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from Kalamazoo Gazette October 4, 2001

GooSayTen Butoh dance in Kalamazoo, MI, U.S.A.

• Butoh dance "A-MA-E-RE-YA" by GooSayTen
  
• at Wellspring Theater (Kalamazoo, MI)
  
• October 5-6, 2001

Butoh, 'dance of darkness,' comes to Wellspring Friday

by Linda S. Mah
KALAMAZOO GAZETTE

A dance form that seeks renewal by exploring the darkest moments of our lives will take the stage of the Wellspring Theater this weekend.

And it couldn't come at a more appropriate time, considering the dark days our nation is experiencing.

The Wellspring Alternative Dance Project will present two concerts by GooSayTen Butoh at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Wellspring/Cori Terry & Dancers launched the dance project this fall to bring alternative dance experiences to Kalamazoo.

Butoh is an avant-garde Japanese dance form that emerged in the 1950s. Tatsumi Hijikata is credited with creating the genre in reaction to the atomic bomb attacks on Japan and his won personal hardships, said Wellspring Executive Director Carol Snapp.

"Butoh speaks to the dark part of the soul, but also to the process of healing and the rebirth and renewal that follows," Snapp said. "Sometimes called 'dance of darkness<' Butoh uses Shinto imagery and excruciatingly slow movement to set up a meditative state, not only for the dancers but for the audience as well."

GooSayTen was founded in 1993 in Sapporo, Japan, by Itto Morita, a professor of psychology at the Hokkaido Institute. He specializes in mind-body relationships, while his partner, Mika Takeuchi, is a dance therapist at a daycare program for the mentally disabled.

Much of Morita's psychology research has focused on relaxation studies, looking at how the body releases tension and offering techniques for how people can achieve total relaxation, he said via e-mail from Japan.

His research led him to a Butoh production by the troupe Sankaijuku.
"My main job is to study and teach about relaxation and mind-body relationship, and Butoh is a basic ground where I can get in touch with my unconsciousness or suppressed things (traumas and/or emotions) and I can deepen myself," Morita wrote.

Butoh, Morita said, should be viewed "as if sleeping and seeing dreams. Good dreams, unpleasant dreams, tenacious dreams, ... Butoh dance sometimes provokes unconscious and unnoticeable images. Butoh is not to be watched but experienced. Together, the artist and audience journey into a dance of 'darkness.'"

Wandering into the unconscious through dance allows the dancers and the audiences to develop an empathetic relationship, he said.
In the best Butoh, wrote a reviewer for the Vancouver Sun last November, "human body disappears in the process of summoning forth other images: The art form's impossible contortions, its glacial speeds, its hauntingly aligned body parts all work to erase the human qualities of the dancing bodies. Instead, we see a ghost, or a dragonfly, or an avenging spirit. Sapporo's GooSayTen ... serves up imagery as intense and finely wrought as any Butoh that has been performed here in the past decade."

The therapeutic nature of Butoh may be especially intense for American audiences in light of the recent terrorist attacks, Morita said. The dance genre emerged after the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, not as a political statement but as an expression of agony - a basic element of mortal existence, he said.

But it is not agony that remains after tragedy, and Butoh helps dancers and audiences seek a broader understanding of life.

"It is usually of no meaning to pick up on a tragedy or two to describe our life. Because we have been and are in calamity," Morita wrote. "I would say that Butoh is a way to find the faintest light or hope in the dark side of our world or our existence by digging out our own suppressed dark sides such as anger, grief, etc."

Linda S. Mah can be reached at 388-8546 or lmah@kalamazoogazette.com
From Kalamazoo Gazette, October 4, 2001
(Citation was permitted by Kalamazoo Gazette on Oct.24, 2001)

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