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.

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