How can something as fleeting as dance be archived and passed on? How can it be saved from oblivion? And how is it changed in this process of being passed on? Takao Kawaguchi – a fear- less performance artist, a shape-shifter of the body and the mind – literally copies the dances of an icon, focusing on video recordings of renowned butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno, who helped to revolutionise dance and founded butoh in the wake of the Second World War. What emerges is a tense, exciting dialogue of two artists between presence and absence, contemporary trash and traditional wisdom.

A former member of the Japanese multimedia performance company Dumb Type from 1996 to 2008, Takao Kawaguchi has since been exploring the fertile field of live arts in the intersection of theater, dance, and visual arts, mainly through solo works and collaborating with other artists of various disciplines. In recent years he has created a few butoh-related works such as “The Sick Dance” (2012), based on the texts of Tatsumi Hijikata, and “About Kazuo Ohno” (2013) which has been nominated as a finalist for New York’s Bessie Award (Outstanding Revived Work) 2016/17. Also, Kawaguchi’s most recent and on-going project since 2015, “Touch of the Other”, which is based on and inspired by the American sociologist Laud Humphrey’s research on homosexual encounters in public toilets in the 60ies in the US, grasps the ethnography of queer sex in the past as well as in the present.

[Source: play bill]

TFB Nr. 1080