Butoh (舞踏, Butō) is a form of Japanese dance theatre that encompasses a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for dance, performance, or movement. Following World War II, butoh arose in 1959 through collaborations between its two key founders, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. The art form is known to "resist fixity"[1] and is difficult to define; notably, founder Hijikata Tatsumi viewed the formalisation of butoh with "distress".[2] Common features of the art form include playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, and extreme or absurd environments. It is traditionally performed in white body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion. However, with time butoh groups are increasingly being formed around the world, with their various aesthetic ideals and intentions.
Butoh first appeared in post-World War II Japan in 1959, under the collaboration of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, "in the protective shadow of the 1950s and 1960s avant-garde".[3] A key impetus of the art form was a reaction against the Japanese dance scene then, which Hijikata felt was overly based on imitating the West and following traditional styles like Noh. Thus, he sought to "turn away from the Western styles of dance, ballet and modern",[2] and to create a new aesthetic that embraced the "squat, earthbound physique... and the natural movements of the common folk".[2] This desire found form in the early movement of "ankoku butō" (暗黒舞踏). The term means "dance of darkness", and the form was built on a vocabulary of "crude physical gestures and uncouth habits... a direct assault on the refinement (miyabi) and understatement (shibui) so valued in Japanese aesthetics."[4]
The first butoh piece, Forbidden Colors (禁色, Kinjiki) by Tatsumi Hijikata, premiered at a dance festival in 1959. It was based on the novel of the same name by Yukio Mishima. It explored the taboo of homosexuality 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 audience outrage over this piece, Hijikata was banned from the festival, establishing him as an iconoclast.
The earliest butoh performances were called (in English) "Dance Experience". In the early 1960s, Hijikata used the term "Ankoku-Buyou" (暗黒舞踊, dance of darkness) to describe his dance. He later changed the word "buyo", filled with associations of Japanese classical dance, to "butoh", a long-discarded word for dance that originally meant European ballroom dancing.[5]
In later work, Hijikata continued to subvert conventional notions of dance. Inspired by writers such as Yukio Mishima (as noted above), Comte de Lautréamont, Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet and Marquis de Sade, he delved into grotesquerie, darkness, and decay. At the same time, Hijikata explored the transmutation of the human body into other forms, such as those of animals. He also developed a poetic and surreal choreographic language, butoh-fu (舞踏譜, fu means "notation" in Japanese), to help the dancer transform into other states of being.
The work developed beginning in 1960 by Kazuo Ohno with Tatsumi Hijikata was the beginning of what now is regarded as "butoh". In Nourit Masson-Sékiné and Jean Viala's book Shades of Darkness,[6] Ohno is regarded as "the soul of butoh", while Hijikata is seen as "the architect of butoh". Hijikata and Ohno later developed their own styles of teaching. Students of each style went on to create different groups such as Sankai Juku, a Japanese dance troupe well known to fans in North America.
Students of these two artists have been known to highlight the differing orientations of their masters. While Hijikata was a fearsome technician of the nervous system influencing input strategies and artists working in groups, Ohno is thought of as a more natural, individual, and nurturing figure who influenced solo artists.
Starting in the early 1980s, butoh experienced a renaissance as butoh groups began performing outside Japan for the first time; at this time the style was marked by "full body paint (white or dark or gold), near or complete nudity, shaved heads, grotesque costumes, clawed hands, rolled-up eyes and mouths opened in silent screams."[7][8] Sankai Juku was a touring butoh group; during one performance by Sankai Juku, in which the performers hung upside down from ropes from a tall building in Seattle, one of the ropes broke, resulting in the death of a performer. The footage was played on national news, and butoh became more widely known in America through the tragedy.[9] A PBS documentary of a butoh performance in a cave without an audience further broadened awareness of butoh in America.
There is a theatre in Kyoto, Japan, called the Kyoto Butoh-kan, which attempts to be dedicated to regular professional butoh performances.[10][11]
Debate
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 from 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), and Teru Goi.[12] 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.[13]
Hijikata is often quoted saying what opposition he had to a codified dance: "Since I believe neither in a dance teaching method nor in controlling movement, I do not teach in this manner."[14] However, in the pursuit and development of his own work, it is only natural that a "Hijikata" style of working and, therefore, a "method" emerged. Both Mikami Kayo and Maro Akaji have stated that Hijikata exhorted his disciples not to imitate his own dance when they left to create their own butoh dance groups. If this is the case, then his words make sense: There are as many types of butoh as there are butoh choreographers.
New Butoh
In 2000 Sayoko Onishi established in Palermo, Italy where she founded the International Butoh Academy at the presence of master and butoh founder Yoshito Ohno. Sayoko Onishi and Yoshito Ohno are credited as being the first butoh choreographers to speak about New Butoh style. The academy name was changed to New Butoh School in 2007. In 2018 the New Butoh School established in Ruvo di Puglia, Italy.
Butoh exercises
Most butoh exercises use image work to varying degrees: from the razorblades and insects of Ankoku Butoh, to Dairakudakan's threads and water jets, to Seiryukai's rod in the body. There is a general trend toward the body as "being moved", from an internal or external source, rather than consciously moving a body part. A certain element of "control vs. uncontrol" is present through many of the exercises.[15]
Conventional butoh exercises sometimes cause great duress or pain but, as Kurihara points out, pain, starvation, and sleep deprivation were all part of life under Hijikata's method,[5] which may have helped the dancers access a movement space where the movement cues had terrific power. It is also worth noting that Hijikata's movement cues are, in general, much more visceral and complicated than anything else since.
Most exercises from Japan (with the exception of much of Ohno Kazuo's work) have specific body shapes or general postures assigned to them, while almost none of the exercises from Western butoh dancers have specific shapes. This seems to point to a general trend in the West that butoh is not seen as specific movement cues with shapes assigned to them such as Ankoku Butoh or Dairakudakan's technique work, but rather that butoh is a certain state of mind or feeling that influences the body directly or indirectly.
Hijikata did in fact stress feeling through form in his dance, saying, "Life catches up with form,"[16] which in no way suggests that his dance was mere form. Ohno, though, comes from the other direction: "Form comes of itself, only insofar as there is a spiritual content to begin with."[16]
The trend toward form is apparent in several Japanese dance groups, who recycle Hijikata's shapes and present butoh that is only body-shapes and choreography[17] which would lead butoh closer to contemporary dance or performance art than anything else. A good example of this is Torifune Butoh-sha's recent works.[15]
Iwana Masaki, a butoh dancer whose work shies away from all elements of choreography, states:
I have never heard of a butoh dancer entering a competition. Every butoh performance itself is an ultimate expression; there are not and cannot be second or third places. If butoh dancers were content with less than the ultimate, they would not be actually dancing butoh, for real butoh, like real life itself, cannot be given rankings.[13]
Defining butoh
Critic Mark Holborn has written that butoh is defined by its very evasion of definition.[18] The Kyoto Journal variably categorizes butoh as dance, theater, "kitchen," or "seditious act."[19] The San Francisco Examiner describes butoh as "unclassifiable".[20] The SF Weekly article "The Bizarre World of Butoh" was about former sushi restaurant Country Station, in which Koichi Tamano was "chef" and Hiroko Tamano "manager". The article begins, "There's a dirty corner of Mission Street, where a sushi restaurant called Country Station shares space with hoodlums and homeless drunks, a restaurant so camouflaged by dark and filth it easily escapes notice. But when the restaurant is full and bustling, there is a kind of theater that happens inside…"[21] Butoh frequently occurs in areas of extremes of the human condition, such as skid rows, or extreme physical environments, such as a cave with no audience, remote Japanese cemetery, or hanging by ropes from a skyscraper in front of the Washington Monument.[22]
Hiroko Tamano considers modeling for artists to be butoh, in which she poses in "impossible" positions held for hours, which she calls "really slow Butoh".[citation needed] The Tamano's home seconds as a "dance" studio, with any room or portion of yard potentially used. When a completely new student arrived for a workshop in 1989 and found a chaotic simultaneous photo shoot, dress rehearsal for a performance at Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, workshop, costume making session, lunch, chat, and newspaper interview, all "choreographed" into one event by Tamano, she ordered the student, in broken English, "Do interview." The new student was interviewed, without informing the reporter that the student had no knowledge what butoh was. The improvised information was published, "defining" butoh for the area public. Tamano then informed the student that the interview itself was butoh, and that was the lesson.[citation needed] Such "seditious acts," or pranks in the context of chaos, are butoh.[18]
While many approaches to defining butoh—as with any performative tradition—will focus on formalism or semantic layers, another approach is to focus on physical technique. While butoh does not have a codified classical technique rigidly adhered to within an authoritative controlled lineage, Hijikata Tatsumi did have a substantive methodical body of movement techniques called Butoh Fu. Butoh Fu can be described as a series of cues largely based on incorporating visualizations that directly affect the nervous system, producing qualities of movement that are then used to construct the form and expression of the dance. This mode of engaging the nervous system directly has much in common with other mimetic techniques to be found in the history of dance, such as Lecoq's range of nervous system qualities, Decroux's rhythm and density within movement, and Zeami Motokiyo's qualitative descriptions for character types.
Influence
Teachers influenced by more Hijikata style approaches tend to use highly elaborate visualizations that can be highly mimetic, theatrical, and expressive. Teachers of this style include Yukio Waguri, Yumiko Yoshioka, Minako Seki and Koichi and Hiroko Tamano, founders of Harupin-Ha Butoh Dance Company.[23]
There have been many unique groups and performance companies influenced by the movements created by Hijikata and Ohno, ranging from the highly minimalist of Sankai Juku to very theatrically explosive and carnivalesque performance of groups like Dairakudakan.
International
Many Nikkei (or members of the Japanese diaspora), such as Japanese Canadians Jay Hirabayashi of Kokoro Dance, Denise Fujiwara, incorporate butoh in their dance or have launched butoh dance troupes.
More notable European practitioners, who have worked with butoh and avoided the stereotyped 'butoh' languages which some European practitioners tend to adopt, take their work out of the sometimes closed world of 'touring butoh' and into the international dance and theatre scenes include SU-EN Butoh Company (Sweden), Marie-Gabrielle Rotie,[24] Kitt Johnson (Denmark), Vangeline (France), and Katharina Vogel (Switzerland). Such practitioners in Europe aim to go back to the original aims of Hijikata and Ohno and go beyond the tendency to imitate a ' master' and instead search within their own bodies and histories for 'the body that has not been robbed' (Hijikata).
LEIMAY (Brooklyn) emerged 1996-2005 from the creative work of Shige Moriya, Ximena Garnica, Juan Merchan, and Zachary Model at the space known as CAVE. LEIMAY has organized and run diverse programs including, the NY Butoh Kan Training Initiative which later became the NY Butoh Festival; Vietnamese Artist in Residency; NY Butoh Kan Training Initiative which turned into the NY Butoh Kan Teaching Residency and now is called LEIMAY Ludus Training). A key element of LEIMAY's work has become transformation of specific spaces. In this way, the space – at times a body, environment or object – and the body – at times dancer, actor, performer or object – are fundamental to LEIMAY's work.
Eseohe Arhebamen, a princess of the Kingdom of Ugu and royal descendant of the Benin Empire, is the first indigenous and native-born African butoh performer.[25] She invented a style called "Butoh-vocal theatre" which incorporates singing, talking, mudras, sign language, spoken word, and experimental vocalizations with butoh after the traditional dance styles of the Edo people of West Africa.[26] She is also known as Edoheart.[27][28]
COLLAPSINGsilence Performance Troupe (San Francisco) was established and co-founded by Indra Lowenstein and Terrance Graven in 1992 and was active until 2001. They were a movement-based troupe that incorporated butoh, shibari, ecstatic trance states, and Odissi. They designed all of their costumes, props, puppets, and site-specific installations, while collaborating with live musicians such as Sharkbait, Hollow Earth, Haunted by Waters, and Mandible Chatter. In 1996, they were featured at The International Performance Art Festival and also performed at Asian American Dance Performances, San Francisco Butoh Festival, Theatre of Yugen, The Los Angeles County Exposition (L.A.C.E.), Stanford University, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the beginning years at Burning Man, and various other venues creating multi-media dance performances.
In 1992, Bob DeNatale founded the Flesh & Blood Mystery Theater to spread the art of butoh. Performing throughout the United States, Flesh & Blood Mystery Theater was a regular participant in the San Francisco Butoh Festival of which DeNatale was an Associate Producer. DeNatale's other butoh credits include performing in the film Oakland Underground (2006) and touring Germany and Poland with Ex…it! ' 99 International Dance Festival.
In 2018, Patruni Sastry redesigned Butoh Natyam with the blend of Indian classical dance Bharatanayam with the pedagogy of butoh and presented/performed across 200 shows in India. in later years Patruni also used Butoh as a part of their drag practice.[29][30][31]
Jay Hirabayashi performs a butoh dance piece in memory of his parents, Gordon and Esther Hirabayashi, at a Day of Remembrance event in Seattle, Washington, February 22, 2014.
Music videos
Music videos featuring Butoh or butoh-style performance
Matt Elliott's song "Something About Ghosts" features Gyohei Zaitsu
Dir En Grey's 2003 "Obscure" features women dressed in Geisha attire with blackened teeth, wearing butoh-style face paint and performing bodily movements/facial expressions similar to those found in butoh.
Foals' "Inhaler" by director Dave Ma with movement choreography by Marie-Gabrielle Rotie
The influence of Butoh has also been felt heavily in the J-Horror movie genre, forming the basis for the appearance of the ghosts in seminal 2002 film Ju-on: The Grudge.[37]
The 2008 Doris Dörrie film Cherry Blossoms features a Bavarian widower on a journey to Japan to grieve for his wife and develops an understanding of Butoh style performance.
Richard Armitage cited the dance form as an inspiration for his animalistic portrayal of the villain Francis Dolarhyde (the "Red Dragon") in the third season of Hannibal.[38]
The Brisbane-based artist, KETTLE, attributes their performance art pieces, Otherwise (2001)[39] and The Australian National Anthem (2001),[40] to Butoh.
Butoh dancers play the coven of witches featured in the climax of the 2015 folk horror film The Witch.
In 2019, Japanese-American indie rock musician Mitski began incorporating Butoh-inspired choreography into her live performances, including "highly stylized, sometimes unsettling gestures," developed with performance artist and movement coach Monica Mirabile.[41][42][43]
Butoh dance is a recurring theme in the 2020 Taiwanese movie Wrath of Desire.[44]
Taiwanese-American performer Nymphia Wind created an outfit inspired by Butoh for the Dancing Queen runway on the season 16 "Snatch Game" episode of RuPaul's Drag Race (2024).[45]
Alishina, Juju (2015). Butoh dance training: secrets of Japanese dance through the Alishina method (paperbacked.). Singing Dragon. ISBN978-1-84819-276-8. / Butoh Dance Training (ebooked.). London: Jessica Kingsley. 21 July 2015. ISBN978-0-85701-226-5. Retrieved 16 September 2020.
1 2 3 Sanders, Vicki (Autumn 1988). "Dancing and the Dark Soul of Japan: An Aesthetic Analysis of "Butō"". Asian Theatre Journal. 5 (2): 152. JSTOR25161489.
↑ Sanders, Vicki (Autumn 1988). "Dancing and the Dark Soul of Japan: An Aesthetic Analysis of "Butō"". Asian Theatre Journal. 5 (2): 148–163. JSTOR25161489.
↑ Sanders, Vicki (Autumn 1988). "Dancing and the Dark Soul of Japan: An Aesthetic Analysis of "Butō"". Asian Theatre Journal. 5 (2): 149. JSTOR25161489.
1 2 Kurihara, Nanako. The Most Remote Thing in the Universe: Critical Analysis of Hijikata Tatsumi's Butoh Dance. Diss. New York U, 1996. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1996. 9706275
↑ Kuniyoshi, Kazuko. An Overview of the Contemporary Japanese Dance Scene. Tokyo: The Japan Foundation, 1985; Viala, Jean. Butoh: Shades of Darkness. Tokyo: Shufunotomo, 1988.
1 2 Iwana, Masaki. The Dance and Thoughts of Masaki Iwana. Tokyo: Butoh Kenkyuu-jo Hakutou-kan, 2002.
Tatsumi Hijikata was a Japanese choreographer, and the founder of a genre of dance performance art called Butoh. By the late 1960s, he had begun to develop this dance form, which is highly choreographed with stylized gestures drawn from his childhood memories of his northern Japan home. It is this style which is most often associated with Butoh by Westerners.
Physical theatre is a genre of theatrical performance that encompasses storytelling primarily through physical movement. Although several performance theatre disciplines are often described as "physical theatre", the genre's characteristic aspect is a reliance on the performers' physical motion rather than, or combined with, text to convey storytelling. Performers can communicate through various body gestures.
Eikoh Hosoe was a Japanese photographer and filmmaker who emerged in the experimental arts movement of post-World War II Japan. Hosoe is best known for his dark, high contrast, black and white photographs of human bodies. His images are often psychologically charged, exploring subjects such as death, erotic obsession, and irrationality. Some of his photographs reference religion, philosophy and mythology, while others are nearly abstract, such as Man and Woman # 24, from 1960. He was professionally and personally affiliated with the writer Yukio Mishima and experimental artists of the 1960s such as the dancer Tatsumi Hijikata, though his work extends to a diversity of subjects. His photography is not only notable for its artistic influence but for its wider contribution to the reputations of his subjects.
Kazuo Ohno was a Japanese dancer who became a guru and inspirational figure in the dance form known as Butoh. He is the author of several books on Butoh, including The Palace Soars through the Sky, Dessin, Words of Workshop, and Food for the Soul. The latter two were published in English as Kazuo Ohno's World: From Without & Within (2004).
Junichi Kakizaki is a Japanese artist, sculptor, floral artist, nature art artist, land art artist and environmental artist. He exhibits regularly both in Japan and internationally. Since 1992, he has mainly worked on scenography. He brought a floral design representation in area of contemporary art. His daughter, Memi, is a former member of Japanese idol group Hinatazaka46.
Ushio Amagatsu was a Japanese choreographer known as the leader of the Butoh dance group Sankai Juku, which he founded in 1975.
Tadanori Yokoo is a Japanese graphic designer, illustrator, printmaker and painter. Yokoo’s signature style of psychedelia and pastiche engages a wide span of modern visual and cultural phenomena from Japan and around the world.
Sankai Juku (山海塾) is an internationally known butoh dance troupe. Co-founded by Amagatsu Ushio in 1975, they are touring worldwide, performing and teaching. As of 2010, Sankai Juku had performed in 43 countries and visited more than 700 cities.
Eiko Otake and Takashi Koma Otake, generally known as Eiko & Koma, are a Japanese performance duo. Since 1972, Eiko & Koma have worked as co-artistic directors, choreographers, and performers, creating a unique theater of movement out of stillness, shape, light, sound, and time. For most of their multi-disciplinary works, Eiko & Koma also create their own sets and costumes, and they are usually the sole performers in their work. Neither of them studied traditional Japanese dance or theater forms and prefer to choreograph and perform only their own works. They do not bill their work as Butoh though Eiko & Koma cite Kazuo Ohno as their main inspiration.
Gustavo Collini-Sartor is a butoh dance artist based out of Argentina. Originally an actor, Collini Sartor starred in a production directed by Ellen Stewart at LaMamma Theatre in New York City, and was invited by Ellen Stewart to act in her production of Edipo in Colona in Italy during 1986. That year he met and studied with Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno then worked with them in Venice, and at the University of Vienna in Austria. While performing with these master artists, Collini-Sartor studied with Grotowski in Italy, at the Centre International Roy Hart in France, and he worked with singer Michio Hiraiama. During this time, Collini-Sartor developed his own style of movement as he began working on the connection between theatre technique and butoh dance.
Atsushi Takenouchi is a Japanese Butoh dancer who performs various solo works as well as collaborations; such as "Enclosure" performed in conjunction with Brighton based arts company, Red Earth, on Hambledon Hill, Dorset.
Ingo Taleb Rashid, is Sheikh of the Tariqah Naqshbandi-Rashidiya, director & choreographer, founder of El Haddawi,
Koichi Tamano (玉野黄市) is one of the masters of the Japanese dance form Butoh. He performed individually or with his wife Hiroko Tamano and their performance group Harupin-Ha. He has also performed with other artists including Kitaro. They introduced the dance form to the west coast of America.
Yoichiro Yoshikawa is a composer, music arranger and film producer.
Akira Kasai (1943) is a Japanese butoh dancer and choreographer, who despite being significantly younger than mentors Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata, is considered to be pioneers of the art form along with them. Kasai trained in other forms of dance, but turned to butoh in the 1960s when he met and began to work with these two men. He started his own studio in 1971 but closed it in 1979 to move and study Eurythmy in Germany. He did not dance professionally at the time and for years after his return to Japan in 1986 he stayed off the stage stating that he felt too disconnected from Japanese society to perform. He returned to professional dance in 1994, with the work Saraphita and revived his studio Tenshi kan, now influenced by Eurythmy and other dance principles. He has since performed, choreographed and taught in Asia, the Americas and Europe, but his choreography is sufficiently different from most other butoh that its authenticity has been questioned.
The Kyoto Butoh-kan is a small theatre space in Kyoto, Japan that is devoted to Butoh-dance.
Kō Murobushi was a Japanese dancer and choreographer who was a leading inheritor of Tatsumi Hijikata's original vision of Butoh.
Nakajima Natsu was a Japanese dancer and one of the first female butoh dancers. She studied with Ohno Kazuo and worked with Hijikata Tatsumi. She also founded the dance company Muteki-sha in 1969.
Sayoko Onishi is a butoh dancer, choreographer and master from Japan, known for the development of the new butoh style, and the foundation of the International Butoh Academy in Palermo, Italy.
Anzu Furukawa(古川あんず, February 28 , 1952 – October 23 , 2001) was a butoh dancer and performance artist. Since 1973 she has worked as a choreographer, performer and dancer in various groups in Japan including Dairakudakan and Europe.
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