Butoh Night Lessons:

The year of 2022 - the third year of the COVID-19.

On a day of the last week of December 2021, my mother died. She was 94 years of age.
During the two years of COVID turmoils, her condintion of dementia had been worse, and she had lost the basic memories about almost everything. She fell down in December, and soon went into a coma...
When she died, I remembered Kazuo Ohno's butoh dance piece "My Mother" I watched very closely in Sapporo. Tatsumi Hijikata, Akiko Motofuji - his wife, Kazuo Ohno, Yoshito Ohno - his son, and some of the Butoh-shu dancers in those days already died...

Akiko Motofuji once told us, Itto and Mika, at the already vanished Asbestos Studio, that she witnessed the Bombing of Tokyo air raids in the Pacific war, and a hundred of thousands citizens were burnt at one night. She told that their white bones were everywhere in Tokyo, and her whiteness of those bones had much to do with the white body painting for her...
We have been preserving those original elements of butoh in Japan since we started Butoh GooSayten in 1995.
Butoh GooSayTen (Mar.3, 2022)

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　 　Ukraine has been attacked by Russian army since February 24, 2022.


　

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　Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, both originated BUTOH in Japan
　after the Second World War II 　 　
There are different views about Hijikata butoh performances, and some people claimed that there were not political messages in them. Acually, during the turmoils concerning the Japan - USA security treaty, he did sudden sarcastic performances in the streets and even in front of a police KOBAN box. But, I think that the essence of his butoh is rather deeply based on the "life and death" themes except those politically oriented period.

Kazuo Ohno, another butoh master, had been agonizing as a soldier of Emperial Japanese Army when many Japanese soldiers were injured and left behind without foods and any supports from Japan: many starved to death in small islands of South East Asia.
Ohno did not tell anything about his experiences of the war, but he started butoh dance in 1949 at his 40s. I think he was devoting himself to love, beauty, and life of the human being while keeping his deep agonies in his mind until he died at the age of 103 years old.
　
Itto Morita: Butoh GooSayTen (Mar.31, 2022)

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The ideas of Choreography and Improvisation in butoh, and etc.(2009)
　　*Please recollect some basics of butoh (May 25, 2022).