nobutohIn Memoriam: Yoshito Ohno

nobutoh. In memory of Yoshito Ohno

Only in silence the word,Only in dark the light,Only in dying life:Bright the hawk’s flightOn the empty sky.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Begin

I can’t do butoh any more.There is no butoh.Anyone can always do butoh.

Kazuo Ohno danced on his death bed.

The decline can be beautiful.

Two bald figures in dark, worn robes sit on the floor of a dark stage, facing each other and talking, each with one hand raised and a cup in the other. An iron teapot and a small bowl stand on the floor between them.
Yoshito Ohno, in a black polo neck, and I, taller, with glasses, in a black shirt, stand shoulder to shoulder in a studio with a wooden floor. We are both smiling at the camera.
Yoshito Ohno at home, with me, not long before he died.

In memory

Yoshito Ohno

1938 to 2020

Yoshito Ohno was the second son of Kazuo Ohno. He began to dance with his father as a schoolboy. In 1959 he danced with Tatsumi Hijikata in Kinjiki, Forbidden Colours, often cited as the first butoh performance.

After Hijikata died in 1986 he directed all of his father’s work, and every week he taught at the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio in Yokohama. He loved the aria O mio babbino caro. He appreciated the books of Ursula K. Le Guin.

Dancing Artist: Yoshito Ohno

Seven minutes with Yoshito Ohno, made for a Chinese series. He talks about the theatre, a rabbit, his father, growing old and being alive.

Yoshito Ohno speaks Japanese. The Chinese subtitles in the picture are the film’s own. The English ones are added here.

Directed by Shen Junjie. Interview by Zheng Guobing. Cinematography by Mao Xiangyu and Li Jingchen. From the series Begin Again, marked Lens. Its credits thank the Penghao Theatre and the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio.

Read the English subtitles
  1. 0:11 At my studio,
  2. 0:15 more and more people come to practise.
  3. 0:19 But
  4. 0:20 fewer young people go to the theatre.
  5. 0:23 Because real life has already become so theatrical.
  6. 0:29 Rather than enjoy made-up stories in a theatre, they might as well
  7. 0:33 enjoy real life, already hard to believe,
  8. 0:37 and very dramatic.
  9. 1:03 There was a huge earthquake in Japan,
  10. 1:06 then the tsunami came,
  11. 1:10 and so many homes were lost.
  12. 1:16 As myself, however much I grieved,
  13. 1:19 it would somehow seem false.
  14. 1:21 So I thought,
  15. 1:23 what if I were a rabbit?
  16. 1:29 A rabbit, however sad it is,
  17. 1:31 would surely be forgiven.
  18. 1:35 So I decided to become a rabbit.
  19. 1:46 ♪ At dusk, along the shore
  20. 1:53 ♪ I wander alone
  21. 2:02 ♪ Those long gone, unforgotten,
  22. 2:09 ♪ rise up in my heart
  23. 2:17 ♪ Waves that come in,
  24. 2:25 ♪ waves that go out
  25. 2:33 ♪ The colour of the moon,
  26. 2:40 ♪ the light of the stars
  27. 3:19 I dance butoh,
  28. 3:22 and my father was a butoh dancer.
  29. 3:27 Look anywhere in the world,
  30. 3:30 in the world of dance,
  31. 3:32 and no good dancer has ever come from a dancer’s child.
  32. 3:41 So for a while I wondered
  33. 3:47 if I would come to nothing too.
  34. 3:49 I always felt I was not cut out to be a dancer,
  35. 3:54 that I would fail.
  36. 3:57 I thought so all along.
  37. 4:00 When I went to Brazil not long ago,
  38. 4:04 they announced: “Kazuo Ohno’s son is here.”
  39. 4:11 Now they don’t say that.
  40. 4:13 They say “Yoshito Ohno is here.”
  41. 4:17 Ah, how good.
  42. 4:19 At last I felt I stood on my own.
  43. 4:25 When we are young,
  44. 4:27 we build our bodies.
  45. 4:30 Yukio Mishima, who was close to the martial arts,
  46. 4:34 worked hard at bodybuilding to build his body
  47. 4:42 and would not allow it to decline.
  48. 4:46 So he took his own life, before the decline.
  49. 4:52 So it must not come to that.
  50. 4:55 After all,
  51. 4:56 we have to accept decline,
  52. 5:00 I think.
  53. 5:07 When we are young,
  54. 5:09 there are times when we rebel.
  55. 5:15 But once we accept it,
  56. 5:19 we find decline beautiful too.
  57. 5:21 Accept it,
  58. 5:22 bring out the beauty of that decline,
  59. 5:26 and face it head on.
  60. 5:36 People do not change.
  61. 5:39 Mishima said it too.
  62. 5:42 Wherever I go in the world,
  63. 5:46 people have a part that never changes,
  64. 5:50 and that is how we reach one another.
  65. 5:55 Because I dieted too hard,
  66. 5:58 I once even had stomach cancer.
  67. 6:01 But I was still doing butoh,
  68. 6:07 so the operation was a great shock to me.
  69. 6:13 To be alive
  70. 6:17 is a precious thing.
  71. 6:21 To be able to go on living is a precious thing.
  72. 6:26 I felt it deep in my bones.
An ink drawing on white paper. A dancer in a loose robe leans to one side with one arm stretched out, the robe breaking into black strokes and grey washes, a dark pool of ink at the feet.
My ink drawing, in memory of Kazuo Ohno.

In memory

Kazuo Ohno

1906 to 2010

Kazuo Ohno made the dance now called butoh with Tatsumi Hijikata. He first danced abroad at seventy-three. He kept dancing into his nineties, from a chair or on the floor, when standing was hard. He died in 2010, at 103.

Handwritten in black ink on a grey card. To you, who walks by, a feast for crows, life’s remnant lies, Ruin’s dance, a silent cry. Kazuo Ohno, In Memoriam, 1906 to 2010.
The card that goes with the drawing.

A Question of Family

Ten minutes with no spoken words. Kazuo Ohno very old, his family around him, a baby, and near the end a song.

By Maureen Freehill. With Kazuo Ohno and family, Mina Mizohata and family, Michiyuki Kato and Keiko Tokumizu.

Original on YouTube, uploaded by YearOfButoh.

Read the English subtitles
  1. 6:34 [Wordless singing]
  2. 6:46 [Singing “Love Me Tender”]

Three performances.

In memory of Yoshito Ohno.

01PainEnter 02DollEnter 03MasculinityEnter

Where this comes from.

Butoh began in Japan in the late 1950s, with Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno.

  1. 土方巽

    Tatsumi Hijikata

    1928 to 1986

    He founded ankoku butoh, the dance of darkness. In 1959 he and Yoshito Ohno performed Forbidden Colours, often cited as the first butoh performance. He directed Kazuo Ohno’s Admiring La Argentina and The Dead Sea.

  2. 大野一雄

    Kazuo Ohno

    1906 to 2010

    He was born in Hakodate. In 1929 he saw the Spanish dancer La Argentina, and in 1977 he made Admiring La Argentina in her honour. From 1980 he performed abroad almost every year, until 1999, when he was ninety-three.

  3. 大野慶人

    Yoshito Ohno

    1938 to 2020

    Kazuo Ohno’s second son. He performed in many of Hijikata’s works in the 1960s, and in 1985 he returned to the stage in The Dead Sea. In 2013 he first performed Flower and Bird, which became his masterpiece. He died in Yokohama on 8 January 2020, aged 81.

In A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin, everything has a true name, and to know the name is to gain power over it. The poem that opens this site is the epigraph of that book, from The Creation of Éa, the oldest song in Earthsea. Yoshito Ohno and I both appreciated her, and we connected deeply over her books. We also connected over our appreciation for Yukio Mishima.

The dates and facts about the three people are from these pages.