Events

Yoshito Ohno’s first solo performance. The poster photograph was by Masahisa Fukase, the ticket artwork by Yuri Nonaka, and the program text by Tatsumi Hijikata. An edited open-reel tape prepared for the performance also survives, revealing that music by groups such as The Doors and Vanilla Fudge was used.

During the actual performance, Yoshito Ohno later recalled that he became almost unable to move, and that at the end, when the Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” began to play, the audience all started dancing. Ikuya Kato described the performance as ‘the petrification of the body’, ‘a bronze walk’, and wrote that ‘the beginning of a Butoh experience that did not move in the way movement is ordinarily expected was brought forth with startling freshness’ (bijutsu techo, January 1970).

Following this performance, however, Yoshito Ohno withdrew from the stage, and until his comeback in 1985 he no longer appeared publicly as a dancer.

The phrase Tatsumi Hijikata wrote in the programme—’His dance is flowers and birds’—became a lifelong question and theme for Yoshito Ohno. In his later years, he would present the solo work “Flower and Bird”, a piece that may be regarded as the culmination of that inquiry.