笠井叡　舞踏をはじめて　＜4＞

Akira Kasai Begins Butoh <4>

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.

In 1963, Akira kasai held his first produced performance, the "Sacrifice" meeting. He danced a duet with Kazuo Ohno for the first time.

It was six months after I started attending Mr. Ohno's rehearsal hall that I held "Sacrifice," a 30-minute piece danced in the Asahi Auditorium, which was located on the sixth floor of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

As for me, I really wanted to dance a duet with Mr. Ohno in this piece. I asked Mr. Ohno to dance with me, and to my delight, he readily agreed.

The dead body of Kasai, a boy, is being burned on stage. Mr. Ohno plays the role of a cremation worker who burns the boy's corpse, and he dances amidst the sound of the corpse being burned. This is the outline of this piece. Mr. Ohno is dressed in a big black jacket and I am almost naked. In my mind, I had the concept of bringing the two bodies to the point of contact, neither alive nor dead. This was expressed in consideration of the age difference between Kasai, who was a teenage boy, and Mr. Ohno, who was over 60 years old.

However, after the performance, Mr. Ohno said to me, "Mr. Kasai, this piece is too abstract for me to understand. The work itself was something that Mr. Ohno and I created together, but I came up with most of the concepts. Mr. Ohno always said, "I like semi-figurative works, which are neither figurative nor abstract, but a mixture of figurative and abstract. I want to create semi-figurative works," and that is where I learned the term "semi-figurative" from Mr. Ohno.

The group "Jikanha," which included painter Ushio Nakazawa, participated in "Sacrifice," and their work was a fusion of dance and their art. the work was a fusion of dance and their art. It is the infamous work that is said to have killed 3,000 chicks. I was dancing alone in a glass case, and chicks were raining down on me. The glass case is filled with more and more yellow chicks. There are many chicks that die, and it is a cruel sight. The bad news is that the Asahi Shimbun building where the event was held was the headquarters of an animal rights group. I was still a minor, so my parents were called and went to apologize, which caused a bit of a commotion later on.

In "Sacrifice," we also experimented with various other things, such as a piece in which a huge ad balloon was slowly rolled over the audience's heads from behind the seats and dancers climbed on it and danced.

Mr. Tatsumi Hijikata wrote a text about "Sacrifice. But actually, Mr. Hijikata was not present at the venue at the time and wrote it from his imagination. I later included that text on the flyer for my maiden recital.

In the spring of 1963, I saw Mr. Tatsumi Hijikata for the first time in "Koureikan Shigaku".Mr.  Hijikata was a sensational figure in the dance world at the time and attracted a great deal of attention.

"Koureikan Shigaku" was a recital directed by Masaki Domoto, and Sogetsu Hall was the venue. Mr. Domoto was a close friend of Yukio Mishima and directed Mishima's play "Three Primary Colors" and Ikuo Kato's "Koureikan Shigaku" for this stage. Art direction was by Masuo Ikeda. There were various innovative artworks, such as making colored mannequin dolls stand on the stage and creating a device that looked like a mysterious fire igniting, and placing a tripod made of a large iron pipe on the stage.

Jean Nouveau appeared in "Koureikan Shigaku," and I was invited by Jean to see the play. I was very interested in Mr. Hijikata and honestly wanted to see him rather than Mr.Jean. However, when I asked Mr.Jean if I could visit his rehearsal space, he refused, and I never got to meet Mr. Hijikata.

Mr. Jean was dancing a duet with Mr. Hijikata. Mr. Jean is dressed in kimono with masks on the front and back of his face so that he looks frontal even when his back is turned.

The first thing that surprised me when I saw Mr. Hijikata was his hair style. Most dancers of the time wore their hair neatly parted, but Mr. Hijikata's hair was cropped short, giving him a masculine look, like a mascular laborer. His costume was almost nude, wearing only black pants, and his body was darkly tanned. My first impression was, “This is a dancer!”. I thought.

He looked like a rough worker, and his eyes were very sharp. As was the case when we talked, Mr. Hijikata's eyes moved wildly, changing direction every second. Curiously, his eyeballs were constantly vibrating. Even when standing on the stage, his eyeballs are shaking, making us feel somewhat uncomfortable and unsure of what kind of space we are in.

On stage, Mr Hijikata quickly raises his hand. As I watched to see what would happen, he fell to the floor with a bang, striking his body hard against the floor. Next, using his middle finger as a fulcrum, he raises his elbow, raises his body, and stands up. He repeats this over and over again.

Some time later, I asked Mr. Hijikata, “Why did you do that move then?” He told me, “It was a movement in which my hands got lost and my body followed them”.

Mr. Hijikata kept pitter-pattering false movements on stage. I felt that it was not just artificial, but a false movement. False movements may not be unusual nowadays, but at the time it was a surprise. It was a moment when I felt that he had created a false movement. At that moment, I thought, “This is amazing. I had a gut feeling, “This is a man who is going to rewrite a piece of history”.

In the early 20th century, the painter Marcel Duchamp titled a toilet bowl "Fountain" and presented it as a work of art. That changed one thing in the history of art. Mr. Hijikata I saw in "Koureikan Shigaku" had such a big impact on me. I felt like I saw something completely new, something that did not exist in the category of dance. He didn't wear tights, he was dressed in a way that ordinary dancers wouldn't be, and he had a kind of coolness to him, with the rawness of a physical worker's style. I was shocked and thought, "This is Tatsumi Hijikata" .

Four years before "Koureikan Shigaku", Mr. Hijikata came to prominence with "Forbidden Colors", which he presented in 1959 at the All Japan Artistic Dance Association's Newcomer's Performance. Based on Yukio Mishima's novel of the same title, Mr. Hijikata danced with Mr. Kazuo Ohno's son, Keito, and made a huge impact in the dance world.

It was a common idea in the modern dance world at that time to bring the world of human internal images and mental landscapes out into the world in a visible form. In such an era, Mr. Hijikata put forth the idea that there is a power to destroy the inner world of human beings just by what we can see. For example, it was the act of strangling a single chicken on stage, and he presented a mental picture using only what we could see. Without any moral categories of good or bad, "Forbidden Colors" was a very shocking event for the modern dance world at that time, including the fact that he performed the act of destroying a life on stage.

However, there had been others before Mr. Hijikata who had created dances using only what they could see, so he was not necessarily the first. For example, Nobutoshi Tsuda brought a lump of mud on stage and moved around in it. But the difference between such avant-garde works and Mr. Hijikata's was that Hijikata's works had eroticism. As the title "Forbidden Colors" itself expresses both sexual aspects, there was a theme of how far the body's eroticism could be brought to the surface.

"Forbidden Colors" was created before I started dancing, but I often heard it sensationalized. However, I think there are more important works in the "Tatsumi Hijikata DANCE EXPERIENCE no kai" series that followed "Forbidden Colors", when talking about Mr. Hijikata.

Among them, the one that left the greatest impression on me was"" Tatsumi Hijikata DANCE EXPERIENCE no Kai "Anma: The Story of the Theater that Supports Lust"" in October 1963. I believe that this was the work that most expressed the essence of Mr. Hijikata's dance. The venue was Sogetsu Hall, and Mr. Hijikata did all sorts of interesting things with it, such as bringing an old lady from a Meguro public bathhouse's shamisen circle on stage, having a dancer appear holding a chicken, and stretching Toshi Ichiyanagi's violin strings.

My "Tatsumi Hijikata Phantom Landscape," which I presented at Nippori d-warehouse in 2018, was in a way an impressionistic piece about "Anma: The Story of a Theater that Supports Lust." It took me more than 50 years to make it into a piece, which is a long time to think about, but I reproduced everything I could recall about "Anma" in it.

Continue to Akira Kasai Begins Butoh <5>.

 

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