Photo of Kazuo Ohno by H. Tsukamoto.

Kazuo Ohno, one of the central founders of the Japanese theatrical style Butoh, died yesterday at the age of 103, the Web site of the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio is reporting. A full obituary by the New York Times dance critic Jennifer Dunning is available here. Writes Dunning:

Kazuo Ohno, a founder of Butoh, the influential Japanese dance-theater form whose traditional look of darkness and decay evoked for many the horrors of the wartime bombings of Japan, died on Tuesday in Yokohama, Japan. He was 103 and had continued to perform beyond his 100th year. …

Mr. Ohno’s solo performances, for which he was known, were irresistibly powerful and fraught with ambiguity. A humanist, he communicated the themes of the form through identifiable characters, most often flamboyantly female. The tottering women whom he personified onstage, his body twisted and grotesque, were both forces of nature and fragile creatures with flapping shoes and skewed wigs.

In this, Mr. Ohno also embodied the dual nature of Butoh, developed in Japan after World War II. It mines the primeval darkness of life and death in harrowing theatrical physical imagery yet is also capable of the dramatic equivalent of raucous, often bawdy laughter.

Many thanks to Andy Horwitz of Culturebot for the news.