As part of the Meltdown series at the Southbank Centre curated by Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons), this was an evening dedicated to butoh legend Kazuo Ohno, who died, at the age of 103, in 2010. Along with Tatsumi Hijikata, Ohno is credited with developing the Japanese dance form of butoh. In A Celebration of Yoshito and Kazuo Ohno, a dance and music event, Antony shares the stage with Ohno’s son, Yoshito.
The evening opened with an appearance from performance artist Johanna Constantine as well as film and tape loops by William Basinski. (Johanna Constantine is a longstanding friend and Antony collaborator, having moved from California to New York with him in 1990. They established the Blacklips Performance Cult in downtown New York, and then were resident at the Pyramid Club between 1992 and 1995, where they performed theatrical extravaganzas that always climaxed in an Antony song. William Basinski is another NYC artist from that period.) The evening also screened excerpts from Chiakji Nagano’s 1973 film, Mr O’s Book of the Dead.
The performance begins with a black and white film of sky, with moving clouds, an intense full moon, and moody music. A white robed apparition appears at the front of the stage, veiled in netting, like a silvery carnival bride, a spectre, reminiscent of Lindsay Kemp circa 1978. After a few minutes in front of the film screen, the spectre waftily stalks off and returns in black shrouding/netting with a shiny black helmet, with rather automated movement, wobbling on high heels, and a lot of slow wafting up and down of arms. The figure wanders off again, the night sky video projection continues (I find the shakiness of the camera work annoying). The soundscape music changes, and the paint splattered figure of Johanna Constantine wafts back on, this time shroudless, to reveal red and black dripping body paint and a silver metal bikini, painted like a Mexican day of the dead skeleton. She may look great in photos or in close-up performance, yet the wandering on and off and costume changes felt very metered, and her presence didn’t carry that far past the first couple of rows.
The film changes to a close-up of skin and a hand placed on bark, fading then to clawing fingers on skin covered in clumpy earth. On the screen words form: ‘spirit manifests itself in every phenomena in the universe’, then ‘a night train through the stars is passing through your inner life’. These words, which are Kazou Ohno quotes, form and dissolve against still photographs of him. Then the screen raises to reveal a grand piano at which sits Antony, and the show begins. Yoshito Ohno enters dressed in white, holding aloft one red rose. The evening shifts into something extraordinary; Anthony’s voice and Ohno’s presence together are beautiful and melancholic, graceful and resonant. Between sections there is an enthusiastic and cheering audience. The evening features songs from Antony’s album The Crying Light, and when Anthony invites the audience to click their fingers in comes Ohno in white trousers, bare-chested and sporting a turquoise horse’s head, looking odd and sweet and funny, a bit like a Dr Seuss character.
In another section Yoshito Ohno comes on stage embracing a five foot long mirror and passes it behind Antony so that the audience can see the keyboards and the back of Antony’s head, and we see ourselves and the relfections of lights.
All in all there are five sections where Ohno enters mid song. It is both a concert and a dance performance, which presents a curious balance as these are songs with lyrics, and Ohno is kind of animating the stage. The songs are very much at the forefront. For example, when Antony sings the song ‘Another World’, which has the lyrics ‘gonna miss the birds, singing all their songs… gonna miss the wind, been kissing me so long’, Ohno, wearing a beautiful white feather hat, comes on holding a child’s handheld windmill, and runs silently in the space before disappearing off.
Toward the end there is video documentation of a company piece performed in a pig sty, dancers in wigs and dresses, camera zooming in and out, followed by a strange processional piece including a character wearing false Groucho-style nose and glasses and another character carrying a mirror. I am unsure how genuine these films were, and if perhaps they were recreations? A comment afterwards from someone who knows a lot about butoh indicated that the only genuine piece of footage was of Kazou Ohno lying on the pig sty floor suckling at a sow. Yet I took this footage to be the rarely seen 1973 film, Mr O’s Book of the Dead.
After this screening, the screen pulls across and Anthony sings ‘Wise Men Say Only Fools Rush In’. Ohno comes on to this final piece wearing a black gentleman’s suit, and seated and dancing in his hand is a small black-suited puppet of a man.
I felt a touch bothered by Johanna Constantine’s lengthy support appearance at the beginning and the sustained quality on such a large screen of some of the video images and footage. Yet this sound, song, visual, film, dance and concert event tribute to Kazuo Ohno left me with the feeling I had witnessed something extraordinary and tender – in Antony’s voice or the potent moments of his eye contact with and toward Ohno, or just in the rare, rare opportunity to witness Yoshito Ohno dance.