TAKAO KAWAGUCHI: ABOUT KAZUO OHNO (Dance)

Takao Kawaguchi, reconsiders authorship and artistic freedom by recreating the movements of legendary Butoh dancer, Kazuo Ohno.

Takao Kawaguchi’s performance, About Kazuo Ohno, caused a great deal of controversy when it premiered in Tokyo in 2013. Using video recordings of the premiere performances of butoh master Kazuo Ohnoʼs early masterpieces including Admiring La Argentina (1977), My Mother (1981), and Dead Sea, Ghost, Wienerwaltz (1985), Kawaguchi attempts to replicate Ohno’s movements.

Ohnoʼs dance is often characterised as being largely improvisational and unique in his distinctive bodily features and movements, which were essential to his ‘dance of soul.’ In an attempt to copy his dance, Kawaguchi’s inevitable divergences come to reveal the distinction between the original and the copy, which in turn reveal the unavoidable interpretive agency of the copier. The copy becomes original. In copying recordings that are themselves copies—or perhaps even copies of copies, Kawaguchi works in direct violation of Ohno’s methodology, which stated that, “if there is the heart, the form will follow.”

By marginalising his own subjectivity and embracing the copy, Kawaguchi rejects the traditional concept of ‘kata’ or ‘ideal form’ in Japanese traditional aesthetics, and works to fit his body into Ohno’s form, “like pouring hot iron into the mold,” and reconsidering the confines of authorship.