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| Courtesy Sankai Juku |
By Tanya Calamoneri
Now one of the best known artists in the avant garde dance form of butoh, Ushio Amagatsu founded Sankai Juku—who come to BAM later this month—in 1975 in Tokyo. A cultural councilor at the French Embassy in Japan invited the company to Paris in 1980, and French audiences smartly fell in love with its work. Sankai Juku has booked nearly bi-annual engagements at Théâtre de la Ville in Paris ever since, and splits its time between Paris and Tokyo. The company also tours extensively, contributing significantly to butoh’s global recognition.
Butoh emerged in 1959 in Japan, instigated by Tatsumi Hijikata, whose work was a provocation to modernity in general and specifically to the Western-lead reconstruction of Japan following World War II. In his 1960 essay “Inner/Outer Material,” Hijikata describes his performances as “bodies that have maintained the crisis of primal experience.” His work was grotesque, erotic, inflammatory, and rebellious. Sometimes dancers would flail wildly. Other times, they would stand completely still—though not serenely—held in place like an insect in amber, crushed by images, sensation, and histories. Rather than a specific dance grammar, butoh utilizes images to initiate movement. The dancers transform their sense of time, space, shape, and relationship based on a string of image poetry that propels them to move.
