Career
After the war, he began work on his dance again, and presented his first solo works in 1949 in Tokyo. In the 1950s, he met Tatsumi Hijikata, who inspired him to begin cultivating Butoh, a new form of dance evolving in the turmoil of Japan's drab postwar landscape. Hijikata, who rejected the Western dance forms popular at the time, developed with Ohno and a collective group the vocabulary of movements and ideas that later, in 1961, he named the Ankoku Butoh-ha movement.
During the 1960s, Ohno sought his own style, while collaborating with Tatusmi Hijikata. In 1977, he premiered his solo La Argentina Sho, directed by Hijikata and dedicated to the famed Spanish dancer Antonia Mercé (known as "La Argentina," whom he had seen perform in 1926.) He received Japan's prestigious Dance Critics' Circle Award for the performance and subsequently toured the piece, impacting the international dance world from the 14th International Festival at Nancy, Meurthe-et-Moselle, in 1980, to his American debut in 1981 at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York City. Other cities on the tour included Strasbourg, London, Stuttgart, Paris and Stockholm.
With Hijikata directing, Ohno created two more major works, My Mother and Dead Sea, performed with his son, Yoshito Ohno. Other works include Water Lilies, Ka Chō Fū Getsu' and The Road in Heaven, The Road in Earth. He was awarded a cultural award from Kanagawa Prefecture in 1993, a cultural award from Yokohama city in 1998, and the Michelangelo Antonioni Award for the Arts in 1999.
Read more about this topic: Kazuo Ohno
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“A black boxer’s career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)