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Kathy Rose as a butoh-like Cleopatra priestess. Photo by Carolyn Jones.

Catch the Last Wave

The San Francisco Butoh Festival moves on

By Yafonne
Special to AsianWeek

A big wave is coming to San Francisco Aug. 3 to 11, and scores of people are getting naked to experience it. Getting naked, that is, in the sense of the art of butoh. The most naked dance of all, butoh is not just about shaved heads and bodies painted white moving at a snail’s pace on stage, but it’s about stripping all things down to their bare essentials.

This visceral, mercurial “dance of darkness” from post-war Japan — founded by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazue Ohno — has become the craze and main dish of many Bay Area artists over the last decade, thanks to Dance-Network’s San Francisco Butoh Festival, now the largest and most influential butoh festival in the United States.

“For me, butoh is first time experience — being honest in the movement, fully in the moment,” says Burmese American Ledoh, 40, who is the artistic director of Salt Farm, a butoh collective of nine dancers, architects, designers and scientists based in San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point shipyard. “It hits you in the gut,” he says.

It’s hard to believe that this festival, a Bay Area mainstay, is finally saying good-bye. National tragedies like Sept. 11 and the dot-com bust have turned the Bay Area arts economy upside-down overnight. With long-time San Francisco avant-garde venue Thâater Artaud closing down, the Immigration and Naturalization Services increasing security checks on international artists and the state government cutting back on arts funding, the climate to produce has truly become harsh.

“The rules are changing this year, and everybody’s scrambling to keep up with the rules,” says Brechin Flournoy, 35, the founding director and curator who has been the festival’s driving force for the last ten years.

'Authenticity for the Human Experience'

Butoh started out with a bang in 1979 through its first settlers Koichi and Hiroko Tamano, the husband and wife team of Harupin-Ha in Berkeley, but this year’s lineup shows it bowing out with a youthful diversity. For opening day on Aug. 3, Julie Becton Gillum of North Carolina will be moving a shifting, sculptural wall of cobblestones in front of the waterfall fountains at Yerba Buena Gardens, along with other free outdoor afternoon performances by Dean Street Foo Dance of New York, John Doyle’s Medicine Wheel Dance Project of the Bay Area, Deborah Butler of Massachusetts and Utah’s Red Junk-et Butoh Co.

“[Butoh] is authenticity for the human experience. I think what you get with most art forms are finished products that are too neat. I am more interested in asking a good question than finding a clear answer,” explains performance artist Michael Sakamoto, 35, who will perform “Amai” — which means sweet in Japanese — a piece that focuses on abstractions dealing with cute female personas from both Eastern and Western cultures. “Butoh does that for me. It brings out things deep within our psyche that I find most other art forms can’t express as authentically.”

Hiroko Tamano of Berkeley, and Ledoh, 40, artistic director of Salt Farm. Top photo by Doug Slater. Bottom photo by Misao Mizuno.

For the festival’s grand finale, Flournoy is not only making a statement by producing younger artists, but celebrating the strong currents of women in butoh — in particular, artists like Su-En from Sweden, Kathy Rose from New York and Hiroko Tamano from Berkeley, as well as Megan Nicely and Molly Barrons from San Francisco.

One of the founders of Bay Area butoh, Tamano has influenced a whole generation of American artists. She will be performing a solo, “Ancient,” based on the Jomon era in Japan, which existed 10,000 years before Christ. “I’m wondering how their sensations were like,” she muses. “I’m trying to explore the inner space … and forces of the Jomon era.”

Having absorbed the purest Hijikata butoh lineage through the legendary Yoko Ashikawa and the Tomoe Shizue & Hakuboto group in Japan, Su-En has integrated butoh with her European sensibility, bridging the old and new. Approved for U.S. entry by the INS only a few days ago, Su-En will perform her solo “Headless — Love on the other side” and will also be teaching intensive butoh workshops during her residency.

“In my work I always focus on the body as a living body, an organism and a living material. This body will be transformed, and this is a starting point for movement,” explains Su-En, who is now pushing butoh into Nordic body experiences and landscapes. “The challenge of the body — mental, physical and existential — is the tool. The pain must be real; the pulling of the gravity must be real. I am deeply devoted to quality of movement and the true experience of body.”

Demystifying Butoh for a New Generation

Every summer since 1995, Flournoy has brought over master artists like Su-En from Europe and Japan to the Bay Area, popularizing, diversifying and demystifying butoh for a new generation of American artists and audiences. American artists by and large are grasping the visual characteristics of butoh, according to Flournoy, but a truly American butoh that is original to this land has yet to be born.

“My criteria in looking for artists is someone who has that utterly original sense of creativity, not digesting something else,” he says.

Flournoy is referring to artists like the New York based Kathy Rose, 52, whose bizarrely amazing 3-D sense-bending works combine animated film with live performance. Rose will perform short excerpts of her works, from Dadaist animated dresses and holographic self-images to expressions of East Indian culture through insect imagery, and a butoh-like Cleopatra priestess.

“I find that I would rather see a bad butoh performance than a good dance performance. The primeval feeling that comes from the gut,” Rose admits readily, “it is a refreshing experience. There’s something rough-edged about it — very honest and very mysterious. No pat answers.”

For those who have never seen or experienced butoh, the time is ripe to catch its last wave at this year’s San Francisco Butoh Festival. These artists are not to be missed, since the next butoh wave in the Bay Area may not come for another 100 years.

“Butoh comes. It feeds the community for a while, then it moves on. I want to stop it while the interest is there,” says Flournoy. So while the festival’s going is tough, there is only one thing left to do: dive in. Feel naked. Catch the last wave of butoh.

The eighth and final season of the San Francisco Butoh Festival opens Saturday, Aug. 3 with a free outdoor afternoon performance starting at 1 p.m. at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Esplanade. It continues with main stage performances at Fort Mason’s Cowell Theater running Aug. 8-11, Thursday to Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 7:30 p.m. To purchase tickets ($16-$24 and discounts) call the box office at 415-345-7575, or visit www.ticketweb.com or go to TIX/Union Square. Butoh workshops, (Aug. 5-9 and 12-16) and classes ( Aug. 4, 5, 10 and 12) Will range in fee from $25 to $385. To register, call 415- 648-1177.