Sankai Juku

Sankai Juku is a company of Contemporary dance Japan ease founded in 1975 by Ushio Amagatsu.

History of the company

The company Sankai Juku (an expression which one could translate by “studio of the mountain and the sea”) and its artistic director, Ushio Amagatsu, belong to the second generation of dancers of butoh in Japan. The Butô is a new Japanese form of art which appeared in the Sixties, like an expression of the humane concerns of a generation born after the war, and strongly marked by it. Under the impulse of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, the Japanese dancers pertaining to this current turned the back on the traditional forms of the Eastern and Western dances, to seek a mode of expression adapted better to realities of modern Japan. The gestures of the butoh emanate from a sensitivity which was harnessed by centuries of tradition, but the body of the dancer of butoh is not encumbered an old vocabulary of the Kabuki or a No. According to Ushio Amagatsu, the butô expresses the language of the body rather than a theoretical direction of the movement, and each one brings there its own physical history, its own mode of expression. Before adopting the style butô, Ushio Amagatsu received a training in ballet dancing and modern, and the prospect that it released some contributed to a better comprehension of the butô. Far from masking or to dissimulate the emotion, its step rests on the contrary on the personal expression of the suffering, and the impassioned exaltation of the joys of the life and sorrows of death. The fixed white face of the tradition represented a blocked human being, but the bleached face of the dancer of butô is animated, in direct link with innocence, amazement, the fear and death.

Principal choreographies

1978: Kikan shonen
1986: Unestu
1988: Shijima
1993: Yuragi
1995: Hiyomeki
1998: Hibiki
2000: Kagemi
2003: Utsuri
2005: Toki (See an extract)

External bond

Official site of the company Sankai Juku

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