Kazuo Ohno
| Kazuo Ohno | |
|---|---|
Ohno in October 1986
|
|
| Born |
October 27, 1906 Hakodate, Hokkaidō, Japan |
| Died | June 1, 2010 (aged 103) Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan |
| Cause of death | Respiratory failure |
| Alma mater | Japan Athletic College, Tokyo |
| Occupation | dancer |
| Years active | 1933–2007 |
| Known for | Butoh dance |
| Notable work | "My Mother," "Dead Sea," "Water Lilies," "Ka Cho Fu Getsu," and "The Road in Heaven, The Road in Earth" |
| Spouse(s) | Chie Nakagawa (died 1997) |
| Children | Two sons |
| Awards | Michelangelo Antonioni Award for the Arts (1999) |
| Website | Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio |
Kazuo Ohno (大野 一雄 Ōno Kazuo?, October 27, 1906 – June 1, 2010) was a Japanese dancer who became a guru and inspirational figure in the dance form known as Butoh. It was written of him that his very presence was an "artistic fact."
He is the author of several books on Butoh, including The Palace Soars through the Sky, Dessin, Words of Workshop, and Food for the Soul. The latter two were published in English as Kazuo Ohno's World: From Without & Within (2004).
Ohno once said of his work: "The best thing someone can say to me is that while watching my performance they began to cry. It is not important to understand what I am doing; perhaps it is better if they don't understand, but just respond to the dance."
The son of a fisherman and a mother who was an expert in European cuisine, Ohno was born in Hakodate City, Hokkaido Prefecture, Japan, on October 27, 1906. He demonstrated an aptitude for athletics in junior high school and graduated from an athletic college in 1929, teaching physical education at a Christian high school. In 1933, Ohno began studying with Japanese modern dance pioneers Baku Ishii and Takaya Eguchi, which qualified him to teach dance at the Soshin Girls' School in Yokohama, from which he retired in 1980.
In 1938, Ohno was drafted into the Japanese Army as a lieutenant, and later rose to captain. He fought in China and New Guinea, where he was captured and interned by the Australians as a POW. The war and its horrors provided him with inspiration for some of his later works, such as Jellyfish Dance, thought to be a meditation on the burials at sea he had observed on board the ship transporting soldiers back to Japan.
After the war, he began work on his dance again, and presented his first solo works in 1949 in Tokyo. In the 1950s, he met Tatsumi Hijikata, who inspired him to begin cultivating Butoh, a new form of dance evolving in the turmoil of Japan's drab postwar landscape. Hijikata, who rejected the Western dance forms popular at the time, developed with Ohno and a collective group the vocabulary of movements and ideas that later, in 1961, he named the Ankoku Butoh-ha movement.
...
Wikipedia