dancedition

バレエ、ダンス、舞踏、ミュージカル……。劇場通いをもっと楽しく。

笠井叡 舞踏をはじめて <3>

大野一雄に学び、土方巽と交流を持ち、“舞踏”という言葉を生んだ笠井叡さん。その半生と自身の舞踏を語ります。

Akira Kasai Begins Butoh <3>

Akira Kasai studied under Kazuo Ohno, interacted with Tatsumi Hijikata, and gave birth to the word "butoh". He will talk about his life and his own butoh.

A gossip he overheard at a bar near Tokyo Metropolitan University changed the course of his life. 1963, at the age of 19, he became a student of Kazuo Ohno.

After Mr,Eguchi's practice, a group of women invited me to go out for a drink with them. There I heard someone say, "I saw a very strange old man dancing with a big chunk of beef hanging from the ceiling, poking it with one little finger," which intrigued me greatly. "Who is that? I asked her, and she said, "It's a man named Kazuo Ohno". I remembered what Jean Nouveau had told me about him before, and I made the connection in my memory that he was the man who danced the boatman in "Sumida River". The dance the woman had seen was the one Mr. Ohno danced in the stage of "650 Experience no Kai" by Tatsumi Hijikata.

To dance with a beef with one little finger is so out of the ordinary. I thought to myself, "There is an amazing person, I would love to take Mr. Ohno's training". But as was the custom in those days, it was very difficult to go to a place other than one's own teacher to learn. That was one of the reasons I asked Mr. Jean to write a letter of introduction. But Mr. Jean did not look at me very favorably.

In the spring of 1963, I took the Sotetsu line to visit Mr. Ohno's training place in Kamihoshikawa, Yokohama. It was pouring so hard that I was soaking wet when I arrived. I had never met Mr. Ohno before, but he was kind enough to let me up to his rehearsal room soaking wet. I had no idea whether or not he would let me practice with him, so I just visited his practice room. Mr,Ohno said, "So Let's start practicing" and his one - on - one training began at once.

Mr. Ohno's practice is basically improvised. As he played the taiko drums, he would say poetic phrases such as, "You have lead in your eyes. The eye of lead is an eye that sees even better than the naked eye". I moved accordingly, just as I thought he would. Mr. Ohno loved surrealism and was particularly fascinated by Satanic literature. At the time, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa was serializing "A History of Literature with Demons" in a magazine called "Mizue," and he would sometimes beat a drum while reciting it. Mr. Ohno had a stack of art books on his desk, and he often used the images from the pictures as a dance. He would open the books one by one, and Mr. Ohno would say one image after another that came to him from the paintings, and I would improvise on the images.

19歳。新人公演に出演

Kazuo Ohno's style was unique. Therefore, he was not accepted in the Japanese modern dance world at that time and was treated as a heretic. He had no disciples and Akira Kasai received one-on-one training.

Although Mr. Ohno's name was well known, he had few disciples at that time. Around the time I started coming to his school, young people such as Natsu Nakajima began to arrive, but even so, they were few and far between. The rehearsal hall was so dusty that when I danced, I left stepping marks on the floor. That is how uninviting it was.

Mr. Ohno was originally a student of Mr. Eguchi, but when I went to ask him to train me, he had resigned from Mr. Eguchi's institute and was going about his own activities. Mr. Ohno had been a truly unique person since his time at Mr. Eguchi's place. Although he learned big movements from Mr. Eguchi, he sticked to small movements. Mr. Ohno said, "Small movements have the power to move people," and in fact, he included small movements in his works, such as the eyes only or fingers only. Such a style was very rare in modern dance at that time.

Mr. Ohno's and Mr. Eguchi's teachings were completely different. Mr. Eguchi uses the body in a large, full way. On the other hand, Mr. Ohno uses only his fingertips, his chin, and other parts of his body. When I first took Mr. Ohno's training, I did big movements as I had learned from Mr. Eguchi, and he said to me, "Mr. Kasai, that's no good". Mr. Ohno said, "There are small sensations and feelings in small movements". He used to say, "There are small feelings in not moving rather than in moving". He taught us not to look for general feelings such as happiness or sadness or liking or disliking, but to look for small feelings in small movements, small feelings that pass unnoticed. For example, take your feelings to the corner of a tatami mat and stay there. Take your feelings between the grains of the tatami. Going into small, small places was a characteristic of Mr. Ohno's practice. When you go into small matters, big feelings, like cosmic feelings, come out from there. Mr. Ohno's idea was that something big flows in small movements.

The work in which Mr. Ohno decisively parted from modern dance was "The Old Man and the Sea". In this piece, a boat is represented in tights, with his son, Yoshito Ohno, and several women in the cast. Mr. Kazuo Ohno had a severe stomach ulcer at the time and was not fit to dance, but he endured the pain as he took the stage. The stage director for "The Old Man and the Sea" was Tatsumi Hijikata. From that time on, Mr. Hijikata and Mr. Ohno gradually began to approach each other. It was a few years after "The Old Man and the Sea" that I went to Mr. Ohno's rehearsal hall for the first time.

19歳。新人公演に出演

I shared a lot of time with my teacher, Kazuo Ohno, outside of rehearsals. I came into contact with Mr. Ohno's bighearted personality and then learned of the great wound he carried inside.

After practice, Mr. Ohno himself would cook meals for me, lend me books on cosmology and Pearl Clay's painting theory, saying, "Take this with you to read," and even pay for my transportation when I didn't have enough money to pay the monthly fee.

Mr. Ohno was very kind and never said no to anything we said. For example, he would never say no to me ever if I went to his rehearsal room at 3:00 a.m. and said, "Please start practicing from now on". However, I feel that this is a little different from simply being mild-mannered.

Mr. Ohno said about himself, "I have gone to the limit of my vices". At first I wondered what he was talking about, but later I came to realize that he was probably talking about the war.

Mr. Ohno is a war veteran, and he went to New Guinea and experienced a scene where many people died. Although he did not talk much about it, I once heard him say, "One fish was eaten by 200 soldiers". That must have been a spectacular experience. Mr. Ohno was a captain in the army, and I have heard that he worked as an agent to infiltrate the area and obtain information, and that when the military needed mercury, he collected boxes full of it.

Mr. Ohno's experience of World War II was a big part of his life. He felt that the experience of the war was a sin too great to be atoned for by himself alone, and for that reason, he felt that it was a waste to be doing what he is doing now, and he wanted to cherish every bit of his life. I feel that he had always been having such thought in his mind.

I attended Mr. Ohno's training for three years, and I also continued to attend Mr. Eguchi's institute at the same time. Mr. Eguchi's movements were also something I could not get rid of. I began to attend performances, and in those days, I often went to the Nihon Buyo events held by Hanayagi school and Fujima school to perform there modern dance.

20歳の頃

 

Continue to Akira Kasai Begins Butoh <4>.

 

Profile

Akira Kasai

Butoh dancer and choreographer, who became friends with Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno at a young age in the 1960s, and gave numerous solo butoh performances mainly in Tokyo and elsewhere. In the 1970's, operated Tenshikan Butoh dance school where he trained numerous butoh dansers. From 1979 to 1985, studied abroad to study in Germany.Studied Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy and eurythmy. After returning to Japan, he did not perform on stage and was away from the dance world for 15 years, but returned to the stage with "Seraphita". Since then, he has given numerous performances in Japan and abroad, and has been praised as "the Nijinsky of Butoh". His masterpiece "Pollen Revolution" was performed in various cities around the world. He has created works in Berlin, Rome, New York, Angers, the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine de France, and elsewhere. https://akirakasai.com

 

 

 

 

-舞踏