Luc ten Klooster
Photographer Visual artist
Butoh
'Ripping your body open in search of your soul' (Fabio Keiner)
Butoh is a form of modern Japanese dance theatre.
The word 'dance' suggests fast and graceful movements, but with Butoh usually the opposite is true. Better to define Butoh as 'movement theater': there are many activities, techniques and motivations for dance, performance, or movement.
Butoh arose after WO II through collaborations between its two founders Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. The art form is difficult to define, common features of the art form include playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, extreme or absurd environments. Traditionally the body is white painted, often nude, combined with very slow hyper-controlled motion.
Butoh aroused my interest not only because of its contemplative origins in Far Eastern culture, but also from a photogenic point of view. I wanted to get into the skin of the performers as deeply as possible, so many images were not taken from a chair in the theater but very close-up, sometimes in the midst of the performers.