The Dancing Gaze Across Cultures: Kazuo Ohno's Admiring La Argentina

Abstract

Kazuo Ohno's 1977 butoh dance Admiring La Argentina is studied as a Bergsonian reflection on “pastness” in performance. As the work questions the absolute quality of the present, it is initially compared with Paul Valéry's concept of La Argentina's dance as existing in the dimension of temporal immediacy. Ohno's relation to La Argentina is discussed as spirit possession, primal identification, cultural anthropophagy, productive consumption, and memorialization. Ultimately, the analysis leads to the premise of excorporation or heteropathic identification. The essay concludes with a 2007 meditation on Yoshito Ohno's homage to his father, Emptiness ( Kuu ).

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper have been read at the Getty Center for Research in Arts and the Humanities, the Society of Dance History Scholars (San Francisco), the Dance Studies Working Group at the University of California at Berkeley, The Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts at Manchester University, the Dance Department of Roehampton University, and the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, in the context of the workshop “Critical Mobilities.” I wish to thank John Solt, Toshio Mizohata, Eikoh Hosoe, Katherine Mezur, Nanako Nakajma, Timothy Murray, Dee Reynolds, Janet Wolff, Seeta Chaganti, Catherine Soussloff, Alexandra Kolb, Joellen Meglin, and the anonymous readers of Dance Chronicle for their critiques and responses, which helped to bring this essay toward its current form. Any errors, however, are exclusively my own.

Notes

Although I have not seen Admiring La Argentina in live performance, I have viewed a film of this work and have seen live performances of other works by Kazuo Ohno. I am an American dance scholar, not a scholar of Japanese culture. I was captivated by Ohno's work when I first saw it in New York in the early 1990s, and I began to write about him. I have written about butoh from my perspective as a Western observer viewing his performances in the West. See Mark Franko, “Where He Danced,” in Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 93–107.

When it comes to discussing the relation of time to the image, Bergsonism, as Gilles Deleuze called it, is as important for Ohno's vision of La Argentina as it was for Deleuze's aesthetics of cinema. Deleuze calls Bergson's theory of memory “one of the most profound, but perhaps also one of the least understood, aspects of Bergsonism.” Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 55.

La Argentina's appearance in Japan in 1929 was part of an extended international tour begun in 1928, one leg of which took her from San Francisco to Honolulu, Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, Manila, and Port Saïd. See “Chronology” in Ninotchka Devorah Bennahum, Antonia Mercé, “La Argentina”: Flamenco and the Spanish Avant-Garde (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 191. I am grateful to Bennahum for many aspects of her study of La Argentina.

Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 50. “Paradoxcially,” specifies Guerlac, “time becomes energy by passing, by losing itself in the very act of becoming, and by being stored through memory. There is a sense in which we are always already in the past” (p. 80). In her short discussion of the role of dance in Bergson's discourse, Guerlac invokes Valéry to support Bergson's views. In this essay, I see the two French writers as representing different positions on dance.

“They [Tatsumi Hijikata and Ohno] also sought to incorporate Kabuki's intimate connections to the dark, taboo, repressed side of everyday life, and hoped that by taking on Kabuki's role of representing all that was seemingly unrepresentable in Japanese society, they might also appropriate Kabuki's ‘particularly provocative technique of converting the socially negative into the aesthetically positive.’ ” Susan Blakeley Klein, Ankoku Buto: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Darkness (Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1988), 37. With regard to the quotation above, Klein cites Masao Yamaguchi, “Theatrical Space in Japan, A Semiotic Approach” (unpublished manuscript).

This lack of purity is also noticeable in the danced genre itself, as noted by Klein: “[W]e might expect when Ohno comes on stage dressed in a flamenco costume and begins to dance to a tango, that we are going to see some kind of imitation ‘Spanish’ dancing. What we see instead are tattered bits and scraps of familiar yet strangely unfamiliar movement swirled together into a whole that paradoxically seems both seamless and discordant.” Ankoku Buto, 43.

Ohno began dance training at age thirty (Kazuo Ohno, “On the Origins of Ankoku Butoh: the dance of utter darkness,” audiotape, Cornell University Library Media Center, [CV2178]). His performing career began with a Tokyo recital in 1949 at the age of forty-three. After working with Tatsumi Hijikata in the late 1950s and 1960s on dance experiments that brought about the innovative style of ankoku butoh, Ohno first retired from the stage in 1967.

I am grateful to Tom LaMarre for these formulations. “Plasticity” is a term used by Bennahum to characterize the modernist and metaphysical quality of La Argentina (Antonia Mercé, 67).

“Thus the consuming and consumable pleasures of nostalgia as an ambivalent longing to erase the temporal differences between subject and object of desire, shot through with not only the impossibility but also the ultimate unwillingness to reinstate what was lost.” Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 10; “vanishing auratic,” 12.

See Stephen Barber, Hijikata: Revolt of the Body (n.p.: Creation Books, 2006). Barber writes, “[A]lmost the entirety of Tokyo's experimental art at the beginning of the 1960s was closely engaged with French culture” (p. 25).

Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno, Kazuo Ohno's World: From Without and Within, trans. John Barrett (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 166. The first butoh performance was reportedly Hijikata's Forbidden Colors, in 1959.

“Both Ohno and Hijikata were born and grew up in Northern Japan (Tohoku): Ohno was born in the fishing village of Hakodate in 1906; Hijikata was born Yoneyama Kunio in a farming village in Akita Perfecture in 1928.” Klein, Ankoku Buto, 5.

Ohno and Ohno, Kazuo Ohno's World, 184, note 4. The painter Nakanishi notes that he “had never met with La Argentina, and, besides, knew nothing about her.”

Bergson, Matter and Memory, 150. “Toute perception est déjà mémoire. Nous ne percevons pratiquement que le passé, le présent pur étant l’insaissisable progrès du passé rongeant l’avenir.” Matière et Mémoire: Essais sur la relation du corps à l’esprit (Paris: PUF, 2007), 167.

Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. A. A. Brill (1918; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1960), 119. “Human beings have souls which can leave their habitation and enter into other beings; these souls are the bearers of spiritual activities and are, to a certain extent, independent of the ‘bodies’ ” (p. 99).

Neil Larsen, “Modernism as Cultural Brasileira: Eating the Torn Halves,” in Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 81. As Larsen points out, once the “transcultural incorporation has been achieved, then consumptive production can become productive consumption.” (pp. 81–82).

Freud, Totem and Taboo, 107. The two ways that magic operates through animism, according to Freud, are similarity and contiguity. Similarity has to do with imitation, but contiguity replaces imitation with relationship. He wrote of the “devouring affection of cannibals as primary identification” in Group Psychology (see Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, “The Primal Band,” in The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, Affect, trans. Douglas Brick et al. [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992], 14).

Robert Stam, “Of Cannibals and Carnivals,” in Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 145. Stam's account of cultural cannibalism relates it to Mikhail Bakhtin's carnival as it encompasses the blending of two identities: “The ‘cannibalist’ and ‘carnivalist’ metaphors have certain features in common.… Both evoke a kind of dissolving of the boundaries of self through the spiritual and physical commingling of self and other” (p. 126).

Freud noted of the primal horde devouring the father that “they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength.” Totem and Taboo, 183.

1. Paul Valéry, “Philosophy of the Dance,” in Aesthetics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 203. Valéry's engagements with dance have recently received critical attention from Véronique Fabbri in her Danse et philosophie: Une pensée en construction (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007).

2. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 34. Matière et mémoire was originally published in French in 1939.

3. Ibid., 15.

4. Valéry, “Philosophy of the Dance,” 210, 198.

5. “Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of ‘images.’ ” Ibid., 9.

6. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 54.

7. I am grateful to one of the anonymous readers for this point.

8. Kazuo Ohno was shown at the New York Butoh Festival, Martin E. Segal Theatre, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, in October 2005. See also Ninotchka Devorah Bennahum, Antonia Mercé, “La Argentina”: Flamenco and the Spanish Avant-Garde (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 170.

9. Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno, Kazuo Ohno's World: From Without and Within, trans. John Barrett (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 150. One could say this dance takes place between her charm and his bewitchment.

10. A film of these dances is held at the Cinémathèque de la danse, Paris.

11. Bennahum, Antonia Mercé, 37.

12. See Carl Wolz, “The Spirit of Zen in Noh Dance,” in Dance Research Annual VIII: Asian and Pacific Dance: Selected Papers from the 1974 CORD-SEM Conference (New York: CORD, 1977), 57.

13. Gunji Masakatsu and Selma Jeanne Cohen, “Virtuosity and the Aesthetic Ideals of Japanese Dance and Virtuosity and the Aesthetic Ideals of Western Classical Dance,” Dance as Cultural Heritage, Dance Research Annual XIV (1983), 89. I thank Joellen Meglin for referring me to the articles of Wolz and Masakatsu.

14. Bennahum, Antonia Mercé, 41.

15. Kazuo Ohno, quoted in Yoshito Ohno, “Food for the Soul,” in Kazuo Ohno's World, 76

16. Kazuo Ohno, “On the Origins of Ankoku Butoh,” Cornell Lecture, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 1985.

17. Katherine Mezur, conversation, San Francisco, July 2009.

18. Jennifer Dunning, “Birth of Butoh Recalled by Founder,” New York Times, November 20, 1985, C27.

19. Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5. I am grateful to Katherine Mezur for suggesting this book to me.

20. Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 168.

21. Ohno and Ohno, Kazuo Ohno's World, 155.

22. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 63.

23. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 81.

24. Toshio Mizohata, “Introduction,” in Kazuo Ohno's World, 4.

25. Yoshito Ohno, Kazuo Ohno's World, 166.

26. See Ohno and Ohno, Kazuo Ohno's World, 147.

27. Marta Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 169.

28. André Levinson, “Argentina,” in Dance Writings from Paris in the Twenties, ed. Joan Acocella and Lynn Garafola (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1991), 96.

29. See Javier Suárez-Pajares and Xoán M. Carreira, eds., The Origins of the Bolero School, Studies in Dance History, published by the Society of Dance History Scholars, vol. 4, no. 1 (Spring 1993).

30. Levinson, “Argentina,” 99.

31. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 56.

32. Ibid.

33. Yoshito Ohno, quoted in Kazuo Ohno's World, 167.

34. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), 336.

35. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, “The Primal Band,” in The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, Affect, trans. Douglas Brick et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 23.

36. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (London: Routledge, 1995), 34.

37. Kazuo Ohno, Kazuo Ohno's World, 185.

38. Ohno and Ohno, Kazuo Ohno's World, 185.

39. Leslie Bary, “Oswald Andrade's ‘Cannibalist Manifesto,’ ” in Latin American Literary Review 19/38 (July–December 1991), 35.

40. Eva Horn, “Leichenschmaus: Eine Skizze zum Kannibalismus in der Psychoanalyse,” in Verschlungene Grenzen: Anthropophagie in Literatur und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Annette Keck, Inka Kording, and Anja Prochaska (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1999), 297–308. I thank Alexandra Kolb for referring me to this essay.

41. See the Brazilian film directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1971). I thank Catherine Soussloff for calling this film to my attention. On the consubstantiality of hate and love in oral incorporation, see Borch-Jacobsen, “The Primal Band,” 12.

42. See Ichikawa Miyabi, “A Preface to Buto” (1983) in Ankoku Buto: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Darkness, by Susan Blakeley Klein (Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1988), 69.

43. Max Scheler, quoted in Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London: Routledge, 1992), 264.

44. Silverman, Male Subjectivity, 265.

45. Ibid., 205.

46. Yoshito Ohno, “Food for the Soul,” in Kazuo Ohno's World, 11.

47. Ibid., 40.

48. Ibid., 62.

49. Ibid., 167.