From Postmodern Dance to Nihon-Buyō, Yasuko Yokoshi Does Away With Categories

Laura Cappelle

After four decades in New York, choreographer Yasuko Yokoshi made a radical change: back in Japan, she immersed herself in nihon-buyō, a choreographic form that has survived centuries of history almost without a scratch. Far from the rebellious individuality of the postmodern scene, she found another way to put herself at the service of dance – and today bridges the gap between the two.

In 2015, Yasuko Yokoshi was at the peak of her American career. Celebrated by the New York Times for her “audacious and singular imagination” in the postmodern tradition, she was fresh off a string of prestigious prizes and residencies – yet felt unease at the implicit pressure from programmers to “create more and more, bigger and bigger work,” to “compromise so much to have more market value.” All the while, she says, she felt “her work was getting weaker.”

She opted for a clean break. Yokoshi returned to her native Japan, which she had left in 1981, and threw herself wholeheartedly into a very different world: that of nihon-buyō, the refined Japanese dance style present in kabuki plays, whose origins date back to the 17^th century. Far from the rat race, she sought, against all odds, to “become nobody” and “to learn, without expectations.”

Now based in Kyoto, Yokoshi navigates with disconcerting ease between the tatamis of nihon-buyō studios and the world of experimental dance. “I've often been told that I’m going back to my home country’s traditions, but for me it was just new choreography,” she explains. “I fell in love with certain nihon-buyō choreographers, like I had fallen in love with Trisha Brown in the past.”

Growing up near Hiroshima, she was hardly predestined for either path. The daughter of two teachers, Yokoshi learned ballet for a few years before studying to become a bilingual secretary, at a time when opportunities for women were “limited.” To further perfect her English, her parents sent her to a college in Massachusetts, where she was the only Japanese student.

By chance, her advisor pointed her in the direction of dance classes to earn extra credits. Yokoshi discovered a new world: barefoot dancing (“very weird for me,” she recalls with a giggle), Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, then choreography through David Gordon, a former member of the Judson Dance Theater.

Through him, Yokoshi dove into the philosophy of postmodern dance, starting with its rejection of choreographic virtuosity: “David talked a lot about taking out all the filler in movement.” One day, he asked the group to invent one minute of dance “without any gesture.” Yokoshi was perplexed, yet fascinated: “So I did kendo, the martial art I’d learned in my youth. I kept screaming and running around like I was fighting.”

Driven by the desire to create her own work, she set off for New York. “I wanted to learn the industry, so I started to audition and audition,” she says. “Around 1986, there weren’t many Japanese dancers there, so I would be cast as ‘the Asian.’ My first audition was for the role of an Inuit...” Her experience as an immigrant quickly informed her creations, broaching issues like gender and cultural identity. “I couldn’t just be a default body, like white dancers. I always had to be aware of my Asian female body.”

Paradoxically, Yokoshi was also increasingly regarded as a foreigner in Japan. “I became way too American for my parents. Their daughter had just disappeared,” she says. “For them, who grew up during World War II and were from Hiroshima, my going to the US was very complicated.”

It was during a long stay in her native country, in 2003, that a friend suggested she take nihon-buyō classes. It was no easy endeavor: in Japan, the teaching of traditional stage forms like kabuki and noh, takes place mainly in private, closed settings, within families of artists who pass on these techniques from generation to generation.

Yokoshi’s path and training stood out in that environment. “Because of my release technique that I was trained with in America, I could copy the movement without an obvious dance style,” she says. “My teacher was really pissed off. She was like: ‘How could you? This gaijin [foreigner] from America!’”

Still, Yokoshi initially found nihon-buyō “boring” – until one day, her teacher demonstrated a dance from the repertoire called “Kishi-no-Yanagi,” inspired by a geisha meeting with her lover. “She was already over 70, and she just transformed into a 30-year-old woman, right in front of me. I thought the story was silly, but I was like: I want to learn this.”

For years, Yokoshi took occasional classes during her visits to Japan. In 2015, she moved back permanently, which allowed her to immerse herself in a training style far removed from postmodern dance. Where the latter favors the artist’s individuality, nihon-buyō demands imitation: “Your teacher is the textbook. You watch and copy her exactly, like a mirror, without asking questions.” The work, Yokoshi explains, is more important than the performer, and is passed down as it is from generation to generation. “Out of respect, you cannot destroy or change it. One day, I was tired, and my teacher asked me to stop, saying, ‘I feel really sorry for the dance.’”

While Yokoshi has created several shows directly inspired by her experience of nihon-buyō, she has not given up on her experimental streak: last October, she presented Lynch (a play), a performance combining fragments of movement and text, at the Kyoto Experiment festival. Today, she combines the two modes of expression without hierarchy, and campaigns for Japanese contemporary dancers to have access to nihon-buyō classes. If they wish to do so. In her case, becoming “nobody” proved a transformative experience. “The idea that performance isn’t about the individual – it’s great freedom,” she says. “It’s not about me. It’s about dance.”

Laura Cappelle is a Paris-based journalist and scholar. In 2023, she was appointed associate professor at Sorbonne Nouvelle University. She edited a French-language introduction to dance history, Nouvelle Histoire de la danse en Occident (Seuil, 2020), now adapted as comic book, Une histoire dessinée de la danse (Seuil, 2024), with illustrator Thomas Guibert. Her new book, Créer des ballets au XXI^e siècle, was published with CNRS Éditions in May 2024. She has been the Financial Times’ Paris-based dance critic since 2010, and the New York Times’ French theater critic since 2017. She is also an editorial consultant for CN D Magazine.

The reporting for this article was done as part of Critics in Residence @Kyoto Experiment 2024, a program organised by the Delegation of the European Union to Japan, operated by the Goethe-Institut Tokyo.

Lynch(a play)
Choreography: Yasuko Yokoshi
as part as Kyoto Experiment 2024 / Past event
Kyoto Experiment festival is supported by Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels