Performing Arts in Asia
dal 6/4/2004 al 23/5/2004
Segnalato da
6/4/2004
Performing Arts in Asia
Ifa-gallery, Bonn
The Dance of the Darkness. The dancer and writer Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986) was the central figure of the Japanese Avantgarde of the 1960s and 1970s. He not only exercised an immense influence on Japanese modern dance and the country's under-ground theatre angura, he was also the intellectual and creative artistic leader of a circle of theatre people, writers, literary critics, musicians and fine artists.
The Dance of the Darkness
Apr 7 – May 23, 200
The dancer and writer Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986) was the central figure of the Japanese Avantgarde of the 1960s and 1970s. He not only exercised an immense influence on Japanese modern dance and the country's under-ground theatre angura, he was also the intellectual and creative artistic leader of a circle of theatre people, writers, literary critics, musicians and fine artists.
Educated in modern and free dance, he broke radically with the western tra-dition of modern dance, in 1959, and began to develop a genuinely Japanese form of contemporary dance which he termed 'ankoku butoh'-'the dance of darkness'. Hijikata turned away from almost every dance convention: he no longer saw the body of the dancer as an abstract instrument, or tool, with which to achieve aesthetic figures, but tried to bring out and show the deeper, darker, inaccessible layers of emotion and expressive movement which shaped and have literally been embodied in that body. His dance conjures up these unconscious 'tracks' by using techniques which switch off, so to speak, the control of the conscious mind over the body. Through this tracking process, his own body becomes impenetrable and obscure even to the dancer himself.
Hijikata's 'rebellion of the flesh', perceived in Japan as a form of dance, is akin to radical developments in the performing arts that took place in Europe and North America around 1960, e.g. the 'Viennese actionism', in particular of Günter Brus and the early happenings by Joseph Beuys in Europe, and the performances of the 'Living Theater' in New York. 'Ankoku Butoh', however, goes way beyond these similar movements in terms of radicality and austerity. In recent years, the European public has been introduced to the traditional Japanese forms of theatre, noh and kabuki, as well as the bunraku marionette theatre (for example in 1998 at the exhibition 'Japan-Theatre of the World' in the Museum Villa Stuck, Munich), but this exhibition organised by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen is the first to give an insight into the Avantgarde dance theatre of Japan and its relations with and unconscious differences from the western Avantgarde dance.
The exhibits are fifty impressive black-and-white photographs of Hijikata's performances, most of them unpublished. The exhibition also runs almost every film documenting Tatsumi Hijikata's dance-from recordings of his own butoh performances (he appeared on stage for the last time in 1973) and those of his early group 'Ankoku Butoh-ha' (1960 – 1966), which he choreo-graphed, to the shows of the later groups 'Hangi Daito-kan' (1970 – 1974) and 'Hakuto-bo' with the leading female dancer Yoko Ashikawa (1974 – 1986). Except for brief sequences, these films have so far not been distributed, and none of them has been shown outside Japan.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a 64-page catalogue, richly illustrated in black and white, with two texts by Tatsumi Hijikata and an essay by curator Johannes Meinhardt, PhD.
ifa-gallery Bonn
April 7 – May 23, 2004
Opening: Tuesday, April 6, 2004, 8 p.m.
ifa-gallery Berlin
June 11 – August 15, 2004
Opening: Thursday, June 10, 2004, 7 p.m.
ifa-gallery Bonn
Willy-Brandt-Allee 9 D-53113
Bonn