Arts Council Tokyo. The surveys might not have been through enough, yet one can glimpse Butoh’s worldwide current situation. Through the eyes of worldwide Butoh practitioners, this book supplies a variety of voices on “something called Butoh.”
In conjunction with Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio, Tasumi Hijikata Archive at Keio University Art Center
Supported by Arts Council Tokyo
Ephemera
Vocal Warehouse, Los Angeles
Jan 24, 2019
