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In 1975, a Japanese dancer trained in Western dance forms founded his own small ensemble -- Sankai Juku -- in an aesthetic style labeled Butoh, which rejected undue reverence to technology and Western culture and its dance values, as well as those of Japan.
The genre that evolved in avant-garde circles in Tokyo in the 1960s was supposed to relate more closely to the new generation -- to be clearly Japanese but not in a traditional way, despite shadings of Noh and Kabuki theater.
Ushio Amagatsu choreographed his first piece for his company in 1978 in Tokyo and six years later came to America at the invitation of the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival.
The following year, On the Boards brought the company to Seattle for its local debut. It ended in disaster when a member of the company, Yoshiyuki Takada, fell to his death during a performance of a piece in Pioneer Square that required dancers, with their ankles tied to a rope, to descend slowly from the roof of the Mutual Life Building to the ground.
The remaining dancers canceled the rest of their foreign appearances and returned to Japan. They began a new tour the next year in Seattle. The troupe, based in Paris and Tokyo, has performed in Seattle several times, always with a different work, at the Opera House, Meany Hall and the last time, in 1999, at the Paramount Theatre. On Tuesday it offers Amagatsu's newest work -- "Kagemi -- Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors" -- at the Paramount.
Butoh means many things. Its literal meaning, if somewhat archaic, is "dance." German dance expressionism and Japanese experimentation are part of its roots. It was intended to remove the conventions of civilization in order to look squarely at nature. Its themes are those of metamorphosis and trascendence, birth and rebirth, death and nothingness. Movement often is slow and stylized. With various companies, not all Japanese, the dance style has spread throughout the world, including Seattle. It can be chaotic, violent, grotesque, raw, provocative, non-linear, abstract, shocking, revulsive, absurd and sometimes just plain weird in ways traditional Japanese art is not.
Sankai Juku is more polished, poetic, highly stylized and refined in temperament than many of its brethren, which is perhaps why it has performed in more than 40 countries and 300 cities, in Europe, North and South America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and has become the most celebrated Butoh company in the world. Like many Butoh artists, those of Sankai Juku spend a great deal of time outside Japan: It has been in residence at the Theatre de la Ville in Paris for more than 20 years.
Amagatsu once said in an interview, "Butoh belongs both to life and death, a realization of the distance between a human being and the unknown. It also represents man's struggle to overcome the distance between himself and the material world. The power in Sankai Juku's performances come from the beauty of its visions."
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