Dance Video Index

In this database, you will find 200 dance videos which were collected in the 2023 fiscal year under the auspices of the EPAD (Eternal Performing Arts Archives and Digital Theatre) .

Overview

• Title
• Performer(s)
• Year performed

• NHK Performing Arts: Expressionists of the Body – From Butoh Festival ’85

  The NHK Performing Arts TV program [NHK Geijutsu Gekijo] featured the first butoh festival held in Japan in 1985. The festival was organised by the Nippon Cultural Centre under the title 'Collection of Confessions Seven Seasons and Castles' and featured seven performances over 14 days. This broadcast began with an introduction to butoh by dance critic Goda Naruo and a narrative by Hijikata Tatsumi, followed by performance footage of Dairakudakan's 'Book of Five Rings: Root, Pillar and Joint', Ohno Kazuo and Ohno Yoshito's 'The Dead Sea: Viennese Waltz and Ghosts' and Tanaka Min + Maijuku's 'Midday Moon', along with interviews.
  
  Butoh Festival '85 took place on 9-27 February 1985.
  The Dairakudakan, Ohno Kazuo and Ohno Yoshito performances were recorded at Yūrakuchō Asahi Hall.
  Tanaka Min's performance was recorded at Shinjuku Bunka Center.

  

  Performer(s)

  Nippon Cultural Centre

  Year performed

  1985

• Night Tide

  Eiko & Koma's first piece with full nudity. NIGHT TIDE explored the body as a landscape. This work was inspired by Eiko & Koma’s solitary living in the Catskills where they felt the movement of mountains. It was created at the time Eiko & Koma were awarded a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Eiko & Koma received their first Bessie (New York Dance and Performance Award) for GRAIN and NIGHT TIDE, presented in a single evening at Dance Theater Workshop. NIGHT TIDE was also presented as a part of NEW MOON STORIES in 1986.

  

  Performer(s)

  Eiko & Koma

  Director/Choreographer

  Eiko & Koma

  Venue

  American Dance Theater Workshop (NY)

  Year performed

  1984

• Nouvelle Tragique

  The dance is based on Marquis de Sade's 'Nouvelle Tragique' (translated into Japanese by Shibusawa Tatsuhiko), which depicts a tragedy of incest. The performance had act, five scenes, and was first performed as 'Butoh Works I'. Later, in March, Marquis de Sade's '120 Days of Sodom' (translated into Japanese by Shibusawa Tatsuhiko) was performed as 'Butoh Works II', and then in May 'Dead Beauty: For Edgar Allan Poe' was performed as 'Butoh Works III'. Kasai Akira touches on Sade's innocence in his book 'Twilight of the Gods', published in March 1979.

  

  Performer(s)

  Tenshi-Kan

  Director/Choreographer

  Akira Kasai

  Venue

  Daiichi Seimei Hall

  Year performed

  1979

• Nurse’s Song

  Performed with TRILOGY, this piece was choreographed to William Blake's "Nurse's Song", music composed by Allen Ginsberg. We became friends with him in Colorado in 1980 in Naropa Institute in Colorado where he and we were teaching separate courses. We also asked Bob Carroll to sing that song because Allen was not available and we also created an instantaneous band with friends and named it as DIRT BAND. Bob was a very well-known stand-up comedian who create political satire and usually performs a solo. We were really close friends. Shortly after the piece’s premiere at The Kitchen, Eiko & Koma left New York City for the Catskills. They never performed Nurse’s Song again.

  

  Performer(s)

  Eiko & Koma

  Director/Choreographer

  Eiko & Koma

  Venue

  The Kitchen (NY)

  Year performed

  1981

• Ondine

  Performed at the Hosei University Student Hall, which no longer exists. At the time, many events were organised under the management of students, and this production was also organised by the such a theatre group called the Black Spotlight (1974-2004). Ondine is a water nymph from Greek mythology, and has been adapted into various works by Giraudoux, Andersen, Shiki Theatre Company, and Terayama Shuji and others. The theme set up Yubiwa Hotel was "Ondine, the diseases of this world. Concomitant with love, it spreads. There is no cure", and the venue was transformed into a sea of fertile red soil.
  
  Main performance at the Yubiwa Hotel: 6 (Roku)

  

  Performer(s)

  YUBIWA Hotel

  Director/Choreographer

  Shirotama Hitsujiya

  Venue

  Hosei University Student Union Hall

  Year performed

  1996

• One Year (Tokyo Scene 88)

  TOKYO SCENE 88 featured four works between 8-11 December 1988, with the theme "pure collaboration between space and acoustic sound. Looking to the future of people and materials". This piece is a collaboration between Hasegawa Roku, also editor-in-chief of the magazine Dance Work, and Mizushima Kazue, before she invented 'stringraphy'.

  Performer(s)

  Studio 200

  Director/Choreographer

  Roku Hasegawa

  Venue

  Studio 200

  Year performed

  1988

• One’s Solo Blue

  "Whilst claiming ""each dance can only be performed once in a lifetime"", this work was rare in that it was performed numerous times. In the autumn of 1993, it was performed for the first time on stage with a 10 minute solo to music by Xenakis. The work is inspired by an image of the sky filled with morning dew, making use of lighting effects, while movements are inspired by puppetry.
  
  Since 1994, this work has toured along with the work of seven other dancers to multiple venues across Italy, Israel, and the United States."
  
  -Performed at the Daniel Ezralow and Friends 1994 Italy Tour

  

  Performer(s)

  Naoyuki Oguri

  Director/Choreographer

  Oguri

  Venue

  Milano

  Year performed

  1994

• 120 Days of Sodom

  "Following 'Butoh Works I: Nouvelle Tragique', performed in January of the same year, this piece is based on Marquis de Sade's '120 Days of Sodom', translated into Japanese by Shibusawa Tatsuhiko. In Kasai Akira's 'Twilight of the Gods', published on 10 March, he touches on Sade's innocence.
  In May 'Dead Beauty: For Edgar Allan Poe' was performed as 'Butoh Works III', and shortly afterwards, Kasai temporarily closed Tenshikan to study eurythmy in Germany."

  

  Performer(s)

  Tenshi-Kan

  Director/Choreographer

  Akira Kasai

  Venue

  Daiichi Seimei Hall

  Year performed

  1979

• OUT OFF (Rabenstein and The Collector)

  The second ’Beauties and Beasts' project collaboration between Ito Kim and Yoshioka Yumiko, performed in Tokyo and Avignon. The concept is parallel solo performances (Yoshioka's 'Rabenstein' and Ito's 'The Collector'), which performed side by side become a duet. Both solos examine boundaries, and look at themes of the outsider. The German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel praised the performance as 'a coexistence of extremes: the pleasure of playing in paradise alongside the fear of the exiled'.

  

  Performer(s)

  tatoeba

  Director/Choreographer

  Delta Ra'i

  Venue

  Tokyo FM Hall

  Year performed

  1994

• Oval Illusion

  Thoughts are always elliptical. They come near then far into the distance again. Is existence nothing but distance? There are many overlapping ellipses. Life and death, light and shadow, and my reflected self wanders through the labyrinth of the body. There, the attractions and repulsions of butoh and image violently collide. A flood of shadows overflow from the inside out. This is the start of an outside without an inside. When these incidents occur on stage, the large ellipse tilts.' - Waguri Yukio
  
  Waguri Yukio + Kozensha Butoh Performance
  

  Performer(s)

  Yukio Waguri + Kozensha

  Director/Choreographer

  Yukio Waguri

  Venue

  Aichi Prefectural Art Theater : Mini theater

  Year performed

  1996

• Papillon en Offrande

  Solo butoh performance by Iwana Masaki. First performed in 1992 in Paris, Pescara (Italy), Chania (Greece), St Petersburg, Bucharest and Tokyo. This video is of the performance held at the 3rd MAMU Festival of Butoh and Jazz in Göttingen, Germany, in 1994. It is based on the memory of a woman Iwana met as a child, who had lost her husband in the war and went mad, wandered the streets in an uchikake [formal silk kimono overcoat].

  

  Performer(s)

  Mamu Festival

  Director/Choreographer

  Masaki Iwana

  Venue

  Junges Theater Göttingen

  Year performed

  1994

• LA PARTIDA

  Chilean artist Víctor Jara was loved around the world for his songs about people's joys, sorrows and their right to live. With a strong will he resisted violence and sang of courage and hope, but was massacred in a coup d'état in 1973. The people's will to live and the universal soul. What was his message? In this work, the artists tackled this question with a live performance of Jara's famous song 'La Partida', together with a group of disabled members of the general public who crawled out of the community, expressing it with their bodies.

  

  Performer(s)

  Performance Troupe TAIHEN

  Director/Choreographer

  Manri Kim

  Venue

  Aster Plaza : Midium Hall

  Year performed

  1999

• Penitence

  Performed at Butoh Festival '85 in 1985. Words by Goi Teru in the program read as follows:
  
  Flesh dances to / cries of the dreaming taiko drums / the soul dances not / yet in the sunlight and shadows / the body sways in intervals / the shining heat of the present day / and the wrecked body / rises with awakened desires
  From the lost dream / the liberated body / becomes a lonely dance exposed to the wind
  
  The title 'Penitence' conveys in it the idea of returning the body to the soil, letting it rot, and digging it up again.

  

  Performer(s)

  Nippon Cultural Centre

  Director/Choreographer

  Teru Goi

  Venue

  Yurakucho Asahi Hall

  Year performed

  1985

• Pieta ’97

  I am dancing 'Pieta' again at DANCE EXPERIENCE, as I did last year, but the image of Pieta has in fact been with me for more than ten years now, and it is still deepening and transforming, still inviting me and motivating me to dance. "I know for sure that you will not look back. But I also know that when I approach death the one who will embrace me is you." (from the flyer)
  
  - Participated in the 3rd OSAKA DANCE EXPERIENCE
  - Yurabe Masami Butoh Performance

  

  Performer(s)

  TORII HALL

  Director/Choreographer

  Masami Yurabe

  Venue

  TORII HALL

  Year performed

  1997

• Pikka Don

  A performance of a solo work previously presented at The Kitchen (New York), designed for video cameras.

  

  Performer(s)

  Yoshiko Chuma

  Director/Choreographer

  Yoshiko Chum

  Year performed

  1982

• Playing with the Universe

  Second meeting of Kazuo Ohno and the theatre company Taihen, following their meeting in May 1994. Part 1 is a performance of 'Reimai' by Taihen (directed by Kim Manri), Part 2 is a butoh dance by Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno, and Part 3 is a collaboration between Kazuo Ohno, Yoshito Ohno and the Taihen company.

  

  Performer(s)

  Performance Troupe TAIHEN

  Director/Choreographer

  Kim Manri, Kazuo Ohno, Yoshito Ohno

  Venue

  AI Hall (Itami City Theater Hall)

  Year performed

  1996

• Point, Distant View and Cantata; Wave; Fiume

  'Wave' was the first of Katoh's performances, and has a simple structure, expanding and returning to single point with surges of energy.
  'Point, Distant View and Cantata' features black spots on white costumes, inspired by Calder's paintings, with chanting and bell players sitting on both sides of the stage. It is a minimalist dance, performed with Asian footwork.
  'Fiume' means 'river' in Italian. It is an eternal stream that flows from a single point to the sea, swallowing everything in its path. Movement, sound and voice merge to weave in the workings of life.
  
  - Presented at the KATOH MIYAKO DANCE SPACE 1982
  -'Wave' was premiered in 1980.
  -'Point, Distant View and Cantata' was awarded Grand Prize for the 1982 Japanese Creative Choreography Competition
  

  

  Performer(s)

  Miyako Katoh Dance Space

  Director/Choreographer

  Miyako Katoh

  Venue

  Sogetsu Hall

  Year performed

  1982

• RAPSODY

  News of Kisaragi Koharu's death reached Hitsujiya Shirotama in December 2000 while she was on a residency in New York. Subsequently, a request was made to revive Koharu's 'DOLL', and, 20 years after its first performance, 'DOLL' was revived by Yubiwa Hotel under the name 'RAPSODY'. The girls who disappeared in the sea in 1983, reappeared on a roof-top tennis court in 2003. Koharu's 'DOLL' dealt with the suicide of high school girls, and this work attempts to embrace Koharu's themes of the death of young women and raise it to new heights as 'feelings of life'.

  

  Performer(s)

  YUBIWA Hotel

  Director/Choreographer

  Shirotama Hitsujiya

  Venue

  Rosa Kaikan's roof tennis court

  Year performed

  2003

• REBIS – Flowers are fragrant in the incense burner

  Performed by Yamada Setsuko and Kamiryo Kunishi, on a set of log turrets and stones set in mud which resemble an ancient ritual site. Kamiryo's animalistic movements intersect Yamada's sacrificial butoh. This work by two former students of Tenshikan (run by Kasai Akira), is imbued with the connections made in Tenshikan between dancing and mysticism. After performing in Tokyo, this work was invited to the Festival d'été de Châteauvallon in France.
  
  - Yamada Setsuko and Kamiryo Kunishi Butoh Performance
  

  

  Performer(s)

  Setsuko Yamada

  Director/Choreographer

  Setsuko Yamada, Kunishi Kamiryo

  Venue

  Institut français de Tokyo

  Year performed

  1984

• Recorded prior to Europe (1971), and in Düsseldorf (1979)

  A digitised compilation of 8mm film reels of Ishii Mitsutaka, one which appears to have been taken in 1971 in Chigasaki, and another taken in 1979 at a gallery and on the streets on Düsseldorf. Ishii was the first butoh dancer to travel to Europe in 1971, performing in the UK, the Netherlands and Germany.

  Performer(s)

  Mitsutaka Ishii

  Director/Choreographer

  Mitsutaka Ishii

  Year performed

  1969

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