22 Mar Space Dance

Within the scope of Space Dance Tokyo / Izmir 2018-2020 project, PI Art Butoh, who curated II. SPACE DANCE IZMIR Butoh days on 9-22 March; Japanese avant-garde Butoh performance artist and Space Dance project director Tetsuro Fukuhara will perform Butoh Space Dance at K2 Contemporary Art Center.

22 March Friday, K2 Contemporary Art Centre

19:00 Exhibition opening

20:00 Butoh Space Dance show

Tetsuro Fukuhara and students will present a butoh show with instrumental avant-garde music that will take you on a metaphysical journey into the depths of your mind.

‘Mysterious Flower’ fits perfectly with the idea that life and death belong to the cosmic cycle. The beauty of this natural order is manifested in its impermanence and repeatability.

Mask and make-up can erase a person’s gender, race or age characteristics. In this way, Tetsuro Fukuhara creates a universal spectacle that does not belong to one culture or one person. It takes place anywhere in the world, regardless of person, date, time and cultural specificity.

In this dance, the body is not a means of expressing a story, the body is the story itself. Each sequence of steps connects with the past and reveals primary instincts. The body balances the surrounding Qi energy with slow and fast movements. In this dance we witness the slow movements of classical butoh and the fast movements of improvised butoh.

WHAT IS BUTOH?

Butoh means dance in Japanese. ‘Bu’ means going into a trance by spinning in its own centre, “Toh” means jumping from the ground and liberation of the person with dance.

It is an avant-garde theatrical dance performance art that emerged in Japan in the late 1950s. Its founders Hijikata Tatsumi and Kazuo Ohno created this art movement with ‘Ankoku Butoh’ and Akira Kasai introduced Post Butoh / Improvised Butoh to the world of Butoh.

BUTOH IS A STEP FROM THE INSIDE, EVERYONE CAN DO THEIR OWN BUTOH WHEN THEY CAN STAY IN THEIR OWN BODY!

Tetsuro Fukuhara

SPACE DANCE / POST BUTOH

The essence of Butoh Space Dance is ‘How can the beyond human memory be recovered?’ and ‘How can nonverbal knowledge be expressed to design a new body for the beyond human?’. According to Tetsuro, in Space Dance, by attempting to recover transhuman memory through our dance, we represent and accumulate the nonverbal knowledge we gain from this experience. Our body ‘Bone Space/Space carries all the memories of both the universe and human evolution. When we dance improvisationally, we can touch many forgotten memories, sometimes with the movement of internal organs, sometimes with a sound coming from the bone, sometimes with the stimulation of a nerve. At that moment we feel a new emotion in our brain and under its influence we discover unexpected movements. These are our forgotten memories. Memories of the universe….

TETSURO FUKUHARA

Butoh master Tetsuro Fukuhara is a choreographer, writer, dancer, photographer and founder and director of Tokyo Space Dance. He has worked with Kazuo Ohno and Hijikata Tatsumi, and appeared in Hijikata’s performance of ‘The Story of the Seven Plants’ in 1983. A second generation Butoh player, Fukuhara learnt improvised Butoh from Akira Kasai. Tetsuro Fukuhara created Butoh Space Dance after meeting Shusaku Arakawa and the theory of ‘Affordance’, which was a turning point for him in 1994, with performances in New York in 2001 and at Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul with the support of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Fukuhara, who started working with the Japanese Space Research Agency (JAXA) in Tokyo between 2004-2006, won Unesco’s international digital arts award in 2006 with his work ‘Space Dance in the Robotic Universe’. In 2008, his first book, ‘Space Dance’ was published; since 2009, the Butoh master, who has realised the ‘Space Dance / Space Dance in the Tube’ project in many regions of Europe, Africa, Middle East, Asia, Central-North and South America, continues to work in Turkey with the Turkish Space Dance team.