A Prodigal Treading Ground and Wearing Time – an interview with Mitsuyo Uesugi
Returning to the Festival & London Audiences
You performed in London for the 2023 edition of the Rebellious Bodies Festival with Melancholia – A Portrait of M. Returning now to perform A Requiem for Her, how does it feel to reconnect with the UK audience? What energy or dialogue do you hope to cultivate this time, both within the festival atmosphere and through your performance?
When I came in 2023, it was alongside Takao Kawaguchi, who performed his piece About Kazuo Ohno. My own piece, Melancholia – A Portrait of M, also took Kazuo Ohno as one of its themes. I had been looking at my work both as a student of Kazuo Ohno and as a woman, so I'm very happy that this connection can continue.
More than anything we ourselves hoped for, that is thanks to you, Mai, and your presence. You were also trained at Kazuo Ohno's studio. This didn't come out of the blue, as if it were simply about me, Mitsuyo Uesugi. There was the context of your work with Mizohata-san and the NPO Dance Archive Network, and before that, Kazuo Ohno. You are someone who chose Kazuo Ohno, and you are the one organising this.
I don’t want to speak too long, but you [Mai Burns] also invited me to Yokohama for your DIGITAL // REALITY, 2021 festival, and the film from that project ended up connecting things in various ways. We are all people who stood in the same place, Kazuo Ohno's studio in Kamihoshikawa (Takao Kawaguchi in a different way), and now that connection can continue in London. It began when we first talked about The Place, and the fact that our conversation has carried on this far makes me feel that Kazuo Ohno himself is calling to us and inviting us. I'm very happy about it, and in a way, very excited.
Returning to The Place After 46 Years
Your history with London runs deep — you performed here in 1980 alongside Kazuo Ohno, and this festival marks your return to the stage at The Place for the first time in 46 years. How does your body process returning to a stage you stood on over four decades ago? Does the space hold architectural or bodily memories for you?
Well, similar to my response to the first question… The Place was a black box. There was nothing like it in Tokyo at the time: those small, black theatres, black boxes. At first it wasn't even planned. The request came suddenly from The Place, and I was especially happy that we could dance not only Kazuo Ohno's Admiring La Argentina but also our Ozen [translated on The Place’s 1980 poster as "A Table"]. I felt great joy.
I also remember the atmosphere of the theatre itself, a black, rather small, experimental space. I don't think there was anything like it in Tokyo then. Before that, in Europe, places like Nancy [in France, where Kazuo Ohno first performed his famous Admiring La Argentina abroad, on this same tour in 1980] felt like theatres in the more conventional sense, and in Paris we even danced in a skating rink. But this kind of box-like space felt very fresh, and I feel my body still remembers that freshness. Places like that taught me that something new is born there, rather than in a so-called big theatre. That's what I felt. (The black box theatre) seems ordinary now, but it wasn't then.
On Physical Transition from Classical Ballet to Butoh
Having trained in classical ballet before entering Kazuo Ohno’s studio at age 20, you underwent a radical shift in physical alignment — moving from ballet’s upward verticality to Butoh’s grounded, earthbound posture. How did your body physically unlearn that balletic lifting, and does any remnant of that early classical training still reside inside your movement today? The demands on the physical body naturally shift over five decades. How has the scale or intensity of your movement evolved? Is it reflected in A Requiem for Her?
Yes, it remains. What I did in childhood doesn't leave me. With pointe shoes especially, you are making a body that is a kind of deformity, taking you away from the raw, ordinary living body. For about fifty years, carrying the fact that it remains was an enormous complex for me.
When I first saw Hijikata's dances with Yoko Ashikawa, it was a shock. It was grotesque, yet incredibly beautiful — a beauty of precise, clearly defined form. I realized my own body already had that form. From the severe training like his kemono-tai [beast-body] work, I think Hijikata used classical ballet in reverse: he turned pointe shoes into geta and turned the outside into the inside. That was his genius.
Artificially remaking the body is a kind of metamorphosis, true for any artist who works with the body. In the end, whatever remains after all attempts to discard it in the name of creativity is right; there is no need to throw it away. After all these years of discarding myself, what still wells up from inside is a treasure: that readiness to fly from the earth, my first Swan Lake and Giselle. Those pieces are about supreme love, something I longed for as a child. It isn't about what you are taught; it's an innate sensibility, like a destiny, that makes an artist. Butoh is art, and that is why it is individual.
Movement changes, but the skeleton, the framework, remains the same. Expressing with the body is an encounter and a struggle with your own bones; muscles come after that. What Ohno said about the universe and hundreds of millions of years is the history of the bones. His Butoh speaks from human fossils, going as far back as mitochondria, the egg, and the sperm in the mother's belly. Deep down, even ballet returns to that origin. So now, when you ask if ballet remains in me... well, I didn't spend all these decades struggling with Butoh only to be asked that.
Femininity and the Female Body in Butoh / Physical Requirements and Evolution
You were one of the very first female artists to carve out a solo path in Butoh, a form that was
initially shaped by strong male figures. In A Requiem for Her, you dance with 'the women that reside inside your body — from mother to grandmother'. How has your understanding of femininity, female lineage and/or gender (or genderlessness) evolved over your 50-year practice? The demands on the physical body naturally shift over five decades. How has the scale or intensity of your movement evolved through ageing in the dancing body? Is it reflected in A Requiem for Her?
Well, first of all, I was born a woman. Though I had boyfriends and was helped enormously by men in making my dance possible, I could never get on board with marriage or children. More than wanting a traditional family, I couldn’t let go of myself. I kept asking: who am I? Why do I protect this "me"? It wasn't about political resistance; it was a deeply personal struggle. I saw mothers breastfeeding and thought it was lovely, yet felt a revulsion toward living simply to endure. My father kept women outside the home while my mother suffered, and my grandmother bore ten children, raising them only to see them sent off to war. I was raised amidst these entanglements, in an environment of innocent, ordinary women who never questioned their fate. In that context, I think of kanojo [meaning she/her, a word Uesugi used for a series of her early performances] as a figure for those women, each with a conflict. Longing for an intellectual relationship on gender like de Beauvoir and Sartre, I grew up excessively sensitive to gender as a destiny you cannot choose.
Japanese men aesthetically love their mothers, but daughters are seen merely as copies of themselves. I loved those women enormously, yet hated their foolishness — and then hated myself for rebelling. I hated being a woman, hated men, and reached a point of not wanting to live. Kazuo Ohno saved me when he first told me that men and women are the same — that we are both, that there are women inside men and men inside women. It was an enormous relief. From then on, I was drawn to the androgynous: angels, Gustave Moreau's paintings, and Balzac’s Séraphîta, where love allows a man to become a woman and a woman a man. I wanted to become that — neither man nor woman, an angel beyond sex.
Training the body turns a woman's physiology into a kind of deformity, which is why I loved ballet. Technique is a constant conflict with female biology. At the Momoko Tani Ballet Company, if a girl had large breasts, she was told to wrap herself in cling film so men wouldn't look at her chest instead of the dance. Managing menstruation and artificially remaking the body are constant struggles. Yet carrying that physiological sensibility as a destiny brought me this far. When I created Kanojo, it was about stepping away from “I" — using technique to place "her" in the third person, creating a necessary distance. I think I might say one day, "actually, I'm a man, there are women within men and men within women”; and when Ohno first said that to me, I was so relieved. If you think that way, you can love everyone.
As a philosophy, realizing how society dictates how a woman or man "should be" allows you to reject state-prescribed roles. That is why I dislike organizations and insist on standing firm as an individual. Butoh isn't just standing; it's treading — treading the ground beneath your feet. Even children shut away with depression who cannot take a step into school are, in a sense, already Butoh dancers. Butoh is thoroughly anti-social, a dropout's path, prodigal. Artists dig into the darkness, burning their lives to leave works behind. When I was twenty and at my lowest, art saved my life. I live on what has been given to me by others.
That is why within kanojo [her], there is also “him". They are the ones who lived before me. I have received the gifts and blessings of predecessors — the ignorant, ordinary women who endured, and the artists who left poems, novels, and paintings at the risk of their lives. That is what A Requiem for Her is. All my thinking is a requiem: acknowledging that I am able to live through the power of others. As my body ages and my movement evolves, dancing becomes an act of gratitude. It is not enough for an audience to simply say, "I was moved". Dancing is a lifetime's responsibility to those who [passionately] burned their lives to leave something behind.
On Costuming, Tactility, and Materiality
In 1977, you created costumes for Kazuo Ohno’s landmark premiere of 'Admiring La Argentina', and material context has always played a subtle role in your work. In A Requiem for Her, how do fabric, costume, or physical objects serve as extensions of the body to evoke the presence of the women who came before you?
For Admiring La Argentina, the costumes were not made by a single person; they came together through many people. Hisako, Akira Kasai’s wife, made the tango dress, which I adapted/arranged with decorations Hijikata brought over. Hijikata also brought a black velvet dress from his studio, and Kazuo Ohno danced in my arrangement. Even Ohno’s chemise on the poster became tattered, so I had to find something similar and adapt it. That collaborative, organic process has defined my approach to materiality ever since my first Kanojo performance.
Since I made the first Kanojo piece, I mostly wear my mother’s clothes. In the beginning, I used black mourning garments, but nearly everything I perform in comes from things my mother made when she was young. She had gifted hands for embroidery and textiles, so the costumes I wear were once on her body. When I wear a suit, it is my father’s suit. I also use remade kimonos and old obi-jime sashes, alongside secondhand garments I bought in France. I have worked with costume designers in the past, but it never felt right. I prefer what I have at home. For me, this is "wearing time”. Those garments hold the lived time of someone decades ago, complete with their lingering smells. By wearing them, I bring that past time directly back into my own body, allowing it to become one of the core elements that gives birth to the dance.
This contrasts sharply with my experience in French contemporary dance with Catherine Diverrès. In the studio, we spent a year building stage pieces, rehearsing in our own secondhand clothes and developing solos and duets. But three months before the performance, decorators, lighting designers, and costume teams flooded the theatre. Money was spent simply because the budget required it. Suddenly, we were given brand new, expensive leather shoes that were impossible to dance in, sand or uneven surfaces on stage, and lighting cues that demanded endless jumps just for a single minute of light. That flow of money neutralized everything, sweeping away the personal time, history, and individuality we had built into our everyday clothes. After three times, I would get fed up, though I think Catherine valued individuality; this is the French contemporary dance world.
I couldn't bring my mother’s clothes to France, so I relied strictly on local secondhand shops. My time there was a huge struggle; I fought fiercely with Catherine and ultimately felt as though I escaped back to Tokyo. I returned at age forty, which marked the true starting point for developing my own Butoh solo form. French dancers who met me abroad came to Japan to study and dance with me in pieces like Ensemble W, but through my early works like Madame Melancholia, I constantly felt "not this, not this".
It was only around age fifty that my Butoh as it is now became clear. I realized that kanojo is about giving physical form to my truest self, the private self behind closed doors. Costumes, fabrics, and objects are not decorative additions; they are extensions of lineage and lived history. By wearing my mother’s handiwork, my father’s suits, and objects infused with the past, I wear time itself. That is how the women and predecessors who came before me reside inside my physical movement on stage.
On Mentorship and Passing down Uncodified Knowledge
Unlike classical forms with rigid syllabi, Butoh is an uncodified art form often passed down through presence, imagery, and atmosphere. Working with younger generations of artists — such as Makiko Takamatsu and MUTSUMINEIRO — how do you transmit bodily memory and the essence of early Butoh without turning it into a rigid technique? How do you cultivate the collaborations with younger generations?
I teach very technical things. I don't put soul or life first. I teach how to stand properly, and some things that are similar to classical ballet, and also suriashi [the sliding walk used in Noh], which I took from Noh. Through my own experience in various places, putting my own body on the line, I always teach what I acquired that way and consider to be technique. After that comes improvisation. First you master that, and then from there you improvise on your own. That's the form I use.
Neiro, Seiji and the others haven't had the kind of body training I had, but then, Mutsumi was a hardcore rhythmic gymnast, and went to university for it. Neiro came from mime and worked with various theatre companies in Poland. Each of them has built up their own technique in a different form. What stands out about Maki is that she comes from film, which I'd say is her own technique. She came into Butoh through show dancing at Hijikata's club, Shogun [the Tokyo cabaret Hijikata was associated with, where Maki worked as a show dancer]. So each one has a different body technique, a different way of choosing their body, and a different sensibility.
What definitely differs is that Hijikata has his Butoh-fu [his system of written movement notation]. We have all stayed entirely away from that. But we have respect for Tatsumi Hijikata, and have looked properly at the books he wrote and at his movement. How to carry out your own method, in a different form from that, is a very painful place for those who chose Kazuo Ohno, but it is also a place of joy. I think that's the most important thing. We haven't severed ties with Hijikata's ways of thinking, despite choosing a different method. But if "it's not this way”, then we need to ask, "what are we?”. I think that is the burden of people who chose Kazuo Ohno.
Evolution & Transformation of Butoh (Japan vs. UK/Global)
Having witnessed Butoh's inception in Japan and its international spread since the 1980 European tours, how do you see the form mutating today? In your view, how does the embodiment of Butoh in Japan compare to its reception and development here in the UK and internationally?
I haven't danced overseas as much as Ohno did, but I feel my own dance has been received with similar warmth wherever I've gone. Last year I went to South Africa and danced A Requiem for Her. The women there embraced me and said, "You danced my whole heart". Fortunately, I suppose people who feel a lot of discomfort with it don't tend to come, so I've been lucky. Workshops are difficult, but on stage I truly receive joy, and I feel nothing but gratitude.
In Ohno's time, it was well received everywhere, really. Ohno would keep dancing until it went over well. He was the kind of person who would keep dancing as long as even one person was clapping.
The workshop and stage performance are perceived and received completely differently, country by country. Their bodies are different. Their inner worlds and their language are different. They aren't so conscious of it themselves, but Butoh carries each country's society, language, and whole body, and these differ. That's what I mean when I say workshops are difficult. With ballet, you can just teach "one, two, three," but here people come who have lived completely different lives and times. What do you tell them to do in just one day, or a few hours? That's how different they are. Kazuo Ohno & Mr O's Book of the Dead
Your early years were deeply intertwined with Kazuo Ohno, from costuming his iconic works to appearing in Chiaki Nagano's film Mr. O's Book of the Dead. Director Nagano famously remarked that in this film, 'to die is to be resurrected at the same time'. Reflecting back, how did working on this film influence your physical philosophy, and how does Kazuo Ohno's spirit continue to move through your choreography today?
At the time, I had no idea what to do; it was a first for all of us. I desperately followed senior dancers like Moritsuna Nakamura and Tomiko Takai, taking cues from their costumes and movement. We shot the film in fits and starts over nearly a year, fitting shoots around Kazuo Ohno’s schedule. We travelled to Lake Shikotsu in Hokkaido during summer holidays with a core group (Nakamura-san, Takai-san and I went with Kazuo Ohno and Chiaki Nagano), or filmed on weekends at locations like Ōyama and a local pig farm.
Ohno’s direction was entirely unpredictable. Out of nowhere, he would hand me a doll and say, “This is your child and mine”, or quietly order me to sleep inside a pigsty right after he suckled from a pig's teat. Although Ohno constantly told us we were free, he was actually giving sudden, spontaneous commands — like telling everyone in the back to laugh. Working with him meant navigating a constant barrage of surprises that forced an immediate physical reaction.
Compared to the dark, solitary intensity of Portrait of Mr O that I really love, Mr O's Book of the Dead captured Ohno’s lighter, more playful side. Director Chiaki Nagano wanted a large crowd, so many people who had never attended rehearsals simply showed up to be on camera. Everyone was heavily dressed up because Ohno always instructed us: “Wear the most stylish clothes you can; put on what you think is the best decoration”.
Looking back, the film is deeply bound to its era. When discussing it with Mizohata-san [NPO Dance Archive Network] in London, we agreed that changing the kayōkyoku [Japanese pop] soundtrack would completely transform and elevate the piece. While I cannot easily judge whether it is a "good" film in a traditional sense, it stands as an authentic artefact of Ohno's world.
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An Evening of Butoh Performance & Mother Forest will be staged at The Place, London on 13th &14th November 2026 respectively, at 19:30.
This conversation with Mitsuyo Uesugi was conducted and simultaneously interpreted by Mai Burns, Director of the Rebellious Bodies Festival. The questions and transcript edits for publication were done by Elspeth Chan.
