Butoh dance is a shocking and provocative art, living between cultural interstices. In its use of music and costumes, butoh dance disrupts traditional gender distinctions and the differences between East and West. Butoh is forbidden dance, which was created to be subversive, cathartic and liberating. When I first encountered butoh dance through my teacher Atsushi Takenouchi in 2014, I immediately felt at home. I have not stopped dancing since then.
The origins of butoh dance in Japan
Originating with the performance Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors) by Tatsumi Hijikata and Yoshito Ohno in 1959, today butoh dance has become an international cultural phenomenon. In Japanese, the term ‘butō’ literally means ‘dance step’. Yuko Haniya described the dance of Tastumi Hijikata, founder together with Kazuo Ohno of this aesthetic, Ankoku Butoh “dance of darkness”[1]. But butoh dance is properly recognised by the definition of Forbidden Dance, which comes from the work of the revolutionary Yukio Mishima (pseudonym of Kimitake Hiraoka) and gave its name to the first performance of Tatsumi Hijikata.
Maintaining a shared aesthetic, butoh is very multifaceted; depending on the performer, it can be wild, spiritual, rough, mystical, violent, sensual, decadent, hypnotic, disturbing or cathartic.
Typically, a butoh dance performance embraces many of these aspects and brings to the stage the constant transformation of existence. This is why butoh dance is also referred to as an alchemical and ritual dance.
Butoh literally means “dance pounded with feet”, indicating the dance step beaten on the ground typical of propitiatory dances for harvests and of the mythological dance of Ame no Uzume. In the intentions of the founder of this dance of Japanese origin, ankoku butō was the dance of the darkness of the human heart, that is, a dance intended to shake the moralistic to cause a revolution of the body.
At the center of butoh dance is the nikutai, the body understood as a mass of flesh, the dark place where desires emerge and where the dance that explores the unexplored emerges. The body dialogues with the objects that are there also with the things that are not, hence the dialogue of the dance also with the worlds of the beyond.
Origins of butoh dance
Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno butoh dance
The influences of this dance are of European origin and inherent in the German Ausdruckstanz, imported into Japan by the founders of modern dance in the land of the rising sun Ishii Baku and Eguchi Takaya. Parallel to these influences, it is important to mention the main Japanese artistic currents of the fifties: the Gutai collective, the High Red Center, the Mono Ha group and Yoko Ono.
The first performance of butoh dance is considered Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors), inspired by the novel by Yukio Mishima and brought on stage with the young Yoshito Ohno in 1959. The performance caused a scandal because of the irreverent and grotesque content of the choreography, which also included the presence of a hen as a ritual sacrifice (the hen was not killed).
It is thanks to the critical action of Nario Goda that Tatsumi Hijikata’s butoh dance established itself as a revolution in dance, with a tendency to strike the audience with performances that have an impact on the prejudices of prevailing moralism. The artistic manifesto of this intention is undoubtedly Tatsumi Hijikata’s 1969 performance Nikutai no hanran.
Meaning of butoh dance
Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno
According to Yoshito Ohno, Tatsumi Hijikata is the structure of butō and Kazuo Ohno is its heart. The styles of the two founders of this dance seem to differ, so much so that today it is conventional to attribute the predominance of interest on form to the work of Tatsumi Hijikata and interest on spirit to the work of Kazuo Ohno. However, I think they can be considered complementary rather than different.
It is interesting to note in this regard that Horonobu Oikawa, founder of the Artaudkan, considers the skin the center of Kazuo Ohno’s research and the skeleton-muscle nexus for Tatsumi Hijikata. The collaboration between the two dancers dates back to 1960 when Tatsumi Hijikata choreographed for Kazuo Ohno the performance Divine sho.
Butoh dance was born in the fifties within a scenario where Tatsumi Hijikata was thinking about the revolution of the body, that is to say to stage a profoundly nonconformist attitude towards the Japanese industrial system and the new social organization devoted to the construction of a world superpower.
The return to the origins of Japanese tradition for Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno means the rethinking of the concepts of beautiful and ugly, the destruction of dichotomies, the reconnection of a deep connection with nature and ancestral rituals, including the cult of the dead.
Body of Butoh Dance
Tatsumi Hijikata and Yoshito Ohno, Kinjiki, 1959
The body of butoh dance is a pile of dog: nikutai. For Tatsumi Hijikata, the body is a corpse desperately holding on. It is a begging body, stamping its feet on the ground and studying the spontaneous movements of very early childhood, disarticulated, invaded movements, freed from social stratifications.
Tremors and convulsions, as well as controlled and millesimal movements are part of the aesthetics of butoh dance, which arise from Tatsumi Hijikata’s vision of the body as a field of social revolution. The body is the bearer of the perturbing, the link with the world of spirits, the evoker of the original bond that connects the human being with what is beyond his sensitive and daily experience.
Today, the body of butoh dance is mostly dyed white and leads to the erasure of the self, towards the restoration of the fetal body, poised between worlds. But in the origins of the dance by founder Tatsumi Hijikata, the body was darkened with the color black, blending with the shadows of the dimly lit scene, evoking the sounds of the body as it struggled in the half-light.
Androgyny in butoh dance
Butoh dance is an originally androgynous dance, where on stage masculine and feminine are not pitted against each other but flow among the possible shades of being. When asked by a journalist why he “disguised” himself as a woman on stage Kazuo Ohno replied, “My intentions in dressing up as a woman on stage are not to become an imitator of a woman, or to transform myself into a woman. Rather, I want to trace my life back to its earliest origins. More than anything, I long to return to where I came from.”
European influences in Butoh dance
The roots of butoh dance lie in the ancient Japanese tradition, when the culture was still matrilineal and strongly linked to the cult of the kami. A time when the mastery of ecstatic techniques gave some women spiritual and at the same time political power[2]. 2] The passion for disguise, facial expressiveness and parody, as well as for defined lines, unites butoh dance with Ukiyo-e painting. The suspended space, the short steps and the time that expands connect Butoh dance to No and Kabuki theatre. But the links between butoh and other art forms are not limited to the Japanese tradition. The roots of butoh dance also lie in German expressionism, breaking down the boundaries between East and West.
The development of modern dance in Japan was influenced by the work of Takaya Eguchi, who studied with Mary Wigman in Germany, and Baku Ishii. Both were masters of Kazuo Ohno, while Tatsumi Hijikata studied under Takaya Eguchi’s pupils: Katsuko Masumura and Mitsuko Ando. The two founders of butoh dance met thanks to Mitsuko Ando’s activity between 1952 and 1954[3].
Kazuo Ohno, the spiritual soul of butoh dance
During his workshops, Kazuo Ohno used to say that he learned butoh dance while he was in his mother’s womb. For him, all arts come from our very first experiences with existence. He explained to his students that only one sperm survives when it unites with the egg to generate life, while a great many other sperm die. Similarly, in the world, the death of many people contributes to the survival of others. In this sense, for Kazuo Ohno, all lives are fragile and must be protected; not only his own, but also that of others.
In his thinking, Kazuo Ohno states that we all have an erotic nature, which takes us back to the origins of our lives. Our bond with our mother preserves the erotic union between our father and mother. This bond is the material for dance. The image of the foetus is recognised as the dimension of full freedom, whose movement becomes the source of maximum inspiration for the butoh dancer.
For Kazuo Ohno, butoh dance must be innocence and intoxication[4].
The aim of the workshops is to bring back spontaneous and instinctive movement. A movement full of emotions, which becomes an expression of the complex relationship between the organism, the world, the memories and the presences at play. Read more about Nicolas Bourriaud’s critique of relational art.
Wabi-sabi aesthetics in butoh
Based on Zen thought, the aesthetics of butoh dance is based on the concept of wabi-sabi. Wabi originally refers to the moment when the rosebud is forming and its colour is barely perceptible, while sabi refers to the moment when the rose is withering and its petals are drying out. Within the wabi-sabi concept, the beautiful and the ugly disappear in their dualism. The beautiful and the ugly come from the same source and are integral parts of the same thing, just as the bud and the withered petals are always the same rose. For butoh everything comes from the one and everything returns to the one. What we call ‘the self’ is within these changes, as it is in constant transformation. Butoh dance brings this to the stage through an aesthetic that does not divide beautiful movements from ugly movements, appropriate movements from inappropriate movements, as long as they are authentic. Read the article on dance and ikebana.
Dancing the authenticity of movement: butoh
When you dance, you don’t listen to the music with your ears, but with your whole body.
In the same way, one listens to the emotions, memories and presences of the surrounding space, the audience and the dimension that opens up beyond it. Becoming like flowers and looking like trees are some useful exercises because from their roots to their petals and branches they are expressive. Kazuo Ohno said to make one’s dance like life by simply studying how a tree grows. From firmly planted feet to firm torso, from strong arms to fine fingers. For the dancer, the audience does not need to see that you are moving, but they need to feel that you are growing, just like the tree. This is where the authenticity of the movement lies.
Make-up and stage costume are fundamental to the performer. Far from being considered masks, they are the forms of expression that allow you to get in touch with what you want to evoke. Make-up becomes a ritual, an integral part of the performance itself, through which the performer takes his form back to the origin of his feeling. Kazuo Ohno stated: “My intentions in dressing up as a woman on stage are not to become an imitator of a woman, or to transform myself into a woman. Rather, I want to trace my life back to its earliest origins. More than anything else, I want to go back to where I came from”[5].
Globalization and butoh dance
As an Italian dancer and researcher on the philosophy of dance, I find that, on the one hand, it is necessary to get involved in this debate by respecting the Japanese cultural heritage, which this dance continues to maintain authentic, on the other hand, I think it is equally important to highlight the intercultural origins of this form of expression, in a world that in 1959 was already globalized.
By studying butoh dance and incorporating it into my artistic research, it was only natural to arrive at the creation of what I called alchemical dance. At the dawn of the human being, after the hunt, we gathered around the fire to dance our gratitude to the universe. These were times of deep connection with our bodies and with the stars. The memories of our origins and the rituals of devotion to the dark world of death to praise life and the great cycle of existence are the vivid foundations from which the arts and mystics typical of our species are born, all over the world.
At these roots of the human being looks the butoh dance, as well as the alchemical mysticism. The Apollonian and Dionysian touch Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata as if there were no language barriers between the Mediterranean Sea and Japan.
[1] The interest of Tastumi Hijikata goes to “the darkness that our modern eye has lost, where the gap between words and things disappear. I shake hands with the dead” (S. Fraleigh, Dancing into darkness, University of Pittsburgh Press).
[2] Towards the 7th century, with the spread of Confucianism, the practices of possession were increasingly marginalised in favour of decorum and a new patriarchal rigour. See Raveri M., Il pensiero giapponese classico, Einaudi, 2014.
[3] See S. Fraleigh, Dancing into darkness, Idibem.
[4] “Dance should be innocence and intoxication” S. Fraleigh, Dancing into darkness, Idibem.
[5] Ohno K. And Y., Kazuo Ohno’s World, Wesleyan University Press, 2004.
