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:
“From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating “Low Average Ability,” reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“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)
“I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)