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from Vancouver Sun November 2-9, 2000
the Vancouver International Dance Festival 2000
GooSayTen's Butoh thrills (excerpted)
by Michael Scott (Vancouver Sun Dance Critic)
- Butoh dance "Toki Hime" by GooSayTen
- at Performance Works (Granville Island, Vancouver)
- Octover 31- November 1, 2000
...
Butoh, which arose in Japan in the late 1950s as a reaction to both
traditional Japanese dance and Western-style modern dance, is an
astonishingly pure form of visual art that uses the moving body as a
transducer of poetry. Inspired by Shinto imagery, butoh tends to flow
slowly between poses of almost Zen-like concentration, with bodies
depersonalized by thick layers of white makeup, eyes red-rimmed, mouths
agape and limbs contorted like branches of witch-hazel.
In the best butoh, the 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
dragon-fly, or an avenging spirit. Sapporo's GooSayTen, founded in 1993
by psychologist/dancer Itto Morita, serves up imagery as intense and
finely wrought as any butoh that has been performed here in the past
decade. In Toki Hime- a phrase in Japanese that means Princess Ibis,
and refers to Japan's endangered national bird, the crested ibis -
Kasai and dancing partner Mika Takeuchi present an extended mediation
on madness and metamorphosis.
The dance presents a stream of images, some active and erotic, others
passive and full of memory. The two characters cross and re-cross the
stage, creating a kind of dreamscape as they go, their faces
alternately masklike and grimacing. In a long introduction Morita
crouches motionless beneath a gauzy crinoline, his arms extended and
hands flexed backward, his head hanging forward to the floor. The
pent-up energy of this pose is spell-binding, and in the passage's long
development, Morita's pendulous head becomes a new, non-human
appendage. In another section, he whirls his partner around and around,
a cloud of fluttering silk gathered about a startled face, creating a
dancing version of Japan's famous erotic woodblock prints. Takeuchi is
at times a ghost, or an ibis princess, drifting amidst flower petals or
disappearing into her ghostly white wedding kimono.
The images of GooSayTen burn in the imagination for hours afterward, as
satisfying a work of dance as you are ever likely to see.
...
"GooSayTen created a dreamscape from an inspired
stream of images."
by Vancouver Sun Dance Critic Michael Scott
( mscott@pacpress.southam.ca )
from Vancouver Sun 2000. November 2-9
"GooSayTen's Butoh thrills" (excerpted)
i11/26,2000. Made by Itto j
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