Recent Articles
The first time that I saw kabuki live was at the venerable Kabuki-Za in Tokyo. I was quite excited and eager to absorb everything that I could, though I had no hopes of understanding the highly stylized singing. I looked around and noticed that I was among the youngest attendees and saw no other Caucasian faces in the audience:...
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Noh Country for Old Men
Noh may have been mostly for entertainment from the beginning, but it had a pervasive morality that came with the ritual dance and song and religious myth from which it borrowed. Noh plays often have no story let alone a specific lesson, but there is always a prayer. The prayer itself is the heart of...
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The Dance of the Living Dead
Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn.
Body language is our first language, our...
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The Transgressions of Butoh
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Before one can hope to reconcile opposing forces, one must first determine what one side considers transgressive about the other, and there is much beside butoh’s pace that...
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Butoh, the Japanese “Dance of Darkness,” has been described as a lot of things: bizarre, gothic, perverse, sexy, wild, sensational. No such descriptions are adequate, and for many earnest butoh performers they are simply repugnant. Some purists claim that butoh cannot be explained or described at all (a position not at...
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Seattle is a young, mid-sized city, caught between rugged provincialism and high-tech pioneering. It is above all a pioneer town (not a mecca of media or publishing or politics or lifestyle), and it is not in spite of this, but because of this that it has long had an amazing arts community, which few would expect to find if they...
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