Ushio Amagatsu, an acclaimed dancer and choreographer who brought worldwide visibility to Butoh, a hauntingly minimalist Japanese form of dance theater that arose in the wake of wartime devastation, died on March 25 in Odawara, Japan. He was 74.
The cause of his death, in a hospital, was heart failure, said Semimaru, a founding member of Mr. Amagatsu’s celebrated contemporary dance company, Sankai Juku.
Butoh is an Anglicized version of “buto,” derived from “ankoku buto,” which translates to “dance of darkness.” It draws inspiration from surrealist European art movements like Dadaism.
Butoh was pioneered by Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata in the late 1950s and early ’60s, when Japan was still rebuilding from the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as dozens of other cities, during World War II. It was part of a countercultural movement that questioned existing values as well as those flooding in from the West, Semimaru said in an email, and it was an attempt to restore Japanese physicality in an unfamiliar new era.
Pointedly anti-traditionalist, Butoh rejected both Western and traditional Japanese dance aesthetics. It is performed by dancers in ghostly white body powder, symbolically erasing the personalities of the individual dancers to focus on humanity as a whole. They contorted their bodies and facial expressions as they explored the most primal recesses of the human experience — the sexual, the grotesque, birth, evolution.
Mr. Amagatsu founded Sankai Juku in 1975 and became one of Butoh’s leading figures. Starting in 1980, the company helped popularize Butoh internationally; it formed an ongoing production partnership with the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris in 1982 and performed in hundreds of cities in 48 countries around the world.
“Butoh, the DNA of Japanese culture, entered European culture through Amagatsu and Sankai Juku,” Akaji Maro, a founder of Mr. Amagatsu’s first company, Dairakudakan, wrote in a recent appreciation in the Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun, “and Amagatsu himself became the global standard for Butoh.”
For nearly a half-century, Sankai Juku won numerous honors around the world. In 2002 it won the Laurence Olivier Award, Britain’s highest stage honor, for best new dance production for “Hibiki (Resonance From Far Away).”
The company’s goal was never to comfort audiences with the familiar.
“A Sankai Juku performance is infused with often spectacular moments, meticulously choreographed and carefully manipulated, that scramble the emotions,” Terry Trucco wrote in a 1984 profile of the company in The New York Times. “Heads shaved and bodies powdered with rice flour, the company’s five men look unformed, not quite human. They writhe, roll back their eyes and grin demoniacally.”
“Hibiki” includes a moment in which four chalk-covered men surround a red dish of water — an allusion to blood, which, the critic Anna Kisselgoff wrote in a review in The Times of a 2002 performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is “the elixir of life” but also “a symbol of destruction.”
“The signature theme of all Butoh,” she added, is “destruction and creation.”
One of Mr. Amagatsu’s signature works, “Kinkan Shonen (The Kumquat Seed),” was inspired by his childhood, which was spent by the sea. Performing before a wall festooned with hundreds of tuna tails, Mr. Amagatsu created movements that seemed to reduce himself to the figure of a boy.
Another, “Jomon Sho” (Homage to Prehistory),” was inspired by cave paintings. It begins with dancers suspended in midair, looking like little more than clumps, before being lowered to the stage and unfolding from a fetal position.
“‘Jomon Sho’ may start with an image of the earth’s creation, of matter forming,” Ms. Kisselgoff wrote in a review of the work’s New York premiere in 1984. Before long, however, it is clear that some unnamed calamity has struck, with Mr. Amagatsu appearing “as a helpless mutant, so foreshortened from our perspective that he appears to be a Thalidomide casualty.”
“The image of the Bomb,” she added, “is never too far away.”
As Mr. Amagatsu told Ms. Trucco. “Projecting unerasable impressions is our business.”
At a more basic level, he often said, his form of Butoh was a “dialogue with gravity.”
“Dance is composed of tension and relaxation of gravity, just like the principle of life and its process,” he once said in an interview with Vogue Hommes. “An unborn baby who is floating inside mother’s womb faces to the tension of the gravity as soon as s/he is born.”
The resulting dance was often very, very slow. In a 2020 video interview, another Butoh dancer, Gadu Doushin, explained, “It’s almost like the people watching just go into hypnosis — or fall asleep, whatever comes first.”
After graduating from high school, he began training in ballet and modern dance, and eventually studied acting, before he developed an interest in Butoh. He helped found Dairakudakan in 1972 and, three years later, started Sankai Juku. The name translates to “studio of mountain and sea,” a reflection of his philosophy that human beings can learn from nature.
Mr. Amagatsu’s survivors include his daughter, Lea Ueshima, as well as a brother, a sister and two grandsons. His marriage to Lynne Bertin ended in divorce.
Mr. Amagatsu also worked extensively outside Sankai Juku. In 1988, for example, he created “Fushi (Homage to the Perspective to the Past ),” with music by Philip Glass, at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Mass.
He continued to perform until undergoing surgery for hypopharyngeal cancer in 2017. Even then, he continued to choreograph for his company, creating two new works, “Arc” (2019) and “Totem” (2023). “Kosa,” a collection of some of his best-known choreography, ran for two weeks at the Joyce Theater in New York last fall.
Throughout, Mr. Amagatsu believed that his choreography “depends on whether or not you can keep that ‘thread of consciousness’ unbroken,” he said in a 2009 interview with Performing Arts Network Japan. “If that thread is broken, it all becomes nothing more than exercise.”
