Man, Woman, Butoh with Ichi & Vangeline

On a mid-summer evening, along the banks of the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan, a colorful band of performers costumed in orange and blue merged with the sunset and the water. Akihito Ichihara, principal dancer with the Butoh dance company Sankai Juku and founder of Elf, performed with a group of students who had just completed a workshop with him. The performance event and workshop were presented by Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute. Among the performers was Vangeline, a New York City-based veteran teacher, dancer, and choreographer specializing in Japanese Butoh. She is the artistic director of the Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute, a dance company dedicated to advancing Butoh in the 21st century, with a particular emphasis on education, social justice, and scientific research.

Ichihara and Vangeline's “Man Woman.” Photograph by Michael Blase

Fjord Review: Ichi, what inspired you to form your own dance company, Elf, in 2022?

Ichi: The motivation was to perform outside of Japan without borders or boundaries. Elf is the means for accomplishing this.

What does the name signify?

Ichi: I didn’t want to call it the Ichihara Dance Company. So I visited a psychic and described my intentions for the company. I explained that I wanted to tour and work without borders and boundaries and with everyone in the world. Also, I am working with a younger generation of dancers—20-year-olds. The psychic responded that the name Elf would convey a helpful, magical quality.

How does the dance work differ from what you do with Sankai Juku?

Ichi: The basic physical method is almost the same. My background is basically Sankai Juku, but when I was young, I was in a lot of other Butoh groups, and I trained with many people from the older generation. Outside of Sankai Juku, there are very few who actually have an organized system or physical method like ballet or Martha Graham technique.

Next year, Sankai Juku will celebrate its 50-year anniversary. In these 50 years, we have created many stage works. We are very precise about keeping the work authentically. There is no rearrangement. The Sankai Juku method makes this possible.

Are they creating new work?

Ichi: Oh yes. To put things in perspective, it’s helpful to know the background of Butoh. It has a history as an expression against something—against society, history, traditional art, and even beauty. The style was very underground and grotesque. Today, there are still many people who insist on keeping it this way. For this, they do not need a clear, critical method. Sankai Juku, in contrast, turned its focus toward the body and a physical method for choreographing dance.

Sankai Juku was founded in 1975. Around 1980, they went to France and began to tour. They left the underground, grotesque Butoh scene in Japan and started to create something different—a high level performing art that could tour the world. At the same time, they were also being exposed to contemporary and western dance styles. In fact, Sankai Juku’s founder Ushio Amagatsu had skills in western dance styles, such as Graham technique. So there was quite a difference between what he was doing and the rest of the Butoh world. Amagatsu focused on choreographing using his own Butoh method. At the beginning, Sankai Juku was comprised of four or five male dancers and they focused on their own way. They created a physical method that we now continue.

I joined in 1997 and have been in Sankai Juku now for 27 years. Today I am a dance master. I also train the younger dancers. My teaching method is based on Sankai Juku’s method.

What are the hallmarks of this method?

Ichi: Relax, release, be natural, and work with gravity. Our Butoh is a dialogue with gravity. The basic element is the naturalness of the body. We try to find or observe the universality of the human body—not just the Japanese body. You see, many Butoh performers insist that Butoh is about the Japanese body. We don’t see it that way. We focus on the universality of the human body.

Where would you like to take Butoh training now?

Ichi: I think Butoh is growing to as high a level as ballet or modern dance. But of course, we need training. A lot of Butoh is very subjective and I think all Butoh dancers should be more objective. I personally try to work with ballet and modern dancers to learn other qualities. I don’t see any future in just doing one kind of dance. I am also working with young people who have no experience with Butoh. I want to learn from them. I can work with anyone who wants to dance Butoh.

So your goal is to develop higher quality Butoh dancers?

Ichi: Yes, and I want to expand the possibility of Butoh. I want to make a new future—maybe not even Butoh—simply dance! In fact, I had an invitation from a contemporary dance company outside of Japan to create a new work for them. It’s a good opportunity to expand the possibility of the dance.

Ichihara and Vangeline in “Man Woman,” a Butoh duet. Photograph by Michael Blase

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.

Ichihara and Vangeline in “Man Woman.” Photograph by Michael Blase

Let’s talk about your current project “Man Woman.” How did this collaboration start?

Vangeline: Ichi was on tour with Sankai Juku at the Joyce last October. We have known each other since meeting in Japan at the Sankai Juku summer workshop in 2016.

Ichi: When I was on tour last October, I asked Vangeline if she would collaborate with me.

Vangeline: I said, “Yes.” In two days we decided what we wanted to do. Two months later, he came back to New York for the month of January, and we started to work, creating 22 minutes of choreography. “Man Woman” takes inspiration from a famous book of photos by the Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe. I had just seen the book. In the history of Butoh, Eikoh Hosoe was very important. He photographed Tatsumi Hijikata [one of the founders of Butoh] and he brought Butoh to the public eye. That book, Man and Woman, contained photos of Hijikata and his wife Akiko Motofuji. The poses captured in the photos indicated gender roles that were very 1960s; Hijikata was more dominant. So when Ichi asked me to collaborate, I thought this would be a perfect point of departure. We both saw the book as a duet between a man and a woman, but with gender roles that we could redefine. It is also symbolic of our wanting to redefine what Butoh can be in the twenty-first century.

Are there many man-woman duets in Butoh?

Vangeline: No, it’s not typical. We haven’t seen a duet for a man and a woman for a very long time. Historically, there are only two companies I can think of─Eiko and Koma in America and there was the duo of Ko Murubushi and Carlotta Ikeda in the late ’70s and early ’80s in France.

Since Sankai Juku is an all-male troupe and Vangeline, you have an all-female company, did either one of you have experience working with the opposite gender?

Ichi: Many many years ago.

Vangeline: I too did a duet with my teacher, but not a sixty-minute choreographed work. It was mostly improvisation.

What is it like for you to explore this territory and content?

Vangeline: It’s a moment! We definitely feel that it’s a historical moment. It has been very easy to work together─almost effortless. When I first approached Ichi with the idea for the piece and I communicated that I felt, as a woman, it had been hard to establish myself in the Butoh world. He listened and said that he understood what I was saying. We knew that we needed to work in a specific way. The work itself has been seamless—for some mysterious reason. In terms of creation, there is a lot of back-and-forth. Sometimes Ichi choreographs a section, sometimes I do, and sometimes we improvise and then choreograph together. The exchange of ideas flows very easily—at least for me. It is a nice surprise, because you never know. Collaborations can be difficult.

Ichi: Yes, they can be difficult. But this is very easy.

Did the collaboration start with discussion first or just moving in the studio?

Ichi: We talked a lot! We shared a lot of images and ideas.

Vangeline: We shared photos from the book. We shared ideas I had and ideas that Ichi had. We responded to each other’s ideas. And of course, we film ourselves, we watch, and then we discuss. This has been our process from the beginning. And usually, we agree a lot. We completely agree on almost everything.

Ichihara and Vangeline in “Man Woman” with costumes by Machine Dazzle. Photograph by Michael Blase

Can you talk about how costumes inspire you creatively?

Ichi: This is quite different than normal Butoh. This is New York style! I have been a fan of Machine Dazzle after seeing some photos of his designs on the Internet. During Sankai Juku’s last performance in New York City [October 2023], we were introduced to each other and I thought to myself, “I know you!”

Vangeline: That’s funny. I have known Machine Dazzle for almost thirty years. I used to go-go dance with him. We grew up together doing club work. So we are really good friends. I was texting with Ichi on Instagram, and I asked him, “What do you think of Machine Dazzle?” Ichi responded with all these emojis of fire, hearts, and explosions. He was so excited about the idea. That was great because I knew that Machine was quite famous now making costumes for big productions, but I also knew that I could knock on the door and ask if he would design something for us. Machine Dazzle, knowing Sankai Juku, Ichi, and me, agreed to do it.

It was an amazing gift. We knew the costumes would not only bring Ichi and me together, but they would also be something very dynamic, new, and propelling. Adding Machine to the mix was like adding spices, or fireworks, to the dish. But it was also challenging because when we got the costumes, they made such a strong statement in terms of dramaturgy. When you look at these costumes, they tell a story.

We gave Machine carte blanche to create the costumes and we would respond to them. And we started working with them about two weeks ago. We had to ask ourselves, “What are we going to do? What is the story? How do we move in these? What are the possibilities and the constraints of the costumes?” It has challenged us in a good way.

Ichi, I know that you are very involved in making your own costumes. Can you share how that all started?

Ichi: I come from an agricultural village in the countryside and my family are farmers. So I’m interested in materials and fabrics that look natural or wild. I selected a rough fabric [burlap] and dyed it with color. On my tours, I often have a lot of participants, anywhere from 20 to 50. I prepare a lot of fabric to costume them. For this year’s tour—Australia, Iceland, New York City, and Mexico—I chose blue and orange. The colors are inspired by nature. Orange is suggestive of the sun and soil. And blue references the blue sky or the ocean. Orange and blue sit opposite each other on the color wheel, so they contrast nicely.

With all these costumes, I always go over the luggage weight limit and I end up decreasing what I pack for my personal use. I really love sharing the costuming aspect with workshop participants.

Vangeline: I have hosted workshops with other masters, and I have never seen anyone else carry so much luggage for the workshop. Ichi would post videos of himself boiling the costumes in dye day and night. He puts so much time and energy into preparing for a workshop because he cares that the participants have a special experience. It’s a very unique way of wanting to offer something—not just Butoh technique, but a total experience that people will not forget. He puts an abundance of care and thought into all the details—bringing make-up and precise packages of ribbons and little decorations.

I saw the workshop performance a couple of weeks ago outdoors in Lower Manhattan. Do all of your workshops result in some kind of public performance?

Ichi: The participants need to share with other people beyond me. They need to share with friends, family, and other audience members. I prefer to hold a performance in a public place. I believe in sharing. Sharing is the next step.

Mihee Suh (Translator): I attended the workshop as a participant and Ichi explained to us his vision of sharing choreography with everybody—all audiences. Dance should not just remain with the dancer. It is for sharing with the audience and with the environment. He said very clearly, “Dance is for sharing.”

Karen Greenspan

Karen Greenspan is a New York City-based dance journalist and frequent contributor to Natural History Magazine, Dance Tabs, Ballet Review, and Tricycle among other publications. She is also the author of Footfalls from the Land of Happiness: A Journey into the Dances of Bhutan, published in 2019.

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