Rodrigue Jean (born in Caraquet , New Brunswick ) is a Canadian film director, screenwriter, and producer of Acadian origin. He has been a theatre director, dancer and choreographer.
28-482: While pursuing university studies, he developed in the 1980s a practice as a dancer and choreographer. In 1986, he went to Japan to train with Tanaka Min . With Tedi Tafel (choreography and performance), Jacques Perron (photography) and Monique Jean (music), he founded Les Productions de l'Os in 1986. A series of performances resulted from this collaboration, which culminated in 1989 with the creation of his first choregraphed short film, La déroute . In 1995, he directed
56-561: A dance festival in 1959. It was based on the novel of the same name by Yukio Mishima . It explored the taboo of homosexuality and ended with a live chicken being smothered between the legs of Kazuo Ohno 's son Yoshito Ohno, after which Hijikata chasing Yoshito off the stage in darkness. Mainly as a result of the audience outrage over this piece, Hijikata was banned from the festival, establishing him as an iconoclast. The earliest butoh performances were called (in English) "Dance Experience ". In
84-531: A dance student's teacher itself, overturning the tradition of the environment taking on a subordinate role to the dance student's technique. He received the Chevalier of l' ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government in 1989 or 1990. He continues to experiment with new ways to use the body, including drawing inspiration from farming. Starting in 2002, he began to appear in movies and on television. He won
112-450: A dance studio, Asbestos Hall, in the Meguro district of Tokyo , which would be the base for his choreographic work for the rest of his life; a shifting company of young dancers gathered around him there. Hijikata conceived of Ankoku Butoh from its origins as an outlaw form of dance-art, and as constituting the negation of all existing forms of Japanese dance . Inspired by the criminality of
140-567: A documentary, La voix des rivières , on Acadians of New-Brunswick , with the support of the National Film Board in Acadia, as well as two short fiction films, La mémoire de l'eau (1996), and L'appel/Call Waiting (1998). Rodrigue Jean then directed three award-winning feature films: the Acadian trilogy Full Blast (1999), Yellowknife (2001) and Lost Song (2008), that earned him
168-648: A drinking club and film venue as well as a dance studio, was eventually sold-off and converted into a private house in the 2000s, but Hijikata's film works, scrapbooks and other artefacts were eventually collected in the form of an archive, at Keio University in Tokyo . Hijikata remains a vital figure of inspiration, in Japan and worldwide, not only for choreographers and performers, but also for visual artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians, architects, and digital artists. Kinjiki ( Forbidden Colors ) by Tatsumi Hijikata, premiered at
196-623: A movement ideology which "conceives of the body as a force of nature: omni-centered, anti-hierarchic, and acutely sensitive to external stimuli." In 1985, Tanaka and his colleagues founded Body Weather Farm, located four hours west of Tokyo, where he taught summer sessions lasting four to five weeks in Japanese and English. Much of the training workshop students received was centered on the labor of workaday tasks, primarily in agriculture. Tanaka taught that performing such tasks in their environments and with their accompanying physical stimulations functioned as
224-481: A series of nearly-naked primarily outdoor improvisational dances that took place throughout Japan, often dancing up to five times a day. For a time in the 1980s, he was associated with Hijikata Tatsumi and butoh , a loose genre of Japanese dance, but now has broken from that framework as well, and no longer uses that term to describe his dances. From 1986 to 2010, Tanaka hosted dance workshops based in Body Weather,
252-510: A triptych at the Joliette Museum of Art . His latest feature film, The Acrobat , was released in 2020. Navigating between documentary and fiction, often mixing genres, and combining ethics and aesthetics, Rodrigue Jean develops a cinematic practice, either by representing people who are deprived of a voice, or by inventing characters driven by their impulses and their desires. Through these two practices of cinema, he examines and questions
280-489: Is this style which is most often associated with Butoh by Westerners. Tatsumi Hijikata was born Kunio Yoneyama on March 9, 1928 in Akita prefecture in northern Japan, the tenth in a family of eleven children. After having shuttled back and forth between Tokyo and his hometown from 1947, he moved to Tokyo permanently in 1952. He claims to have initially survived as a petty criminal through acts of burglary and robbery, but since he
308-513: The Cinémathèque Québécoise in 2016, and the triptych Insurgence (2013), Rupture (2016), and Contrepoint (2016) on the great political and social movement launched by the 2012 Quebec Student Strike . Epopée also worked on the massive incarceration of Indigenous women in Canada, with the installation The Reappearance of Sheri Pranteau (2018), which was presented as
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#1732897617023336-512: The Comte de Lautréamont , as well as by the French Surrealist movement, which had exerted an immense influence on Japanese art and literature, and had led to the creation of an autonomous and influential Japanese variant of Surrealism, whose most prominent figure was the poet Shuzo Takiguchi , who perceived Ankoku Butoh as a distinctively 'Surrealist' dance-art form. Especially at the end of
364-445: The 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Hijikata undertook collaborations with filmmakers, photographers, urban architects and visual artists as an essential element of his approach to choreography's intersections with other art forms. Among the most exceptional of these collaborations was his work with the Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe on the book Kamaitachi , which involved a series of journeys back to northern Japan in order to embody
392-472: The Asbestos Hall and devoted his time to writing and to training his dance-company. Throughout the period in which he had performed in public, Hijikata's work had been perceived as scandalous and the object of revulsion, part of a 'dirty avant-garde ' which refused to assimilate itself to Japanese traditional art, power or society. However, Hijikata himself perceived his work as existing beyond the parameters of
420-721: The Body (inspired by preoccupations with the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus and the work of Hans Bellmer ) in 1968, and then to his solo dances within group choreography such as Twenty-seven Nights for Four Seasons in 1972. He last appeared on stage as a guest performer in Dairakudakan's 1973 Myth of the Phallus . During the years from the late 60's through 1976, Hijikata experimented with using extensive surrealist imagery to alter movements. Then, Hijikata then gradually withdrew into
448-461: The French novelist Jean Genet , Hijikata wrote manifestoes of his emergent dance form with such as titles as 'To Prison '. His dance would be one of corporeal extremity and transmutation, driven by an obsession with death, and imbued with an implicit repudiation of contemporary society and media power. Many of his early works were inspired by figures of European literature such as the Marquis de Sade and
476-402: The Japanese 'erotic-grotesque' horror-film genre, in such works as the director Teruo Ishii 's Horrors of Malformed Men and Blind Woman's Curse , in both of which Hijikata performed Ankoku Butoh sequences. Hijikata's period as a public performer and choreographer extended from his performance of Kinjiki in 1959 to his famous solo work, Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: Revolt of
504-502: The award for best supporting actor at the 26th Japan Academy Film Prize for The Twilight Samurai . Hijikata Tatsumi Tatsumi Hijikata ( 土方 巽 , Hijikata Tatsumi , March 9, 1928 – January 21, 1986) was a Japanese choreographer , and the founder of a genre of dance performance art called Butoh . By the late 1960s, he had begun to develop this dance form, which is highly choreographed with stylized gestures drawn from his childhood memories of his northern Japan home. It
532-464: The constructions of identity and sexuality that stand up against the imperatives of any form of normativity. Director Producer Writer Actor Min Tanaka Min Tanaka ( 田中泯 , Tanaka Min , born March 10, 1945) is a Japanese dancer and actor . Tanaka was trained in ballet and modern dance , but in 1974, turned his back on these forms. He began his solo career with
560-482: The creation of the installation L’État des lieux (2012), and two feature films, L’État du moment (2012) and L’État du monde (2012). Deepening his research into misrepresented lives, and in continuation with Men for Sale and Epopée, he directed in 2014 the fiction feature Love in the Time of Civil War . Besides the project on masculine sex work, the collective launched the installation Fractions , presented at
588-409: The documentary Men for Sale , offering a striking portrait of sex workers in downtown Montreal . In 2009, he founded Epopée , a film action group born out of a co-creation project with the participants of Men for Sale . With Epopée, he deepened his engagement with sex workers, in collaboration with the organization RÉZO. This collective work, composed of documentaries and fiction films, led to
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#1732897617023616-529: The early 1960s, Hijikata used the term "Ankoku-Buyou" (暗黒舞踊 – dance of darkness) to describe his dance. He later changed the word "buyo," filled with associations of Japanese classical dance, to " butoh ," a long-discarded word for dance that originally meant European ballroom dancing. In later work, Hijikata continued to subvert conventional notions of dance. Inspired by writers such as Yukio Mishima (as noted above), Lautréamont , Artaud , Genet and de Sade , he delved into grotesquerie, darkness, and decay. At
644-479: The early 1960s, and whose work had become a prominent public manifestation of Butoh , despite deep divisions in the respective preoccupations of Hijikata and Ohno. During Hijikata's seclusion, Butoh had begun to attract worldwide attention. Hijikata envisaged performing in public again, and developed new projects, but died abruptly from liver failure in January 1986, at the age of 57. Asbestos Hall, which had operated as
672-442: The era's avant-garde movements, and commented: 'I've never thought of myself as avant-garde. If you run around a race-track and are a full circuit behind everyone else, then you are alone and appear to be first. Maybe that is what happened to me... '. Hijikata's period of seclusion and silence in the Asbestos Hall allowed him to mesh his Ankoku Butoh preoccupations with his memories of childhood in northern Japan, one result of which
700-493: The presence of mythical, dangerous figures at the peripheries of Japanese life. The book references stories of a supernatural being — ' sickle-weasel ' — said to have haunted the Japanese countryside of Hosoe's childhood. In the photographs, Hijikata is seen as wandering the stark landscape and confronting farmers and children. From 1960 onward, Hijikata funded his Ankoku Butoh projects by undertaking sex-cabaret work with his company of dancers, and also acted in prominent films of
728-590: The recognition of critics and made his name as a leading filmmaker. In 2005, with the documentary Living on the Edge , he celebrated the work of the Acadian poet Gérald Leblanc . During a stay in London in the early 1990s, he worked as a theatre director. He also organised video workshops at Streetwise Youth, a sex worker centre in London (1991–98). Between 2005 and 2007, after several decades trying to fund this project, he directed
756-620: Was known to embellish details of his life, it is not clear how much his account can be trusted. At the time, he studied tap, jazz, flamenco, ballet, and German expressionist dance. He undertook his first Ankoku Butoh performance, Kinjiki , in 1959, using a novel by Yukio Mishima as the raw input material for an abrupt, sexually-inflected act of choreographic violence which stunned its audience. At around that time, Hijikata met three figures who would be crucial collaborators for his future work: Yukio Mishima , Eikoh Hosoe , and Donald Richie . In 1962, he and his partner Motofuji Akiko established
784-435: Was the publication of a hybrid book-length text on memory and corporeal transformation, entitled Ailing Dancer (1983); he also compiled scrapbooks in which he annotated art-images cut from magazines with fragmentary reflections on corporeality and dance. By the mid-1980s, Hijikata was emerging from his long period of withdrawal, in particular by choreographing work for the dancer Kazuo Ohno , with whom he had begun working in
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