PERFORMANCE STUDY: DARK DANCE - THE ORIGINS OF BUTOH
Kazuo Ohno, Yoshito Ohno & Tatsumi Hijikata. William Klein, 1960
I finally got my shit together to re-work a draft I started way back in Spring of 2016 on the Japanese dance style known as Butoh.
I took a huge pause with Butoh because I found myself at a loss. I don't know anything about the Japanese worldview, nor do I know much about post-war Japan; two elements so deeply entangled in Butoh, that I grew overwhelmed by my ignorance. Plus, what Butoh has become since its inception in the late 1950s is much different than its origins—and in fact, there is a lot of controversy surrounding Butoh these days. (See The New Yorker’s recent article about this here). But since someone else wrote about the sordid part that seems to overshadow Butoh right now, I feel once again at liberty to come back to the early days of Butoh before the controversy. Nowadays, some in the US even call Butoh a cult, while others in Brazil are making it their own art-form that I think departs greatly from its Japanese heritage. This is not to say that some forms of Butoh in the west aren’t amazing, it just morphed once it left Japan.
Most of what is written in the US about Butoh, I feel, incorrectly marks Butoh as a version of Kabuki. And many reviewers use "zen-like" to describe the movements. I believe these misconceptions are symptomatic of the West lacking the cultural script required to understand the nuances of a people that are greatly still The Other, as well as our tendency to appropriate and stereotype Eastern concepts in general. Also, one particular school of Butoh in the US is taught by a trained zen buddhist, so this could likewise reinforce the misconception that butoh is somehow linked to buddhism.
But for these reasons, I've focused on the founders of Butoh, Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata.
Beginning in 1959, Butoh was a rejection of western influence in Japanese dance in post-war Japan. It was also at the same time a departure from traditional Japanese dance. Interested in evoking movements that were more "Earth bound," Butoh explored taboo subjects such as homosexuality, aging, death, and decay. Employing squatting motions and often curling one’s limbs as if in pain, the postures introduced in Butoh, to me, are reminiscent of Medieval European depictions of demons and hell. Using these poses, Butoh consists of slow movements, with the dancers bodies and/or faces often covered in white paint.
Kazuo Ohno
Tatsumi Hijakata
The name Butoh came after the dance itself formed with Ohno and Hijikata, and has come to mean Dark Dance or Darkness Dance. Prior to this connotation, 'Butoh' was a word that was no longer used in the Japanese language, previously referring to European ballroom dance. I can’t find any interviews in English that explain why if they were rejecting western influence in Japanese dance, they ended up using a defunct word for European Ballroom dance, but my guess is that it was a way to subvert the recent oppression of the American occupation in Japan. (Reminder that for Japan, WWII ended with two atomic bombs dropped by the US, followed by a period of American occupation).
From the Los Angeles Times
Hijikata believed that art had become too mannered, imitative and polite to be real. So he stripped dance to its raw essentials: convulsive movements and contorted gestures that captured the agony and absurdity of a nation clawing its way to prosperity after two of its major cities — and hundreds of thousands of its innocent citizens — were killed by U.S. nuclear bombs.
Unlike in the west where black is the color of death, in Japan, white is, so the use of white body or face paint is a symbol of the macabre nature of the dances (also seen in the pallor of the Pierrot in the west who is supposed to appear near death). Hijikata did the first Butoh dance, Kinjiki in 1959 without white body paint, but wearing a white mask (as Butoh was to become a formal dance style as a result of this performance). The performance ended with Kazuo Ohno’s son, Yoshito Ohno, holding a live chicken between his legs, being chased off stage by Hijikata. This performance caused such a stir, that Hijikata is said to have been banned from performing at dance festivals. As a result of this performance, Hijikata received a great deal of attention, and together with Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno, as well as a few other dancers, the Butoh style was created.
My personal favorite style among the two founders of Butoh is Kazuo Ohno’s because he is just so weird! His facial expressions and curling movements are inimitable, I could watch him for hours. Compared to Tatsumi Hijikata, who is technically the first to do Butoh, Kazuo seemed much more focused on the grotesque than Hijikata was, but be sure to watch A Rose Colored Dance (1965) by Hijikata after a few of my favorites from Ohno below.
Like Merce Cunningham, many of the Butoh dances you find on film in the 60s were choreographed specifically for film, and were referred to as Cinedance. In many of the Hijikata films, Ohno and his son appear in the dances, as they were originally students of Hijikata’s before Ohno broke off and created his own school. From these two initial schools, Butoh has grown to what it is today, which in some cases is very much a departure from its origins (not unlike Yoga once it reached the west).
Between the two original teachers, Hijikata was much more extreme in his theories surrounding butoh, sometimes depriving his students of sleep or food in effort to affect their dancing. This practice has been carried over into many western schools in butoh, but since ohno did not take part in these practices in his school, some butoh in the west is without such aestheticism.
Kazuo Ohno
Tatsumi Hijikata
Trigger warnings:
Animal cruelty
Child nudity
Please note I am showing this as a historical piece and am not promoting anything in this film. Keep in mind the film was made in reaction to the nuclear bombings in Japan, and is not exploitative. The imagery is used as symbolism to express the experience of post-war Japan. Please remove your post modern lens before viewing this film and consider its preservation done so in the interest of anthropology.
An excerpt from the film’s abstract:
In Hosoe Eikoh's film Navel and A-Bomb, featuring Hijikata Tatsumi and his choreography, the (Japanese) body is connected to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the utter destruction of Japan. Navel and A-Bomb (1960) figures the 'birth' of a new Japanese identity in the wake of the atomic catastrophe, the subsequent defeat and occupation of Japan.
Sadly, with its founders both deceased, Butoh has no anchor to its origins, and is inevitably morphing with each person it comes in contact with. There are many Butoh dancers today who honor much of the integral elements of the dance, so a variety of Butoh dances still mirror its early performances, but I think due in part to the eastern philosophies rooted in the practice, the dance can have adverse psychological affects on the western mind. This is the otherness I was referring to in the introduction of this article, and this is also what caused the controversy discussed in the linked New Yorker article above. (The information in the article isn’t actually new, but it feels better for me to link a very well respected publication with regards to this situation).
Regardless, I’m so RELIEVED to finally complete this piece… four years in the making.
Last thing I’d like to mention is that I intentionally omitted the so-called philosophies surrounding Butoh that are woven into the controversies today, as this piece is about its origins, and those philosophies associated with its origins are discussed here. If you’re curious about what I’m avoiding, just read the New Yorker article linked above. I just don’t want to get into it because I want to honor and discuss this artform as is was performed in Japan in the 1960s.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
William Klein's Tokyo Pop. Marlaine Glicksman, American Suburb X. June, 2015
Kazuo Ohno, a Founder of Japanese Butoh, Dies at 103. Jennifer Dunning, New York Times, 2010.
Review: Sexual, comical, painful. A rare U.S. look at the radical art of Tatsumi Hijikata. David Pagel, Los Angeles Times, 2019
Courtney Bagtazo, © Bagtazo 2020