Sankai Juku in the UK

Joanne · **Posted:** Thu Jun 12, 2003 3:18 pm

review from The Telegraph.

Quote:

Although they have built up a devoted Sadler's Wells following, this is less to do with a British love of the aridly unchallenging Butoh style of dance they practise, than their usually fabulous interior decoration skills. I challenge anyone to define any differences in the choreographies they have brought to London, Unetsu, Shijima, Hibiki or now Kagemi. Easier to recall the show with the eggs, the one with the skeleton wall, the one with the bowls of blood. Kagemi's signature prop is a floating field of giant mushrooms. Alas, don't expect much of a trip.

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And from The Times.

Quote:

THE all-male, Olivier Award-winning troupe Sankai Juku is probably the planet’s best-known purveyor of butoh, a movement-based avant-garde art form that arose angrily from the ashes of post-Hiroshima Japan. Founded nearly 30 years ago, the company gradually replaced butoh’s raw, scandalous origins with a far more streamlined and, I would argue, surface aesthetic.

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<small>[ 19 February 2004, 02:33 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Stuart Sweeney · **Posted:** Sat Jun 14, 2003 12:27 am

Sankai Juku
By Sanjoy Roy for The Guardian

Originating in Japan in the late 1960s, Butoh is a darkly expressionist style of movement characterised by elemental gestures, excruciating slowness, gaping mouths and shaven-headed bodies dusted with white powder. Choreographer Ushio Amagatsu, a second-generation Butoh artist, and his all-male company Sankai Juku have had the highest profile in the west - but have also been accused of adding a lacquer of designer sophistication to the style.
Though it is not the tradition but the work that matters, Kagemi, Sankai Juku's latest piece shown in the UK, lends support to that charge.

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Sankai Juku
By Clement Crisp for The Financial Times

Sloth is one of the deadly sins. And so, I suggest, are portentousness, turgid movement, and the passing off of leaden-footed orientalia as something worthwhile. Sankai Juku, apostle-troupe of Japanese butoh dance - is back in Rosebery Avenue with Kagemi which, you will be fascinated to learn, means "Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors", and slothful, laboured activity is not the least of the sins on view.

It is the mixture as before. Ravishing visual effects - a setting of giant lotus flowers; a colour range that verges frenziedly from pale beige to pale ivory, beautifully lit.

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Joanne · **Posted:** Sat Jun 14, 2003 10:35 pm

Review from The Sunday Times.

Quote:

Ushio Amagatsu and his contemporary butoh company, Sankai Juku (from Japan and Paris), have been visiting Britain for more than 20 years and now make biennial appearances at Sadler’s Wells. A packed house for their latest production, Kagemi, on Tuesday, left no doubt that they have a devoted following.

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Stuart Sweeney · **Posted:** Mon Jun 16, 2003 11:03 pm

Sankai Juku: Kagemi
By Nadine Meisner for The Independent

They may be ultra-slow, impenetrable and downright weird, but Sankai Juku performances gather enthralled audiences. What do they think they have been watching? A series of perfectly composed moving tableaux? A freak show, on the edge between serious risk-taking and grotesque sensationalism? Or philosophical profundities, perhaps?

Sankai Juku's latest show to hit London, Kagemi, created in 2000, is all those things. The philosophical profundities, though, I take on trust. This is the Japanese dance or physical theatre form called Butoh, after all. It's not that evocative elements are totally absent, but precisely what they add up to is anybody's guess.

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Stuart Sweeney · **Posted:** Fri Jun 27, 2003 11:18 pm

Kagemi
By Jenny Gilbert for The Independent

I guess Ushio Amagatsu, director and leading performer of the Paris-based cult Japanese company Sankai Juku, was aiming for a similar level of resonance in Kagemi ("Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors") the latest production to arrive at Sadler's Wells.

His slow-moving ceremonials based on the post-Hiroshima art of Butoh attract a devoted following around the world and many claim to find deep significance in the performers' pained, tortoise-paced movements.

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lpaillier · **Posted:** Fri Aug 04, 2006 3:24 am

For the eyes some photos of "Toki" and "Kinkan shonen" of Ushio Amagatsu in Paris last season.

http://www.laurentpaillier.net/galerie/galleries/amagatsu/toki/index.html

http://www.laurentpaillier.net/galerie/galleries/amagatsu/kinkanshonen/index.html

Stuart Sweeney · **Posted:** Fri Aug 04, 2006 7:03 am

Many thanks for those links, Laurent.


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