Dancer finds true calling in 'butoh'

Asip Hasani, Contributor, Yogyakarta

Shortly before a scheduled performance at an international performing arts festival in Yogyakarta (The 2nd Jogja Arts Festival 2005), in late September, outstanding butoh dancer Mitsuyo Uesugi canceled her planned solo performance, titled Madame Melancholia.

As an alternative, she, along with four young dancers of her Ahiru Dance Studio, performed her new work, titled A Butterfly in the Dark.

What lay behind the cancellation had a drastic impact on the middle-aged solo dancer.

"I lost my father earlier this year. Not long after that, my mother passed away too," said Uesugi, who looks younger than her years.

The death of her father and mother seems to have caused her a great deal of pain.

Uesugi's parents, an ordinary couple living in Fukuoka, a small city-island in southern Japan, gladly enrolled her in a classical ballet course in the 1950s when she was around seven years old.

Ballet and other kinds of modern, Western dance were very popular in Japan at that time. Meanwhile, Japanese traditional dance began to be abandoned by Japanese youngsters.

Uesugi's parents were so proud of her talent in Western dance that they allowed her to leave for Tokyo when she was 20 to become a professional ballet dancer.

In Tokyo, she attended many different performances ranging from traditional to modern Western dance. She was very interested in then newly founded Japanese contemporary dance, butoh, which was performed publicly for the first time in 1959.

She paid special attention to butoh performances by one of the first generation of butoh dancers, Kazuo Ohno.

"Once I saw Ohno's performance, I knew it was the sort of bodily movement I was looking for," said 55-year-old Uesugi, adding that she then made up her mind to go to Ohno and study butoh under his guidance.

Her decision to study butoh, which was, at that time, considered an odd dance style to many Japanese and, sometimes, identified with either naked or topless dancers, upset her parents, who were devout Buddhists. From that point, her relationship with her parents became very strained.

For years, Uesugi and her parents did not communicate with each other. However, about two years ago she was invited by a festival organizer to perform at an arts festival in her hometown, Fukuoka.

Witnessed by her father, there in the festival Uesugi performed topless one of her most praised works titled She. To her surprise, her father came to her after the performance and said that he had just seen a great dance performance by his daughter. The relationship with her parents was back on the rails.

The happiness, however, did not last long: Last year her father died. Shortly afterward, she also lost her mother.

Uesugi said that she did not know exactly what happened to her but she felt unsettled since her loss of her parents. That was why she decided not to perform the solo Madame Melancholia in Yogyakarta.

Uesugi is a famous second-generation butoh dancer. Her butoh tutor, Ohno, is one of three important originators of the art form. She started to study butoh under Ohno's tutelage in 1970 and since then accompanied Ohno to most of his performances for around 15 years.

In 1988, Uesugi moved to France and gave many solo butoh performances, as well as being involved in various plays and collaborative dances with French dancers.

She returned to Japan and founded her own dance company, Ahiru Dance Studio, in 1994. In 2000, she began regularly to hold dance workshops at national choreography centers throughout France.

Among other works of hers are A Kettle and Scream (2004), part of the Madame Melancholia series and A Love Supreme (2004), a duet piece with another famous butoh dancer, Yukio Waguri, in Neural Weighting-beam (2005).

In 1988, her critically acclaimed solo piece, She, was commissioned at theater festivals in European countries, the United States and elsewhere.

She performed Nega-reality in the Kazuo Ohno Festival in 2004 in Yokohama city. The opportunity reminded her of the years under Ohno's tutelage. Formless movement is a butoh characteristic she learned from Ohno, a style referred to by critics as the "dance of light" to distinguish it from ankoku butoh ("dance of darkness"), which was established by another butoh originator, Tatsumi Hijikata and his student, dancer Yukio Waguri.

"Despite his formless movement on the dance stage, Ohno's dance produces a strong reaction in onlookers that can make people cry," said Uesugi.

"He also provides me with an example I want to follow -- to continue dancing as long as I can. Ohno still dances today at 99, said the unmarried Uesugi.