A documentary about legendary butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno.

Taking inspiration from the haunting Japanese dance/performance art form Butoh, the film offers a cinematic interpretation of this singular style of expression. With high contrast, exaggerated grain, abstracted colors and flickering frames, A Monster with Its Mouth Agape captures the unsettling and chaotic climate of post-war Japan. Featuring a rare audio recording of Butoh master Yoshito Ohno.

Short film in which butoh dancing is used to reflect on the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Invisible People is a multi-layered depiction of the unique Japanese contemporary dance Butoh that flows between revolt, eroticism, trance, prayer, ancestral experience, and physical anonymity. The film gradually drifts away from its core issue and becomes a general portrayal of life itself, with all its unforeseen strokes of fate and strange micro-connections.

"O,Kind God!"is another take on Kazuo Ohno. This moving testimony to the effects his physical evolution has had on his every-day life and dance reveals yet even more strongly that ever-present and life embracing emotions so characteristic of all his previous work. In his appearance in Venice (1999) and a series of performances in his home in Yokohama in 2001, Ohno powerfully demonstrated that his dance embodies life in all its aspects. (Now, though physically immobile), Ohno's very presence continues to exude emotion: it overflows with facial expressions and delicate hand movements; fluid as water and changeable as the sky. This documentary reveals what dance is truly about. Kazuo has given us something very precious.

Comprising historic archive footage and texts this DVD box enlightens us greatly about Yoshito Ohno's here and now. Butoh has a distinct starting point, namely, in 1959, with Kinjiki , a duet featuring Tatsumi Hijikata and Yoshito Ohno. His father, the legendary Kazuo Ohno created another epoch-making opus in 1977 Admiring La Argentina, with Yoshito Ohno as production manager. These links are no mere coincidence. To date, we've tended to overlook Yoshito Ohno, barely granting him the recognition he merits. Just as dance requires a lengthy gestation period in which to evolve, his dance has finally come into our field of vision, in all its freshness and stark-nakedness, linking Butoh's origins to its zenith, to a point where he now stands at a crossroads.