Kazuo Stands

I’ve been staring at this photo of Kazuo Ohno for 17 years.

I’m not sure what I usually notice first.  Is it the perfectly upright body broken only by a slightly turned out left hand and the head slightly tilted to the right?  Is it the perfectly balanced and subtle tones of gray, white, and black that invite me in to this man’s universe as well as keep me at a distance with its otherworldly feel?  Is it the two cracks in the wall; one thick one emerging from behind Ohno’s head and the other traversing above, straight from left to right (or right to left if you read it in Japanese), a signifier (undeniably?) of a cross, (especially?) given Ohno’s allegedly devout Christian faith. 

Or perhaps other, smaller details.  The old, worn shoes.  The cheap linoleum floor.  The unbuttoned collar with no tie.  The right hand slightly clawing (inward or outward?).  His aged, thinning, crumpling hair?  It all leaves me with a feeling of simultaneous desire and emptiness that keeps me coming back for more.

The face, of course. 

Pasty white makeup.  80 years of wrinkles.  Eyes sunken, still, searching, though not actually lifeless.  Lips edging downward, unparted, perhaps never smiling.  A clown without a stage.  Neither beauty nor beast.  More the image of seeming absence while remaining the embodiment of presence.  He is definitely there, but perhaps defining a form of life that most would count as dead and gone.

I know for certain one thing that does not strike me very often but that instills me with a soft, gentle viscerality when it does is Ohno’s shadow.  If his body, his apparition, impresses at all, it is because of the contrast between the clarity of his shadow, impossible without the presence of something, yet that referent, his body, so ghostlike.

Seeing this image of Ohno for the first time, as I entered the concert hall to watch him perform, my first encounter ever with Butoh, I did experience love and terror.  After witnessing the performance, I did experience ecstacy.

For nearly two decades, this photo has defined for me what it means to be alive and dead, or perhaps more correctly, living and dying, at the same time. 

How many countless moments onstage have I consciously and subconsciously assumed this position?  This photo is my fallback, my security blanket, my reference point.  It is my tabula rasa from which I have measured so many performance experiences, so many hundreds of attempts at personifying, making real and tangible that which I love about my being as a generative entity in the world, my self a site for discovery and transformation.  It has been, in the worst moments, my escape, and, in the best moments, my way of knowing how simply to stand.