Yumi Umiumare

this interview published in beat as Butoh Queens (what a title, i dont come up with these things of course)

Danny Episode

It’s a grey, climate change warm Melbourne Sunday and Danny’s sitting on the back stair to an abandoned building from an empty car park in the industrial heart of Richmond. The pub where we planned to meet is still closed and I just can’t stomach the idea of entering the vic gardens shopping center, the giant Ikea sign dominating the horizon is just too much marketing for this reporter.

And somehow the gunmetal end of the world sky and the trashed and empty factories seem like the perfect place to be talking to Australia’s butoh diva, Yumi Umiumare. For the foremost performer of an artform which grew out of the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, known as the dance of darkness, Yumi is bright, cheerful and a joy to talk to.

But I’ll admit it, Danny’s a big fan.

Yumi is performing as part of the new Spring Dance season at dance house as a double bill with Kitt Johnson. Here’s what she had to say.

“I am doing my short solo Dis-Oriental, which I did in The Performance Space in 2004. I did a part of this project with Rakini Devi as Woman In Transit and I wanted to revisit that piece. Kitt was the main performer, I mean not main, but she's an amazing performer who I met in Copenhagen in 2003. She invited me to the post Butoh festival in Copenhagen and she did her own show, as well as curated the whole festival. They had a forum about “What’s Butoh Now” kind of thing. Butoh’s main time was sort of in the 80s and 90s and in Europe they think its slowly changing. They think it has been transformed a little bit, so Kit has also had an influence from Butoh and has worked with Japanese Butoh performers and also German expressionism. So she was creating her solo work ages ago, 25 years or something and she’s a very established performer, very busy person, travelling around the world doing her show. But because I met her and she invited me to her festival, I wanted to invite her here and at last Dance House got a bit of funding so we can bring her over.”

Kitt’s performance, called The Mirror, shares the second week with Dis-oreintal.

“It’s the full scale performance, like 55 minutes, performance. She’s going to bring a Danish musician, live music and a lighting technician. So the three of them are coming from Denmark. Kitt is already here. So this is kind of a double bill, two performers, but I call myself an entrée for kit, I’m performing for her.”

I can’t miss the opportunity to ask what Yumi thinks of Butoh now in the new millennium.

“Some people are still doing it like the first generation of butoh people, now in their 50s or 60s … Kazuo Ono is one of the eldest butoh performers in the world, I think 97 or 98, but he’s still dancing on wheelchairs, so there are definitely people in the first generation still doing it in their own way. But since they invented it, in the late 50s and 60s, lots of second generation, third generation performers have been making up their own style. Society has changed. When butoh was made there was lots of social reaction about Americanisation after the war and the 60s, it was generally a very exciting time, a very political time too. So butoh started, in a way, like a revelation. It was about opening up your own identity, the national identity, agony and difficulties. That's why they called it the dance of darkness to start with. But I think we have got lots of chaos of the social context in a very different way now in the 21^st century. I think butoh now, for me, is so many diverse performers you can’t say this is butoh and this isn’t. For me butoh is one of the few artforms that can create whatever it wants, which is dangerous too.”