Pictured: tsushi Takenouchi. Photo: POMPKA Foundation.
On Sunday, 19 February 2017 (7 pm), the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute in Warsaw will host the premiere presentation of Embrace by the Japanese butoh artist Atsushi Takenouchi. The artist will perform as part of the cyclical project Japanese butoh masters ? presentations, organized by the POMPKA Foundation. During his visit, Takenouchi will perform his latest piece and hold international workshops. He will be accompanied by Hiroko Komiya, who composed the music for Embrace. Takenouchi?s solo performances are always a unique experience. The unity of the dancer?s spirit, body, and mind allow the audience to actively participate in the limitless and timeless journey to the universal source of being. The master?s slim body emanates with energy, providing the audience with intense emotions, while the lighting and music, reminiscent of the sounds overheard from nature, complete the impression of full participation in a living picture. The ability to translate the gamut of human feelings into a minimalistic and, at the same time, very powerful language of butoh, is only intimate to the masters following years of personal and exhaustive research. Atsushi Takenouchi is among the rare artists who fit the bill.
In Embrace, the artist refers to universal issues related to the place occupied by humans in the natural world, and their co-responsibility for life on earth. He dances the unavoidable cycle of life and death, which is the experience of all beings uniting in a common prayer.
On principle, butoh pieces are not linear stories. Such is the case with this one, too. However, Takenouchi wrote a short poem, which conveys the emotions which he finds close to him. The full version of the poem may be found on the Foundation?s website, says Anita Zdrojewska, organiser of the event.
Embrace
No thinking, no thoughts with deep breathing
Then from death life emerges,
like a flower opening
Life is a flower opening to the Universe
The flower is embracing the Universe
Embracing everything
Butoh has been the centerpiece of our Foundation?s activity. We organize workshops and presentations, and we?ve published a book supported by the Institute of Music and Dance and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (?The world of Kazuo Ohno?s butoh?), and hosted its author, Yoshito Ohno. Atsushi Takenouchi is yet another artist featured in the ?Japanese series?, following Kazuo Ohno and Yukio Waguri, adds Zrdojewska.
TICKETS:
PLN 50 (full price)
PLN 20 (reduced)
Available online at: eventim.pl
RESERVATIONS:
phone no.: + 48 791 877 377
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The Japanese butoh masters ? presentations series is a unique opportunity for anyone seeking interesting phenomena in culture and arts. It presents butoh ? a counterculture form of dance created in Japan in the late 1950s by Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986) and Kazuo Ohno (1906-2010). As Prof. Dariusz Kosiński writes, butoh is not only a distinctive style of dance, a contemporary performative genre or a certain type of training; it is a holistic approach combing a unique method of work, aesthetics, dramaturgy and philosophy. Formed by blending the traditions and inspirations of the East and the West, and still open to the intentions of creators, it is an extraordinary reflection of the complexity of contemporary global culture, at the same time offering ways of overstepping its limitations.
Atsushi Takenouchi joined Hoppo-Butoh-ha in Hokkaido in 1980. His last performance with the company, Takazashiki (1984) was created by butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata. Atsushi started his own Jinen butoh in 1986 and created solo works Itteki and Ginkan, combining the universal picture of nature, the Earth, ancient times, impressions of the moment, meetings with people and environment. He went on a three-year Jinen project tour of Japan, with 600 improvisations in 1996?1999. At that time he was a student of Kazuo Ohno and his son Yoshito Ohno. Since 2002, he has stayed mainly in Europe, collaborating with dancers and actors from France, Poland, the United States and other countries. He has staged his solos at the Avignon Festival, Paris Butoh Festival and NY Butoh Festival. Over that time, he has also collaborated on films. Ridden by Nature, an environmental art film shot in Alaska and Hawaii, won the Best of the Fest award at the Martinique International Film Festival and an official selection for the Venice Film Festival.
Hiroko Komiya transforms the images born in the air and the surrounding space or created by the body, into sounds without a regular melodic line or rhythm. They are completely simple, single, ever present, like the weather or closest environment. She uses water and natural materials such as stone, bamboo, sand, leaves and shells, as well as bells, drums and percussion. She started to study percussion instruments used in traditional Hindu music in 1996 under tabla player Masahiro Besso. In 1999 she began to work with butoh dancer Atsushi Takenouchi. During JINEN Butoh workshops she will interact with the participants? breath and movement. She composes music for dancers and actors, and for workshops with children and adults with special needs in Japan, France, United States and Poland. She uses voice in its basic, natural form. In 2002 she began to collaborate with the tribal singer, poet and percussion player Jean C. Dussin on Inuit, African, Celtic and circle songs.
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More about the workshops (18, 20-22 February 2017)
