_____________ Butoh
We normally use our individual body as a tool for attaining what we think we want or what society wants.
We normally ignore that society makes us want to hide our naked life, our true nature.
We normally forget that our bodies harbor their transformative nature inside.
BUTOH: The Dream of Existence Perfected. --To manifest existence rather than to listlessly, passively exist like an automaton, (a machine of flesh, soulless, numbed of sensation)...
--To be free, fluid, ever-changing, protean, extravagant --To be soft/rigid, rapid/slow, tense/released, vivid/dull, moist/dry, organic/inorganic, new/old, male/female, alive/dead… This is why we turn to Butoh. Not thinking about succeeding. Just to try. To try to be.
However, our own consciousness, our blood, our breath, the vital energy that should freely flow from without to within is repressed by the codes and customs of our societies.
Tatsumi Hijikata said he drops a ladder deep into his body and climbs down it every night. Since he presented 'Forbidden Colors', 50 years have passed, but his words remain in the present: we always need to look down in the body. Each one of us needs to try again and again to penetrate the darkness of our bodies in order to reach the true essence of our lives. Each one of us has a distinct nature. Each one of us has a way of existing, deep inside, that we cannot learn from anyone else. Not from our parents, not from our friends. Not from Society. But deep inside, we have our own dance. This is our butoh. Butoh teachers can give you techniques to open the mind and the body. But in the end you have to express your own nature. When you express your own spirit: this is your butoh. You can only find that for yourself. Without judgement and without self-deception. We are all lightness and darkness...
(...)
We each contain the potential for all the kindness and all the cruelty in the world. It's not bad or good, it's simply nature. But to dance butoh you have to really look at these things. You have to be able to look inside yourself without lying. Once you recognize what you are, it is much easier to transform into anything.
Today, we can easily be informed of everything from all corners of the world through multimedia. And we reveal our own daily life to unknown people. So we are exposed, but not known, vulnerable, but not felt ... Our 'life' will never be truly revealed by multimedia, but it can succumb to it. What can we learn of other people through technology? It may be their body skin, clothing or what they possess... but not deeper. Like we cannot seize a foreign country without being soaked in the place, we may never live a life without entering inside of the bodies, base of the life. Each of our bodies has a human form. However, inside that form, each body contains many other bodies, of the living, of the dead, of the visible and the invisible. How can we find a connection with each life in the body? How can we reach the crossroads with another life? How can we live that life? This search will be our dance.
*Assimilating, Rendering in English, Expanding & Proofreading... : Danse Perdue
*Rough idea for the text on this page: Yuko Ota
>>> Here, you will have complete version of the text.
_____________ Millenary Euphoria?
It is taken from the title of a book written by Kenji Nakagami "Sennen no yuraku" (A Thousand Years of Joy). This book is composed of six stories about men of the Nakamoto family in a buraku (outcast community) in Kii peninsula. All of them died roiling in the turbulence of their decadent and violent existences. However, their lives are not described as pathetic but fully engraved by deep shadow and very dense light with numerous breathing lives as if they have an ephemeral and eternal life. The luminous and tenebrous air of this world reflects in Yuko's butoh/dance/life.
_____________ and Yuko Ota...?
CV in ENGLISH >>> PDF file
Here and there, she makes performances, not only but mainly of butoh since 2000 and she makes workshop of butoh since 2005.
She encontered butoh in 1999 in a workshop of Atsushi Takenouchi, since, she is often fed by him and his partner Hiroko Komiya (musician) as dancer, family, friend and human being...
When she settled in Paris in 2003, she was soon involved in a movement of Les Transe-Mutants, interdisciplinary art company and worked with them till 2006 as a regular member. It enormously helped her by bringing her physical and spiritual awareness.
While she had been in Paris, she also worked in an art association PLURIEL Le Tunnel. The encounter with artists, especially with Mariette Barret and André Sarfati who had devoted themselves for Le Tunnel influenced her being.
In 2007 summer, she became literally rootless wanderer... She had been in India for three months and it immersed her in full of life/death in a daily life... really so full that it could be felt in the air and on the skin. And there, she got an intensive Iyengar yoga course given by Usha Devi in Rishikesh which led her to deepen her physical consciousness.
And then, she has been in several cities/villages in Japan, France and Italy for making a show, workshop, visit or nothing special. On the road, she met Death Posture (currently Danse Perdue) from US, butoh based multidisciplinary arts collective which made her remember the gaze at animas' breathing...
Today, she wants to return back to the life of a settler on a place and to elaborate what she has learnt...
Main works
gyoku - 玉 (solo piece, 2005)
les enfants perdus - who killed the inner child? (solo piece, 2009)
Layers (improvisation in a city)
INNATUS (improvisation in a forest, a field, a river, a sea, a mountain...)
And do you hear me? (group piece, 2008)
PermaDream (group piece, 2010)
Le Sacre du Printemps of Igor Stravinsky (Co. Les Transe-Mutants & Quartette Le Bruit qui Court, 2006)
U-Pipe (Directed by Atsushi Takenouchi, 2007)
