To the editors:
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In Renaldo Migaldi’s article on the appearance of butoh artist Natsu Nakajima at Randolph Street Gallery [“In Performance: dance of the empty dancer,” July 9], he states that this marked the occasion of the first Japanese butoh performance in Chicago. This information was provided in Randolph Street Gallery’s press material (I received the same packet of information). However, this is inaccurate information, as Eiko and Koma, a noted butoh performance team, have already appeared three times in Chicago at the now defunct MoMing Dance & Arts Center (September 12 to 13, 1980; December 18 to 20, 1981; and October 2 to 5, 1986). This Japanese husband-and-wife performance duo moved to the U.S. and have been instrumental in introducing American audiences to the art of butoh. It is a slap in the face to both their artistry to ignore their previous presence in Chicago, as well as to the visionary programming of MoMing. Randolph Street Gallery should do its homework before making grandiose “historical” statements.
“She may call them butoh, but that’s her opinion,” says Overstreet. “I do know that as recently as the mid-1980s Eiko and Koma were not making that claim, nor have I ever read anything where they have made that claim. A lot of their work is definitely influenced by butoh. They may have studied in workshops with Kazuo Ohno like everybody has, but I have not seen them listed in Tokyo Journal, Theater Dance Review, Dances Butoh, or any publication I am aware of that is specifically about butoh artists internationally. When I did workshops with Eiko and Koma at MoMing, they gave me names of butoh artists in Japan; but I asked numerous people in Japan about them and they’d never heard of them.”
