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Portrait of Mr O + Anma + Rose Color Dance + In Passing (15*)

Japanese Avant-garde & Experimental Film Festival

an image of a man covered in some kind of mud and headdress looking upwards

The first of our two screenings celebrating butoh co-founders Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno through wildly inventive and highly surreal cinematic works.

Our bodies are in crisis! This programme brings together Chiaki Nagano and Takahiko Iimura’s collaborations with butoh pioneers Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. JAEFF attempts to define a dance style which defies definition. Beginning with the first entry in Nagano’s Mr O trilogy, viewers will be plunged headfirst into the grotesque absurdities of a form which seeks to “resist fixity”. The unforgettable imagery of Portrait of Mr O is complemented by Iimura’s “cinedance” recordings of Hijikata’s early 1960s performances. Both Anma and Rose Color Dance are efforts to film choreography and to choreograph film.

Connecting these works to present-day conceptions of movement, society, and technology is Anne Verheij’s In Passing.

This screening includes a video introduction by Michael Sakamoto.

Japan 1969 Dir Chiaki Nagano 65 min

Japan 1963 Dir Takahiko Iimura 20 min

Japan 1965 Dir Takahiko Iimura 13 min

UK 2019 Dir Anne Verheij 5 min

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Barbican Cinema 2