Ledoh will be performing Butoh at di Rosa Preserve. His performance draws from
his childhood experiences in Burma (now Myanmar) and Thailand.
Atuxedoed man with a shock of bright orange hair on an otherwise naked scalp draws a length of ribbon across the throat of a woman in a wedding gown – slowly, the man cinches the ribbon in his hands. Time and space seem to contract as often as the performer’s body contorts and unwinds with the lucidity of someone underwater. The performer seems to freeze, then suddenly erupts into a tumult of knees and elbows.
Meet Ledoh, Sonoma’s own practitioner of Butoh, the umbrella term for a collection of contemporary dance techniques that emerged as a rebel form in Japan following World War II.
“It’s something that hits you in the gut. I don’t want ‘meanings.’ For me, Butoh is not that, but at the same time the academic world is trying to find words for it and definition for it. That’s a danger. I’m just part of the movement,” explained Ledoh, who furthers the movement with “Red,” a work he will perform at the di Rosa Preserve’s monthly art party “First Friday” this September (members and non-members alike can imbibe wine, beer and cocktails in the preserve’s Gatehouse Gallery while San Francisco DJ duo Dave Paul and Jeff Harris play ‘80s beats).
Ledoh’s performance explores the relationship between power and freedom and draws from his childhood experiences as a member of the oppressed Ka-Ren tribe of Burma (now called Myanmar) and Thailand. The piece is continuation a project incubated with New York-based non-profit arts foundation Creative Capital dubbed “Signature Required: Life During Wartime.”
“I’m trying to use Butoh as a way to express,” said Ledoh. “Living as an immigrant person in this modern culture, the only way you can break the caste, or the different income brackets, is through art. Art breaks that.”
As an artist, Ledoh was attracted to dance, and Butoh in particular, precisely because he initially had little experience with it. The result was that he was able to explore the discipline, which often juxtaposes images of kinetic elegance to a grotesquerie of knotted limbs, without any aesthetic preconceptions.
“I didn’t have a dance background, so it allows me to be free in it. Visual art limits itself, whether it’s a canvas or multimedia or whatever medium one uses to convey the experience of art,” explained Ledoh. “I look at Butoh as the whole piece – not just the kinetic movement, but the visuals, the sound, the space itself, the air, the breath, all of that which the environment envelops.”
Though the form was born of artistic dissent, it’s often associated with spiritual undertakings, a notion that Ledoh accepts though he is more inclined to use the form to engender a sense of “presence.”
“There are some people who call Butoh ‘mystical’ and are more drawn to that aspect of it. I am free from it. You can do yoga and meditation, but it’s always talking about a ‘moment.’ You can’t come from a concept, you have to go back to the form that we live in – the body – which is always present. Our mind is always in the past or future, therefore, how do we be in the moment?”
For Ledoh, the answer to the question is, of course, Butoh.
“It’s all about my mind’s relationship to my body,” said Ledoh. “I am not just the work – I am. Where does that come from? Am I? That’s the way I approach the world.”
Ledoh performs “Red” at 7 p.m., Friday, Sept. 7 at the di Rosa Preserve, 5200 Carneros Hwy. 121, Napa. To RSVP, call 707.226.5991, ext. 47.
