music art film review - REDEFINE magazine
Butoh Dancing (舞踏): Discovering Emptiness, Embodiment & Environment in an Archeology of Body
The mythological quest to express the sublime through the human body can be the great mystery and significance of dance. The grace and emotive gravity of dance inspire us to explore shared resonance and to comprehend our substance through a most intimate artistry. Yet we are ever limited by our human bodies, those endlessly elusive entities that enrobe our vocabularies and begin and end our extraordinary worlds. Butoh dancing (舞踏) is an expression of body that has found relevance outside of its roots in Japan, across cultures and generations.
Originally known only as the "dance of darkness" or "dance of death", Butoh has evolved into an encompassing expression of every element to be found through the human body. It does not transcend the human form or express a superhuman consciousness, but challenges us to comprehend ourselves through a different mentality. Despite the fairly recent origination of this dance form, it has quickly appealed and demonstrated that it speaks to something common within us, however we may allow our cultural and geographic borders to define us.
A Background on Butoh
Kazuo Ohno © H. Tsukamoto
Dance is a corporeal poetry that speaks to us through sensual body memory and intangible thought, thus communicating experience and expressing ideals. We may, for instance, find the most exquisite aspirations to perfection in the sculptural forms of ballet and the etiquettes of ballroom dance -- but what dance is there to speak of anguish and terror? What of the uncontainable spirit that seeps from our grotesque beings in spite of vigilant taboo? Would it not be deceptive to express the most visceral of human experience through only forms of chiseled beauty?
Dance that declares itself as an encompassing language for human experience yet speaks from under a veneer of piety for conventional aesthetics is fundamentally dishonest. With passionate protest to the void in integrity of expression and against standards of superficiality, Butoh emerged at the end of the 20th century.
It was in the shadow of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Butoh's first breaths were drawn, already shuddering naked and borne by true darkness. Shaped into its ghostly form by dancers Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata, Butoh came to define Japanese avant-garde dance in its embrace of the totality of emotional experience and the absurdity found in the raw body. Ohno and Hijikata composed a new lyric for the human body where nothing was forbidden to experience. The revolutionary spirit of Butoh explored morbidity and sexuality in its most explicit forms. By doing so, it not only transformed the Japanese stage but connected with international audiences and dancers, tantalizing a universal desire for this same purity of expression. Until the '60s, there had been no such dance within Japan that allowed for the communication of the uninhibited body and, as far as technical form, there still exist few such parallels.
Kazuo Ohno & Tatsumi Hijikata
"Butoh, as [with] so many true arts, contains the beautiful spectrum of being. Often these first looks at Butoh are early works of suffering individuals. I have found that once the repressed or taboo aspects of life and the soul are allowed to naturally surface through the body and art, the lightness and loving joy must also be revealed." - Maureen Freehill (Seattle-based Butoh dancer, Artistic Director of "Butopia")
As Butoh has grown in popularity, its essence has evolved into as many forms as there are dancers.
"In general," says Katsura Kan, a Kyoto-based Butoh dancer and choreographer, "if we have five Butoh dancers, we have six different philosophies."
Despite this fluidity, there remain some elements that unify familiar aesthetics and practices within Butoh. In a celebration of the unmediated experience, Butoh often disregards the use of particular choreography. Themes of the absurd, tragic and grotesque continue to dominate, although this has increasingly evolved as dancers accept the anti-aesthetic essence of Butoh form. Butoh invites unlimited possibility for exploration of self and of environment. The continued progress made in sharing this revolutionary dance is sure to open a greater medium of expression and of engaging with every aspect of our realities.
Highlight Question
What are some of the most important differences and challenges in adapting Butoh around the world? How do you think Butoh will change to become more relevant to a younger generation, and adapt across cultures? "Butoh needs more time, and let's see the future as a new vocabulary to discover the human that you are." – Katsura Kan (Kyoto-based Butoh dancer, Director of "Katsura Kan & Saltimbanques") "The seed of Butoh is flowing all over the world and a lot of different flowers are growing - Butoh flowers - but I don't know how Butoh will develop." – Tadashi Endo (Göttingen-based Butoh dancer, Director of Butoh-Center MAMU and Butoh-Festivals MAMU) "I think the most important way to adapt Butoh around the world is to stop constraining our Japanese way to foreigners [...] The definition of Butoh is just "a step from within": this concept is very simple -- out of [the] Japanese way, more universal way -- [a] so everybody can try it around the world." – Tetsuro Fukuhara (Tokyo-based Butoh dancer, Director of Tokyo Space Dance) "I think it's extremely important to always refer back to Hijikata, Ohno, Tanaka and Kasai, and Nakajima. If we lose the original drives and aspirations completely, then we will also dilute and destroy the original promise of Butoh. It has to be radical, alive, relevant, and this is the power for a younger generation." - Marie-Gabrielle Rotie (London-based Butoh dancer, Butoh workshop director)Butoh Dancer Spotlight: Florencia Guerberof (Argentina/U.K.)
"I come from Buenos Aires, Argentina. I was exposed to dance, theater and cinema since my childhood. My parents worked in the theater, so the theater where they used to work was like my second home… I was fascinated by the Lindsay Kemp company. I also remember Moses Pendleton (creator of the MOMIX company). My mother took me to see many incredible performances by the Argentinean choreographer Oscar Araiz and the wonderful French artist Jean Francois Casanovas. I was also struck by Laurie Anderson's work: her strength and manly appearance. Peter Brook's play Peter Brook's play The Man Who... based on clinical tales by Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (1985).
In 2011, I created a piece called My Hometown Is In My Shoes. This dance theater work focuses mainly on the feet. The shoes are seen as a home, and this responds to my condition as a foreigner living abroad for many years, not grounded or rooted to any particular place.
I always try to make work using very basic means. My aim is to be able to create something powerful out of very simple and immediate things. This idea comes from my origin.
I studied art in Argentina... I remember with admiration how the art students in Buenos Aires used to make amazing work out of nothing. They worked with very basic means, as we didn't count with high technology and all the facilities, but with brilliant minds. The lack of resources makes you more creative. This is what has influenced me the most about my country."
music art film review - REDEFINE magazine
Butoh Dancing (舞踏): Discovering Emptiness, Embodiment & Environment in an Archeology of Body
Tokyo geisha with shamisen, circa 1870s
Delilah cutting Samson's hair, c. 1460
Picture of "Raven Releasing the Sun", by Todd Baker
An illustration from an 18th-century Icelandic manuscript depicting Huginn and Muninn sitting on the shoulders of Odin.
Harlem - Saturday (Funkþátturinn) @ 01:30
Hermigervill is like Animal on Sesame Street, a whirling dervish of hair, playing some bizarrely childish electronic beats. But the real gem of his performance is that he is having more fun on stage than the entire audience combined.
Image © Stephen Lofstrom.
The glitch aesthetic is generally expressed in visuals that are fragmented, warped, discolored, and often filled with noise, as a result of technological errors in equipment or digital image codes. Mutations are seemingly infinite, varying between the unrecognizable; simple interplaying layers such as linear patterns; minimal to moderate distortions; and slightly shifted perspectives on an otherwise nearly preserved image.
To capture such decay of image data, glitch artists amass their materials from a combination of analog and digital sources -- but the roots of glitch lie in analog technology, such as television screens and cameras that are prone to malfunctioning. There, the artist can naturally encounter visual error without having to primarily simulate the effect through software. Circuit bending, for instance, is a technique that an artist can employ, by rewiring electronic devices so that their behavior changes. A glitch artist can coax a disrupted image from the altered functions; he or she can create with broken equipment and make defective hardware the premise of their work.
"This is an extreme form of modification which has the potential to push the device well beyond design specifications, into unknown territory, through to points of failure," explains Brooklyn-based electronic media artist Phillip Stearns. "Documenting the process using audio recording, video recording or still images is handy when the on-board capabilities of the device are severely compromised."
Image © Sabato Visconti
Image (top) © Sabato Visconti, (middle) © Mathieu St-Pierre, (bottom) © KARBORN
Spanish text by Tom Cabrera; English translation by Estefanía Enzenhofer
"My mechanism-process is having a good stock of my own pictures that generate a common ground, a visual world where these pictures can dialogue. When I expose them to the heat of the scanner, I try to move the photograph over light in a way that creates a simple choreography that explores the static form. Once I feel that the photographs have exhausted all their possibilities of deformation, I look over them and select those that have really exploited the resource beyond just technical qualities.
I believe that glitch doesn't apply to every picture and this is why themes run out. Body anatomy and architecture are two big image fields for me because their formal aspects allow me to play around with their specific morphology. To transform what is known to address the unknown. The more recognizable the glitched form is, the more interesting the visual interplay becomes." - Tom Cabrera
Mi mecanismo-proceso es tener un buen stock de fotografías propias que generen un mundo visual común o equilibrado, que dialoguen entre ellas. Al exponerlas al calor del scanner, intento que los movimientos que voy haciendo de la fotografía sobre la luz, armen una coreografía simple que explore la forma inmóvil. A partir de eso, es hacer muchas pruebas a ciegas y sin ver los resultados que van generando el escaneado. Una vez que siento que la fotografía agotó sus instancias de deformación, las reviso y selecciono para encontrar aquellas que realmente explotan el recurso más allá de sus cualidades técnicas.
Considero que no todas las fotografías responden igual a los glitchs y por eso, las temáticas se acortan. La anatomía del cuerpo y la arquitectura creo que son dos grandes grupos de trabajo de la imagen, más que nada porque sus cuestiones formales me permiten jugar mucho más con su morfología específica. Transformar desde lo conocido para abordar lo desconocido. Mientras más reconocible es la figura/forma que se expondrá al glitch, más interesante es el juego visual que propone la pieza para el espectador."- Tom Cabrera
"I work quite a lot with gender identities and their impacts on the 'normative matrix' (Heterosexual Matrix by Judith Butler (1990)). We regard male, female and hetero sexuality as normal -- hopefully most of us -- also bi- and homosexuality. Yet that limits us to up to three categories of the biological gender, thereby neglecting the psychological gender, which I regard as equally important to being human as the biological one. The tricky part about that story is to read that gender since it’s not done by lifting one's skirt.
Society and culture have established a frameset for what’s intelligible (note: readable) and what’s thereby not ruling out any masculine or feminine behaviour that’s outside of its respective gender norm. Given that culture and society can be described as a system, the act of acting outside the norm sends out information that is hardly decipherable by a receiver that’s not familiar to the codification, thus leading to a heightened likelihood that cultural glitch occurs. In my performances, I’d usually work with drag and/or make up to play with codes within the system of cultural grammar, but not exclusively." - Raffael "Urban Grau" Miribung
It soon becomes apparent that Abu Eyad can no longer take the oppressive weight of life inside the camp. Unable to leave, and unable to work for a living, he is (like many young men) in purgatory. His boredom and hatred of Lebanon, and of the politics in the region, begin to fester. Music and movies brought by Fliefel from abroad appease Abu Eyad's moods at first. But eventually Abu Eyad becomes fed up with life in Ain al-Hilweh. "I want to blow myself up," he confides, at one point, to Fleifel. He talks of wanting to die, simply to end a life with no prospect of betterment or change. Ostensibly in preparation, we watch Abu Eyad giving away his possessions, burning his school papers and books, and clearing out of his apartment to stay at one of the Fatah-sponsored residences.
Fleifel's uncle Said is also increasingly on-edge. Once a cool and fun-loving mentor to Fleifel, Said is frustrated with his life as a single man. He collects cans to sell by the kilo, and cannot save up enough money to marry, despite pressure from his family to do so. Said dwells on the death of his older brother when they were teenagers (in a gun battle against Lebanese soldiers attempting to invade the camp) and tends to the pigeons he keeps on his rooftop. We learn that he once was cheated out of an opportunity to flee Lebanon by a family member, an event that darkly hovers over the fun-guy persona he portrays outwardly in the camp.
Interspersed throughout the film are little snippets of daily life. We see that inside Ain al-Hilweh, the refugees enjoy some of the privileges we all do. They drink soda and juice. Many families have a television, with daytime shows just as bad as Days of Our Lives and American Idol. Coffee and cigarettes are a daily routine. Growing up, Fleifel would watch American action movies with his uncle Said. A BMW SUV drives by in one shot. One friend of the family has a wedding, and wears a beautiful white dress, and there is dancing and a tearful celebration before the bride leaves. Clothespins hang on clotheslines in courtyards or on top of buildings.
The details of Ain al-Hilweh contrast greatly with the few images we get of a seemingly idyllic Denmark, where Fleifel spent his young adult years. While green and furtile, most days there were rainy and cold. Instead of people congregating and living their life in the narrow streets of Ain al-Hilweh, there are open but empty pastures, urban homes that sprawl, and long drives to find halal meat and other treats from home. Fleifel tells us he was embarrassed of his family while growing up in Denmark. Trying to fit in there, his father's ways in particular were a reminder to him that he was out of place.
Fleifel is careful to include both the dark and light sides of life in Ain al-Hilweh. At times, it feels like too much footage is included – but it is diverse for a reason. The universality of these feelings, items, and activities heightens the viewer's appreciation of both the anger and deep weariness that landlessness foments. Above all, the futility of clinging to a piece of land that is no longer one's home comes through. Home is, after all, wherever one is, or where one continues to return. For many Palestinians, that has become Ain al-Hilweh.
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The project’s accompanying albums, Marram’s Sun Choir and BOATS, feature many international and noteworthy musicians. Many of the tracks on these albums share an epic quality, with sonic ranges and depths sometimes verging on chaos, yet often tempered by the raw quality of the recordings of the children's voices. There are meditative interludes with looped samples, used to ambient effect, combined with the influence of the children's instinctive chanting, which is a sound deeply entrenched within their everyday culture. Anyone who's been to India will have experienced a similar saturation of the senses.
Most of the musicians involved worked remotely using samples of the children's voices, but all took a different approach. American rapper and producer Doseone wanted to create the feeling of a mutual and fun exchange with the children, as if they were in the room together. The result is a rap-like song, which seems almost like a dialogue between him and the children.
Greg Saunier, best known as the drummer of Deerhoof, endeavored to embrace the gulf between the two cultures and languages with a formalist piece of music that eschewed linguistics and focused instead on the sonic poetics of the sampled recordings of the children's voices.
Tim Rutili from Califone was deeply affected by the children's voices, which he describes as "beautiful and haunted". In response to images of "smallness" and "innocence" that the children’s voices conjured up for him, Rutili created a song to affirm their solidarity and strength. The result, "Those Mountains are God's Teeth", merges Rutili's distinctively American drawl and delicate twangs of guitar, with the soaring, almost unearthly ringing of the children's choir. Echo and reverb swathe the voices atop an ambient synth backdrop, heightening the track’s mystical and epic qualities.
Rutili talks of the capacity for music to induce "momentary unity", which in turn may plant the seeds of opening up the consciousness. The experience of working with the children's voices has since inspired him to want to work on further charitable projects.
Untouchables are born into an unalterable social status, allowed only to mix and marry with those from their own caste and to perform only lowly jobs and tasks befitting their "station" in life. This belief system decrees that acceptance of these restrictions and living a virtuous life may lead to an individual moving up the caste system in their next incarnation. Whilst laws made have since made discrimination against the untouchables illegal, it still prevails and remains painfully evident in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan to this day.
Particularly in the rural areas of India, where the majority of the poor population live, untouchables are banned from temples and higher caste homes. They perform jobs such as cleaning latrines and sewers by hand, or are bonded workers, many repaying debts incurred generations ago. Figures published only fifteen years ago saw 15 million children working in slave-like conditions for less than a dollar a day.
In 2001, Amnesty International reported on an "extremely high" number of sexual assaults on Dalit women, often the victims of landlords, upper-caste villagers, and police officers. Only 5% of the attacks were reported, and 30% of the rape complaints were dismissed by the police as false.
Thousands of pre-teen Dalit girls are forced into prostitution. Named devadasis, which translates to "female servant of god", they are "married" to a deity or a temple, where they are forced to have sex with upper-caste community members until they are finally sold to urban brothels.
In 2013, national crime statistics indicated an average of over 1,000 rape cases against Dalit women are reported annually, the highest of any social group. Bear in mind the majority of crimes will go unreported, and murders of rape victims often go unpunished.
The image on the cover of Abandoned City, an illustration of the skeleton of a large building, seems to be a reminder that there can be "abandoned" cities within living cities, in the physical remains of old foundations and structures, or even in people's memories of locations that have changed over time. In fact, the image was taken from a city that is very much alive, which seems to suggest that a sense of renewal also plays in to the album's theme.
"I had the music finished, every track, and I was looking at this picture..." Bertelmann explains, recalling an occurrence at a friend's house in San Francisco. "I said to the man, I think I would love to have this picture for my living room.... Somehow, this was resonating with the feeling that I had while I was writing the music. I think it was a parking garage in Las Vegas, outside of Las Vegas; [in] the black and white version of this picture you can see in the back the airport of Las Vegas, very, very [present] in the dust. What I liked about it is that it has only a kind of structure, but it also feels like there is some loneliness in there, but on the other side, it also looks like a monument."
"Especially in American cities you have... maybe empty streets, or you have a kind of area where you just think, ‘Oh man, where am I?'" he continues, "because there is nobody here, even in the huge city. That actually somehow totally got me into this theme of abandoned cities... Why are they abandoned?"
Bertelmann notes that he also made quite certain to not only choose locations with serious tragedies underscoring them, "because you can come in very quickly into the kind of war zone where you feel like maybe nearly half of the cities are abandoned because of the catastrophe and war, or they got destroyed, or people got killed, or things like that. You have also cities that have a very funny or very obscure background. I tried to actually add those as well, to give [Abandoned City] a little bit more of the broader range and maybe to show that I'm not only interested in the drama and the war catastrophe."
All bands need good stories, and GOAT’s is one of the better ones. A quick Google search of Korpilombo and voodoo yields nothing but GOAT-related results. Combine this wonky backstory with the fact that live, the members of GOAT all wear cloaks and masks and operate in a shroud of mystery, and it is enough to be almost too much of a schtick. But what makes the tradition of GOAT work is that the band doesn’t let this aura undermine the music.
Although virtually all the songs GOAT perform live are much longer than their recorded counterparts, the band makes sure to keep their songs at digestible length; they don't allow anything to go for so long that any ounce of boredom can set in, and this is an important point. All the elements are there for GOAT to jam band off into space and leave everyone else behind, but the band has the maturity to keep it all close, yet new and original, at the same time.
Bands with schticks are a dangerous thing. It is easy to get overwhelmed by the story and just be that crazy band with outfits. GOAT are anything but. World Music, their debut full-length, was one of the best psychedelic albums to come out in the past few years. The band followed it up with a live album of the recorded material, and it is even better. GOAT, as a band, isn’t just music; it is an experience.
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