Kazuo Ohno

Kazuo Ohno

1906-10-27
103 (2010-06-01)
Hakodate, Hokkaido, Japan

Butoh dancer. Christian. After experiencing WW2, Ohno devoted his life to dance. He introduced the unique dance style “Butoh” to the world. (Courtesy of NPO Dance Archive Network)

Hakodate, Hokkaido, Japan

Butoh dancer. Christian. After experiencing WW2, Ohno devoted his life to dance. He introduced the unique dance style “Butoh” to the world. (Courtesy of NPO Dance Archive Network)

Most Known for...

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Dress Rehearsal 1980 (6.3)

An exhilarating, essayistic documentary about the 1980 festival of experimental theatre in the French city of Nancy. Werner Schroeter's favourite of his own films.
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Mr O's Book of the Dead 1973 (6.5)

Mr O’s Book of the Dead is the last of a trilogy of experimental films about Kazuo Ohno, co-founder of the contemporary Japanese style of dance known as butoh, made with director Chiaki Nagano during a period in which he had retired from public performance, and just before he began touring the world as a solo dancer with his celebrated work Admiring La Argentina. In the film, Ohno leads a troupe of strangely dressed, made-up and gesticulating dancers through a succession of landscapes alternately lush, desolate and surreal.
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Dance of Darkness 1989 (9)

The dark sensibilities and cultural resonances of Butoh, the radical Japanese dance movement, are explored in this multilayered work. Profoundly rooted in both traditional and contemporary Japanese culture, Butoh arose in a spirit of revolt in the early 1960s. Characterized by frank sexuality and bodily distortions, Butoh transforms traditional dance movements into new forms, stripping away the taboos of contemporary Japanese culture to reveal a secret world of darkness and irrationality.