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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 explanation for his loss of life, in a hospital, was coronary heart failure, stated Semimaru, a founding member of Mr. Amagatsu’s celebrated modern 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 Nineteen Fifties and early ’60s, when Japan was nonetheless rebuilding from the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the bombings of dozens of different cities throughout World War II. It was a part of a countercultural motion that questioned present 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 rejects each Western and conventional Japanese dance aesthetics. It is carried out by dancers in ghostly white physique powder, symbolically erasing the personalities of the person dancers to give attention to humanity as an entire. They contort their our bodies and facial expressions as they discover essentially the most primal recesses of the human expertise — the sexual, the grotesque, start, evolution.
Mr. Amagatsu based Sankai Juku in 1975 and have become one in all Butoh’s main figures. Starting in 1980, the corporate helped popularize Butoh internationally; it shaped a unbroken manufacturing partnership with the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris in 1982 and carried out in tons of of cities in 48 nations.
“Butoh, the DNA of Japanese tradition, entered European tradition by means of Amagatsu and Sankai Juku,” Akaji Maro, a founding father of Mr. Amagatsu’s first firm, Dairakudakan, wrote in a latest appreciation within the Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun, “and Amagatsu himself grew to become the worldwide commonplace for Butoh.”
For almost a half-century, Sankai Juku received quite a few honors around the globe. In 2002, it received the Laurence Olivier Award, Britain’s highest stage honor, for finest new dance manufacturing, for “Hibiki (Resonance From Far Away).”
The firm’s purpose was by no means to consolation audiences with the acquainted.
“A Sankai Juku efficiency is infused with usually spectacular moments, meticulously choreographed and thoroughly manipulated, that scramble the feelings,” Terry Trucco wrote in a 1984 profile of the corporate in The New York Times. “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 through which 4 chalk-covered males encompass a pink dish of water, an allusion to blood, which is “the elixir of life” but in addition “a logo of destruction,” the critic Anna Kisselgoff of The New York Times wrote in reviewing a 2002 efficiency on the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
“The signature theme of all Butoh,” she added, is “destruction and creation.”
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 tons of of tuna tails, Mr. Amagatsu created actions that appeared to cut back himself to the determine of a boy.
Another, “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 reviewing the work’s New York premiere in 1984. Before lengthy, nevertheless, 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 distant.”
As Mr. Amagatsu informed 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 strain of the gravity as quickly as s/he’s born.”
The ensuing dance was usually very, very gradual. In a 2020 video interview, one other Butoh dancer, Gadu Doushin, defined, “It’s nearly just like the individuals 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 trendy dance and ultimately studied appearing earlier than he developed an curiosity in Butoh. He helped discovered Dairakudakan in 1972; three years later, he began Sankai Juku. The title interprets to “studio of mountain and sea,” a mirrored image of his philosophy that human beings can be taught 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 labored extensively exterior Sankai Juku as effectively. In 1988, for instance, he created “Fushi (Homage to the Perspective to the Past ),” with music by Philip Glass, on the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival 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 set of a few of his best-known choreography, ran for 2 weeks on the Joyce Theater in New York final fall.
Throughout, Mr. Amagatsu believed that his choreography “depends upon whether or not or not you may preserve that ‘thread of consciousness’ unbroken,” he stated in a 2009 interview with Performing Arts Network Japan. “If that thread is damaged, all of it turns into nothing greater than train.”
