Butoh, Dance of Darkness
Yoko Ashikawa. Dance- Intimacy Plays Its Trump.
Butoh dance or ankoku butō (暗黒舞踏) “the dance of utter darkness” as it was known originally, is intense, raw, disturbing.
It’s grotesque poetry, an achieved transformation, a transmutation of the body in other forms.
Describing Butoh is a hard task. Not because there is lack of information on it, but because there is no conscious thinking in it, it’s more than a technical form or art, it transcends the human dimension, it's the dance of the unconscious.
It's just soul, spirit.
After World War II, Japan experienced a revolution in intellectual and artistic experiments that defined the post-war avant-garde of the 50s and 60s. During those turbulent years, Japanese writers, artists, performers and choreographers started to create and re-establish a new artist identity as a opposition to the Western ideals of beauty that had been overtaking traditional Japanese performance aesthetics.
Co-founded by Hijikata Tatsumi (土方巽) and Ohno Kazuo (大野一雄), the dance style of Butoh developed from the reactionary attitudes and movement experiments of Shingeki or “new theater“ which sought to deconstruct the Western theatrical norms through exhibitions that revealed the violent, grotesque, and orgiastic potential of performance.
In 1951, dancer and choreographer Hijikata created and performed Forbidden Colors (禁色, Kinjiki) based on the homonyms novel by Yukio Mishima. This homosexual-erotic piece was a pure underground and outbreaking statement, whose style had never been seen before in Japan or the world. Presented at a dance festival in 1959, the Japanese art community was scandalized by its extreme form and Hijikata was banned from the Modern Dance Association and became an outlawed dancer.
“Underground art turns into mere trendiness because of the people practicing it. They create a desert around them, then complain there is no water, Why don’t they try drinking from the well of their own bodies? Let them pluck the darkness from their own flesh.”
Kazuo Ohno ‘Dead sea’ 1985.
Tatsumi Hijikata performing “Quiet House,” 1971. Photograph by Ruiko Yoshida.
Butoh dance deals with the dark side of human beings. It's an expression of the inexpressible. Dancers take thoughts and feelings that are buried deep inside, what people don’t want to face. They take what is beneath a conscious awareness and bring it to the light, confront and transform it, in an attempt to recover a primal state; the body that “has not been robbed” as Hijikata used to say.
Unlike western dance where performers’ bodies try to express an emotion or idea, in Butoh, a dancers' achievement is to become someone or something else. This “other” is generated in the dark areas of the persona and is pushed out through the act of Butoh dance.
Coming to life, usually through the painted white bodies of the performers, along with shocking visuals, and touching on taboos in society; in Butoh the hyper-controlled movements of the dancers is reminiscent of the awkward, jerking movements of a zombie.
Akaji maro Company. American Dance Festival, 1982.
As a consequence of the historical context that gave birth to this art, Butoh has a violent nature that comes from an obsession with death. In the wake of Hiroshima, Hijikata perceived Butoh as a dead body standing up. He believed that by distorting the body, he could get away from the traditional ideal of beauty and get closer to a more organic state.
On the other hand, Ohno, the co-founder of the movement, who was a prisoner of war himself, understood his way of dancing with darkness as a way of transcending and moving towards the light. He brought a delicate sensibility to the strangeness of butoh. Together with Hijikata, Ohno’s contributions started to construct the core of what we know now as Butoh.
Kudo Taketeru and Akiko Motofuji.
Zarathoustra, Ko Murobushi,1982.
“The best thing someone can say to me is that while watching my performance they began to cry. It is not important to understand what I am doing; perhaps it is better if they don’t understand, but just respond to the dance.”
Butoh dance deals with the dark side of human beings. It's an expression of the inexpressible. Dancers take thoughts and feelings that are buried deep inside, what people don’t want to face. They take what is beneath a conscious awareness and bring it to the light, confront and transform it, in an attempt to recover a primal state; the body that “has not been robbed” as Hijikata used to say.
Unlike western dance where performers’ bodies try to express an emotion or idea, in Butoh, a dancers' achievement is to become someone or something else. This “other” is generated in the dark areas of the persona and is pushed out through the act of Butoh dance.
Nowadays, Butoh has become one of the major developments of contemporary dance and involves a wide range of styles, from the grotesque to the austere, from erotic to comic. It has grown, elevated and been perfected. Although still mysterious and hardcore, Butoh has become a worldwide known art and has even been introduced into popular culture.
Keeping it surreal and androgynous, Butoh’s powerful, imaginary and radical approach has become a strong source of inspiration all over the world.
Dai Rakuda Kan ‘Dance The North Sea’.
Uno Man. Dance ‘21,000 Leagues’.