笠井叡　舞踏をはじめて　＜6＞

Akira Kasai Begins Butoh <6>

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 1965, when he was 21 years old, he appeared in Hijikata's work "Rose Color Dance - A LA MAISON DE M.CIVECAWA (Toward Mr. Shibusawa's House)".

I danced with Mr. Mitsutaka Ishii, dressed in pants and white paint, holding a clear plastic hose in my mouth and sucking on it as we hit the floor. Mr. Hijikata had the theme of "making things disappear" in his mind, and he imagined our dance as "a fetus making things disappear".

Mr. Hijikata placed two Victor dogs on the stage. Victor dogs are the mascot characters of the record company, and they are very cute when they stand side by side. Mr. Hijikata told me, "Mr. Kasai, point to these and say, 'Oh, they are Victor dogs'. But I dare to pronounce it as "Ah, there is Victor's dog".

Mr. Hijikata often brought things up on stage. What on earth is a thing? What Mr. Hijikata was trying to do was to present that the material is a new dance. When you put a dancer's body and a Victorian dog together, it is certain that a physicality emerges that would never appear in movement. Until then, dance had been created on the premise of the body, but Mr. Hijikata has taken out a physicality that can never be brought out by the body. By having humans encounter objects, something of the human physicality became visible for the first time in the history of dance. In that sense, I think Mr. Hijikata created a very important moment.

During the creation of this work, Mr. Hijikata was fascinated with sugar candy. Under Mr. Hijikata's supervision, he made the lips, hands, and male penis out of sugar confections, painted them with colors, and sold them at the venue neatly packaged in a paulownia wood box, just like some old confectionery. This was designed by Mr. Mitsuo Kano. It was very well done, but it didn't sell very well, and there were a lot of them left over.

 

The art was by Mr. Natsuyuki Nakanishi. Mr. Nakanishi's point of view is unique. He used a man's naked back as a canvas and painted the female genitalia in large, vivid colors. When the light shone on them, they looked wonderfully beautiful.

Mr. Nakanishi, together with Mr. Jiro Takamatsu and Mr. Genpei Akasegawa, formed a group called the High Red Center, which attracted much attention at the time for its unique activities. Takamatsu=High, Akasegawa=Red, and Nakanishi=Center, hence the name Hi-Red Center. The Hi-Red Center did not present works of art as objects, but rather actions as art. It is the so-called Happening. The Happening was a guerrilla art movement started by Alan Kaprow in the U.S., and it had a great influence on the art world at that time.

The Hi-Red Center was very radical. At that time, the Jiro Soka Incident, an incident in which small explosives were delivered here and there in Tokyo, was causing a stir. The case is still unsolved, so we don't know who the culprit was, but there were rumors that the Hi-Red Center had actually set it up as a happening. There was an atmosphere at the Hi-Red Center that such a thing could be done.

Then, dressed like a doctor in a white coat and mask, he appeared on the streets of Ginza and spent dozens of minutes meticulously polishing the cobblestones on the street, one by one. Polishing is not the goal, but a happening of minute expression. The Hi-Red Center did something that would normally be unthinkable, and Mr. Hijikata spoke highly of them.

The poster for the performance was designed by Mr. Tadanori Yokoo. Mr. Yokoo had been presenting art that connected Japan with pop culture, such as colorfully depicting the rising sun on posters, and Mr. Hijikata began to often use the Japanese flag on costumes around that time. When Mr. Hijikata wears the Japanese flag Hinomaru, Japan is perceived as erotic. It was not the so-called national Shinto, but one such force that transformed the Japanese flag, Hinomaru into Eros. Sometimes, such glittering medals just like the one worn by the emperor are used for costumes, and when Mr. Hijikata wears them, the medals are also transformed into eros. Mr. Hijikata presented the medal not as a tool to show hierarchy, but as a way to show that wearing the medal changes Japan into an erotic state.

In "Rose Color Dance," there is an image as the root of eros, and the specific person is Mr. Tatsuhiko Shibusawa. I think Mr. Hijikata saw Mr. Shibusawa's existence itself as something erotic. Although he never said it clearly, I feel that he had a strong longing for Mr. Shibusawa. They were the same age.

I think Mr. Hijikata wanted to hear how Mr. Shibusawa perceived "Rose Color Dance". One night when I was talking with Mr. Hijikata, he said, "Let's go to Mr. Shibusawa's house from now on". It was already almost midnight and Mr. Shibusawa's house was in Kamakura. I said, "Wow, isn't it rude to go there from now on?" But Mr. Hijikata said, "I really want to hear about the stage, so I'm going there now". I didn't really want to go, but I had no choice but to go with him.

When we arrived at Mr. Shibusawa's house, the house was dark as I expected. I rang the doorbell and his wife Sumiko came out and said, "Shibusawa has already taken a rest, but I will ask him". Mr. Shibusawa is not the kind of person who would turn away in such a case, so we ended up staying at his house.

Mr. Hijikata was shy and althoush his real intention was that he wanted to ask him how the performance was, but he couldn't get to the point. Even though we had come all the way to Kamakura, we couldn't bring it up face to face, so we just talked about unrelated things. The topic that came up was whether it is better to train the body and put it on stage, or whether it is better to put it out there as it is without doing anything, which is the way we perceive dance today. Mr. Hijikata is the type of person who likes to show his body as it is, not as he has trained it. He often took ordinary high school students and put them on stage, or put an old lady who plays shamisen in a public bath in Meguro on stage, and so on. Mr. Shibusawa was like an intermediary between us, asking "What do you think, Mr. Kasai?" "What about Mr. Hijikata?" The three of us talked until morning, but I couldn't hear what Mr. Shibusawa thought about the stage after all.

Mr. Shibusawa, Mr. Yukio Mishima, Mr. Genpei Akasegawa, Mr. Tadanori Yokoo, Mr. Natsuyuki Nakanishi, Mr. Minoru Yoshioka, Mr. Masuo Ikeda, Mr. Kuniyoshi Kaneko, Mr. Simon Yotsuya, Mr. Toshi Ichiyanagi ....... Writers, literary scholars, poets, painters, and many others gathered around Mr. Hijikata. They are all from different genres and different activities, but because they are disparate, they seem to be searching for something that connects them.

Mr. Hijikata was not a person who tried to create dance only with dance, but a person who crossed over genres. Mr. Hijikata had many interactions, especially with people in the literary field, and the influence he had on them was significant. Mr. Hijikata himself wrote under the pen name “Hijikata Nue” when he was learning dance in Akita, and I have heard that he wondered for a time whether to go into literature or dance.

Those were the days when artists of various genres were tied together. I sometimes think that the kind of comprehensive art that Mr. Hijikata and those around him tried to create in the Showa period was not yet finished, and that it was the beginning of something new. In this day and age, there is a strong tendency to go back to the past rather than to create something new. This is not a bad thing, but it may lead us to the future if we reevaluate what those things were in the Showa period, rather than simply going back to the Showa period. I think so once again.

 

Continue to Akira Kasai Begins Butoh <7>.

 

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