Curious about…Butoh.
I’m in Japan giving a talk in Sendai, the region tragically devastated by this years 3.11 earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear reactor meltdown, and in doing research for it have started to look at both traditional and untraditional ways that the Japanese express anger, complex social and emotional issues and generally how they externalise and politicize their feelings. One form of self-expression that seems noteworthy is Butoh, a nuanced and complex set of dance and physical movements.
Butoh (舞踏) is the collective name for a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for dance, performance, or movement inspired by the Ankoku-Butoh movement. It typically involves playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, extreme or absurd environments, and is traditionally performed in white body makeup with slow, hyper-controlled motion, with or without an audience. There is no set style, and it may be purely conceptual with no movement at all. Its origins have been attributed to Japanese dance legends Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno.
Butoh appeared first in Japan following World War II and specifically after student riots, when the roles of authority were subject to challenge and subversion. It also appeared as a reaction against the contemporary dance scene in Japan, which Hijikata felt was based on the one hand on imitating the West and on the other on imitating the Noh. He critiqued the current state of dance as overly superficial.
The first butoh piece, Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours) by Hijikata, premiered at a dance festival in 1959. It was based on the novel of the same name by Yukio Mishima. It explored the taboos of homosexuality and paedophilia and ended with a live chicken being held between the legs of Kazuo Ohno’s son Yoshito Ohno, after which Hijikata chased Yoshito off the stage in darkness. Mainly as a result of the misconception that the chicken had died due to strangulation, this piece outraged the audience and resulted in the banning of Hijikata from the festival, establishing him as an iconoclast.
There is much discussion about who should receive the credit for creating butoh. As artists worked to create new art in all disciplines after World War II, Japanese artists and thinkers emerged out of economic and social challenges that produced an energy and renewal of artists, dancers, painters, musicians, writers, and all other artists.
A number of people with few formal connections to Hijikata began to call their own idiosyncratic dance “butoh.” Among these are Iwana Masaki (岩名雅紀), Tanaka Min (田中民), and Teru Goi. Although all manner of systematic thinking about butoh dance can be found, perhaps Iwana Masaki most accurately sums up the variety of butoh styles:
“While ‘Ankoku Butoh’ can be said to have possessed a very precise method and philosophy (perhaps it could be called ‘inherited butoh’), I regard present day butoh as a ‘tendency’ that depends not only on Hijikata’s philosophical legacy but also on the development of new and diverse modes of expression. The ‘tendency’ that I speak of involved extricating the pure life which is dormant in our bodies.”
What Of It? Subversion is fascinating in cultures such as Japan where the prevalence of manners makes it hard to rebel. Butoh is a fascinating form of physical expression, both uniquely Japanese in its calm, almost contemplative forms and metaphorical subtext, but also subtly anarchic in its message.
I Am Curious about art forms that express complex emotions in culturally nuanced ways, about metaphorical storytelling and physical endurance as performance.
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