Festival brings international butoh to San Francisco.

SAN FRANCISCO--An art of anarchy becoming a spiritual practice? Not as unlikely as it sounds. At least that's what's happening in the Bay Area to one of Japan's most recent cultural exports. Butoh used to be a rather esoteric Japanese dance form, parented by postwar nativism and the memories of German expressionist dance. No longer. For the last four years, Brechin Flournoy, founder and director of San Francisco's annual Butoh Festival (which runs August 10 though 28 at Fort Mason), has seen the appeal of what used to be a chillingly mesmerizing art form grow and diversify. "At first it was the dancers and visual artists who came," she explained, "but now we get much broader audiences."

Not only have audiences changed; so have participants in the quarterly workshops which the festival offers as an ongoing, year-round activity. "We now get nondancers, teachers, engineers, taxi drivers, ordinary people. They come because of the way butoh encourages them to look inside themselves."

Flournoy understands that appeal. Trained as a modern dancer, her first exposure came through Maureen Fleming, who taught butoh at Antioch College. "The way she taught the process of letting go of technique made me feel that for the first time in my life I was moving naturally." Flournoy was hooked, and a butoh festival was just a matter of time.

This year, with a budget that has more than tripled since 1995, the San Francisco Butoh Festival (codirected by Takami Mochizuki Craddock) has been expanded to three weeks. It includes workshops, a free symposium at the Asian Art Museum, free outdoor performances, and appearances by guest artists and local butoh dancers. To give Bay Area audiences a taste of just how many flavors butoh has acquired since its early days in the underground nightclubs of Tokyo, Flournoy has invited groups from Thailand (Katsura Kan), Japan (Masahide Ohmori, Abe "M" Ria, Yan-Shu), Canada (Kokoro Dance), Mexico (Diego Pinon), and Argentina (Gustavo Collini Sartor).

The local butoh community presents the world premiere of an as yet untitled evening-length work developed under the guidance of Hijikata pupil and master teacher Akira Kasai, who used to dance on those late-night Tokyo stages.