All language subtitles for About Butoh 1. Intro to Butoh (inglés_ASR)

so i want to talk about bhuto pluto is

this

avant-garde experimental performance

style that began in japan in the late

50s early 60s the founders of bhuto

kazuo ono and tatsumi hishikata have

been trained in western dance but didn't

feel like it fit their bodies so they

wanted to find a way of moving that fit

their bodies more authentically without

going back to traditional japanese ways

of moving bhuto is very much

about

an exploration

of your own relationship to your body

your relationship to your psyche your

relationship to the world your

relationship to the universe

and for that reason

the techniques that kazuo ono and

tatsumihihikata

pioneered are in some ways universal

because it's not

about finding a japanese way of moving

but of finding your own ways of moving

and there are certainly a lot of analogs

in the west

to the type of work that they did and i

want to talk about that too as the

series goes on

their style involved finding the impulse

for movement from inside yourself

rather than have it being imposed from

outside so when a performer even a

director or choreographer might

choreograph

a company they wouldn't say hey move

your hand like this

they would give them an image that might

give them the impulse to raise their

hand you know your arm is floating on

the surface of water your arm is being

lifted by a string and those are just

very simple

almost simplistic images that i just

gave the images in butter we'll get to

talking about the later are much more

can be much more surreal much more

intense

tatsumi shikata and kazuo ono the

founders of bhuto took very different

paths in their art

hishikata was a very mercurial artist

when he was finished exploring one

aspect of his art he would move on to

another the early pluto performances he

directed were more

reminiscent of what we might call the

happenings from the 60s than any kind of

structured dance piece

they were wild they were chaotic they

were scandalous to japanese society at

the time

but after this period hishikata changed

his style he began to work with large

group of dancers in a very specific

choreographed way and this is the style

of bhuto that is most well known in the

west the low to the earth the white

makeup from head to toe the stylized

movements

the slow movements the dancers moving in

almost unison the strange facial

expression so all of this was developed

in this period of hijikata's career that

began in the early 70s

kazuono on the other hand took a very

different path his work was always

improvised casual ono never directed a

dance company he was a solo artist all

his life he would sometimes you know in

these early pieces would perform with

tatsumi shikata would continue to

perform with his son yoshita ono

but his work was very different from

tatsu hishikatus it was

always

improvised

every night he would try to be true to

his authentic self

i saw him perform

three times in new york city in 1999

he was in his 90s if i remember right at

that point but he was still an amazing

dancer he saw him three nights in row

and every night

he performed differently the music was

the same his son yoshita ono was dancing

with him in some of the pieces that

night and yoshita ono would do the exact

same choreography every night but kazuo

ono would bring a different energy a

different feel

every time he performed

even different costumes on some of the

nights it was an incredible

string of shows and they just got better

and better after each one i feel very

blessed and lucky to have been able to

actually see him perform so that's a

very different style of bhuto

kazuo ono very

improvised

trying to be true to the moment never

repeating himself feeling that there's

something deadening about doing

something that is choreographed as the

same night after night because your mind

is never the same after night every

night your spirit is not the same every

night your

your mind

your heart is not the same every night

they developed from

these two different branches

two different

branches of bhuto one which is highly

choreographed highly stylized groups

like sankajuku

dairukudakan

are really good examples of that

um

my teachers koichi domino's

is another

example of that and then there's this

other style which came more out of the

casual ono branch of bhuto which is

improvised where the dancers will

perform differently every night it's

much more personal

and

people like mintanaka and

another one of my teachers akira kasai

they would perform more that personal

improvised style of pluto i want to talk

about another aspect of bhuto that i

don't think i've communicated

quite as well yet as i would like to

and that is the thing that to me is the

heart of bhuto and the thing that

attracts me most to it

it's a thing that's difficult to talk

about without sounding cliched without

sounding pretentious but one of the

aspects of bhuto

which is

very important to me

is the idea that it frees you from

yourself

it's not mysticism but it can be seen as

a spiritual practice in fact kazu ono

talks very

deeply and sincerely about the spiritual

side

of bhuto

um that's one of the reasons for example

that one of the aesthetics of bhuto is

the shaved head the white makeup from

head to toe the idea is you're using the

makeup as a way

to

[Music]

eliminate the self to free yourself

from yourself and bhuto is about moving

from a place of non-intention which is

the one of the way it achieves that for

example a modern dancer if they want to

dance water might think how does water

move how can i imitate the water the

movement of water with my body

a butter dancer

would be more likely

to

go deep into themselves

try to create in their imagination the

sense of being water

and then just letting your body move

freely

spontaneously to the image

one teacher i had put it like this you

don't want to move your body to the idea

of the image but to let the energy of

the image move your body

so you're not moving from intention

you're not moving

from self you're not even moving from

desire

you're trying to free yourself from all

of that in fact one of my favorite

quotes from kazuo ono he said being free

is not doing what you want or what you

think

it's being liberated from thought being

liberated from

will

being free is not doing what you think

or what you want it's being liberated

from thought

liberated from will

and combining that with the imagery of

bhuto where you can embody anything you

can body animals you can embody

the sea you can embody

like i said some surreal images we'll

get into later

another quote i remember sanko juko i

saw them perform in berkeley once i wish

i had saved the program notes but from

my memory they said something like butto

they want to free themselves from the

nervous agitations of personal

psychology

there's a lot more to talk about in

terms of the internal image of bhuto but

i did want to talk a little bit about

that about the spiritual side of bhuto

about how it opens you up

to the universe and frees you from

yourself

that's a very important part of bhuto

and

um

we'll talk more about that and the

different approaches to it

um as we go through this series

so anyway that is a brief rundown of

uh what bhuto is about um i hope i gave

some sense of what might make it

interesting

um

over the course of the next few videos i

will

explore like i said the history of pluto

the aesthetics pluto

western analogs pluto my own approach to

bhuto

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