BUTO CONNEXIONS

Screenings, concert, dance, publications, discussion

Friday, November 15th – 8pm and Saturday, November 16th – 8:30pm

Kazuo Yamashita

Hijikata Tatsumi invented buto, in Japan of the 1960s, marked by a virulent opposition to government policy and shaken by major social convulsions.

Dancing the butō is showing a body in crisis, without a brain, deprived of normal motor skills, inspired by Western painting (Bosch, Wolz, Bacon), the dance of Vatslav Nijinsky, the texts of Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, Lautréamont, and Japanese culture.

Friday, November 15th - 8pm
Screenings, publications, discussion

The first evening will focus on the emblematic figure of Hijikata Tatsumi and his multiple artistic connections with Japanese underground cinema and artists like Natsuyuki Nakanishi or Eikoh Hosoe.

Saturday, November 16th - 8.30pm
Shin'ichi Isohata concert, dance

The second evening will highlight a contemporary extension of this emblematic post-war Japanese dance, thanks to Shin'ichi Isohata. The music of Masayuji's last student "Jojo" Takayanagi (a disruptive element of free-music in Japan), is of great amplitude, ranging from popular music, to classical music, noise and abstract jazz. Shin'ichi Isohata, like a Haikist monk, prefers scarcity, poverty to accumulation. He will be accompanied by pianist Naoyo Yakushi, sometimes playing amplified objects, to create a unique sound universe around Misuzu, a dancer with two faces who seems to emerge from the butō darkness.