ABSTRACT
Amagatsu Ushio, the founder and artistic director of Sankai Juku, is an artist who ruminates through the process of sedimentation: dripping and dropping superfluous thoughts. Opposing the western classical ballet tradition, in which narratives are constructed through a dialectic development, or, differing from the collective brainstorming methodology of Hijikata Tatsumi, whereby a pool of literary and iconographic imageries are thrown pell-mell into the creative vessel, Amagatsu, conversely, peels off redundant concepts, aesthetics, and semiotics. This method of “creative filtration” has been adopted from his very first work Amagatsu-shō (1977): A metaphorical tale of an amagatsu, an ancient Japanese doll that used to be placed by a child’s bed as a talisman (Amagatsu 2015, 23).
