Ushio Amagatsu, an acclaimed dancer and choreographer who introduced worldwide visibility to Butoh, a hauntingly minimalist Japanese type of dance theater that arose within the wake of wartime devastation, died on March 25 in Odawara, Japan. He was 74.
The reason for his dying, in a hospital, was coronary heart failure, stated Semimaru, a founding member of Mr. Amagatsu’s celebrated up to date dance firm, Sankai Juku.
Butoh is an Anglicized model of “buto,” derived from “ankoku buto,” which interprets to “dance of darkness.” It attracts inspiration from surrealist European artwork actions like Dadaism.
Butoh was pioneered by Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata within the late Fifties and early ’60s, when Japan was nonetheless rebuilding from the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in addition to dozens of different cities, throughout World Battle II. It was a part of a countercultural motion that questioned current values in addition to these flooding in from the West, Semimaru stated in an e-mail, and it was an try to revive Japanese physicality in an unfamiliar new period.
Pointedly anti-traditionalist, Butoh rejected each Western and conventional Japanese dance aesthetics. It’s carried out by dancers in ghostly white physique powder, symbolically erasing the personalities of the person dancers to deal with humanity as an entire. They contorted their our bodies and facial expressions as they explored probably the most primal recesses of the human expertise — the sexual, the grotesque, beginning, evolution.
Mr. Amagatsu based Sankai Juku in 1975 and have become considered one of Butoh’s main figures. Beginning in 1980, the corporate helped popularize Butoh internationally; it shaped an ongoing manufacturing partnership with the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris in 1982 and carried out in lots of of cities in 48 international locations all over the world.
“Butoh, the DNA of Japanese tradition, entered European tradition by Amagatsu and Sankai Juku,” Akaji Maro, a founding father of Mr. Amagatsu’s first firm, Dairakudakan, wrote in a current appreciation within the Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun, “and Amagatsu himself turned the worldwide normal for Butoh.”
For practically a half-century, Sankai Juku gained quite a few honors all over the world. In 2002 it gained the Laurence Olivier Award, Britain’s highest stage honor, for greatest new dance manufacturing for “Hibiki (Resonance From Far Away).”
The corporate’s objective was by no means to consolation audiences with the acquainted.
“A Sankai Juku efficiency is infused with usually spectacular moments, meticulously choreographed and punctiliously manipulated, that scramble the feelings,” Terry Trucco wrote in a 1984 profile of the corporate in The New York Occasions. “Heads shaved and our bodies powdered with rice flour, the corporate’s 5 males look unformed, not fairly human. They writhe, roll again their eyes and grin demoniacally.”
“Hibiki” features a second during which 4 chalk-covered males encompass a purple dish of water — an allusion to blood, which, the critic Anna Kisselgoff wrote in a overview in The Occasions of a 2002 efficiency on the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is “the elixir of life” but in addition “a logo of destruction.”
“The signature theme of all Butoh,” she added, is “destruction and creation.”
Certainly one of Mr. Amagatsu’s signature works, “Kinkan Shonen (The Kumquat Seed),” was impressed by his childhood, which was spent by the ocean. Performing earlier than a wall festooned with lots of of tuna tails, Mr. Amagatsu created actions that appeared to cut back himself to the determine of a boy.
One other, “Jomon Sho” (Homage to Prehistory),” was impressed by cave work. It begins with dancers suspended in midair, wanting like little greater than clumps, earlier than being lowered to the stage and unfolding from a fetal place.
“‘Jomon Sho’ might begin with a picture of the earth’s creation, of matter forming,” Ms. Kisselgoff wrote in a overview of the work’s New York premiere in 1984. Earlier than lengthy, nonetheless, it’s clear that some unnamed calamity has struck, with Mr. Amagatsu showing “as a helpless mutant, so foreshortened from our perspective that he seems to be a Thalidomide casualty.”
“The picture of the Bomb,” she added, “is rarely too far-off.”
As Mr. Amagatsu instructed Ms. Trucco. “Projecting unerasable impressions is our enterprise.”
At a extra primary degree, he usually stated, his type of Butoh was a “dialogue with gravity.”
“Dance consists of rigidity and rest of gravity, similar to the precept of life and its course of,” he as soon as stated in an interview with Vogue Hommes. “An unborn child who’s floating inside mom’s womb faces to the stress of the gravity as quickly as s/he’s born.”
The ensuing dance was usually very, very sluggish. In a 2020 video interview, one other Butoh dancer, Gadu Doushin, defined, “It’s nearly just like the folks watching simply go into hypnosis — or go to sleep, no matter comes first.”
Masakazu Ueshima was born on Dec. 31, 1949, in Yokosuka, a coastal metropolis about 40 miles south of central Tokyo. (He later adopted his stage title on the suggestion of Mr. Maro.)
After graduating from highschool, he started coaching in ballet and fashionable dance, and ultimately studied appearing, earlier than he developed an curiosity in Butoh. He helped discovered Dairakudakan in 1972 and, three years later, began Sankai Juku. The title interprets to “studio of mountain and sea,” a mirrored image of his philosophy that human beings can study from nature.
Mr. Amagatsu’s survivors embrace his daughter, Lea Ueshima, in addition to a brother, a sister and two grandsons. His marriage to Lynne Bertin resulted in divorce.
Mr. Amagatsu additionally labored extensively outdoors Sankai Juku. In 1988, for instance, he created “Fushi (Homage to the Perspective to the Previous ),” with music by Philip Glass, on the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Competition in Becket, Mass.
He continued to carry out till present process surgical procedure for hypopharyngeal most cancers in 2017. Even then, he continued to choreograph for his firm, creating two new works, “Arc” (2019) and “Totem” (2023). “Kosa,” a group of a few of his best-known choreography, ran for 2 weeks on the Joyce Theater in New York final fall.
All through, Mr. Amagatsu believed that his choreography “is dependent upon whether or not or not you’ll be able to maintain that ‘thread of consciousness’ unbroken,” he stated in a 2009 interview with Performing Arts Community Japan. “If that thread is damaged, all of it turns into nothing greater than train.”
