In Between, Butoh and Dance Performance by Yoshito Ohno and Lucie Grégoire at L'Agora de la Danse, Montréal. (2011)

In Between, by Yoshito Ohno and Lucie Grégoire (Montreal. 2011)

I was very excited about watching Yoshito Ohno for first time live on stage (at L‘Agora de la danse); my only experience had been through videos and inside his father’s studio (the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio), but he was only teaching and sometimes performing minimal chains of movements. Wednesday November 16th 2011 was the day to see him performing in a real production.

In Between is a project, a part of a trilogy (the second part) that Yoshito Ohno has been working with Lucie Grégoire since 2008. Lucie works mainly with modern dance techniques, but she’s been very close to Butoh and also works with it. Master Ohno follows his father's (Kazuo Ohno) teachings as well as his rich experience working (at various times) with Tatsumi Hijikata from the 1950’s till 1970’s; he is a real heir of those Butoh creators.

Lucie Grégoire and Yoshito Ohno performed In Between with several solos and duos, little by little mixing their personalities and techniques. My interest was, obviously, in observing all of Ohno’s movements, but Grégoire was so powerful and the whole piece of such great unity that it was impossible not see both works.

In Between is the encounter of two cultures of body movement, Butoh and Modern Dance, but also the encounter of two artistic personalities. None of them left aside their personal background, style of movement or ways of seeing their own performing art, but their encounter is successful, it reaches a union of a very high quality.

Yoshito Ohno's style of Butoh is simple, clear, we could see and differentiate each action in his work; his movement was so concrete that we could keep our attention on his eyes, his hands or his legs without missing other parts; he knows very well how to direct our attention. His hands were specially strange and beautiful, with almost no movement in them but always charged with energy. We feel him trembling and we never stop watching him.

There were two types of music, two epochs (actually several), and their images gently exploded in front of us. I cannot forget the movements of Grégoire’s back and arms, as well that infant dressed like a rabbit (or a rabbit itself) Yoshito offered to us.

One to one the solos became duos and their physical speech resulted comprehensive and simple: it doesn’t matter what exactly they were talking about, we observed their music, their past, their dreams, we could see their own relatives on stage.

Yoshito Ohno and Lucie Grégoire. In Between. (Montreal. 2011)

Like a ritual, they looked for their ancestors, for their own ghosts. And what we see at the final scene, two charming ghosts coming from the past in a lovely union, is one of the most beautiful and simple images anyone could ever see on stage.

We were pleased and we were happy at the end of In Between.

Slideshow of In Between at L'Agora de la Danse (Montreal. 2011)

Texts, photographs and videos in this Blog are all author's property, except when marked. All rights reserved by Gustavo Thomas. If you have any interest in using any text, photograph or video from this Blog, for commercial use or not, please contact Gustavo Thomas at gustavothomastheatre@gmail.com.

大野庆人 Yoshito Ohno's Butoh Open Class in Montreal (2011)

Yoshito Ohno and Lucie Grégoire at LADMMI, Montreal. (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)

If last April I had traveled to Yokohama with fears of exposure to nuclear radiation from Fukushima plant, why not face Montreal’s cold autumn this time? Master Yoshito Ohno had told me he’d come to Canada in November this year to perform “In Between” with Lucie Gregoire, a French Canadian contemporary dancer, as part of a trilogy they both have been creating since 2007. My experience in Yokohama had been crucial in my artistic path, so I did not hesitate at any point in going to see the show and if possible take a few more sessions, and so I went.

Two days before his performance, Yoshito Ohno’d gave an open Butoh class for students at LADMMI, L'École de Danse Contemporaine. It would be a class for students, yes, but some interested outsiders were admitted.

LADMMI is part of an art schools complex very close to the Place des Arts de Montreal, but independent from it, in one of the main shopping streets, Sainte Catherine. The building, in a forties style, has been remodeled to host art and dance schools and work spaces for everything having to do with bodywork and design; LADMMI is on the third floor and you can take a look from the street itself while some of the classes are happening.

BELGO, Montreal (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)

LADMMI, Montreal (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)

The wait was long, since I had to be there early to make sure I was included among those coming from outside (in the end, we were only three outsiders). So that gave me time to wander around Sainte Catherine, observe some classes at the dance school and eventually discover the difference between my view of Butoh and that of a school of contemporary dance. Obviously, for the dance school, Butoh is a complement to the training of its dancers and, possibly, a way to develop a style in dance. For me, Butoh is a performing art in itself.

Classroom at LADMMI, Montreal. (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)

Yoshito Ohno arrived with his wife, a translator, Lucie Grégoire and the school principal; we were waiting for him, among a huge mass of students with different levels of training. Lucie apparently had transmitted some knowledge of Butoh to her groups, but not all of those students had had contact with Ohno’s discipline.

Master Ohno, obviously, didn’t remember who I was.  He finally did it when I mentioned April, that I was Mexican and that I had taken his workshop in Yokohama.  These are the curiosities of certain re-encounters, which I enjoy a lot.
I guessed Master Ohno would repeat most of his common exercises: the flower, the prayer, working with silk, etc. But the presence of dance students made me think  I’d experience a kind of pedagogy of Butoh I did not know till that moment, a Butoh introductory class; and that was what he did.

It was an interesting class as a reminder of the rules of this art form, but also an example of teaching people these bases without having previous contact with Butoh.

Yoshito Ohno during his Butoh Open Class at LADMMI, Montreal (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)

Posture

The first thing Ohno (with help from the French translator) said was that we should understand the Japanese characters of man, heaven and earth, to identify our body as in the middle of two forces. He emphasized the image of a line passing through the center of the body to the crown and pulling us up, while the feet were “roots” that pull towards the earth. The chin pointing down and our gaze forward. With that posture, we were to walk. “Amazing Grace” was the first piece of music we worked with in this class.

He made a special comment about the hands; he spoke of the strength of the hands and fingers to remain together, with minimal separation. Then he took the idea of how those hands, that position, the chin down and the line between heaven and earth, were a hell to reach a presence on stage, a link between opposing forces.

We made several physical exercises as if pulling something and feeling the force, and then returning to the position and perceiving this new presence in us. This set of physical tensions initially left in us energy moving within us, and when standing, doing nothing, our body energy was charged without movement, what we call presence on stage.

The flower

In a case he had brought to the studio master Ohno had flowers for all, a lot of scented, artificial flowers. Then he spoke of the flower as the best example of what is standing between heaven and earth, in complete union. He asked us to move with the flowers.  At some point he talked about being the flower, but did not elaborate on it. And we moved along with the music towards our flowers.

He asked us to carry the flower as if we were wind, and at the sound of our steps he asked us not to make noise, even when walking quickly, giving an example by doing it himself, saying there was no need to disturb the viewer's attention from our objective; our steps then followed the flower in the wind.

He told us how, early in his career, asked his father, Kazuo Ohno, to teach him to dance, and he replied giving him a flower and saying, “look, you don’t have to learn to dance, just seek to be a flower. Move with the flower. Do this every day; one day you will feel that you are that flower and will not need to have it in your hand any more.”

The silk

Similarly, he took out from his case several small pieces of silk and gave them to us; each of us began to work with the idea of the strength and softness of silk, the strength and softness of our body. Moving from one state to another depending on the piece of silk we were stretching in our hands. That was our body and our interior; when strong, before stretching, as an adult, it was tense; as it stretched, it became soft, like a child asking for his mother.

As we were working on the technical aspects of the performance, he took from his bag Hokusai's painting “The Wave”.  And he tried to explain the idea emanated from the painting: the artist, who has a different view of things, can see far away and can see up close, like an insect. We had to represent that in order to move, we had to find different views of our work. There was a technical search, but we had to feel the technical work too.

The piece of cloth

Yoshito offering a piece of cloth (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)

He gave each of us a piece of cloth, and we began to squeeze  at the same time that our bodies squeezed, twisting with the piece of cloth. It was tension by stress, and the feeling of the texture of the fabric was to guide us in our squeezing movement, we had to work those points as the source of our movement and whatever came of it.

He made short mention of his theory of “forte pianissimo”, where the most complicated thing for the butokah is not to exploit but to maintain the strength of a possible explosion within while moving gently or slowly.

Squeezing the fabric was his way of addressing the “forte pianissimo” idea while moving.

The tissue

Then he showed us the image of the wooden sculpture of the Buddha of Nara. He showed the same photo he had in his studio in Yokohama as part of a calendar.  Master Ohno made us note the sculpture's hands, hands that are never fully attached but are together within a separation the width of a sheet of paper.

He then offered us each a sheet of tissue paper and talked about the meeting of these hands together but separated, the same for our knees, and our arms in contact with the torso.

We practiced with that tissue paper for a while, but then he interrupted our work and asked us to add a pray to our movement; without further explanation besides saying that it wasn’t a religious thing, but a personal prayer, internal.

The music played for the final movement was the "Ave Maria" by Schubert, which his father always used in training and was the background music of one of his most famous pieces on the scene dedicated to his mother.

Farewell

At that moment, the time allotted for our class had run out and had to stop. Without saying more, Yoshito Ohno thanked us, saying that all the objects we worked with that day were a gift and we could keep them and should use them daily in our training; then he said goodbye. We all applauded to him, we were at a dance school and this is the way dance students are used to thank to their teachers.

Yoshito Ohno's 4 objects for work (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)

Yoshito Ohno saying good bye to each one of the participants (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)

Although Yokohama left me a profound and enlightening experience about Butoh, about its origins and technique, with this short open class in Montreal I discovered (or confirmed), from my point of view, the basis of the pedagogy of Yoshito Ohno for Butoh. 

Now I also had something really tangible, physical, to support my daily training, a support as simple as an artificial flower, a piece of silk, a cloth and a small tissue. They will remind me, while working every day with them as physical objects, every of Yoshito’s words, and will be witnesses of my own development.

Yoshito Ohno and Gustavo Thomas. LADMMI, Montreal. (2011)

The performance Yoshito Ohno gave in Montreal together with Lucie Grégoire, “In Between”, will be part of another blog post.

Texts, photographs and videos in this Blog are all author's property, except when marked. All rights reserved by Gustavo Thomas. If you have any interest in using any text, photograph or video from this Blog, for commercial use or not, please contact Gustavo Thomas at gustavothomastheatre@gmail.com.

Photographs of 4 sesions at Yoshito Ohno's Butoh Workshop in Yokohama (2011)

I've been writing about my experience at Yoshito Ohno's Butoh Workshop in Yokohama and I'm very pleased with the result, many good and interesting comments and good wishes to my new career in Butoh. So, now I'd like to share not words but images, part of hundreds of photographs I extracted from the videos recorded during those days. These photograph also talk about my experience there and they are an invaluable record of my student life, hope you find them interesting.

You'll se only one photograph published of each session (I only choose 4 sessions) but a slideshow from flickr with all the other images. I'm starting with session 2.

2nd session

Slideshow: 2nd sessión Yoshito Ohno's Butoh Workshop in Yokohama

http://www.flickr.com//photos/gustavothomastheatre/sets/72157626701191638/show/

3rd session

Diapositivas: 3a sesión Taller de Butoh con Yoshito Ohno en Yokohama

http://www.flickr.com//photos/gustavothomastheatre/sets/72157626576955943/show/

4th session

Diapositivas: 4a sesión Taller de Butoh con Yoshito Ohno en Yokohama

http://www.flickr.com//photos/gustavothomastheatre/sets/72157626576706225/show/

5th session

Diapositivas: 4a sesión Taller de Butoh con Yoshito Ohno en Yokohama

http://www.flickr.com//photos/gustavothomastheatre/sets/72157626701528874/show/

Texts, photographs and videos in this Blog are all author's property, except when marked. All rights reserved by Gustavo Thomas. If you have any interest in using any text, photograph or video from this Blog, for commercial use or not, please contact Gustavo Thomas at gustavothomastheatre@gmail.com.

“If you feel that the flower is beautiful, then you are beautiful.” (Learning Butoh with Yoshito Ohno)

(Translated by Tadeo Berjon)

Being a flower. Yoshito Ohno studio. (By Gustavo Thomas. Yokohama 2011.)

Yoshito tells us that Hijikata used to say: “Your body possesses everything within, you just have to find it” and he would add that the way in which Kazuo Ohno and Hijikata did that was through Butoh.  Moving every day, each moment of their lives, every moment of doubt, of inspiration, of relaxation, of crisis; moving every moment of discipline and work, of dreaming, of pain, of remembrance.  And it’s true, that attitude is completely logical:  else, how could we find the all within our bodies if we don’t immerse ourselves totally in it, rummaging in every detail of our unknown interior?

The search is done initially by walking, and the slow pace would seem a premise.  In our slow walking we discover that the experience is risky too:  if our body contains all, then, besides life and prayer and love, it also contains death itself and its ghosts, that which others suffer and others ask themselves, violence and grudges, fears and anguish, mental labyrinths and hells... everything.

In those games of the logic of being congruent with our Butoh, Yoshito adds other words from Hijikata:  “the dead body always walks risking life.”

Nothing in the studio of master Ohno is compulsory; a proposal for movement is not an order, nobody is forced to search for their hates, their fears or their violence; everything is simple, soft; something is commented, something is told, something is proposed, and then we must move.  The risk appears because it finds you when you move, like a sunlight or a mother that cradles her baby. 

So, while moving in that search of the all within, I could write at the end of my second session:  “I’ve just arrived from my work with Yoshito Ohno.  Today, dancing, I was a three-day flower, a blossoming peach tree that died in the wind, a prayer, and a child’s heart.”

Our body contains everything and can transform itself into anything.  The proposal was always “be”, “you are...”

“If you feel that the flower is beautiful, then you are beautiful” would tell us Kazuo Ohno through the voice of his son,  Yoshito.

Tens of photos, both of Kazuo Ohno and of Tatsumi Hijikata, show them “being” that which they imagined while moving.  I remember them and learn too.

Hijikata being earth. Photo by Eikoh Hosoe. (book Kamaitachi)

Kazuo Ohno, a pond. Book cover of Hidden Body, The World of Kazuo Ohno.

And in that studio, for various sessions, we were dozens of flowers, under different circumstances and conditions; we were silk, and with it we learned the softness and strength of our bodies, by being the characteristics of silk, by touching silk, we discovered in movement the characteristics of our bodies; and we were bamboo too, and with bamboo in our hands, we explored the strength of our exterior and the emptiness of our interior, the hollowness of our physicality.

Silk. Yoshito Ohno studio. (Photo by Gustavo Thomas. Yokohama, 2011)

We were all if we found it in movement.  There are no fixed structures but each session some patterns repeated themselves:  Yoshito talks, shows, demonstrates, exposes, asks us to move based on that, we always do it with music, after some 5 minutes he stops, continues talking about the same subject or changes to a new one.  And so for two hours every session.  At the end, some tea and snacks while we talked about the petty details of life.

How happy I was because I was never judged on whether I really was the flower, silk, bamboo, the sea or the wave!  That’s right, I was never judged, nor were the others: we were invited to be and to move while being, and just that.

Looking at pictures of Rodin’s sculptures we learnt that he, like Butoh, was revolutionary because they didn’t imitate the movement of the body, but were simply the body that was expressed in itself, it was a kiss or a hug or a pride.  We learnt that impressionist painters, like Butoh, were revolutionary because they offered life from other angles, and that those impressionists got their inspiration to discover those angles from Hokusai and, in particular, his piece “The Wave.”

And then we moved being water, being the sea, being waves, being the force of gravity, the moon itself, and the wave again.  We were, in the line of the water (and not always in the same session), the feminine and the moon; we danced to a piece by Chopin, we remembered the mother, the bosom of the mother; we lived the night and retook the sea.

With a piece of cloth we discovered the intensity of our interior:  by stretching it or squeezing it the intensity was bigger; by relaxing its stretching our interior diminished its intensity.  We played with emotions without knowing which ones they were; it was my mind that associated to some, to my past, to my inventions, to my hidden desires, it responded to what the cloth itself was, my body in contact with the force applied to that piece of cloth. 

Working at Yoshito Ohno Workshop. (By Gustavo Thomas. Yokohama, 2011)

Yoshito tells us about the “remnants of emotion”, that which remains after squeezing the cloth of our emotions, that which remains and weighs and drags within.  While he commented he moved, his walking was slow, tense, heavy.  He talked about the difficulty of expressing those remnants on stage, of the so called “forte pianissimo” and he also moved with great intensity but in an extremely soft way: - “forte pianissimo” - he repeated while moving, and invited us to try.  “This is a challenge to face, every day” - he would explain.  Kazuo Ohno was a master of that “forte pianissimo”.

In the line of emotions we made them body and voice:  on a single occasion (and explaining that he did it specially because I was an actor), he asked me to say a sentence on the heaviness of life, in my language, and to say it while walking.  We were all charged with the search for the forte pianissimo.  Then he asked one of the participants to climb on my back and let his weigh drop on me; I was supposed to continue repeating the sentence during all my walking. That night we didn’t talk more.

I felt the flower was beautiful, then I was beautiful...

Yes, that night we didn’t talk more; but some other days we sang...

Texts, photographs and videos in this Blog are all author's property, except when marked. All rights reserved by Gustavo Thomas. If you have any interest in using any text, photograph or video from this Blog, for commercial use or not, please contact Gustavo Thomas at gustavothomastheatre@gmail.com.

A Secret (Learning Butoh with Yoshito Ohno)

Yoshito Ohno drinking tea at his studio. Yokohama. (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)

-As you pray (while we pray in motion) gather your hands .-

And the hands lead us, thinking about what we are praying, seeing it, dancing.

Yoshito stops and, approaching us, says: - A secret! -

He takes the page of a large photo book and shows it to us:

-Nara, a beautiful city, a very old and important Japanese city. There are many Buddhas there but one of them is special; this Buddha is special, look...-

Then he brings the photo of the Buddha closer to us... What's special about it?

Cover of Buddha of Nara Photo Book. Yoshito Ohno studio. (By Gustavo Thomas, 2011)

- Look at his hands ... They don't come together; there is a minimal separation in between, barely a rice-paper fits in between them.  There is not another one like it in all Nara. That makes it very special. Everything is compressed between his hands; it is powerful. Kazuo Ohno knew that; it is a secret ... 

He looks at us, smiling and thoughtful, at each and every one of us around ...

-Pray with your hands together and feel a separation the width of rice-paper.-

And our hands worked with that separation, and we moved with Maria Callas and Anthony singing in the background. In later sessions we used a handkerchief. That separation could be not only in our hands, but between our knees, as a young and caring woman, and you could also feel that paper between the arms and trunk, between the feet and the ground as the walk of a Japanese Noh master.

Yoshito Ohno shows all while speaking: he is the Buddha of Nara, he is the beautiful and shy teen who walks with a minimal separation between her knees, he is Kazuo Ohno when he performed a woman and his arms barely touched the flanks of his trunk and he is also a walker on rice paper.  He continually separates from us and takes a few steps with his hands almost joined together and raising them to heaven. He doesn't pretend to be a role model, it is just that he must inevitably move as he speaks.

Yoshito Ohno and the rice-paper between his hands. Yokohama. (By Gustavo Thomas, 2011)

Yes, his sessions are full of little and big secrets about Butoh, on how to achieve the inner strength of our movement:

- pay attention to your back, as if it spoke;

- a direct encounter with the whole of the space, with its corners, the front, the back, the up and down; thanking the space...

- know where to land your gaze while walking; if you look down you always seems sad, it is better to look neutrally forward, openly.

We "move" every secret, we explore every secret, we practice, without further instructions, without judgement.

The examples to reveal the secrets each are given, as always happens in his workshop, with the remembrance of passages from the two great masters of Butoh, Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata, but also with simple drawings: geometric patterns to discover the different displacements of our body in space, or Chinese characters (Japanese writing originated in, and retains the use of, Chinese characters) on the body, on man, on day. He talks while drawing, he shows us each drawing he makes, he lets us touch it and review it.

The showing of a palpable example when mentioning every secret functions as an inspiration pivot, as a guide beyond than words or formal instructing; at the end every secret comes to us through an internal image that is created from listening to him, seeing him move, looking at a picture or touching an object. We did it, as I'll talk about in the next post, touching flowers, silk, bamboo, balls...

Zen circle image at Yoshito Ohno studio. Yokohama. (By Gustavo Thomas, 2011)

That painting, so simple, known as the "Zen circle" is one of the biggest inspirations for the discovery of the body in motion as a circle, as a whole, as philosophy on scene. Yoshito tells us that his father was also a philosopher and that he philosophized on stage through Butoh, and that one of the inspirations for philosophizing while moving was that image of the circle drawn by a Zen monk, a circle that clearly doesn't close but which we know includes everything. Kazuo Ohno was not Buddhist but he was a sensitive, religious man, wherever he found inspiration he stopped and moved.

That circle is explored everywhere, be it in the space, be it inside and outside the body, be it with our hands. The hands that emanate from the circle itself, those hands that he tells as waterfalls of force surging from Hijikata. Hands are the holders of the circle that is a sphere, the moon. Yoshito asks us to look at the moon, to feel the moon and see it as a manifestation of that zen circle, and the sphere. Our hands can touch the moon, take it, split it into two, move with it, with its strength, with its attraction, with its poetry.

Moving with the spheres on each hand. Yokohama. (By Gustavo Thomas, 2011)

Several sessions with a number of spheres; inner images that move us, and that make us philosophize without thinking, while moving ... How can one philosophize without thinking? I never asked myself that question while working ... Perhaps there was also another secret.

Those secrets and that philosophizing cause a change in others, teacher Yoshito Ohno tells us. For years people around the world came to the workshop of his father, they listened to him speak, watched him move, moved with him and then something happened, they changed, their life changed. Kazuo Ohno had the force to change others through their own secrets unveiled at each session (secrets that no one could decipher or explain), explored through the philosophical or poetic or surreal movement of Butoh. 

After a few sessions, those visitors changed the paths of their creativity and, in many cases, their very lives.

Texts, photographs and videos in this Blog are all author's property, except when marked. All rights reserved by Gustavo Thomas. If you have any interest in using any text, photograph or video from this Blog, for commercial use or not, please contact Gustavo Thomas at gustavothomastheatre@gmail.com.

At the beginning are the founders, prayer and the offering. (Learning Butoh with Yoshito Ohno)

The three Butoh masters in an improvised niche. Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio. (2011)

Butoh is young, very young; it was born in the fifties of the 20th century and it specifically recognizes a single founder, Tatsumi Hijikata. Hijikata discovered in Kazuo Ohno his partner for revolution. Kazuo then becomes the co-founder of the new style and, according to others, its counterpart as well: while Hijikata worked what was grotesque, dark, tense and destructive, Kazuo worked what was bright, soft, loving. Through them both Butoh takes on an unusual expansion and its influence will cover hundreds of artists of all fields around the world.

The first thing master Yoshito Ohno did, after we introduced each other, was to show me a book with photographs by William Klein, 'Tokyo', with images of Kazuo Ohno, Tatsumi Hijikata and Yoshito Ohno doing a "happening" in Shimbashi area in 1960. It was like telling me that he was part of the big moment in Butoh (and indeed he was part of it; a kind of presentation of himself as someone to be trusted.

William Klein Photograph of Kazuo Ohno, Tatsumi Hijikata and Yoshito Ohno. (1960)

William Klein photograph of Kazuo Ohno, Tatsumi Hijikata and Yoshito Ohno. (1960)

Yoshito Ohno has always been there; from the beginning he has been an observer and a total practitioner of the Butoh revolution in Japanese art, of its development and its changes: as a teenager he took part in several performances by and with Hijikata, he learned from his father how to dance, he saw Hijikata die and accompanied his father in every performance during his last 30 years. Being part of its own mythology, Yoshito Ohno transmits Butoh through the example of the creators in the same place in which Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata worked for years, where Kazuo Ohno left his own legacy.

Yoshito Ohno dancing at his father studio. (2011)

Therefore, any instruction to follow in the workshop of master Yoshito Ohno has as a benchmark either of the two founders of Butoh, some of their movements, some of their anecdotes, some of their speeches, some of the comments by others on their work: if you're going to move your hands, master Ohno talks about Hijikata's hands when he was on stage, about how they seemed to emanate energy from the fingers and palms; if it had to do with the feet, he speaks of how Hijikata had such strength in his feet that, the day he died, at midnight, a sparrow came and stood on them for a moment; if you're going to work with the gaze, he talks about how Kazuo avoided the gaze directed toward the ground while he moved along the floor or how he seduced theater technicians with movement and gaze exercises that earned him the respect of those who did not know who he was. If someone had talked about the creation of a surreal body in Kazuo (and that's what a Japanese critic called it), that served us to search for our our own surreality and create it in our body. In the beginning there are always the founders of Butoh.

They then, the creating teachers, are our starting point and inspiration. To them we also offer our work.

And before every offering, we learn to pray.

Never before, until the first day of work with master Yoshito Ohno, had I heard of the idea of praying on stage, in a way so simple, and without implying any religion. Several Western teachers had told me about a sacred workspace, but they seemed clumsy attempts to sanctify something that was totally alien to us.

When my first exercise with master Ohno was just to pray, something new appeared: in his way of saying it (I was lucky to have someone translate for me in real time during that session), in his intonation, in his eyes, the instruction was different; we should take the first step by praying, the first exercise, that is, the first movement, the first movement improvisation.

The first step is, always, to pray.

Yoshito Ohno explained to us that Butoh dance was born out of the memories in Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno of the terrible tragedies of the Second World War, their hatred and their pain; he talked about how Kazuo had suffered in his journey back to Japan from the Philippines, of how he had seen people die on the boat, and that he prayed with them, with those images, and that he also offered them his movement. Then he would ask: what's in your prayer? about what do you pray? for whom do you pray? And that way we began to move.

Yoshito Ohno playing the same music as his father did. (2011)

Every day the starting working sentence was "pray"(inoru "

祈る")

, then he would go where there the sound system was and began playing records, two, three, four pieces: Schubert's Ave Maria (which Kazuo so appreciated), Il mio babbino caro (by Maria Callas), Amazing Grace, or pieces of Buddhist music. And then we prayed, day by day, and each session, and in its repetition new possibilities for prayer were in us: I prayed for those dead who Kazuo saw, for my own dead ones, I prayed for the image of a dying Kazuo, for the feet of Hijikata's corpse, I prayed for my own past ... and I moved, like the others who were there and  who also prayed and moved.

Learning how to pray through movement. Yoshito Ohno's Butoh Workshop. (2011)

From that praying came the offering, our movement as an offering: the story of that offering by Kazuo for all those dead people was profoundly powerful, just as the one in which he dedicated his dances to his mother, to the great love he felt for her, where his prayer turned into the sensation of an umbilical cord on stage which was in reality a huge womb.

That offering was a petition, a petition to our strength, to the workspace, contact with it, all our senses on it, with all four corners, four sides, the ground, the sky.

Our movement shouldn't be external, prayer and the offering should be internal: "Nobody knows how you must pray and offer yourself, only you, find your prayer, find your way of offering by moving." It is an ongoing exploration.

That was more than a month ago and today, back home, I still do that, exploring;  every day I wake up to move and pray with the momentum of those searching sessions in Yokohama ... Why? I can not say for sure why, I just think I simply need it now.

Texts, photographs and videos in this Blog are all author's property, except when marked. All rights reserved by Gustavo Thomas. If you have any interest in using any text, photograph or video from this Blog, for commercial use or not, please contact Gustavo Thomas at gustavothomastheatre@gmail.com.