Paper short abstract:

This paper discussed the questions of how performances made by radical performance communities are challenged and reinterpreted in an age of theatrical re-enactment

Paper long abstract:

Butoh and angura performance evolved as radical artistic communities that were partially aligned with the new left politics of solidarity and protest in 1960s Japan. Training in these forms and performing them for audiences were not seen as separate processes and artists usually identified with a particular troupe, artistic leader and collective process. The notion of the underground theatre community became the norm for the development of contemporary theatre and is to some extent still a visible phenomenon. A greater degree of independence from the 'angura system' is also evident and a number of challenges to its orthodoxy have arisen. Among these is the idea of reproducibility and re-enactment. How does butoh, for example, revive and reinvent itself in a time when its active cultural communities are breaking down? A particular example that has caused consternation is Kawaguchi Takao's About Kazuo Ohno, a work made by a modern dancer with no butoh training who has been 'reliving' Ohno's major works in a performance that is part re-enactment and part documentation of Ohno's oeuvre. About Kazuo Ohno has enjoyed critical success and yet also causes consternation among some spectators for its apparent paradox. Butoh people value the idea of community and muse over choreography and in some instances reject the work of Kawaguchi as an affront to butoh. At the same time, Ohno's works were choreographed and the idea of their authenticity as a production of an artistic community can be challenged. This paper asks if we can re-enact 1960s angura performance communities and what that might mean in artistic and political terms.