Dancing to Faulkner - Oguri Brings the Japanese Art Form Butoh to the REDCAT Stage
by Lea Lion
Published: Friday, February 23, 2007


Oguri and Honeysuckle practice an avant-garde form of Japanese dance called butoh. This week the dancers present a world premiere of a work based on two William Faulkner novels. Faulkner understands there is no past, no future, it's all in the present, Oguri said. That very much connects with dance too. Photos courtesy of REDCAT

On a recent Monday morning, the Japanese-born, Los Angeles-based choreographer who goes by the single appellation Oguri is sipping green tea from a delicate, white-and-blue porcelain teacup. He is holding the brew in one hand and using the other to make subtle hand gestures as he discusses his upcoming dance premiere.

The gestures are characteristic of Oguri, who practices an avant-garde form of Japanese dance called butoh, which relies heavily on just such understated movements. Oguri's new dance work, Caddy! Caddy! Caddy!, based on two novels by William Faulkner, runs March 1-4 at REDCAT in Downtown Los Angeles.

The first act depicts The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness masterpiece, while the second act picks up with the Southern gothic novel Absalom, Absalom! Unlike more conventional dance performances based on literature, Oguri's work is not meant to be representative of Faulkner's novels. Rather, Oguri says, it is more like a meditation on the author's words.

One thing is for certain: The abstract, butoh-style dance performance will rival the Southern author's propensity for non-linear storytelling.

"I learned from working with [butoh dancer] Min Tanaka how to work with literature," Oguri said in his thick Japanese accent. "The dance is not like a theater company, we are not following the story - not using it as a scenario, not using it that way. It is some metaphor, some depth of image."

For Caddy! Caddy! Caddy!, Oguri teamed up with dancers Jamie Burris, and Morleigh and Roxanne Steinberg. All three have worked with Oguri for more than a decade, although they recently adopted the name Honeysuckle in the spirit of the Southern-themed performance. Just as the troupe's name changes from performance to performance, the dance itself is amorphous and contains an element of improvisation.

"In reading the first part of The Sound and the Fury you really have to just let yourself absorb it because there is no logical sequence and so you have to let the images penetrate," said Roxanne Steinberg. "That's kind of what the dance is that we do. The words serve as images and we just kind of let ourselves be saturated with those images."

Caddy! Caddy! Caddy! features a score by Paul Chavez and a set installation by Hirokazu Kosaka. Kosaka has collaborated with Oguri six times in the past, including a quilt-like backdrop of multi-colored electric blankets for the 2000 piece Flagship Powhatan and the wet clay stage topped with fresh-from-the-kiln ceramic bowls of Verandah from 2001.

For the REDCAT collaboration, Kosaka constructed a stage out of scrap wood that he "charcoalized," or turned into the black, sooty substance. He also built a 20-foot wall that holds hundreds of oversized spools of thread. The idea, Kosaka explained, is for the dancers to slowly unravel the spools.

"It's about Faulkner's different characters, every page has different characters in it," said Kosaka, who also is the artistic director of the Doizaki Gallery at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center. "I want those pages and words and volumes of information and people of different colors, different characters to be something like a string."


Butoh Beginnings


Butoh, short for ankoku butoh or "dance of darkness," is an avant-garde dance form that emerged from the chaos of post World-War II Japan. Butoh's founders, Tatsumi Hijikata and Yoshito Ohno, debuted the style in Kinjiki, a sexually explicit piece that scandalized audiences in 1959. The new art form combined elements of Japanese theater, martial arts and modern dance, although it bore little resemblance to either traditional Japanese or Western dance.

Often danced in a trance-like state with bent legs and rolled eyes, butoh movements were initially regarded as ugly. But Hijikata considered them to be a true form of beauty. Growing up in the harsh climate of Northern Japan, he grew accustomed to the bent and twisted bodies of the rice field laborers. Hijikata believed that by distorting the body, he could subvert the traditional idea of physical beauty and return to a more natural definition.

Butoh has as many faces as those who practice it. Some dancers don the traditional white body makeup of Japanese kabuki theater; others perform without makeup. Some dance in elaborate costumes; others wear nothing. Some tease their hair into nest-like tangles; others shave their heads bald. Butoh movements can range from wildly exaggerated to almost imperceptible.

The common thread that runs through all the variations is the concept of transformation. The goal of butoh is to physically morph into a character or object, as opposed to merely offering a representation.

As the butoh dancer Min Tanaka, who was a student of Hijikata and Oguri's teacher, once said, "You have to free yourself from the conventional definition of dance in order to extend it, closer to life itself."

Perhaps that is why when asked if the performance is set in the time of Faulkner, Oguri took a sip of his tea before responding.

"Faulkner understands there is no past, no future, it's all in the present," he said. "That very much connects with dance too. Dance is always in the present."

Caddy! Caddy! Caddy! runs March 1-4 at 8:30 p.m. and March 4 at 3 p.m. at REDCAT, 631 W. Second St., (213) 237-2800 or redcat.org.

Contact Lea Lion at lea@downtownnews.com.

ladowntownnews

Cold Dream Colour
November 10, 2010



Morleigh Steinberg, choreographer, wife of The Edge, is Artistic Director of Cold Dream Colour: a ‘dance homage’ to Ireland’s greatest living artist, Louis le Brocquy.

The performance features original music by The Edge, and premieres in Dublin this Friday and Saturday, at the Pavilion Theatre. U2.com caught up with Morleigh ahead of opening night.


So, a dance ‘homage’ to Louis le Brocquy… what’s that all about?!

A dance homage – yes! When I first saw his work, about 15 years ago, I thought his paintings were so indicative of dance. For me, they were such an inspiration to create movement and I wanted to study the paintings, to really get into them.
He’s such an amazing artist. He’s worked so hard his whole life, and has remained so present in his own work. It’s all connected, it’s all going somewhere, it’s all very beautiful to see.
I had a conversation with him, briefly, and I asked if he’d ever seen his paintings danced. He said no, he had never seen his paintings danced! So the idea started there. He so often pays homage to different painters, and I thought, for his birthday we could pay homage to him.

Where did you start?

I looked at the whole body of his work, and then chose some of his periods that seemed relevant to movement or to theatre - or that really moved me, and stirred my soul. I asked two other choreographers - Liz Roche, from Ireland, and Oguri, who is Japanese and lives in LA - to look at the work too, and to see what they gravitated towards.
We studied the paintings, and the ideas behind them, and the technique and the colour, and started to make a piece from there.
The first ones I looked at were The Heads – beautiful white faces coming out of this beautiful light atmosphere. There is something so primal and so spiritual about them. So that was my first inspiration. And then the whole grey period, which had to do with post-war Ireland. A very bleak subject matter, but there’s always hope in Louis’ work.

Have you created a narrative to the performance?

There is a narrative in the way he painted, and we kind of stuck to that. There’s always hope in his paintings, a hope that rings true: the hope in the human spirit, in being human.
The dance is not chronological in terms of his work; it’s a loose narrative, just as his paintings are. You only ever look at one painting at a time, after all. They’re snapshots.
But I really didn’t want to create a literal interpretation of his paintings. I wanted to ask, what do they inspire in us?

How did Edge get on, creating the original music?

Well, he and Paul Chavez and I got into a studio, and it was a lot of fun. It’s so freeform; you’re creating sound beds. There are some melodic pieces, and pieces with rhythm; but it was fun and liberating for him to work on sound, rather than to work within the distinct structure of rock songs.
I asked them, “What do these paintings sound like? What is their sonic atmosphere?” I didn’t want them to make music for the dance, as such; I wanted them to make music for the paintings.
The result is at times atmospheric, and at times tuneful. But there are no vocals. It’s been recorded, but it will be mixed live by Paul on the night. So the music feels organic within the performance.


Was Edge using synths, or guitars, or what?

Oh my God... they used everything from a glass harmonica to guitars, to strange keyboards, to bottles… It was such fun. It was a lot of work, but a lot of fun.
Edge is pleased with how it’s turned out. We did a workshop performance earlier this year and he was very happy with it.


You’re from the States, and Louis le Brocquy is one of Ireland’s great living artists. Is this a cross-cultural embrace, for you?

When I first arrived here, I didn’t have much connection with Ireland at all - and looking at his paintings helped me to make a connection. I began to understand Ireland more, because I could relate to his paintings on a physical level. It was very personal; they helped me to feel more at home.


What do you hope your audience will take from Cold Dream Colour?

I hope it hits people at a very guttural level, as Louis’ work does. We’re dancing from the inside out. It’s not a superficial performance, that’s for sure. Even if people don’t understand it, they will still feel something.


Is Louis coming?

We hope so. He’s turning 94 on Wednesday, so it depends how much energy he has.


If he does get to see it, what do you hope he’ll draw from the experience?

You know, even if he just listens to the music and is inspired by that, I think it would be great. If he sees the performance and feels something of his work within it, that would be a success. And if he comes and just falls asleep and has a wonderful dream, I’ll be very happy.

Further info on this weekend's performances here
U2.com

Dancing about art
The Irish Times - Saturday, November 13, 2010



INTERVIEW: Morleigh Steinberg has devised a dance homage to Louis le Brocquy. Róisín Ingle met her at a break in rehearsals

HALFWAY THROUGH INTERVIEWING dancer Morleigh Steinberg, a U2 song comes on the stereo, a barely audible elephant in the back room of the Dún Laoghaire pub where we meet to discuss her latest project, a dance interpretation of Louis le Brocquy’s paintings. When I point out the musical “coincidence”, dark haired, dark eyed Steinberg, who also happens to be Mrs The Edge of U2, doesn’t miss a beat. “Yes, I heard that when it came on,” she says in her soft voice. Of course she did. You imagine that it’s no longer much of a novel marital hazard for U2 songs to find their way on to the stereo when she or her husband venture out for business or pleasure.

Steinberg, a beautiful women with creamy skin who looks younger than her 40-something years, has taken a break from rehearsals in a nearby dance studio. There, dancers including Liz Roche from acclaimed modern dance troupe Rex Levitates are warming up, contorting limbs into elegant poses in preparation for the world premiere of Cold Dance Colour – A Dance Homage to Louis le Brocquy . A grafter, and multi-tasker extraordinaire, Steinberg is artistic director, co-choreographer, lighting designer and soloist for the piece. The first works of le Brocquy’s that she ever saw were his white faces and ancestral heads. “I found them deeply inspiring,” she says. “I had only just come to Ireland and they made me feel more at home here, I related very much to his way of looking at the world.

“Having got to know Louis I asked him had he ever seen his paintings danced. He didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no, he said ‘that’s such a good idea’ so I took it upon myself to do it. There is a lot of movement and energy in his paintings so it felt very natural and a lot of fun.”

The paintings reminded her of the dancing style of her co-choreographer Oguri – a Japanese dancer who is married to her sister Roxanne (also a dancer) – and of the work they do together. “We dancers are very incestuous,” she laughs at one point. “Louis wasn’t just painting the face, he was painting what was coming from the inside out and what we do as dancers is more about that too,” she says.

She met Oguri through her sister who studied alongside him in Japan. Her first feature length documentary Height of Sky was about her brother-in-law’s quest to rediscover his relationship with dance in the Californian deserts. He also dances in the le Brocquy piece. As with much of her work, she says, “it’s a family affair”.

Cold Dance Colour is having its premiere in the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire, the same week that le Brocquy turns 94. The first show was last night and the second is this evening. “I’m not sure if he can come. I would actually just perform it just for him and for his wife Ann and their friends,” she says. Her husband, also known as Dave Evans, has composed the music with Paul Shavez. “He knew how to go naturally, I think, it was just a matter of him seeing that he didn’t have to make a song out of it,” she says. The costumes are by family friend, writer and fashion designer Mariad Whisker.

Dance, Steinberg says, has been her life. As a young child growing up in Los Angeles, the daughter of a lawyer and an interior designer, she was tutored by a “wonderful” teacher in modern dance. “My mother found this teacher and we all danced with her, my sister, my mother, a station wagon of my school friends . . . It was dancing without mirrors, so it wasn’t about looking like everyone else. There was technique but not having a mirror you learned to express yourself, like when you are a child you are not worried about what you look like, no, it’s about what do you feel like.”

A “second generation Los Angeleno”, she had something of a privileged background, attending Beverley Hills High – “a really great school with fantastic music and dance facilities which is why my mother sent us there” – and grew up around famous Hollywood neighbours.

Her grandmother, an Austrian born in New York, was secretary to the head of Universal Pictures and her South African grandfather was a camera man in the city. “So it’s in the blood, Hollywood. My mother grew up on the Universal lot,” she says. “But LA is much more than that, part of it is this very large hick town, it’s also very multi-cultural and then there is Hollywood. But most of the people who work in the industry are technicians, there are more of them than famous actors. I love it that people went west to have a dream,” she says.

She is unashamedly enthusiastic about her hometown even though dancing has provided her with something of a gypsy life, taking her away from the place of her birth for long periods since she was a teenager.

She was 16 when she went away to study dance at the famous Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan and 17 when she travelled to Paris with her older sister. “I turned 18 in Paris, it was just this crazy year of dancing,” she remembers. On her way back from the city she was invited to join the fledgling Momix dance company, the influential Connecticut-based group of “dancer illusionists”. After several years of touring she left with three other Momix founders to create a dance company called ISO. (Given the abstract lingo that surrounds modern dance it’s heartening to discover that the I, S and O stand for nothing more esoteric than I’m So Optimistic.)

ISO were two couples who at one point romantically “crossed over” as Steinberg puts it. The dynamic, she says, was not unlike a rock group, which is perhaps how she has a deep appreciation for her husband’s work. “It’s not always easy when he is away touring, sometimes you don’t feel like being the one left behind with the children . . . but I really respect his work ethic, as he does mine, and I love when people are working hard at what they do best,” she says.

ISO spent their formative years collaborating and creating their own work, starring in music videos and feature films, as well as touring their own live shows. One of the videos they starred in was U2’s With or Without You . She first met the band and struck up a friendship with Bono backstage after one of the gigs on the Joshua Tree tour. Does she remember the first time she met Edge? Were there fireworks? “Yes, I remember, but no, there were no fireworks,” she says. She became Bono’s movement coach for the Zoo TV tour. “One day he just said, ‘why don’t you dance, you are there watching every night’,” she remembers, so she took over the belly dancer part in Mysterious Ways even though she wasn’t a bellydancer.

“I’m a dancer, I watch, I keep my eyes open,” she says. Her romance with Edge, who had separated from his first wife, took off at the end of the tour. “I always think it took us a long time to find each other,” she muses. She was never phased by making friends and finding romance within the world’s biggest rock group. “I grew up in Hollywood, remember,” she says.

Moving to Ireland was the next natural step, but as a rover dancer it only felt permanent when the couple had their two children, daughter and son Sian and Levi. The couple have homes in Dublin, New York, France and LA. “I came to Ireland with a suitcase, it never really felt as though I moved all my stuff here. I still kept my place in LA, I still have it. It wasn’t until I had children that I felt ‘well, now I am here’.”

How did she adjust to life in Ireland? “Honestly? It was hard. Coming from a multi-cultural international city like Los Angeles it was hard to suddenly be in a culture I had no connection with and no roots . . . at the same time it was wonderful to be in a country that was completely itself. I feel like that about Italy. Although I have watched Ireland change over the years and I can’t help feeling ‘don’t do it, don’t lose the Irishness’.”

She is clearly itching to get back to the studio now, politely answering questions in the pub while her head, her heart is back in the studio with Oguri and the other dancers.

“I just wanted to bring everybody’s expertise to bear on this, I want it to be a live event, a real celebration of Louis’s work,” she says. She hopes it has legs and that there will be a demand for the work to go on tour. So far her professional life has taken her into lighting, directing, filmography and photography but she is a dancer before all of that.

“I will never stop moving,” she says as she takes her leave, a portrait of understated elegance. “As long as I can move I will dance.”

is at The Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, Dublin tonight. paviliontheatre.ie

irishtimes

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Edge makes frantic dash from NY to get home for premiere of wife's new show
By Cormac Byrne


Saturday November 13 2010

THE EDGE downed his Spiderman guitar for a few hours last night to jet home for the premiere of his wife's new music and dance project.

The U2 performer left rehearsals of the Broadway musical, composed by himself and Bono, to be in Dublin to catch the first performance of Cold Dream Colour, a music and dance piece created by wife Morleigh Steinberg.

The piece, inspired by the work of artist Louis le Brocquy, is a source of immense pride for The Edge.

"Morleigh really put the whole thing together, it's been a labour of love of hers now for a number of years since Louis expressed his enthusiasm for this concept of dancing to his pictures," he said.

The show, at Dun Laoghaire's Pavilion Theatre, marks le Brocquy's 94th birthday.

He is recognised as the foremost Irish artist of the 20th century.

The Edge had assisted his wife by working with her in a recording studio on the soundtrack for the piece.

Morleigh had joked that she felt like her husband's producer on the sessions.

"It was fun for him to create music without thinking 'will this be the next big single'," she said.

hnews@herald.ie

- Cormac Byrne
herald

Cold Dreams Launch Night
World Premiere of 'Cold Dreams' by The Edge's wife Morleigh Steinberg about artist Louis le Brocquy, The Pavillion Theatre, Dublin, Ireland - 12.11.10.






vipireland