ABSTRACT
I first saw Kazuo Ohno perform in New York City in the early 1990s and have continued since then to write about him. This essay, like the one on Pina Bausch (Chapter 12), brings psychoanalytic theory to bear on dance. The dialogue that occurs between Ohno as witness to La Argentina’s dance in 1929 and Ohno as reenactor of La Argentina in 1977 passes through a significant tension in thinking about dance and time implicitly debated by Bergson and Valéry. The strange temporalities of reenactment must be associated with a “mimetic delay” that bring us back into the ambit of Duchamp and figurability (Chapters 7 and 9). Mimetic delay understood together with melancholic incorporation bring our interpretation of Ohno’s tribute to La Argentina into a postcolonial context.
The eye comes always ancient to its work.
–Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, 7