Peter Kowald on Kazuo Ohno and butoh

Excerpt from Peter Kowald interview

(https://www.academia.edu/4914378/Peter_Kowald)
Heffley: This subject of how you best fill up the time, how you know when to just
keep playing with the process and when it's time for a decision?…Again, I'm
thinking about this biological clock thing we were talking about. I was thinking
about Schönberg, who developed his grand system, and then along comes Webern,
who made these little distillations of it, like you're talking about. Is this process of
making little short pieces, crafted in the studio, a development in you of the
biological clock as the source of form? of decision making? Do you become more
aware of your timing somehow?"
Kowald: "It has to do with a point of view. I guess Chinese or Asian philosophy
has talked about that much more, in a way, than European science. To look at
things from different sides. It's interesting that Japanese have a word for 'know,'
but they never use it. Roland Barthes' book The Empire of Science, is an interesting
book for this. This is a wonderful book about Japan, which he describes as being
not really about a real place in the world, but if it was it would be about Japan.
Which is a very Japanese way to describe something. That is to say that I feel you
can look at things from a lot of different angles, and I try to do that always. So
everything is many things at the same time…
Heffley: … The quintessentially European Globe Unity's name began to be
lived up to after the fact of the band itself, through individual members'
collaborations with Japanese butoh and other dancers, poets, and artists from
around the world.1
1
. The butoh dancers are particularly interesting artistic allies. Their movement emerged, like
FMP's, as a gesture against American cultural and military hegemony; it was characterized by a
rejection of Western aesthetic standards, and a commitment of the body to ancient Japanese
archetypes, dance thick with images of animality, death and horror, raw sex—the 'primitive'
 "We were tired of it, money was always a problem, so we decided to stop it and
try something else," he relates. "We had another festival from 1983 every two
years—1985, then '87—called 'Cries Across the Border' (Grenzüberschreitungen).
That included not just music but also artists and theater people, with a special
emphasis on bringing people from other cultures. [Butoh pioneers] Kazuo Ohno
was there, Min Tanaka, whoever…
…"When I met Tanaka a few years ago, he said, 'Maybe I react to this music,
but maybe it will be five minutes later," laughs Kowald. "That was another way to
say it; I love it.2 That's what I tried to teach my youth ensemble during the Ort
year: if you want to, react immediately, but if not, that's okay too. See what
happens. Usually the more interesting music would result from people not overtly
interacting. Which goes to another typical stereotype of spontaneous
improvisation, that it's so unrelentingly reactive between players, which is bullshit.

personalized, then worked [also like the free jazz movement] to more refined statements from
there. See the video documentary Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis (Michael Blackwood
Productions, Inc. 1990) for an excellent overview of the movement and its principals, including
those Kowald mentions here.
2
. Some of the words of the butoh masters Kowald worked with are worth citing in passing,
for their strong resonance with this study's view of its German music. Akaji Maro: "I like to be
wild and reckless. Intuition, not intellect, is what guides me. I have an inner dialogue—that's
what motivates me…Butoh is timeless, It is always about to be born. If it actually came into
being it would cease to exist. Butoh is eternally unborn…Temptation is the power of the simple
daily actions of humanity, which have been shed in the course of human evolution. It is the
gestures, the signs that have undergone friction, abortion, miscarriage, that I gather together and
rearrange, gestures that are not intentional or deliberate that is the source of 'temptenshki' and
that is how I construct my drama…It is not the bodies that dance, but what emerges in the space
above them. A kind of monster…I am always paying homage to the body. The body is supported
by something you can discover with language. You can't chase it with words." Min Tanaka:
"There are those who believe that we are physically moved by unseen forces that inhabit the
flesh. In Japanese, ma refers to the space between, an interval, spacial or temporal. People
wonder, what is this ¨ma¨ trying to ask? what is it trying to do? it is here in this space between
that spirits and gods dwell. To capture those spirits, those gods inside our body, that is what
butoh is all about." Kazuo Ohno: "You should not think of the past as being dead and gone,
with no connection to the living. If you took that out of my dance, there would be nothing
left. It is my history."
It's one of the possibilities, but one can train oneself not to react always, to get
beyond that limitation."
"It's another aspect with interesting social implications too," I reflect, then
consider it too as a deliverance from what psychologists call codependency…
"Yes, it is; that's what I mean when I talk about the global village, too, that it's a
social lesson."…
… My eye had caught a book on a table in his studio earlier that his last words
recall to mind: "What exactly happened with this?" It is a program about a gig he
did with Japanese butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno.
"The trio with Leo Smith and Baby Sommer played in Japan in 1980, for a
week in Tokyo, then did a little tour, including Yokohama," he says. "During the
concert there, in the intermission, a 73-year-old man came up and said, 'I'm a
dancer, and I've never heard this kind of music before, but before I die, I want to
dance with it.' So we said, 'Second set.' And when he undressed himself, he had
some kind of white woolen underwear, and he painted his face white, and it was
Kazuo Ohno.
"Since then, we have been in contact. I did a little solo concert in Tokyo, in one
of those cultural cafés; when I got there, an hour before the gig, he was standing
before the door. He had gotten on the train from Yokohama and said, 'You know
why I'm coming—second set!'" Kowald laughs. "He likes to dance with this music,
and he likes the way I play. Then he came to Wuppertal because we invited him,
together with Pina Bausch. He had a big performance here, and then he asked me
to play fifteen minutes in his piece, so he changed his piece for that night.
"We've had several other collaborations, both here and in Japan, whenever we
can. He's the first generation of butoh dancers. Also I played with Min Tanaka, in a
trio with Butch Morris; he is the second generation, my age, 53 or 54. Then there's
a couple of younger butoh dancers I sometimes play with—but Kazuo Ohno is
one of the two people who invented butoh; the other one died."
So—the dance (of the slowest, deepest, most primal and often violent sort)
came into Kowald's system from the East. And, I learn next, the painting that most
resonated with his music was a depiction of a kind of bodily dance.