Naoyuki Oguri (born c.1963), [1] [2] who performs as simply Oguri, is a dancer and choreographer from Japan who lives in Los Angeles, California, where he works creating and teaching dance. His work is influenced by the tradition of the Japanese Butoh style of dance.
Oguri was born in Tajimi in the Gifu Prefecture of Japan. [1] Prior to coming to Los Angeles he studied with master Tatsumi Hijikata, [3] the founder of a genre of Butoh dance whom Oguri credits as his inspiration for interest in the field. [1] He also studied and danced with Min Tanaka's Body Weather in a mountain village in Yamanashi Prefecture in rural Japan [2] where he met dancer and choreographer Roxanne Steinberg. [4] In 1990 he came to Los Angeles and married Steinberg. In 2002 he was featured in the book In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art by Meiling Cheng. [5] Oguri was also featured in the film Height of Sky a documentary by Morleigh Steinberg. [1]
Subsequent works include Kalpa, performed at the Getty Center in Los Angeles in January 2012 [6] as well as a performance of Cold Dream Colour as a member of the Arcane Collective at the REDCAT, part of the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex. [7]
Butoh is a form of Japanese dance theatre that encompasses a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for dance, performance, or movement. Following World War II, butoh arose in 1959 through collaborations between its two key founders, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. The art form is known to "resist fixity" and is difficult to define; notably, founder Hijikata Tatsumi viewed the formalisation of butoh with "distress". Common features of the art form include playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, and extreme or absurd environments. It is traditionally performed in white body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion. However, with time butoh groups are increasingly being formed around the world, with their various aesthetic ideals and intentions.
The Los Angeles Music Center is one of the largest performing arts centers in the United States. Located in downtown Los Angeles, The Music Center is composed of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Ahmanson Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, Roy & Edna Disney CalArts Theatre (REDCAT), and Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Tatsumi Hijikata was a Japanese choreographer, and the founder of a genre of dance performance art called Butoh. By the late 1960s, he had begun to develop this dance form, which is highly choreographed with stylized gestures drawn from his childhood memories of his northern Japan home. It is this style which is most often associated with Butoh by Westerners.
Kazuo Ohno was a Japanese dancer who became a guru and inspirational figure in the dance form known as Butoh. He is the author of several books on Butoh, including The Palace Soars through the Sky, Dessin, Words of Workshop, and Food for the Soul. The latter two were published in English as Kazuo Ohno's World: From Without & Within (2004).
Charles "Chucky" Klapow is an American choreographer and dance instructor who has performed and choreographed for various performers and several television and stage productions. He is also known for his teachings on the mental approach to dance. Klapow's mother is Filipino, and his father is European-American.
Kenneth John Ortega is an American filmmaker, touring manager, and choreographer. He is known for directing the films Newsies, Hocus Pocus, The Cheetah Girls 2, High School Musical, Michael Jackson's This Is It, Descendants, and Julie and the Phantoms. He also choreographed the films St. Elmo's Fire, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Dirty Dancing; and directed multiple concert tours for Cher, Gloria Estefan, Miley Cyrus, and Michael Jackson. For his work, Ortega was honored with both a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a Disney Legend Award in 2019.
Sankai Juku (山海塾) is an internationally known butoh dance troupe. Co-founded by Amagatsu Ushio in 1975, they are touring worldwide, performing and teaching. As of 2010, Sankai Juku had performed in 43 countries and visited more than 700 cities.
Benjamin Millepied is a French dancer and choreographer, who has lived and worked in the United States since joining the New York City Ballet in 1995, where he became a soloist in 1998 and a principal in 2002. He has also created choreography for the company, and choreographed pieces for other major companies. He retired from the NYCB in 2011.
Rino Nakasone is a Japanese dancer, choreographer, artistic director and actor. Nakasone and her dance crew, Beat Freaks, participated in the third season of America's Best Dance Crew, where they finished in second place. Nakasone has worked as a choreographer in South Korea and Japan, working with groups such as Shinee, Girls' Generation, TVXQ, f(x), Red Velvet, and SMAP.
Colin Connor is a Canadian–British dancer, choreographer, and educator, based in the United States. With over forty commissions that span the worlds of contemporary dance, ballet and flamenco. Works draws from a large range of influences – musical, literary, social, and scientific – all used to bring attention back to the communicative power of the human body. He frequently, collaborates with artists of other disciplines, including composers, artists, and designers. As a choreographer, teacher and dancer, Connor is currently influencing the next generation of contemporary dancers and dance makers. Dancers who have trained with Connor have gone on to Mark Morris Dance Group, Scapino Ballet, Hubbard Street Dance, The Limon Dance Company and others.
Paul Chavez is an American composer of dance music, and a sound designer for installation and theater. He often composes under the project name FeltLike. Chavez has worked in the Los Angeles, California area since 1990 where he did some of his first works at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions where he started as a sound engineer. Chavez's music is influenced by the minimalism of Steve Reich and Paul Dresher and the experimental music of Robert Ashley and Laurie Anderson. His work has been featured at the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles and his recent score for the Arcane Collective's dance work Cold Dream Colour was created in collaboration with U2's The Edge.
Morleigh Steinberg is an American choreographer and dancer with the production company Arcane Collective. She is married to The Edge, a rock guitarist with U2, a rock music band.
Arcane Collective is a contemporary dance production company, producing and presenting work from a cooperative of international artists from different backgrounds. It was founded in 2011 by Morleigh Steinberg, a dancer and choreographer and Oguri, a dancer and choreographer from Japan.
Degenerate Art Ensemble is a Seattle-based multi-art performance company whose work is inspired by punk, comics, cinema, nightmares and fairy tales driven by live music and visceral movement theater and dance. The group was founded and is co-directed by dancer/performer/director Haruko Nishimura and composer/conductor/performer Joshua Kohl. Degenerate Art Ensemble is both a multi-discipline performance company and a band, having performed major dance and live music works, orchestral concerts, rock shows and site-specific street spectacles.
Akira Kasai (1943) is a Japanese butoh dancer and choreographer, who despite being significantly younger than mentors Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata, is considered to be pioneers of the art form along with them. Kasai trained in other forms of dance, but turned to butoh in the 1960s when he met and began to work with these two men. He started his own studio in 1971 but closed it in 1979 to move and study Eurythmy in Germany. He did not dance professionally at the time and for years after his return to Japan in 1986 he stayed off the stage stating that he felt too disconnected from Japanese society to perform. He returned to professional dance in 1994, with the work Saraphita and revived his studio Tenshi kan, now influenced by Eurythmy and other dance principles. He has since performed, choreographed and taught in Asia, the Americas and Europe, but his choreography is sufficiently different from most other butoh that its authenticity has been questioned.
Carmina Escobar is an experimental vocalist, improviser, performance artist, multimedia artist, composer, and educator from Mexico City who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Jeffrey Fleishman from the Los Angeles Times has written that Escobar "can make her voice sound like insects dancing on dry leaves or a rocket ship dying in space." She is on the VoiceArts faculty of the California Institute of the Arts where she teaches on "voice technique, experimental voice workshops, contemporary vocal music, and interdisciplinary projects regarding the voice".
Nia Love is a dancer and choreographer based in New York City. She is a radical thinker, artist, performer and professor that focuses on Modern dance, Post-Modern dance, and West African dance. She is known for her spiritual relationships to movement and performance, as well as her personal work that is critical of structural racism and examines the role of women in dance through her poetry, movement and art.
Jonathon Grasse is an American composer, ethnomusicologist, and improvising electric guitarist. He is a professor of music at California State University, Dominguez Hills.
Hirokazu Kosaka is a Japanese-born American artist, ordained Shingon Buddhist priest, and the Visual Arts Director at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. In 1966 Kosaka moved from Kyoto to Los Angeles where he attended Chouinard Art Institute and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts. While at Chouinard he became influenced by conceptual art, leading to his participation in L.A.’s emerging conceptual art scene during the 1970s. Eventually moving back to Japan, he then traveled to Europe and South America before returning to Los Angeles to live in 1976. In addition to his B.F.A. he also holds a Master of Arts in Theology from Columbia University. His multi-disciplinary practice spans performance art, sculpture, calligraphy, conceptual art and Kyūdō. In 2004, Kosaka performed “In Between The Heartbeat” at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, using Kyūdō, electric blankets, and copier machines to comment critically on technology.
Baku Ishii was a Japanese dancer and choreographer. He was a pioneer of modern dance in Japan.