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Ushio Amagatsu, an acclaimed dancer and choreographer who brought worldwide visibility to Butoh, a hauntingly minimalist Japanese form of dance theater that arose in the wake of wartime devastation, died on March 25 in Odawara, Japan. He was 74.<\/p>\n
The cause of his death, in a hospital, was heart failure, said Semimaru, a founding member of Mr. Amagatsu’s celebrated contemporary dance company, Sankai Juku.<\/p>\n
Butoh is an Anglicized version of \u201cbuto,\u201d derived from \u201cankoku buto,\u201d which translates to \u201cdance of darkness.\u201d It draws inspiration from surrealist European art movements like Dadaism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Butoh was pioneered by Kazuo Ohno<\/a> and Tatsumi Hijikata<\/a> <\/em>in the late 1950s and early \u201960s, when Japan was still rebuilding from the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the bombings of dozens of other cities during World War II. It was part of a countercultural movement that questioned existing values as well as those flooding in from the West, Semimaru said in an email, and it was an attempt to restore Japanese physicality in an unfamiliar new era.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Pointedly anti-traditionalist, Butoh rejects both Western and traditional Japanese dance aesthetics. It is performed by dancers in ghostly white body powder, symbolically erasing the personalities of the individual dancers to focus on humanity as a whole. They contort their bodies and facial expressions as they explore the most primal recesses of the human experience \u2014 the sexual, the grotesque, birth, evolution.<\/p>\n Mr. Amagatsu founded Sankai Juku in 1975 and became one of Butoh\u2019s leading figures. Starting in 1980, the company helped popularize Butoh internationally; it formed a continuing production partnership with the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre de la Ville in Paris in 1982 and performed in hundreds of cities in 48 countries.<\/p>\n \u201cButoh, the DNA of Japanese culture, entered European culture through Amagatsu and Sankai Juku,\u201d Akaji Maro, a founder of Mr. Amagatsu\u2019s first company, Dairakudakan, wrote in a recent appreciation in the Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun, \u201cand Amagatsu himself became the global standard for Butoh.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For nearly a half-century, Sankai Juku won numerous honors around the world. In 2002, it won the Laurence Olivier Award, Britain\u2019s highest stage honor, for best new dance production, for \u201cHibiki (Resonance From Far Away).\u201d<\/p>\n The company\u2019s goal was never to comfort audiences with the familiar.<\/p>\n \u201cA Sankai Juku performance is infused with often spectacular moments, meticulously choreographed and carefully manipulated, that scramble the emotions<\/a>,\u201d Terry Trucco wrote in a 1984 profile of the company in The New York Times. \u201cHeads shaved and bodies powdered with rice flour, the company\u2019s five men look unformed, not quite human. They writhe, roll back their eyes and grin demoniacally.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHibiki\u201d includes a moment in which four chalk-covered men surround a red dish of water, an allusion to blood, which is \u201cthe elixir of life\u201d but also \u201ca symbol of destruction,\u201d the critic Anna Kisselgoff of The New York Times wrote<\/a> in reviewing a 2002 performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.<\/p>\n \u201cThe signature theme of all Butoh,\u201d she added, is \u201cdestruction and creation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n One of Mr. Amagatsu\u2019s signature works, \u201cKinkan Shonen (The Kumquat Seed),<\/a>\u201d was inspired by his childhood, which was spent by the sea. Performing before a wall festooned with hundreds of tuna tails, Mr. Amagatsu created movements that seemed to reduce himself to the figure of a boy.<\/p>\n Another, \u201cJomon Sho\u201d<\/a> (Homage to Prehistory),\u201d was inspired by cave paintings. It begins with dancers suspended in midair, looking like little more than clumps, before being lowered to the stage and unfolding from a fetal position.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201c\u2018Jomon Sho\u2019 may start with an image of the earth\u2019s creation<\/a>, of matter forming,\u201d Ms. Kisselgoff wrote in reviewing the work\u2019s New York premiere in 1984. Before long, however, it is clear that some unnamed calamity has struck, with Mr. Amagatsu appearing \u201cas a helpless mutant, so foreshortened from our perspective that he appears to be a Thalidomide casualty.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe image of the Bomb,\u201d she added, \u201cis never too far away.\u201d<\/p>\n As Mr. Amagatsu told Ms. Trucco. \u201cProjecting unerasable impressions is our business.\u201d<\/p>\n At a more basic level, he often said, his form of Butoh was a \u201cdialogue with gravity.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDance is composed of tension and relaxation of gravity, just like the principle of life and its process,\u201d he once said in an interview with Vogue Hommes. \u201cAn unborn baby who is floating inside mother\u2019s womb faces to the tension of the gravity as soon as s\/he is born.\u201d<\/p>\n The resulting dance was often very, very slow. In a 2020 video interview<\/a>, another Butoh dancer, Gadu Doushin, explained, \u201cIt\u2019s almost like the people watching just go into hypnosis \u2014 or fall asleep, whatever comes first.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Masakazu Ueshima was born on Dec. 31, 1949, in Yokosuka, a coastal city about 40 miles south of central Tokyo. (He later adopted his stage name at the suggestion of Mr. Maro.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After graduating from high school, he began training in ballet and modern dance and eventually studied acting before he developed an interest in Butoh. He helped found Dairakudakan in 1972; three years later, he started Sankai Juku. The name translates to \u201cstudio of mountain and sea,\u201d a reflection of his philosophy that human beings can learn from nature.<\/p>\n Mr. Amagatsu\u2019s survivors include his daughter, Lea Ueshima, as well as a brother, a sister and two grandsons. His marriage to Lynne Bertin ended in divorce.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Amagatsu worked extensively outside Sankai Juku as well. In 1988, for example, he created \u201cFushi (Homage to the Perspective to the Past ),\u201d with music by Philip Glass, at the Jacob\u2019s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Mass.<\/p>\n He continued to perform until undergoing surgery for hypopharyngeal cancer in 2017. Even then, he continued to choreograph for his company, creating two new works, \u201cArc\u201d (2019) and \u201cTotem\u201d (2023). \u201cKosa,\u201d a collection of some of his best-known choreography, ran for two weeks<\/a> at the Joyce Theater in New York last fall.<\/p>\n Throughout, Mr. Amagatsu believed that his choreography \u201cdepends on whether or not you can keep that \u2018thread of consciousness\u2019<\/a> unbroken,\u201d he said in a 2009 interview with Performing Arts Network Japan. \u201cIf that thread is broken, it all becomes nothing more than exercise.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n