INTERVIEW: Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons
Kazuo Ohno, one of the founders of Butoh, “the dance of darkness,” a Japanese dance form which embraces playfully grotesque costuming, subversive subjects, and absurd staging. Over the years, Hegarty would incorporate some of these elements into his own work. The poster of Ohno, from that point forward, would remain above Hegarty’s bed and it would be a source of his greatest inspiration.
“Kazuo has been a lifelong hero of mine, and has a very particular, quite feminine ecstatic approach to theatrical dance form—very devotional and very emotional,” said Hegarty. “And in the course of my work, I’ve aspired to do in music what I was so compelled to observe him doing in dance in terms of aspiring to a kind of transformation, the white inside blackness—shaking inside molecules—in a very tender way.”
