WILLIAM KLEIN ‘DANCE HAPPENING TOKYO 1961’ at AKIO NAGASAWA GALLERY

ウイリアム・クライン「Dance Happening, Tokyo1961」展、Akio Nagasawa Galleryで開催。

Akio Nagasawa Gallery企画により昨年のアルル国際写真フェスティヴァル(フランス)にて「Kazuo Ono By Eikoh Hosoe and William Klein」と題され、細江英公氏との二人展にて発表されたものの東京巡回展。

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本展は、クライン氏が写真集「東京」の撮影のために来日された1961年に撮影されたもので、敗戦から立ち上がり成長を始めた都市・東京と、新たなダンスを試行する稀有な舞踏家たち3人の肉体、そしてそれらを鋭く見つめる写真家とのコラボレーションにより創り出されたもの。被写体となっているのは大野一雄、土方巽、大野慶人の3人の舞踏家で、写されている街頭で行なわれた“行為”は、その後、ハプニング、パフォーマンスと呼び名を変えて行われる肉体芸術の源流とも言えるもの。これらは世界的に見ても先駆的なもので、初期舞踏の貴重なドキュメントとなっている。展示の一部は、写真集「東京」に収録されていて、ほとんどのものは未発表のまま、人知れずクライン氏のスタジオに眠っていたもの。この56年もの時を経て、再び現れた“行為”は、クライン氏が3人の舞踏家に出会った(東京で)時と同様に、我々の眼に衝撃を与えるに違いない。

William Klein’s iconic work featuring butoh dancers on the streeeets of Tokyo will be shown at Akio Nagasawa Gallery’s exhibition “Dance Happening, Tokyo 1961”.

This Tokyo show is part of the travelling exhibition ”Kazuo Ohno By Eikoh Hosoe and William Klein” of works by the two photographers, which was originally put together by Akio Nagasawa for last year’s Rencontres d’Arles international photography festival in France.

The works shown in this exhibition are photographs taken in 1961, when Klein was in Japan for shootings that eventually resulted in his photo book Tokyo. Products of a collaboration between Klein and Hosoe, the pictures on display here showcase the two photographers’ keen observations of the city of Tokyo during the initial years of recovery and growth after the war, and at the same time, of the bodies of three eccentric Butoh dancers and their experimentation with a new form of dance.

The three Butoh dancers are Kazuo Ohno, Tatsumi Hijikata and Yoshito Ohno, whose “actions” in the streets can be considered as a prototype of the physical art that would later be called “happening” or “performance”. These photographs serve as valuable documents of early Butoh that was pioneering also in international terms. While some of the works shown in this exhibition were also included in the book Tokyo, most of the photographs have been lying dormant in Klein’s studio without ever being published. The “actions” that resurface now, 56 years after the event, still have the same striking visual impact that they had on William Klein when he first encountered the three dancers in Tokyo

WILLIAM KLEIN ‘DANCE HAPPENING TOKYO’AKIO NAGASAWA GALLERY1/11 – 2/26/2017