Fifteen years ago when he turned 40 and realized that his body was aging, the acclaimed Japanese choreographer Ushio Amagatsu completely changed his training. He described part of his exercise regimen in a rare telephone interview with The Gazette from Tokyo last month.
"I swim very, very slowly in a place where there are no other people.
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The description could serve as a telling metaphor for the works that Amagatsu has created over the past 30 years for his company, Sankai Juku (the name translates into "Workplace between mountain and sea"). After an absence of 16 years, the company returns to Montreal this week with a work from 2000 called Kagemi (Beyond the Mirror).
Kagemi has much that is slow moving and its seven male dancers in white body makeup and white robes have an air about them of isolated Buddhist monks.
In its insistence on extremes, the work recalls the Japanese modern dance form called butoh. Amagatsu studied butoh early on in his career, but then went on to develop his own style, a profound fusion of East and West.
In a world where religious and ethnic differences are motives for violence, artists who have the ability to integrate opposing cultures without sacrificing the integrity of either deserve our interest.
"You can find the universal in cultural differences," Amagatsu said through an interpreter. "This is what I've learned very slowly since 1980 (the year his company began touring abroad, eventually covering 41 countries). When I look at things that are in common, I come to the essential matter.
The development of the newborn child. The child who is ready to walk. When we're grown up, we have to sleep each day.
It's common in all cultures."
Amagatsu was a member of the first Japanese generation to grow up under Western influence. Contact was direct and inescapable in his hometown of Yokosuka, a port city near Tokyo where the U.
S. navy established a post-war base. Some people speculate that anger and resentment over the war-time near-destruction of Japan and its subsequent U.
S. occupation were the underlying sentiments that led to the creation of butoh and its extreme forms. But destruction in butoh leads to images of creation, a cycle seen in Kagemi and other of Amagatsu's works.
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