Vangeline, you have talked about evolving the Butoh art form for the next generation. What do you mean by that?

Vangeline: I have always cared or worried about the continuation of the art form. I have felt this way for a long time even before I met Ichi. What does that mean? For example, Ichi is Japanese and comes from Sankai Juku, so he has a sense of lineage. But for me, being a non-Japanese person and a woman working in America and teaching Butoh, I ask myself, “What kind of Butoh am I creating and how can I pass it on to the next generation?” I have always been invested in creating work that can outlast me. That includes training my company and training dancers. We are all getting older, so we have to think about what happens next, what is the future? There is a sense of responsibility for the art form and of wanting to be part of the evolution that Ichi is talking about. Everything evolves and changes.

What part of the tradition do we keep? What methods or ways of working are going to serve this evolution? Working in New York, the dance capital of America, my mission has been to bring Butoh beyond the stereotypes that Ichi described—the small-mindedness that people have kept Butoh in since the 1970s’ vision of the grotesque.

We, instead, insist on a level of excellence. There is a complacency, almost a laziness, in the Butoh world of people not pushing themselves enough to create work that is finished and polished. The excuse is, “Well, it’s Butoh, and we define the art form, so we don’t really have to finish it.” I completely disagree. If we engage in an art form, we have an obligation to bring to it a level of excellence. For example, I have a company, and we must compete for grants with companies like Mark Morris and New York City Ballet. When I get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, it means that the US government has determined that the work I am creating in the Butoh genre has a level of excellence that is comparable to other forms of dance. But if we are complacent, our form will not evolve and will die. So we need to define what excellence is and how we get there. We are part of a much greater ecosystem than just Butoh. We are part of the performing arts. So, we need to figure out how to push this art form forward. We need to be organized and meet certain standards.

I am hearing a frustration with fixed and limiting ideas that have defined the majority in the Butoh world. Can you identify what these are so we can know what you would like to expand beyond in your evolution of Butoh?

Vangeline: There are two issues. One has to do with the perception of Butoh held by the press and the public. It is a leftover from the past. For example, they have the image of Butoh as people painted in white doing the grotesque. In America, they frequently say that Butoh was born from the horrors of Hiroshima. This is a way of keeping Butoh chained to its history. It denies Butoh an evolution. That is a perception that we need to change, and we are working very hard to challenge it. We want more than just this image from the past.

And then there are the practitioners in Japan, or as Ichi pointed out, people that have an attachment to and identify with Butoh as an artform that is counterculture. That confines Butoh to being a political statement. But a dance form is not a political statement. It may make a political statement, but this is not enough to define the art form.

If I stand on the shoulders of those who came before me, for instance my teachers who are Japanese, that means if I say that I am doing Butoh, then I have a responsibility to that art form and its future. I cannot just pick and choose one aspect that suits me. It is an exploitation of Butoh to say that it is only counterculture and that I just want to express myself. No, Butoh is a body of techniques and methods. I have felt frustrated by this collection of judgements: Butoh is not this, Butoh is not that, you are too tall, you are not Japanese, it’s not provocative enough, it’s not grotesque enough. Where does this come from? We have a choice about how we want to engage today. As practitioners in the twenty-first century, we have an obligation to direct this evolution.

Ichi: I want to try to expand the area in which I am active. The idea is to share with a lot of people, including different cultures—everybody around the world. I want to tour places where Sankai Juku couldn’t go—like Africa and some parts of the Middle East. I want everybody to share in the activity of dance. I have had recent engagements cancelled because of war. One of my future goals is to work with people in conflict zones—to create work with the local people there. I can be a bridge. So I am trying to connect with different cultures and nations and let people with differences dance together. I want to be a bridge.