Structureless in Structure: The Choreographic Tectonics of Hijikata Tatsumi’s Buto Bruce Baird Re HAs A DANCE form mystified audiences—both in Japan and in other countries—as much as butd has. The white face and body paint, slow movements, distorted faces, and writhing bodies have convinced audi- ences that something weighty must be afoot, but often those same audiences (and the critics among them) have been at loss to explain exactly what that something is. Yet what many today know as butd is a product of an evolution in the dance methodology of Hijikata Tatsumi in the late sixties and early seventies. Gone were the early athletic, somewhat improvisatory, and homo- erotic works, replaced by a complex dance form that reflected butd’s status as a performance art at the crossroads of many artistic movements and theo- retical debates. I shall not have the space here to address all of the facets of buté’s formation, but I should like to point the way to a reorientation of how we sec and understand buts. This reorientation was aided by the release of Hijikata’s notcbooks (butofu) to the public, and the publication of commentary on the structure of his later dances by several of his dancers. Although there is some disagree- ment in terminology, there is a great deal of overlap in their accounts, which allow us to see that Hijikata’s methodology consisted of (somewhat arbi- trarily) combining small units of movement into larger sequences, and sub- jecting those movements to various constraints. This structure can be divided into six components: instructions, poses or movements, phrases, character types, background media, and narrativ It will be clearest if we examine instructions, poses or movements, and —93—94 Bruce Baird phrases simultaneously. Consider the following excerpt from a phrase or series titled “Rose Girl”: ' Beardsley No. 1 * person made entirely from nerves + noble woman wearing a thin silk skirt with a long hem + line of sight pursues the nerves that extend from fingertips of left hand * nerves extended from back part of top of head to the ceiling Beardsley No. 2 i + noble women walking in the dark following a wall * instability of footing 1 * eyes affixed to the fingertips of the right hand, which touches the wall i * nerves extending to the ceiling Beardsley Peacock Lady ; * incredibly thin feathers extend out from back of head * long silk skirt (=the peacock wings that extend out of hips) * as the woman spins, the long skirt comes after * not that the woman is spinning, but the skirt is spinning * the nerves from the nape of the neck that cross over the back of the head and extend to the ceiling pull on the skirt’s hem stare at the skirt that follows the spins wind puffs from below noblewoman holding skirt does half turns it is as if there is a deer there Beardsley No. 3 * nerves extending as if the jaw is seeking help ftom the ceiling * resting hands Beardsley No. 4 * gazing at partner from over shoulder * left hand seeking to shake hands * nerves extending to the ceiling so that one cannot run away to the rear Rose Girl + rose blossoming in mouth + dandelions in cars, valerian on soles of feet + wings on hips * left hand has a bottle with deadly poison? This is a series of moments that would follow one after another. Each of the headings such as “Beardsley No. 1” or “Rose Girl” is the name of one move- ment or a pose. The bulleted items are the “instructions’”—short snippets of information on how to achieve the pose. Note that the instructions are of varying kinds: some describe relatively physical things (“gazing at partner from over shoulder”), while others require the dancer to use imagination to alter the base movement (“nerves extending to the ceiling”—perhaps if the Hijikata Tatsumi's Buto 95 dancer imagines this, she strives for a more upright pose). In fact, there were other kinds of instructions as well, such as + 30,000 insects eat their way from the pores into the internal organs* + be observed from a bird’s-eye view + manteau of light—transparent, infinitely transparent® * speed of reflection is faster than the speed of secing® * the desire to walk precedes and the form follows’ It might be fruitful to interpret these instructions as asking for differing levels of abstraction. It is one thing to imagine a flower opening in one’s mouth and how that affects one’s body, It is another thing to imagine insects eating one’s internal organs, and yet another to imagine being observed from a bird’s-eye view and how those two exercises affect one’s body (or mind). Yet all of them probably ask the dancer to alter somehow the quality or tone of the performance by introducing a new mental condition. That being said, the last two seem like philosophical statements, and thus it is hard to see what affect they would have had on the dancer. To be sure, these techniques have parallels in other kinds of dance. For a long time, choreographers must have been telling dancers to make a dance sexy or sad in order to achieve tonal modifications. In addition, every dancer knows that redirecting one’s attention—be it to a part of the body or in an attempt to enact mood—can alter the physical quality of a motion, Dance teachers often caution their charges to smile while in the middle of an excru- ciatingly difficult movement, and in ballet, masters might ask ballerinas to imagine being swans or sugar plum fairies, Hijikata innovated the ways in which and the extent to which he employed visualization, For example, rather than tell the dancer straight out to imbue a dance with a creepy feeling, he asked them to imagine insects burrowing into their pores, The assumption was that this is a more effective way to convey or enact creepiness than merely to try to convey creepiness directly, To be told to redirect one’s con- centration in order to relax one’s contorted facial muscles and then re-flex them in a perma-smile is perhaps not substantively different from being required to redirect one’s concentration to see oneself from an imaginary bird's-eye view. However, we can begin to observe the truly high dispersal of concentration Hijikata demanded of his dancers. Dancers did not just con- form their bodies to a required configuration, but rather were required to spread their attention to many parts of their bodies and imagine those parts under an unprecedented number of conditions and circumstances. From moment to moment, Hijikata’s dancers had to focus their concentration on between three and seventeen instructions for a single movement or pose. We can take from this structure an observation about butd and the body.Figure 7.1: Aubrey Beardsley, The Peacock Skirt, for “Salome,” 1894, black ink and graphite on white wove paper, 23x16.8 cm. (Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, Photo credit, Kallsen Katya, Accession number 1943.649.) Hijikata Tatsumi’s Buto 97 Budd is often read as having been a refocus on the body, and certainly, it has put a new variety of body types and movements onto center stage. However, it should be obvious that the results of these instructions do not constitute some more natural or more primordial way of moving that needs no expla- nation, as opposed to other kinds of movements that are mediated or driven by mental or cultural needs. One of the above instructions was “left hand has a bottle with deadly poison.” A bottle of poison is already a cultural artifact; one can never hold it in any non-culturally-mediated way. This is just one instruction out of many, but it allows us to insist that buto is not a pre- linguistic art form, nor is it a return to a more natural body. On the contrary, Hijikata’s butd comes equipped with a veritable wash of words words words to help the mind take the body to new twists and contortions never before conceived. If we consider the poses/movements and their sources, a related point fol- lows. Five of the above are tagged as relating to “Beardsley.” Aubrey Beard- sley was a modern artist and print maker from whom Hijikata drew some sort of stimulus. One finds the names of Western artists scattered through the lists of poses and movements (including Bosch, Bacon, Goya, Michaux), as well as reproductions of hundreds of Western paintings plastered in H kata’s notebooks. In this case, the phrase is composed of poses modeled after figures in Beardsley prints from Oscar Wilde’s play Salome. For example, “Beardsley Peacock Lady” is obviously a reproduction of a pose from the print The Peacock Skirt for “Salome.” Hijikata culled poses from Bacon’s Chimpanzee and Bosch’s The Mendicants as well. This use of poses from Western artists allows us to observe that just as butd is not a return to a pri- mordial body, neither is it a dance form tailored to the specificities of the Japanese body. Unless, that is, Beardsley was painting a Japanese Salome and Bacon was painting a specifically Japanese chimpanzee. The process of learning a dance would begin with the study of poses and ue of how to movements and their instructions, and then proceed to the organize those movements into a phrase. The dancers tell of having to pour a tremendous effort into the mastery of the movements. They would fever- ishly take notes during or after rehearsals so they could remember what they had learned, and spend time reading and looking at paintings in order to better understand the various poses.’ The choreographic process included creating the individual poses and determining their order within larger phrases, and even extended to altering the order of a phrase on the night before a performance. Two extra elements accentuate the choreographic structure. The first is character type—some examples were “Old Woman,” “Pariah Girl,” “Maya.” The character type is separate from but affects (in a wholesale manner) what98 Bruce Baird the dancer does. Hence, “Beardsley Peacock Lady” will come out differently if it is executed by an old woman than if it is done by a pariah girl, and then again differently if it is executed by yet another character. That is to say, the instructions remain the same whether it is an old woman or a pariah girl, but the medium (the kind of person) will influence the particulars of the movement. Beyond the task of mastering these various character types waited the added task of altering the imaginary medium in which the movement was executed to alter the movement subtly. For example, the dancer might be asked to do “Rose Girl” inside of a stone or underwater." In one instruction, Hijikata says, “The density of the rock is 90 percent—one must pass through the density of the rock.” Here, the visualization task was not to alter the character, but rather to alter the character’s surroundings, and to see how that would affect the base movement. The theatre anthropologist Eugenio Barba observed Hijikata’s dancer Nakajima Natsu and wrote: Nakajima Natsu, direct heir of Tatsumi Hijikata who, with Kazuo Ohno, founded buta dance, is explaining and demonstrating her way of working (Bologna, ISTA, July 1990). She chooses a series of images for each of which she establishes an attitude, a figure for her dance. She thus has available a series of immobile poses sculpted into her body. She now assembles the series of immobile poses one after another, passing from one to another without inter- ruption, She obtains a precise design of movements. She repeats the same sequence as if meeting three different types of resistance, which must be over- come with three different types of energy: it is as if she was moving in a space as solid as stone; in a liquid space; and in the air, She is constructing, on the basis of a limited number of poses, a universe of images, a choreography." On the one hand, this concern for the material medium may only have been important because it allowed Hijikata to alter tempo or amplitude while avoiding merely mechanical movements. Rather than telling the dancers to spread an arm movement over four counts instead of two, Hijikata might have told them to do the movement inside a rock rather than inside water. Or rather than saying “squat lower” or “stretch higher,” he might have had the dancer do the movement in stone or air thereby altering the total ampli- tude. On the other hand, Hijikata may have been interested in exploring the way one moves against resistance or drag, and in that case he would have wanted to capture the straining of muscles by transferring action to within stone, The dance and buto scholar Sakurai Keisuke has compared Hijikata’s tech- niques with William Forsythe’s Improvisation Technologies, in which Forsythe essentially sets up a matrix of operations for discovering new movements by Hijikata Tatsumi’s Buto 99 altering fulcra or planes of base movements." One could imagine one’s hand and outstretched forefinger going around in a circle with one’s elbow as a fulcrum somewhat as a traffic cop motioning traffic onwards; then one could imagine altering the plane of the movement from the one directly in front to the plane ninety degrees to the side as if to send the traffic behind; and then again imagine rotating one’s arm ninety degrees either up or down and draw- ing this same circle on two planes parallel with the ground. Next, one might imagine one’s whole arm going around in a wider circle with one’s shoulder as a new fulcrum as if in fast-pitch softball. In Forsythe’s system, these trans- formations of planes and fulcra are the bases for new movements. In Hijikata’s case, it appears that he started with the assumption that use of visualization or imagination would alter the body. Thus, he could subject basic movements to a matrix of operations in order to create new move- ments. First he could transform the underlying character (go from being a “pariah girl” to an “old women”), Next might well be the transformation of the medium in which the material moves—executing “Rose Girl” in stone or water. Moreover, once he had lain the groundwork that different visualiza- tions change the quality and tone of movements in different ways, then it followed that altering what one imagined—such as electrical currents, insects crawling through pores, or nerves extending to the ceiling—would alter the base movement. At that point, the possibilities for new movement became endless, because the way the instruction “rose blooms inside of one’s mouth” affects a base movement obviously differs from the effect realized by imagin- ing “bugs come crawling up from at one’s feet,” which in turn is different from the effect of “slug crawling on one’s neck.” In a note (regarding two movements not discussed here, “Maya” and “Yardstick Walk”) appended onto the pose “Horse,” Hijikata counseled his dancers: Sense the weight, stupidity, and shortness of the neck of a cow, if you put the horse head in the middle of the “Yardstick Walk,” it creates a kind of strange mysterious person. If you put it into things like “Maya,” from the neck down, is object and from the neck up is animal; through these numerous variations, bodily expression is carried out.'* In Hijikata’s distinctive style, this is as close as one gets to a clear-cut state- ment of artistic method. Hijikata came up with a way of creating a new dance form with new movements though these “numerous variations” of com- pletely arbitrary poses. Finally, Hijikata would combine the phrases into an entire work and deter- mine which character type and background medium the dancers were to visualize at each moment. However, the largest unit of the choreographic100 Bruce Baird structure, the “narrative,” is not a list of character types, backgrounds, and phrases from which one could backtrack to individual poses and instructions. Rather a “narrative” is a kind of “prose poem” or script.'’ Here is part of a narrative: GRAVE WATCHMAN it is spring fragrant flowers are blooming all over the area an unseasonable wind is blowing in the blue sky under a high flying lark, a sea of yellow vegetable flowers trembling in the wind, a wave noticeably rolls, and a white man appeared he has birdlime and draws near with a light gait his feet came toa dead stop flying dust a lark in the sky and the vegetable flowers also fell silent itis as ifitis a picture the man’s eyes stare off yonder rather if you look closely _ he is looking at a certain spot it is a bird’s nest taking care not to be noticed, he advanced two steps there is a bird’s nest in the top of the tall trees he is just looking at it the color the chirping of the chicks _ the sweet grandness it is as if he has been possessed by a demon he carefully studies each individual feather even the down also the color of the beak like a child that has gone out to capture cicadas and rather been captured by them the thing that looks in the mirror is an empty shell, reality is the thing that reflects there is nothing in the man’s eyes now but nest the chick that is screaming under a stone is a high flying secret the nest is reflected in his eyes _ rather, in his eyes the nest is complete furthermore, in his head, his head is filled to the brim with the nest it is Bosch he is truly hopeless" The narrative provides what might be thought of as the surrealism-inflected story behind the dance. Here the basic outline seems to be that of Hierony- mus Bosch hunting birds on a sunny day. Some of the elements are similar to the dance instructions already presented in the account of movements and phrases: “taking care not to be noticed, he advanced two steps,” or “the thing that looks in the mirror is an empty shell, reality is the thing that reflects.” The first might well correspond to walking two paces. The second seems like the kind of philosophical statement that was already identified as one of the elements of the instructions. Yet the narrative is clearly different from the movements and phrases. It is also unlike any previous script. Return for a moment to the strange and insightful metaphysical comment on what it means to look in the mirror, To interrupt the contorted narrative to com- ment that nothing has an essence, but that reality is an endless play of mirrors Hijikata Tatsumi’s Buto 101 means that this kind of narrative functions radically differently from a script, and to attempt to put that philosophical insight onstage by means of some set of instructions, movements, and phrases means that buto differs radically from other forms of dance. What to make of all of this? First of all, buté has always been a dance form in which one is free to or forced to append a private narrative over the top of what one sees. This includes even the early dances that do not share the structure outlined here. Occasionally, the choreographer has offered various hints in the program notes, but in principle the audience has been left to its own devices. Thus, while we have some information about the underlying narrative of certain dances, Hijikata seemed more interested in providing puzzles than answers. Indeed, considered in terms of its structure, butd is a dance form full of puzzles and without the full answer to any of them. This was undoubtedly intentional. All of the dancers are in agreement that Hiji- kata did not want to curtail the number of readings possible on the part of the audience. Yet there is something more important going on than just a refusal to dictate to the audience how it should think. In writing about impressionistic art and a new experience of urban space, Walter Benjamin made the following highly suggestive comment: ‘The daily sight of a lively crowd may once have constituted a spectacle to which one’s eyes had to adapt first, On the basis of this supposition, one may assume that once the eyes had mastered this task they welcomed opportunities to test their newly acquired faculties. This would mean that the technique of Impres- sionist painting, whereby the picture is garnered in a riot of dabs of color, would be a reflection of experiences with which the eyes of a big-city dweller have become familiar.'” Benjamin gives the genesis of an entire genre of painting a precise historico- materialist explanation. The variegated sights of the big city first prove diffi- cult to process. However, once city dwellers grow used to those sights, they Jook to riotous paintings for a chance to practice their newfound processing skills. This is a quite specific account of how a work of art or a kind of enter- tainment functions in society: works of art succeed because in some manner or another they reflect the world around them. Impressionistic stipples give people the chance to practice the skill of organizing and coping with the vol- ume of information and stimuli that the urban space provides. If we return to Hijikata armed with this notion of how an artwork func- tions, we might observe that the Tokyo of the sixties was an even more formi- dable urban space than the Paris of the fléneur in the beginning of the twentieth century, and therefore it required a broader array of navigational skills. Enough has been said about the various conflicts, contradictions, andloz Bruce Baird ironies of the age—atomic warfare, the imposition of large networks of knowledge by the Occupation, a rehabilitated emperor in whose name the war was fought, student protests, Cold War politics, high-growth economics, Western avant-garde artists drawn to classical Japanese art forms to revitalize moribund Western arts. To these need be added Hijikata’s personal experi- ences—being a northern country hick in a soi-disant sophisticated society, seeing successive older brothers not return from the war, possessing a body incapable of excellence in ballet because of an injury. One begins to grasp the contours of a society in which the real skill to be mastered was coping with insufficient information, The plight of the people in the audience, who watched the dance with incomplete knowledge, mirrors the state they found outside the theatre as they watched the world around them with a similar lack of information. Buto gave them the chance to practice narrative compo- sition with insufficient information. One of Hijikata’s instructions is “stand- ing silently when there is nothing to be done, when it’s bad to try to do something and it’s also bad not to do it.” The spectators stand poised on the cusp of a problem, and they do not have enough information to deter- mine which choice is best; or to enable them to make one option viable. But they must act. This surely reflects the world in which Hijikata and his audi- ence lived. How will the audience act? What narrative will.each person create to make sense of his or her state? This is the crux of Hijikata’s butd. Yet it cannot be that buio is merely about insufficient information. What are we to make of the dizzying intricacies | have outlined over the past pages? In his Geijutsu to shite no shintai (The Body as Art), Amagasaki Akira outlines a transformation in art from a model in which an artist conveys a message to the audience to a model in which the spectators are invited to be co- creators with the artist.'” As it happens, Mikami gives us a clue regarding how the butd spectator might go about participating in the creation of a work of art. Having identified the complex structure of Hijikata’s dances, she then reads certain elements of the structure as occupying pride of place. For exam- ple, she refers to the “Ash Pillar Walk,” a movement that, according to her, Hijikata analogized with the walk of death row inmates on their way to the gallows, or the walk of children whose legs have fallen asleep due to having been forced to sit still for many hours.” The ash pillar, she explains, is a human sacrifice that has been burned completely so that the only thing left is ash ready to crumble at any moment—it is all form with no faculties. When this ash figure walks, it has lost the power to control itself, and so moves in unpredictable ways. In essence, Mikami has donc two things. First, she has invited the observer to look at a dance from the perspective of the dancer. This is consonant with Amagasaki’s perspective. He pointed out that we are now unsatisfied with Hijikata Tatsumi’s Buto 103 thinking of the dancer’s body as a medium for the choreographer’s expres- sion (in the same way as we might think of a painter using paints or a sculp- tor using bronze), for as he observes, “The body is also who the dancer is.”2! In the world of butd, many performers claim that in order to understand buto one must practice it. In one respect, this sounds like an attempt to control the interpretive field of butd. In another respect, this sounds like an invitation to co-creation by adopting the perspective of the dancer and knowing what the dancer knows, Second, Mikami has created a reading of a movement/pose in which aes- thetic and ethico-political concerns overlap. Capital punishment is seen as state-sponsored violence (whether the person is guilty of a crime or not). Hijikata examines the body of the person subject to this state repression to see what properties it has. What he finds is that the person in this condition has lost autonomy and only resembles other humans in superficial ways, and thus that such a person acts in an unpredictable manner. The ethico-political side of this is Hijikata’s unerring sense of how politics has decisive and devas- tating effects on individual bodies. The aesthetic side is that Hijikata then tums this into the basis for dance: he puts this body in stage. However, for the moment, that point is less important than the fact that Mikami isolates this movement out from how it appears in any particular dance and accords to it its own right of interpretation. Under her reading criteria, in any dance in which Hijikata used the Ash Pillar Walk, an informed spectator would be justified in drawing a connection to capital punishment, state (ab)use of power, and bodies that lack autonomy. Mikami also reads the backgrounds of Western artists cited by Hijikata in order to find clues about the significance of poses. In analyzing the move- ment “Goya—Pope of Pus,” she cites both Goya’s loss of hearing and subse- quent loss of sinecure, as well as his efforts to break down boundaries between the holy and the vulgar. Here are the instructions: Goya—Pope of Pus pus, saliva, otorrhea, meat falling from bones, darkness brain dripping out of the mouth draw in the vestments of pus with one’s elbow meat falling off bones—falls off over there—falls off here vestments of pus receding into the darkness management of time to stagger gaps—dispersion”™ Where we might have thought that in a list of deliquescent substances, otorr- hea would be merely one more thing to disgust us, Mikami reminds us that in the case of Goya—having lost his hearing—an ear discharge might have been a daily reality, or might have been the cause of or the reminder of his104, Bruce Baird losing his job. Regardless of the context of this movement in a phrase or in the overall surreal narrative, it would seem that the spectator would be justi- fied in making connections to unemployment, hearing loss, and (given the instructions about vestments) to religious authority and the ways that it affects bodies. We can draw a hint for how to look at a multilayered art by looking at similar practices from different times and places. The Patristic philosophers looked for ways to reconcile Greek and Hebrew thought, and the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. John Cassian, assuming texts to be complected, postulated a four-part structure in order to elucidate their meaning: Literal/Historical (Jerusalem is the city of the Jews), and what he identified as the three levels of the spiritual: Allegorical/Typical (Jerusalem is the church of Christ), Tro- pological/Moral (Jerusalem is a metaphor for an individual soul), and Ana- gogical/Mystical (Jerusalem is the heavenly city of God).”* Michele (Michael) Marra, in his “Japanese Aesthetics: The Construction of Meaning,” compares these attempts with the use of solecism and honkadori (allusive variation) through which poems can be interpreted on various different levels. Marra points out that by tracing back the allusions and accounting for the inten- tional grammatical mistakes in Fujiwara Teika’s poems, one can make a divi- sion between a nature reading, a psychological reading, a romantic reading, and a Sinitic reading." Marra argues that the technique in Teika’s hand insures that unitary meaning is deferred. I have already noted Hijikata’s hesitancy to dictate a correct reading for his dances. We can add to that hesitation a contemporary concern with the limits of the interpretive act itself, as well as a disinclination to employ stereo- typical raised-fist declarations when making artistic or philosophical points. All this adds up to the fact that Hijikata was not interested in beating the spectator over the head with his point. However, it would be ridiculous to assert that Hijikata’s dances point nowhere whatsoever. Just as Fujiwara Teika and Cassian provided the apparatuses for up to four different readings of a poem or text, Hijikata’s choreographic structure subtly provides several different apertures of access to his dances.** We have already seen two in Mikami—she reads the movements, and Hijikata’s source material. We can expand this, by looking at Hijikata’s 1972 dance Hosdtan (Story of Smallpox). Kobayashi Saga explains that on the narrative level this was simultaneously a dance about a low-class prostitute waiting for an abortion on a sultry day, and about a mother carrying a child. This mother carrying a child has three referents. The first two are (possibly fictional) incidents from Hijikata’s own recorded history: his mother fleeing with him in the middle of the night to escape his father’s abusive wrath, and his mother carrying him to a doctor when he was ill.2° The third referent is a woodblock print by Utagawa Kuni- Hijikata Tatsumi’s Buto 105 yoshi, Omi no kuni no yaifuu Okane (The Strong Woman O-kane of Omi Prov- ince). Kobayashi also says that Hijikata took poses from Hieronymus Bosch’s The Mendicants, and from several Francis Bacon paintings such as Painting; Head Ils Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X; Study for the Nurse in the Film ‘Battleship Potemkin’; and Chimpanzee” Given the hints of Mikami and Marra about how to guide possible read- ings, we are in a position to consider how one might co-create this dance. Kuniyoshi’s woodblock print of a woman subduing a horse points to a pre- ponderance of strong women in Hijikata dances—women who do not fit one common conception of Japanese women. The idea of a woman carrying a child points to the two incidents from Hijikata’s personal history. Whether the incidents are true or fictional, if one makes a dance about evading spousal and child abuse or about carrying a sick child to a doctor, one has made a dance with an ethical component. Bosch’s mendicants point to another ethi- cal theme in Hijikata—that of indigents and others left behind by the high- growth economic advances of postwar Japan. Bacon’s figures point us right back to Hijikata’s penchant for recycling images, as Bacon himself modeled paintings after Velazquez and Eisenstein, and also point us to a tactic of humanizing the divine that can be seen in Bacon’s various paintings of popes and cardinals. We could base a reading—the act of co-creation—on any one of six things: movements and instructions, source materials, surreal narra- tives, and personal or communal history. Moreover, any of these readings could have technical, political, ethical, or philosophical overtones. These levels of interpretation bring me back, for a moment, to the issue of buté and the body and buté and the mind. My contention was that butd does not elicit some natural body, but I must follow that assertion with the oppo- site one: buto is not merely a cerebral exercise of imagining various con- straints on the body. Understanding the complex layers of the dances allows us to see that butd’s focus on the body is a focus on specific types of bodies— Hansen’s disease patients, pariahs, prostitutes, homeless people. In a country where forced confinement in leprosaria was not outlawed until 1996, a focus on the specific body of the Hansen’s disease patient not only concretizes what might sound like an abstract mind game, but also reinforces my proposed varied levels of reading, which include the technical, ethical, political, and historical." I have mentioned the degree to which the dancers were required to spread their consciousness and concentration out to many different places on their bodies or in the theatre. If the dancer is to imagine an eye in a different place on the body, similarly the audience might fruitfully explore an extra level of meaning enabled by widening out concentration through injecting Beardsley or Bosch into a dance about a prostitute. The eye in a different place allows106 Bruce Baird one to see the world differently, while Bosch in the middle of a Tohoku dance allows one to see Tohoku differently. To ignore the instruction about the eye would make it impossible for the dancer to render a pose, and so also for the audience to ignore Bosch would be to ignore one crucial part of the dance composition. It is as if Hijikata is literally trying to approach cubism from the opposite side, Rather than trying to bend or multiply an object so that we can see more facets of it from a single position—thus reminding us of the limits of our perspective—Hijikata requires his dancers to add extra eyes so that they can see the world from different viewpoints. Similarly, he requires us to add extra levels in our approach to his dances, Just as cubism fails if the extra angles are taken to be a full representation of an object, buto fails if the extra eyes are taken as a means to grasp the world completely. If the multiplication of eyes can suggest an invitation to the task of approaching things from many angles while remembering that extra approaches yield at most asymptotic nearness to the complex world, then butd will have succeeded. At this point one can recognize that the weight of the varying philosophi- cal burdens shouldered by this structure makes this a choreographic method that is sometimes at cross-purposes with itself. However, that same weight insures dances with profound depth. Recognizing the depth of these dances is not to accord them some transcendent aesthetic dimension—as often hap- pens in Hijikata studies (in which depth is taken as the outcome of a focus on mystery and ritual, or is taken to stem from contact with an aesthetic sphere). Here the depth does not come from ritual as much as from loading the dance with so many elements and layers that if it seems that there is more than meets the eye, this is literally true. As is the case with so many interventions in our world, here lies both buté’s strength and its weakness. We know today, despite all our mistrust of grand narratives, that solid work on mini-narratives (or given butd’s pen- chant for mixing disparate items, mini-monogatari) will yield results. Investi- gative reporting will uncover the connections between the politician and the corporate donor, or the connections between Occupation policy and conser- vative Japanese politics. The world is not just a fuzz of information; rather, information can be ferreted out if one is willing to look hard enough. How- eyer, an aesthetic focus that requires one to exercise skills in living with ambi- guity also threatens to overlook the moments when nonambiguity is possible. Just as butd fails if those extra viewpoints are an indication of a totalizing viewpoint, so also buto fails if those extra eyes are an indication of the impos- sibility of understanding anything. Butd succeeds if it teaches us to spend our time sifting our way through available information (which may be insuffi- cient or overly plentiful) setting up provisional interpretations and gradually Hijikata Tatsumi’s Buto 107 weeding out things that turn out to be dead ends after a look from a second or third perspective. Hijikata’s butd offers us both plenty of information and not enough. In participating in its invitation to co-creation, how we deal with that abundance and lack reflects on us. Notes 1, The main sources are as follows: Mikami Kayo, Utsuwa toshite no Shintai: Ankoku Butd Giho e no Apurochi (Body as Receptacle: An Approach to the Tech- niques of Ankoku Butd) (Tokyo: ANZ-Do, 1993). Unfortunately, because Mikami studied with Hijikata during a time when he was not preparing dances for staging, she relied on the notes of other dancers regarding works that were actually staged, which limits the value of her book with respect to Hijikata’s staged dances. However, other dancers from different eras have echoed her ideas, so her work is invaluable in understanding Hijikata. Waguri Yukio, Butoh Kaden (Tokushima, Japan: Justsystem, 1998), Waguri’s CD-ROM is hampered by a design that makes it difficult to under- stand how the instructions, poses, and phrases fit together, but he does show short snippets of dance poses or movements. Nakajima Natsu was one of the first and lon- gest dancers with Hijikata. She has not written her own explication of butd, but she advised Lee Chee Keng on his master’s thesis (Lee Chee Keng, Hijikata Tatsumi and Ankoku Butoh: A Body Perspective (M.A. diss., National University of Singapore, 1998)), so his account of buté can be taken to represent her understanding of the dance form. Finally, | conducted interviews with and made videotapes of longtime dancer Kobayashi Saga to round out my understanding. . Mikami, Utsuwa, 118-119, 183, . Mikami, Utsuwa, 161. . Mikami, Utsuwa, 116. . Mikami, Utsuwa, 116. . Mikami, Utsuwa, 100. . Mikami, Utsuwa, 100. 8, Mikami, Utsuwa, 182. 9. Susan Blakeley Klein, Ankoku Butd: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Darkness (Ithaca, N. ‘ast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1988), 55. 10. Keng, Hijikata Tatsumi and Ankoku Butoh, 50, 11, Mikami, Utsuwa, 146. 12. Eugenio Barba, The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology, translated by Richard Fowler (New York: Routledge, 1995), 71-72. 13. Sakurai Keisuke. Nishiazabu dansu semina (Nishiazabu Dance Seminar) (Tokyo: Parco, 1995), 211. 14, Mikami, Utsuwa, 173-174, 15, Mikami, Utsuwa, 187. 16. Mikami, Utsuwa, 188-189. Here as elsewhere, | have followed the original in punctuation and spacing. NaupUN108 Bruce Baird 17. Walter Benjamin, fluminations, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 197. 18, Mikami, Utsuwa, 151 19. Amagasaki Akira, Geijutsu toshite no Shintai (The Body as Art) (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 1983), 3. 20. Mikami, Utsuwa, 84-91, 21, Amagasaki, Geijutsu, 19. 22. Mikami, Utsuwa, 114. 23. John Cassian, Conferences, translated by Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), 160. 24. Michele (Michael) Marra, “Japanese Aesthetics: The Construction of Mean- ing.” Philosophy East and West 45, no. 3 (July 1995): 52-74. 25. Citing Fujiwara Teika is not meant to indicate that there is something distinc- tively Japanese about multiple readings, anymore than citing Cassian suggests that Hijikata had a connection to the Patristic philosophers. Moreover, citing Cassian raises the problem of intention. The writers of the Hebrew texts certainly did not have in mind the readings that Cassian finds. However, here I mean only to explore how to think about saturated art forms, and each of these three had different reasons for postulating the existence of or creating such forms. Marra points out that Teika was concerned with saving the prerogative of the Mikohidari poetic lineage from attacks from the Emperor Go-Toba, who thought that the quality of poetry was dependant on the social status of the author (“Japanese Aesthetics,” 52-74). By using allusions to other poems, Teika could guarantee that only a person with a deep knowledge of previous poetry had the ability to judge the quality of a poem. Cassian, of course, was taxed with rendering a text amenable to a new set of readings. 26. Hijikata is known to have fabricated certain incidents in his personal history, so it is unclear whether or not either of these incidents actually happened. 27. Kobayashi Saga, interview with the author on May 25, 2002. 28. Kitano Ryuichi, “The End of Isolation; Hansen’s Disease in Japan.” Harvard Asia Quarterly 4, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 40.