The dancing gaze across cultures: Kazuo Ohno's admiring La Argentina

Kazuo Ohno's 1977 butoh dance Admiring La Argentina is studied as a Bergsonian reflection on “pastness” in performance. As the work questions the absolute quality of the present, it is initially compared with Paul Valéry's concept of La Argentina's dance as existing in the dimension of temporal immediacy. Ohno's relation to La Argentina is discussed as spirit possession, primal identification, cultural anthropophagy, productive consumption, and memorialization. Ultimately, the analysis leads to the premise of excorporation or heteropathic identification. The essay concludes with a 2007 meditation on Yoshito Ohno's homage to his father, Emptiness (Kuu).