The Big Bang of Bay Area Butoh Historical Highlights of Butoh What Bay Area Artists Have to Say About Butoh
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The Big Bang of Bay Area Butoh

Koichi Tamano, here in make-up and costume, is considered a butoh master in the dance community. photo by Doug Slater.

By Yafonne

Every morning at the crack of dawn, Koichi Tamano gets up and drives from Berkeley to San Mateo to buy fresh fish, fighting Bay Bridge traffic all along the way. He and Hiroko open their restaurant, Country Station Sushi, in the Mission District of San Francisco at 5:30 p.m., offering organic sushi without MSG. Closing down at 10:15 p.m., they finish cleaning and drive back to Berkeley by 2 a.m.

At Country Station the Tamanos are busy working, taking orders and serving sushi, shouting back and forth in a lively manner with their customers. Koichi rubs his back once in a while, and walks somewhat bandy legged. Decorated with junk turned into art, Country Station looks like a wacky visual Butoh installation, complete with heavy metal guitar background music.

And no wonder. The Tamanos are the “Big Bang” of Japanese butoh dance in the Bay Area, in fact, the “mama and papa” that influenced an entire generation of artists from Asians to Americans alike. Having taught hundreds of butoh workshops for over 22 years, the Tamanos have given birth to a new landscape of butoh artists, who are wildly Californian at the same time.

Koichi and Hiroko Tamano at their Country Station Sushi Restaurant in the S.F. Mission District. photo by Yafonne.

In the back of their restaurant, there is a round table covered with a checkered tablecloth and decorated with a vase of plastic sunflowers. They sit, each lighting up a cigarette. Outside, the wind blows hard, and every ten minutes, a window slams against the wall, startling the Tamanos into hearty laughter.

Koichi, at 53 years, has the look of a wide-eyed primitive, with his long hair tied in a bun on top of his head, wearing blue jeans and a dirt-stained apron. Forty-eight-year-old Hiroko, his wife, dons a cap to cover her shaven head and a long red kitchen apron. She is elegantly austere with a childlike face.

Speaking English in thick Japanese accents, they are a casually wacky couple, taking a drag now and then with the customers who come back for a smoke, and sipping Japanese sake to fight the cold air. They don’t appear to be butoh dance masters, except for the fact that they move differently from most others. Their bodies, weighted with the physicality of dance, speak the language of butoh.

Born near Mt. Fuji in Japan, Koichi Tamano studied for 10 years under butoh-founder Tatsumi Hijikata, who christened Koichi his “bow-legged Ninjinsky.” Hiroko and Koichi danced in Hijakata’s company in the ’60s and ’70s in Tokyo. Now the resident butoh master in the Bay Area, Koichi arrived to San Francisco in 1978, with a group of contemporary fine artists for the San Francisco Art Exhibition entitled Japan Now. A year later, Koichi and Hiroko Tamano relocated to Berkeley and formed Harupin-Ha with Bay Area artists. They performed in exhibitions at the old SF MOMA near City Hall and worked on several Broadway shows.

Founded by his teacher and colleague Hijikata, Harupin-Ha refers to Manchuria and literally means “a studying station from Asia to Europe, a place of journey for mixed cultures.” The Tamanos and their company, Harupin-Ha, have performed throughout Japan, France, Germany, Mexico and the United States at venues including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Theater Artaud, and the San Francisco Butoh Festivals. Last year, the Tamanos premiere F6 at ODC Theater. In 1996, they collaborated with the Japanese musician, Kitaro, in The Foxes Marriage produced at Laney College in Oakland.

A New Generation of Artists

The majority of today’s movers and shakers in the Bay Area butoh scene attribute the start of their careers to the Tamanos, the root and foundation of this artistic movement. Of the generations of students they have taught and inspired, many, in the spirit of butoh, have gone on to create their own dance. For instance, there’s Brechin Flournoy, 33, the founder and director of the San Francisco Butoh Festival, now going on its sixth year. When it first started in 1995, Flournoy decided to bring master butoh artists here after her plans for going to Japan did not materialize. Presented by d-net (dance-network), the festival was so popular that she had to keep going on this wild roller-coaster ride that hasn’t stopped yet.

“It was an instant success. We oversold all the performances and had to turn people away,” remembers Flournoy. “The responses were so overwhelming that we had to keep doing it the next year.”

Flournoy’s passion for making Butoh accessible to all people earned her a 1999 Goldie Award from the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Perhaps it was the timing of the festival, which opened on the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, or perhaps the Bay Area was simply ready for the blossoming of a new dance form, but for whatever reason, San Francisco became the de facto epicenter of butoh explosion in the United States.

“The festival is a tangible center to a largely underground art,” explains Flournoy. “Now 60 percent of our student base comes from out of town. We get e-mails year round from people all over the world asking about butoh classes.”

Today, the festival is recognized nationally as the largest and most influential butoh festival in the United States, serving as a model for other similar festivals in Portland, Ore., Seattle, Vancouver, B.C., San Diego, Calif., and Olympia, Wash.

“Butoh, for the most part, seems to work best as a solo form; the anarchy that bubbles just below its surface discourages ensemble work,” observes Guardian dance critic Rita Felciano about the 1999 festival. As if to challenge that observation, Festival 2000 sets out to do exactly the opposite—“to celebrate the power of ensemble work” by turning the spotlight on three Bay Area butoh companies: Koichi and Hiroko Tamano’s Harupin-Ha, Shinichi Momo Koga’s Inkboat, and a performance company led by Leigh Evan.

Alongside Flournoy, artistic director Shinichi Momo Koga, 31, is an up-and-coming butoh artist, who also attributes his beginnings to the Tamanos. Shinichi is a soft-spoken and thoughtful. He head is shaved and he dresses in Eastern garb, giving him the look of a contemplative Tibetan monk in his gold-rimmed spectacles. But his daily appearance belies his stage presence. “Boy, you seem like such a nice guy, but on stage you become a terrifying demon!” his friends exclaim after his performances.

Through the training of the Tamanos, and Tadashi Suzuki’s Theater Method, Koga has founded three companies and has directed over 35 productions in the United States, Europe and Japan in the last 12 years. His new company, Inkboat, a collective of sonic/butoh/Suzuki/action theater performers in the Bay Area, teeters between the birth and death cycles, where according to Koga, “humans are shattered and re-forming, dying and resurrecting.”

His latest work, Cockroaches to premiere at the festival on Aug. 4, is a testament to the human will to survive in spite of holocausts. In butoh that survival instinct manifests beauty, terror and mystery.

“I thought of cockroaches as artists, surviving on the margins of society, living and getting by on scraps, despised and shunned by people,” says Koga. Tested on the streets of the Mission District last week in an Art Strikes Back protest against the city’s current real estate crisis, Cockroaches roused baffled suspicions from the San Francisco Police.

Then there’s choreographer and teacher Leigh Evans, 38, another former student of the Tamanos, and a fast-rising local artist who has performed extensively in Germany, Japan and the Bay Area.

“For me, my interest in the arts is to open up my humanity to deep levels of experience, a sense of what it’s like to be alive,” she says. Drawing inspiration from in-depth studies of butoh, Tadashi Suzuki’s Theater Method, Indian odissi dance, hatha yoga, Evans creates interdisciplinary visual theater that addresses issues of gender, identity and spirit.

Butoh has made a profound impact on Evans’ choreography and palette of expression.

“It was my first exploration in an Asian art form,” she says. “I saw a performer who walked in slow motion across the stage. Wow. That’s meditation. I could see the energy of the moving body. It put me in such a different state of mind.”

Evans studied butoh for two years with the Tamanos, going deeply inside herself to confront the raw states of humans.

“It seems to express what the person is at the root, and the expression of the underbelly of society...” explains Evans. “What are the things that don’t see the light of day, things that are buried? For the Japanese, it’s like the image of the crippled rising from the mud. The images for Americans are totally different. We have a different set of circumstances.”

According to Evans, the images Americans have deal with the materialism of the West. Her new work, Red Rivers Run Madly to the Sea, which premieres at Theater Artaud this Sunday, confronts plastic over consumption. Red Rivers depicts a sea goddess rising from the ocean, wrapped in real garbage collected from the beaches of San Francisco. Five other dancers depict birth from an embryonic sac of a shopping cart womb, completely wrapped plastic waste materials. The work grapples with the consequences of technological convenience—over-consumption, water, destruction of the planet by American lifestyles, and what she calls “our removal away from a natural world.”

Besides local artist Evans and Koga, the 11-member Harupin-Ha will premiere Koichi Tamano’s new work, The Beauty of the Sky with live musicians on Friday and Sunday at Theater Artaud. Striving to maintain Hijikata’s style of butoh, Koichi Tamano re-iterates, “In dancing we aim at an internal space. We paint our bodies white to provide clear, uncluttered canvas for physical manifestations of agony, ecstasy—the whole spectrum. We work from imagery and emotion, never trying to initiate movement without first feeling something in the guts.”

The American Appeal

With the groundwork laid down by the Tamanos these last 20 years, the seeds scattered by the visiting master artists, Bay Area avant garde enthusiasts have embraced butoh.

Molly Barrons, 31, the associate producer of the festival observes, “I find that butoh caters to a very eclectic, very artistic, very intellectual mind. It draws a total mixture of people because it appeals to many people on multiple levels for different reasons.”

And indeed, the festival draws not only dancers, but college students, business leaders, teachers and seniors.

“People don’t confront their dark sides enough,” says Koga. “Many are thirsty for confronting for something a little bit less civilized. It’s another way to tap into that negative element of being modern primitives.”

Despite its success, the Bay Area butoh scene is also fragile. Like all other art forms here, butoh artists are threatened by the real estate crisis of the dot.com invasion.

“When I look back, the thing that continues to impress me is that the city of San Francisco was a real do-it-yourself town. I don’t think the butoh festival could have grown and stabilized as quickly as it did if it were in New York. Things in the Bay Area were very accessible back then,” says Flournoy upon reflection. “Now with the dot.com industry growing, the do-it-yourself community is disappearing. And that makes me kind of sad.”

This only makes the upcoming festival more precious, points out Barrons. “It’s a very sacred time. We just don’t have enough time in our lives to gather and share like this, these two weeks coming up. I feel blessed with the gift that the Tamanos have given me and the community here in the Bay Area.”

As for the future, it is left for the next generation of butoh artists here to forge new landscapes of being. “Setsuko Yamada once said she was very pleased to see some seeds that were growing here, and it was a very different tree,” comments Flournoy.

A new generation is trying to create art that fits the landscape of California and its urban ecosystem. Flournoy continues, “I think we are making a shift away from Japanese butoh into a style that is our own...I hope that in a few years something new will come out. A new expression will emerge.”

The Tamanos agree with this direction. It is a natural, inevitable outgrowth of the Hijikata butoh outlook. They themselves cannot do it, because Japanese history and society is so intertwined with their bodies, from their earliest impressions as children.

“We came from Tokyo. We have a beat. Tik-tik-tik-tik-tik. We may be very strange to people here.” says Hiroko in a merry way.

“In Tokyo the weather is very wet, so hot, with insect noise. The humidity squeezes your body out,” complains Koichi. “The weather is not mean here. In Japan it’s very extreme. California is more dry, lots of sunshine, no snow. The weather is not mean to the body. So the dance form is lighter.”

“San Francisco has a beautiful fog,” adds Hiroko, now sitting back on the chair their restaurant. All these elements affect Butoh here...We are here 20 years. That’s why we really see the Japan where we were raised is inside our bodies.”

But when push comes to shove, the Tamanos are quite pleased with the legacy they have created here, seeing the fruition of their 20 years of helping develop new emerging artists.

They still study butoh, seeking the basic root of life, and work hard at their restaurant, but they keep a playful mind. Hiroko’s face brightens at the thought of her five-year old grandson.

“When he tiny, I do laundry everyday,” she says. “I hang them in the backyard, in the sunshine California. I learn from my mother when the sun energy in the body no catch cold. So I make baby naked in the California sunshine. Let the whole body absorb the sun, feeding his life.”

Koichi jumps in, laughing with his eyes, and gesturing wildly.

“Art is the sending of energy to another, not only watching others have fun, but really shocking people to give off energy. Shake their body and mind to give off energy. Otherwise cannot call it art. What we show in theater is energy, like people eating good food. They say, ‘Mmm!” Good energy comes out of my body. There’s new energy in my body!”