Bruce Baird - Rosemary Candelario - The Routledge Companion To Butoh Performance-Routledge (2018)

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO
BUTOH PERFORMANCE
The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance provides a comprehensive introduction to and

analysis of the global art form butoh.
Originating in Japan in the 1960s, butoh was a major innovation in twentieth century dance
and performance, and it continues to shape-shift around the world. Taking inspiration from the
Japanese avant-garde, Surrealism, Happenings, and authors such as Genet and Artaud, its influence
can be seen throughout contemporary performing arts, music, and visual art practices.
This Companion places the form in historical context, documents its development in Japan and
its spread around the world, and brings together the theory and the practice of this compelling
dance. The interdisciplinarity evident in the volume reflects the depth and the breadth of butoh,
and the editors bring specially commissioned essays by leading scholars and dancers together with
translations of important early texts.
Bruce Baird is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst, USA.
Rosemary Candelario is Associate Professor of Dance at Texas Woman’s University, USA.

ROUTLEDGE THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE COMPANIONS
The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare

Edited by John Russell Brown
The Routledge Companion to Actors’ Shakespeare
Edited by John Russell Brown
The Routledge Companion to Stanislavsky
Edited by R. Andrew White
The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance
Edited by Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and John Bell
The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy
Edited by Magda Romanska
The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell’Arte
Edited by Judith Chaffee and Olly Crick
The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov
Edited by Marie Christine Autant Mathieu and Yana Meerzon
The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq
Edited by Mark Evans and Rick Kemp
The Routledge Companion to Scenography
Edited by Arnold Aronson
The Routledge Companion to Adaptation
Edited by Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs and Eckart Voigts
The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance
Edited by Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/handbooks/

products/SCAR30
THE ROUTLEDGE
COMPANION TO BUTOH
PERFORMANCE
Edited by Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario

First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario to be identified as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Baird, Bruce, 1968- editor. | Candelario, Rosemary, editor.
Title: The Routledge companion to Butoh performance / [edited by] Bruce Baird,
Rosemary Candelario.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge
theatre and performance companions | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018005516 | ISBN 9781138691094 (hardback : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781138691100 | ISBN 9781315536132 (ebook : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Butåo. | Modern dance—Japan.
Classification: LCC GV1783.2.B87 R68 2018 | DDC 792.80952—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018005516
ISBN: 978-1-138-69109-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-53613-2 (ebk)
Typeset in ApexBembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Bruce:
For Jeanne, Beckett and Axel

Ayako Kano and Linda Chance
And for Rosemary Candelario, the best co-editor one could possibly imagine
Rosemary:
For my first butoh family: Deborah, Ellen, Alice, Hortense, and Nathan
And, as always, for Karl
CONTENTS
List of figures xiii

List of contributors xviii
Acknowledgements xxviii
A note on Japanese names and words xxix
Introduction: dance experience, dance of darkness, global butoh:

the evolution of a new dance form 1
Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario
SECTION 1
Butoh instigators and interlocutors 23
1 On the eve of the birth of ankoku butoh: postwar Japanese

modern dance and Ohno Kazuo 25
Kuniyoshi Kazuko (translated by Bruce Baird)
2 From vodou to butoh: Hijikata Tatsumi, Katherine Dunham,

and the trans-Pacific remaking of blackness 37
Arimitsu Michio
3 Contemporary nightmare: an avant-garde dance group dances

Forbidden Colors 52
Mishima Yukio (translated by Bruce Baird)
4 The relationship between avant-garde dance and things 54

vii
Contents
5 Rethinking the “indigeneity” of Hijikata Tatsumi in the 1960s

as a photographic negative image of Japanese dance history 56
Inata Naomi (translated by Bruce Baird and the author)
6 À la maison de Shibusawa: the draconian aspects of Hijikata’s butoh 71

Robert Ono
7 Hijikata Tatsumi: burnt offering dancer 78

Shibusawa Tatsuhiko (translated by Robert Ono)
8 A certain kind of energy: dancing modern anxiety 79

9 Butoh and taboo 81

Gunji Masakatsu (translated by Jane Traynor)
10 “Inserting the hip/s” and “lowering the hip/s” excerpt from

Chapter 1, “That Which Is Nanba-like” from What Are Traditional Arts?
A Dialogue for Criticism and Creation 85
Takechi Tetsuji and Tomioka Taeko (translated and with an introductory
essay by Maki Isaka)
11 The problematics of butoh and the essentialist trap 92

William Marotti
12 Returns and repetitions: Hijikata Tatsumi’s choreographic practice as a

critical gesture of temporalization 99
Sara Jansen
13 Ohno Kazuo: biography and methods of movement creation 113

Lucia Schwellinger (translated by Charlotte Marr and Rosemary Candelario)
14 What we know and what we want to know: a roundtable on butoh and

neuer Tanz 126
Kate Elswit, Miyagawa Mariko, Eiko Otake, and Tara Rodman
15 Oikawa Hironobu: bringing Decroux and Artaud into Japanese

dance practices 137
Yoshida Yukihiko (translated by Bruce Baird)
16 Foundations and filiations: the legacy of Artaud in Hijikata Tatsumi 142

Samantha Marenzi
viii
Contents
17 Butoh’s remediation and the anarchic transforming politics of

the body in the 1960s 150
Peter Eckersall
18 Bodies at the threshold of the visible: photographic butoh 158

Jonathan W. Marshall
19 The book of butoh; the book of the dead 171

Uno Kuniichi (translated by Bruce Baird)
SECTION 2
The second generation 179
20 “Open butoh”: Dairakudakan and Maro Akaji 181

Tomoe Aihara (translated by Robert Ono)
21 Growing new life: Kasai Akira’s butoh 192

Megan V. Nicely
22 Light as dust, hard as steel, fluid as snake saliva: the Butoh Body
of Ashikawa Yoko 203
SU-EN
23 The expanding universe of butoh: the challenge of Bishop Yamada

in Hoppo Butoh-ha and Shiokubi (1975) 214
Kosuge Hayato
24 Murobushi Kō and his challenge to butoh 226

Katja Centonze
25 Oscillation and regeneration: the temporal aesthetics of Sankai Juku 237

Iwaki Kyoko
SECTION 3
New sites for butoh 243
26 “Now we have a passport”: global and local butoh 245

Rosemary Candelario
27 A history of French fascination with butoh 254

Sylviane Pagès (translated by Sherwood Chen)
ix
Contents
28 The concept of butoh in Italy: from Ohno Kazuo to Kasai Akira 262
Maria Pia D’Orazi
29 German butoh since the late 1980s: Tadashi Endo, Yumiko Yoshioka,
and Minako Seki 276
Rosa van Hensbergen
30 SU-EN Butoh Company – body, nature, and the world 285

SU-EN
31 Butoh in Brazil: historical context and political reenactment 294

Christine Greiner
32 A sun more alive: butoh in Mexico 303

Gustavo Emilio Rosales (translated by Jordan A. Y. Smith)
33 Global butoh as experienced in San Francisco 313

Brechin Flournoy
34 LEIMAY, CAVE, and the New York Butoh Festival 325

Ximena Garnica
35 Iraqi Bodies’ The Baldheaded: “butoh”-inspired Iraqi contemporary

performance 337
J Dellecave
36 “We need to keep one eye open . . . ”: approaching butoh at sites of

personal and cultural resistance 343
Jeremy Neideck
SECTION 4
Politics, gender, identity 359
37 Butoh’s genders: men in dresses and girl-like women 361

Katherine Mezur
38 Death rituals and survival acts: Hata Kanoko’s “butoh action” and
alternative inter-Asian transnationalism 371
Chiayi Seetoo
39 When the “revolt of the flesh” becomes political protest: the nomadic
tactics of butoh-inspired interventions 381
Carla Melo
x
Contents
40 Butoh beyond the body: an interview with Shakina Nayfack on transition,

evolution, and the spirit at war 388
Jacquelyn Marie Shannon
41 Critical Butoh and the colonial matrix of power 399

Miki Seifert
SECTION 5
Pedagogy and practice 407
42 The daily practice of Hijikata Tatsumi’s apprentices from 1969 to 1978 409
Caitlin Coker
43 Butoh pedagogy in historical and contemporary practice 418

Tanya Calamoneri
44 Waguri Yukio’s Butoh Kaden: taking stock of Hijikata’s butoh notation 426
Rosa van Hensbergen
45 A flower of butoh: my daily dance with Ohno Kazuo (1995–2012) 437

Maureen Momo Freehill
46 On and through the butoh body 447

Katherine Adamenko
47 My Dairakudakan experience 451

Julia A.Vessey
48 Butoh as an approach to performance in South Africa 456

jackï job
49 Wrecking butoh: dancing poetic shores 464

Bronwyn Preece
SECTION 6
Beyond butoh 481
50 Tanaka Min: the dance of life 483

Zack Fuller
51 Body Weather Laboratory Los Angeles: an interview with Roxanne

Steinberg and Oguri 491
Joyce Lu
xi
Contents
52 The cinematic forms of butoh films 503

Aaron Kerner
53 Locus solus – locus fracta: butoh dance as protocol for visual

self-representation 510
Lucile Druet
54 Ohno Kazuo’s lessons for a French choreographer: Ô Senseï

by Catherine Diverrès 519
Miyagawa Mariko
55 Michael Sakamoto and the breaks: revolt of the head (MuNK remix) 525
Michael Sakamoto
56 Burn butoh, start again 533

Shinichi Iova-Koga
Index 539
xii
FIGURES
0.1 Hand position taken from Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun (1912) and
Japanese courtly headgear reproduced with a clog and feather duster,
Gibasan (1972), photograph by Onozuka Makoto. Courtesy of
Onozuka Makoto. 6
0.2 Megan V. Nicely at CAVE (presented by LEIMAY, New York
Butoh Festival 2009), photograph by Yana Kraeva. Courtesy of LEIMAY. 16
0.3 Tanya Calamoneri at CAVE (presented by LEIMAY, New York Butoh
Festival 2007), photograph by Dola Baroni. Courtesy of LEIMAY. 19
0.4 Zack Fuller at CAVE (presented by LEIMAY, New York Butoh
Festival 2007), photograph by Dola Baroni. Courtesy of LEIMAY. 20
0.5 Shinichi Momo Iova-Koga (co-presented by LEIMAY, New York
Butoh Festival 2007 as part of Japan Society’s Kazuo Ohno 101
Celebration and Butoh U.S. Marathon), photograph by Dola Baroni.
Courtesy of LEIMAY. 21
2.1 Forbidden Colors studio performance (1959), photograph by Ōtsuji Kiyoji.
Courtesy of the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive, Keio University Art Center. 38
2.2 Forbidden Colors studio performance (1959), photograph by Ōtsuji Kiyoji.
Courtesy of the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive, Keio University Art Center. 39
2.3 Forbidden Colors (expanded version), “6 Avantgardists: September 5th 6:00
Gathering” (September 5, 1959). Photographer unknown. Courtesy of
the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive, Keio University Art Center. 40
2.4 “The Elegance of the Authentic: Sensual and Powerful.” The Asahi Shimbun
(evening ed.), September 29, 1957. Courtesy of The Asahi Shimbun and
Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt. 42
2.5 “Katherine Dunham and Her Company of Dancers, Singers, Musicians.”
The Yomiuri Shimbun (evening ed.), September 9, 1957. Courtesy of
The Yomiuri Shimbun/Yomidas Rekishikan and Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt. 43
2.6 “Ms. Dunham, A Dancer of a Different Color: A Black Dance Company
to Visit Japan.” The Mainichi Shimbun (evening ed.), September 10, 1957.
Courtesy of The Mainichi Shimbun and Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt. 44
2.7 A program for Niguro to Kawa (1961). 46
xiii
Figures
2.8 Cover illustration of Niguro to Kawa (Tokyo: Kokubunsha, 1958)

[a translation of Langston Hughes’s Weary Blues (1926) by Saitō Tadatoshi]. 47
6.1 Shibusawa in his study. The replica of Bellmer’s doll, described above,
is visible in the back. Photograph by Ishiguro Kenji. © Ishiguro Kenji. 75
15.1 Oikawa’s interpretation of Barrault’s triangles. 139
18.1 Hijikata Tatsumi and dancers, from the 1960 pamphlet for Dance Experience,
photograph by Hosoe Eikoh. Courtesy of Hosoe Eikoh. 160
18.2 Otoko to Onna (Man and Woman) #24, by Hosoe Eikoh, 1960; featuring
Hijikata Tatsumi (1960), photograph by Hosoe Eikoh. Courtesy of Hosoe Eikoh. 161
18.3 Ohno Kazuo in La Argentina, directed by Hijikata Tatsumi, 1977,
photograph by Hanaga Mitsutoshi. Courtesy of Hanaga Tarō. 162
18.4 From the Kamaitachi series [#31, Gendai shichosha version, 1969]
featuring Hijikata Tatsumi (1965), photograph by Hosoe Eikoh.
Courtesy of Hosoe Eikoh. 167
18.5 From the Kamaitachi series [Final Plate, Gendai shichosha version, 1969]
featuring Hijikata Tatsumi (1965), photograph by Hosoe Eikoh.
Courtesy of Hosoe Eikoh. 167
20.1 Butoh groups derived from Dairakudakan during the 1970s. 183
20.2 Dairakudakan Temputenshiki, Paradise (2016), photograph by
Kawashima Hiroyuki. 185
21.1 Kasai Akira. Pollen Revolution (2004), photograph by Chelsea Mosher. 193
21.2 Kasai Akira in Emotion in Metaphysics by Hijikata Tatsumi (1967),
photograph by Takai Tomiko. 194
21.3 Kasai Akira Solo Dance Recital. Courtesy of the Hijikata Tatsumi
Archive, Keio University Art Center. 198
22.1 Ashikawa Yoko in Hitogata (1976), photographer unknown.
Courtesy of Morishita Takashi and the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive,
Keio University Art Center. 206
22.2 Ashikawa Yoko in Geisenjo no Okugata (1976), photograph by
Nakatani Tadao. Courtesy of Nakatani Tadashi and the Hijikata
Tatsumi Archive, Keio University Art Center. 207
22.3 Ashikawa Yoko in Geisenjo no Okugata (1976), photograph by
Nakatani Tadao. Courtesy of Nakatani Tadashi and the Hijikata
Tatsumi Archive, Keio University Art Center. 207
23.1 Bishop Yamada in the dressing room at the cabaret in Matsuyama
in summer 1973, photographer unknown. Courtesy of Bishop Yamada. 218
23.2 A promotional poster for Shiokubi (1975). Courtesy of Bishop Yamada. 219
24.1 Murobushi Kō, quick silver (Azabu Die Pratze, Tokyo, 2006),
photograph by Awane Osamu. Courtesy of Awane Osamu. 231
24.2 Murobushi Kō, Krypt (Kamakura, 2012), photograph by Awane Osamu.
Courtesy of Awane Osamu. 232
26.1 Katsura Kan’s Beckett Butoh Notation “Not I” (Highways Performance
Space, 2009), photograph by Moses Hacmon facesofwater.com.
Featuring Heyward Bracey, Rosemary Candelario, Pamela Herron,
Katsura Kan, Melissa Lohman, Eric Losoya, and Vangeline. 249
26.2 Workshop participant performance at BRM Tlalpujahua Celebración
de Quince Años (15th Anniversary celebration of the BRM Center
in Tlalpujahua) (2016). Courtesy of Diego Piñón. 251
xiv
Figures
28.1 Ohno Kazuo, Dead Sea (Rome, 1986), photograph by Marco Tambara. 264
28.2 Iwana Masaki, Jokanaan (Rome, Sala Uno, 1998), photograph by Emilio D’Itri. 265
28.3 Iwana Masaki, Jokanaan (Rome, Sala Uno, 1998), photograph by Emilio D’Itri. 266
28.4 Kasai Akira, Seraphita (Rome, Teatro Greco, 1998), photograph by Emilio D’Itri. 267
28.5 Kasai Akira, “Rhinoceros” (Rome, Teatro Furio Camillo, 2009),
photograph by Emilio D’Itri. 268
28.6 Kasai Akira, portrait (Rome 1998), photograph by Emilio D’Itri. 268
28.7 Alessandro Pintus, “Eliogabalo Project,” directed by Kasai Akira
(Rome, Teatro Furio Camillo, 2009), photograph by Emilio D’Itri. 269
28.8 Alessandro Pintus, Flavio Arcangeli, Manuela Giovagnetti, Marie
Thérèse Sitzia, “Eliogabalo Project,” directed by Kasai Akira
(Rome, Teatro Furio Camillo, 2009), photograph by Emilio D’Itri. 270
28.9 Alessandra Cristiani, “Flower” (Rufa Rome University of Fine
Arts, 2016), photograph by Eleonora Cerri Pecorella. 271
28.10 Marie Thérèse Sitzia (Rufa Rome University of Fine Arts, 2016),
photograph by Eleonora Cerri Pecorella. 272
28.11 Maddalena Gana, “InPrimia” (Rufa Rome University of Fine
Arts, 2016), photograph by Eleonora Cerri Pecorella. 272
30.1 Poster photo for Fragrant (2005), photograph by Henriette Lykke.
Courtesy of SU-EN Butoh Company and Henriette Lykke. 287
30.2 From SU-EN Butoh Company production Blush (2010), photograph
by Gunnar H Stening. Courtesy of SU-EN Butoh Company and
Gunnar H Stening. 291
32.1 Yumiko Yoshioka, photograph by Gabriel Morales. 304
32.2 Ken Mai, photograph by David Uriegas. 305
32.3 Isabel Beteta, photograph by Gabriel Morales. 307
32.4 Murobushi Kō, photograph by Eugenia Andrealli. 310
33.1 Images from the 1995, 1996, and 1997 San Francisco Butoh Festival.
Courtesy of Brechin Flournoy. 318
33.2 Images from the 1998, 1999, and 2000 San Francisco Butoh Festival.
33.3 Images from the 2001 and 2002 San Francisco Butoh Festival.
34.1 Ximena Garnica in Antigones (co-presented by LEIMAY, New York
Butoh Festival 2007, as part of Japan Society’s Kazuo Ohno 101
Celebration and Butoh U.S. Marathon), photograph by Dola Baroni.
Courtesy of LEIMAY. 326
34.2 The Tamanos (co-presented by LEIMAY, New York Butoh Festival 2007,
as part of Japan Society’s Kazuo Ohno 101 Celebration and Butoh
U.S. Marathon), photograph by Dola Baroni. Courtesy of LEIMAY. 327
34.3 Murobushi Kō in Quick Silver (presented by LEIMAY, New York
Butoh Festival 2007), photograph by Dola Baroni, courtesy of LEIMAY. 329
34.4 Kasai Akira in Flowers (presented by LEIMAY, New York Butoh Festival
2005), photograph by Piotr Redlinski. Courtesy of LEIMAY. 329
34.5 Yoko Kaseki in Tooboe (presented by LEIMAY, New York Butoh Festival
2005), photograph by Piotr Redlinski. Courtesy of LEIMAY. 332
34.6 Iwana Masaki (presented by LEIMAY, New York Butoh Festival 2005),
photograph by Piotr Redlinski. Courtesy of LEIMAY. 332
xv
Figures
34.7 Waguri Yukio at CAVE (presented by LEIMAY, New York Butoh Festival
2007), photograph by Dola Baroni. Courtesy of LEIMAY. 333
34.8 Furnace, a LEIMAY collaboration by Ximena Garnica, Shige Moriya,
Murobushi Kō, and an international group of performers (New York Butoh
Festival 2009), photograph by Yana Kraeva. Courtesy of LEIMAY. 334
35.1 Anmar Taha, photograph by Khalil Younes. 338
36.1 Forest – Deluge Cycle 1 (2011), photograph by FenLan Chuang. Pictured:
Kat Henry, Jana Penshorn, Terry Hesketh, Mark Hill, Tak Hoyoung,
Park Younghee. 345
36.2 Some of the metaphors developed during the Deluge project and described
in this chapter. 352
36.3 Elements – Deluge Cycle 5 (Brisbane Powerhouse, 2014), photograph by
FenLan Chuang. Pictured: Park Younghee, Sammie Williams,
Jeremy Neideck, Amy Wollstein. 354
38.1 Hata Kanoko as “Barrel Woman” (Zunnü 樽女) in Body-Vessel of
the Priestess (Zhugao zhiqi 祝告之器, 2011), photograph by You-Wei Chen. 375
39.1 Corpus Delicti, street protest performance. Hollywood Boulevard,
Los Angeles, CA (February 15, 2003), photograph by Hamidah Glasgow. 383
39.2 Alegria e Elegia: Unidos da Praça Roosevelt Pede Passagem. Group street
performance directed by Carla Melo, resulting from workshop she gave
at the Hemispheric Encuentro of Performance & Politics: Cities/Bodies/
Action: The Politics of Passion in the Americas (Praça Roosevelt, São Paulo,
January 2013), photograph by Tānia Farias. 385
40.1 Revolution of the Flesh (2011), photograph and artwork by Raul Pizarro. 390
40.2 Death Drive (still from extended dance segment) (2014), photograph by
L. E. Salas. 391
40.3 Death Drive (still from extended dance segment) (2014), photograph by
L. E. Salas. 392
40.4 Arena y Sangre, Blood & Sand (2004), photograph by Rigo Maldonado. 394
41.1 Miki Seifert as Miss Texas, photograph by Craig Thomson. 403
41.2 Miki Seifert as Dressmaker’s Doll, photograph by Craig Thomson. 404
42.1 Cleaning the floor at Asbestos-kan, photograph by Fujimori Hideo.
Courtesy of the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive. 411
42.2 Chatting at Asbestos-kan: Hijikata Tatsumi and apprentices, photograph
by Yamaguchi Haruhisa. Courtesy of the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive. 412
42.3 Rehearsal for the “avant-garde show.” Kobayashi Saga, Ashikawa Yoko,
Hijikata Tatsumi, Tamano Kōichi, photograph by Nakatani Tadao.
Courtesy of Nakatani Tadao and the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive,
Keio University Art Center. 413
42.4 Kobayashi saga and props for the Space Capsule Show, photographer
unknown. Courtesy of the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive. 414
44.1 Screenshot of Part 1: BUTOH-FU. 428
44.2 Screenshot of Part 2: References. 433
45.1 Maureen Momo Freehill with Ohno Kazuo on tour in Venice.
Courtesy of the author. 441
45.2 Maureen Momo Freehill with Ohno Kazuo on her wedding day.
Courtesy of the author. 443
xvi
Figures
46.1 Choreographer/performer Katherine Adamenko. Water Cure

(Galapagos Art Space, 2005), photograph by Steve Zak. 450
49.1 butoh-as-i-as-butoh. Courtesy of the author. 465
50.1 Drive (Performance Space 122, New York City, 1980), photograph by
Charlie Steiner. 487
50.2 Emotion (Kanjo) (La Mama E.T.C., New York City, 1983), photograph by
Charlie Steiner. 487
51.1 Flyer for Body Weather Laboratory workshops at La Boca, photograph by
Gary Matteson. 492
51.2 Oguri at Plan-B, Tokyo (1986), photograph by Christine Quoiraud.
Courtesy of Médiathèque du Centre National de la Danse, Paris. 495
51.3 Simone Forti and Oguri, Flower of the Season (2016),
photograph by Sally Stein. Postcard Art + Design by Kio Griffith. 495
51.4 Steinberg and Oguri, Person’s Body (Electric Lodge, 2017), photograph
by Moses Hacmon facesofwater.com. 498
51.5 Oguri, Melinda Ring, Roxanne Steinberg, Galvanic Murmur
(La Boca, 1992), photograph by Gary Matteson. 499
51.6 Roxanne Steinberg, photographer unknown. 500
52.1 Screenshots from Horrors of Malformed Men. 504
52.2 Screenshots from Himiko. 505
53.1 Lucile Druet, Koma/The Chapter, 2014 (digital photograph).
Courtesy of the artist. 515
53.2 Lucile Druet, Mononoke hime, 2015 (digital photograph).
Courtesy of the artist. 515
56.1 Father, Yuzo Koga, pictured on right, provides early influence on
Shinichi Iova-Koga’s physical discipline. Courtesy of the author. 534
56.2 Shinichi Iova-Koga, influenced by butoh even when not explicitly
performing butoh. Photograph by Pak Han. 535
56.3 “Crazy Cloud,” co-directed by Murobushi Kō and Shinichi Iova-Koga.
Photograph by Pak Han. 537
xvii
CONTRIBUTORS
Katherine Adamenko is a butoh dancer, performance artist, actress, and writer. She has worked
extensively in both traditional and experimental theatre with an esteemed array of international
artists throughout the United States and Europe. With an eye on spectatorship and disruption,
Katherine enjoys performing original site-specific work in locations such as storefronts, street
corners, closets and kitchens. She is the author/creator of three one-woman shows, presenting
her own brand of cabaret performance art that fuses feminism and satire to create biting (and
often humorous) social critiques. She earned her BA in Dance and joint Political Science/History
from Rutgers University and her MA in Contemporary Theatre Practice from the University of
Essex in England (with Distinction). You can learn more about her work at www.ladypants.com.
Tomoe Aihara is an associate professor at Japan College of Social Work. She began studying
dance at Ochanomizu University, and has participated in the workshops of Ohno Kazuo since
1992. Her recent performances include “Two Women” (2014) held at the Lower Manhattan
Cultural Council’s Arts Center at Governor’s Island, New York, in which she partnered with
Eiko Otake of Eiko & Koma.
Arimitsu Michio is an associate professor at Keio University, Japan. His research interests
include comparative histories of the Asian and African diaspora as well as the politics and poetics
of cultural translation. He has published articles on the haiku-inspired poetry of Amiri Baraka
and Sonia Sanchez. His current book project examines African Americans’ heterogeneous adap-
tations of haiku from the early twentieth century to the present.
Bruce Baird teaches Japanese Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a
research focus on butoh, Japanese theater, and new media studies. He has written widely on
butoh including the landmark book Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits.
Tanya Calamoneri is an Assistant Professor of Dance at Texas Tech University, and previously
was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colgate University. She completed her PhD at Temple Uni-
versity and her MA at New York University. She is a former member of Shinichi Koga’s inkBoat,
based in San Francisco and Berlin. Her writing is published in Dance Chronicle and Movement
Research Journal and presented at Congress on Research in Dance, Society of Dance History
xviii
Contributors
Scholars, Association of Theatre in Higher Education, and Performance Studies International.

Her performance work with Company SoGoNo has received recognition from the New York
Innovative Theater Awards and funding from New York State Council on the Arts, New York
Foundation for the Arts, American Music Center, among others.
As a scholar and performer, Rosemary Candelario specializes in butoh. Other research interests
include Asian and Asian American dance, dance and ecology, site-specific performance, and arts
activism. Her book, Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma’s Asian/American Choreographies was
published by Wesleyan University Press in 2016. Rosemary earned a PhD in Culture and Per-
formance from UCLA and is Associate Professor of Dance at Texas Woman’s University. www.
rosemarycandelario.net
Katja Centonze is currently a Lecturer at Waseda University, Visiting Researcher at the Tsub-
ouchi Shōyō Memorial Theatre Museum, Joint Researcher at Nichibunken and PhD candidate
at Trier University. She has been teaching Japanese Literature and Theatre at Ca’Foscari Uni-
versity (Venice) since 1998, and Japanese Language and Literature at Calabria University since
2005. Her research focuses on the body in Japanese performing arts (especially Hijikata Tatsumi’s
butoh and contemporary dance) and on the body as represented in Japanese literature. Among
her publications she edited Avant-Gardes in Japan. Anniversary of Futurism and Butō: Performing Arts
and Cultural Practices between Contemporariness and Tradition (Cafoscarina, Venezia, 2010).
Sherwood Chen is a dancer and cultural worker. He has worked as a performer with artists
including Xavier Le Roy, Amara Tabor-Smith, Min Tanaka, Anna Halprin, Yuko Kaseki, inkBoat,
Murobushi Kō, Jess Curtis, l’agence touriste, Anne Collod, Oguri, Grisha Coleman, and Sara
Shelton Mann. He leads trainings for contemporary dancers and performers internationally.
Caitlin Coker received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at Kyoto University in 2017 and
currently teaches at Mukogawa Women’s College in Japan. Her research interests are physicality,
movement, and performance. Her doctoral thesis, based on extensive interviews with Hijikata’s
dancers as well as her own ten-year practice of butoh, is planned to be published in Japanese in
2019.
Maria Pia D’Orazi (PhD 2002, Rome University “La Sapienza”) is an adjunct Professor of
Performing Arts History at RUFA (Rome University of Fine Arts). She has widely written about
Butoh in specialized theater magazines, and published the books: Akira Kasai. Un libro chiamato
corpo (2016); Il Corpo Eretico (2008); Kazuo Ōno (2001); and Butō. La nuova danza giapponese
(1997). She has been organizing butoh workshops and performances since 1995. Among oth-
ers, she produced Iwana Masaki for ten years (1995–2004), introduced to Italy Maro Akaji and
Dairakudakan (together with Japan Foundation, 1997) and Kasai Akira (1998). Since 2004 she
has an ongoing artistic collaboration with Kasai Akira.
J Dellecave holds a PhD in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California, Riverside;
MA in Performance Studies from New York University; BFA in Dance from Temple University;
and has had a lifelong career in dance and experimental performance. She is a Brooklyn-based
multi-disciplinary choreographer, interdisciplinary scholar, dancer/performer, and educator. Her
writing has appeared in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist History and itch Dance Jour-
nal. Her graduate research was awarded the prestigious Jacob K. Javits Fellowship by the U.S.
Department of Education.
xix
Contributors
Lucile Druet is lecturer of Japanese Art at Kansai Gaidai University, Osaka. Her research and
teaching includes Japanese fashion with a focus on kimono. Her research also covers Japanese
aesthetics, notably the connections between Zen Buddhism, the concept of Wa and visual arts.
Her artistic practice as a photographer and videographer developed from the study of a variety
of Japanese art forms, especially butoh, its codes, metaphors and influences.
Peter Eckersall teaches at the Graduate Center, CUNY and is an Honorary Professorial Fel-
low, University of Melbourne. His research interests include Japanese performance, dramaturgy
and theatre and politics. His recent publications include: New Media Dramaturgy: Performance and
New-materialism, co-authored with Helena Grehan and Ed Scheer (Palgrave, 2017), and The Dumb
Type Reader, coedited with Edward Scheer and Shintarō Fujii (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2017).
Kate Elswit is author of Watching Weimar Dance (OUP 2014) and Theatre & Dance (Palgrave
2018). She is winner of the Gertrude Lippincott Award, the Biennial Sally Banes Publication
Prize, the Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research, and her work has been funded by
sources including the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford
University, the Lilian Karina Research Grant in Dance and Politics, and the Batelle Engineering,
Technology, and Human Affairs Endowment Grant with Harmony Bench. She is Reader in
Theatre and Performance at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London,
and also works as a choreographer, dramaturg, and curator.
Brechin Flournoy is an artist, peace activist, and cultural omnivore born in Denver, Colorado,
and living in San Francisco. She worked professionally in every aspect of the performing arts,
and settled into the role of grantwriter, marketing/public relations expert for the Bay Area dance
community. She holds a BA Dance/Arts Administration from Antioch College, Ohio (where the
Gits were the houseband). She studied at the School for New Dance Development (Amsterdam)
and launched her arts career as an intern at PS122 in the mid-80s. The SF Butoh Festival was her
baby, and (unofficial) Masters’ thesis. Now she is a photographer.
Maureen Momo Freehill, MFA moves with presence, as nature moves, holding space for oth-
ers to do the same. She lived in Japan, and performed and studied with butoh dance teachers
Ohno Kazuo and Ohno Yoshito during the final 20 years of Ohno-sensei’s life. Maureen for-
merly directed the Seattle College Drama Department and now hosts embodied arts in nature
workshops and is a Life Art Mentor for individuals and groups at her butoh school/retreat center
on Whidbey Island, in Boulder, CO and online at www.butopia.net. Her MFA is in Directing
Asian Performance with training/certifications in Outdoor Education, Massage, Hypnotherapy
and Yoga.
Zack Fuller is a scholar, dancer, and choreographer living in Rockland County, New York.
He has performed throughout Europe, Japan, and the United States in dance works by Tanaka
Min, including the U.S. tour of Poe Project. His own dance has been presented at venues such
as CAVE’s New York Butoh Festival, and Plan B in Tokyo. His articles and reviews have been
published in Movement Research Journal, Asian Theatre Journal, and Theatre, Dance and Performance
Training.
The artistic duo of Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya, based in Brooklyn, New York at their
home CAVE, create collaborative works ranging from sculptural, video, mixed media, and light
installation art, to contemporary performances, publications, and research projects. They are
the artistic directors of the LEIMAY Ensemble, a group of dancers and performers who work
xx
Contributors
throughout the year creating body-rooted performances of high physicality and meditative still-
ness, and developing the LEIMAY LUDUS. They also show work at larger theaters, visual art
galleries, museums and public places in New York and the United States as well as internationally.
Christine Greiner is Professor in the Department of Body Languages, Graduate Program of

Communication and Semiotics and the Undergraduate Course of Communication and Body
Arts at the Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil. She is the author of the books Leituras do
Corpo no Japão (Readings of the Body in Japan, 2015) and Fabulações do Corpo Japonês (Readings
of the Body in Japan 2015, and Fabulations of the Japanese Body 2017, n-1 Editions), among other
books and several articles published in Brazil, France, and Japan. She was curator of the exhibi-
tions Tokyogaqui an Imaginary Japan (2008), Revolt of the Flesh (2009), and Bodies of Images (2010).
Gunji Masakatsu (1913–1998) was a Japanese theater scholar who nearly single-handedly
instituted the fields of kabuki and Japanese dance (Nihon buyō) studies. He also directed kabuki
productions and wrote and directed avant-garde plays.
Inata Naomi is Associate Professor at the College of Performing and Visual Arts at J. F. Oberlin
University in Tokyo. Her research and critiques range from Western classical ballet to Japanese
contemporary dance, butoh, cultural policy and community dance. She holds a BA, MA, and
PhD from Waseda University. She is the author of Hijikata Tatsumi – The Body Once and for All
(NHK Books, 2008). The book was awarded the 14th AICT, Association International des Cri-
tiques Theatre, Theatre Critic Award Japan.
Shinichi Iova-Koga is the artistic director of the San Francisco-based company inkBoat. He
is the editor of the book 95 Rituals and has been recognized with five “Izzie” awards. He has
co-directed with Anna Halprin, Murobushi Kō, Sten Rudstrøm, Kaseki Yuko, Ishide Takuya, KT
Nelson (ODC). He has been a member of both TEN PEN CHii (Germany), and Harupin Ha.
Together with his wife Dana, Iova-Koga runs an annual workshop at inkGround that explores
the relationship between nature and dance, using forests, rivers and ocean-side as new media for
the life/dance investigation. Shinichi teaches in Europe and the USA.
Maki Isaka teaches Japanese theater and literature, as well as gender studies, at the University
of Minnesota. Author of Secrecy in Japanese Arts: “Secret Transmission” as a Mode of Knowledge
(2005), Onnagata: A Labyrinth of Gendering in Kabuki Theater (2016), and articles on shingeki, etc.,
Isaka currently works on female chanters of gidayū music and their fandom in modern Japan.
Gidayū is the story-telling component of the four-century-old, all-male puppet theater, called
bunraku today.
Iwaki Kyoko is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at Waseda University specializing in Japa-

nese theatre. Her research interests include post-war Japanese theatre, nuclear catastrophes and
theatre, politics and representations of violence, and identity performances in Asia. Her recent
publications include Tokyo Theatre Today (Hublet Publishing 2012). She is the co-author of Ushio
Amagatsu: Des rivages d’enfance au būto de Sankai juku (Actes Sud 2012), and has essays in Fukush-
ima and the Arts: Negotiating Nuclear Disaster (Routledge 2016) and A History of Japanese Theatre
(Cambridge University Press 2016). From January 2018, she is also a Visiting Scholar at The
Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Sara Jansen is a dance scholar and dramaturge. She has degrees in Japanese studies from
KU Leuven, Belgium, and performance studies from New York University, and was a Japan
xxi
Contributors
Foundation Fellow at Waseda University in Tokyo. As a researcher, she is currently affiliated with
the Universities of Antwerp and Brussels in Belgium, and she is completing a study on chore-
ography, history, and the politics of time in the context of the Japanese postwar avant-garde. She
has collaborated on performances by, among others, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker/Rosas; Heine
Avdal and Yukiko Shinozaki/fieldworks; and Trajal Harrell.
jackï job lectures in the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of
Cape Town, South Africa. Her predominantly independent performance career has been eclectic,
including solo performances, choreographies of classical operas, directing theatre works, as well
as hosting television shows in South Africa. job’s PhD study interrogates liminality from a cor-
poreal perspective and how it can contribute to the meaning of personhood and transformation
in South Africa.
Aaron Kerner is a Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. Some
of his publications include the 2015 Rutgers University Press volume: Torture Porn in the Wake
of 9/11. Edinburgh University Press published his co-authored book Extreme Cinema in 2016.
He has published interviews in the journal positions with significant Japanese experimental
filmmakers – namely Iimura Takahiko and Matsumoto Toshio. The 2015 issue of Animation
Journal published an article discussing the live-action work of Anno Hideaki. He is currently
working on a range of subjects in and around the concept of ugliness and disgust.
Kosuge Hayato is professor of Foreign Languages and Liberal Arts, Keio University, and Direc-
tor of the Keio Research Center for the Liberal Arts. He was visiting scholar at the University
of Cambridge in 1996–1998, and Stanford University in 2003. He is involved in the Hijikata
Tatsumi Archive in the Keio University Arts Center and the project leader of the research group,
Portfolio Butoh. He was editor and coauthor of Fuhai to Saisei (Corruption and Regeneration)
in 2004; among his English publications is “Transformed and Mediated Butoh Body: Corpus
Moriens in Hijikata’s Earthen Statue Project” in 2013.
Kuniyoshi Kazuko is a dance critic and researcher, teaching dance history, theory and perfor-
mance art at Tama Art University, Tokyo, as a visiting professor. She is also the author of Yume no
Ishô, Kioku no Tsubo; Buyo to Modernism. (Costumes of Dreams and Vessels of Memory: 20th Century
Dance and Modernism) 2002, Tokyo, and wrote about butoh in the 1960s for BUTO(S) (Paris:
CNRS, 2002), and “Le Kabuki du Tohoku et l’empereur” for Etre Ensemble (Paris: CND, 2003).
Joyce Lu is a participant in Body Weather Laboratory Los Angeles (BWL-LA) and has performed
with BWL in various collaborations with Hirokazu Kosaka and the Arcane Collective at the
Guggenheim and Getty museums, the REDCAT, and the Japanese American Cultural & Com-
munity Center. Joyce also dances with Christine Germain and Diana Lara in the San Francisco
Bay Area and practices Balinese dance with Burat Wangi in LA. She is a certified Feldenkrais
Method Practitioner and she currently teaches in the Departments of Theatre and Dance and
Asian American Studies at Pomona College.
Samantha Marenzi is adjunct professor in Iconography of dance and theater at Roma Tre Uni-
versity. She earned a PhD in Performing Arts in 2010 with a dissertation on Antonin Artaud.
After working on manuscripts, she published the book Antonin Artaud e Colette Thomas (2013).
Professional photographer and Black and White print maker, she is teaching analog techniques
and dance photography. As a dancer, she trained with Yoko Muronoi, Murobushi Kō, Yoshimoto
Daisuke and continuously with Iwana Masaki and Kasai Akira. With her company Lios she
xxii
Contributors
organized the Butō Dance Festival Trasform’azioni (2000–2011). Since 2009 she collaborates
with the Akira Kasai Dance Company.
William Marotti is associate professor in the Department of History at UCLA and Chair of the
East Asian Studies M.A. Interdepartmental Degree Program. He teaches modern Japanese history
with an emphasis on everyday life and cultural-historical issues. Marotti’s Money, Trains and Guil-
lotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (Duke University Press, 2013) addresses politics in Japan
in the 1960s through a focus upon avant-garde artistic production and performance. His current
book project, The Art of Revolution: Politics and Aesthetic Dissent in Japan’s 1968, analyzes cultural
politics and oppositional practices in Japan, with particular emphasis on 1968 as a global event.
Charlotte Marr received her MA in History from Temple University, Philadelphia. Dance
classes in ballet and modern dance introduced her to aspects of lighting design. After a year of
graduate studies at CalArts, she returned to Germany as event planner. Her work as event plan-
ner and recently master electrician and lighting designer at Munich Kammerspiele increasingly
brought her previous academic training back into focus. She also works as lecturer on light and
color as well as theater history at the Bavarian Theater Academy August Everding.
Jonathan W. Marshall is an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in history. His mono-

graph Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot (Palgrave MacMillan 2016)
examines how fin de siècle neurologists deployed theatrical models, and how this both supported
and undermined their practice. Marshall has also published on animals in art, landscape and
performance, art history, and dramaturgy. In 2016 he moved from the University of Otago to
become postgraduate coordinator of the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith
Cowan University, Perth. https://edithcowan.academia.edu/JonathanWMarshall
Carla Melo is a theatre artist, researcher, educator, and artistic director of CorpoLuz Thea-
tre, based in Toronto. She was co-founder/co-director of the butoh-inspired ensemble Corpus
Delicti. Her creative work and research center on the intersections of performance, activism,
corporeality, memory and public space in the Americas. Her writings have been published in
The Drama Review, Latin American Theatre Review, Canadian Theatre Review, Latin American Cultural
Studies and Theatre Journal, among others. After serving as Assistant Professor at Arizona State’s
School of Theatre and Film (2007–2013) she taught at McMaster and York Universities, and
joined ASU’s Master of Liberal Studies faculty.
Katherine Mezur is a Lecturer, Department of Comparative Literature, University of California,

Berkeley. She is a scholar, dramaturg, and dance/theatre artist, whose practice/research focuses on
transnational, gender, and mediated performance in the Asia-Pacific. She holds a PhD in Theatre
and Dance: Asian Performance, University of Hawai’i, Manoa. (MA Dance/Choreography, BA Film)
Publications include Beautiful Boys/Outlaw Bodies: Devising Female-likeness on the Kabuki Stage, Corpo-
real Politics: Dancing East Asia co-edited with Emily Wilcox, articles/chapters in Discourses in Dance,
Women and Performance, Performance Research, Global Performance Studies, Theatre Research International,
Movements of Interweaving. She has taught at Georgetown, UW Seattle, McGill, and CALArts.
Mishima Yukio (1925–1970) was a prolific novelist, playwright and public intellectual in post-
war Japan.
Miyagawa Mariko is a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Arts and Science at the Uni-
versity of Tokyo. She was a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in
xxiii
Contributors
2014–2016 and is a temporary lecturer at Kaichi International University. Her study focuses on
the butoh dancer Ohno Kazuo, especially the relationship between his words and movements.
Jeremy Neideck is a performance maker who has worked between Australia and Korea for
over a decade, investigating the interweaving of cultures in performance, and the modelling
of new and inclusive social realities. His practice encompasses music, physical, and dance
theatre with his works 㑩䀁 Underground, Deluge: ◥㈁ᣙぞ, and ⶕ㝖 Shimchong: Daughter
Overboard! playing in Brisbane and Seoul. Jeremy holds a PhD from Queensland University
of Technology, where he is an Associate Lecturer in the drama, music and dance disciplines
of the Creative Industries Faculty – School of Creative Practice, and coordinates voice and
movement training for the acting program. Jeremy regularly consults on the architecture
and facilitation of collaborative projects and programs of institutional and community
transformation.
Megan V. Nicely is an artist/scholar working at the intersections of contemporary choreog-

raphy and Japanese butoh. Her artistic work has been presented in the United States, UK, and
Europe, and her writing has appeared in TDR: The Drama Review, Choreographic Practices, Journal of
Dance and Somatic Practices, and Performance Research. She holds a BA in art history (Reed), an MFA
in dance (Mills), and a PhD in performance studies (NYU). She is co-editor of the Critical Acts
section of TDR and currently a professor of dance at University of San Francisco, whose program
focuses on performing arts and social justice. www.megannicelydance.org
Robert Ono is a senior assistant professor at Japan College of Social Work. After receiving his
PhD from International Christian University in 2014 with his dissertation on Ki no Tsurayuki,
a tenth-century Japanese poet, he continues to explore various works of literature and culture
of Japan, especially from a comparative and theoretical perspective. He is also the translator of
several academic volumes, including Nosco et al. eds. Values, Identity, and Equality in Eighteenth-and
Nineteenth-Century Japan (Brill, 2015).
Born and raised in Japan, Eiko Otake is a New York-based movement artist, performer,
and choreographer who for more than 40 years worked as Eiko & Koma. Since 2014, she
has directed and performed a solo project, A Body in Places, in which she collaborates with
photographer and historian William Johnston to create and present a series of exhibitions
showing her dancing in irradiated Fukushima and elsewhere. She teaches an interdisciplinary
course about the Atomic Bombings and Nuclear disasters at Wesleyan University and Col-
orado College.
Sylviane Pagès is a Lecturer in the dance department at Paris 8 University. She published Le
butō en France, malentendus et fascination (Centre national de la danse, 2015); with Mélanie Papin
and Guillaume Sintès, Danser en mai 68 (Micadanses-Université Paris 8, 2014) and with Isabelle
Launay, Mémoires et histoire en danse (L’Harmattan, 2010). She is member of the editorial board for
Repères, cahier de danse (2010–2013) and Recherches en danse at http://danse.revues.org.
Bronwyn Preece lives completely off-grid on Lasqueti Island/Xwe’etay, an honoured guest

on unceded Traditional Straits Salish Indigenous Territory. She is an improvisational site-
sensitive performance eARThist and activist, community-engaged applied theatre practi-
tioner, butoh dancer, author and poet, and the pioneer of earthBODYment. She performs and
facilitates workshops internationally. She is currently undertaking a PhD through the Uni-
versity of Huddersfield, examining her own embodiment of Ecology and Disability through
xxiv
Contributors
performance. She holds an MA and BFA in Applied Theatre. Bronwyn has published three
books, guest edited journals, and has a range of publications from articles, artist pages to book
chapters. She also served six years in local politics, being the youngest woman ever elected
to her post.
Tara Rodman is an Assistant Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine. Her
research focuses on the circulation of modern performance in and through Japan, Europe, and
the United States, with an emphasis on the career of Itō Michio.
Educated at the Universidad Autónoma de México, Gustavo Emilio Rosales directs the jour-
nal, Revista DCO: Danza, Cuerpo, Obsesión, the sole outlet in Latin America for the theory and
criticism of choreography. His books include Intemperancia y situación de una Atopía: Las actuales
tendencias conceptuales y estéticas de la danza contemporánea mexicana (2007); Epistemología del cuerpo
en estado de danza (2013), and Días de Danza: Antropología del cuerpo en estado de danza (2015). His
writing has been widely published in Mexico, Spain, and South America. He currently directs the
Escuela Autónoma y Maldita de Otra Danza, and heads their diploma program in epistemology.
Michael Sakamoto is an interdisciplinary dance theater artist, photographer, scholar, and Assis-
tant Professor in Dance at The University of Iowa. His work has been performed and exhibited
in 14 countries throughout Asia, Europe, and North America. Michael’s creative and scholarly
research is focused on intercultural dialogue and sustainability, working with artists and thinkers
from street, folk, classical, and contemporary idioms. More information at www.michaelsaka-
moto.org
Lucia Schwellinger obtained a PhD in Japanese Studies from the University of Munich. Her
doctoral thesis was about the formation of butoh dance by Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo.
After having worked as a reader in a publishing house, she is currently a member of the editorial
staff of a Japanese-German dictionary project at Freie Universität Berlin.
Chiayi Seetoo holds a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley
and teaches at Shanghai Theatre Academy. Her interests include critical studies of dance, physical
performance, Asian and Sinophone cultural studies, practice-research in the arts, and intercultural
communication. Teaching and scholarship aside, Seetoo also performs, directs, and organizes
artistic projects and community events. She serves on the board of Performance Studies inter-
national (PSi), and has published articles in P[art]icipatory Urbanisms, PAR: Performing Arts Review,
TDR: The Drama Review, and LEAP. Seetoo is working on two book projects about contempo-
rary dance of Taiwan and mainland China.
Miki Seifert is one of the artistic directors of With Lime (www.withlime.co.nz), the only
resident butoh company in Aotearoa New Zealand. As a recipient of the 2008 New Zealand
International Doctoral Research Scholarship, she completed her PhD at Te Kawa a Māui/School
of Māori Studies at Victoria University of Wellington in 2011. For her development of a decolo-
nising performative research methodology, she received the 2010 Victoria Postgraduate Research
Excellence Award for Māori Knowledge & Development. Growing up in Bethlehem, Pennsyl-
vania, she was a competitive gymnast and a circus aerialist.
Jacquelyn Marie Shannon is an artist and teacher heavily influenced by butoh, avant-garde
theatre, spiritualism, and mythopoesis. She holds a graduate degree from Indiana University
where she studied affect, performance, and poetics, and a second graduate degree from NYU
xxv
Contributors
in Educational Theatre. Since her introduction to Butoh in 2006, she has learned from many
teachers, including Diego Piñón, Anastazia Louise Aranaga, and Vangeline. She has produced and
performed both solo and ensemble-based work across the United States and continues to engage
butoh and other performance modalities as poetic equipment for living, for manifesting radical
possibility, and for personal and social transformation.
Shibusawa Tatsuhiko (1928–1987) was a scholar of French literature, prominent public intel-
lectual, and the Japanese translator of many of the lights of European decadent literature includ-
ing Cocteau and Sade.
Jordan A. Y. Smith (Associate Professor of Inter-cultural Studies, Josai International Uni-

versity) works in translation studies and contemporary Japanese literature. He has translated
works by Yoshimasu Gōzō, Kanie Naha, Nagae Yūki, Mizuta Noriko, and many more. With a
background in comparative literature (PhD UCLA), his current research projects include a book
on global comedy and a growing collection of writings on Japanese poetry. He is co-editor of
Tokyo Poetry Journal.
SU-EN is the artistic director and choreographer of SU-EN Butoh Company, founded in Tokyo
in 1992. The company is based in Sweden, tours internationally, and conducts a wide range of
artistic activities. SU-EN studied with the legendary Ashikawa Yoko and the Tomoe Shizune &
Hakutobo butoh company, in Japan in 1988–1993. SU-EN holds a nattori license from Izumo
Yoh School of Jiuta-mai, traditional Japanese dance. In 2006–2014, SU-EN curated the per-
formance art festival Friction in Uppsala, Sweden, and has since 2006 curated the K.R.O.P.P
platform of contemporary dance and body art in Uppsala. SU-EN Butoh Company has received
many prizes and awards. For more information, see www.suenbutohcompany.net
Takechi Tetsuji (1912–1988) was a Japanese avant-garde theater director with a strong foun-
dation in kabuki, and other premodern theater forms. He reinterpreted classics of the Japanese
stage and was an influential theater critic.
Tomioka Taeko is an award-winning Japanese poet, novelist, feminist critic, and translator of
Gertrude Stein.
Jane Traynor graduated with her MA in East Asian Studies from the University of Alberta in
2017 and is currently pursuing her PhD in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cul-
tures at Columbia University. Her research interests include the role of kata (forms) and their
transmission in traditional Japanese theatres.
Uno Kuniichi is Professor Emeritus at Rikkyo University in Japan. He has published more
than twenty books in Japanese on literature, philosophy, painting, dance, theater, cinema, and
biopolitics, including Artaud: shikō to shintai (“Artaud: Thought and Body,” Hakusuisha, 1997),
which was adapted from his PhD dissertation directed by Gilles Deleuze at the University of
Paris VIII. His publications also include The Genesis of an Unknown Body (n-1 publications, 2012,
bilingual English and Portuguese) and the forthcoming Penser le corps épuisé de Hijikata Tatsumi
(“Considering the Exhausted Body of Hijikata Tatsumi,” Presses du réel). He has also translated
the works of Deleuze and Guattari into Japanese.
Rosa van Hensbergen is completing a PhD on poetic language and movement notation in the
1970s–1980s at the University of Cambridge. She works on artists like Hijikata Tatsumi, Samuel
xxvi
Contributors
Beckett, and Yvonne Rainer. She also writes, edits, and publishes poetry, and makes and produces
performance work.
Julia A. Vessey graduated from Arizona State University with an MFA in 2008. In 2009, she
was accepted into the Tokyo based butoh company, Dairakudakan. Vessey joined them for their
2009–2010 performance season under the founder, Maro Akaji. While in Japan, Vessey also
studied under butoh teachers Muramatsu Takuya, Mukai Kumotaro, and Ohno Yoshito. Presently,
Vessey is on the faculty of the dance program at James Madison University (JMU), where she
developed the nation’s first university supported butoh curriculum. These classes have developed
into an exchange between Dairakudakan and JMU, with study-abroad butoh training for stu-
dents of both the United States and Japan.
Yoshida Yukihiko has written numerous reviews and articles for dance magazines and news-
papers, and has worked as a jury member for dance competitions. He studies dance archive,
dance documentation, and dance and technology and has worked for the International Advisory
Boards of the Digital Community Division, Prix Ars Electronica (2005–2009) and as assistant of
Professor Ted Nelson and Project Xanadu, the original Hypertext project. He has many invited
papers in international conferences and workshops.
xxvii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank Talia Rogers, former Editor of Routledge Theatre and Performance
Studies, for pushing us at the proposal stage to develop a more expansive vision of what the
Companion could be. This book is all the better for her early guidance. We thank our Editor, Ben
Piggott, for his expert guidance and Editorial Assistants, Kate Edwards and Laura Soppelsa, for
their steady support. We also thank Sheri Sipka and the Apex CoVantage production team for
seeing this project through to the end, including copy editing, type setting, layout, and indexing.
Our invaluable Research Assistant, Jonathan Pattiwael, kept us on track by making sure
everything was collected, organized, and correctly formatted. His work with us was made pos-
sible by a Texas Woman’s University Creative Arts and Humanities Research Grant and by the
University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. We
also thank Eliot Decker, whose work with us earlier in the process was funded by the UMass
College of Humanities and Fine Arts. The talented Kae Ishimoto provided essential assistance in
Japan tracking down photos and permissions. She is always a pleasure to work with! Yuki Yoshi-
mura and Steve Forrest at UMass kindly assisted with translations. Finally, we thank Morishita
Takashi, Homma Yu, and the Hijikata Tatsumi Archives at the Keio University Arts Center for
their kind facilitation of photos for this book as well as their ongoing support for international
butoh research.
xxviii
A NOTE ON JAPANESE
NAMES AND WORDS
Unless otherwise noted, we follow the Monumenta Nipponica Style Sheet (completely revised
edition, May 2017) for all Japanese names and words, and romanization thereof. Exceptions
have been made for names and words that have established spellings or order outside of Japan.
Thus we spell butoh and Ohno without macrons. Japanese sources without a specific place of
publication were published in Tokyo.
xxix
INTRODUCTION
Dance experience, dance of darkness, global
butoh: the evolution of a new dance form
In the 1980s and 1990s, if you had asked someone what the most important modern Japanese
contribution to the world of performing arts was, you would likely have gotten the answer: the
theater of Suzuki Tadashi and Terayama Shuji. Suzuki’s physical training method caught the
attention of some highly influential people in the Western theater world. He directed major pro-
ductions around the world, founded the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT), and co-founded the
Saratoga International Theater Institute. Similarly, Terayama was the darling of certain sectors of
avant-garde theater in Europe. However, if you asked the same question today, you might get this
answer: “Undoubtedly, modern Japanese theater’s greatest legacy to the world is butō,” because
that is precisely what a leading theater scholar wrote (Poulton 2014, 320).
The advent of butoh in 1960s Japan was a major innovation in 20th century dance and
performance, not only in Japan but around the world. Encompassing influences ranging from
German modern dancers like Mary Wigman, to Japanese and European surrealism, to modernist
and avant-garde literature and painting, the dance form gestated by Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno
Kazuo urgently sought new modes of bodily expression that would be commensurate to the task
of engaging with and rebelling against a rapidly changing society. Beginning in the mid-1970s,
butoh began to travel beyond Japan’s borders, in a route to the world that has been more circu-
itous, but also more enduring and widespread than that of Suzuki or Terayama. There are now
butoh companies and practitioners all around the world, and many major metropolitan areas and
many far smaller locales feature an annual butoh festival. More and more people are doing butoh
training, and butoh is seen as relevant to a wide variety of art forms beyond dance such as theater,
performance, music, fashion, and the visual arts.
What is butoh? Why do so many people gravitate to it? What routes did it take to reach all
those people in all those places? And why does it still have the power to move audiences and
inspire artists today? These are the questions this volume addresses, and in order to do that, we
must turn to the dance and the dancers themselves. We begin by tracing Hijikata’s dances in
detail, including his influences and collaborators and the discourses that swirled around them –
and that they themselves also spun. With this foundation we can then begin to understand how,
why, and to what end other dancers began creating their own butoh projects, resulting in the
development of multiple trajectories over time that make up the constellation that is contem-
porary butoh.
1
A brief history of butoh

As Inata Naomi points out in her chapter in this volume (Chapter 5), butoh is not often thought
about in the context of Japanese dance history. But this context can be helpful to understand
the training of dancers like Ohno and Hijikata as well as what they were reacting against. Before
butoh, there was a broad variety of dance in Japan. Ordinary people participated in festival and
harvest dances, joined by anyone who cared to dance. The dances often featured simple steps and
patterns passed from person to person. These social dances were in some cases related to another
common form of dance, the ritual dances of mediums of the animist religion Shinto. Mediums
might dance to pacify unsettled spirits or to increase the chances of a bounteous crop. Both kinds
of dance were related to the courtly dances of kagura and bugaku, which also had roots in China
and India. The two most prominent premodern performing arts of Japan, noh and kabuki, both
drew on these forms of dance and featured dance segments as parts of narratives. In the case of
kabuki, famous dances were excerpted from their original context, and presented as stand-alone
pieces in revues. Kabuki dance was in turn the main foundation of professional entertainer (gei-
sha and courtesan) dance, which evolved into Nihon buyō (Japanese dance). Nihon buyō is taught
privately all over Japan and primarily serves as a kind of finishing skill for upper-class women
just like flower arranging or the tea ceremony. Other forms of dance were introduced from
Europe and America in the modern era. Ballet arrived early on, but was largely not successful
until after World War II. Far more successful were German modern dance and American revue
dance, both of which had become firmly established parts of the Japanese dance landscape by
the time butoh came along.
Butoh has its origins in the dance experiments of Hijikata Tatsumi (1928–1986).1 He was
born Yoneyama Kunio on the outskirts of the city of Akita in Akita prefecture in northern
Japan (Tohoku). The Yoneyama family appear to have been middle class; they dressed their
second youngest son in Western clothes and sent him (possibly on scholarship) to a leading
primary school. He played rugby and practiced taekwondo. He says that at some point he saw
a performance by the prominent modern dancer Ishii Baku (who had studied ballet, and then
became a student of Mary Wigman). Hijiikata eventually decided to take dance lessons at the
studio of Masamura Katsuko, a student of two of the other giants of Japanese modern dance,
Eguchi Takaya and Miya Misako (both of whom had also studied with Wigman). After the war,
Hijikata moved to Tokyo and studied in succession with Andō Mitsuko, Horiuchi Kan, Oikawa
Hironobu, Yoneyama Mamako, and Tsuda Nobutoshi. From these teachers, he learned modern,
ballet, jazz, tap, flamenco, and mime. It was through Ando and in the context of modern dance
that Hijikata first met Ohno Kazuo, who was at that time already an established modern dancer.
Thereafter, Hijikata acted as the director for Ohno’s dances.
Hijikata had a few chances to choreograph sections of other dances, but in 1959 shocked the
dance world with his formal debut entitled Forbidden Colors (Kinjiki), in which an older man
intimates having sex with a younger man and then forces him to kill a chicken. Initially Hijikata
created dances that were more shocking than those of other modern dancers but not significantly
different from some of the other narrative based Japanese modern dances of the time, which were
heavily influenced by German modern dance (“neuer Tanz”). Early works were reminiscent of
German modern dance pioneer Kurt Jooss’s The Green Table (1932). The dance Banzai Woman
(1959) featured a mother sending a son off to war, while Bride (1960) portrayed a bride being
passed from one family to the other. Soon, Hijikata become dissatisfied with representational
dance and led a small group of dancers, including Ohno Kazuo, Ohno Yoshito, Kasai Akira, Naka-
jima Natsu, Ishii Mitsutaka, Takai Tomiko, and his partner Motofuji Akiko in experimenting
with new forms of bodily articulation that rejected pre-existing dance concepts and categories.
2
Introduction
Ohno Kazuo is often called the co-founder of butoh but his role was actually much more
complicated than that. More than twenty years Hijikata’s senior, Ohno had an established dance
career before he met Hijikata. At the beginning of their relationship, when he was still strug-
gling to make himself noticed, Hijikata depended on Ohno’s prestige. However, Hijikata was a
controlling personality who soon came to call most of the shots. Ohno was a core participant
in Hijikata’s dance experiments from 1960 to 1968, but maintained his own dance studio and
students, and had very different methods of teaching and ideas about what dance is for. Yet his
solo work and international renown as a butoh dancer did not come until more than twenty years
after Hijikata’s choreographic debut.
The group cultivated contacts with artists and writers, including ones in the Neo Dada,
Happenings, and Fluxus movements, such as Akasegawa Genpei, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, pop artist
Yokoo Tadanori, and the surrealist Takiguchi Shūzō. They also read widely and appropriated
ideas from Sade, Genet, Bataille, Marcuse, Rimbaud, and Lautreamont. The specific problematic
of each of these is beyond the scope of this introduction, but they share some common themes.
One was the notion that the world was an infinitely more complicated place than thought in both
Japanese and Western traditions. The second was that the everyday world was shot through with
conventions and strictures which controlled what one could do, say, and think, but that humans
had become so inured to these that they were not even aware that these conventions were con-
stantly functioning in the background. So, each hunted for an alternative to current socializing
pressures by recourse to processes employing the unconscious, randomness, shock, or all three.
The group’s experiments in dance included using jerky movements which almost suggest
West coast funk dance popping and locking in Dark Body (1960), using extremely slow move-
ments in Seed (1960), all of the performers leaving the stage and running a lap around the theater
in Three Phases of Leda (1962), employing athletic movements (pretending to throw baseballs
across the universe, running wind sprints, riding bicycles) in Masseur: A Story of a Theater that
Sustains Passion (1963), and incorporating zany happenings or pedestrian movements into cho-
reography (photographing the audience, pulling a rickshaw around stage, and eating cake) in
Rose-colored Dance: To M. Shibusawa’s House (1965). In addition to these specific examples, larger
recurring themes included eroticism (including homoeroticism), pain, madness, violence, disease,
and the relationship of humans to technology.
An experiment in the dance Mid-afternoon Secret Ceremony of a Hermaphrodite (1962) left a
lasting mark. It consisted of slathering white plaster of paris over Hijikata’s body to make him
look like one of the sculptures of George Segal, letting it dry, and then Hijikata moving in such a
way that the plaster cracked and made patterns on his body, but also constrained his movements
in interesting ways. In time, the dancers began to use white body paint in place of plaster of
paris to mark themselves as separate from normal society in some way or another, and this white
body and face paint eventually became a signature part of their dances (and the dances of other
like-minded performers).
At the time, no one used the word butoh for these dances. They termed the experiments
“dance experiences” or “terror dance” and then ankoku buyō (dark black dance), and later still
ankoku butō. Buyō is the general word for “dance.” The word butō – composed of two Chinese
characters meaning “dance” and “tread”/“stomp” – usually indicated western style dances such
as flamenco, ballet, and waltz. So ankoku butō originally meant something like the “waltz of
darkness” or the “ballet of darkness.” In time this was shortened to butō, and then was romanized
“butoh.”
In the late 1960s Hijikata began a meticulous and comprehensive study of himself, his child-
hood, and the world around him. He sought to understand the countless conventions and habits
that had shaped and socialized both his body and mind. At the same time, he sought to discover
3
new sources for movements. His project was based on the idea that he could use elements from
his past and his observations as material for new dances, and the assumption that being aware of all
the conventions that had molded him would enable him to free himself from unconscious bodily
and mental structures. In addition, he assumed that if he could neutralize the conventions, habits,
and customs that had been controlling him, he would be more sensitive to the world around
him and more able to respond to it in new ways and further generate new movements and ideas.
A dance from this time, Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: Rebellion of the Body (1968), shows
the scope of his project. As the title indicates, the dance was about Hijikata himself, about the
people that had shaped him, and about how he might free his body from prior constraints. In this
collection of solos, Hijikata danced a bride, an old woman, a male burlesque dancer, a flamenco
dancer, a scoliosis patient, a nattily dressed sailor, and a young girl. One interpretation of this
dance is that Hijikata was enacting various people from his childhood, and another interpretation
is that he was portraying several aspects of himself (including alternate gender identities) that
normally were not allowed to come to the surface because of prevailing norms.
The detailed nature of the project translated into a new comprehensive approach to chore-
ography and dance training. Up to that time, Hijikata had induced visceral reactions in his audi-
ences, but now he began to experiment with using images and words to evoke visceral responses
in his dancers in order to increase the power of their performances. He started by studying
people and things not usually seen on stage. These included animals, people from lower classes
or the periphery of Japan (prostitutes, farmers, diseased people), or even figures in paintings and
sculptures reproduced in art magazines. He took from these observations specific poses, but also
qualities and tonalities. He (or a scribe) kept records of these observations and pasted cut-outs
from art magazines in notebooks, to the side of which are scrawled various notes about poses or
qualities to be gleaned from the photos. From this material, he created poses or dance steps, which
he would then alter using imagery prompts. The dancers might be asked to envision a specific
person doing the step, so that if a young girl were doing the step, it would be different from if an
old woman were doing it. Or Hijikata might require the dancers to imagine differing media in
which the step occurred. For example, water would create a drag on the movements that would
not appear if the medium in which the movement occurred was simply air. Hijikata also exper-
imented with modifying the scope of a movement. For example, insisting that dancers imagine
the movement filling the air around the dancer, or transferring a movement from one limb to
another. The image prompts were multisensorial: dancers might be asked to imagine sounds,
smells, tastes, sensations, feelings, or onomatopoeia and to allow these image prompts to evoke
reactions in the body. Finally, Hijikata would have the dancers imagine many different things in
order to transform the underlying pose or step. These might include being eaten by a certain
number of bugs, or being shocked by a certain number of volts of electricity, or having imaginary
liquid dribble down parts of their bodies. These choreographic experiments were developed
with and realized by a cohort of female dancers including Kobayashi Saga, Nakajima Natsu, and
most famously Ashikawa Yoko, and at each moment along the way, Hijikata or Ashikawa would
demonstrate to the dancers how the imagined scenarios should alter their movements.
All these mental images can seem quite surreal, but Hijikata had indeed studied surrealism,
and he was likely aware of Comte de Lautréamont’s famous phrase – “the encounter of a sewing
machine and an umbrella on an operating table” – which the surrealists took as emblematic of
their attempt to find new ways of thinking by putting together dissimilar ideas, images, or objects.
In his new dance experiments, he probably wanted to find out what would happen when he
combined very different things. Perhaps he thought that our usual conventions and habits could
not control the movement that came from simultaneously imagining these various things. When
the dancers practiced imaging all these things, they had to observe all the parts of their bodies
4
Introduction
simultaneously. And they even had to be aware of the spaces around their bodies. The necessity
of being aware of one’s own body is not unique to butoh. All dancers must do this, but it was
having to manage so many different things at once that makes Hijikata’s methods stand out. As
the dancers became better at doing this, they became increasingly able to alter their bodies in
minute ways. Moreover, they became progressively more sensitive to the things and people that
surrounded their bodies. Sometimes the dancers were overwhelmed by the flood of information
Hijikata subjected them to, so they brought notebooks to rehearsals (with the blessing of Hijikata)
and frantically took notes about the movements and their imagery sources. These notebooks, as
well as Hijikata’s scrapbooks, have provided an interesting layer of documentation for the world
of butoh, and become an additional source of inspiration for visual artists beyond the striking
images seen on stage.
Once Hijikata had amassed a sufficient number of movements, he connected them into
sequences. Curiously, Hijikata intended for strings of these movements to enact an underlying
narrative – for example, telling the story of a prostitute waiting for an abortion on a sultry day –
though he evidently was not concerned if the audience grasped this narrative or not. The general
orientation to madness, senility, disease, and pain remained in butoh, so although the technique
should have let Hijikata tell any underlying narrative he liked with these arbitrary chains of
movements, in general his underlying narratives focused on diseased or socially dispossessed peo-
ples, or bodies in pain. Virtuoso performances of these radical new choreographies by dancers
like Ashikawa Yoko would come in time to cement Hijikata’s legacy as a major innovator of 20th
century modern dance.
Although Hijikata was primarily interested in his own self, his interests drew him to look at
dispossessed people in Japan, which sometimes resulted in him presenting characters on stage
who wore ethnically marked costumes and sometimes moved in ethnically marked ways. This
exploration of his own personal identity, as a person from a relatively impoverished section of
northeastern Japan, dovetailed with a wider movement in Japan to see such peripheral areas as
still possessing an authentic Japanese-ness that was not sullied by modern life. This was manifest
in a late 1960s and 1970s movement often called “return to Japan.” One prominent example
was a Japan Railways campaign called Discover Japan, which sought to induce urban Japanese
people to take the train to rural Japan to rediscover their rural roots.
Hijikata, himself, seems to have been well aware that in fact modern life had reached down
into even such places and that there was no pure Japan (if such a concept ever made any sense).
We can see evidence for this in his scrapbooks where we find that he used an image of a flower
in a Picasso painting as the model for a Japanese-looking hairstyle and a ~500 CE Iranian bas
relief as the model for a Japanese interior in Quiet House (1973).2 Similarly, in Gibasan (1972),
the dancers use hand movements borrowed from Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun (1912) while one
dancer wears “Japanese” courtly headgear (that was subsequently appropriated by the animist
religion of Japan, Shinto) created by using a clog (geta) and a feather duster, and turned around
so they hang off the head in front of the face, rather than behind. So, we can observe the creation
of “Japanese” elements from Spanish and Iranian building blocks, as well as the parodic creation
of highbrow or elite “Japanese” elements from everyday objects (see Figure 0.1). Obviously, there
is some complex and nuanced negotiation of ethnic identity going on in such dances, which is
not simply reducible to ethnic chauvinism.
However, there were certainly people who claimed that Hijikata’s work was an attempt to
articulate a bodily basis for Japanese ethnic identity. For example, in an impressionistic essay
(translated in this volume) relying on homophonic similarities between words, the theater scholar
Gunji Masakatsu argued that butoh had rediscovered Japan by tapping into the folk beauty of
kabuki. Gunji was savvy enough to reverse himself and recognize that butoh had “desecrated
5
Figure 0.1 Hand position taken from Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun (1912) and Japanese courtly headgear
reproduced with a clog and feather duster, Gibasan (1972), photograph by Onozuka Makoto. Courtesy of
Onozuka Makoto.
Introduction
kabuki” as well, but the overall thrust of his essay was to draw simplistic connections between
butoh and premodern Japan. Another theater practitioner, Takechi Tetsuji, argued (in a book
chapter also translated here) that the gait used in walking through wet rice paddies in wet-rice
agriculture was the foundation for all Japanese performing arts, and that Hijikata had used a mod-
ified version in his dances. Interpretations like these (coupled with the fact that Hijikata did not
share the details of his choreographic process widely, and in typically obstreperous fashion aided
and abetted such interpretations at times) made it hard to see Hijikata and fellow butoh performers
as active participants in an international art dialogue and contributed to further misunderstandings
about butoh. Kurihara Nanako suggests that Hijikata, while not participating directly in this quest
for authentic Japanese ethnic identity, was a “shrewd” performer who made use of the wider
current of ethnocentrism, while contesting it in radical ways.3 Whatever the case, the assumption
that Hijikata was actively engaged in a search for ethnic identity has on the one hand obscured
other important parts of his practice, while on the other hand it has also inspired in some subse-
quent butoh practitioners explorations of other identities, including ethnic, regional, and gender.
The turn to this new deeply personal, but highly complex choreography caused the movement
to fragment. Among the first people to declare independence from Hijikata was Ishii Mitsutaka
(1939–). From 1959, Ishii had studied ballet and modern dance with Ishii Baku (no relation).
He then joined forces with Hijikata in 1961. In 1969, Ishii debuted his own performance Butoh
City: Blind Thief Version. In one scene, he used a metal grinder to shower sparks from a Mongo-
lian BBQ pot that a dancer wore as a hat. In 1971, he relocated to Europe where he spent time
in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Germany but also traveled around the continent and through
the Middle East performing and holding workshops. In 1977, Ishii started the series MU-dance.
The title referred to the fictional continent of Mu, but was also likely an allusion to the Buddhist
concept of mu (nothingness or formlessness). The possible appearance of a Buddhist term is
strange considering the nature of Ishii’s dances in Japan. But in Europe no one knew the word/
genre “butoh” at the time, so he began advertising his performance as a “pantomime portraying
a being imbued with Eastern philosophy and Buddhist sutras.” Additionally, a character modeled
after him in a contemporary Japanese novel complains, “If I don’t call [my performance] some-
thing like ‘The Miracle of the Buddha’. . . I cannot stimulate the deep psychology of people who
come to the theater for the usual fare” (Harada 2004, 132, 140). These kinds of statements make
it seem that Ishii’s dance transformed over time as he catered to his European audience. In 1979,
Ishii returned to Japan. In performance, he favored structured improvisations, but ultimately
felt that butoh should express a deep reality that could only be attained through unstructured
improvisation in nature, and thus danced most often in snowfields, waterfalls, streams, and forests.
He also used butoh as dance-therapy at a mental health institution.
Kasai Akira (1943–) felt that Hijikata’s dances were too full of bizarre elements, which were
threatening some deeper meaning that butoh should properly strive for. He had originally stud-
ied mime with Jean Nouveau (the stage name of Ōta Junzō), classical ballet with Chiba Akinori,
and modern dance with Eguchi and Miya. In 1963, he began to study with Ohno and partici-
pated in all of Hijikata’s dances through the mid-sixties, before splitting with Hijikata and staging
his own recitals. In 1971, he formed a studio/company Tenshikan (Angel Hall) as a center for
non-hierarchical anarchic bodily experimentation. In 1979, he closed Tenshikan, and traveled to
Stuttgart, Germany, to study the eurythmy and anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner. After gradu-
ating from the Eurythmeum in 1983, he joined a eurythmy stage group for two years. He then
returned to Japan, where he taught eurythmy and anthroposophy and presented airy, flowing, and
colorful eurythmy-based performances. He resumed butoh activities in 1994 with the perfor-
mance Séraphīta: My Girl with the Mirror Genitalia. The title was taken from Balzac’s novel about
an androgyne beloved by both a man and a woman.
7
In his dance and training exercises, Kasai has dancers enunciate sounds or move in tune with
music or poetry. The dancers try to feel the reverberations of the sounds through the body and
allow the sounds to dictate movement. He also practices fine-tuning his perception of the body
to be aware of the different responses of the body to different outer stimuli. It is difficult to
assess Kasai’s motivation for leaving the world of butoh for fifteen years and studying eurythmy.
However, a focus on the connection between words, sounds, and bodily movements has remained
in his butoh practice. Overtime, Kasai has promoted an understanding of dance and butoh as
striving for a kind of atheistic mysticism that incorporates the body, language, music, community,
and history into one unified whole.
The very fact that he wanted to study eurythmy and anthroposophy may indicate that the
experiences of the founders of butoh in studying German modern dance fundamentally shaped
the origins of butoh and continue to guide it today. Of course, butoh and German modern dance
differ significantly, but share many core concerns such as a focus on individual experience and
its expression, and an attempt to find or create a universal bodily vocabulary. The similarities
between butoh and German modern dance likely influenced the aesthetic direction many butoh
performers would take, and specifically led Kasai out into the world to seek out other parallel
sources for the task of articulating individual expression in both verbal and bodily ways.
One artist who contributed greatly to the worldwide growth of butoh was Maro Akaji
(1943–). Maro performed in the Situation Theater of Kara Jūrō (1940–) before working with
Hijikata from 1964 to 1971. In 1972, he established his company, Dairakudakan (Great Camel
Battle Ship). Building on the imagery and evocation techniques developed by Hijikata, Maro
brought to butoh an even greater sense of theatrics that any of his predecessors, and became
known for the use of complex stage devices and props. As important as Maro’s style is for the
history of butoh, his ability to nurture performers to become choreographers in their own right
is central to his legacy. Maro’s “one person, one troupe” philosophy stimulated, from 1974
onward, performers to leave Dairakudakan to start their own companies. To give just a few
examples, in 1974, Furukawa Anzu (1952–2001) and Tamura Tetsurō (1950–1991) started Dance
Love Machine, and Carlotta Ikeda (Ikeda Sanae, 1941–2014) started Ariadone Dance Com-
pany. In 1975, Murobushi Kō (1947–2015) established Butō-ha Sebi (Butoh-faction Back-Fire),
and Amagatsu Ushio (1949–) founded Sankai Juku (Mountain-Ocean School). In 1976, Ōsuka
Isamu (1943–) created Byakkosha (White Tiger Company).
These artists and companies spread out over Japan, and then to Europe and around the world.
After Ishii’s (and Eiko & Koma’s)4 various activities across Europe beginning in the early 1970s, in
January 1978, Carlotta Ikeda, Yumiko Yoshioka, and Murobushi Kō presented the first recorded
butoh performance in Europe, a dance called Last Eden – Gate to the Beyond. This performance was
extended for a month and touched off a frenzy of interest in butoh. In October of that same year,
Hijikata choreographed Twelve Phases of the Terpsichore of Darkness: Fourteen Nights for the Louvre Palace
for his principal dancer, Ashikawa. The performance, which Hijikata did not attend in person, was
sponsored by the Festival d’Automne in connection with the MA: Space-Time of Japan exhibition
at the Museum of Decorative Arts. The Parisian audience was so astounded by what they saw that
they demanded repeat performances up to five times a day. Soon, several dancers relocated to Europe
(Murobushi and Ikeda in 1979, Amagatsu in 1981, and Furukawa Anzu to Berlin in 1989), and the
European butoh boom swung into gear. For dancers who were used to presenting roughly one show
a year (and paying for the use of the theater), the interested producers, packed crowds, and dancers
eager to take lessons and workshops provided tremendous opportunities not available in Japan.
The artist who has had the most consistent mainstream success in Europe is Amagatsu Ushio. He
trained in ballet and modern dance before joining Dairakudakan as a founding member. He broke
out on his own in 1975 to found Sankai Juku. They toured Europe in 1980, and then in 1981
8
Introduction
Amagatsu relocated to Paris. Sankai Juku became a French anchor in the growing butoh rage, both
lauded and criticized for its aesthetics that seem designed for a European audience. Between 1982
and 2015, Amagatsu premiered new works on a biannual basis at the Theatre de la Ville Paris, which
has also acted as a co-producer for the shows. During alternate years, the troupe tours the outlying
French provinces and also tours extensively through the rest of Europe, North and South America,
and Asia. Sankai Juku has become internationally famous for their lyrical and aesthetically beautiful
shows enacted with supreme control and touched with a tinge of the grotesque.
Undoubtedly the person who became the most famous in the history of butoh, and became
an iconic expression of its global roots and reach, was Hijikata’s long-time collaborator Ohno
Kazuo (1906–2010). In 1929, Ohno saw the Spanish folk and neoclassical dancer Antonia Mercé
y Luque (La Argentina) perform. He took dance lessons from the three Japanese pioneers of
modern dance Ishii, Eguchi, and Miya – all pupils of Mary Wigman, a leader of German modern
dance. He also saw Harald Kreutzberg perform. After graduation from Japan Athletic College,
Ohno became a physical education teacher (and subsequently a janitor) at the Catholic Soshin
High School in Yokohama, and converted to Christianity. In 1938, World War II called him
away from dance for nine years. He was initially a supply soldier and then later a war prisoner
in New Guinea. Upon his return to Japan in 1947, he resumed his dance career. He debuted as
a modern dancer with the Andō Mitsuko Dance Company, after which he gave a series of solo
recitals (three of which included a dance entitled “Tango”). He caught Hijikata’s attention and
danced for Hijikata from 1960 to 1968. Then he turned his attention to performing in a series
of experimental movies by Nagano Chiaki, such as The Portrait of Mr. O (1969).
In 1977, he returned to the stage at the age of 71 in a solo piece Admiring La Argentina
(directed by Hijikata). The dance was, as Ohno Yoshito has said, a retrospective of the “sum and
substance of Ohno’s life” (Ohno and Ohno 2004, 150), as well as an homage to the dancer he
had seen forty-seven years before. The first two scenes were taken from Hijikata’s 1960 revised
version of Forbidden Colors, in which Ohno danced the role of the aged transvestite prostitute
Divine (in a ratty shawl and soiled dress) from Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. Ohno appears
to have been expressing the painful life of the poor cross-dressed prostitute. At one point, he
hung almost as if impaled on the back wall with his arms and head hanging down. Then, perhaps
miming the tuberculin Divine retching into a toilet, Ohno knelt and died. In the scene “Daily
Bread,” Ohno, naked save a pair of black trunks, engaged in daily activities such as stretching his
neck and cleaning. The “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” featured Ohno leaning against a grand
piano, mouth agape and looking up, with his arms splayed out to the sides, as if the hard years
pressed on him and threatened to squeeze out any remaining life. The second half of the dance
was an homage to Mercé, in which Ohno danced impressionistic flamenco and tango movements
to tango music. In the final section, Ohno appeared in a yellow dress to the accompaniment of
Maria Callas singing Puccini. The section consisted of off-balance tiptoeing in rightward arcs,
menacing attacks, kneeling and miming drinking, and covering his mouth and bending over in
grief. Ohno reappeared for a curtain call without the hat and looking very frumpy. Finally, after a
second curtain call still in the dowdy dress, he raised his hand in military salute to end the dance.5
The 1977 version of Admiring La Argentina was not yet epoch-making in the history of butoh.
It needed to detour through France in order to become historically significant. Capitalizing on the
recent success of butoh performers in France, in 1980 Ohno was invited to the Nancy International
Theatre Festival. Through his performances in Nancy and a subsequent tour to London, Paris, and
Stockholm, he came to be thought of as the patriarch of butoh, largely because the audiences were
seeing his performances without any context of the twenty-year history of butoh in Japan, and
without any knowledge of Hijikata. As with the other butoh artists who preceded him in France,
in time Ohno danced to packed houses all over Europe, the Americas, and Japan. However, his
9
dances were changing. The original performance of Admiring La Argentina had been rather dark
and contained allusions to Ohno’s life such as janitorial duties, stretching exercises, and war-time
experiences (along with a depiction of a dying prostitute and the homage to Mercé). However, over
time the dance (and his dances in general) became more abstract, much lighter in tone, more sacral,
humorous, and campy. One reviewer referred to him as a “glittering old hag” (Dunning, 1981), and
it is hard to escape the impression that there was something less layered but nonetheless still pow-
erful in his later dances. One impact of the change in choreographic structure is that the audience
was likely not meant to be finding their own way through the cacophony of layers as they were
in Hijikata’s dances, but was meant to have a particular kind of universal experience of the work.6
Certain mannerisms of Ohno, as well as issues of translation (both of literal language trans-
lation and of cultural interpretation), likely contributed to the way both Ohno and butoh were
seen in the West. Although Ohno danced structured improvisations utilizing Hijikata’s imagery
exercises, in workshops and interviews he did not talk about the techniques he used to create
his dances, but rather talked about dance as stemming from deep inner urges expressed through
improvised movement and about universal or deeply personal themes. Sometimes, he talked in
quite mystifying ways that likely fed into Orientalist assumptions that European audiences already
had about Japan. In Chapter 29 of this volume, Rosa van Hensbergen relays an anecdote about
a translator declining to translate what Ohno actually said (which was quite surrealist in the first
place), but rather what the translator thought Ohno must have meant, and Maria Pia D’Orazi, in
Chapter 28 of this volume, outlines how in Italy Ohno’s way of speaking about his own dances
contributed to the notion that butoh required no particular skills. These kinds of assumptions and
(mis)translations continue to resonate and influence audiences and dancers even today.
In the 1980s a new group of dancers without direct links to the experimentation or training of
the first- or second-generation butoh performers also began to use the term “butoh” to describe
their work, or had the term applied to their performances by critics and promoters. These include
Tanaka Min, Iwana Masaki, Goi Teru, and later Tadashi Endo. Tanaka (1945–) was a basketball
player who trained from 1963 to 1973 in classical ballet and modern dance at the Hiraoka Shiga
Dance Academy. In 1973, he began his own dance experimentation. Early dances were usually
entitled Subject (sometimes with a subtitle) or Butai (Dance State). They almost invariably featured
Tanaka dancing naked (often to a soundscape provided by Noguchi Minoru). In one early version
of Subject (June 22, 1974), Tanaka seated his naked wife and child on the lawn outside OAG Hall
in Tokyo. There he did things such as lie on his back on the lawn, or jump into the air over and
over and pull his knees to his chest and then shift his weight to send himself toppling back to the
earth on his side. Inside the hall, he crawled on the ground – seeming to examine the tiles on the
floor – or crouched on the balls of his feet with his elbows and hands tucked close to his chest, but
his face turned sideways to look up. Another dance, Subject: Dead (October 4–5, 1974) featured
Tanaka dancing on wires strung in the performance space. Tanaka performed these site-specific
dances throughout Japan, dancing as many as five times per day. Tanaka’s unique postmodern-like
dances (which at that time were as yet unconnected in any way to American postmodern dance,
although he did later work with Anna Halprin and Elaine Summers) drew international attention,
and he found himself performing alongside butoh dancers at international festivals and events such
as the previously mentioned MA exhibition. As a result Tanaka was for a time associated with
butoh, even as he continued his own experimentation, developing Body Weather as an approach
to dance and dance training that explores the body as one part of a wider world. In 1981, he
established his company Maijuku as a complement to his solo work.
Despite not being connected to the butoh lineage, Tanaka had deep respect for Hijikata’s work
and in 1983 joined forces with him for the celebration Hook Off 88: One Ton of Hairstyles for
the Scenery. In 1984, Hijikata choreographed Tanaka in a duet with Ashikawa in the Performance
10
Introduction
for the Establishment of the Pure Love Butoh School. Eventually, Tanaka came to feel that the “butoh”
label was paradoxically being used to limit the possibilities of bodily experimentation. So, after
being known internationally as a butoh performer for several years, Tanaka repudiated the term,
although he continues to maintain that he is an heir of Hijikata’s original thoroughgoing exper-
imentalism. After his association with Hijikata, Tanaka established the Body Weather Farm to
both serve as a training ground for a rotating group of international dancers and a source of
income. Over the course of his career, he has broken new ground in understanding the nature
of improvisation, collaboration (often with artists from the free jazz or free improvisation move-
ment), and the relationship between bodies and spaces, and he has continued to work towards
minute discernment and control of all parts of the body.
By the turn of the century, butoh had blossomed worldwide with practitioners on every con-
tinent. But it should be clear that as the form spread, it began to change. Rather than being cod-
ified as a unified style, butoh has instead proliferated into manifold forms. The transformations
in butoh were both facilitated and exacerbated by misunderstandings and disagreements, because
artists with different aims and methods all called their work by that name. Touring and teaching
forced second and third generation dancers to begin to articulate and codify their own under-
standing of a dance that until that point had been developed and performed by a small group of
individuals. Some dancers (such as Kasai with Eurythmy and Tanaka with Halprin and Summers)
specifically reached out to their counterparts in Europe and America to share ideas and learn
new approaches, thereby bringing themselves into dialogue with other currents of dance. Other
changes in butoh certainly happened as some Japanese artists conformed to Western expectations
of what an art from Japan should look like, as in the example of Ishii referring to the wisdom
of the Buddha in his dances because he had to cater to his audience. Furthermore, contact with
Europe may have drawn out in butoh particular aspects already nascent via its roots in German
modern dance. Finally, changes took place as non-Japanese dancers encountered butoh in some-
times deep and other times superficial ways and began to adopt it for their own uses.
Today, many artists, both within the world performing arts and the world of plastic arts, are
investigating butoh, bringing it into conversation with other art forms, and using it as inspiration
for their creative process. These include the Finnish dancer Tero Saarinen’s breathtaking mash-up
of butoh idiom and New England Shaker music in “Borrowed Light” (2007); the homage to
Ohno Kazuo by singer Antony Hegarty (now known as Anohni) of Antony and the Johnsons
on the album Crying Light (2009); Givenchy fashion designer Riccardo Tisci’s spring 2011 haute
couture homage to Ohno Kazuo and the giant robot anime series Mobile Suit Gundam (Blanks
2011); the collage artist Richard Hawkins, whose Hijikata series was featured in the Whitney
Biennial in 2010; Big Dance Theater’s Resplendent Shimmering Topaz Waterfall (2015) based on the
recently published scrapbooks of Yamamoto Moe, which were his recordings of Hijikata’s chore-
ography on him for the dance Costume en Face (1976); and a January 2017 Vogue Italia “butoh”
fashion spread by the photographer Camila Falquez and the stylist Yasmina Benabdelkrim, just
to name a few (Falquez and Benabdelkrim 2017).
Two recent dancers merit special attention. The first is Kawaguchi Takao and his performance
About Ohno Kazuo: Kawaguchi Takao Solo Dance Performance (2013).7 Using video, Kawaguchi pre-
cisely reconstructed and performed specific iterations of Ohno’s dances (such as scenes from the
1977 version of Admiring La Argentina), right down to using the video’s audio track, including the
ambient noise and applause. While Kawaguchi was quite clear that for him the project was an inter-
esting postmodern challenge about embodying another dancer’s archives, many audience members
seemed to view him instead as an avatar of Ohno. Perhaps this should not be a surprise given
the layers of mythologizing surrounding the late Ohno. Despite (or maybe even because of ) the
reaction of some audience members, Kawaguchi’s use of the audio from the original performance,
11
rather than finding a clean audio of Maria Callas’s arias, raises all sorts of interesting new media
issues related to applause and laugh tracks and how audience expectations are molded (and satisfied).
Trajal Harrell is engaged in a decade long project similarly based on Hijikata’s and Ohno’s
methods called “In One Step Are a Thousand Animals.” Harrell is known for juxtaposing gen-
res, such as early postmodern dance and voguing in his award-winning Twenty Looks or Paris Is
Burning at the Judson Church, 2009. As he looked through Hijikata’s notebooks and scrapbooks
he was taken with the way that Hijikata was looking at so many artists across so many times and
places. He began to get a sense (as can be seen from the title of his project) about the ways that
Hijikata would fill up movements with many evocative words and images in order to help the
dancers deepen the affective power of the performance. Thus far, Harrell’s project has resulted
in several performances such as Used, Abused and Hung out to Dry (2013, an attempt to vogue
Hijikata); The Return of La Argentina (2014, a “fictional archiving of Kazuo Ohno’s renowned solo
piece Admiring La Argentina”); In the Mood for Frankie (2016, a mediation on Hijikata’s principal
danseuse Ashikawa Yoko and modern dance choreographer Katherine Dunham); and The Ghost
of Montpellier Meets the Samurai (2015, based on the premise that Ellen Stewart of La Mama con-
trives to get Hijikata Tatsumi and nouvelle danse choreographer Dominique Bagouet to meet in
Manhattan and create a dance together).
Vectors and tensions of butoh practices and discourse

As the reader can see from the foregoing history, certain aspects of butoh’s history render it sus-
ceptible to people layering their own ideas, discourses, biases, and inspirations on top of it. The
primary reason for this is that butoh specifically developed as a physical performance intentionally
overladen with strata of gestures, images, and text that was meant to resist interpretation; in the face
of this, audiences tended to make meaning of the dances based on their own beliefs and experi-
ences. Accordingly, for a period of time in the 1970s the main commentators in Japan read butoh
according to their own agendas such as nihonjinron (theories of Japaneseness), rather than looking
at the art itself (and the fact that Hijikata’s methods in particular took a long time to come to the
surface exacerbated this problem). This is evident, for example, in the Takechi Tetsuji and Tomioka
Taeko text, the English translation of which appears for the first time in Chapter 10 of this volume.
A second reason is certainly the intentional obfuscation by the artists themselves, related not only
to their ties to surrealism but also to participation in their own myth-making. Outside Japan the
main commentators on butoh mainly came from the world of dance and performance arts and did
not have the linguistic skills and/or cultural knowledge of Japan necessary to accurately understand
what they were seeing without resorting to preconceived notions of “Japan,” heavily influenced by
Orientalism. Similarly, scholars from the field of Japanese studies did not by and large have enough
knowledge of dance and performance to be able to locate butoh within those fields. Another issue
outside of Japan is related to which dancers traveled abroad from which lineage. This had the
effect of skewing who was seen as representative of butoh (e.g. Ohno, Sankai Juku), and resulted in
assumptions about the whole of the form based on a limited knowledge of its full diversity.
Despite these competing and conflicting assumptions, or perhaps because of them, we can
currently categorize performers in the butoh constellation according to various categories along
various continua.8 There are artists who claim the term butoh, such as Maro Akaji, and those who
reject it (but may still have drawn something from butoh) such as Tanaka Min. There are dancers
who have direct connections to an established lineage through training and/or performance, and
those who employ (or once employed) the term for themselves, such as Tadashi Endo, despite
not having any formal butoh training. There are those who look like the stereotype of butoh
with white face and body paint and contorted movements (and who sometimes are dismissed
12
Introduction
by critics as butoh knockoffs or passé), and those who do not but still claim the name (such as
Ōhashi Kakuya). There are those who think that the stereotype is a hindrance to the true practice
of butoh, which is more properly marked by fundamental orientations (towards such things as
space-time or anti-aesthetics), philosophical approaches (self-exploration, interrogating the body
or socialization, contesting power structures, working through fundamental questions of human-
ity such as the nature of life and death), or ways of using the body (contortion, metamorphosis,
or articulation and disarticulation of the body). There are those who think that butoh should be
marked by its focus on marginalized peoples, such as those who are differently abled, infirm, or
aged, or otherwise do not match the norms of society. As a result, it is not uncommon to hear
a performance identified as “butoh” or “butoh-like,” even when it has no direct connection to
butoh lineages or training. For example, if a dancer is engaged in a particular kind of self-explo-
ration, or is engaged in a bodily contestation of power structures, or is passing through stages of
metamorphoses, some people might identify such a performance as butoh. Similarly, other art
forms (horror cinema, mime, clown, Grotowski theater, to name a few) are often identified with
butoh, even if there is no historical evidence to link them.
In addition to the above sets of often opposing investments, other continua actively in contes-
tation include improvisation and site-related dances (often but not necessarily in a natural settings)
versus minutely structured choreographed dance; spectacle and entertainment versus personally
cathartic, emotional, or authentic experience; and the issue of what we might call the connection
between the movement or bodily signifier and the signified. Hijikata’s dance, for example, was
predicated on the assumption that one could create a new bodily vocabulary by arbitrarily com-
bining all sorts of different elements. These new movement signifiers could then be arbitrarily used
to convey an underlying narrative. Conversely, dancers like Kasai and Ohno seem to assume that
their dances convey the emotional states they intend with no gap between the movement signifier
and the signified; their approach to dance presumes a kind of humanist universality that enables
all audiences to connect to the dances’ content and affect. In practice, all of these approaches have
overlapped and fed into each other, so the reality is even messier than the presentation of these
categories and continua would seem to suggest. The important thing to note is that dancers on
all sides of these issues and at all points on these continua call their dances butoh (even as others
with butoh training reject the label). By now, it is not an exaggeration to say that there are nearly
as many approaches to butoh as there are people who claim to be practicing it.
However, for much of butoh’s short history, not all those categories and continua were equally
visible in Europe and America. Many viewers, dancers, and dance critics knew butoh mainly
through the activities of Ohno, Amagatsu, and relative outsiders who did not call their work
butoh (or called it butoh for some period of time, but then repudiated the term, such as Tanaka).
However, Ohno always maintained that he did not have anything to teach others, because they
should discover their own dance inside themselves. Amagatsu seldom talked about the techniques
of his highly controlled imaged-based choreography and instead spoke of his dance as a dialogue
between universals and particulars. So much of the detail about the actual techniques used in the
performances, and particularly the use of the body and mind in Hijikata’s branch, was missing
in the discourse surrounding butoh. A great number of people thought that butoh was only
concerned with improvisation or was a direct response to the atomic bomb, rather than see it as a
product of an urban-inflected international avant-garde. Certainly butoh’s circulations changed
the form, but perhaps more importantly, the (mis)understandings of butoh that accrued to the
form over the years get in the way of attempts to understand butoh more completely. Moreover,
these misunderstandings may have acted as a feedback loop that exacerbated the problem of the
pressure to conform to Western expectations mentioned above. In order to get their perfor-
mances booked into festivals and be invited to teach workshops (which is how they made – and
13
in many cases continue to make – their living), these largely itinerant artists may have felt some
pressure to conform to not just what a Japanese art should look like, but also to what their audi-
ences already knew (or thought they knew) about butoh. In other words, aesthetic decisions were
sometimes made in relation to economic conditions, not only cultural or philosophical ones.
The messiness of these categories is in large part a result of the ways that butoh initially frag-
mented in Japan. By the early 1970s Hijikata and Maro had the most influence in Japan in terms
of the number of dancers and collaborators they worked with and the prominence of their perfor-
mances. Although Ohno taught regular workshops throughout this time, his more open methods
coupled with his only rare performances between 1968 and 1977 meant that his influence was not
strongly felt. The same could be said for Kasai, in part because he left the world of butoh for fifteen
years. By the mid-to-late 1970s, Maro’s “one person, one troupe” philosophy led to six companies
splitting off of Dairakudakan. Sankai Juku, Carlotta Ikeda, Murobushi Kō, and Furukawa Anzu
ensured that Maro’s lineage is strongly represented outside of Japan. After Ohno’s initial European
performances, he began drawing a relatively large number of Western dancers to Japan to study
with him in the early 1980s, as would Tanaka later in the decade. Western dancers who wanted
to learn butoh (and who could not afford to travel to Japan for extended periods of time) had to
depend on studying with itinerant performers such as Kasai, Murobushi, Katsura Kan, Nakajima
Natsu, Yumiko Yoshioka, Furukawa, and Minako Seki. Unlike the relatively straightforward model
of genealogical filiation among Japanese dancers in which key figures had their own dedicated
students, Western dancers of necessity were more likely to study for shorter stints with multiple
teachers. This has exacerbated the eclecticism that now characterizes butoh.
Overview of the book

The Companion provides a solid foundation for butoh specialists and novices alike by both tracing
a fuller history of the form than has been previously available and developing a rigorous analysis
and critique of the full range of butoh practice and discourse. Chapters place butoh in its his-
torical, dance, and performance studies contexts by describing butoh’s artistic and philosophical
antecedents and development in Japan by key practitioners. The volume details often neglected
second-generation practitioners as well as the global travels of butoh dancers beginning in the
1970s who have been instrumental in the persistence and expansion of the form. This global
circulation of butoh has until now received scant scholarly attention, and represents a major
innovation of the collection. Finally, the volume addresses a variety of butoh pedagogies, issues
explored by practitioners (gender, politics, identity), and ways that butoh has impacted other
dance, theatre, and performance practices.
Of course, this companion devotes a number of historical and analytical chapters to Hiji-
kata and Ohno. But even as we deepen the literature on these two central figures, we argue for
an expansive understanding of butoh that accounts for the various pre-existing theatrical and
art forms that the early artists appropriated as they created their new dance form, and for the
historical twists and turns that have created such a wide variety of artistic activities, all included
under the butoh umbrella. Our expansive approach moreover conceptualizes the form through
an attention to the activities of those on the margins of the form alongside the activities of the
founders and more famous dancers. Additionally, we include a number of chapters written by
artists as a way of documenting the manifold practices that constitute butoh today.
Beyond the simple breadth of this volume, another key strength lies in the attention we pay to
the ways that butoh has been understood over time and across different locations, and how that may
have, in turn, changed the dance. We recognize that the ways people talk about butoh often act as
a filter that prohibits easy understanding of what the dancers were and are trying to do, and that
14
Introduction
the various categories and concepts that people use to understand butoh have exerted their own
pressure on the dancers and in some cases led to changes in practice. We therefore include trans-
lations of Japanese essays, reviews, and commentary that were published contemporaneously with
early butoh performances, and which have not been previously available in English. We want to be
clear that we are not necessarily endorsing the arguments in the historical essays included here, and
in fact sometimes we disagree with them, but they are nonetheless a valuable way for the reader to
grasp how butoh was understood in previous eras and how the discourses around butoh developed.
The first section of the Companion, “Butoh instigators and interlocutors,” presents the first
phase of butoh history in Japan through a focus on the two key early figures in butoh, Hijikata
Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo, along with the artistic contexts that influenced its development and
reception in Japan. We conceive of this history as encompassing a number of major pre-existing
art forms that butoh artists appropriated as a way to understand the artistic and intellectual fer-
ment that produced butoh. Moreover, Section 1 sets the background for the rest of the text by
demonstrating the broad range of discursive contexts in which butoh has been talked about and
theorized thus far, including early Japanese commentary and reviews.
In Chapter 1, “On the eve of the birth of ankoku butoh: postwar Japanese modern dance
and Ohno Kazuo,” Kuniyoshi Kazuko provides a brief survey of modern dance in Japan before
butoh, and looks at the choreography of Ohno before he met Hijikata. Chapter 2, “From vodou
to butoh: Hijikata Tatsumi, Katherine Dunham, and the trans-Pacific remaking of blackness,” by
Arimitsu Michio, highlights the early appropriation of blackness by Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno
Kazuo, and seeks to show the role Afro-diasporic cultures played in the early history of butoh.
Chapter 3 is a translation of Mishima Yukio’s article “Contemporary nightmare: an avant-garde
dance group dances Forbidden Colors,” introducing Hijikata and collaborator Wakamatsu Miki to
his readers and considering how avant-garde dance is created and appreciated. Chapter 4, “The
relationship between avant-garde dance and things,” is another work by Mishima in which he
continues his exploration of avant-garde dance in relation to everyday movements. In Chapter 5,
“Rethinking the ‘indigeneity’ of Hijikata Tatsumi in the 1960s as a photographic negative image
of Japanese dance history,” Inata Naomi reconsiders the indigenous elements in Hijikata’s dance
in relationship to pop art and in the context of Japanese dance history. Robert Ono considers
the relationship between Hijikata and the scholar of European decadence, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko
in Chapter 6, “À la maison de Shibusawa: the draconian aspects of Hijikata’s butoh.” The chapter
on Shibusawa is followed by two Shibusawa essays, Chapter 7, “Hijikata Tatsumi: burnt offering
dancer,” a program note in which Shibusawa compares Hijikata to various figures from Western
history from the Roman era to the 19th century, and Chapter 8, “A certain kind of energy:
dancing modern anxiety,” which Shibusawa wrote to introduce Hijikata to a wider audience, and
in which he examines various aspects of Hijikata’s personality. Chapter 9 “Butoh and taboo,”
is a translation of the theater scholar Gunji Masakatsu’s impressionist essay about the white face
paint of butoh. In it, Gunji argues somewhat tendentiously that butoh is related to the aesthetics
of late 19th century kabuki. This is followed by another translation, Chapter 10, “‘Inserting the
hip/s’ and ‘lowering the hip/s,’” by Takechi Tatsuji and Tomioka Taeko, with a contextual essay
by Maki Isaka. In it, Takechi argues that the gait used in walking through wet rice paddies in
wet-rice agriculture was the foundation for all Japanese performing arts, and (without citing
any movements from any dances) that Hijikata had used a modified version of it. Chapter 11 is a
translation of William Marotti’s influential essay “The problematics of butoh and the essentialist
trap.” In it, Marotti argues against readings of butoh that tie it to the supposed particularities of
the Japanese body. In Chapter 12, “Returns and repetitions: Hijikata Tatsumi’s choreographic
practice as a critical gesture of temporalization,” Sara Jansen further complicates the assertion
that Hijikata sought to return to some pure Japan, and instead reads Hijikata as conducting a
15
complex reconfiguration of time registers and a realignment of the past, present, and future. The
section returns to Ohno with Chapter 13, Lucia Schwellinger’s “Ohno Kazuo: biography and
methods of movement creation.” In this excerpt from her 1998 German book, translated into
English for the first time, Schwellinger examines Ohno’s consolidation of a personal cosmology
and the movement characteristics of his dances. As its title suggests, Chapter 14, “What we
know and what we want to know: a roundtable on butoh and neuer Tanz” is a discussion among
Kate Elswit, Miyagawa Mariko, Eiko Otake, and Tara Rodman about how to think through the
connections between German modern dance and butoh. In Chapter 15, “Oikawa Hironobu:
bringing Decroux and Artaud into Japanese dance practices,” Yoshida Yukihiko discusses the
relationship between Oikawa Hironobu and early butoh dancers with reference to mime and the
understanding of Artaud that Oikawa advocated. The theme of butoh and Artaud continues with
Chapter 16, “Foundations and filiations: the legacy of Artaud in Hijikata Tatsumi,” Samantha
Marenzi’s examination of the ways that butoh artists have appropriated Artaud. In Chapter 17,
“Butoh’s remediation and the anarchic transforming politics of the body in the 1960s,” Peter
Eckersall considers the use of media in butoh as a mechanism for putting the viewer in the
space of the dance. Jonathan W. Marshall continues the exploration of butoh in media with an
examination of butoh and photography (with particular reference to Hosoe Eikoh’s Kamaitachi)
in Chapter 18, “Bodies at the threshold of the visible: photographic butoh.” Finally Uno Kuniichi
closes Section 1 with an examination of Hijikata’s writing in his quasi-memoires, Ailing Terpsich-
ore, in Chapter 19, “The book of butoh; the book of the dead.”
Chapters in Section 2, “The second generation,” outline the innovations of dancers who
worked with Hijikata as they increasingly adapted the idiom for their own purposes. In Chap-
ter 20, “‘Open butoh’: Dairakudakan and Maro Akaji,” Tomoe Aihara discusses the core concepts
and ideas of Maro Akaji’s choreographic philosophy. Megan V. Nicely (see Figure 0.2) follows in
Figure 0.2 Megan V. Nicely at CAVE (presented by LEIMAY, New York Butoh Festival 2009), photograph
by Yana Kraeva. Courtesy of LEIMAY.
16
Introduction
Chapter 21, “Growing new life: Kasai Akira’s butoh,” with an account of Kasai’s vision of butoh
as an interconnected flux of language, movement, and history. The third generation butoh dancer
SU-EN contributes Chapter 22, “Light as dust, hard as steel, fluid as snake saliva: the Butoh Body
of Ashikawa Yoko,” to reflect on the career of Hijikata’s principal danseuse, Ashikawa. In Chap-
ter 23, “The expanding universe of butoh: the challenge of Bishop Yamada in Hoppo Butoh-ha
and Shiokubi (1975),” Kosuge Hayato examines the career of Bishop Yamada, one of the first
dancers to move to the periphery of Japan and found a butoh company. The mercurial nomad
Murobushi Kō is the subject of Katja Centonze’s Chapter 24, “Murobushi Kō and his challenge
to butoh,” an exploration of the important role Murobushi played in the international spread
of butoh, even as he contested the very categories of butoh throughout his career. Iwaki Kyoko
ends the section with an account of how Amagatsu Ushio, the founder of the world-renowned
troupe Sankai Juku, choreographs in different temporal registers in Chapter 25, “Oscillation and
regeneration: the temporal aesthetics of Sankai Juku.”
Section 3, “New sites for butoh,” focuses on the international spread of butoh through the
performance and teaching activities of Japanese dancers outside of Japan and the travels of
non-Japanese dancers to Japan to study. Chapters address the development of butoh dancers and
audiences in major sites around the world through the analysis of key festivals, companies, and
locations. This section documents butoh’s better-known (but little written about) paths through
France and Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and later San Francisco and New York
City, while also expanding attention beyond Western Europe and the United States to significant
butoh practices in the Americas, the Middle East, Australia, South Africa, and Asia.
In Chapter 26, “‘Now we have a passport’: global and local butoh,” Rosemary Candelario
uses the idea of diaspora to trace the implications for the travels of butoh performers and the
pilgrimages to Japan in the creation of what she calls “new local butohs.” No destination was
more important in butoh’s history than Paris in 1978, and in Chapter 27, “A history of French
fascination with butoh,” Sylviane Pagès unfolds this consequential moment and shows the felic-
ities and miscommunications that made France such a fertile place for butoh to take root. Maria
Pia D’Orazi tracks successive stages of the understanding of butoh in Italy in Chapter 28, “The
concept of butoh in Italy: from Ohno Kazuo to Kasai Akira.” The development of butoh in Ger-
many, and in particular the activities of Tadashi Endo, Yumiko Yoshioka, and Minako Seki, is the
feature of Rosa van Hensbergen’s Chapter 29, “German butoh since the late 1980s: Tadashi Endo,
Yumiko Yoshioka, and Minako Seki.” In Chapter 30, “SU-EN Butoh Company: body, nature,
and the world,” SU-EN gives an account of her own butoh performances and their relationship
to her environment in Sweden. Christine Greiner presents a synopsis of the twists and turns of
butoh in Brazil in Chapter 31, “Butoh in Brazil: historical context and political reenactment,”
while Gustavo Emilio Rosales recounts the analogous but different trajectory for butoh in Chap-
ter 32, “A sun more alive: butoh in Mexico.” The Companion turns to festivals for Chapter 33
and 34. In Chapter 33, “Global butoh as experienced in San Francisco,” Brechin Flournoy, the
founder of the San Francisco Butoh Festival, recounts the curatorial choices she made as she
established the first major butoh festival in the United States. She is followed by Ximena Gar-
nica in Chapter 34, “LEIMAY, CAVE, and the New York Butoh Festival.” Garnica outlines the
interconnection between the artistic practice of LEIMAY and the curatorial choices she and her
partner Shige Moriya made. In Chapter 35, “Iraqi Bodies’ The Baldheaded: ‘butoh’-inspired Iraqi
contemporary performance,” J Dellecave explores how choreographer Anmar Taha adapted and
appropriated butoh to contest stereotypes about Iraqis after 9/11. The section concludes with
Chapter 36, “‘We need to keep one eye open . . . ’: approaching butoh at sites of personal and
cultural resistance,” Jeremy Neideck’s meditation on a collaboration between Australian butoh
dancers and Korean p’ansori artists.
17
Butoh has attracted many practitioners as a fertile ground for grappling with some of the most
important issues of the day. Similarly, commentators have seen in butoh practice an invitation
to theorize about butoh and to use butoh to theorize about other important matters. Section 4,
“Politics, gender, identity,” continues that trend by providing a space for not only analyzing
butoh, but also using the perspectives provided by butoh (in its many forms) to create new phi-
losophy and push forward current critical conversations.
One of the most striking elements of butoh has always been the gender play of performers. In
Chapter 37, “Butoh’s genders: men in dresses and girl-like women,” Katherine Mezur articulates
the ways that butoh artists have responded to and rebelled against various gender norms. Chiayi
Seetoo discusses Hata Kanoko and politically minded “butoh action” performances at a leper
colony in Taiwan in Chapter 38, “Death rituals and survival acts: Hata Kanoko’s ‘butoh action’
and alternative inter-Asian transnationalism.” The theme of butoh and protest continues in Carla
Melo’s Chapter 39, “When the ‘revolt of the flesh’ becomes political protest: the nomadic tactics
of butoh-inspired interventions,” in which she recounts the anti-war protests of Corpus Delicti
Butoh Performance Lab in Los Angeles and a performance in response to the forced displace-
ment of marginalized subjects from Praça Roosevelt, a famous São Paulo square. In Chapter 40,
“Butoh beyond the body: an interview with Shakina Nayfack on transition, evolution, and the
spirit at war,” Jacquelyn Marie Shannon interviews Nayfack, a butoh practitioner, theatre direc-
tor, performing artist, and trans-activist. In Chapter 41, “Critical Butoh and the colonial matrix
of power,” Miki Seifert examines a collaborative performance, He rawe tona kakahu (She wore
a becoming dress), by herself and a Maori performer that sought to use butoh as a method of
decolonization.
Butoh’s varied practices and learning opportunities make it unique among dance forms. Sec-
tion 5, “Pedagogy and practice,” provides a foundation in butoh pedagogy under Hijikata and
other early companies, while also presenting a range of practitioner and scholarly perspectives
on butoh pedagogy and practice. Caitlin Coker opens the section with Chapter 42, “The daily
practice of Hijikata Tatsumi’s apprentices from 1969 to 1978,” in which she draws on extensive
interviews to record the experiences of Hijikata’s dancers who lived, trained, worked, and danced
together. She places particular emphasis on the confluences between dancing in cabarets and
rehearsal for butoh performances. In Chapter 43, “Butoh pedagogy in historical and contem-
porary practice,” Tanya Calamoneri (see Figure 0.3) looks at how Hijikata’s dancers fashioned
his rehearsal training into a pedagogy that could later be delivered in workshops and long-term
training sessions. Rosa van Hensbergen’s Chapter 44, “Waguri Yukio’s Butoh Kaden: taking stock
of Hijikata’s butoh notation,” revisits Hijikata’s training via Waguri’s DVD-ROM, which attempts
to translate Waguri’s notes of Hijikata’s rehearsals into replicable, embodied exercises. In Chap-
ter 45, “A flower of butoh: my daily dance with Ohno Kazuo (1995–2012),” Maureen Momo
Freehill provides a practitioner’s perspective on training with Ohno Kazuo for a decade and a
half. In Chapter 46, “On and through the butoh body,” Katherine Adamenko provides a student’s
perspective on butoh practice with an account of lessons from several different teachers. She is
followed by Chapter 47, “My Dairakudakan experience,” Julia A. Vessey’s account of being the
first non-Japanese dancer to train long term with Dairakudakan. In Chapter 48, “Butoh as an
approach to performance in South Africa,” jackï job recounts how she translated her years of
studying butoh in Japan into a personal performance and pedagogical practice adapted to the
racial and political contexts of her home country. In Chapter 49, “Wrecking butoh: dancing
poetic shores,” Bronwyn Preece provides a poetic account of the Wreck Beach Butoh perfor-
mance intensive with Canada’s Kokoro Dance.
As previously noted, butoh has throughout its history been enriched by artists who have
intersected with the form, embraced (and also rejected) aspects of it, injected it with new
18
Introduction
Figure 0.3 Tanya Calamoneri at CAVE (presented by LEIMAY, New York Butoh Festival 2007),
photograph by Dola Baroni. Courtesy of LEIMAY.
influences, and taken its inspiration into other media and performance genres. Section 6,
“Beyond butoh,” provides a glimpse into some of those artists and activities on the edge of
the butoh idiom. In Chapter 50, “Tanaka Min: the dance of life,” Zack Fuller (see Figure
0.4) provides an account of the career of Tanaka, who, as discussed above, has been associated
with butoh over the years despite having developed his own unique approaches to move-
ment, including Body Weather. In Chapter 51, “Body Weather Laboratory Los Angeles:
an interview with Roxanne Steinberg and Oguri,” Joyce Lu draws attention to the ways
Body Weather itself has spread around the world and become part of local dance scenes.
In Chapter 52, “The cinematic forms of butoh films,” Aaron Kerner considers the films
connected to the world of butoh, and the affective resonances between cinema and butoh.
Visual and media artist Lucile Druet discusses the ways butoh has influenced her photography
and video practice in Chapter 53, “Locus solus – locus fracta: butoh dance as protocol for
visual self-representation.” In Chapter 54, “Ohno Kazuo’s lessons for a French choreographer:
Ō Sensei by Catherine Diverrès,” Miyagawa Mariko presents the journey of French contem-
porary dancers Diverrès and Bernardo Montet to study with Ohno in the early 1980s as well
as Diverrès’s recent choreographic tribute to Ohno. In Chapter 55, “Michael Sakamoto and
the breaks: revolt of the head (MuNK remix),” Sakamoto parallels the practices and philoso-
phies of butoh and hip-hop in his own personal and artistic development. Perhaps appropri-
ately, given the theme of the section, Shinichi Iova-Koga (see Figure 0.5) closes the section and
19
Figure 0.4 Zack Fuller at CAVE (presented by LEIMAY, New York Butoh Festival 2007), photograph by
Dola Baroni. Courtesy of LEIMAY.
the book with Chapter 56, “Burn butoh, start again,” by narrating his own personal evolution
into and out of butoh.
One of butoh’s characteristics that has contributed to its continued vibrancy almost six dec-
ades after its initial experiments is how it skillfully and sometimes inadvertently moves along mul-
tiple registers of signification and corporeality, often simultaneously. Likewise the chapters in this
book could be productively read alongside and against one another in multiple configurations.
Moreover, we were keenly aware when we assembled the Table of Contents that some chapters
could have fit into multiple sections. Below we propose some alternate pathways through this
book. Just as Maro Akaji encourages his dancers to become choreographers of their own butoh,
we encourage readers to create further pathways through this rich, critical, highly personal, and
sometimes contradictory material called butoh.
• Japanese dance history: Kuniyoshi, Inata, Elswit et al.

• Networks of artistic exchange between Japan and Europe: Elswit et al., Yoshida, Marenzi,
Pagès, D’Orazi, Centonze
20
Introduction
Figure 0.5 Shinichi Momo Iova-Koga (co-presented by LEIMAY, New York Butoh Festival 2007 as part
of Japan Society’s Kazuo Ohno 101 Celebration and Butoh U.S. Marathon), photograph by Dola Baroni.
Courtesy of LEIMAY.
• Ohno Kazuo: Kuniyoshi, Schwellinger, Freehill, D’Orazi, Miyagawa

• Maro Akaji: Aihara, Vessey
• Kasai Akira: Nicely, D’Orazi, Flournoy, Garnica
• Yumiko Yoshioka: van Hensbergen, Centonze, D’Orazi
• Diego Piñón: Candelario, Shannon, Adamenko, Seifert, Rosales
• Improvisation: Schwellinger, Freehill, Fuller, Lu
• Media and Intermedia: Eckersall, Marshall, Kerner, Druet
• Race and ethnicity: Arimitsu, Takechi, Seifert, Dellecave
As this volume demonstrates, butoh is no longer a unitary movement, but a vibrant and
ever-shifting art form performed by a set of keen, ever-questing, caterwauling artists who seek to
find their way forward into the future while vigorously debating butoh’s past and present. Rather
than being an impediment, the tension between these factions and their paradoxical aims has only
served to enrich and sustain butoh into its sixth decade and beyond.
21
Notes
1 Much of the historical account in this essay was taken (with extensive modifications) from Baird 2015.
2 For the Picasso image used to create a Japanese hairstyle and the Iranian relief used to depict a Japanese
interior, see Wurmli (2008, 179, 245, and 258). See also the discussion of these images in Baird (2012,
203–204).
3 Kurihara Nanako, “Hijikata Tatsumi: The Words of Butoh: [Introduction].” TDR 44, no. 1 (2000): 21.
Inata Naomi suggests a similar thing in “Rethinking the ‘Indigeneity’ of Hijikata Tatsumi in the 1960s as
a Photographic Negative Image of Japanese Dance History” (Chapter 5, this volume).
4 Ishii and Eiko & Koma briefly worked together in Amsterdam in 1973. See Candelario (2016) for more
on Eiko & Koma.
5 This description taken from archival recordings of the second night of the performance on November 2,
1977.
6 Lucia Schwellinger, in her chapter in this volume (Chapter 13), attributes this change to the consolidation
of Ohno’s personal “cosmology,” which increasingly drove his performance and teaching.
7 Retitled in English in 2016 as About Kazuo Ohno – Reliving the Butoh Diva’s Masterpieces.
8 These categories are taken primarily from three sources: Baird (2015, 324) and Ishii (2015, 26–30), and
from the excellent summary in Christine Greiner’s “Butoh in Brazil: historical context and political
reenactment” (Chapter 31, this volume).
Works cited
Baird, Bruce. 2012. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits. New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan Press.
———. 2015. “Butō: The Birth and Maturation of a New Global Art Form.” In East Asia in the World: An
Introduction, edited by Anne Prescott, 243–260. New York: Routledge.
Blanks, Tim. 2011. “Spring 2011 Couture: Givenchy” with slide show. Vogue January 24. https://www.
vogue.com/fashion-shows/spring-2011-couture/givenchy
Candelario, Rosemary. 2016. Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma’s Asian/American Choreographies. Mid-
dletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Dunning, Jennifer. 1981. “The Dance: Kazuo Ohno.” The New York Times, July 31.
Falquez, Camila, photographs, and Yasmina Benabdelkrim, stylist. 2017. “Talents on set: Butoh” with slide
show. Vogue Italia January 27. http://www.vogue.it/en/vogue-talents/talents-on-set/2017/01/27/
butoh-camila-falquex-yasmina/
Harada, Hiromi. 2004. Butō taizen: Ankoku to hikari no ōkoku. Gendai shokan.
Ishii, Tatsuro. 2015. “The Body as Object: Butoh in the World and the Appearance of Modern Dance.”
In Raices Profundas de la Danza ( The Deep Roots of Dance), edited by Gustavo Emilio Rosales, 23–31.
Non-numbered trilingual special edition. DCO Danza Cuerpo Obsesión.
Nanako, Kurihara. 2000. “Hijikata Tatsumi: The Words of Butoh [Introduction].” TDR 44, no. 1 (Spring):
18–28.
Ohno, Kazuo, and Ohno Yoshito. 2004. Kazuo Ohno’s World: From Without and Within, translated by John
Barrett. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Poulton, M. Cody. 2014. “The 1960s and Underground Theater [Introduction].” In The Columbia Anthology
of Modern Japanese Drama, edited by J. Thomas Rimer, Mitsuya Mori, and M. Cody Poulton, 315–325.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Wurmli, Kurt. 2008. “The Power of Image: Hijikata Tatsumi’s Scrapbooks and the Art of Butō.” PhD Diss.,
University of Hawai’i at Manoa.
22
SECTION 1
Butoh instigators and interlocutors

1
ON THE EVE OF THE BIRTH
OF ANKOKU BUTOH
Postwar Japanese modern dance and Ohno Kazuo
Kuniyoshi Kazuko (translated by Bruce Baird and condensed

and adapted by the Editors)
In 1926, at the age of twenty, Ohno Kazuo came to Tokyo, and then entered the world of dance
in 1936, while working as physical education teacher. Before and after the war, he was involved in
the dance world, and then in 1954, he met Hijikata Tatsumi. Eventually, he participated alongside
Hijikata in the creative period of ankoku butoh. How did he go from modern dance to butoh,
and just what were the reasons that lead to his separation from modern dance? By looking at this
period from the vantage point of Ohno, I want to cast light on the eve of the birth of ankoku butoh.1
The encounter with dance: on the dance of Mary Wigman and

the new dance of Eguchi Takaya and Miya Misako
Ohno started dancing with Eguchi Takaya and Miya Misako in 1936. But prior to that time, he was
required to teach dance as condition of his employment at the Soshin Girls School, and thus had
studied with Ishii Baku in 1933. About Ishii’s actual dance training, he writes that “it was mainly like
pantomime. . . . It was dance like drama, and it was theatrical,” and the basis was classical ballet. He
says that he thought, “If it is dance like pantomime, there is no need to study it” (Tsuboi 2002, 66).
He encountered the dance of Eguchi and Miya via reviews and photographs of their 1934
dances Work No. 1 and Operating Room that they performed at their first recital upon returning
from Germany (Ohno 1995, 40).2 Eguchi said about Work No. 1,
One day, I sat in a chair, and while I was idly moving the fingers on my right hand
(which was resting on my knee), when I tried to bend my wrists almost to the square
and stand my middle and ring fingers up firmly, I became aware of a sharp and severe
sensation, and thought to make that into the basis for creating a ‘Movement.’
Eguchi 1969, 2
And again,
This ‘hand movement’ that I had made with no particular purpose in mind became
a ‘stimulus’ and I was able to give birth to various movements all at once using this
25
Kuniyoshi Kazuko
movement as a base. Although I considered the overall structure and order of move-
ments when I compiled them, it is basically just a work that was only movements.
Eguchi 1961, 18
One person was silver and one person was gold, and the only thing different was their
color; their costumes, wigs, and shapes were the same, and they did the same move-
ments, which became a powerful dance that felt quite radical.
Eguchi 1961, 174
Ohno saw photographs accompanying reviews or introductory articles about both dances
in the newspapers, and said that this was probably “the first dance in Japan which was truly
abstract.” And he suddenly thought, “This is it. I had the feeling that without a doubt, I had
finally found what I was looking for” (Ohno 1995, 40).
When you look at pictures of Operating Table, and Work No. 1, they are both duets with Eguchi
and Miya, and one can feel clear sharp sculpturality in the forms of their bodies and limbs. It
must have been these clear forms that Ohno felt were so fresh and new. It was not a dance with
a dramatic exalted feeling, but something that made one feel simple clear forms, (even in the
costumes which were subordinate to the movements), and this matched what Ohno was looking
for at the time. This was not the descriptive dance achieved through mime that Ohno had seen
at Ishii Baku’s studio previously.
When Eguchi and Miya returned from their time in Europe in the mid-1930s, it had already
been about ten years since the form of “New Dance” had emerged in Japan. Interest was increas-
ing in the modern dance that was all the rage in Europe, and many people went to Europe to
study, starting with Ishii Baku. Many dancers including Anna Pavlova and La Argentina (Antonia
Mercé) also came to Japan in this era. From the 1930s, such dancers from New Dance as Alex-
ander Sakharoff, the Bodenweiser Sisters, Harald Kreutzberg, and Ruth Page came to Japan. The
new dance in Germany, which was to exert such a profound influence on the formation of dance
in Japan, was introduced by Ishii Baku and also Tsuda Nobutoshi and Kuni Masami. Eguchi and
Miya were a new stream who were reacting against Ishii. They spread the form of expressionist
dance that they had learned for two years from Mary Wigman. Thus, Ishii and Eguchi and Miya
had all studied with the German Expressionist dancer, Mary Wigman, but their choreography
was different. Why did Ohno choose the Eguchi/Miya version rather than Ishii’s version? Before
thinking about that question, let us think about Wigman’s dance itself.
Of course, Wigman is the first name in German Expressionist dance. Wigman thought of
personal experience as the motivation for the creative process. She wrote,
Therefore the dancer-choreographer must turn his inner feelings and perceptions into
visible expression, he must clarify and give expression to his personal life experiences
through the medium of the dance.
Wigman 1973, 86
That is, Wigman generates in clear movement forms that which is felt in personal experience,
and all of the transformations that are a result of natural reactions to it. The process becomes the
dancing body, and is embodied. She took it as necessary to search for a method of converting
the inner emotions that arise and disappear and the transformations of the spirit into bodily
movement forms. Wigman thought that dance was that thing which is transmitted through
form when that which is experienced psychologically and mentally is consciously given shape
though visible bodily movements. Moreover, she thought that that which was expressed through
26
On the eve of the birth of ankoku butoh
exceedingly simple strong forms, which were appropriate to convey an experience, would tran-
scend individual experience and obtain a greater universality.
In contrast to this way of thinking, just what was Eguchi/Miya’s dance like? Eguchi explained
about the new dance in detail in his 1961 Method of Dance Creation.
Modern dance prizes the ‘construction of space.’ Even the ‘movement’ that I spoke of
previously is included in the ‘creation of space,’ and one creates (on the basis of intuitive
calculations) that which will make the place of the stage come alive: how, where, and
when the movement will unfold, what kind of organization, what movements, what
progression, what feeling will be contained therein, and the presentation of things
which have what kind of nuance.
Eguchi 1961, 5–6
To summarize Eguchi’s thought, this kind of ‘creation of space’ had not existed in Japan before
that time, and instead, there was narrative, to which theatrical gestures were appended.
Eguchi (ibid.) also wrote “I wanted to know other kinds of movements, to seek out all such
movements,” and made all the movements of humanity part of his creative process. And, he con-
tinued, as a result of pursuing the transformations of the various bodily movements (such as the
position of feet on the floor, or the way of bending joints),
I was able to discover that the movements of humans are infinite ... and just how it is
that the infinite movements are infinite. This is not just that I conquered the world of
movements, but coming to this way of thinking was the most important thing for the
new dance.
When he went to Wigman’s school, Eguchi was quite shocked to find out that there was
connection between what he saw there and the kind of movements he was seeking. Because
Wigman grasped the elements of numerous movements, and brought these into her method,
Eguchi immediately decided to study with her. In this way, Eguchi and Miya ended up spending
two years studying abroad. While learning from Wigman, Eguchi was able to touch the source
from which free movements could be freely created, and we might observe that he chiefly learned
a method for eliciting new movements. In sum, Eguchi and Miya learned a very analytical
approach from Wigman.
On the other hand, Ishii felt the strength of Wigman in her attempt to express through
bodily movements the internal transformations of the spirit and the dramatic transformations
in the emotion of the individual, and not in the specific transformations of the movements
themselves. Ishii thought the task of dance expression was not the expression of the truth of
the human through trivial daily life, or the details of real life, but through taking the matters of
daily experience, purifying them, strengthening them, and elevating them into a more universal
movement. This is what Wigman called “Absolute Dance,” and it corresponds to the expression
that is held in the highest regard in expressionist dance and doubles up with the attempt to reach
a universal world that transcends the individual. The tendency of Ishii’s dance to treat universal
subjects with heightened dramatic movement is due to his having imbibed this part of Wigman.
In contrast, Ohno felt that such exalted dramatic dance is unnaturally forced, and he could
not get used to such lofty spheres and a universality that surpasses everyday human emotion,
and for the same reason, he felt extremely uneasy with the movements that are born as a
result (Ohno 1995, 41). Reflecting on Eguchi’s dance training, he also said that since all the
parts of the body are influenced by every single movement, limitless movements are born.
27
Kuniyoshi Kazuko
Moreover, that he understands what Eguchi means when he says that all the body’s parts are con-
nected to each other, so even in the movement of one joint, there are innumerable movements,
but movement is also naturally related to problems of the heart/mind, soul and life. In the case
of movement, first there is some kind of necessity and then a movement. Ohno says that first
you think of going, and then the legs follow. He also says that he spent five years in trial and
error trying to figure out the foundations of movement. It is interesting that during his period
of establishing his dance studio, he was not worried about all the variations of a movement, but
rather had an interest in what movements would come out when the “thought comes first”
(Ohno 1995, 41). In particular, we can say that Ohno was proceeding by trial and error in
stimulating himself internally, and also in the thinking about the connection between his own
existence and expression, all the while taking lessons from Eguchi and Miya, and earning his
livelihood.
The era of independence and recitals 1949–1953: Ohno’s method

of composition as a modern dancer
In 1949, Ohno established the Ohno Kazuo Dance Studio, and almost immediately held the First
Ohno Kazuo Dance Recital. As if a dam had broken, Ohno held recitals every year until 1951,
and then skipped a year and held a fourth recital in 1953. There were usually solos interspersed
with group dances for a total of twenty-nine dances. In his review of the first performance,
Eguchi Hiroshi wrote:
Ohno Kazuo’s recital was full of extremely eccentric ideas, and while there was certainly
uniqueness in his expression of them, I feel a dull regret that his intentions are not
sufficiently expressed. For example, in a work entitled Statue of the Ernst Family, which
at first glance is certainly strange work, the treatment of the protagonist Owl had a
certain strange flavor to it, but the work as a whole never developed beyond conceptual
boundaries. This tendency gives birth to strange works such as Flower and Chair, Good
Morning Praying Mantis, and Fetters, but each of these lack a thorough treatment, and
there is a tendency for only the ideas to be particularly glittering. When it comes to the
short works, Ohno’s individuality is honestly expressed. For example, Tango displayed a
fresh individuality which was different from common practice. There’s no doubt that
this is a newcomer with a singular personality.
Eguchi Hiroshi 19493
The representative phrases are ‘extremely eccentric,’ ‘strange,’ ‘strange works,’ and ‘strange flavor.’
These are connected to ‘singular personality,’ ‘uniqueness of expression,’ and ‘individuality.’ The
conclusion is that the works are not particularly dance-like in terms of rhythm, melody, and
movement, that they have a conception which is difficult for the usual spectators to understand,
and that they are on the whole more literary rather than dance like. In general, rather than
appraising his skill as a dancer, the reviewer focuses on the world of the performance, the unique-
ness of the images, and the unprecedented nature of the works.
In another view of this same performance, the critic Nagata Tatsuo locates Ohno’s dis-
tinctiveness in Praise of Jacob and Tango, which were short works. Although Ohno lacks
power, he writes, “we should praise the intention of his poetic expression in his choreogra-
phy, however, it is necessary for him to be precise about the organization of his bodily expres-
sion,” thus indicating that in general, Ohno and his dancers are lacking in bodily training
(Nagata 1949).
28
In 1950, Ohno held his second dance recital, and not surprisingly, there was a short review in
the Tokyo newspaper by Eguchi Hiroshi:
There are no parallels for the eccentric pieces in Ohno’s modern dance . . . The dance
lacks the feeling of movement, but has a peculiar kind of feminine lyricism, and the
fact that the result is not as he intends, is likely due to the uniform and monotonous
choreography. But when compared with last year, both the pieces in the dancing have
a feeling of stability.
Eguchi Hiroshi 1950
In this review for the second recital, there is the familiar refrain of the unique works and the lack
of movement, but also a recognition of “feminine lyricism.” In a letter from some time probably
in 1951 between the second and third recital, Ohno wrote as follows:
I think I more or less have the technique of expressiveness, but the important thing is
to grasp the content that I am trying to express, and thinking that I cannot squeeze this
from my mind, I’m scavenging through various kinds of poetry paintings and newspa-
per articles. Right now, my teachers are poetry and paintings. Modern poetry that is.4
Along with the Rilke’s “Under the Linden Tree,” he uses passages from Rilke’s “Song of the
Statue” (in 1953 – Fox and Statue), Verlaine’s “Il pleure dans mon coeur” (1951 in Rain on the
Town), the Bible, Emerson, Takami Jun, Tamura Ryuichi, Murano Shiro, and Nagase Kiyoko.
The November 1953 Fourth Ohno Kazuo Dance Recital featured positive reviews. Eguchi
wrote, “I want to express my respect for his effort to throw off all commonsensical pre-existing
dance techniques, and for his unique world of dance” (Eguchi Hiroshi 1953). And Hiraiwa
Yasuhiro wrote:
In each of his dances, which take as their themes the emotion of life, Ohno . . . explores
his skepticism toward life, but they can be seen as a manifestation of Ohno’s vision of
life. The peculiar interest of the dance lies in freely using the techniques of expression,
and distorting the emotions of movement to render them into artistic shapes. In the
world of dance in which many people emulate their predecessors, it is hard to find
people who think that this kind of creativity is the thing to be pursued in the essence
of art.
Hiraiwa Yasuhiro, in Eguchi 1954
The 1953 reviews treat Ohno’s uniqueness in a positive manner. In contrast to the then current
dances which had a tendency toward spectacle such as Eguchi and Miya’s The Fire of Prometheus
(1950) and Ishii’s Human Buddha (1953), it is fascinating to see that Ohno was tilting in the exact
opposite direction, which the reviewers seemed to support.
Deviation from modern dance/1st period of latency

1954–1959/meeting Hijikata
After the 1953 recital, other than appearing as a supporting dancer in Eguchi and Miya dances once
or twice a year, Ohno quit appearing in own performances for five years, so we can think of this
as the first period of silence for Ohno. Ohno has never said why, but we can surmise that perhaps
he was feeling frustrated about the way things were going or that it was economically impossible
29
Kuniyoshi Kazuko
to continue to stage shows. It was in this era that Ohno met Hijikata at the 1954 Andō Mitsuko
Dancing Heels Special Performance, in which Hijikata debuted as jazz dancer and Ohno was mak-
ing a special appearance as a senior member of the Eguchi/Miya lineage. The second time they
met was in 1955 on the occasion of the first performance of Ando and Horiuchi Kan’s Unique
Dance Group (from 1957 it was called the Unique Ballet Group). Hijikata played the role of the
bar tender in a dance called Cocktail and Ohno was a customer. Later, Ohno Yoshito said that Ando
had the practice of staging in the same recital both serious dances that treated social topics, and also
jazz dances. Usually it was Ohno Kazuo in the artistic dance pieces and Hijikata in the jazz dance
pieces. In 1956, on the occasion of the second Unique Dance Group recital, Hijikata invited Ohno
out for tea, and Ohno Yoshito recalls him saying to Ohno, “I have seen all your works” (Mizohata
2005, 11). It is not clear what they talked about, but it’s likely that Hijikata related the shock he felt
in Ohno’s 1949 performance and other things that made an impression on Ohno. Likely they had
many chances to meet after that. Whatever the case, the period during which Ohno could not make
work had arrived. We can understand his frame of mind from his own words.
In May 1955, during the period of inactivity, there was a round table discussion entitled
“Spreading One’s Wings” in Gendai buyō [Modern dance]. We can get an idea of what Ohno was
thinking about and worrying about at this time. Ohno says that he was criticized by the poetry
group of a friend for the dance Random Thoughts, which was a depiction of commonplace scenes.
According to Ohno, “the poets felt like I had been irresponsible in the unfinished quality of the
work” (Ohno et al. 1955). Ohno went on to stress that even though the work was unfinished,
he gave it his all.
The Random Thoughts program note read: “This is not like the pitiful protagonist in Bicycle
Thief who stakes his whole life on a bicycle, but just the attempt to put a man on stage and depict
how he walks in his everyday life.” There was also an insert in the program with this prose:
Even if you don’t think urgently about what it means to live, it is impossible to conceive
of oneself apart from the world. A child cried out as if it suddenly touched fire. Did it
see something in a dream? Even if it wasn’t a dream, the baby as a baby is certainly being
forced to live having a connection to human life. Unable to sleep, I tried to depict my
walking based on this thought.
This work, that did not try to express easy-to-understand emotions such as dramatic elevated
feelings, or simple joy, anger, pity, and pleasure, had a tension from focusing on both movement
and Ohno’s inner life.
Although Random Thoughts was not liked by the poets, the reception by the critics was exceed-
ingly favorable.
Random Thoughts was excellent in showing one way of pursuing solo works (as per con-
versation with Ohno). The improvised harmonica music was pleasant, and the atmos-
phere created by playing a bird call whistle as if it was a child crying was as beautiful
as phosphorescence.
Ikemiya 1954
Random Thoughts was an eccentric presentation with, just as the title says, a simplicity
to it as if he was just tossing out thoughts; it was the kind of solid work that exhibits
the characteristics unique to him. . . . I want to express respect for his unique dance
environment and his effort to throw off heretofore ordinary dance techniques.
Eguchi Hiroshi 1953
30
It is likely that rather than trying to use the movements he had learned at Eguchi and Miya’s
studio, Ohno was already trying to create a work using his own peculiar gestures. However, this
was not lyrical description like pantomime, nor abstract movement oriented to clear formali-
zation. It was movement that causes one to strongly feel the urge to approach his inner world
without preconceptions. Also, at the same time, he must have been feeling the limitations of the
dance world that he had studied. During this time, Ohno quit appearing on stage, and entered
the period of exploring the roots of being.
About The Old Man and the Sea

During the time when Ohno had ceased activities (1954–1958), the dance world was changing.
In 1956, the Modern Dance branch of the Japan Art Dance Society separated from the main
society and started the All Japan Art Dance Society (with Ishii as president, and Eguchi Takaya
as chairman of the board), and began to sponsor joint performances with local companies and
also yearly New Face concerts. Meanwhile, young dancers were forming groups and putting
on performances. On the other hand, it was also the era when TV spread, and dance began to
be promoted in the broadcast media. In 1955, Martha Graham came to Japan and introduced
a different method from that of German neue Tanz, and then the later 1957 visit of Katherine
Dunham, also influenced Japanese modern dance. Ohno staged The Old Man and the Sea (April
1959) in just such circumstances.
The Old Man and the Sea takes its subject from Ernest Hemingway’s novel published in 1952,
which was translated into Japanese by Fukuda Tsuneari in 1955. Ohno was deeply impressed
with it and decided to make it into dance.5 He asked Ikemiya Nobuo to write a script. Ikemiya
also acted as the producer and the music was by Yasuda Shugo, while the stage direction was by
Hijikata. At the time of the performance, Ohno attempted to send Hemingway a letter asking for
permission to use the novel (although it is not clear whether it was ever actually sent). According
to the letter, Ohno took considerable pains to express the bobbing of the boat on the open sea,
but in the end three female dancers became the boat’s mast, bow, and stern. From the letter, we
can see that they tried to create a means by which they would capture the interest of the audience
by connecting the movements of the three women representing the rocking of the boat being
toyed by the waves with the moment by moment psychological changes in the old man riding
the boat: “the boat surpasses the usual understanding of it as a nonliving thing, and becomes a
part of the old man” (Ohno 1959).6
In this letter he says, “I have been to great pains researching the relationship between dance
pieces and expressive techniques since 1953. When I read The Old Man and the Sea, I received a lot
of suggestions from it.” Ohno had been impressed by the joy and bewilderment of the man who
had captured his biggest fish ever in the last fishing trip of his life, and the emotional strength of
will of the old man who although he had his hopes cruelly dashed in the next moment still boldly
fought with enemy. He said, “I wanted to grasp this with my own body and spirit by throwing
myself into The Old Man and the Sea, through the medium of dance.” In this way, we see that Ohno
was trying to realizing in his own body that which was born of the deep character of the old man.
What caused me the most trouble was the role of the Old Man. This was because if the
man’s whole world didn’t ooze into each of his steps, the role wouldn’t come alive. As
you can see from this picture, I am a slender man. But I am staking my whole person-
ality as a dancer on this old man. I want to create a stage space so that the audience will
not notice the weak size of my body, which I can’t change now, and I am determined
to do this by understanding the old man, and his world.
31
Kuniyoshi Kazuko
Ohno tried to express with his whole body’s movements the look of spirit and pride of someone
who had endured long years of hardships, and triumphed over nature again and again, and caught
countless fish.
A hint from Alberto Giacometti

The January 1959 issue of Mizue contained a special issue on Giacometti, in which Ohno under-
lined parts of an essay by Yanaihara Isaku entitled “Giacometti Life and Works II.” Yanaihara’s
article says that Giacometti is often spoken of as a surrealist, but he did not seek illusions above
reality, but tried to pursue a vision of reality. Ohno has underlined the following parts:
However, even if the abstract object belongs to the fruits of the imagination and is the
expression of a mental image, it is itself a closed world because there is no path for it to
come out into the world of reality. The works of Giacometti when he was inclined to
surrealism can be seen as a conflict between the thirst to restore the connection with
reality and the enthusiastic bias towards abstract structure.
Yanaihara 1959, 24
Giacometti could not be satisfied with abstract objets and attempted to use his younger brother
as a model for sketching actual human body structure, that is, as an attempt at figural sculp-
ture. And, in order to create a sculpture “which realized just as he saw it that which existed in
reality,” Giacometti excised as much as possible everything unnecessary, and tried to grasp the
unified “tightly knit whole” (26). When he did so, his sculptures became smaller and smaller.
Ohno has underlined this passage by Yanaihara and written in the margin, “small training.”
Giacometti’s terrible pursuit continued and finally he arrived at a work that was close to his
conception, but
Again, he surprised himself because when he wanted to make a large sculpture it

became thinner and thinner. These thin sculptures were the forms of human beings at
the extremity with anything extraneous stripped away.
33
Again, Ohno has underlined and in the margins written “thin.” The period of trial and error
until Giacometti was able to create his sculptures which were as thin as wire was fierce, but
in order to create sculptures that grasped the being of living things, they ended up with this
form. Ohno – who was in the middle of using trial and error in the creation of The Old Man
and the Sea – read this text about Giacometti by Yanaihara over and over, and tried to live it
in rehearsal.
Reverberations from The Old Man and the Sea

Right before the performance, Ohno sent a letter to an acquaintance in which he said that he
was trying to stage The Old Man and the Sea, according the method of “New figuralism/new
representationalism.” This is quite a departure from the style that Ohno had studied under Egu-
chi and Miya because of their sharp abstractions. In order to open up the closed off nature of
abstraction, Giacometti had observed the object thoroughly and adopted an air of sketching from
nature (shasei). Ohno had taken a hint from this for his dance. In order to understand how this
32
was turned into dance, we have to go to the reviews, since there are no filmic recordings and also
very few photographs.
Ohno Kazuo has a kind of unique [mode of] expression not through formal movements
but through what you might call moving within his heart/mind. It follows that there
is no excitement that would make the form of the movement large, but he depicts psy-
chological engravings with rich shading. So, the expression is perfect for the content.
Shiro 1954, 6
He is thoroughly not able to produce the physical strength and vitality of the fisherman.
This is a deteriorated-almost-to-the-point-of-pain fisherman. It is impossible for Ohno
to play the hero of such a story.
Nagata 1959, 8
It is structurally too long, and the music/sound did not form a consistent whole from
beginning to end, and here also, Ohno embraced his own images ever further inside
himself, and did not give enough consideration to the external materialization. How-
ever, it is fun to follow along with his writhing bountiful images that are whirling
around inside him. This is what sustained this piece. There are many dancers who
only dance superficial outward forms and have nothing inside themselves. The exact
opposite is Ohno who is quite awkward and as a rule not stylish, but he is without a
doubt a unique dancer.
Mitsuyoshi 1959, 8
As far as it goes, it is composed in an orderly and systematic manner, but there is some-
thing that makes me feel unconvinced in terms of the dance continuity in the battle
with the fish and the connection to the character’s memories. . . . It appears that there
is a clear mismatch between Ohno’s strong personality and the other dancers, and par-
ticularly in the second and third acts, there are moments that feel quite empty. To put
this another way, this is because the undulations in the radiation of Ohno’s personality
are too excessive.
T.H. 1959, 29
In the review by Mitsuyoshi, we can see the attitude of accepting Ohno’s introverted psycho-
logical expression as the indispensable personality for dancing that specific world. However, in
the T.H. review, the dance/Ohno is criticized for not having sufficiently dramatized the structure
of the dance work. Due to the strength of Ohno’s personality, the work as a whole is destroyed.
While recognizing the “excessive passion” that Ohno put into the dance, the reviews obliquely
suggest that the work as a whole was a failure.
The general tone of the reviews is basically that although there are no exaggerated movements
and the movements of the earnest but introverted Ohno are lacking in expansiveness, Ohno is a
dancer filled to overflowing with an abundance of internal images. I cannot give any concrete
evidence for this, but we can conjecture about how Ohno tried to approach his aims. That was
the polar opposite of the dance methodology that Ohno had learned from teachers Eguchi and
Miya, and rather a unique creative methodology that Ohno tried to grasp.
Now then, returning to the argument, we can see from the letter to Hemingway that Ohno
was worried about and searching for his own technique and works as a dancer. However, Ohno’s
33
Kuniyoshi Kazuko
choreography and structure do not have provocative elements but were rather works that might
be said to be overly serious that expressed Ohno’s internal struggles though symbolic production
and choreography such as in the battle with the big fish and the battle with the sharks. We would
have to say it was certainly an orthodox modern dance based in the text of a story. That is, it was
the situation of one who was responding to the problems of the self, right before his eyes, or one
who had his hands full with dealing with himself and had no spare time for orienting himself
outward, to temporal or social matters such as what was happening in the world of dance. He was
very subjective and even took his own subjective view as absolute, and he was not very interested
in any external affairs. He did not have much inclination to avant-garde and was not worked up
to do something entirely new, but only thinking about dancing his own dance.
In a letter to a friend after The Old Man and the Sea, Ohno wrote,
After it was over, I went to a mutual criticism meeting and was thoroughly criticized,
but I gave it my best, even when I could not do what I wanted, but somehow after it
was all over, I have a feeling of bleakness, and no feeling whatsoever of glamor. Perhaps
there was a way that was appropriate, but because I followed the plot too carefully, and
because I was in a state in which I had no inner reserves, perhaps if I had pursued things
further, I could have drawn something out, but because now I have to start from the
beginning, in that sense, I think that I got out of it what I could and did what I wanted.
However, he also wrote of his depressed spirits after the dance, “It really hit me hard, and because
I spent a lot of time and effort on it, I am tired in mind and body.”
Period of creation of ankoku butoh, 1960–1967: entrance of Divine

One month later, Hijikata staged his Forbidden Colors. In his dance, Hijikata danced with Ohno
Yoshito, Ohno’s second son, who had not trained extensively as a modern dancer and Hijikata
professed to prefer the bodies of amateurs. By contrast, Ohno was making a break from modern
dance when he danced with Hijikata in the 1960s. He had a quarter of a century career as a
dancer, so it would have been impossible for him to go back to an amateur body. But he did have
an extravagant imagination – one could say that it was almost to the point of being delusional –
and he had the power to concentrate on his target with his whole body and soul. In place of the
Old Man, Hijikata gave him the role of the aging prostitute in Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. It
is as if Ohno is rediscovered owing to Hijikata and is able to find his kind of expression on stage.
The opportunity is Divine.
In Hijikata’s 1960 Hijikata Dance Experience Gathering, Ohno found himself asked to appear
on stage in drag playing the role of the aging male prostitute Divine. Ohno portrayed Divine
exposing his old age to the world, and dying in a sea of feces. Hijikata gave Ohno a slight push
and warped Ohno’s approach which had spun fruitlessly in an orientation towards life and ori-
ented him instead towards eroticism and death. Up until that time, Ohno had been investigating
orthodox reliable dance while trying to be a humanist, but through meeting Hijikata, Ohno
grasped the existence of flesh which lives eros. As if discovered by Hijikata, Ohno grasped the
stage as a place for expression.
Ohno’s appearances in Hijikata’s performances lasted until 1966 (Tomato), and then he appeared
in a supporting role in the performances of his own students. Then Ohno gradually cut off rela-
tionships with the people around him and entered a period of isolation and latency until 1976.
It is likely that something occurred between Ohno and Hijikata in the years between 1966 and
Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People in 1968 that necessitated the split between the two. During
34
that time, the story of Ohno’s travels are recorded in the Portrait of Mr. O movies. On the other
hand, Hijikata switched to minutely choreographing Ashikawa Yoko and produced a series of
works called Tohoku Kabuki, which resulted in the formation of butoh.
In conclusion
1959 was an interesting year in the history of western dance in Japan. It was the year in which
the collision between the pre-war modern dance and the postwar avant-garde came to the sur-
face. The 1959 dance The Old Man and the Sea was Ohno’s last work as a modern dancer. He had
become independent from Eguchi and Miya, while continuing to search for the interrelation-
ships between the techniques he learned in modern dance and his own life, and The Old Man and
the Sea was the summation of this research. Although he gave it his all, the result was a failure. The
cause was the exposure of the gap between the skills of modern dance and the world that Ohno
expressed in his body. To the extent that he was faithful to the original work, his body would
run a path away from modern dance. The Old Man and the Sea was not an avant-garde work
but had the structure of an orthodox emulation of modern dance, but Ohno’s body had already
transformed into a different kind of being. Hijikata recognized Ohno’s expressive potential before
anyone else, so it is only natural that he employed him in his early dances in the 1960s and the
following year, Ohno was reborn as the aged Divine.
Notes
1 This chapter was adapted and condensed by the editors from Kuniyoshi Kazuko, “Ankoku butō tōjō
zenya” in Okamoto Akira ed. Ōno Kazuo butō to seimei (Shichōsha 2012), 43–94. That article was in turn
an expansion of a previous article, Kuniyoshi Kazuko, “Ankoku butō tōjō zenya: Ōno Kazuo sakuhin
‘Rōjin to umi’ kara mita senkyūhyaku gojūkyūnen” Buyōgaku (Choreologia) 31 (2008): 22–33.
2 Eguchi and Miya went to Europe in December 1931 and returned to Japan in December 1933.
3 In some cases, the Ohno’s clipped reviews from newspapers and pasted them inside or on the back of
programs, which are available in the Ohno Kazuo Dance Studio Archives. Every effort has been made to
find the original articles, but in some cases, owing to the ephemerality of these sources, page numbers are
not available.
4 The recipient of this letter is unclear, but within the letter, Ohno addresses a woman in honorific language,
and also writes “among last year’s works . . . there was a solo called ‘Spring Offering,’” so we can conclude
that this was written in 1951.
5 The 1958 John Sturges’s movie The Old Man and the Sea (with Spencer Tracy) caused quite a stir. Ohno
pasted pictures of the movie on the walls of his room and used them as aids in making the images.
6 In a memo to himself, Ohno wrote that the boat should suggest a cradle and one should feel the sea as if
the old man were being entrusted to the hands of beloved.
Works cited
Eguchi Hiroshi. 1949. “Ishoku no shinjin: Ōno Kazuo buyō hyō.” Tokyo shinbun, Dec. 3.
———. 1950. “Buyōhyō: Ōno Kazuo to Kataoka Mari.” Tokyo shinbun, Oct. 26.
———. 1953. “Ōno Kazuo no tokuisei.” Tokyo shinbun, Nov. 26.
———, compiled. 1954. “Ōno Kazuo kōen ni yoserareta hihyō.” Gendai buyō 2, no. 2 (Feb.), 17.
Eguchi Takaya. 1961. Buyō sōsakuhō. Kawai gakufu.
———. 1969. “Zoku Buyō sōsakuho 85.” Gendai buyō 17, no. 11 (Nov./Dec.), 2.
Ikemiya Nobuo. 1954. “Yorozu choho.” Gendai buyō 2, no. 2 (Feb.), 17.
Kuniyoshi Kazuko. 2008. “Ankoku butō tōjō zenya: Ōno Kazuo sakuhin Rōjin to umi kara mita sen-
kyūhyakugojūkyūnen.” Buyōgaku (Choreologia) 31, 22–33.
———. 2012. “Ankoku butō tōjō zenya.” In Ōno Kazuo butō to seimei edited by Okamoto Akira, 43–94 .
Shichōsha.
35
Kuniyoshi Kazuko
Mitsuyoshi Natsuya. 1959. “Uchi ni kagayaku shijin no seishin.” Mainichi Shimbun, Apr. 28, p. 8.
Mizohata Toshio, ed. 2005. Ōno Kazuo to Hijikata Tatsumi no rokujūnendai. Yokohama: BankART, 1929.
Nagata Tatsuo. 1949. “Saikin no buyōkai.” Shinyūkan, Dec. 9.
———. 1959. “Ōno Kazuo no rōsaku Rōjin to umi o miru.” Ongaku shimbun, May 10, p. 8.
Ohno Kazuo. 1959. Letter to Ernest Hemingway.
———. 1995. “Eguchi Takaya o kataru.” Buyōgaku (Choreologia) 17, 40.
Ohno Kazuo, Ippei Fukuda, Mieko Fuji, and Mitsuko Andō. 1955. “Habatakumono.” Gendai buyō, May
12–17.
Shiro (Pen name). 1954. “Buyōka sareta Rōjin to umi: atarashii Ōno Kazuo no modan dansu.” San shashin
shinbun, Apr. 30.
T.H. (Pen name). 1959. “Ōno Kazuo modan dansu kōen: daisaku ni shinkō kara torikumu jōnetsu to
dōryoku no ketsujitsu.” Gendai Buyo 7, no. 5 (May), 27–29.
Tsuboi Keiko, ed. 2002. Ōno Kazuo ishigara no hanamagari. Sapporo: Kanrinsha.
Wigman, Mary. 1973 (1925). The Mary Wigman Book. Ed. and trans. by Walter Sorell. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press.
Yanaihara Isaku. 1959. “Giacometti Life and Works II.” Mizue no. 664 (Jan.): 23–36.
36
2
FROM VODOU TO BUTOH
Hijikata Tatsumi, Katherine Dunham, and the
trans-Pacific remaking of blackness
Arimitsu Michio
I remember Hijikata’s body – a northern body, the skin very white, the hair standing out very black
against it.
Donald Richie, “On Tatsumi Hijikata” (1987)
The “blackness” of early butoh

Originated in post-WWII Japan, butoh – also known as ankoku butoh (dance of darkness)1 – has
become a truly global phenomenon in the past six decades. Within much of the existing litera-
ture on its birth and early development, however, there remains a rarely challenged premise that
posits a dichotomy or dialectic between the “white” West and Japan. In particular, when recent
critics argue that Hijikata Tatsumi (1928–1986), one of its co-founders, creatively adapted and
remade the styles and themes of European and American literary, artistic, and choreographic tra-
ditions to suit the cultural exigencies of post-WWII Japan, many of them overlook the impact
of Afro-diasporic cultures on his aesthetics and choreography. Making an intervention into
this critical assumption – and the general understanding – of early butoh, this chapter seeks to
demonstrate that Afro-diasporic cultures indeed played a significant role in its early history. The
full recognition of early butoh’s at times problematic but surprisingly intimate relationship to a
racialized form of “blackness” should compel us to revise its heritage as having been fundamen-
tally transcultural and indeed “global” from the very beginning.
How butoh became “white”: excavation of early Hijikata’s “blackness”

The direct influence of Afro-diasporic cultures on the birth of butoh has been largely ignored or
forgotten partly due to the “whiteface” that Hijikata began in the early 1960s (literally painting
his and his dancers’ faces and bodies in white). The adoption of the whiteface performance, as I
shall demonstrate, roughly coincided with a more metaphorical, retrospective “whitewashing” of
its earlier form and background.2
As a matter of fact, the white makeup, which is generally considered today as butoh’s hallmark,
was conspicuously absent in Hijikata’s early performances from 1957 to 1961. Motofuji Akiko,
his second wife and life-long manager, distinctly remembers that “Hijikata’s naked body” in
37
Arimitsu Michio
Figure 2.1 Forbidden Colors studio performance (1959), photograph by Ōtsuji Kiyoji. Courtesy of the
Hijikata Tatsumi Archive, Keio University Art Center.
Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors), the epoch-making piece in 1959 recognized (by Hijikata and others)
as inaugurating butoh, was “painted with black greasepaint spread thin with olive oil” (Motofuji
1990, 56). In photographs taken during the studio rehearsal and actual performance of Kinjiki,
Hijikata’s darkly painted face and torso indeed draw a sharp contrast with the pale skin of Ohno
Yoshito (see Figures 2.1–2.3).3 Moreover, Hijikata and Ohno danced in this piece to the “faintly
bluesy tune of a harmonica (composed by Yasuda Shugo),” which added a sonic dimension to
the “blackness” of the performance.4
What should one make of the very first performance of butoh, which featured such visual
and sonic signs of “blackness”? As for the black makeup, Wakamatsu Miki, an avant-garde cho-
reographer/dancer who regularly performed with Hijikata at the time, has directly pointed to
an Afro-diasporic influence by testifying that Hijikata began “blacking up” after watching the
African American choreographer/dancer/anthropologist Katherine Dunham (1909–2006) and
her company perform their Afro-Caribbean show in Tokyo in 1957 (Wakamatsu quoted in Inata
2008, 61). As Inata Naomi has suggested, the two choreographers most likely crossed paths in
Tokyo when Dunham used Andō Mitsuko’s dance studio for her rehearsals while Hijikata was
still Ando’s student. Despite the subsequent critical negligence or oversight in properly register-
ing the significance of this encounter and of the impact of racialized “blackness” on early butoh,
Wakamatsu recalls that Hijikata was “strongly influenced by Dunham’s shows that explored the
ways in which vodou rituals represented female sexuality” (p. 61).
The dance critic Gōda Nario also states that the black-facing butoh continued until the early
1960s:
The black butoh with greasepaint, which had shocked the dance world from 1959 till
then (when Anma [the Masseur] was performed in November of 1963), was gradually
replaced with white butoh, which has since become the standard. It was then that the
38
From vodou to butoh
Figure 2.2 Forbidden Colors studio performance (1959), photograph by Ōtsuji Kiyoji. Courtesy of the
Hijikata Tatsumi Archive, Keio University Art Center.
male butoh, characterized by the grotesque beauty of the black shining body . . . shifted
into a white, powdery, feminine dance. This opened butoh’s way into the fantastic realm
of androgyny.
Yoshioka 1987, 108–109
To be sure, multiple sources confirm that Gōda is not being quite accurate here. Hijikata had
already covered his dancers with searing white plaster in 1961, during the performance of
39
Arimitsu Michio
Figure 2.3 Forbidden Colors (expanded version), “6 Avantgardists: September 5th 6:00 Gathering”
(September 5, 1959). Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive, Keio University
Art Center.
Mid-afternoon Secret Ceremony of a Hermaphrodite: Three Chapters; this was an idea of the neo-dada
artist,Yoshimura Masunobu, who was asked by Hijikata to do the costume design for the produc-
tion. Hijikata went on to use the plaster of Paris, which had a side-effect of making the dancers
contort in pain, a few more times – in Anma of 1963 and Rose-colored Dance: A LA MAISON
DE M. CIVEÇAWA of 1965 – before moving on to white paint (Barber, n.p.; Baird, 62, 121;
Inata, 109).5
In any case, Gōda’s memory should serve as a corrective to many of the Eurocentric accounts
provided by Hijikata specialists, who have long sought to explain the ankoku (utter darkness) of
butoh only in its relation to such figures as Jean Genet, Georges Bataille, Comte de Lautréamont,
Marquis de Sade, and Antonin Artaud.6 Reflecting and refracting the “darkness” of these Euro-
pean writers’ erotic, subversive, or surrealistic writings, Hijikata’s early aesthetics certainly flaunted
intense corporeality, sexual transgression, criminality, as well as the grotesque and the abject.
Nevertheless, Gōda’s remark, together with Wakamatsu’s testimony, complicates this meaning of
Hijikata’s “darkness.” For it compels us to address his early obsession not just with “darkness” but
also with “blackness,” the idea that should be recognized in its properly racialized context.7 Fur-
thermore, early Hijikata’s multivalent but specific fascination with racialized “blackness” invites
us to speculate whether Dunham’s visit to Japan might have had an even more far-reaching sig-
nificance on butoh. If it was indeed Hijikata’s encounter with the African-American dancer that
led him to start his career literally as a “black” performer, his interest in Dunham’s exploration
of black female sexuality may also be said to have prefigured butoh’s subsequent shift from the
masculine to the feminine.8 If these claims are true, Dunham can – and indeed should – be seen
as a transcultural godmother of butoh in more ways than one.
40
From vodou to butoh
Even more interesting – and certainly less problematic than the controversial practice of appro-
priative racial masquerade9 – is an echo of Dunham’s vodou-inspired performance in Hijikata’s early
works. At the climax of Kinjiki (1959), Ohno Yoshito notoriously placed a white chicken between his
thighs and seemingly smothered it. Many in the audience, thinking that the bird had just been killed
right in front of their eyes, were shocked at the sudden act of violence. This sensational performance,
in addition to the explicit display of homoeroticism between the two male dancers, was what earned
Hijikata his reputation as an enfant terrible of the modern dance scene in Japan.10
Upon watching Kinjiki, Mishima Yukio published Gendai no muma: “Kinjiki” o odoru zenei
butōdan (Contemporary Nightmare: An Avant-Garde Group Performs Forbidden Colors) in
Geijyutsu shinchō (September 1959). In this review, Mishima effusively praised Hijikata’s per-
formance, which borrowed the title, if not the substance, of his own novel. In this otherwise
highly abstract compliment on Hijikata’s avant-garde dance, Mishima astutely recognized
early butoh’s affinity with vodou: “The sacrificial black chicken used in the West Indian
vodou ritual has been transformed into the white chicken embraced by the white-skinned
boy [Ohno Yoshito]” (Mishima 1959, 131). Mishima went on to describe Hijikata and Ōno as
“the vodou priest and the priestess lying on top of each other on the floor” (p. 131). As Inata
has noted, Mishima strongly emphasized the “smell” of the “primitive” in Hijikata’s perfor-
mance, which the ritualistic killing of the chicken on stage clearly reinforced (Inata 2008, 67).
Such comparison of Kinjiki to vodou turns out to be more than an outlandish conceit that
came out of nowhere. In fact, it was directly informed by Mishima’s first-hand observation of
both performances, as he had just taken a tour around the world from July 1957 to January
1958, with a short stop in Haiti, where he saw vodou in person (Mishima 1975, 76).
It was roughly around the same time when Mishima encountered vodou in the Caribbean
that Hijikata, who was never to go abroad in his life, must have seen Dunham’s show in Tokyo.
On the program of Dunham’s production were a series of short pieces inspired by the rich cul-
tural heritage of the African diaspora: Afrique, Bel Congo, and Rites des Passage (translated as Ningen
no isshō), along with Shango (premiered in 1945), a dance that prominently featured the sacrificial
killing of a chicken. Halifu Osumare’s verbal reconstruction of the performance demonstrates
how strategically Dunham calibrated her show for a Western audience:
The High Priest ceremonially carries a prop that looks like a white chicken in a basket
across downstage center. This processional path is accompanied by presumably a “tra-
ditional” Afro-Caribbean song with strong accents, the last of which brings the knife
of the Priest’s attendant symbolically down to kill the chicken. The role of High Priest
(like the ougan who officiated the Haitian ceremonies she witnessed and participated
in) was played by the Cuban drummer, Joe Sirca, who had participated in santeria cere-
monies in his homeland of Cuba. Thus Dunham starts the ballet with the sacred nexus
of life and death that animal sacrifice in African-based religions represents, giving the
Western audience an immediate sense of African religion that was prevalent in Haiti
and other Caribbean islands during her fieldwork.11
One cannot help but wonder how Dunham’s fusion of Western and Afro-Caribbean cultural tra-
ditions appealed to the Japanese in the aftermath of WWII. For the audience who had been only
familiar with ballet or modern dance (not to mention traditional Japanese choreographies), Dun-
ham’s vodou-inspired Afro-diasporic performance must have seemed nothing short of a revelation.
A review article published in Asahi Newspaper’s evening edition on September 29, 1957, gives
us a glimpse of the amazement of the audience at the time. The anonymous reviewer admired the
“robust, sensual, energetic, and thrilling dance with its ingenious use of the distinct movements
41
Figure 2.4 “The Elegance of the Authentic: Sensual and Powerful.” The Asahi Shimbun (evening ed.), September 29, 1957. Courtesy of The Asahi Shimbun and
Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt.
From vodou to butoh
Figure 2.5 “Katherine Dunham and Her Company of Dancers, Singers, Musicians.” The Yomiuri Shimbun
(evening ed.), September 9, 1957. Courtesy of The Yomiuri Shimbun/Yomidas Rekishikan and Marie-
Christine Dunham Pratt.
of the shoulder and the hip, which are peculiar to the Negro dance.” The reviewer also described
Shango as “an intense folk dance which strongly smelled of tribalism.” “With a huge jungle tree
constituting the background,” the article continued, “the most primitive, ritualistic, and incred-
ibly dynamic dance unfolded mystically to the rhythm of the drums and to the shouts of the
dancers” (see Figures 2.4–2.6). In the midst of twelve stage performances, which ran twice a day
from the end of September to early October, Dunham and her company also danced live for half
an hour on nationally broadcast primetime TV.12
To be sure, Hijikata himself never explicitly admitted his debts to Dunham, but the testimonies
provided by Wakamatsu and Motofuji make it difficult to dismiss the obvious influence. It may
be true that Hijikata’s obsession with chickens goes back to his childhood,13 and that he even
attempted (and failed) to stage a show in August of 1957 in which a chicken was to be choked;
even earlier than that, he may or may not have toyed with the idea of “releasing 50 birds and
stepping on them to death” (Andō Mitsuko quoted in Inata 2008, 49–50). As Mishima’s influ-
ential review made it obvious, however, the close affinity between Hijikata’s subversive spectacle
and Dunham’s vodou-inspired dance was undeniable at the time.
It was perhaps Haniya Yutaka who first began making a conscious attempt to cover up Hiji-
kata’s (unacknowledged) debts to the African diaspora. In his oft-cited essay Sei to do no rizumu
43
Figure 2.6 “Ms. Dunham, A Dancer of a Different Color: A Black Dance Company to Visit Japan.” The Mainichi Shimbun (evening ed.), September 10, 1957.
Courtesy of The Mainichi Shimbun and Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt.
From vodou to butoh
(On the rhythm of motion and stillness 1962), Haniya emphasized that Hijikata’s dance was
“neither like white nor black,” that is, neither like the Western ballet nor the Afro-Caribbean
ritual.14 In his effort to foreground the uniqueness of Hijikata’s early choreography, Haniya spe-
cifically compared and contrasted Hijikata to Dunham, ironically confirming – by denying – the
already established (if soon-to-be-forgotten) trans-Pacific, Afro-Asian connection between butoh
and vodou.
Proliferation of “blackness” in post-WWII Japan’s avant-garde circle

In Hijikata’s avant-gardist circle in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, “blackness” served
simultaneously as a fantastic, racialized symbol of the hip and the cool and, in particular, as
a powerful source of what Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic has called a “counter-culture of
[Eurocentric] modernity” (Gilroy 1993, 1).15 Let us once again recall Kinjiki with its blackface
performance. The piece was presented at the “All Japan Art Dance Association: Sixth New-
comers Dance Recital” in 1959. Just a few hours before, Hijikata had also performed in Nagata
Noriko’s Poinciana: Beginning of the Summer that Will Freeze and Wane in the Non-Melodic Metropolis,
a piece that was set to the Afro-Cuban rhythm of bongos (Baird 2012, 16–17; Kuniyoshi 2002,
180). Just like the bluesy tune in Kinjiki, Nagata’s choice of music in Poinciana was iconoclastic.
As Motofuji reminds us, before Kinjiki and Poinciana, most modern dancers in Japan would not
have dared to use anything other than the Western classical music composed by the likes of Liszt
and Chopin (Motofuji 1990, 56). The insertion of “blackness” therefore bolstered Hijikata and
Nagata’s struggle against the unabashedly Eurocentric modern-dance establishment in Japan.
That their rebellion was more or less successful was ironically confirmed when Hijikata and those
who sympathized with him left the association.
Similarly, in 1960, when Hosoe Eikō, a close collaborator of Hijikata, worked on a book of
photography to be published under the title of Otoko to onna (Man and Woman, 1961), Hosoe
doused Hijikata and others, during a shooting, “with black greasepaint spread thin with olive oil
so they would look like black people” (Motofuji 1990, 61), while the jazz drum of Art Blakey
blasted in the background.
In July of the same year, Hijikata also danced in Niguro to Kawa (The Negro and the River),
written and co-directed by Ikemiya Nobuo, produced, choreographed and co-directed by
Fujii Kunio, with an English subtitle: “Modern Dance on Negro Document ’61” (see Fig-
ure 2.7).16 According to Inata’s reconstruction of the performance, Niguro to Kawa consisted
of three acts, and dealt with “a deeply social theme, as it responded to the on-going struggles
of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States” (Inata 2008, 106). Ikemiya and Fujii’s
work was actually inspired by Langston Hughes’s brilliant epic poem, “The Negro Speaks of
Rivers,” which had recently been featured in a 1958 Japanese translation of Hughes’s anthol-
ogy, Weary Blues (1926) (see Figure 2.8). According to Motofuji, who also danced in this
piece, Fujii used Dixieland Jazz, which was also very popular in Japan at the time. Applying
a choreography that reminded Motofuji of “a slow-motion film-like version of modern
dance technique” (Motofuji 1990, 107), Hijikata appeared in an African-American funeral
scene, where he danced at the front of the marching procession, with a white parasol in hand
and presumably with black makeup on. Motofuji also performed as an African-American
washerwoman – most likely in an homage to Dunham’s Bel Congo, which included a comic
dance about Haitian washerwomen.
In the same month, Hijikata also organized “Hijikata Tatsumi Dance Experience Associa-
tion,” and again appeared on stage with black makeup. Motofuji recalls Hijikata’s bare, oily skin as
reminiscent of a “black person’s body” (90). Fascination with “blackness” is also confirmed when
45
Arimitsu Michio
Figure 2.7 A program for Niguro to Kawa (1961).
Motofuji created a new dancing team, “Dancing Gorgui,” named after a black character in Jean
Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. On March 3, 1959, Hijikata also took part in a group dance enti-
tled “Strange Fruit” (music by Yura Kazuo, art by Kanamori Kaoru), which was clearly inspired
by Billie Holiday’s famous tune about lynching (Inata 2008, 57). To cite one more example, when
Hijikata and Motofuji produced Three Phases of Leda in 1962, the tungsten bulbs to be used for
46
From vodou to butoh
Figure 2.8 Cover illustration of Niguro to Kawa (Tokyo: Kokubunsha, 1958) [a translation of Langston
Hughes’s Weary Blues (1926) by Saitō Tadatoshi].
lighting were comically personified and referred to in the program as “Tungsten M. Hughes.”
As Baird has already pointed out, this was obviously a playful allusion to Langston Hughes.17
With so much evidence to show how implicitly and explicitly Hijikata associated himself –
or was associated by others – with “blackness,” it is perhaps no wonder that after watching
Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: The Revolt of the Body (1968), an audience recalled Hijikata’s
47
Arimitsu Michio
appearance, with a long curly hair, as “an afro no yō na (Afro-like or Black-like) Christ” (Harada
2004, 32). Even though Hijikata had long stopped wearing black makeup, this legendary perfor-
mance prominently featured a sacrificial killing of a chicken, again bearing witness to Hijikata’s
enduring debts to Dunham and to vodou.
Towards a more transcultural analysis of butoh

Most accounts of butoh suggest that Hijikata’s white butoh, especially after Hijikata Tatsumi and
the Japanese People (1968), embodied a performative rejection of the West and modernization,
or more specifically, the decolonization of the Japanese in the face of rapid Americanization. In
the 1970s, Hijikata is said to have symbolically returned to the mythic “Tohoku” (northeastern
region of the country where he was born) – and by extension to a pre-modern Japan. These
accounts typically essentialize “Tohoku” and “Japan” in butoh, as Inata and Miryam Sas, among
others, have critically pointed out (Inata 2008; Sas 1999, 2011). In addition to contesting such
essentialization in Hijikata’s late career, this chapter has shown the need to critique the “white-
washing” of his early performance as well. It is about time we recognized the undeniable “black”
influence of Afro-diasporic cultures on early Hijikata and his dance of darkness. For it is only
when we acknowledge this forgotten presence of “blackness” in butoh and reconsider its devel-
opment from a fundamentally transcultural perspective that we will truly be able to appreciate
its significance, which has become more global than ever.18
Notes
1 The Japanese word, ankoku, consists of two Chinese characters, 暗 [darkness] and 黒 [black], literally
meaning “utter darkness.” For the anecdotal account of this nomenclature, see Motofuji Akiko, Hijikata
Tatsumi to tomoni [With Hijikata Tatsumi] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1990), 140, and Inata Naomi, Hiji-
kata Tatsumi: zetsugo no shintai [Hijikata Tatsumi: The Body after Death] (Tokyo: Nihon Hosō Shuppan
Kyōkai, 2008), 504.
2 Hijikata’s cultural indebtedness to the African diaspora remains generally invisible even though some
scholars have recently touched on the subject. This is because their treatment of Hijikata’s relationship
with “blackness” has been either too vague, too brief, or both. See, for instance, Stephen Barber, Hijikata:
Revolt of the Body (Washington, DC: Solar Books, 2005) and Bruce Baird, Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh:
Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 17, 161. An important exception
in Hijikata scholarship that resists the general oblivion of the black influence on early butoh is Inata’s
Hijikata Tatsumi (2008). Her comprehensive research recognizes certain Afro-diasporic influence on
Hijikata (61). In my view, however, Inata does not emphasize the significance of her own findings
enough. This article therefore seeks to build on and expand her important work and to radically revise
the meaning of the “darkness/ blackness” in Hijikata’s early aesthetics and performance.
3 For more details on the costume, see Baird, 17–18.
4 For an in-depth analysis of this piece, see Inata, 56–82; Baird, 15–58.
5 In the mid-1960s, Hijikata and Motofuji also began to cover their skin with gold powder during their
more commercial and entertainment-oriented shows at nightclubs and jazz clubs. Inspired by 1964
James Bond movie Goldfinger, these performances were dubbed as the kinpun shō [gold dust shows].
Hijikata used this venture to make a living and also to finance his butoh projects. (For more on this
subject, see Baird 83–84).
6 For these writers’ significance to Hijikata, see Inata, 103, 114. For his relationship with Japanese surreal-
ism in general and with Takiguchi Shuzō in particular, see Miryam Sas, Fault Line: Cultural Memory and
Japanese Surrealism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) and “Hands, Lines, Acts: Butoh and Surre-
alism,” Qui Parle, 13, no. 2 (2003) – a slightly revised version of the latter is in Miryam Sas, Experimental
Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Asia Center, 2011). Although this goes way beyond the scope of this chapter, it should be noted that sur-
realism in France had once been explicitly anti-racist, anti-capitalist, in addition to being critical of the
supposedly universal claims of Enlightenment rationalism. For more on the often forgotten connection
48
From vodou to butoh
between surrealism and anti-colonialism, see Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical
Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). Kelley’s book compellingly shows how “black revolt shaped
the development of surrealism as a self-conscious political movement,” while underscoring “the impact
surrealism has had on modern political and cultural movements throughout the African diaspora”
(159). Although butoh scholars have rarely mentioned these aspects of surrealism (including the work of
Comte de Lautréamont, whom Kelley calls one of “its spiritual fathers”), it makes sense that Hijikata was
drawn to surrealist aesthetics (at least partly) because it had been closely aligned with anti-colonial and
anti-racist struggles. Even if French surrealism’s explicit political stance had been forgotten or suppressed
in Japan, its implicit counter-cultural critique of Western modernity must have resonated with Hijikata.
In this sense, Kelley’s multiracial and post-colonial account of surrealism supplies the missing link – its
close tie to the black diaspora, anti-colonial, and anti-racist politics – in Sas’s argument that “Hijikata’s
turn to toward the abject, the earth, the primal place of origins is linked to the literary works he drew
on, and the writings of his surrealist mentors” (Sas 2003, 28). Apart from his encounter with Katherine
Dunham, Hijikata’s fascination with blackness was at times mediated by the work of the white French
writer Jean Genet, who wrote two anti-racist, anti-colonial plays set in Africa: The Blacks (1958) and
The Screens (1966). Genet not only became a staunch supporter of the Black Panthers in the 1970s, but
also claimed that he could identify himself “only in the oppressed of the colored races, the oppressed
who revolted against the whites,” and that “I am a black whose skin happens to be white, but I am
definitely a black” (qtd. in Hubert Fichte, “Jean Genet talks to Hubert Fichte,” trans. Patrick McCarthy,
The New Review 4, no. 37 (1977), 12). For an informative account of Genet’s relationship with the Black
Panthers, see Robert Sandarg, “Jean Genet and the Black Panther Party,” Journal of Black Studies, 16, no.
3 (Mar. 1986), 269–282. I thank Bruce Baird for first pointing out this aspect of the French writer when
thinking about him in relation to Hijikata’s investment in racialized blackness.
7 In the general usage, the word ankoku (literally, “darkness” and “blackness”) refers to “utter darkness”
and does not have a racial implication in the Japanese language. However, I argue that Hijikata came to
racialize and foreground the latter part, koku [“blackness”], as he developed his early aesthetics substan-
tially modeled on the cultures and images associated with the people of African descent.
8 From 1972 onwards, Hijikata began to give female dancers, particularly Ashikawa Yoko, increasingly
prominent roles in his productions. As Uchino Tadashi has suggested in a personal correspondence with
the author (24 September 2015), this shift in gender might be better understood more as a change from
the masculine to the emasculated, as Hijikata was apparently rocked by the suicide of his friend/mentor
Mishima in 1970, as well as by the miserable, violent, and anticlimactic endings that awaited radical
groups such as the Red Army Faction and the United Red Army. The failures of these revolutionaries
put off many of those who had once identified with radicalism – both political as well as cultural – in
Japan by the early 1970s.
9 For the subtle and yet provocative readings of blackface in the United States, see Eric Lott, Love and
Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and
Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1996). On problematic instances of literal and metaphorical blackfacing in Japan,
see a series of insightful articles by John G. Russell. Among others, see “Consuming Passions: Spec-
tacle, Self-Transformation, and the Commodification of Blackness in Japan,” positions 6, no. 1 (1998),
113–177; “Race and Reflexivity: The Black Other in Contemporary Japanese Mass Culture,” Cultural
Anthropology 6, no.1 (1991), 3–25. Nina Cornyetz’s, “Fetishized Blackness: Hip Hop and Racial Desire
in Contemporary Japan,” Social Text 41 (1994), 113–139, and Ian Condry’s, “Yellow B-Boys, Black
Culture, and Hip-Hop in Japan: Toward a Transnational Cultural Politics of Race,” Positions 15, no. 3
(2007), 637–671, also provide useful information and perspectives on this topic.
10 For more on the response to Kinjiki, see Inata, 56–82; Baird, 15–58.
11 Halifu Osumare, “Dancing the Black Atlantic: Katherine Dunham’s Research-to-Performance Method,”
AmeriQuest 7, no. 1 (2010), 9.
12 The short description of the program is included in “Kyoku Dayori [A Correspondence from the Sta-
tion].” Yomiuri Newspaper (morning ed.). September 21, 1957.
13 In another sense, the figure of the chicken was there from the very beginning of Hijikata’s dance career.
In Imai Shigeyuki’s production entitled Haniwa no mai (The Dance of the Burial Mound Figurine
1958), Hijikata was invited as a guest to choreograph and perform a solo dance in a brief section called
“Motion.” This performance officially marked the beginning of his career as “Hijikata Tatsumi” – before
then, he had appeared under his real name,Yoneyama Kunio. On this occasion, Hijikata allegedly choked
a chicken to death for the first time on stage (Baird, 28; Inata also mentions the use of a chicken in the
49
Arimitsu Michio
performance, but does not confirm whether the animal was smothered or not. Inata, 53–54). On this
subject, also see Harada Hiromi, Butoh taizen: ankoku to hikari no ōkoku (Compendium of Butoh) (Tokyo:
Gendai Shokan, 2004), 46–48.
14 Yutaka Haniya, “Seito do no rizumu [On the Rhythm of Motion and Stillness].” In Complete Works of
Haniya Yutaka, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1998), 111–117. The essay was later revised and reprinted as
“Tainai meiso ni tsuite [On the Meditation in the Womb].” In Complete Works of Haniya Yutaka, vol. 9
(Tokyo: Kodansha, 1999), 597–601.
15 As has been noted, celebration of “blackness” in post-WWII Japan also fetishized the people of African
descent. In this context, it would be remiss of me not to mention Norman Mailer’s 1957 “White Negro:
A Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” The Jewish American writer’s skewed celebration of “black-
ness” as a means of counteracting the middle-class ennui that he saw as pervading the United States in
the post-WWII era, was exported and translated into Japanese as part of the author’s later collection,
Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (New York: Putnam, 1959), as early as in 1962.
16 On April 9, Hijikata also staged Arugeria ni ikitai (I want to go to Algeria), in which the dancers, includ-
ing Ohno Kazuo, apparently also wore makeup to look like black people. The documentary record of
this performance is scarce, and I would like to thank Bruce Baird for bringing it up to my attention.
17 For more on this performance, see Baird, 63.
18 The original, longer version of this chapter, “From Voodoo to Butoh: Katherine Dunham, Hijikata
Tatsumi, and Trajal Harrell’s Transcultural Refashioning of ‘Blackness,’” was commissioned on the occa-
sion of Trajal Harrell: In One Step are a Thousand Animals at the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
2014–2016. The research was made possible by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in
Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation. I wish to thank Trajal, Ana Janevski, and
Martha Joseph for giving me the chance to explore this subject. I also want to express my gratitude
to Morishita Takashi, Uchino Tadashi, Hisano Atsuko, Nakamura Akane, Kim Seonghee, Max-Philip
Aschenbrenner, and Bruce Baird for generously encouraging and guiding me during this new venture
into performance studies.
Works cited
Baird, Bruce. 2012. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Barber, Stephen. 2005. Hijikata: Revolt of the Body. Washington, DC: Solar Books.
Condry, Ian. 2007. “Yellow B-Boys, Black Culture, and Hip-Hop in Japan: Toward a Transnational Cultural
Politics of Race.” Positions 15, no. 3.
Cornyetz, Nina. 1994. “Fetishized Blackness: Hip Hop and Racial Desire in Contemporary Japan.” Social
Text 41.
Fichte, Hubert. 1977. “Jean Genet Talks to Hubert Fichte.” Translated by Patrick McCarthy. The New Review
4, no. 37.
Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Haniya, Yutaka. 1962. Seito do no rizumu (On the Rhythm of Motion and Stillness). In Complete Works of
Haniya Yutaka. vol. 5. 1998. Tokyo: Kodansha.
Harada, Hiromi. 2004. Butoh taizen: ankoku to hikari no ōkoku (Compendium of Butoh). Tokyo: Gendai
Shokan.
Hughes, Langston. 1958. Niguro to kawa (The Negro and the River/The Negro Speaks of Rivers). Translated
by Tadatoshi Saitō. Tokyo: Kokubunsha.
Inata, Naomi. 2008. Hijikata Tatsumi: zetsugo no shintai (Hijikata Tatsumi: The Body after Death). Tokyo:
Nihon Hosō Shuppan Kyōkai.
Kelley, Robin D. G. 2002. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press.
Kuniyoshi, Kazuko. 2002. Yume no ishō, kioku no tsubo: butoh to modanizumu (A Dress of Dreams, a Pot of
Memories: Butoh and Modernism). Tokyo: Shinshokan.
Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Mailer, Norman. 1959. Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam.
———. 1962. Boku jishin no tame no kōkoku (Advertisements for Myself ). Translated by Eiichi Yamanishi.
Tokyo: Shinchōsha.
Mishima, Yukio. 1975. Bi ni sakarau mono (That Which Defies Beauty). In Complete Works of Mishima Yukio.
vol. 30. Tokyo: Shinchōsha.
50
From vodou to butoh
———. 1959. “Gendai no muma: ‘Kinjiki’ o odoru zenei butōdan” (Contemporary Nightmare: An Avant-
Garde Group Performs Forbidden Colors). Geijyutsu shinchō 9.
Motofuji, Akiko. 1990. Hijikata Tatsumi to tomoni (With Hijikata Tatsumi). Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō.
Osumare, Halifu. 2010. “Dancing the Black Atlantic: Katherine Dunham’s Research-to-Performance
Method.” AmeriQuest 7, no. 1.
Richie, Donald. 1987. “On Tatsumi Hijikata.” Japan Times (Tokyo). March 7.
Rogin, Michael. 1996. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
Russell, John G. 1991. “Race and Reflexivity: The Black Other in Contemporary Japanese Mass Culture.”
Cultural Anthropology 6, no. 1.
———. 1998. “Consuming Passions: Spectacle, Self-Transformation, and the Commodification of Black-
ness in Japan.” Positions 6, no. 1.
Sandarg, Robert. 1986. “Jean Genet and the Black Panther Party.” Journal of Black Studies 16, no. 3.
Sas, Miryam. 1999. Fault Line: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 2003. “Hands, Lines, Acts: Butoh and Surrealism.” Qui Parle 13, no. 2.
———. 2011. Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Asia Center.
Yoshioka, Minoru. 1987. Hijikata Tatsumi sho: nikkito inyo ni yoru (Admiring Hijikata Tatsumi: Based on the
Diary and Quotations). Tokyo: Chikumashobō.
51
3
CONTEMPORARY NIGHTMARE
An avant-garde dance group dances
Forbidden Colors
I heard from someone that Hijikata Tatsumi of the Tsuda Nobutoshi Dance Studio presented
a modern dance work using the title of my Forbidden Colors (Kinjiki) as its title, but I missed the
opportunity to see it. Actually, I surmised that it was probably the excessively idealistic work of
a literarily green youth. However, after visiting the Tsuda Studio and seeing with my own eyes
this Forbidden Colors, Wakamatsu Miki’s Black Point (a work I am told concerns impotency) and
some rehearsals of topics, I couldn’t help but having a profound interest in this most avant-garde
experiment.
I was asked to provide titles for improvisational exercises at Tsuda’s studio and I proposed
‘Dali’s Melting Clock’ and ‘The Marquis de Sade.’ It was a mistake to have proffered the latter. Of
the ten-plus men and women there, some had read Sade and others had not, and likely only knew
his name and some vulgar ideas about him. One will easily comprehend that even if they come
together and perform an improvisational dance, the varying levels of education of those people
render it impossible for them to grasp a unified image. Of course it is not necessary in such an
exercise for the members to have exactly the same idea. Even if one part of the group does not
know who Dali is or what psychological symbolism he put into the Melting Clock, that is not a
hindrance in the least. It is sufficient if a “distortion” is born from the imagination of ‘melting’
and ‘clock.’ And because their creativity lies in the various movements of the body and not in
words, it is sufficient if an ideal stimulus evokes a unified image in the various non-everyday
bodily movements.
First an idea is proposed. Then various components of bodily movement are extracted and
structured. I was able to fully taste the attraction of that kind of creative process during the les-
son. Of course all sorts of dances are created in this manner, but I had the impression that there
is no more nakedly pure process than that of “modern dance.” However, an idea gives birth to
an action, and an action gives birth to a purposeless energy, and that energy flows back to the
idea and enriches it and causes it to divide and develop. At that moment, I was able to under-
stand a deeper and truly musical interest in the comparatively long creative process of Forbidden
Colors and Black Point. I have a feeling that there is no more interesting dance art in Tokyo at
the moment.
From watching the circus, gymnastic competitions, and various sports, we have figured out
in so far as is possible what movement possibilities there are in the human body, how much it
can bend and contort. We have come to understand that compared with the language of the
52
Contemporary nightmare
alphabet, the language of the human body is significantly restricted. Watching modern dance, or
the improvisational exercises, the movements and forms did not surprise us that much. What was
surprising was the way the sudden movements of the body, or the sudden shouts did not corre-
spond to [answer to] any of our everyday expectations and instead continually and exquisitely
betrayed our purposive consciousness. In this respect, the impressions that we received were of
an entirely different character from those received in sports in which power is concentrated in
accordance with desire. I think you will be able to imagine this from the photographs, but the
alienated feeling that comes from fixed psychological laws being crushed all at once by strange
and shocking movements of the body is not available in the dance that has retained classical tech-
niques. That feeling of alienation is agreeably piquant. However, after a fixed period of time, the
dance continues and then finally it ends. The audience will be hard pressed to understand why
it continued and why it had to end. But that strange density certainly comes from the irritating
feeling of discontinuity. The thing which preserves the temporal continuity from beginning of
the dance to end is not music but a few sweaty half awake, half dreaming bodies, and this is an
expression of the significance of the purity performed by dance with regard to the body.
The black hen that is a sacrificial animal in the vodou ceremonies in the West Indies has been
transformed in Forbidden Colors into a young boy with a white rooster, and the scene of a vodou
priest and a female medium falling to the floor and one lying atop the other has been reproduced
in Black Point with a young man and women entangling each other in a strangely masochistic
way. That these hit me with such force perhaps lies in the fact that they exude a ritualistic fra-
grance that is rare in modern arts. Discontinuous continuity is a characteristic of religious cere-
monies. It appears that these people are seriously celebrating the fearful nightmare of the modern.
Work cited
Mishima, Yukio. 1959. “Gendai no muma: Kinjiki o odoru zen’ei buyōdan” [Contemporary Nightmare: An
Avant-Garde Dance Group Dances Forbidden Colors], Geijutsu shinchō 10, No. 9 (September): 128–131.
53
4
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
AVANT-GARDE DANCE
AND THINGS
Recently when I was speaking to Hijikata Tatsumi, he said something interesting. Usually, his
speech is a series of unexpected chimerical fantasies, but the following really struck me.
He said,
Recently, I saw a paralyzed child try to reach for an object. I observed that his hand
did not reach directly for the object, but went in the opposite direction and only after
having traveled a long way finally grasped the object, and it is this image that is the same
as the peculiar kind of hand movements that I have taught in the past. I was encouraged
by this.
And saying this, he showed me the movements. He hunched his shoulders, and moved his
hands in an uneven manner. The movements that he showed me, were already familiar from his
recitals.
I then thought about classical ballet. There is no dissonance between humans and things in
classical ballet, the beauty of the movement (in which the appearance of things is very rare) is a
kind of decoration, a kind of exaggeration, and if one were to use a handy word, nothing more
than a “formalization.” However, in avant-garde dance, the awesome “thing itself ” – even if it
should not be concretized on stage – exists imperiously, and the relationship between things and
humans is full of tragic contradictions. The movements of humans try to arrive at things, but
slide into an empty abyss, or else, they are completely controlled by things. These1 [things] are
useful in exploding the falsehood of everyday movements, the falsehood of our ‘natural move-
ments’ that are trained by social custom. This is because reaching our hands out mindlessly for
a cigarette, or cup of coffee on the table and grasping them, that is begreifen-ing them, is possible
precisely because we live peacefully in a world of concepts (Begriff ),2 and that which we think
of as natural movements are in actuality a momentary glossing over of the fearful and strict rela-
tionship between humans and things, through the performance of a kind of collusive ceremony
by everyday movements under the veil of collusion. A strange perversion lurks here, or rather it is
precisely our everyday movements that are ceremonial; it is precisely the avant-garde-dance-esque
movements of a paralyzed child, that in the true sense of the word are “natural movements.”
In the upcoming dance of Hijikata, “Sugar Candy,” it appears that the stage will be filled with
jangling and fragile toy phenomena, but toys are “flatter objects,” the so-called monster “things”
54
Avant-garde dance
by which the fearful world of things dresses up to draw near to children. And yet, they deceive
children with their fragile and easily breakable character (rather than their solidity and perma-
nence), turn them into children, and cause them to see the world of things indulgently, and are
thus the beginning of social training by the adults who cause the children to try them out. I am
looking forward to seeing the results of the creation of a performance in which Hijikata and his
cohorts approach the toy-like things and do battle with them.
Notes
1 Translator’s note: From here to the end of the paragraph is also translated in Miryam Sas, Fault Lines:
Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003), 170–171.
2 Translator’s note: Mishima uses the German verb begreifen (grasp, grip, comprehend, fathom, take in) and
the related noun Begriff (concept, idea, perception, understanding).
Work cited
Mishima Yukio. 2004. “Zen-ei buyō to mono tono kankei (The Relationship between Avant-Garde Dance
and Things)” originally in the pamphlet for the September 3, 1961 2nd Hijikata Tatsumi Dance Experience
Gathering. Reprinted in Hijikata Tatsumi no butō: Nikutai no shururearisumu, shintai no ontorojī (Tatsumi
Hjikata’s Butoh: Surrealism of the Flesh, Ontology of the Body), edited by Takeshi Morishita, 16–17.
Tokyo: Keio University Press.
55
5
RETHINKING THE
“INDIGENEITY” OF HIJIKATA
TATSUMI IN THE 1960S AS A
PHOTOGRAPHIC NEGATIVE
IMAGE OF JAPANESE
DANCE HISTORY
Inata Naomi (translated by Bruce Baird and the author)
Introduction: Hijikata Tatsumi and butoh

Hijikata Tatsumi (1928–1986), dancer and choreographer, is one of the founders of butoh, a new
dance form created in Japan. He called his dance ankoku butoh, which literally means darkness
dance, and symbolized it with the aphorism “Butoh is a dead body desperately standing up.”
Hijikata was born in 1928 in Akita in northern Japan (Tohoku) and died in 1986 in Tokyo.
He first studied modern dance, and then ballet, jazz, and cabaret dancing. From the late 1950s to
early 1960s, Hijikata created works one after another that defied the mainstream modern dance
and ballet of the Japanese dance world. His works featured themes that were taboo at the time such
as homosexuality, cross-dressing, perversion, and crime, and the choreography disregarded existing
dance forms and techniques. These activities caught the attention of influential members of the
postwar Japanese literati, such as Mishima Yukio, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, and Tanemura Suehiro, who
wrote essays introducing the dances and contextualizing them as avant-garde dance. The discourses
surrounding butoh reflected the society of resistance and rebellion in the 1960s, and described a
philosophy of existence, and the fundamental crisis and dark side of humanity in the modern age.
However, Hijikata’s work changed gradually in the late 1960s, and after 1970, there were
profound transformations in the style, motifs, and physicality of the works. Many of the previous
critical responses have taken this transformation to stem from Hijikata seeking the basis of ankoku
butoh in the culture and body created by the poverty and cruel climate that he experienced in the
farming village in Akita in northern Japan (Tohoku), where he was born and raised. Specifically,
the posture of bow-legs and bent waist, characteristic of bodies deformed by farm work over
many years, were adopted in the dance as forms (kata), and interpreted by the intelligentsia as
essentially Japanese. Tohoku readily provides images of Japanese stereotypical farming villages
and rural areas, which seem “premodern” or “indigenous,” especially to intellectuals who grew
up in Tokyo.
56
Rethinking the “indigeneity” of Hijikata Tatsumi
In addition, the impression of Hijikata’s body as tightly connected to the Tohoku climate was
created by the photo book Kamaitachi published in 1969 by photographer Hosoe Eikoh,1 and
numerous other photos in weekly magazines. Hijikata gave interviews and wrote texts as if to
guide reporters to this interpretation and to further it.2 Led by this discourse and these icono-
graphic images, it became more and more common to interpret butoh as a dance rooted in the
Tohoku climate, and as a return to the “pre-modern” “indigenous” body lost in the process of
Western modernization.
In this way, even I myself repeatedly employed a simplistic oppositional framework in which
the main characteristics of butoh in the 1960s were “anti-modern” and “avant-garde” and the
characteristics of the 1970s were “pre-modern” and “indigenous.” However, I did not interpret
“indigeneity” in an essentialist manner that constricts “indigeneity” into a signifier for the essen-
tial oneness of the “Japanese body” (Inata 2004; Inata 2009).3
Moreover, conventional discourse almost entirely accorded to Hijikata and butoh a priv-
ileged position by isolating butoh from Japanese dance history and for the most part not
referring to Hijikata’s connections to ballet and modern dance. However, he began dancing by
learning modern dance in Akita, and then learned ballet after he came to Tokyo. It was only
after acquiring these disciplines and methods and beginning his own performance activities
that he challenged them. For that reason, rather than contextualizing butoh in relation to
Hijikata’s childhood and the avant-garde art of the 1960s, I will attempt to rethink Hijikata
from the perspective of the history of Western dance (ballet and modern dance) in Japan. On
the other hand, I am still troubled by the ambiguity of the word “indigeneity” that has often
been used in regard to butoh. Today, butoh – which is said to have the “indigeneity” of a
specific place – has acquired an artistic universality and is now is spoken of highly around the
world. The purpose of this chapter is to reconsider the “indigeneity” of butoh in the context
of Japanese dance history. Because I want to consider the things Hijikata chose not to use, as
well as the things he chose to use – the “indigeneity” that Japanese dance has eliminated – you
could say that this will be a depiction of Hijikata as a photographic negative of the history of
western dance in Japan.4
What is “indigeneity” (dozoku)?

The word dozoku (土俗) might be translated into English as “folk,” “local,” or “local customs.”
However, the Japanese language already has the word minzoku (民俗), which has a nuance
closer to “folk,” and a homonym minzoku (民族), which is close to the English word “ethnic.”
So I usually translate dozoku as “indigenous,” even though I feel it does not sufficiently capture
the nuance of dozoku. Dozoku is composed of the Chinese characters “土” (soil, earth) and “
俗” (profane, vulgar). According to the dictionary it means “The people of a place [land], the
customs of a place, the practices of a place. The folk.”5 However, in general usage, it differs
from the “folk.”
In the context of dozoku, soil or earth indicates not only the material soil or land, but also the
specific nature and environment of a region. It is close to climate “風土” (which is composed
of the Chinese characters for wind (風) and the same soil (土) as dozoku). When the soil/earth
is combined with zoku (俗-profane/vulgar”), a vague image is born at the level of sensation of
something like a smell or scent which one cannot precisely visualize nor put into words but
which can certainly be perceived, and which is represented by the clichéd expression, “smell of
the soil.” Therefore, the term dozoku (indigeneity) implies the quotidian, profane, rustic, vulgar
culture of a certain region or climate. It is the unrefined, naive, crude, popular, and common. It
is the intangible but perceivable smell that cannot be wiped off the body.
57
Inata Naomi
Hijikata Tatsumi used the word “smell” to explain the perceivable but extra-logical character-
istics arising from life and experience that distinguish a certain group from another.
A gang of pals, exists at the level of smell. The word “world” was nothing but raving to
me, who had spent my youth like a cur. Bleeding nature always overflows the allotments
of history and sociology, and my gaze never wavered from it. The friends I made in
Tokyo were, so to speak, inhabitants of the transparent, mechanical “world,” without
any ties to bleeding nature and even without smell. For some reason, I could not help
seeing them as corpses.
translation modified from Hijikata 1987, 43, author’s emphasis
It was not just Hijikata who described difference using the idea of smell. When the renowned
kabuki and traditional performing arts scholar Gunji Masakatsu compared Hijikata with the folk
theater of the Flower Festival (hanamatsuri), he described the difference using the metaphor “the
smell of the soil.”
Even if I do not consciously call it to mind, suddenly the firelight shadow dancing of
the Flower Festival, and the dance of Hijikata Tatsumi spring into my vision. A kind of
smell of soil pervades the atmosphere. In the Flower Festival, the smell of the soil was that
of the spirit of the black mountain wet with snow. The smell of soil with Hijikata was
smell of dust dancing up from the feet of the provincial body dried in sun.
Gunji, 1973, 121, author’s emphasis
On the other hand, eminent Japanese modern history scholar Kano Masanao considered the
indigeneity (dozokusei) of Taisho democracy in the 1920s:
The “indigenous” spirit – which had been crushed by the modernization policy of
“Civilization and Enlightenment,” chased underground, sneered at by the Japan that
considered itself a major power, and even been obstructed during the era of Taisho
democracy by the basic theme of rationalist enlightened thought – this indigenous
spirit, smoldering under the surface, spouted up all at once.
Kano 1973, 25
This modernization (“rationalist enlightened thought”) was not seen only in the Taisho era
(1912–1926) that followed the Meiji era (1868–1912) when Japan opened the door to the
world after emerging from isolation, but was also seen after the Second World War. After the
Taisho Democracy movement, Japan shifted to militarism, was eventually defeated, and then
reoriented itself to a policy of economic development. The period when Hijikata was born
(1928) and began his butoh activities (the 1960s), was an era in which indigenous spirit gushed
forth again. However, such an “indigenous” spirit is not a unitary given simply by virtue of
being Japanese.
What I am calling the “indigenous” spirit for the moment refers to the whole value
awareness that was fostered organically (that is, not as a consequence of Western culture)
by the people (that is, not the intelligentsia) in their daily lives (that is, not by deduction
from principles). It includes a tendency for the people to emphasize their own indige-
neity even when they cannot deny the influence of the West.
Kano 1973, 25–26
58
The “tendency” Kano describes existed in the 1960s, about 100 years after the Meiji Res-
toration. I suggest that it was “indigeneity” that Hijikata stressed and the audience and general
discourse tried to find. The background of accepting butoh, not as “folk” nor “ethnic” but as
“indigenous” was a reflection of historical changes in Japan.
A new dance – modernization for national music

Dance in Japan is roughly divided into Japanese dance (hōbu) and Western dance in Japan (yōbu).
The term “Japanese dance” refers to traditional dances that have been passed down from before
the Meiji era, and includes kabuki dance and jiuta mai. Western dance includes ballet, modern
dance, and flamenco, which were all imported after the Meiji era. The distinction between
domestic or Western arts suggests both a global perspective and dualistic thinking. This distinc-
tion can be found not only in dance but also in other arts.
The history of Western dance in Japan (yōbu) begins in 1911 with the opening of the Impe-
rial Theatre. Beginning in 1912, Italian dance master Vittorio Rosi began teaching and directing
ballet and opera at the theater. After five years, the attempt at importing and imitating ballet and
opera ended in failure. The first generation of students abandoned ballet, transitioned to modern
dance, and became the founders of Japanese modern dance, including Ishii Baku, Ito Michio, and
Takata Seiko. The next generation, including Eguchi Takaya and Miya Misako, went to Germany
to study with Mary Wigman or at the school of Dalcroze.
On the other hand, within the history of Japanese dance, a movement was born to transmit
traditional dance, but at the same time to reform it based on both Western aesthetics and a con-
sciousness of the modern nation-state. That movement began in 1904, when Tsubouchi Shōyō
(1859–1935) published New Music Drama Theory (Shin gakugeki ron) to advocate the creation of
a new musical drama modeled on Wagner’s musikdrama (Tsubouchi 1904). He classified Japan’s
theater into noh, kabuki, and Japanese theatrical dance ( furigoto-geki ). He coined the term
“Japanese theatrical dance” (furigoto-geki ) to include broad range of dance and dance music. He
urged the creation of a “new musical drama” as an “art of a civilized nation” by improving the
pre-existing Japanese theatrical forms. So he repudiated the imitation of the theater of the West,
while encouraging the preservation of noh and (some elements of ) kabuki.
In contrast with noh and kabuki, which were to be retained almost in their entirety, Shōyō
identified the “deficiencies” of Japanese theatrical dance (furigoto-geki ), namely that the plots
were “incoherent and illogical” and “based in sensual hedonism,” and that because the music
was based on songs of the pleasure quarters, there were a great number of “frail, obscene and
cowardly” songs, and the lyrics were “unrefined, vulgar, . . . frivolous, and barbaric” (Tsubouchi
56–58). Shōyō was especially dismissive of the various schools of music accompaniment such as
Tokiwazu, Kiyomoto, and Nagauta, which he saw as “faddish products of single classes, societies,
cities and eras” and therefore, “not appropriate for national nor global tastes” (Tsubouchi 70).
In sum, during this era, Shōyō had a global perspective, and in order to create a “New Music
Drama” that could stand shoulder to shoulder with the arts of the West, he sought to excise the
deficiencies of the theaters specific to Japan and fuse regional variations into one “New Music
Drama.” This would not be a local product, but must be suited to the nation-state and the global.
Unfortunately, his vision did not come to fruition, but it was connected to a movement within
Japanese dance called the “New Dance Movement.” For the intellectuals of that era, the only
way to modernize Japanese arts so that they could become comparable with Western arts was to
improve traditional arts by following the Western arts. Thus, Japanese dance oscillated between
trying to preserve and reform traditional Japanese dance while mimicking the past. On the other
hand, Western dance in Japan continued imitating the West, before eventually interweaving with
59
Inata Naomi
Japanese elements to create “semi-Western style.” Moreover, in the process of modernization,

both Japanese dance and Western dance eliminated their “deficiencies” (which Shōyō had
pointed out): hedonism, irrationality, vulgarity, unsophistication, and locality. The modern dance
and ballet that Hijikata learned and eventually resisted should be contextualized in this history of
the modernization of Japanese dance.
Citing folk dance in modern dance

While Japanese dance continued preserving and improving traditional dance, there was a cate-
gory of traditional dance that did not fall within the category of Japanese dance (hōbu). This was
“folk dance,” which was also called “regional entertainment,” and is one of the folk performing
arts that has been formed and passed on by people in each region. Folk dance is rooted in people’s
lives, customs, locality, and faith. It includes dance, music, and theater, often associated with festi-
vals or ceremonies. Over hundreds of years, it has been performed by ordinary non-professionals
in each community. Therefore, it is regarded as public entertainment rather than as an art. Since
the 1930s, its worth has been gradually recognized because researchers began paying attention
to it. In 1954, it was recognized as an official cultural property and given protection through
governmental policy. At the same time, almost to the extent that it has been protected by the
government, it has been exposed to the danger of decline. In addition, it has come to be regarded
as one of the performing arts that can be performed in the theatre, and thus it might be separated
from its background in its climate and community.
It was such a period when a representative of Western dance in Japan (yōbu) met the folk
performing arts. Eguchi Takaya (1900–1977) was one of the kingpins of modern dance at the
time, and the teacher of Hijikata’s first teacher, Masumura Katsuko. In 1951, Eguchi began a series
based on “local dances from each place in Japan” (Eguchi 1989, 439). Eguchi’s dance Japanese
Drum (1951) cited a “deer dance” and became one of his masterpieces. Eguchi encountered
the “deer dance,” a typical folk performing art, in Iwate Prefecture, which is to the east of Akita
prefecture where Hijikata was from. He described the process of incorporating this dance into
his own as follows:
There is no meaning if I dance it just as it is. Also it is impossible to express the peculiar
rustic feeling of local dance. I have to create a piece appropriate to perform in a modern
theater, accompanied by an orchestra.
Eguchi 1989, 440
Because Eguchi was impressed by the dynamics of the movement, the stirring music, and
brilliant costumes of the “deer dance,” he used it as a basis for his dance but made significant
alterations. He did not intend to represent the indigenous “smell of the earth.” Instead, he
choreographed a new modern dance by altering the movements and composition, adding
orchestral accompaniment composed by Ifukube Akira, and downsizing the costume of the
“deer dance” so that his dancers could move more freely. The dance critics evaluated this piece
as follows:
Having the composition of modern dance, it captures with modern sense the behavior
of a deer like one might see in the movie Bambi. But I still hope for a more lively mod-
ern expression, and a more deformed shape, based on this sketch.
Yamawaki Kameo, Asahi Newspaper November 19, 1951,
quoted in Eguchi 1989, 431
60
Eguchi took up the deer dance, a local dance from the northeastern Tohoku region, and
injected a modern spirit into it, thereby inaugurating a new phase in creative dance, and
showing remarkable talent in collecting the material.
Kageyasu Masao, Jijishinpo November 21, 1951,
quoted in Eguchi 1989, 432
A record of a different way of looking at the dance came from a local Aomori newspaper. We
can get a glimpse of rural pride in how the reviewer rejoices that Eguchi found a universal value
in creating a modern dance from an entertainment that has its roots in the local; but the reviewer
also warns against falling into nostalgia for the good old days, or regional-centric thought.
I am exceedingly grateful to this person for showing us that there is a universal value
in that which we have done and seen in our everyday lives from time immemorial. . . .
It is still the case in the postwar era that there is novelty in the old, and goodness in
the regional areas. However, in saying so, there is no room for pointless nostalgia for
the good old days, or for exclusionary self-righteous rural centrism. Simple nostalgia
is an extravagance of civilization, and exclusionary self-righteousness is an obstacle to
a global view.
author unknown, Tō-o nippō, November 21, 1951
While the piece was appreciated because it modernized folk dance, Eguchi confessed that it
was difficult for the modern dancers in Tokyo to sustain the physicality of folk dance.
First of all, if I stand straight up with my legs extended and my knees straight, as in
normal dance, then my calves become limp. It is powerfully beautiful to squat with
one’s heels separate and strike the knees deeply. . . . This form is good for standing still
and walking, so we use it all the time in dance. But the modern dancer finds it hard to
maintain this form. . . . In the beginning, it was painful to maintain this form for a long
time without moving, and I wanted to yell out “Save me!”
Eguchi 1989, 444–442
The basic form of this dance is similar to “tucking the pelvis” (koshi o ireru) in noh and
kabuki – which is the polar opposite from the balletic Western form of extending the legs and
back straight to the heavens – and is regarded as a typical form of Japanese performing arts. This
form is frequently taken to stem from the same source as one of the characteristic “forms” of
Hijikata’s butoh.6
Even the eminent modern dancer Eguchi, who was born in Aomori located in northeast-
ern Japan, found it difficult to maintain what was supposedly a typical “Japanese form.” Other
modern dancers also realized that their own embodiment differed from that of the folk dancers.
However, the audience and the critics appreciated the work as a modern improvement of folk
dance. As a result, the Eguchi-Miya Dance Institute was awarded the prestigious Art Recommen-
dation (geijutsu senshō) of the Agency for Cultural Affairs that year. The work was reproduced
many times, and starting in 1953, became an annual part of the New Year’s program of NHK,
Japan’s public television station (Nikaido 2013, 50).
The success of this work was due to the modernization – removing the folk dance from
its locale and climate, and making the dance, music, and costumes more showy. That is to say,
removing the indigenous “smell of the soil,” developing and refining it (to use Shōyō’s words),
and turning it into a widely known modern dance.
61
Inata Naomi
At that time, Hijikata moved from Masumura Katsuko’s Tokyo dance studio to Andō Mitsu-
ko’s studio. Ando was making a name for herself with her work with jazz music. Shortly after,
he became a member of Ando’s troupe, and danced in modern, jazz, and ballet works for TV
programs. Around 1958, he left Ando’s studio and moved to the modern dance studio run by
Yoneyama Mamako (1935–) and Imai Shigeyuki. Yoneyama was a disciple of Eguchi, so Hijikata
had the opportunity to visit Eguchi’s studio, get acquainted with Eguchi’s disciples, and perform
in their pieces. Hijikata might have seen Japanese Drum in rehearsal there, and gotten a feeling for
one way of appropriating folk dance.
In December 1958 Hijikata appeared in and choreographed a scene for Yoneyama and Imai’s
dance Hanchikik, which was an epic poem telling the story of the Ainu myth of the Sparrow God.
The Ainu are an indigenous people of the northernmost part of Japan. From the early modern
era, they were subject to Edo bakufu and Tokyo governmental control and forced assimilation
policies, and were in the process of losing their culture, language, and customs. Yoneyama, Imai,
and Hijikata repeatedly visited the home of the Aini authority Kindaichi Kyosuke and collected
materials and listened to him speak about the Ainu. The dance of the minority Ainu was not
even included in the classification system of the time (with its two categories of Japanese dance
and Western dance), but it was a chance for Hijikata to encounter an indigenous dance.
Ethnic dance and socialist realism in ballet

Ballet, another pillar of Western dance, became popular beginning in 1946 when the first Japa-
nese Swan Lake was performed. Many individual ballet studios were established bearing the name
of ballerinas, and aimed to perform typical classical ballet pieces created in the 19th century, along
with original etudes set to classical music. In the 1950s some ballet companies created original
pieces based on Japanese traditional stories, folktales, and music. A few companies created pieces
with contemporary themes.7
On the other hand, the Matsuyama Mikiko Ballet (now Matsuyama Ballet), created many
“ethnic ballets.” Its masterpiece The White Haired Girl (1955) is based on the eponymous Chi-
nese propaganda film. The piece represented the hero as a typical poor peasant in China, and
the choreography cited Chinese ethnic dance, thus it follows Stalin’s thesis of socialist realist arts
as “nationalist form, socialist content.” The next year the librettist and co-choreographer Ishida
Taneo went to the Soviet Union for short-term ballet study. After he came back to the company,
he choreographed several classical ballets influenced by the Stanislavsky method and ethnic ballet
based on socialist realist themes. In fact, when he choreographed his first piece The Tale of Ukinuno
in 1956, he cited the folk dance from his hometown in Shimane Prefecture, instead of other
more widely known forms of Japanese ethnic dance. The dance became the impetus for him
to study folk dances from various places in Japan (and especially from Shimane). For example,
Gion Festival (1963) portrayed the village elders of Kyoto who revived the Gion Festival in the
Muromachi period. Ishida choreographed by citing folk dances and customs that he had seen in
his childhood in his hometown.
I was born in the remote countryside of Shimane Prefecture, and this rural upbringing
was unexpectedly helpful in choreographing Gion Festival. When I listen to the music
of the Gion Festival I am reminded of the rural scenes of my childhood. In the summer,
at the festival for the jizo (guardian deity of children) on the embankment behind of
my house, we chanted a prayer to Buddha while passing a large rosary in a circle. I
adapted this for The Dance of Amitabha Group in the first act. The feature of the dance
for the O-Bon Festival of the Dead is shaking one’s hips – I adapted this for the Dance of
62
Village Elders. The stone kicking that we did on a side street rarely used by automobiles
became the Peasant Dance in the second act. I turned my memory of being mobilized
to the countryside in my junior high school days into the Rice Planting Dance. And so it
went one after another. If I had set out to specifically create a Japanese-style ballet, and
looked only at famous Japanese masterpieces of old, I think I could not have made this
work. By observing the present more deeply, Japanese ballet will be born, and I think
I have to become an even more minute filter of the present.
Ishida 1967, 149
Ishida tried to create an original ballet, not by using the famous paintings of the past or the “folk
dance” that had already become representative of the country, but by using the “folk dance” and
the indigenous customs that were still practiced in various locales. This was neither the vector
based in socialist realism of creating “ethnic ballet” by quoting stereotypical “folk dances” nor
Tsubouchi Shōyō’s vector of developing and refining traditional dance by eliminating unsavory
elements. It was an attempt to create a “ballet rooted in Japanese climate” and born out of real life.
Ishida urged caution in the manner of quoting these materials:
If it is only the movement that is necessary in Gion Festival, you can just watch a film. If
you do so, the personality of the family lore has been already lost. A tradition is severed
at once.
Ishida 1967, 140
Ishida refers to the danger of a dance form becoming an empty shell if one extracts only the
choreography and cuts it off from the life and climate of the background, and attributes the
failure of creative ballet in Japan, to exactly this. For the dance Gion Festival, his dance troupe
earnestly studied the history and costumes of the Gion festival, and consequently it was a great
success. After Ishida left Matsuyama Ballet in 1968, he continued to create “ballet rooted in the
Japanese climate,” but it was not always easy for him, and few choreographers followed his lead.
This tendency became all the more remarkable beginning in the 1970s when instead of creating
original Japanese ballet, overseas ballets were popular and garnered critical attention. In other
words, the movement in the 1950s and 1960s to create a ballet that incorporated Japanese culture
and climate foundered and Japanese ballet again shifted to importing and imitating ballet from
the West.
“Indigeneity” and pop art in Rose-colored Dance (1965)

Even though Socialist realism did not take deep root in Japan, it still exerted an influence on
some artists in the worlds of dance and the arts. One such artist was Nakamura Hiroshi (1932–),
who later become one of Hijikata’s collaborators. His interest in folk and indigenous elements
stemmed from the principles of socialist realism. In the 1950s, he was active in socialist real-
ist “reportage painting,” which was considered another form of avant-garde art separate from
“anti-art,” Neo-Dada-ism, and Surrealism. Nakamura followed the principles of socialist realism
to depict typical folk, landscapes, and workers, and this led him to an encounter with the pop-
style elements of Japan, such as Ukiyo-e. Accordingly, he thought that pop art was a symbol of
American indigeneity.8 He said,
Abstract Expressionism came directly to the United States from Europe; and it was very
modern. Pop Art was, in a sense, a tremendous reaction against it. It’s the indigeneity
63
Inata Naomi
of Marilyn Monroe that is great, and Warhol too. He is not at all modern, but rather
indigenous. The thing about Lichtenstein, he was an American cartoonist. I do not
know whether Pop Art can be called folk, but it was the result of awakening to the
promotion of locality – “this is our country.” I think there is nothing more uncouth
than the United States.
Inata 2008, 204
For Japanese people generally, the motifs of Andy Warhol such as Coca-Cola bottles, Camp-
bell’s soup cans, and Marilyn Monroe, were regarded as a symbol of prosperity, progress, and the
consumer society of the United States.9 However, Nakamura saw pop art in the context of art
history, as a symbol of American “indigeneity,” rather than considering them in relation to mass
media images of reproducible products.
In addition, the graphic designer and Hijikata collaborator Tanaka Ikko (1930–2002), drew a
connection between pop art and the stage arts in Rose-colored Dance. He said,
American Pop Art motifs are things like the Coca-Cola bottle and Campbell’s soup
cans, but if you think about what would be the corresponding motifs in Japan, it could
be the motifs of Yokoo Tadanori and Hijikata. They might be Japanese Pop. The Victor
dog on stage might be pop in a Japanese style.
Inata 2008, 203
Hijikata first collaborated with Nakamura in 1968, so he could not have gotten any ideas from
Nakamura during the creation of Rose-colored Dance in 1965. Nevertheless, it is possible that
Hijikata could sniff the smell of “indigeneity” in American pop art and considered how to
achieve that indigeneity in Japan.
Hijikata first requested that Tanaka design the poster for Rose-colored Dance, but Tanaka, a
renowned modernist graphic designer, could not do it. So, Tanaka asked Yokoo Tadanori (1936–),
because Tanaka saw in Yokoo a style that matched with Hijikata’s of “not refining, nor aiming to
be sophisticated” (Ibid.). When Yokoo met Hijikata at the first time, he thought he understood
Hijikata at once, because he saw Kimchō Mosquito Coils in the house. Yokoo captured the smell
of “indigeneity” from Hijikata and his every day surroundings. Yokoo felt a sense of stagnation
when he was oriented to the polished modern design of Tanaka, but he was inspired by Hijik-
ata. Consequently, it was as if a dam had broken, and indigeneity overflowed in the poster for
Rose-colored Dance. The Akebono brand canned salmon, which is regarded as a parody of Andy
Warhol’s Campbell soup can, represents Japanese pop “indigeneity.” Designs of the rising sun of
the naval flag, waves, clouds, and cherry blossoms portray retro Japanese pop of the Taisho era.
However, the idea underlying the design was Hijikata’s. The idea was to incorporate the
oil painting Study of Pink and Green drawn by Nakanishi Natsuyuki (1935–2016) on the basis
of the Fontainebleau school painting, Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters. When Hijikata
saw the picture, he spoke to Yokoo about the image of the Taisho era and the Taisho Emperor.
Accordingly, Yokoo was inspired by those things. Hijikata also dictated the use other elements,
for example, writing the title horizontally from the right to the left. This writing style inspires in
Japanese people the retro image of the Taisho and Meiji eras. This poster has come to represent
not only butoh and Yokoo in the 1960s, but also it has become an iconographic image that sym-
bolizes the entire culture of the 1960s. And it was Hijikata who instigated this pop “indigeneity,”
and supplied many of the concrete suggestions for the elements to incorporate.
Hijikata asked Kano Mitsuo (1933–) to design a “lick-able program” made of sugar candy, and
looked for a confectionary shop that could make it. Hijikata likened it to the “celebratory kinkatō
64
confection” (gold flowered sugar) used as a present (“makimono”) for the audience. Makimono
are a custom in the societies of traditional entertainers and geisha. The confections were made
in the shape of lips, a hand, and a penis, then put into a cedar wooden box, and distributed to
the audience at the venue. It was an exquisite combination of the rawness of severed body parts,
fetishism, eroticism, the sweetness of sugar, the texture of melting and disappearing in the mouth,
primary colors, and popular traditional customs.
In the performance itself, a Victor dog splashed with pink paint was placed upstage, and ten
men were arranged in a line facing away from the audience as if they were taking a piss. Naka-
nishi drew a realistic vagina in full color on Tamano Koichi’s back, and Tamano undulated his
back during the piece. In addition, there were men at the side of audience who were going to
be shorn by a barber during the performance. In this way, the stage art of Rose-colored Dance was
avant-garde and at the same time pop, vulgar, bright, sweet, erotic, humorous, that is to say “indig-
enous.” Today we only know the work from black and white photographs and film. However, the
stage was full of colors such as pink, green, and red. It follows that we can think of Rose-colored
Dance as being full of Japanese indigenous pop art layered in several levels with quotations of
western avant-garde motifs such as heretical eroticism, violence, ritual, Happenings, and also the
smell of Japanese vulgar customs.
As a keyword or symbol of the early period of Hijikata starting with Forbidden Colors (1959),
Ichikawa Miyabi proposed “Western eroticism,” (Ichikawa 1983, 161) and Shibusawa Tatsuhiko
identified the “aim for an eroticism of ritualistic sacrifice” and the “method of expressing sculp-
turally, that is through the pure bodily language, metaphysical concepts” (Shibusawa 1983, 227–
228). In the middle era starting with Masseur (1963), Ichikawa saw Hijikata as trying to “recover
the gestures and passions that lurk in every corner of a Japanese house” (Ichikawa 1983, 61),
and Shibusawa suggested that Hijikata was “influenced by American happenings” (Shibusawa
1983, 227–228). Rose-colored Dance was the moment when the characteristics of the early period
and the middle period (as identified by these two fellow travelers) erupted in the indiscriminate
shapeless “smell” of pop “indigeneity.”
The symbol or key concept often theorized as a feature of the “indigeneity” of butoh in the
late 1970s was the stereotypical image of the dark, harsh conditions of the rural northeast district.
However, as described above, “indigeneity” already abounded in Rose-colored Dance, but it was a
bright, sweet, vulgar, erotic, and ridiculous “indigeneity.”10
The “indigeneity” of Hijikata Tatsumi’s dance

In order to further understand the pop “indigeneity” that emerged in the 1960s, and the “indi-
geneity” Hijikata himself brought about, we can rethink it from viewpoint of his collaborators.
Artists perceived his “indigeneity” from his appearance and daily life, and were shocked by him.
For example, Akasegawa Genpei (1937–2014) was deeply impressed when he saw Hijikata for
the first time in a photograph in a weekly magazine. He went to watch Hijikata’s performance,
and subsequently collaborated in Rose-colored Dance. He said,
At the time, everyone was infatuated with the West. We saw Duchamp’s toilet bowl and
Man Ray, and thought they were “so cool.” Then Hijikata appeared. He was like a blast
of “indigeneity.” His name in Chinese characters can be read as both “Hijikata” and
“dokata” [construction worker]. . . . Hijikata himself contained both something West-
ern and something different, something strange that was Asian or Japanese. It was my first
time encountering such a thing. In my world, if you saw some so-called Japanese thing,
for example a Japanese painting or calligraphy, you’d wonder what was the point. But,
65
Inata Naomi
Hijikata was the other Japan, but also not the West. If I were forced to find something
like him, it would kind of mythological, like Yamato Takeru, or rice balls, clenched
fists, miso soup, that sort of thing. Today it might be homeless people, outlaws from
the world, people who live in the mountains, those who smell like they are trailed by
something from the mountains of Japanese Shinto, or mountain worship. It’s dirty, but
connected to the world of the gods. Previously, I saw a tattered rain-soaked flag when I
went to Bhutan, that kind of feeling. It might because of the talent of the photographer
Hosoe Eikō, but Hijikata had both “indigeneity” and “style.”
Inata 2008, 124
Akasegawa saw Hijikata’s “indigeneity” as something Asian or Japanese that relativized Western
modern art. It was a fusion of daily life and awe that was different from sophisticated Japanese
traditional arts.
The aforementioned Tanaka Ikko (who was renowned for his constructivist modern design)
recalled how surprised and puzzled he was when he encountered Hijikata:
While Tokyo was rapidly modernizing, I looked only to the United States and Europe.
Whatever was new came from the West, from New York. On the other hand, I was
born in Nara Prefecture. Nara is the boonies compared to Kyoto, but civic culture
has been refined for a long period of time, for example the placement of chopsticks
and the arrangement of dishes, and so on. There is detailed sophistication in every
corner. Northeastern rural culture, which is different from Kyoto-like refined culture
and Kansai-based secular culture, came to Tokyo and blossomed in the ’60s. Because it
suddenly appeared in Shinjuku in Tokyo, we were surprised. When we encountered the
culture of Hijikata Tatsumi, Terayama Shuji, and Kara Juro, we thought “where have we
been looking all this time?” Consequently, we recognized ourselves as Japanese again.
Hijikata was someone who give me that feeling the most. I had a feeling that we were
defeated by what we had been trying to forget. There is a strange dual structure, in
my mind and everyday life. Our secular culture is about, at the most, slapstick comedy;
but rural culture is not lazy like that, and but rather there is something sharp about
it. I guess it might be a religious issue. I can faintly smell elements such as kagura and
Shinto rituals.
Inata 2008, 197–198
Probably, the artists who were promoting the avant-garde and modernism at the time, shared
the feeling of a “strange dual structure” that Tanaka refers to. Tanaka recognized this “indige-
neity”-as-Northeast-rural-culture in Terayama Shuji (1935–1983), born in Aomori, and also in
Kara Juro (1940–), born in Tokyo, and saw it as a general trend in the 1960s, but Hijikata was the
one who really stood out. And in the same way as Akasegawa, he pointed out the folk religious
awe of Hijikata.
Moreover, Hijikata’s most intimate collaborator, Nakanishi, described the peculiarity of Hiji-
kata’s awe and spirituality.
At that time, Hijikata was regarded as an extremely charismatic person, so I wondered

how I could talk with him. Nowadays it is uncommon, but formerly there were people
who believed that an uncontrollable power of nature or the power of God was some-
where above them, pushing them when they tried to do something, such as moving,
working, screaming, or crying. Hijikata might be the last person who thought this. We
66
believe the foundation of the human being is at the molecular level, or in its chromo-
somal mechanism. But Hijikata-san was in contact with something uncontrollable.
That might be why he chose to dance that way. He was constantly thinking about what
it means to be a human. And the things he talked about provoked me to think about
the same thing. There is a side of Hijikata that is very strongly inclined to dismantling
things. But, if so, I wonder why he has such a serious side . . .
Returning to the topic of his seriousness, he had an extremely strong personality, and
long before groping for a way to create avant-garde dance, he had something like a fear
of death. Of course, he considered how to create performance and dance strategically,
I also think he was thinking about how to assemble a human being. Otherwise, I can’t
understand his seriousness.
Inata 2008, 240
Nakanishi also recognized that Hijikata was awed by nature, spirituality, and death. Then,
Nakanishi thought that such feelings made Hijikata’s work change.
In the 1960s, he considered himself avant-garde, and was regarded as such by people in
the world of art. But, I do not think so. He was something after avant-garde has col-
lapsed, having gotten out of control, and must be repaired with something different. He
was that person. Considering the panorama of the 1960s, I think it had to come to that.
The body was not dispersed; but even if the body were to disappear, there would still be
something like breath. If breathing stopped, something like an aura would still appear.
But not Chinese qi. The question of how to deal with that issue had sprouted already
in the 1960s, I think. Hijikata was aware of question, and was trying to solve it, I guess.
At that time, by chance, I depicted illustrations of reaching ecstasy while exchanging
breath with someone. . . . At that time, we thought about the objet, while likening the
body to a part of a machine. On the other hand, he had this side of him in which he
temporarily assumed the existence of a sacred space, and then sought to leap there. I
have such a feeling about Hijikata.
Inata 2008, 240–241
Taking a panoramic perspective of the 1960s Nakanishi saw Hijikata as the one who rec-
ognized that the avant-garde had come to a dead end, and sooner than anyone else sought
something new. He saw the new direction in Hijikata’s seriousness born from spirituality. By
combining the view of Nakanishi, Akasegawa, and Tanaka, we can see that Hijikata had not only
the hipness of Western avant-garde but also an unconcealable “indigeneity,” which was not just
rural unsophisticated vulgarity, but also a traditional spirituality which penetrated his everyday
life. The “indigeneity” of Hijikata that the artists above attempted to describe was something
like a vague unavoidable “smell,” rather than being a something which can be clearly presented
visually or aurally. But this was not something one tastes nostalgically as with stereotyped forms,
but has to be rethought in terms of awe.
Conclusion
The discourse on Hijikata Tatsumi and his butoh tends to converge on some typical interpre-
tations such a preoccupation with darkness, exploration of the unconscious, and anti-social
themes, and considering it as post-atom-bomb spectacle. For the most part, the interpretation
of the obvious “indigeneity” in Hijikata’s post-1970 dances (as manifest in costumes, stage
67
Inata Naomi
props, and choreographic elements) has centered again on darkness, combined in an essentialist
manner with the coldness and poverty of Akita and the Northeast. On the whole, people did
not look back at Hijikata’s relationship to the world of Japan that he was both a part of and
sought to escape.
However, as demonstrated in this chapter, a kind of pop indigeneity is visible in Rose-colored
Dance. It is likely that Hijikata thought of this popular, sweet, bright, indigenous pop art as a
power that could oppose Western modern art and culture that would take the place of surre-
alism, Neo Dada-ism, and anti-art. At the same time, throughout the 1950s Hijikata likely saw
firsthand all of the elements of Western modernization of Japanese dance and Western dance,
such as exclusion of various things from these two kinds of dance, the integration of some things
into these dances, the quotations of folk dance and folk art, and the various reforms and blends.
So, it is likely that he sought to use all the elements excluded from the two spheres of Japanese
dance as power to contest the mindless imitation and refinement of the world of Japanese dance.
The transformation in his work in the 1960s can be thought of as having occurred in response
to Hijikata coming to understand the various kinds of trial and error experienced in the avant-
garde arts and in the world of dance. It is probably not the case that he analyzed this with clarity
and sought to consciously elaborate a strategy to do this, but rather that he looked at and consid-
ered matters from his position as an artist. And the thing which guided him was the “indigene-
ity” that he himself could not escape.
Hijikata discarded the bodily discipline of Western dance, and dismantled the rules and beauty
of both Western and modernizing Japanese dance, and thus founded butoh. However, his col-
laborators noticed his smell of “indigeneity,” which was a fusion of Japan and the West, with
diverse aspects and peculiarities, and not simply the given “traditional folk arts.” In the 1960s,
both Hijikata and his audience were apt to find “indigeneity” in visible simple forms, or smell
it. That intricate smell could be found in Rose-colored Dance and in Hijikata himself, as sweetness,
brightness, humor, vulgarity, eroticism, cruelty, and pop art.
Writing in an impressionistic form, rather than in an academic manner, Gunji Masakatsu
noticed a similar aesthetics in butoh to what Shōyō had pointed out in premodern kabuki.
Where did the postures that oppose the beauty of dance, such as bowed-legs, bent
spines, clenched hands and feet, first originate? . . . In fact, the conditions for accepting
the beauty in such postures, lie in the traditional theater of kabuki. Boar necks (ikubi)
and hunched backs, as Tsubouchi Shōyō has already explained, are linked to the beauty
of cruelty and obscenity and form the basis for the beauty of late Edo kabuki. . . . In
addition, Shōyō . . . confirms the existence of a beauty of irrationality and artificiality
by recognizing the sadism and masochism and acknowledging the eroticism and vio-
lence in late Edo kabuki. And to the extent that such passion is acknowledged, butoh,
of course, becomes the confirmation of such.
Gunji 1985, 88–89
Gunji wrote this after he watched Twenty-seven Nights for Four Seasons in 1972. This kind of
discourse, of assuming continuities in physical forms between arts separated by centuries, carries
a risk because it easily leads to an essentialist interpretation (Inata 2001). However, the viewpoint
of Gunji and Shōyō enables us to rethink the “indigeneity” that existed before Western modern-
ization, and thus that differs from that of contemporary kabuki and artistic dance.
To only see the characteristics of Hijikata’s butoh in anti-modern heretical literature and
avant-garde arts, or in a return to the premodern indigeneity of northeast Japan is to end up in
the cheap and easy intellectual framework of Western modernization. I want to think of Hijikata
68
as having experienced the flow of the Japanese dance world in a process of Westernization and
modernization; then, jumping out of that world; and, while being sensitive to the trends of the
art world and the concerns of his fellow artists, opening up a new path for materials and forms
by remaining connected to the indigeneity and popular culture that trailed behind him.
Notes
1 From autumn 1965 to spring of 1968, Hosoe and Hijikata took photos starting in Tashiro village in
Akita Prefecture, and at various places in and near Tokyo including the Tsukuba foothills, Shibamata,
Kameari, the Kōganji Temple in Sugamo, and at the Meguro Immovable Wisdom King Temple. The
photos were collected into the March 1968 photo exhibition, “An Extravagantly Tragic Comedy: Photo
Theater Starring a Japan Butoh Dancer, Genius (Hijikata Tatsumi).” The following year, the photos
were released as the photo book Kamaitachi. Hosoe Eikō, Kamaitachi (Gendaishichōsha, 1969). See the
related chapter in this volume by Jonathan Marshall, “Bodies at the Threshold of the Visible: Photo-
graphic Butoh.”
2 Editor’s note: But also see Sara Jansen’s argument in this volume about the ways that Hijikata also
repudiated this connection in some interviews and articles, “Returns and Repetitions: Hijikata Tatsumi’s
Choreographic Practice as a Critical Gesture of Temporalization.”
3 The turning point of the essentialist interpretation of Butoh was brought about by William Marotti’s
essay “Butō no mondaisei to honshitsushugi no wana,” trans. by Kawamizu Mihoko, Shiata ātsu 8 (1997):
88–96, included here as Chapter 11, “The Problematics of Butoh and the Essentialist Trap.”
4 This essay is a revision of two of my prior essays Inata (2011, 2016).
5 Kojien sb. “Dozoku.”
6 Editors’ note: For a discussion of “koshi o ireru” (tucking the pelvis), and an argument about Hijikata’s
supposed connection to this kind of movement, see Takechi Tetsuji and Tomioka Taeko, Chapter 10 in
this volume.
7 Traditionally themed ballet included “Asuka Story” (Maki Asami Ballet, 1957), incorporating gagaku
and bugaku (imperial court music and dance) and “The Tale of the Bamboo-Cutter” (Matsuo Akemi
Ballet, 1962). Contemporary themed ballet included “Hikarigoke” by Youth Ballet Group in 1958,
based on the Hikarigoke Incident of 1944, in which shipwrecked sailors resorted to cannibalism to
survive.
8 Pop art was received rather negatively in Japan as can be seen from the “pop art debate” between
Takashina Shuji and Tono Yoshiaki. Miyagawa Jun also criticized pop art and “anti-art” as “a descent
into vulgar everydayness” (Miyagawa 1964).
9 Yanai Yasuhiro dissects the poster design thus: “salmon can (which was a reference to Andy Warhol’s
Campbell’s Soup Can Series)” and “images of the west and old and new Japan were fused together”
(Yanai 2000, 29). Morishita Takashi writes, “Salmon can: in order to include a Pop Art element, this was
an example of something that was a mass produced item in Japan that would correspond to Warhol’s
Campbell’s Soup Can Series” (Morishita 2000, 33).
10 I analyze the choreography of the piece in Inata (2001, 2008).
Works cited
Eguchi Takaya. 1989. Modern Dance Eguchi Takaya to geijutsu nendaishi. Edited by Nishimiya Yasuichiro.
Tokyo shimbun shuppan kyoku and chunichi shimbun tokyo honsha.
Gunji Masakatsu. 1973. “Shi to iu koten butō.” Bijutsu-techo 364 (February): 121–123.
———. 1985. “Butō to kinki.” Gendaishi techō 26, No. 6 (May): 86–89.
Hijikata Tatsumi. 1987 (1961). “Keimusho e.” Bibō no aozora. Chikuma shobo. Originally published in Mita
bungaku (January 1961). Translated as “To Prison,” by Jacqueline S. Ruyak and Kurihara Nanako. TDR
44, No. 1 (Spring 2000): 43–48.
Ichikawa Miyabi. 1983. Buyō no kosumorojii. Keisōsha.
Inata Naomi. 2001. “Hijikata Tatsumi no butō to bunshō: keishiki to buntai ni yoru butō kaidoku no
kokoromi.” Bungaku kenkyuka kiyō 46: 15–24.
———. 2004. “1970 nendai ankoku butō no gihō kenkyu: mienai gihō wo megutte.” Engeki kenkyu senta
kiyō 2: 49–59.
———. 2008. Tatsumi Hijikata: Zetsugo no shintai. NHK Shuppan.
69
Inata Naomi
———. 2009. “1970 nendai shotō ni okeru ankoku butō no furitsuke hō no henka: kata no shutsugen to
kiritsuka sareta shintai no kaitai.” Engeki eizou gaku No. 1: 183–205.
———. 2011. “Ankoku butō, Hijikata Tatsumi no 1960 nendai ni okeru ‘dozoku sei ’.” In Buyōgaku no gen-
zai: geijutsu, minzoku, kyōiku kara no appurochi. Edited by Endo Yasuko, et al., 46–62. Bunrikaku.
———. 2016. “Furitsukeka Ishida Taneo ga mezashita ‘Nihon no fudo-teki na barê’: Shakaishugi riarizumu
ni yoru minzoku barê kara no tenkan.” Engeki kenkyu No. 39: 93–110.
Ishida Taneo. 1967. “Barê ‘Gion matsuri’ to minzoku geinō: kaden no zōni no aji” (originally in the Gion
matsuri program, Oct. 30, 1963) and “Yoku kansatsu suru koto: furitsukeshi no kokoroe” (originally pub-
lished in Nagoya rōon kikan shi, April 1964). In Tobu shisō: Sovuieto no barê, Nihon no barê. Sutaffu Sentaa.
Kano Masanao. 1973. Taisho demokurashii no teiryu: ‘dozoku’-teki seishin e no kaiki. NHK Shuppan.
Miyagawa Jun. 1964. “Han geijutsu: sono nichijōsei e no kakō.” Bijutsu-techo 236 (April): 48–58.
Morishita Takashi. 2000. “Yokō Tadanori Barairo dansu postā wo bunkai suru” [Dissecting Yokoo Tadanori’s
Poster for Rose-Colored Dance]. Translated by Bruce Baird. In Barairo dansu no ikonorojī. Edited by Sumi
et al., 32–33.
Nikaido Akiko. 2013. “Eguchi Takaya no Buyo sōsakuhō kara kōsatsu suru ‘wa mono’ ni tsuite: ‘Nihon no
Taiko’ o chushin ni.” Ochanomizu joshi daigaku shōgaigakushu jissen kenkyu no. 11: 47–56.
Shibusawa Tatsuhiko. 1983. “Hijikata Tatsumi ni tsuite.” In Yameru maihime. Hakusuisha.
Sumi Yōichi, Fujio Maeda, Takashi Morishita, and Yasuhiro Yanai, eds. 2000. Barairo dansu no ikonorojī: Hiji-
kata Tatsumi wo saikōchiku suru [The Iconology of Rose-Colored Dance: Reconstructing Tatsumi Hijikata].
Keio University Center for the Arts and Arts Administration.
Tsubouchi Shōyō. 1904. Shin gakugeki ron. Waseda daigaku shuppan.
Yanai Yasuhiro. 2000. “Sakuhin kaisetsu” [Explanation of the Works]. Translated by Bruce Baird. In Barairo
dansu no ikonorojī. Edited by Sumi, 25–31.
70
6
À LA MAISON DE SHIBUSAWA
The draconian aspects of Hijikata’s butoh
Robert Ono
Shibusawa Tatsuhiko (1928–1987) occupies a unique space in post-war Japanese culture. He is

perhaps best known as the translator of works by Marquis de Sade, but is also credited as a widely
learned critic who introduced and popularized many notions pertaining to Western art and
history, especially surrealism and the occult. It is safe to say that butoh pioneer Hijikata Tatsumi
(1928–1986) had a great respect for this decadent scholar of his own generation.
While Shibusawa wrote several essays on Hijikata’s performances and helped his ideas of butoh
to disseminate, Hijikata also learned considerably from Shibusawa’s works. On one occasion, Hiji-
kata grandly acknowledged this by adding the epigram “À la maison de Civeçawa [Shibusawa]” to
the poster of his performance Rose-Colored Dance (1965). Shibusawa, on the other hand, wrote: “I
cannot reflect upon the 1960s without thinking about Hijikata Tatsumi” (“On Hijikata Tatsumi
and ankoku butoh” 土方巽と暗黒舞踏派について, 1976, Complete Works 14:431).1 It could be
said that during the 1960s, their visions were intertwined, and to some extent, evolved in tandem.
This chapter aims to shed a light on how several aspects of Shibusawa’s draconian (the adjective
he used to sum up the vast scope of his interest, from the Chinese character “dragon” in his name)
hemisphere might have influenced Hijikata’s practice of butoh, and how Shibusawa perceived
Hijikata’s performances. Special attention will be paid to Shibusawa’s view on human body as
objet, the idea he nurtured through his studies on surrealist art.
Mutual interest
Shibusawa Tatsuhiko was born to Takeshi, a bank clerk, and Setsuko, his wife. Although related
to Shibusawa Eiichi, a banking tycoon sometimes dubbed “the father of Japanese capitalism,”
his immediate family led a modest life. In fact, it is not hard to imagine that Tatsuhiko was under
hefty pressure when his father suddenly passed away in 1955, making him head of the house, with
his mother and three younger sisters to care for. At the time he was 27 years old and had two
volumes of translated books published in his name: Ōmatabiraki 大胯びらき, or Jean Cocteau’s
Le Grand Écart, and a collection of short stories by Sade, entitled Koi no kakehiki 恋の駈引 (The
Bargain of Love).
By the summer of 1959, he was gaining significant attention as the translator of works by Sade
and several other French authors. He was also beginning to contribute book reviews and critical
essays to different magazines, while building networks with contemporary literary figures, most
71
Robert Ono
notably novelist Mishima Yukio (1925–1970). It was August of this year that, according to his first
wife Yagawa Sumiko (1930–2002), he met Hijikata Tatsumi for the first time.2 Although the details
of their encounter are not clear, it is not hard to imagine that Hijikata, who would perform Saint
Marquis (Sei-Kōshaku) in the following year, was already well acquainted with Shibusawa’s works.
Perhaps in a more official sense, their professional relationship began in July 1960, at the per-
formance of “Hijikata Tatsumi Dance Experience.”3 After the performance, Mishima took Shi-
busawa backstage and introduced him to Hijikata. As if this formality greenlit their professional
correspondence, we can promptly see Shibusawa’s name on the pamphlet of the next “Dance
Experience” that took place in October. Here, Shibusawa contributed a small article entitled
“Avant-garde and Scandal” 前衛とスキャンダル.
Solitude is power, said Saint Marquis. This is such a noble paradox, that in today’s world,
it is solely reserved for artists.
Complete Works 2:357
The last sentence of the article, quoted above, should definitely have flattered Hijikata. Shibusawa,
who has been his guide to the world of Sade, is now making analogies between him and the
Marquis. Was this pure praise? Or was there calculation involved?
We must bear in mind that Shibusawa was on the verge of entering a legal battle with the
Japanese government, which was seeking to ban his translation of Sade’s Histoire de Juliette, ou les
Prospérités du vice. In April 1960, the police raided Gendai Shichō-sha, the publisher, and confis-
cated 162 copies of the novel’s second volume. In January 1961, Shibusawa would be sued for
distribution of obscene objects, which is a violation of Article 175 of the Japanese Penal Code.4
Given such circumstances, we are able to see another reason why he may have compared
Hijikata to Sade. Shibusawa describes Hijikata as an artist who engages reality in a scandalous and
terrorizing manner, a definition that almost exactly mirrors the ideal he saw in great works of lit-
erature. In an essay entitled “Dark Humor, or Literary Terror” 暗黒のユーモアあるいは文学
的テロル, he claims that the work of art should be made of “chaos and terror, which arise from
the destruction of the ancien regime” (Complete Works 1:110).5 In a way, therefore, while advocating
Hijikata’s scandalous performance on the surface, Shibusawa was simultaneously advocating the
works of Sade and his own role as the translator of decadent literature.
But this does not mean Shibusawa’s essay was written in a selfish manner, nor that it fails to
capture the essence of Hijikata’s performance. Quite on the contrary, as Bruce Baird states, it
seems to demonstrate the deepest understanding of Hijikata’s butoh, especially when compared
with other essays contributed to the pamphlet:
Ironically, the one essay on the program not specifically dealing with synthesis, Shibusa-
wa’s “Avant-garde and Scandal,” seems the most prescient, given the form that Hijikata’s
synthetic arts were to take.
Baird 2012, 61
In the following year, Shibusawa wrote two more essays concerning Hijikata and his buyō.6 The
first essay, “Hijikata Tatsumi: Burnt Offering Dancer” 燔祭の舞踊家・土方巽 (Complete Works,
2:413–414), which was once more written for the pamphlet of the “Dance Experience” gather-
ing in November 1961, is a collection of aphorisms that makes comparisons between Hijikata and
various figures of the past, such as emperor Caracalla, a Byzantine theologian, an Italian tyrant,
and Joséphin Péladan, an occultist poet. Here we see that Shibusawa has released Hijikata from
the framework of Sade and started to critique his performance from a wider scope.
72
À la maison de Shibusawa
The second essay written in 1961, “The Caged Eros” 檻のなかのエロス (Complete Works,
2:309–315), was the first occasion for Shibusawa to introduce Hijikata to the wider public. The
essay was contributed to the magazine TV Drama, which had a national circulation. Here Shibu-
sawa shares his dialogue between Mishima and Hijikata about how modern technology relates to
the human body. This article perhaps had a significant impact on increasing Hijikata’s celebrity,
but what is more important here is that Shibusawa discusses Hijikata in the context of eroticism,
as defined by the French poet Robert Desnos and philosopher Georges Bataille. Shibusawa, who
in 1958 translated Desnos’ De l’erotisme, and will in 1973 translate Bataille’s L’Erotisme, acknowl-
edged himself as an expert on this matter. Therefore, to evaluate Hijikata as an embodiment of
eroticism was, for Shibusawa, an utmost compliment.
Let us not forget that Shibusawa was still a novice critic. Sade and concepts such as scandal,
terror, and eroticism covered a big portion of themes he had at his disposal, and he manipulated
them all to theorize the performance of his dancing comrade. For Shibusawa, who was working
vigorously to build up his reputation as a critic, Hijikata was an excellent point to start. And Hiji-
kata too, like Shibusawa, had only began his career. He surely benefitted from a critic who could
advertise his endeavors and set him up in a certain position within the contemporary art scene.
Perhaps it was a token of appreciation, then, that Hijikata gave Shibusawa a special place in
his work Rose-Colored Dance (1965). On its poster, designed by Yokoo Tadanori (born 1936), the
imagery of several artists that were important to Hijikata was incorporated in a collage-like man-
ner: Nakanishi Natsuyuki (1935–2016), Kanō Mitsuo (born 1933), Yokoo himself, and finally,
Shibusawa. Clearly Shibusawa is in a place of his own; not only is Shibusawa’s portrait inserted
independently in the top-left hand corner, but the subtitle of the performance, which is displayed
in large print (even larger than the main title) across the poster, reads À la maison de Civeçawa
(Shibusawa). One might even suspect that the whole performance is dedicated to this sanctified
patron.7
Retrospectively, in “On Hijikata Tatsumi” 土方巽について (1968), Shibusawa shares his
thought on the subtitle of this performance:
Perhaps some would find it odd that the title of the performance held in 1965 was À
la maison de Civeçawa. This is pretty much in the same vein with Proust’s À la maison de
Swann8. We were so close for a while back then, and I was always welcomed at Asbestos
Hall in Meguro where they practiced.
Shibusawa’s home at Kamakura had many visitors: artists, critics, writers, and performers, includ-
ing names such as Iwaya Kunio (born 1943), Matsuyama Shuntarō (1930–2014), Tanemura Sue-
hiro (1933–2004), Katō Ikuya (1929–2015), and of course, Hijikata. The phrase “maison de
Shibusawa” crystalizes the nights they spent together discussing vigorously about art and philoso-
phy of all time and space.9 It could be said that Hijikata’s Rose-Colored Dance was in part, therefore,
designed to commemorate their friendship and mutual trust.
The body as objet

In the 1961 essay “Begone With the Ethics of Productivity” 生産性の倫理をぶちこわせ,
Shibusawa focuses on the concept of objet:
Incidentally, the surrealist works of art that are called objet are an attempt to restore the
alienated beauty of the objects themselves by returning the tools of production – which
73
Robert Ono
assert their existence t the center of capitalist society – to their original state of purpose-
lessness, separate from all necessities of life.
Complete Works, 2:342
For Shibusawa, who himself was in the midst of the struggle against modern, capitalist values, objet
was definitely a hopeful concept. And it seems Shibusawa believed that Hijikata had an ability to
free the human spirit from bodily imprisonment.
Let us take a look at his essay “She Fears a Negative Response” 彼女は虚無の返事を怖
れる, which was published in Anma あんま, a small volume printed by Dance Experience to
commemorate the eighth anniversary of Hijikata’s butoh. Here Shibusawa laments how human
beings are forever trapped in their bodies. This means eros, the very source of eroticism, is also
unable to leave the cage of flesh. However, Shibusawa thinks this may be altered if the concept
of the body could be substituted with that of a doll.
Wax dolls, paper dolls, marionettes, realistic dolls, mechanical dolls . . . these dolls, with
their rigid forms, awkward limbs, and still eyes of glass, exist on the other end of rhyth-
mical dance, and serve as mystical substitutes for the human body. From them arises a dif-
ferent sort of eroticism, an eroticism of discontinuity, rather than rhythmical movements.
Complete Works 3:360–361
And Shibusawa claims that this analogy of human body as objet, or doll, makes perfect sense
when he sees Hijikata dance:
Perhaps with painstaking effort, the human body could be transformed into something
closer to a doll. I dearly love Mr. Hijikata Tatsumi’s performance that is full of spas-
modic, painful, and dangerous moments, which overcome the impossibility of unleash-
ing eros from the body.
To give his argument some concreteness, Shibusawa mentions Hans Bellmer (1902–1975), a
German painter, photographer, and doll maker, who worked closely with surrealists in Paris.10
According to Tanaka (2008), in the 1960s, Bellmer was introduced to Japan as the inventor of
the ball-joint doll by critics such as Shibusawa and Takiguchi Shūzō, and therefore he has had a
bigger impact on the Japanese public than in the West, where he is not considered a doll maker
per se. Yotsuya Shimon (born 1944), arguably the most celebrated doll maker in Japan, for exam-
ple, relinquished his style once he read Shibusawa’s essay on Bellmer published in 1965 in the
magazine Shin Fujin 新婦人.
The essay entitled “The Women’s Kingdom” 女の王国, discusses Bellmer along with the
painter Paul Delvaux. Shibusawa states that Bellmer is obsessed with the human body, as is appar-
ent from the dolls he produces:
The doll, which twitches spasmodically, is usually naked. Sometime it wears panties,
stockings, socks, or shoes. The crudeness of its immature eroticism!
Note the adjective “spasmodic” 痙攣的 being used for both Hijikata and Bellmer’s dolls. For
Shibusawa, the two had a lot in common: the severed body, the body without meaning, and the
body as objet. As Fujii (2014) claims, during this period Shibusawa was not only fascinated by
74
Figure 6.1 Shibusawa in his study. The replica of Bellmer’s doll, described above, is visible in the back.
Photograph by Ishiguro Kenji. © Ishiguro Kenji.
other works with similar themes, such as the novel L’Ève future, by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and
the short story “One Arm,” by Kawabata Yasunari, but he even wrote a story of a similar nature
himself, entitled “Doll Mound” 人形塚 (1962). Hijikata was to add yet another aspect to Shibu-
sawa’s pygmalionic universe through his performance.
Finally, perhaps Hijikata’s significance for Shibusawa is best demonstrated in his essay “The
Danger Within the Body” 肉体のなかの危機, published in July 1968 in the magazine Tenbo 展
望. Here, Hijikata and his dance are neatly aligned with many of the themes Shibusawa cherished:
The objet of the surrealists strips purposiveness from objects and tools made in the
service of goals, customs, and the everyday, and returns them to a state separate from
all daily necessities. The beauty that was alienated from these objects is thus restored.
Likewise, the body in Hijikata’s dance aims to peel off the phony purposiveness that
clings to our bodies and expose their alienated beauty under the bright sun. . . . And
this is where the body in Hijikata’s dance starts to become erotic. The body stripped
of purposiveness, like the fetish of primitive man, charges eros into its void. The same
mechanism applies to the human body. By shedding its customary purposiveness, the
body may charge eros into its own empty space.
Conclusion
Perhaps Shibusawa’s vast scope of interest may be summarized with a single word: heterodoxy.
Throughout his career, he wrote tirelessly on demons, black magic, alchemy, hermaphrodites,
Rosicrucianism, conspirators, and poisoners. Shibusawa, however, did not live in an ivory tower;
he had to grapple with the modern, capitalist society as a translator and advocate of decadence.
75
Robert Ono
Naturally, he needed an ally, preferably a contemporary, real-life artist, to whom he could entrust
his views toward the world; and Hijikata fitted the profile perfectly.
During the 1970s and 1980s, as Hijikata began exploring his career off stage, Shibusawa wrote
considerably less about him. And when he did, it was more about his memory of Hijikata, rather
than the actuality of Hijikata’s recent activities. In “On Hijikata Tatsumi and ankoku butoh,” Shi-
busawa claims that during the 1960s, he had served Hijikata as a “mastermind and a consultant,”
a “loyal critic,” and a “strategic agitator” (Complete Works 14:431).
Through the process of critiquing and thus encouraging performances of Hijikata, Shibusawa
was able to re-evaluate and reinforce his views towards concepts such as body, eroticism, dolls,
and objet, and this in turn very likely affected Hijikata’s process of creation. Their interest was
mutual, and they both gained significantly from the relationship. The bottom line is, they were
comrades in arms.
When Hijikata died in January 1986, it was Shibusawa who served as the master of ceremony
at his funeral. In his eulogy Shibusawa explains his relationship with Hijikata in a personal tone,
substantiating their friendship straightforwardly:
Back then, around 1960, Hijikata Tatsumi and I were both in our early thirties. I think
we influenced each other professionally.
A year and a half later, in August 1987, Shibusawa died from a rupture of carotid artery aneurysm.
The two, who were born the same year, and even shared a phonetic value in their names, left this
world in rapid succession, as if in a pas de deux.
Notes
1 All citations from Shibusawa (1993–1995) will be referenced in this manner, with the volume number
followed by page number.
2 Yagawa recounts her memory of this day in Inata (2008).
3 Shibusawa has written, on several occasions, that this was the night he met Hijikata for the first
time. He never mentions Hijikata visiting him in the previous year. Perhaps this “confusion” was a
deliberate one, since it would obviously be more dramatic to include Mishima on the sight of their
encounter.
4 The course of the trial, which continued until October 1961, is well documented in Supplementary
Vol. 2 of Complete Works. Although Shibusawa lost the case and was ordered to pay the fine (of a mere
70,000 yen), all in all it boosted Shibusawa’s publicity. The case itself, without a doubt, had a significant
impact on the issue of freedom of expression in Japan.
5 Baird (2015) points out that Hijikata himself once called his performance “terror dance.”
6 Shibusawa almost always uses the term buyō instead of butoh. In the essay “On Hijikata Tatsumi”
(土方巽について, Complete Works 20: 459–466), he claims that during their conversation, Hijikata
always used the former.
7 Baird offers a detailed analysis of the poster in Chapter 3 of Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh (2012).
8 The section of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is, of course, “Du cōté de chez Swann.” However, since
the phrase is commonly translated into Japanese as “To Swann’s House” スワン家の方へ, it would
become “À la maison de Swann” when re-translated into French. Katō Ikuya recalls Hijikata saying
dreamily, “look, Proust is walking along the edge of hibachi stove,” while having a conversation at Asbes-
tos Hall (2001, 31).
9 Tanemura Suehiro’s collection of essays (2003) dedicated to Shibusawa is aptly titled Tea at Five at Shibu-
sawa’s House 澁澤さん家で午後五時にお茶を.
10 The title of the essay, “She Fears a Negative Response,” is taken from a poem composed by Paul Éluard,
which accompanied his dolls in the work Les Jeux de la Poupée (1944).
76
Works cited
———. 2015. “Butō: The Birth and Maturation of a New Global Art Form,” in East Asia in the World: An
Introduction, edited by Anne Prescott, 243–260. New York: Routledge.
Fujii Takashi 藤井貴志. 2014. “‘Bachelor Machines’ and the Representations of ‘Malformed Bodies’: On
the Contemporaneity of Tanin no Kao, Kataude and Ningyō Zuka” <独身者の機械>と<異形の身体>
表象: 「他人の顔」「片腕」「人形塚」の同時代性. Modern Japanese Literary Studies 91: 95–110.
Inata Naomi 稲田奈緒美. 2008. Zetsugo no Shintai 絶後の身体. Tokyo: Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai.
Katō Ikuya 加藤郁乎. 2001. Kōhō Kenbunroku 後方見聞録. Tokyo: Gakushū Kenkyūsha.
Shibusawa Tatsuhiko 澁澤龍彦. 1993–1995. Shibusawa Tatsuhiko Zenshō 澁澤龍彦全集. Tokyo: Kawade
Shobō Shinsha, 24 vols.
Tanaka Keiko 田中圭子. 2008. “The Development of Ball-Jointed Dolls in Japan” 日本における球体関
節人形の系譜. Shakai Kagaku 80: 43–58.
Tanemura Suehiro 種村季弘. 2003. Shibusawa San-Chi de Gogo Goji ni Ocha wo 澁澤さん家で午後五時
にお茶を. Tokyo: Gakushū Kenkyūsha.
77
7
HIJIKATA TATSUMI
Burnt offering dancer
The Roman emperor Caracalla was stabbed to death by an assassin, while he was urinating by
the roadside during his pilgrimage to the lunar temple. The Japanese dancer Hijikata Tatsumi
discovers in the figure of the back of a urinating man, the form of human crisis, at the dawn of
the latter half of the twentieth century.
The Byzantine theologists argued interminably under the stars to determine the sex of angels.
The Japanese dancer Hijikata Tatsumi choreographs interminably under the darkness of night to
bestow sex upon all things in nature. What a penance!
Medieval Italian tyrants cut off the members of boys at noon on brightly sunny days, so the
voices of boy sopranos could be saved. The Japanese dancer Hijikata Tatsumi cuts off the poi-
sonous members of retired choreographers, in order to bring about the miracle of rejuvenation
in his dance. And he does this in the tragic daylight cast by footlights.
In the twilight of Latin decadence, Sar Joséphin Péladan, the poet-metaphysician, fantasized
about androgens who could realize the magical harmony between the sexes. The Japanese dancer
Hijikata Tatsumi creates the physical notion of an androgen, who is devoid of all ordinariness, in
order to capture the possibilities of dance as criminal fiction.
Thus are the dialectics of Hijikata’s choreography. All of his dances are his experience, and are
burnt offerings to the earth. Do not picture a stage.
Work cited
Shibusawa Tatsuhiko. 1993. “Hansai no buyōka.” First published in the program for the Hijikata Tatsumi
DANCE EXPERIENCE no kai, Daiichi Seimei Hall, September 3, 1961. Reprinted as “Hansai no
buyōka – Hijikata Tatsumi” in Iwaya Kunio et al. eds. Shibusawa Tatsuhiko Zenshū, Kawade Shobō Shin-
sha, vol. 2: 413–414.
78
8
A CERTAIN KIND OF ENERGY
Dancing modern anxiety
Hijikata Tatsumi is a dancer. He calls himself a dancer of ankoku buyō.1 After hosting three dance recit-
als in Daiichi Seimei Hall, another one in Sōgetsu Hall, and having organized the “Leda Association”
three years ago, which was a mysterious nocturnal gathering, he has already become a legendary figure.
Nobody knows what kind of life he led after he left his native region of Tohoku to live in
devastated post-war Tokyo until he became a legendary avant-garde dancer. Being a taciturn
man, he does not talk much about his past. From what I have overheard, his father, a well-known
drinker, kept a soba joint in a town in Akita.
Hijikata Tatsumi has a different face each time I see him. That makes me wonder. One day he
looks like Yul Brynner with his clean-shaven head. The next day he is covered in a long beard,
with the complexion of an Indian yogi.
Every time we visit his studio in Meguro, the young members of the ankoku buyō circle wel-
come us politely. The physical training they endure is awe-inspiring. “We are staking our lives
on this! Our lives!” he yells.
A naked man turned upside down on the stage with his back rounded and his limbs curled.
This is where Hijikata’s dance begins. It makes one think of a meditation in the womb. He then
gets to his feet and starts walking awkwardly, as if he suffers from polio.
I believe that the dance of Hijikata, which established two fundamental forms, the expression of
anxiety and the expression of danger, is the most cutting-edge in the world. Merce Cunningham
should be so lucky as to drink a broth made from his nail-clippings and toe jam. Yes, I really mean it.
“Take a burglar to a café during the day, and feed him some cake. He will cry,” Hijikata says
with a serious face. His strange ideas, often full of unique pathos, make us laugh out loud. To him,
however, they are absolute truths. At the bottom of his avant-garde dance flows Japanese sorrow.
This summer, Hijikata ran a shaved ice stand in front of the Meguro Immovable Wisdom
King Temple (Fudō-myōō). When I visited him at the studio, I was served shaved ice with rice-
flour dumplings, which cost sixty yen. “I like those hand-operated ice shaving machines,” I said.
To this he replied sadly, “They are all electric nowadays. I can’t find any hand-operated ones.”
Note
1 Editor’s note: ankoku buyō is literally “darkness dance.” Later this will be changed to ankoku butoh using
the word for Western social dances such as the waltz.
79
Shibusawa Tatsuhiko
Work cited
Shibusawa Tatsuhiko. 1995. “Gendai no fuan wo odoru.” First published in: Hōseki 1, no. 2
(November 1965): 161–166. Reprinted in Iwaya Kunio et al. eds. Shibusawa Tatsuhiko Zenshū.
Kawade Shobō Shinsha, vol. suppl. 1, 262–263.
80
9
BUTOH AND TABOO
Gunji Masakatsu (translated by Jane Traynor)
The horror of white

Why is it that that when one sees the white-painted limbs of ankoku butoh troupes, one gets the
feeling that one has been imprisoned within walls? You might think it is the color of punishment
for the sin of treachery. It goes without saying that such whiteness is not clear and bright. The
black of darkness is submerged in the depths of those naked bodies, and they are abnormally
enveloped with the scent of repression.
Originally, we can say white has two meanings: on the one hand white represents a world with
no color whatsoever and is a sign of the world of the dead; on the other hand it is a sign of the
world of the living and denotes the white light of the sun.
The white face and body paint of the world of the ankoku butoh troupes gives one the strong
impression that they are covered with white mud. I think it is possible that it brings to mind a
mental image that has affinities with the image of living things covered with the ashes of death.
It is likely that since the beginning, there has been an association between the color white and
the bleached bones of the dead.
It is not unreasonable for those who have seen Ohno Kazuo’s butoh, in which he wears a thin,
white robe, to see the dance of a skeleton. However, his butoh does not have an uncanny muddied
darkness. Rather, viewers feel only the passing of a serene, clean, white wind. A calm wonderful
brightness that changes bad fortune to auspiciousness produces a world of stirring white light.
We know without a doubt that the world is not one that has been plastered over with white, but
rather he has [or we have] escaped into a world of a god playing with the white light.
In the traditional dance of this country, wearing a white robe is one of the conventions. This robe
is called an omigoromo (small mourning robe). It can also be called a mourning robe, and it is worn
by mediums in order to become possessed by a god. By wearing white cloth they satisfy one of the
requirements for being possessed by a god. This is one of the reasons why white clothes are thought to
be related to divinity. Originally the long robe (nagaginu or chōken) and the dance robe (maiginu) of noh
were white, and the reason why they (along with the feather robe of the female deity [miko] in the leg-
end of Hagoromo) are thought of as related to the legend of the swan lies in the use of the white color.
In the “white mountain rite” (shirayama gyōji) of the flower festival in the former Mikawa
province, portable shrines pass through buildings adorned with white emblems, and it is said that
by passing through the white world, humans are reborn, but if we look at this from a different
81
Gunji Masakatsu
perspective, while still living, they experience the colorless world of the avidya (Buddhist concept
of ignorance) of death. The shirayama (white mountain) worship was established on the basis of
the image of a snowy mountain, however, I think that there can be meaning drawn from the idea
of something being “covered,” as when one says that the mountain is covered in snow. The color
of snow is the color of the death of the season, which has been covered by natural ashes of the
dead. Perhaps we see this as divine, because we are suppressing a fear of the cold colors of death.
In this world, “shirako” (white child) is the common name for fish sperm sac (milt), however,
humans born covered with that sperm are also called shirako. In the Wakan sansaizue (Illustrated
Sino-Japanese Encyclopedia) which quotes the Wuzazu (a late Ming, 1602, encyclopedia), it says,
People: there are people born with white hair. They are close to supernatural beings.
There was a small child in the first year of Yongning of the Jin dynasty. Even though
he is only eight years old, his hair and body were all white and he did divination well.
Also, in Min (present day Fujian), there was a person who only had white hair, not even
a single strand was black. Both eyes were dim and he could not see anything at all.
In the Wakan sansaizue it says to call these shiroko. Such people were not just found in China, but
also in Japan. In the same book it says,
When I think about it now: from time to time there are shiroko; they are completely
white. Only the hair on their heads is light red and thin. There are times when both
the mother and the child are shiroko, I saw this.1
The people who are colloquially called shirako (white child) in Japan became misemono (objects
for show, but also public spectacle or freak show). In Asakura Musei’s Research on Misemono there
were instances of shirako misemono in 1819, 1835, 1838, and 1853. In the second month of 1819,
in Ōsu, Nagoya, there was exhibition (with an accompanying karmic tale) of a shirako that was
said to have been born from an ama (female diver) and a shōjō (mythical Japanese sea spirit with
red hair) who was billed as “Matsuura Fukujusai, the Great Shōjō all the way from Hizen” and
its hair was believed to be entirely reddish-brown. The Great Shōjō danced a shōjō dance based
on the shirako dance due to his coloration.
When people saw that freak, they believed it would bring health and longevity, which fanned
the flames of its popularity.2 In short, the people of the past had the idea that invalids were gods
of longevity. Regarded as supernatural beings (marebito) who were different from ordinary peo-
ple, they were welcomed as visitors from the land of eternity. These freaks fell in status due to
science and medical theories. It is for this reason that I saw the ankoku butoh of today as possibly
an upright posture which adds enmity to that white.
It seems that it can be also said that changing the taboo of the white face and body paint
into enmity reminded us of a suspicious holy boundary. There is malice in whiteness. In remote
areas, there is a practice called shirabito (white people) in which the faces of new-born children
are covered in a white cloth and or wet white paper to abort them. It seems that they enshrine
the spirits of the children in the practice of shirabito kokumi during the exorcism and purification
rite (oharai) in June. This can be found in Ueda Akinari’s Tandai shoshin roku.
When the white-painted corpse bodies of butoh crouch, there is an association with returning
to the womb. In Okinawa, childbirth is called shirabujō (white impurity). Because menstruation
is called akafujō (red impurity), it suggests white blood. When humans were born, there were red
children and white children. Let us say that the white children of butoh are the form of a world
of darkness which is a taboo in the real world and must be destroyed.
82
Butoh and taboo
The 800 Buddhist nuns of Wakasa have a legend which says eating the meat of a mermaid
guarantees a long life; however, the 800 likely also refers to having lived for 800 years. However,
originally they were called “white nuns,” and they propagated the shirayama (white mountain)
belief. There is text called o-shira saimon chanted by the mediums in Tohoku and if you remove
the honorific “o” in the o-shira saimon, it becomes shira saimon. It tells the origin of the silkworm
god. However, apparently it is said that this story must be related to the shirakami (white god)
of shirayama (white mountain). The transparent-white gems which are the eggs of a silkworm
cocoon must also have been shirako. In the tale of the horse and the princess, The Tale of the Mar-
riage of the Horse and the Daughter (Bajō kon-in tan), there is the tale of the birth of an abnormal
child, namely the birth of the silkworm god.
The white paint of ankoku butoh causes one to think of a fallen god. The Wakan sansaizue
quote “Both eyes were dim and he could not see anything at all” could be recognized as indicat-
ing something like a cataract; however, instead, it could be that in the place where this world is
not visible, one confirms the existence of darkness. It seems that the whiteness demonstrates the
state of light closed off on the other side.
On the topic of existence

In figures of butoh dancers, which rebel against prior dance forms, there is an ugliness which is
opposed to refinement. Where did the postures that oppose the beauty of dance, such as bowed-
legs, bent spines, clenched hands and feet, first originate? Is there a relationship between the roots
of butoh and whether you (we) will approve of the existence of butoh? If we do not recognize
this, butoh cannot exist. However, the conditions for accepting the beauty in such postures, in
fact, lie in the traditional theater of kabuki. Boar necks (ikubi)3 and hunched backs, as Tsubōchi
Shōyō has already explained, are linked to the beauty of cruelty and obscenity and form the
basis for the beauty of late Edo kabuki. That is likely the reason why Westerners often refer to
ankoku butoh as kabuki. The rediscovery of Japan by butoh (which is established by transgressing
the taboos of dance) lies here. This is because the thing which butoh arrived at, having broken
through the Japanese climate, was the posture of the fetus, which has become the posture of
malice in modern society. In addition, Shōyō (in Reminiscing about kabuki plays I saw in childhood)
confirms the existence of a beauty of irrationality and artificiality by recognizing the sadism
and masochism and acknowledging the eroticism and violence in late Edo kabuki (Tsubouchi
1920b). And to the extent that such passion is acknowledged, butoh, of course, becomes the
confirmation of such.
Butoh can be accepted as having been established on the breaking of taboos of Western dance
aesthetics, because it unknowingly received and passed along the transmission of folk beauty in
traditional kabuki. Or rather, it is perhaps more correct to say that butoh desecrated kabuki.
In kabuki, there is a congratulatory scene called danmari (pantomime in the dark), in which
the setting and technique have been formalized. In the dark, the actors who are unable to see
each other make gestures of searching for each other. That space is one of darkness, not that of a
typical space. There is only “darkness.” In kagura, there is a number in which the dancer gropes
around in the eternal darkness saying “dark, dark.” It evokes a world of darkness which existed
before the Sun Goddess Amaterasu appeared. This raises the question, “What is space?” On the
noh stage, space appears when the dancer revolves (mawaru). The meaning of mawaru can be
ascertained in the term mau (to dance).
On the stage of this country’s performing arts, it is not that there is space which the per-
former dances in, rather space appears through the revolving (mawaru) of the actors. Even if the
performer has just one mat, like in kagura, they lay it out and it is the dancing which creates the
83
Gunji Masakatsu
space. This is called goza no mai. Performers make the space round, and dance holding it in their
hands. This is how metaphors work. One can see the whole world on the skin of a taiko drum.
The worldview of Indian Hinduism is similar to this one-mat-stage in that in the Mandala,
the central lotus pedestal occupies the position of the center of the universe. That is to say, is it
not the case that from the beginning, butoh has been no more than the top of a lotus pedestal or
the space on the bottom of a foot?
Butoh is the wrath of the universe. At times it is sad, as times it is kind, at times it is eerie,
at times it is fearful and anxious, and when that space is transformed into the universe, it towers
above everything, but when the performer refuses to shoulder that space, and when the space
becomes unsettled, the stage becomes simply a place and butoh loses its world.
Notes
1 Editor’s note: We have excised four lines of the quotation that are not germane to the argument about
whiteness.
2 Editor’s note: Andrew Markus presents a more pessimistic view of such spectacles, in which the karmic
story is merely an excuse for the display of the freak. See his “The Carnival of Edo: Misemono Spectacles
from Contemporary Accounts,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 45, no. 2 (1985): 529–530.
3 Editor’s note: “Boar neck” (ikubi) refers to pushing the neck forward and extending the head out. Gunji
does not cite a source here for Shōyō’s observation about boar necks and the beauty of late kabuki,
but Shōyō writes about this issue in Tsubouchi, 1920a, p. 113–116. Shōyō’s understanding of such
physical features as boar necks and hunched backs is very different from Gunji’s because he approaches
the issue from various specific angles such as stage acting techniques, and the physical aging of female
impersonators.
Translated from
Gunji Masakatsu. 1985. “Butoh to kinki (Butoh and taboo).” Gendaishi techō 28, no. 6 (May): 86–89.
Works cited
Tsubōchi Shōyō. 1920a. Shibai-e to Toyokuni oyobi sono monka (Scenes from kabuki plays by Toyokuni and
his disciples). Shunyōdō.
______. 1920b. Shōnenji ni mita kabuki no tsuioku (Reminiscing about kabuki plays I saw in childhood).
Nihon engei shuppanbu.
84
10
“INSERTING THE HIP/S” AND
“LOWERING THE HIP/S”1
EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 1,
“THAT WHICH IS NANBA-LIKE”
FROM WHAT ARE TRADITIONAL
ARTS? A DIALOGUE FOR
CRITICISM AND CREATION
Takechi Tetsuji and Tomioka Taeko
(translated and with an introductory essay by Maki Isaka)
TAKECHI: In order for the Japanese – rather than Westerners – to provide a new cultural value
in the present, it’s critical to push to the extreme thinking through things in a nanba-like
manner. That is, in a manner of rice-cropping agriculture in paddies, a thinking style that is
available to nobody other than the Japanese. We have to be based on this nanba-like thinking
style, or it’s impossible for a contemporary art to emerge, isn’t it? It was Hijikata Tatsumi who
did that to a certain extent, you see. And then, rather than Hijikata himself, what’s called
ankoku butoh has been appreciated overseas to some degree.
TOMIOKA: That’s why it has been, isn’t it?
TAKECHI: That’s the reason, I think. It was, after all, coming from the fact that Hijikata himself
started by thinking about the essence of rice-cropping agriculture in paddies, at least abstrac-
tively. That certainly appealed [to audiences overseas], I think.
Yet, I can also say, as a critic, that Hijikata’s way of doing it was wrong in terms of methodology.
But it’s not that everything about it was wrong, you see. He was partially wrong, and yet, in terms
of orientation, it is really appropriate that he thought that the Japanese folk must do a dance
that had arisen from muddy paddies. That fits the purpose of probing the origins of an ethnic
tradition, or ethnic culture, I think.
TOMIOKA: At least he took that as his starting point, didn’t he?

TAKECHI: That’s the only method by which one can generate a global contemporary art, you see.
85
So there might be some elements in kabuki as well that could produce such a global art, but
in order to do so, you have to trace back traditions not within kabuki itself but well back beyond
that. That path would go back to noh, via kyōgen, and then, through noh, to martial arts, to
entertainment arts, and return to rice-cropping agriculture in paddies. If you follow this line to
the end, there can be something you can boast of to the world as a contemporary art. In short,
through competition with the world, that is.
In a way, Japan didn’t manage to have a renaissance, you see. Instead, Japan used renais-
sance-like effects while not achieving a renaissance. That I think is the reason why noh and
kabuki are highly praised in the world nowadays.
TOMIOKA: I think Hijikata, too, started by returning to the point that was most native to him,
that is, the land where he was born. What you just said means that that which is native most
probably leads to that which is international, correct?
TAKECHI: I hear there’s no word, world-wide, for principles of the people, an -ism of the people
[folk].
TOMIOKA: Is that so?
TAKECHI: Only the Japanese people have that word, minzoku-shugi [folk-ism].
TOMIOKA: We are dealing with race, so you could say racism, though it sounds forced.
TAKECHI: But the word racism indicates discrimination.
TOMIOKA: Right, it’s used to indicate discrimination.
TAKECHI: [The meaning of the word, minzoku-shugi] might be somehow expressed by a word
like, say, racialism, though.
TOMIOKA: But if you praise a culture born out of the -ism of the people, or from the way of
living specific to the said people alone, if you praise a culture born out of things like that,
wouldn’t it become a self-centric-cultural thought, thought centering on one’s own culture?
TAKECHI: It’s not so much a self-centric-cultural thought. Rather, the current situation where
kabuki is being praised overseas, or noh is being praised, those situations indicate a situation
where nothing contemporary is being generated among the Japanese. Foreigners might get
stimulated by that [noh and kabuki] and might produce contemporary things, maybe. Most
probably, inside kabuki and noh are things that foreigners have never ever thought of. There-
fore, they can make a contemporary art [from them]. It wouldn’t work for the Japanese,
however, no matter how far back they go in noh and kabuki [alone]. What the Japanese
have to think, in order to produce contemporary arts, is Hijikata’s way of thinking, that is,
“I’m a peasant, so I’m gonna crawl up from muddy paddies.”
TOMIOKA: Does it mean that it won’t at all become a self-centric-cultural thought?
TAKECHI: It won’t, if you follow [that path].
TOMIOKA: Because you’d always have to go back to that point, I imagine.
TAKECHI: I think you ought to do it while always gazing at that very point of origin.
TOMIOKA: Though ideas of half-baked -isms of the people tend to fall into a self-centric thought,
don’t they?
TAKECHI: Like Japanese people who say “we’re ok, cos we’ve got noh and kabuki that stand
unrivaled in the world, cos foreigners are all imitating those, so we’re fine.”
TOMIOKA: Yes, then it would lead them to something like, say, “Japanese entertainment arts can’t
be understood anywhere else in the world, cos they are the best,” wouldn’t it?
TAKECHI: That would be a self-centric thought, yes, but that’s not the case [for what we’re talking
about]. Rather, it’s [as follows]. The origins of those traditions, of what’s been transmitted,
those origins partially lie in a culture associated with the spirituality of Zen, which in turn
can be traced back to the productive and subdued arts (haragei: “acquired artistic technique”
86
“Inserting the hip/s”
[gei] of guts [hara]) of peasants, who were accustomed to crouching in muddy paddies and
thinking deeply. We ought to think, by going back to that, and then to jump to contem-
porary times.
You can say that Hijikata did that, by grasping a certain clue. He and I were old friends since
we were young.
TOMIOKA: I also saw most of his stage productions.

TAKECHI: In terms of nanba culture, the technique of “inserting the hip,” which we were talking
about before, that’s a technique of walking, originally. [When walking in the nanba gait,]
unless you insert your hip, the entire left part of your body would go forward when your
left upper body and left leg move forward. And the right [half] would go forward when
the right leg moves forward. But then, you can’t really walk in that manner. That’s why
the people of Yamato2 culture would “insert the hip.” And then Hijikata adopted it, and his
version is thought to be none other than the true Japanese nanba, but it is a compromise in
a Tōhoku-region manner. His is “lowering the hip” and not “inserting the hip.”
TOMIOKA: Is that so?
TAKECHI: The shape becomes flat like this, doesn’t it. People think of it as “inserting the hip.”
But that’s an interpretation of Yamato culture in a Tōhoku manner. That figure is, in short,
a figure of riding a horse in a saddle. The shape when one is astride a horse, isn’t it.
TOMIOKA: He was from Akita [prefecture]. Coming from a place where there are deep paddies,
wasn’t he?
TAKECHI: But although Hijikata knew the touch of mud, had experience in pulling his legs out
of that, and whatnot, but when you scrutinize it, it’s not a “inserting-the-hip”-kind of ata-
vism that goes back to the ancestors, but the shape of horseback riding, the figure of riding
a saddled horse, you know. By nature, nanba-that-inserts-the-hip would emerge inevitably
from exclusive agriculture, coming from the wisdom of living with agriculture, the wisdom
of walking. However, if an equestrian people, or a nomadic people learn it later, the original
equestrian shape remains somewhere [in their version of nanba]. So the town of Kamakura is
round while Kyoto is square, so they say, and round towns are somehow equestrian, you see.
TOMIOKA: I thought, though, that Hijikata was quite conscious about nanba.
TAKECHI: You see, it was an adoption of Yamato-nanba culture. When it’s understood in the
Tōhoku manner, “inserting the hip” becomes “lowering the hip.”
TOMIOKA: That shocked the audiences who saw Hijikata’s dance at that time, including Mishima
[Yukio], didn’t it? Does it mean, then, they didn’t know nanba?
TAKECHI: That’s right, they didn’t know nanba itself. They didn’t know that there was a much
more refined nanba. And yet, Mishima sensed something. He felt keenly that in kendō [which
Mishima practiced] you have to be able to do tsugiashi [“succeeding steps”: a martial-art gait
related to nanba. With tsugiashi, when one leg moves, the other immediately follows it]. But
what everybody is mistaken now about Hijikata-like stuff lies in the difference between
“inserting the hip” and “lowering the hip.” “Lowering the hip” is the posture when you’re
riding a horse. If you understand that by associating it with agricultural production, you’ll
probably end up with that shape [lowering the hip], I think. So it differs from the shape of
the people engaged in the true rice-cropping agriculture in paddies, I think.
TOMIOKA: But when I talked with Hijikata, he didn’t talk about the hips. When one pulls one’s
totally worn-out legs from the paddies, and places them on firm ground, the joints are
completely exhausted and don’t move, he said. So much so that one’s legs and arms are like
poles, and one walks just like a pole. That’s what I heard from him.
87
TAKECHI: In a nutshell, there’s no action of “lowering one’s hip” in cultures originally born out
of rice-cropping agriculture in paddies. There is “inserting one’s hip,” though.
TOMIOKA: So while it went up north [from Yamato to the Tōhoku regions] . . .
TAKECHI: It altered, while it was being gradually accepted by the equestrian ethnic characteris-
tics. That’s what Hijikata was, I think, which is somewhat different from [the cases of] noh
and kyōgen in the basic sense. That’s why Hijikata’s feet got caught in rice paddies, right up
to his knees. And then straighten . . .
TOMIOKA: They won’t bend, just like straight poles. So he’d walk quickly just like that, so I heard.
There was a dance piece [or pieces] in which the arms were also like sticks, wasn’t there?
TAKECHI: There were some reactionary elements in it.
TOMIOKA: Is that so? So that wasn’t a perfect nanba, was it?
TAKECHI: Not a perfect nanba, no. If your ancestors are an equestrian people, and they encoun-
ter rice-cropping agriculture in paddies, and if they need to digest it, it [that nanba] must
have turned out like that, quite possibly. In the Kansai region [western part of Japanese
archipelago where the Yamato culture comes from], there are hardly any deep paddies, you
see. And the closer you come this way [the Eastern part of Japanese archipelago, includ-
ing Tokyo, beyond which lies the Tōhoku region], the less suitable the land becomes for
rice-cropping agriculture in paddies, essentially. And [Tōhoku] people made paddies out
of such soil, which inevitably results in muddy paddies [specific to the Tōhoku region].
There’s no way but to lower your hip, in order to stand straight in such muddy paddies,
it turned out.
Commentary on the Text: Takechi Tetsuji, the nanba gait,

and Japanese performing arts
Maki Isaka
The above excerpt is taken from the book titled What Are Traditional Arts?3 which in its entirety
discusses nanba as one of the defining characteristics of traditional Japanese performing arts.
Nanba (a.k.a. nanban) refers to a specific human locomotion, and the extract included here deals
with nanba that was practiced by Hijikata Tatsumi (1928–1986). The book takes the form of
a dialogue between theater director and critic Takechi Tetsuji (1912–1988) and poet/novelist/
critic Tomioka Taeko (b. 1935), but it is nearly entirely Takechi’s ideas that are explored in it, with
Tomioka assuming the role of an interviewer but also sometimes acting as a check to Takechi’s
assertions. Takechi’s primary claim in this book is that nanba is an integral part of traditional
Japanese performing arts. In this section, his argument extends into contemporary arts. That is,
he states that the butoh Hijikata initiated is a rare case for contemporary arts to use nanba, and
that this feature made butoh’s success as a global, contemporary art possible; yet he also states
that Hijikata’s nanba is not an authentic nanba but a variant. Takechi was one of the earliest
thinkers who introduced nanba into critical writings, along with dance critic Ashihara Eiryō
(1907–1981). Due to the weight of nanba in the text, some discussion of it is necessary for our
effective reading of the text.
According to the most popular and simple definition, nanba signifies the parallel gait: as the
right leg moves forward, the right hand moves forward simultaneously. (A minority hold the
opposite opinion that nanba refers to a diagonal gait.4) While his other texts on nanba also explore
non-agricultural activities (e.g., mining), in this particular excerpt, Takechi claims that the most
fundamental nanba, which provided Japanese performing arts with their basic principles and
postures, inevitably came from lives spent in the paddies in wet-rice agriculture. Rice-cropping
88
agriculture in paddies is the key here, for not only is it the base for sustained, continuous tension
that characterizes Japanese arts (9), but it is also the materialistic, physical condition that results in
the bodily technique of “inserting one’s hip” (29), which in turn defines the most fundamental
nanba. Noh and kyōgen retain this nanba. To be precise, they differ, says Takechi, with the nanba of
kyōgen being faithful to gestures of agricultural production, while that of noh has been refined as
abstract and symbolic, nonetheless the basics of kyōgen’s nanba and that of noh’s are the same (9).
According to Takechi, Hijikata’s nanba is a variant, marked by the vertical location of the hip
(“lowering the hip”), differentiated from the authentic nanba characterized by a certain angle
of the lower end of the spine (“inserting the hip”). Takechi connects this incongruity with two
conditions of the Tōhoku region where Hijikata came from: (1) field conditions unsuitable for
rice-cropping agriculture in paddies and (2) equestrian culture as a historical background. These
conditions, says Takechi, determined Hijikata’s version of nanba.
One may say that, according to Takechi, Hijikata’s relationship with nanba is analogous to that
of kabuki theater, albeit for different reasons. While I have no space here to detail his discussion
on the case of kabuki, Takechi states that its status as an ever-changing contemporary theater
caused kabuki to destroy nanba in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; in the pres-
ent excerpt, Takechi recognizes another set of factors that caused in a comparable manner an
alteration in Hijikata’s nanba. Differently put, butoh and kabuki display a shift in nanba, a kind of
change that never happened to noh and kyōgen. For the case of butoh, the land of the Tōhoku
region (northern part of Japanese archipelago), where Hijikata came from, was not ideal for
rice-cropping agriculture in paddies, as it was in the Kansai region (western part of Japanese
archipelago), and Tōhoku people had no choice but to create deep, muddy paddies specific to
the Tōhoku region. This, states Takechi, was responsible for the change in posture, from nanba’s
original “inserting one’s hip” posture to its variation: “lowering one’s hip.” In other words, “low-
ering the hip” is a somatic revision of “inserting the hip,” a revision that deeper and muddier
paddies required for human locomotion. Furthermore, an equestrian background in the Tōhoku
region further necessitated that Tōhoku people alter the posture of “inserting the hip” into that
of “lowering the hip” when they adapted nanba. In short, according to Takechi, the geographic
locus of the Tōhoku region and its equestrian cultural background in the past ended up affecting
the acceptance of nanba in that region and, eventually, adjusting its fundamental posture.
Takechi’s categorical and unambiguous demarcation between the “agricultural inserting-the-
hip/s” and the “equestrian lowering-the-hip/s” necessitates careful consideration, however. As
indicated in the editor’s note, the distinction between “inserting” and “lowering” one’s hip/s
is already cumbersome. Added to this is another can of worms, that is, the connection between
them and “rice-cropping agriculture in paddies” and “equestrian culture” respectively. My cur-
rent theory is as follows. First, on the level of language usage, the two phrases emphasize different
foci of attention: “inserting the hip/s” pays attentions to a certain angle of the lower end of the
spine and “lowering the hip/s” to the vertical location of the hip. Accordingly, it does not mean
that the lower end of the spine in the latter case does not have an angle. It might well be that the
difference between the two lies in a matter of degree in a literal sense (e.g., degree x for “inserting
the hip” as opposed to degree y for “lowering the hip”), and that there is no established consensus
how distant x and y must be to make the two distinctive from each other. If that is the case, it is
quite probable that the difference between x and y is big enough for Takechi to consider them
separate, while small enough for some others to regard them as roughly the same. Incidentally,
the alleged degree x of the lower end of the spine is to be achieved by “tucking the pelvis,” or,
from a different perspective or focus, by “straightening and sinking the lower part of the spine.”
There remain several points of caution for the reader. Nanba has recently become a widely-dis-
cussed topic chiefly – if not exclusively – in popular discourse, such as trade books, magazines,
89
blogs, TV programs, and whatnot. Due to its distinctively visible nature, nanba tends to be
explained (away) in a simple manner. That is to say, nanba is thought to have been the default gait
of the Japanese, making it a universal feature that all the Japanese possessed in common, before the
beginning of the Meiji era (1868–1912), when the fledgling Meiji government – with its colonial
agenda – modernized and westernized its subjects by correcting their nanba gait through military
and educational apparatuses. In this kind of narrative, nanba easily accommodates Orientalist and
reverse Orientalist discourses (e.g., nihonjin-ron, the theory of Japaneseness), which assert in one
way or another that nanba is a specific feature particular to the Japanese, be it bizarre, unique,
or superior. The above-mentioned narrative that nanba was instantly erased by the government’s
westernization-and-modernization-policy is suited to such narratives of particularism and essen-
tialism, whether Orientalist or reverse Orientalist.
On closer look, as a limited number of thinkers such as Takechi and Ashihara suggest, the
nanba gait involves much more nuanced and complex issues. First, nanba entails not so much
the limb combination alone as a holistic body operation including, but not limited to, the
torso that is not twisted. Second, the nanba gait appears broadly in Asian performing, martial,
ceremonial, and religious arts, as well as in Western sports and arts, such as on ancient Greek
vases and in fencing, boxing, basketball, ballet, and the like. It was thus never unique to pre-
modern Japan. Third, while it is certainly the case that the military and educational apparatuses
affected the bodily carriage of people in Japan, there is no scholarly agreement regarding the
said shift from premodern to modern locomotion. Suffice it to say that it did not happen in
a black-and-white manner, as it is usually said to have, but rather must have entailed multiple
kinds of ambiguity, phases, and variations of nanba (e.g., temporal overlaps, incongruity among
the Japanese, etc.).
The impression that Takechi was in line with reverse Orientalist essentialism (i.e., nihonjin-ron)
is substantial in the excerpt, and indeed, Takechi’s remarks are often cited in reverse Orientalist
discourse. The presence of the variation of nanba indicates, however, a much more complicated
situation than might first appear. This is because, while reverse Orientalist discourse posits nanba
as a universal feature for the Japanese as a whole, the occurrence of diverse nanba – including
such a variant lacking what is said to be the essential characteristic of an authentic nanba – simply
negates such a universalist claim presupposed in this particularism. What is more, Takechi and
Tomioka both mock such essentialists right in this excerpt. However, the fact that they both
seem to uncritically accept the existence of the “perfect nanba” of the Yamato culture and see
little problem with characterizing Hijikata’s variant as a mistake – and kabuki’s version as another
devastating diversion for that matter – may mean that they share some similar attitudes with the
very essentialists they mock.
Furthermore, it is noteworthy that Takechi’s reasoning for the diversity of nanba accords with
a performative logic of cultivation (shugyō): a training system for performing arts (and beyond)
in premodern Japan, in which repeated and devoted training (doing) will create body and mind
(being). In the case of nanba, the field conditions of constant agricultural praxis determined
respective types of nanba and the bodies that perform them. A convoluted relationship between
essentialism and constructionism is apparent in the performative concept of cultivation, the
details of which would need a much larger space to discuss.5
One more critical remark about the excerpt is needed regarding the parlance, “the spirituality
of Zen” as the origins or source of entertainment-art traditions in Japan (29). Unless put into
perspective, the remark in this extract would risk being anachronistic and misleading. This is
not to be read as suggesting any causal relationship or any influence from X to Y, such as Zen
spirituality affecting Japanese entertainment-art traditions. Such a question regarding a possibility
of Zen’s influence over Japanese arts is indeed brought up by Tomioka later in the book, which
90
Takechi immediately negates, “That’s the other way around, isn’t it” (85). It is, Takechi continues,
not so much influence as mutual resonance that was happening between Zen and the said tradi-
tions. Prior to the arrival of Zen, peasants had long been accustomed to holding a tense posture
in agriculture (i.e., nanba) and thus to contemplate things in depth. This echoed with Zen when
the latter was brought to Japan, states Takechi, and it was this confluence that led to Zen blos-
soming in Japan. (The etymology of Zen is meditation after all: Chan, which came from dhyāna
[introspection into one’s consciousness].)
Notes
1 Editor’s note: These are literal translations of the original phrases, koshi o ireru (inserting the hip/s) and
koshi o otosu (lowering the hip/s). Various scholars are split on whether the first, koshi o ireru (inserting
the hip/s), is idiomatic for being aware of and engaging one’s core or idiomatic for lowering one’s center
of gravity. One scholar refers to it as “a modified demi plie, 1st position, but with feet parallel and facing
forward” (email to the editors from Laurence Kominz, May 8, 2017). Another scholar says that koshi o ireru
“creates muscular tension all around the hips and center of the body and makes this area a dynamic place
from which the impulse for the body to move originates” (email to the editors from Mark Oshima, May
8, 2017). Some scholars think that koshi o ireru (inserting the hip/s) and koshi o otosu (lowering the hip/s)
mean the same thing, although Takechi is clearly using them to indicate different things in this excerpt.
Dance scholars may find the terms “tucking the pelvis” and “lowering the pelvis” helpful in visualizing
the possible difference between these two terms, although the body-mind conformation(s) suggested by
this terminology are difficult to pin down exactly. See also the Commentary by the translator.
2 Editor’s note: This is the name for the dominant ethnic group in Japan stemming from the original clan
that conquered rival clans and established control over the archipelago. It is the clan associated with the
Imperial household.
3 Takechi Tetsuji and Tomioka Taeko, Dentō geijutsu towa nani nanoka: hihyō to sōzō no tame no taiwa [What
Are Traditional Arts? A Dialogue for Criticism and Creation] (Tokyo: Gakugei Shorin, 1988). Hereaf-
ter, all references for citations from this work will be given as in-text documents of page numbers in
parentheses.
4 For my discussion on nanba, including this alternative usage of the term, see Maki Isaka, “Naturally
Disciplined,” in Onnagata: A Labyrinth of Gendering in Kabuki Theater (Seattle and London: University of
Washington Press, 2016), 87–111. It is also noteworthy that nanba cannot be reduced to gait alone. Other
parts of the translated book discuss nanba well beyond gait: feet, legs, hips, torsi, guts, lungs, diaphragm,
vocal cords, etc. Such a holistic approach to subject matter is common in the paradigm of traditional
performing arts in Japan. Practitioners of the Suzuki stamping method (by Suzuki Tadashi) might be
reminded of a similar understanding that the foot stamping training is also to enhance voice projection.
5 See Isaka, Onnagata.
Works cited
Isaka, Maki. 2016. Onnagata: A Labyrinth of Gendering in Kabuki Theater. Seattle and London: University of
Washington Press.
Takechi, Tetsuji, and Taeko Tomioka. 1988. Dentō geijutsu towa nani nanoka: hihyō to sōzō no tame no taiwa
[What Are Traditional Arts? A Dialogue for Criticism and Creation]. Tokyo: Gakugei Shorin.
91
11
THE PROBLEMATICS OF BUTOH
AND THE ESSENTIALIST TRAP
William Marotti
What is deadly about the interpretation of art, moreover, even philosophically responsible
interpretation, is that in the process of conceptualization it is forced to express what is
strange and surprising in terms of what is already familiar and thereby to explain away the
only thing that would need explanation.
– Theodor W. Adorno, “Looking Back on Surrealism”
The dance/performance genre that has come to be referred to as “butoh” did not initially
emerge as a recognizable style; indeed, there is general agreement that the early performances of
butoh were chiefly distinguished by their anti-formalistic nature.12 Even accepting the frequent
canonical equation of butoh’s origin with Hijikata Tatsumi and his works from 1959’s Forbidden
Colors (Kinjiki) performances (in May and in September) onward, the performances in the 1960s
can hardly be encompassed by a singular stylistic definition.3 The point of origin itself is a retro-
spective, genealogical presumption, obscuring the historical process in which butoh emerges as
the product of a complex series of experiments by a number of interrelated performers. These
performers in turn were part of a remarkable period of artistic productivity from the late 1950s to
the early 1970s that was mediately related to the wider historical dynamics of the period. Butoh
in its experimental naissance emerged as part of a wider critical problematics of representation
and of the body, in which artists working in varied media and performance genres strove to give
shape to sensibilities that were historically new, though often echoing Taisho and early Showa
artistic productivity and contemporary international developments.
It is thus a tremendous tragedy that the richness of butoh’s complex development and exper-
imental content has tended to fall victim to approaches that displace this historicity, obscure
its problematics, and dull its criticality. In the worst instance this can amount to a reading of
butoh that sees in it merely an instance of the signification of the eternally identical, based on an
idealized conception of racio-cultural essence. This meta-discourse flattens butoh into a detem-
poralized, dehistoricized thing, stripping butoh’s distinctiveness to make it simply another item
in a catalog of de-historicized proofs of the continuing manifestations of unchanging essence.
Imagined as a defense against historical change and loss, this meta-discourse is itself an agent of
this destruction, obliterating histories while at the same time working to guarantee the status
quo in the service of capital and the modern super-state. To disentangle butoh from this dis-
cursive emptying and return to butoh as a historical problem necessitates recontextualizing the
92
The problematics of butoh
discourse on and of the body within which butoh is situated, for it is here that butoh becomes
re-appropriated.
Butoh and the problematics of representation

To understand butoh’s emergent anti-formalistic recourse to the body in the late 1950s/early
1960s, one needs to look to other related forms of artistic productivity at the time, particularly
in regard to issues of representation and action. Akasegawa Genpei has written on the remarka-
ble series of unadjudicated exhibitions that were the Yomiuri Indépendant-ten. They had taken
place yearly since 1949, but around 1960 there had come to be a change in consciousness in the
participating artists. This was expressed in an overall shift in emphasis from two-dimensional
works such as paintings, to incorporating textured substances and found objects as projections
from the painted surfaces, and finally to three-dimensional, Marcel Duchamp-style examinations
of stand-alone objets [obuje]. As described by Akasegawa,
Had we not discovered the minimum separation between painting and real life? . . . I
held in my hand the explosive force to fuse fiction and the real world and I could foresee
that flat and closed pictorial space could now be twisted out into three dimensions. At
first, our timid efforts to protrude further from the pictorial surface progressed rapidly.
Wood, rope, shoes, and cooking pans were all used. Then steel ribs, car tires, scrap metal
were brought into play; the protrusion leapt from 17 centimeters to 30, and then on to
1 meter. This soon went beyond the bounds of what the picture surface could support
and the projections began to fall off. In this way the picture was left behind and we
began to look at different objects lying on the floor. It was by doing this that we learned
what an objet was.
Akasegawa 1985, 86
The image is that of a progression in which the formalized artistic representation elongates and
extrudes itself into the world before both artist and viewer, or in other words, a movement from
representation to embodiment.
The uncanny objet emerged as the predominant technique of the artists of the Yomiuri
Indépendant-ten, expressing a hope to close the gap between representation and reality, between
art and life, to facilitate the exploration and penetration of the everyday – that is, to enable artistic
action. This desire went so far as artists putting their own bodies directly into the works, which they
could then inhabit as uncanny objet. In this way they could mediate their own existence through
the artistic form to take advantage of its short-circuit of art/life, representation/reality. This was
the “happening,” in which the artistic activity and the artists themselves became part of the art-
works, rather than being separated by a process/product relationship.
What I would like to emphasize about this well-known practice, however, is its close kinship
with the objet; it was thanks to the investigative practice of the objet that the happening’s trans-
gression of normal artistic practice was able to take on its particular sense. Thus Akasegawa’s
notorious “model 1000-yen bill” project, an experiment on the nature of money and its role
as an objet at the intersection of capital exchange and the state, shared an awareness of the same
concerns exemplified by the performance works of Kosugi Takehisa, Kazekura Sho, and others
(who included their own bodies as part of their submitted works at the Yomiuri Indépendant-
ten), or by the activities of “happening”-oriented groups such as Neo-Dada or Hi Red Center.
They expanded the Duchampian concept of the objet to extend their work beyond formalized
representational modes to critical interaction with the world.
93
William Marotti
The body of the artist, refigured as an uncanny, performing body, worked to exceed the ordi-
nary parameters of expressibility, parameters that Akasegawa found to originate in a hegemon-
ically controlled space of representation at the intersection between capitalism and the modern
state (Akasegawa 1970b, 125–126; Akasegawa 1970a, 39). Of course, other artists did not neces-
sarily come to this conclusion about the source of the problem (Akasegawa was certainly aided in
this regard by his being prosecuted by the state for this art project). Yet the idea of circumventing
representational limits – limits between art and life, between representation and reality, between
artist and action – formed a central problem across a wide range of artistic endeavors, well beyond
the few examples I have raised here. It was through this problematic that artists approached any
of the myriad wider concerns that they wished to address; yet, moreover, this problematic was
itself recognized as indissociable from these concerns.
Butoh’s emergence thus needs to be recognized along with these other artistic activities, not in
terms of proximity to Anpo or its partaking in some sort of dubiously constructed ideal “Zeit-
geist,” but as part of a broad problematic being expressed within an artistic sphere.4
Butoh’s development ought to be seen as one important part of the exploration and devel-
opment of this problematic. This is not to take anything away from the fascinating experimen-
talism that came to be known as butoh. Rather, it is to allow for a richer and better-historicized
appreciation of both butoh and these other related developments in art, one in which they might
both be better illuminated.
Butoh of course is about a problematics of the body; but this problematics cannot be discussed
ahistorically without obscuring its nature. If we look at the butoh approach to the performing
body in terms of this wider problematic as sketched out above, butoh’s anti-formalism and exper-
iments in expressibility begin to be understandable in themselves, in a way that tended to elude
contemporary observers. Indeed, that conceptual elusiveness that emergent butoh is so notable
for can be read as part of the problematics of experimentation itself, part of this wider artistic
search to give adequate expression to sensibilities which were as new as the situations that had
given rise to them.
Butoh’s distinctiveness lies in working out the experimentalism through the performing body
itself (although sets, backdrops, props, costuming, and the like were an important part of butoh
performance). The performing body was both a kind of uncanny objet and site (ba); through that
site, butoh practitioners tried to give rise to something new, an image coming through the body
that might evade its hegemonically controlled representation to register something not yet said.
As in the “happenings,” butoh performance as a kind of inhabited objet brought the artist into
its uncanniness. One can see in its performances evidence of a kind of desire by the practitioners
to bring themselves through the performance, and into the world, transformed. They attempt
a leap across the gap between art and life, representation and reality, to enable a kind of artistic
action and, conversely, a kind of “becoming” on the part of the artist.
An integral part of the questing that was retrospectively given the designation “butoh” was
the search not only for adequate means of expression, but for that which was to be expressed
itself. The performing body of the artist was to be the site of this expression, but because it
always pointed beyond performance itself to some sort of remaking (tsukurikaeri); its nature was
thus necessarily unclear.
Thus the body in early butoh registered a kind of productive excess, both in form and in
content. The eroticism of butoh appeared through a kind of pleasurable excess spilling out into
action. This excess dramatically transgressed norms of sexuality and of gender, subsuming the
latter to a kind of devouring, violent desire. Yet this very quality of excess also allowed pho-
tographer and filmmaker Hosoe Eikō to provocatively treat the inexpressibility of the atomic
bomb in his strangely sexual 1960 film, Heso to genbaku (Navel and A-Bomb). In the work, Hosoe
94
filmed a number of performers who were part of the formative butoh nexus (including Hijikata
and Ohno Yoshito). In this way, the latent possibilities opened up by butoh acquired critical and
artistic expression in another medium, film.
Butoh and the assumption of identity

As we have seen, the body in butoh was part of an unsolved, emergent problematic, being broadly
expressed in a variety of artistic means. Yet even as this problematic was being falteringly first
expressed, it was quickly enclosed and subsumed within a hegemonic representational sphere.
This came in the form of what Harry Harootunian has referred to as a “national poetics”: an ide-
ology of racio-cultural identity and an “endless present” deployed ultimately through the postwar
democratic state to displace the criticality of artistic and cultural productivity of which butoh had
been a part, excluded in favor of affirming the status quo (Harootunian 1993, 215–216). In its
grasp, the body as a focus of inquiry as presented in butoh was forced into a self-apparent bastion
of identity, of “Japaneseness.” An a priori was substituted for the question itself, the problematic
collapsed into a mere consideration of bourgeois identity, with the answer assumed already.5
Whereas in butoh the body might be a kind of inhabited objet, opening the way to artistic
action and the registration of something not yet imaged, the fantasy of the singular “Japanese
body” makes “bodily objects (karada no taishōbutsu)” appropriate to its vision. Such body objects
then can only register this supposed unchanging singleness as moments of its instantiation. It also
carries within it the most virulent, racialist definitions of “Japaneseness,” for what is a distinctive
Japanese body if not a racially distinct body? If this performing body is to instantiate racial identity
and national “essence,” it becomes reduced to the merely existing, and the sign of the existing
(aru koto – that which is). Thus, rather than being an undecided, open site for new potentialities,
the body becomes the foreclosed sign of a presumed sameness, whose expressivity fundamentally
reduces to statements about shared “essence.” In this context, butoh becomes safe for the essen-
tialist pseudo-critic, who no longer runs the risk of being surprised by anything unfamiliar. With
everything reduced to this assumed “essential” content, butoh goes from being provocative and
challenging to something whose safety and harmlessness is secured.
With the problem of the body elided, butoh as productive exploration becomes but a circu-
lar process, in which what was presumed at the beginning is “discovered” again and again. Yet
butoh’s practitioners did not necessarily accept this short-circuiting of their expression. Even
Hijikata himself maintained a certain ambiguity against the stronger claims of identity. Even the
title of the 1968 performance, Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese: The Revolt of the Flesh [Hijikata
Tatsumi to Nihonjin – Nikutai no Hanran] implies a certain negotiation of identity, not a perfect
consonance, in its “and” (to). The performance itself continued to embody the kind of carni-
valesque, wild excess of eroticism and gender ambivalence for which early butoh was so noto-
rious. Yet by gravitating towards these questions of identity, particularly in works from the early
1970s onward, butoh made itself open to co-optation and closure by the essentialists.
Important in this process were some of the people who had played important roles during the
butoh genre’s formative years. Mishima Yukio became personally involved in butoh and espe-
cially with Hijikata after hearing of his Forbidden Colors performance’s borrowing of the title of
his novel. While participating himself in a broader racio-cultural essentialist discourse, Mishima
also served as one of the earliest informal commentators on butoh as the genre evolved. His influ-
ence in his role as associate/critic/commentator helped prepare the way for butoh’s culturalist
subsumption. As it was for so many others, the question of the body was one of Mishima’s chief
concerns in the sixties; his solution to the problem, though complex, nevertheless was based on
a strong concept of racio-cultural essence. He was always eager to read (or misrecognize) butoh’s
95
William Marotti
provocativeness in terms of his own evolving conceptualization of the problematics of the body,
in turn helping to prompt further misrecognitions by others.
The turn to issues of local identity by such a major figure as Hijikata provided another avenue
for butoh’s recuperation. It came at a time in which great efforts were underway to undercut local
activism with a culturalist discourse locating local identity within a quiescent, status-quo sup-
porting concept of Japanese identity. Discussions by Shibusawa Tatsuhiko and others of Hijikata’s
so-called “return to Japan (Nihon kaiki)” in his works with overt Tohoku references were very
much a part of this flow, as were critics’ deployments of the vocabulary of contemporary nativist
ethnology (minzokugaku). These all became staples of butoh “criticism” in the seventies, and not
merely by ideologues, but as well by those who had been convinced that such discussions were
truly getting down to fundamentals. Sometimes as part of this discursive turn, other times perhaps
as a reaction to its reductionism, some commentators turned to the evocativeness of vagueness
and mystifications to try and reserve some remainder within butoh.6
In the early 1980s, Gōda Nario, one of butoh’s major interpreters, wrote of his sense that
there had been a gap between butoh and its criticism subsequent to the 1968 Revolt of the Body
performance. He expressed his reservations as follows:
Considering Hijikata’s career after that performance, one might say that it was a turning
point; or that it should be understood as signaling a “return to Japan (Nihon kaiki);”
or you might say that, as you’d expect from its subtitle, people just went wild over the
body’s revolt. . . . However, it now appears to me now that those of us who, with smug
complacency, pointed out this dance as a turning point, or were ecstatic with enthusi-
asm, were actually being sharply rebuked from the stage.
Gōda went on to suggest his sense that the interpretations of a “‘return to Japan’ . . . have never
drawn near to the font of Hijikata’s inspiration, or to the structure of Ankoku Butoh which
corresponds to it” Nevertheless, Gōda recognized that “these criticisms had played a major role
supporting Ankoku Butoh’s formation” (Gōda 1983; Klein 1988, 83–84).
By this point, Gōda and some other serious butoh critics were willing to reassess their initial
enthusiasms for the path butoh and butoh criticism had been taking. Yet butoh itself had also
reached a point of respectability sufficient for it to become a topic of address for more directly
essentialist commentators. A recent example came in the fifth issue of this very magazine (The-
atre Arts). Nomura Yukihiro’s strongly racially essentialist argument used Hijikata in an attempt
to try to demonstrate how the racially unique Japanese body’s natural emotive expressiveness
ultimately dictated the form of Hijikata’s dance. Nomura thus unified Hijikata’s butoh with the
grand pantheon of a racio-culturally imagined “Japanese Art” (Nihon bijutsu) (Nomura 1996).
By the terms of Nomura’s argument, (Japanese) bodily identity exists as an inescapable “fact”;
he linked Hijikata by “feeling (kanjiru)” to its singular expression, essentially unchanged for
millennia. Lost to this ideological processing, of course, is any sense that butoh might be about
something other than repetition.
The stolen body of butoh

The fate of butoh in the hands of the pseudo-critics reveals the larger process by which the crit-
ical problematics of which butoh was a part became misdirected and enclosed. Postwar activism
and experimentalism that threatened to end in social transformation was tamed by its subsump-
tion by an inauthentic culturalism, one tied to the state, capitalism, and the status quo. As if by
96
sleight of hand, the tautological endless “rediscovery” of a presumed content was substituted for
a process of creative investigation that was both open and critical. This culturalism promised to
reveal the true fundamentals behind everyday forms, yet by foreclosing the possibility of arriving
at an unpresumed answer, it redirected cultural productivity into the service of maintaining a
status quo whose content would not be questioned.
Key to this process was the assumption of an absolute difference between “things Japanese”
and its presumed Western other. Through this presumption, critical encounters hinting towards
an unknown dialectical resolution could be reread as signs of absolute incompatibility, redirecting
one back to the tautological rediscovery of “essence.” Thus the authentic criticisms by Natsume
Sōseki, for example, become discarded as Sōseki himself becomes reread as a canonical sign of
absolute difference and expresser of a “distinctly Japanese” sensibility. In the case of butoh, crea-
tive anti-formalism, having international roots itself, becomes rewritten as a rejection of Western
dance techniques on the grounds of absolute bodily incompatibility; butoh is then imagined as
the authentic expression in dance of this bodily distinctiveness. One might note that in both
of these two examples, the search for distinctiveness curiously proceeds within the bounds of
presumably universal but in fact eminently modern, historical concepts – literature and dance.
Although imagined to be an authentic protest against a Western-imposed modernity, the
assertion of Japanese distinctiveness that is the hallmark of this culturalism is in fact deeply
implicated within the very discourses that it claims to oppose. As Harry Harootunian points
out (in the above-cited essay), the narratives of this national poetics perfectly complement the
imposed definitions and goals of modernization theory, itself a postwar domestication of the
imperialist/colonialist project. The distillation of purported essence from the cultural raw mate-
rials thereby narrativized reduces histories to fit safely within the boundaries of this narrative.
Anything not in accord with its assumed goals is in turn discarded. Butoh, like any of the other
items thus processed, reduces to a sign of the eternal same, part of an ideology of reassurance and
acceptance. In this way butoh comes to assert the ideology that, as Harootunian puts it, “[the
Japanese] have not yet become anything other than what they have been since the beginning of
time in a world where everything else is changing” (Harootunian 1993, 221). For there to be a
return to a truly critical butoh would require reopening the problematic that has been obscured
with the abandonment of its history. Then perhaps the body in butoh, stolen by this culturalism,
can be returned as uncanny objet, the site for a creative, critical experimentation whose ends are
not already prescribed.
Notes
1 This chapter was translated by the author from “Butō no mondaisei to honshitsushugi no wana.” Shiatā ātsu
8 (May 1997): 88–96.
2 For simplicity I will leave off brackets from the term butoh. Taken at a different level of abstraction, butoh
is as consistent and ambiguous as any performance genre.
3 This is often amended to give credit to the Ohnos as co-founders, citing Ohno Kazuo’s The Old Man and
the Sea (Rōjin to umi) performance in April of 1959, as well as the appearance of Ohno Yoshito (Ohno’s
second son) in both The Old Man and the Sea and Forbidden Colors. His eldest son, Ohno Yukito, also per-
formed in The Old Man and the Sea, though it has been generally forgotten.
4 Many contemporary observers in fact referred to some of these activities with the paradoxical label “anti-
art,” symptomizing the confounding of forms that was the hallmark of this problematic.
5 In discourse, we can see this transformation effected in the increasing prevalence at the time of the term
“shintai” over the previously favored “nikutai.” Both refer to the body, but nikutai more strongly connotes
flesh, and excess. [Translator’s note: in the essay, “body” is rendered with the characters for “shintai,” but
glossed as “karada.”]
97
William Marotti
6 In the context of this alternate, reductive discourse, the turn to vagueness has a different, potentially stra-
tegic valence than that prompted by butoh prior to this fixing of its conception, i.e., during its formative
period. My objection to this tactic is that it too ultimately delivers up butoh to its co-opters: while deny-
ing the possibility of a fuller understanding, it remains blind to the fact that vagueness and mystification
themselves play vital roles in the discourse of essence.
Works cited
Akasegawa, Genpei. 1970a. “Final Statement.” Concerned Theatre Japan, 1 (3): 36–43.
Akasegawa, Genpei. 1970b. “Saishuu ikenchinjutsu.” In Obuje o motta musansha: Akasegawa Genpei no bunshō,
118–133. Tōkyō: Gendai Shichōsha.
Akasegawa, Genpei. 1985. “The 1960s: The Art Which Destroyed Itself.” In Reconstructions: Avant-Garde Art
in Japan 1945–1965: An Exhibition, edited by David Elliott and Kazu Kaido, translated by John Clark.
Oxford: Museum of Modern Art.
Gōda, Nario. 1983. “Ankoku butoh ni tuite.” In Butō: nikutai no shūru rearisuto-tachi: Hanaga Mitsutoshi
shashinshū = The butoh. Tokyo: Gendai Shokan.
Harootunian, Harry. 1993. “America’s Japan/Japan’s Japan.” In Japan in the World, edited by Masao Miyoshi
and Harry D. Harootunian, 196–221. Durham: Duke University Press.
Klein, Susan Blakeley. 1988. Ankoku butō: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Dark-
ness. Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University.
Nomura, Yukihiro. 1996. “Hijikata Tatsumi to Nihon Bijutsu.” Shiatā ātsu: geki to hihyō Theatre arts 5:
172–181.
98
12
RETURNS AND REPETITIONS
Hijikata Tatsumi’s choreographic practice as a
critical gesture of temporalization
Sara Jansen
I initially wrote this essay in response to an invitation to make a pilgrimage to the Tohoku region
of Japan to attend a conference in August 2015.1 It takes the “return to Tohoku” enacted by this
conference as the starting point to question some of the many returns performed in and around
Hijikata Tatsumi’s oeuvre. As I was preparing to make my first trip to the area to participate in
this event, I wanted to engage specifically with my own resistance to the conventional reading of
Hijikata’s body of work through his personal history with Tohoku.
Scholars continue to trace the origins and aesthetics of ankoku butō back to Hijikata’s experi-
ences growing up in the rural Northeast, and to farm life and culture, local religious rites, rituals,
and traditions. I have always felt uneasy about the uncritical return to this and other, often per-
sonal and anecdotal, narratives in publications on the artist. Not much documentation of Hiji-
kata’s performances is publicly available and serious critical engagement with his choreographic
thinking and methodology remains scarce. The same information, stories, and interpretations are
cited and circulated endlessly.
And then there are my own returns. I have been turning and returning to Hijikata’s oeuvre
for many years, trying to find an appropriate entry point: one that does justice to his dance, to
the extent that this is possible from a (temporal and spatial) distance, and when one has to make
do with its traces and the limited and, in my view, limiting narrations of it.
It is not my intention to examine this “compulsion to repeat” in the psychoanalytic sense.
Butoh is frequently marketed as a representation of a post-apocalyptic world and a direct response
to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All too often it is psychologized or pathol-
ogized and framed in the context of personal traumas of the artist, the Japanese trauma of the
loss of WWII, several waves of Japanese identity crises, or the healing effects of the methods
developed by his disciples. Despite the dance’s radical countercultural beginnings, butoh and the
butoh body became utopic sites, and the object of projection, orientalism, nostalgia, and nation-
alism. Hijikata’s “dance of darkness” aims to be opaque, draws on an eclectic range of sources,
and indeed provides ample openings for appropriation, misreading, and mystification. However,
it is my contention that the conventional interpretations of his oeuvre tend to obscure the dance
itself – its reality, actuality, and materiality – and attest to a general resistance to recognizing Hiji-
kata’s work as choreography and the artist as a choreographer (indeed, often butoh and choreography
are seen as mutually exclusive).
99
Sara Jansen
I decided, therefore, to revisit the very event that is commonly considered the turning point in
Hijikata’s career, and the very moment when he is perceived to have made a radical aesthetic and
ideological turn and, after a decade of cutting-edge cross-disciplinary collaborations, embarked
on a new, and more “Japanese” period by returning to his own past in Tohoku for inspiration,
namely the performance series Twenty-Seven Nights for the Four Seasons in 1972.2
My aim is to propose another approach to this key work by foregrounding choreography as
what I will call a gesture of temporalization.3 I introduce this concept to challenge how most writing
on Hijikata revolves around constructing chronological timelines and periodizing his oeuvre as a
way to pinpoint the exact origins and sources of his dance. This, I argue, results in a movement
further and further back in time that neglects the (eruptive) timeliness of Hijikata’s experiments
and their radical intertextuality and openness. It also feels counterproductive to fit this oeuvre
into a coherent linear narrative or to try to grasp it completely/as a whole, considering Hijikata’s
vision for dance and the dancer’s body actively resists such linearity and wholeness. Instead, the
choreographer cites, juxtaposes, and layers diverse material, and combines multiple temporalities
to create openings for other perspectives (on dance, movement, the body, the world) and produc-
tive moments of slippage.
I am interested in discovering other ways to explore the stakes of Hijikata’s gestures of return
in his later work, not as merely symptomatic of the nostalgia for things past/Japanese prevalent
in 1970s Japan, but as part of a dynamic engagement with time itself – as material in dance.
The notion of gestures of temporalization is meant to underscore choreography’s fundamental
entanglement with time and the times. Hijikata’s returns and repetitions are in the first place
particular to choreographic practice and how it always figures and refigures time. Butoh espe-
cially is well known for its radical transformations of the time and timing of dance. Below, I will
foreground this aspect, and the ways in which choreography as an apparatus (dispositif ) – that
is, “a praxis, . . . a practical activity that must face a problem and a particular situation each and
every time” (Agamben 2009b, 9) – works in, on, and against time and the times. By proposing
“a counterpoint and counterrhythm” (Didi-Huberman 2003b, 274) to the dominant focus on
a return or regression to a better past, I hope to open up spaces in which Hijikata’s innovative
choreographic methodology may be appreciated as praxis: as a self-reflexive, critical, and political
artistic practice.
Twenty-Seven Nights for the Four Seasons

(Shiki no tame no nijūnanaban, 1972)
In contrast with the happening-like actions and impromptu events in the 1960s, Twenty-Seven
Nights for the Four Seasons introduced an expanded performance format: it consists of five distinct
evening-length pieces, each linked with a specific season, performed after hours at Art Theatre
Shinjuku Bunka, a movie theatre in a back alley of Tokyo’s Kabuki-chō, on twenty-seven consec-
utive evenings from October 25 to November 20, 1972.4 The event engaged the passing of time
on multiple levels simultaneously, and indeed performed a number of “returns.”
Twenty-Seven Nights for the Four Seasons marked Hijikata’s highly anticipated return to the stage
as a dancer, for instance, after a “silence” (chinmoku) of four to five years. During this absence
he had acquired a near mythical status (and, according to critics at the time, became part of the
institution), resulting in a rush on tickets and extensive coverage in the mainstream media. After
a series of collaborative projects, Hijikata also returned to being the sole choreographer of his
work. He assembled a group of young dancers around him – the so-called second generation
of butoh dancers (which for the first time included women); changed the name of his troupe to
Hangidaitōkan; and began exploring a new choreographic methodology.
100
Returns and repetitions
I don’t perceive this work as the radical break it is often purported to be: it enacts many returns
to Hijikata’s previous performances, movements, and ideas. However, it does reveal itself as an
instance when the artist radically challenged his own dance history and choreographic thinking,
and began carrying out extensive research into new possibilities for dance and the dancing body.
This process unfolded over time. For instance, a few years before the premiere of Twenty-Seven
Nights for the Four Seasons, Hijikata began directing Kobayashi Saga, Ashikawa Yoko, and others in
short experimental ankoku butō pieces, which were performed multiple times a day at Shinjuku
Art Village, a small space above a jazz café in Kabuki-chō. These cabaret-style shows ended up
forming the basis for the individual installments of the work (Kobayashi 1998, 31).5 In addition,
the series set off a long-term research project entitled Tōhoku kabuki keikaku ( Tohoku Kabuki
Project), which continued until Hijikata’s death in 1986.
I see Hijikata’s so-called return to Tohoku as an integral part of this research into new methods
to generate movement material or, in Hijikata’s own words, into the “contours” of ankoku butō
(Mainichi Shimbun 1972). This process involved looking for material outside of dance (visual arts,
literature, philosophy, society) but also revisiting his own trajectory as an artist. Much like his
work of the 1960s, Twenty-Seven Nights for the Four Seasons is, for example, created in dialogue
with artists and art movements across artistic disciplines, in Japan and abroad. Hijikata continues,
for instance, to engage with how the Surrealists, Dadaists, and Fluxus artists, to whom his work
is very much indebted, repeat, reframe, and debase found images.6 For this series, he collects and
brings together on the stage numerous borrowed images and gestures, and an over-abundance of
everyday objects, clothing items, and props. This strategy also reflects his interest in the material/
materiality of the medium of dance (time, space, body, and movement), which is also evident in
the scrapbooks he started compiling in preparation for Twenty-Seven Nights for the Four Seasons.
Presumably in the late 1960s, the choreographer began filling a series of notebooks with a diverse
range of images of iconic (European and American) paintings and sculptures cut out from main-
stream visual arts magazines of the time, which he used during rehearsals as a source of inspiration
for gestures, facial expressions, costumes, color schemes, textures, and light design. Hijikata cuts,
pastes, and re-purposes these reproductions, and juxtaposes, re-combines, and re-organizes them
in dissident, non-linear chronologies. The pictures and the gestures they inspire become (part of )
his (personal) choreographic archive. In most cases, the scrapbooks are not explicitly linked with a
specific performance in the series. He likely turned and returned to them in the context of mul-
tiple pieces, re-inscribing his relationship to and the connection between these images over time.
We recognize references to earlier work. Photographs of Hōsōtan, the first piece in the series
and the only installment (partially) documented on film, show the dancers executing poses
inspired by documentation of Nijinsky’s dance, which were originally developed for Tamano
Kōichi’s Nagasukujira (1972). Hijikata also revisits the journeys to Tohoku he undertook with
photographer Hosoe Eikoh between 1965 and 1968, and which were a major source of inspira-
tion for his previous evening-length choreography Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People (1968).7 It
is perhaps this experience that encourages him to turn to past experiences of life in the country-
side to further mine his (corporeal) memory for gestures, sensations, ideas, and imagery in order
to generate and compile, re-invent and expand his movement vocabulary. The choreographer
borrows and transforms such “found” gestures to challenge conventional perspectives on what
constitutes dance at this particular moment in time (on the cusp of modern, postmodern, and
contemporary dance).
Hijikata also continues to draw on some of the discourse developed around his earlier work.
Asbestos Studio announces the series as a ritual (gishiki), for instance, which not only frames it as a
late night underground event in an obscure location but also references literary sources of inspira-
tion and echoes the characterization of Hijikata’s first choreographic works as heretic ceremonies
101
Sara Jansen
by novelist Mishima Yukio and others.8 The term gishiki was also used in relation to the political
resistance at the time. Artists including the members of Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension) referred
to their interventions in the streets in this era of mass-demonstrations as gishiki. The ritualistic
aspects of the performance are coupled with the cyclical time of the seasons (a common motif
in the ballet and classical music), the cycle of life, and the notions of death and memorialization,
all important themes of the work. Gishiki (ritual) also evokes Hijikata’s earlier experiments, his
ongoing relationship with radical movements across artistic disciplines, as well as the political
context out of which his dance emerged, its timeliness.
It is my contention that Hijikata here delves into the archives of modern art and into his own
archive as a dancer/choreographer, to mobilize choreography as a (self-)reflexive gesture. He
also appears to take on the history of, and particularly his personal history with dance (modern
dance, German expressionism, ballet) in this work. Perhaps his cramped hands in Hōsōtan, his
toes turned inward, the “dance choirs” (of “stomping” dancers behind him when he performs
a solo), and the ritualistic, mythical, archaic, “primitive,” and ethnographical elements that
punctuate his movement language in Twenty-Seven Nights for the Four Seasons are not merely an
evocation of the rural landscape of Northern Japan but also (a layering of ) critical citations of
the choreographic vocabulary of Wigman and Nijinsky (and their respective sources of inspi-
ration), for instance. We might also think of his gestures of “self-exotisation” (by drawing on
kabuki, ukiyo-e, Japanese folklore and rituals), as in dialogue with (and as part of a critique of )
the exoticism and orientalism that informed the modern art, (ethnographic) Surrealism, early
modern dance (including the work of Japanese “pioneers” like Ishii Baku), or even the work of
John Cage (who found inspiration in Zen philosophy and aesthetics) that (in turn) informed
Hijikata’s own dance.9
One could argue that Hijikata’s returns and repetitions are the material of dance. While there
is an imaginary aspect to these “returns”10 – they activate his imagination (as an artist) – there is
also a material quality to them. They are part and parcel of the temporality of artistic creation,
and of how time operates in choreographic practice in particular. His reflections are those of a
choreographer.11 They are also critical gestures. Hijikata’s gestures of return are perhaps a turn-
ing back, but they also demonstrate a turning on, turning away from or turning upside down,
and act of détournement, of re-routing. He returns as an act of resistance, of pushing against the
limitations of (conventional/Eurocentric ideas surrounding) the dancing body and dance. In the
process, he radically expands the possibilities of the medium, and indeed how it works on/in
time, in the specific context of early 1970s Japan. It concerns, as Sas has also argued, a “return-
ing” (Sas 2011, 176), and a movement. It is a repeated gesture, an active and ongoing process – of
positioning and repositioning, discovery and rediscovery, confrontation and overturning – as well
as a critical reflection on the prevailing tendency to return itself. Indeed, as we will see below,
Hijikata performs various strategies of opposition and deconstruction – in dialogue undoubtedly
with the anti-art and non-art movements in the visual arts at the time – and of détournement, on
dance and on the discourse on (his) dance perpetuated at the time when he created Twenty-Seven
Nights for the Four Seasons.
Tohoku Kabuki Project (Tōhoku kabuki keikaku)

Twenty-Seven Nights for the Four Seasons inaugurated a new, continuing project that Hijikata termed
the Tohoku Kabuki Project. The combination “Tohoku Kabuki” embodies the kind of “radical
juxtapositions”12 that came to characterize Hijikata’s dance. It merges the imaginary categories
of the (marginalized, exploited, and idealized) rural Northeast of Japan and the (originally pop-
ular but by this time highly formalized) “traditional” Japanese theatre. It layers multiple times,
102
realities, and references, and produces provocative tensions, ambiguities, slippages, and a myriad
of possible (mis)readings.
Although it is the combination of these two terms that makes them particularly potent here,
it is useful to examine them sequentially, starting with the term Tohoku and then moving on to
the nuances of Hijikata’s use of the term kabuki. Hijikata provides several perspectives on what he
might mean by these two ideas in interviews leading up to Twenty-seven Nights for the Four Seasons.
His words reveal that his performance series does not (re)present Tohoku, is not a return to his
own origins per se, let alone those of the Japanese people, Japanese dance, or Japanese tradition.
As I point out above, Hijikata here appears to return to the project he started with photographer
Hosoe Eikoh a few years earlier, and the kinds of performativity of identity and memory it
explores. It is in this project, which is now known as Kamaitachi but was originally entitled An
Extravagantly Tragic Comedy (Hosoe 1987, 25), that theatre and Tohoku appear to merge for the
first time. By inserting the dancer into the remote rural landscape, it turns the daily reality of
the other (accidental) performers into theatre, and simultaneously reveals the fictional aspect of
photography (and of memory), countering its purported reality (Hosoe 2016). While Hijikata
went along to perform in the landscape of Hosoe’s wartime memories, the experience clearly
resonated with his own reality and personal history, opening up new possibilities for his dance.
In an interview, Hijikata speaks of the tension between “the theatre as everyday” and “the
everyday as theatre” (Sports Nippon 1972). His work introduces other types of gesture and other,
embodied histories into dance. By recognizing as dance the unsteady movements of the farmers
stumbling along the ridges between the rice fields, for instance, and the postures and attitudes
they develop to cope with the extreme climate or labor conditions, Hijikata also introduces dance
into the everyday and expands the limits of dance, to cover every aspect of life.
His words also suggest that his project involves a return to and a turning on – a perversion,
and oftentimes a literal inversion or reversal of – a particular clichéd image of rural Japan. The
choreographer not only explicitly takes on this image (rather than the reality) of Tohoku, but
his references to (his experiences in/of ) the countryside are also inextricably bound up with the
image of dance and with his search for ways to revolutionize choreography by developing a new
perspective on what might constitute movement material and dance practice (akin to what is
happening in other parts of the world at this time).
“You could call my latest dance Tohoku kabuki,” the choreographer states. “I am cramming in
all that is part of the image of Tohoku: rice paddies, the sky, the wind, and salty foods. If classical
ballet stands for an extension upwards towards heaven, I cling to the land and return to the inside
of my own body” (Sports Nippon 1972, my emphasis). This quote illustrates how his gestures of
turning on the clichés circulated about his native region on the one hand and about the ballet
on the other are intertwined. The return to the land and to the body’s interior space are offered
as literal counter-movements to the upward extension of the body, the outward focus, and the
particular worldview of the ballet.
In this context, Hijikata describes his strategy to develop a unique choreographic method-
ology as one of opposition (Asahi Shimbun 1972 and Sports Nippon 1972). His use of the term
rinkaku (contours) is evocative in this context, as his method revolves around the radical pursuit
of the negative image of what people expect from dance (Mainichi Shimbun 1972). He does this
thoroughly, literally, and in a humorous fashion. “The world of darkness, which expands end-
lessly, that is my world” (Tokyo Chūnichi Sports 1968), he states, as he counters the clear lines of
the classical ballet and modern dance with blurred silhouettes, deformed faces, collapsing shapes,
slowly shifting movements, and in-between states. His starting point is the intent observation
of the inner workings of his own body, as it transforms and crumbles, withers and weathers
away. The ideal butoh body is then a literal counterpoint to a whole/healthy body in control,
103
Sara Jansen
disciplined, mechanized (the technologies of the body of ballet), an act (not of composure but)
of decomposition and ruination. Rather than standing up straight and emanating lightness and
light, he states that his dance emerges from the damp darkness of a futon in an empty house
(Mainichi Shimbun 1972) and “begins when the body wants to hide because of the cold, to fold
over and shrink as much as possible. This kind of dance doesn’t exist. Anywhere in the world”
(Asahi Shimbun 1972).
Not only does he revisit past experiences as tools to revolutionize dance, he is also explicitly
critical of the superficial ways in which Tohoku is turned into a spectacle by his contemporaries.
For example, he refers explicitly to the “angura boom” and points out that the citation of indig-
enous (dochakuteki) culture in the theatre results in the “vulgarization” ( fūzokuka) and “disinte-
gration” ( fūka) of this culture (Mainichi Shimbun 1972). He answers by turning the popular image
of Tohoku itself inside out. His explorations of its landscapes serve to expose the darker reverse
side of the romanticized imagery perpetuated in the media. He addresses the politics behind
and the perversity of this nostalgia, as he associates the countryside he grew up in above all with
death, loneliness, and misery. Hijikata underscores the area’s marginal position and notes the real
poverty and destitution of its inhabitants. In interviews, he contrasts the idyllic image of the rice
fields with images of himself as a child, snot and tears running down his face as he walks along
the ridges carrying urns filled with the bones and ashes of his siblings, observing labor so harsh
that it made farmers pretend to be working, or experiencing cold so fierce that it makes one’s
bones snap (Hijikata 1970 and Asahi Shimbun 1972). Different “realities,” and different sides of
the same reality, come together in one image, which, in turn is variously transformed. The result
is violent, uncanny, and humorous.
Hijikata also dismisses the connection made between his own dance and local folk dances,
which he refers to as tourist performances (omiyage buyō) (Sports Nippon 1972). He is equally
dismissive of ties to the traditional performing arts, stating that, “Ankoku butō was born from
cutting ties with all Japanese tradition, and sets itself apart precisely by not taking the poison of
tradition” (Tokyo Shimbun 1972).
Looking at the limited documentation of the pieces, Hijikata appears to experiment with
elements of kabuki such as kamae-like postures, mie-like poses, transformations/metamorphosis,
colorful costumes, and make-up-like facial expressions. However, he also employs kabuki as a
procedure to spectacularize Tohoku. As I point out above, he underscores the theatricality of the
environment in which he grew up, and aims perhaps to expose the fiction (and the politics) of
Tohoku, and of kabuki at the time.
His dance evokes formalized, high-end theatre culture as well as kabuki’s popular origins, and
the alleged derivation of its name from the verb katamuku, to slant or tilt.13 “Kabuki-as-perver-
sion” is employed here as a strategy to challenge and overturn the current situation in art, politics,
and everyday life, as well as the “returns to Tohoku” and Japanese tradition many artists resort
to at this time.
Traditionally, kabuki actors were relegated to the margins of society, and to areas of town that
housed other kinds of popular entertainment as well as the sex industry. Significantly, Hijikata
returns to one such area. Indeed, kabuki here also evokes Shinjuku’s Kabuki-chō (and its obscurity,
decadence, and position as the birthplace of counterculture). It is here that Twenty-Seven Nights for
the Four Seasons premiered, and where previous versions of most of its installments were created
and presented. In 1960s Japan, it is also the area of the capital where the bars and jazz cafes are
located where artists met to drink all night, exchange ideas, perform, and set up the exciting
collaborations that ended up shaping postwar vanguard art and popular culture. This is arguably
where the real origins of ankoku butō are to be found. This connection also hints at the collabora-
tive aspect of this dance, its underground qualities, its politics, and its eroticism. Hijikata’s dancers
104
danced in cabarets and nightclubs to raise money for his stage performances. The material devel-
oped for the cabaret shows are a significant part of the choreography and eroticism an important
characteristic of the dance (as Gunji 1973, for instance, points out). Kabuki-chō is a temporally
and spatially heterogeneous space/place. In this sense, too, Hijikata plays on layering and juxta-
posing divergent images, references, and worlds, and, like the many other sources of inspiration,
popular discourse and culture become part of the dance material and is unpacked, transformed,
and woven into the very fabric of the choreography.
“Return to Japan”
In February 1973, visual arts magazine Bijutsu techō dedicates a forty-plus page special to this
event (Bijutsu techō 1973, 109–152). It includes articles by kabuki scholar Gunji Masakatsu and
theatre director Suzuki Tadashi, among many others. The texts describe Hijikata’s dance as inno-
vative and timely but tend to locate its timeliness in how it folds onto itself, retracts into the (per-
sonal confines of the) body, moves back in time, and taps into the nostalgia for Japanese tradition
and folklore widely covered in the popular media in the early 1970s. It is read as symptomatic of
the out-of-joint-ness of Japanese society at this juncture, which, as Marilyn Ivy has beautifully
shown, resulted in the tendency to return to elements of Japanese culture perceived to be in the
process of vanishing, and to the omnipresence of specters in postwar Japanese art (Ivy 1995).
In “Shi to iū kotenbutō” (“A Traditional Dance Called Death”), Gunji describes Hijikata’s solo
in Hōsōtan as a performance of the “ecstasy of death,” a ceremony that pulls the audience into its
trance and transports it, and as a “dance of blood” and a “danse macabre.” According to Gunji, who
specifically underscores Hijikata’s extremely fragile physique, this dance not only summons the
spirits of the dead, but also revives the rural Tohoku landscape, Japanese folklore, and indigenous
culture. He characterizes Hijikata’s butoh as “superb traditional dance” and as the “home [origin]
of dance.”14 While he points to the contradictions/tensions in Hijikata’s movement language, he
also suggests it re-presents a return to an ancient, local body.
The authors describe Hijikata’s movements as uncannily familiar and as a (re)collection of
repressed memories, gestures, and postures disappearing from daily life and memory. In his review
of Twenty-Seven Nights for the Four Seasons for the Yomiuri Shimbun, dance critic Ichikawa Miyabi,
for instance, writes that Hijikata
takes on the task to . . . turn his back on the idiotic culture that we have built in
the capital to subsequently retrieve and resurface what has been buried deep in our
memories, what unfairly ended up deposited in the depths of history.
Ichikawa 1972
Similarly, Suzuki Shiroyasu writes that this dance is an attempt at saving “the local Japanese
body” (nihonjin no dozokuteki na nikutai no arikata), which is about to vanish, as “since the Meiji
period, the Japanese have been eager to get rid of it.” He continues: “I could not help but be
impressed by Hijikata’s rescue attempt” (Suzuki 1973, 125).
Gunji describes Hijikata as a shaman conjuring up ghosts and as an appearance returning from
the realm of the dead. Cycling between birth, death, and rebirth, the dancer is seen as beside himself,
outside of himself, or not himself; and as outside of time. Hijikata’s role is not so much that of cho-
reographer but of magician or sorcerer. The perception is that this dance is not the result of a (col-
laborative) creative process, nor of years of dance training, artistic research, professional experience,
and critical thinking but rather appears – in true modernist fashion – as if naturally, just like that,
from the body/unconscious of the artist as charismatic genius. In Hijikata’s postures, Gunji writes,
105
Sara Jansen
we do not see the usual training of the body. The only movements we see are those
called for by flesh and bones that have ignored the training of the body as material or
for expression. We don’t see the fraud here of training or accumulation.
Dance technique and choreography are dismissed as “fraud,” and “rather than about artistic
dance (geijutsuteki buyō),” Gunji also states, “it is more apt to speak about the dance that preceded
it,” or an older form of dance (Gunji 1973, 122).
Such interpretations are frequently repeated. The “return to Tohoku” in question is not so
much spatial as it is temporal. Hijikata’s dance is seen as part of the widespread trend in postwar
Japan to “return to Japan” (nihon kaiki日本回帰) to look for inspiration in so-called pre-modern
Japanese art, culture, and rituals. The remote countryside of Tohoku in particular came to be
seen as a site where such disappearing practices and sights could still be encountered. Miryam
Sas speaks about an “imaginary return” (Sas 2011). Since Hijikata’s death in 1986, this reading
of Hijikata’s dance as a nostalgic return to the more real or more Japanese Japan of the past is
compounded with another kind of return, and indeed another practice of mourning, also referred
to as kaiki (回忌): much writing on the artist takes the form of personal memories, and perfor-
mances are scheduled to commemorate the anniversary of Hijikata’s death.
There is validity and timeliness to the perception of this choreographic work as a return to
Tohoku/Japan, which, as Ivy and Sas have shown, was in the air at the time (Ivy 1995; Sas 2011).
Hijikata for his part speaks extensively about Tohoku. However, as I argue above, I believe such
readings are rather reductive and tend to lose track of the choreographic.
By focusing on the choreographic I aim to question the binaries and preconceptions that
inform readings of this oeuvre, and indeed my own position. Twenty-Seven Nights for the Four
Seasons is a complex work and challenges my understanding of history and of contemporary
choreography. How might one theorize the (pseudo) autobiographical, the exotic, the ghostly,
and the ritualistic elements of Hijikata’s aesthetics of the 1970s and 1980s, without inscribing his
work into the dominant narratives of the time, or reducing it to familiar categories? How else
might time be at stake in Hijikata’s dance?
Gestures of temporalization
The critics cited above identify an untimely timeliness in Twenty-Seven Nights for the Four Seasons, an
uncanny being caught in-between times. “It is essential,” Hijikata states in one of the interviews,
“to take on the time of the everyday at all times” (Sports Nippon 1972). Elsewhere he points out that
butoh must be danced “in a place where there is no time to waste” (Hijikata 1998, 152). The result
is a movement language that incorporates both sudden, violent jolts of movement and focused,
minimal gestures and maximally expanded suspensions of time. Hijikata’s gestures are borrowed
from, re-routed, and re-inserted into the fabric of the everyday. His choreography activates the
intersections between the time of dance and other times/temporalities, including the lived time
of daily life, memory, and history, in order to radically refigure dance as well as directly confront
the art’s socio-political context. Hijikata’s engagement with time moves beyond a mere reflection/
re-presentation of the demands and anxieties of the times. His dance explores counter movements
to the linear progression of time and history in modern times and introduces alternative/dissident
approaches to time. I read his temporally heterogeneous experiments not so much as enacting a
return(s) – in order to save or recover – but as a revolt, a radically physical struggle, with time(s), and
the times, time and time again. He does this in the shared here and now of a performance but also
stretches this time to overlap with that of daily life (day and night).15 His choreography is a gesture
of dissent: it infiltrates and takes on the “time of domination” (Rancière 2012, 37).
106
Hiijikata’s choreographic methodology evokes what Jacques Rancière calls a “montage of

times,” or a “heterochrony,” which he defines as “a redistribution of times that invents new
capacities for framing the present” (Rancière 2012, 36). To the extent that Hijikata explores
returns, he does so to question and re-organize the present, in the present. I see Hijikata’s returns
first and foremost as an aspect of his being “contemporary,” of being “actual” and “internation-
ally contemporaneous,” to cite terms used by the choreographer and his contemporaries, and, to
quote Terry Smith, of “being with time (con tempus), that is to say, with many times at the same
time” (Smith and Mathur 2014, 168).
According to Giorgio Agamben, being contemporary involves a particular relationship to
time, which he qualifies as a “dys-crony.” “Contemporariness is,” he writes, “a singular relation-
ship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More
precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism”
(Agamben 2009a, 14, italics in original).
It is important to realize that the appointment that is in question in contemporariness

does not simply take place in chronological time: it is something that, working within
chronological time, urges, presses, and transforms it. And this urgency is the untime-
liness, the anachronism that permits us to grasp our time in the form of a “too soon”
that is also a “too late”; of an “already” that is also a “not yet.”
Agamben 2009a, 47
The philosopher defines this relationship not only as a “special relationship with the past” but
also as a “special relationship between the different times” (Agamben 2009a, 50, 52). Like Smith,
he qualifies the present as a coming together of multiple times. Agamben’s understanding of the
contemporary itself as returning to the past,16 as part of grasping and confronting the present
(which is not yet lived) offers another entry point into Hijikata’s choreographic strategies. It
specifically reframes the idea of the “return” as located in the present.
“The entry point to the present,” Agamben writes,
necessarily takes the form of an archeology; an archeology that does not, however,
regress to a historical past, but returns to that part within the present that we are abso-
lutely incapable of living . . . The present is nothing other than this unlived element in
everything that is lived . . . And to be contemporary means in this sense to return to a
present where we have never been.
Agamben 2009a, 51–52
Reading Hijikata’s returns as part of this dynamic, I would argue that, rather than (re)constructing
linear timelines it is more apt to draw on what Georges Didi-Huberman calls an anachronistic
temporal model. He introduces Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne as an alternative form of art history,
focusing, not on its familiar narratives of revival or innovation, but instead on a model he names
“survival” and “afterlife.” It represents an understanding of history that does not separate past and
present but instead brings them together in ever shifting ways. “Time conceived as a succession
of direct relationships (‘influences’) or conceived in the positivist way as a succession of facts had
no appeal for Warburg,” he writes. “Instead he pursued, as a counterpoint or counterrhythm to
influence and fact and chronology, a ghostly and symptomatic time” (Didi-Huberman 2003b, 274).
This resonates provocatively both with the spectrality of Hijikata’s dance (which draws multiple
pasts into the present), for instance, and with the prominent role citation, collage, and montage
play in his aesthetic and choreographic methodology. Agamben’s archeology and dys-chrony and
107
Sara Jansen
Didi-Huberman’s anachronism and afterlife offer alternative angles from which to explore the
stakes of Hijikata’s gestures of repetition and return, not in the context of the melancholia, the nos-
talgia for a disappearing past prevalent in Japan in the 1970s, but as a dynamic engagement with
time itself in contemporary choreographic practice, in the present/now, in which time is layered,
multiple, and may be alternatively temporalized and activated as part of a timely critical praxis.
Caesura in time
Agamben describes the contemporary as disjointed and draws on the corporeal metaphors of
“shattered backbone[s]” and “broken vertebrae” to talk about the cuts in time he sees as charac-
teristic of the contemporary’s relationship to the present. He states that the contemporary poet
embodies the fracture of the time: “The poet, insofar as he is contemporary, is this fracture, is at
once that which impedes time from composing itself and the blood that must suture this break
or this wound” (Agamben 2009a, 42).
(Re)turning to the methodology Hijikata begins developing in preparation for Twenty-
Seven Nights for the Four Seasons, this image resonates provocatively on different levels. It
speaks to the incisions and cuts, the ruptures and moments of temporal suspension performed
by the collages in Hijikata’s scrapbooks. His use of modern art and literature as the basis
for his movement language has its roots in the history of ballet and modern dance, but the
cuts across the pages appear as fractures, as breaks. Hijikata rewrites his own dance history
by cutting up, reframing, and re-assembling imagery, and by exploring alternative networks
of/between influences. He turns and returns to similar images and narratives to invert and
subvert them. He “recall[s], re-evoke[s], and revitalize[s] that which [he] had declared dead”
(Agamben 2009a, 50). He takes, makes, and transforms time, splits it up, or creates caesura in
time.17 He constructs alternative histories by cutting and pasting, layering, folding, crossing
out, and connecting differently.
The collage- and montage-like procedures the choreographer applies to the documents glued
and annotated in these scrapbooks is reflected in all aspects of the work, from posters and fliers
to sound and set design. Consider the reproduction of Marcel Duchamp’s Network of Stoppages
(1914), worked into the set for Susamedama, or the portrait of Hijikata with Abe Sada, taken after
they collaborated on a film, reproduced on a pamphlet for the event (Ishii 1998, 19, 70). Such
examples illustrate that his choreography does not appear in a vacuum or outside of time, as an
original and originally Japanese genre (as is often claimed). Instead, I see it as highly “intertex-
tual” work (Kristeva 1986, 37), as a “tissue of quotations” (Barthes 1988, 146)18 or a “mosaic
of quotations,” (Kristeva 1986, 37) which is in a “constant dialogue” with and a “perpetual
challenge” (Kristeva 1986, 40) to what came before, a “rewriting” of – dance, art, and personal –
history, as well as “a social and political protest” (Kristeva 1986, 36).
Images of dislocation also feature heavily in Hijikata’s movement vocabulary. Think of the
literal rupture with established dance genres and the dance he studied/encountered in the past,
and the strategies of opposition or reversal/inversion discussed above, which also play out in/on
the body. Hōsōtan includes a solo showing Hijikata curled up, on his back, emaciated, dressed in
rags, his hair long, his body dusted white, slowly and repeatedly trying to get up from the floor,
only to lose his balance and footing, and to collapse to the ground, over and over again. Hōsōtan,
considered representative of Hijikata’s aesthetics of the 1970s, inaugurates his poetics of the pre-
carious body. He speaks of an estranged body, of flesh gone astray (hagureta nikutai), and of the
solo as depicting the carnal body’s attempt to escape the control of the mind (Yomiuri Shimbun
1970).19 The dancer’s limbs move in opposite directions and away from the trunk, continuously
refiguring the outline of the body.
108
Gunji focuses extensively on Hijikata’s personal metamorphosis and sees in the dancer’s skeletal
figure a real dance of death. He stopped eating ten days before the premiere and returns to the stage
mere skin and bones (Asahi Shimbun 1972). He literally sheds his body of the very flesh that became
such a common, overused term in popular and artistic discourse in the 1960s, and juxtaposes the
healthy body of German expressionist dance and the fitness craze with a mōretsuna suijakutai (vio-
lently frail body) (Hijikata 1998, 153). The phrase nikutai no hanran (rebellion of the flesh) takes on
new meaning here, as he turns on the flesh itself.20 Perhaps he addresses also the recent omnipresence
and failure of other rebellions of the flesh, including the student demonstrations of the 1960s.21
“In Tohoku there is a culture one can only call Tohoku Kabuki,” Hijikata states.
It can be summarized as “a corpse standing up straight at the risk of its life.” In this
performance, I want to use the body to give shape to the wind of Tohoku, its piercing
skies, the howling electric wires and other things Tohoku, as well as the misery and
humility of the people.
Mainichi Shimbun 1972
Hijikata juxtaposes life and death, speaking to the tension between presence and absence central to
dance and an important theme in his movement language and writing. He sets out to materialize
the immaterial: wind, air, the sky, sounds, shadows, death, and time. Tohoku and kabuki merge in
this new “outline” for the body, which is shaped by exhaustion, sleep deprivation, and starvation.
Its boundaries porous, its contours blurred. ankoku butō takes the formless (l’informe), as Bataille
describes it as the “task” to “bring things down in the world,” to the extreme (Bataille 1984, 31).
Hijikata turns on the popular returns to Japan by going further, to the point of no return,
as it were, where the body itself becomes undone. He pushes to the extreme the capacity for
metamorphosis of the kabuki actor, not only confronting different identities and entities – dead
and alive, animate and inanimate – in one and the same body but also effacing the body itself.
He starts the performance days in advance by fasting or, in his words, turning the body “into a
ruin” (“jibun no nikutai wo ichido haikyo ni suru”) (Sports Nippon 1972). Tohoku Kabuki then stands
for a poetics of ruination and the decomposition of material, flesh, and time. Not just “wabi,” as
the artist states elsewhere, but real disintegration. (Hijikata 1998, 153). He proposes the body as
a transformational object, reduced to a single bone, or to a bone fragment, freed from all identity
markers (Hijikata and Shibusawa 1998, 13).
This fragile, ephemeral body underscores the tenuous relationship between dance and history.
Hijikata speaks provocatively about the history embedded in the flesh (nikutai no maibotsushi)
(Yomiuri Shimbun 1970). He examines the meaning and potential of this (personal, corporeal)
history by literally deconstructing it to start from an outline of the body, a skeleton. This pro-
cedure reflects a concern with the tension between remembering and forgetting in dance,22 and
specifically speaks to the crisis surrounding the meaning of history, the past and the future in
postwar Japan, when artists across disciplines experiment with ways to keep the past alive while
also actively resisting it, both for political reasons and to revolutionize their art. The body/flesh
plays a key role in such explorations.
Hijikata’s decomposition, de-(con)struction, and reconstruction of the body in dance also ques-
tions the way in which the body is constructed in other realms, including daily life, politics, and
ideology. Such strategies are symptomatic of the way in which Hijikata, from the start of his career,
takes position (or opposition) in relation to dance and indeed to what happens in the world around
him, by turning against, overturning, reversing and inversing images, norms and conventions.
Hijikata’s dance, while making many returns, continuously expands the scope of time. This
involves a re-organization, a re-alignment of past, present, and future. It is a process of exploration,
109
Sara Jansen
experimentation, and of tentativeness, insecurity, urgency, and potentiality, rather than of certainty
and of bringing back (or regressing to) a familiar and timeless past. I read his procedures of
layering, montage, and radical juxtaposition, the expanded and heterogeneous time/temporality
of the dance, and his poetics of the porous, disjointed body as strategies to break open the dom-
inant discourse on dance to open up new possibilities. In the process, Hijikata also, in Jacques
Rancière’s terms, challenges the “time of domination” (Rancière 2012, 37).
Rancière sees political “potentialities” in “forms of art that work at the crossroads of tem-
poralities and of worlds of experience” (Rancière 2012, 37). Choreography, which offers endless
possibilities for transforming, distributing, juxtaposing, activating, and resisting time is a particu-
larly powerful dispositif. Hijikata’s practice in particular pushes the limits of Rancière’s ideas. He
paces time differently, challenges lived time, engages radically with the experience of time – in
daily life, history, as well as in dance – in order to interrogate the way in which dance, time, and
history are understood at this historical juncture.
Notes
1 The Performance Studies international conference, Beyond Contamination: Corporeality, Spirituality and
Pilgrimage in Northern Japan, hosted by Keio University Art Center (Hijikata Tatsumi Archive) and the
Aomori Museum of Art took place in Aomori City from August 28 until September 1, 2015. The
oeuvres of Hijikata Tatsumi and Terayama Shūji, both born and raised in the region, were key topics of
the conference.
2 While it is difficult to discuss one work in isolation, I will, for the purpose of this essay, focus solely on
Twenty-Seven Nights for the Four Seasons (1972) and on the documents produced in conjunction with this
performance, including photographs, newspaper articles, interviews, previews, and reviews. It is not my
intention to be complete or to offer the definite reading of this complex work but rather to open up
potential alternative perspectives. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Japanese are my own.
3 I am inspired in particular by Georges Didi-Huberman, who uses the phrase “an act of temporaliza-
tion” in reference to the “choice of time” inherent in “every act, every decision of the historian”
(Didi-Huberman 2003a, 35).
4 Each section is linked with a specific season: Hōsōtan with the spring, Susamedama with summer, Gaishikō
and Nadareame with the fall, and Gibasan with winter.
5 Editors’ note: for more about the cabaret shows, see Coker, Chapter 42 in this volume.
6 A photograph of a panel with a reproduction of Duchamp’s Network of Stoppages (1914) is included in
Ishii (1998, 19).
7 Hijikata returns to his trips with photographer Hosoe Eikoh for the photo series An Extravagantly Tragic
Comedy (later Kamaitachi), exhibited and advertised contemporaneously with the premiere of Hijikata
Tatsumi and Japanese People (1968), which, as Hosoe points out, is part of the same project (Hosoe 1987,
26). Hosoe inserts Hijikata’s dance (in all its out of place-ness) into the landscape of his own wartime
memories. He juxtaposes the fiction of the dance with the reality of the countryside and its inhabitants,
in order to address the subjectivity of the medium of photography (see also Hosoe 2016). As we will see
below, Hosoe’s performative portrait of Hijikata and the questions that inform it are reflected in Hijikata
Tatsumi and Japanese People (1968) and in Twenty-Seven Nights for the Four Seasons (1972). Every show by
Hijikata’s dancers at Shinjuku Art Village was preceded by a slide show of Hosoe’s photographs (Kobayashi
1998, 31), and Waguri Yukio points out that especially Gaishikō unfolded inside the “black and white
world” of these prints (Waguri 1998, 26).
8 The programs for the Dance Experience Meetings (1960 and 1961), for example, make ample reference
to rituals. Mishima Yukio’s dramatic ritual suicide in 1970 is often cited as behind Hijikata’s temporary
retreat from the stage. All performances literally bear Mishima’s mark, as his calligraphic rendering of
“Hangidaitōkan” is on all flyers and posters produced in conjunction with the event.
9 This is an aspect American choreographer Trajal Harrell explores in his recent work inspired by Hijikata’s
dance.
10 I am referring to what Miryam Sas calls “imaginary returns” (Sas 2011).
11 Dancers engage in daily practice, rehearse and repeat movement (to make it their own), revisit elements
from previous work (differently, over time), and explore ways to access, re-activate, or erase corporeal
110
memories. While Hijikata’s words are very poetic, I would argue that he is speaking from the perspec-
tive of a dancer/choreographer, exploring novel ways to think about key elements of dance, including
balance; gesture; the timing, intensity, level, architecture, and dynamics of a (series of ) movement(s); tran-
sitions; facial expressions; the expression of emotion; intention; concentration; the relationship between
music, rhythm and movement, care of the body, and so on.
12 “Radical juxtaposition” is a term coined by Susan Sontag in her essay “Happenings: An Art of Radical
Juxtaposition” (1962).
13 Kabuki scholar Faubion Bowers mentions that the verb kabuku, to slant or incline was derived from the
verb katamuku, meaning “to slide downhill . . . to decline or degenerate” (Bowers 1974: 38).
14 “I think,” Gunji continues, “his butō is not new, but, because it touches on our very roots, presents the
tradition of human beings” (Gunji 1973, 121).
15 Apart from the introduction of scrapbooks and performing at cabarets and nightclubs, Hijikata’s new
choreographic methodology also involved ballet barre exercises during the day, ankoku butō rehearsals
all through the night, and fasting. Day and night were inverted and butoh seeped into every nook and
cranny of daily life.
16 Agamben includes references to the archaic and the primitive in avant-garde art, for instance, which are
relevant in this case.
17 “Those who have tried to think about contemporariness have been able to do so only by splitting it up
into several times, by introducing into time an essential dishomogeneity” (Agamben 2009a, 52).
18 A text, Roland Barthes writes, is constituted of traces, it is “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety
of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the
innumerable centers of culture” (Barthes 1988,146).
19 “The rebellion of the body against the way in which people have been controlling the flesh with the
mind” (Mainichi Shimbun 1972).
20 Perhaps he is taking on the perception that in his previous work, Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People
(1968), later subtitled Rebellion of the Flesh, he purged his dance of his (foreign) influences by turning on
the flesh itself. I read his strategy as a procedure of détournement on other levels too. The term resonates
with the alienation of Marxism, Brecht’s alienation effect, Bataille’s argument on the discontinuity of life
in Erotism, Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty,” and Grotowski’s “Poor Theatre.”
21 The student demonstrations in 1968 are often referred to as “hanran” (gakusei hanran) and the partici-
pants as nikutaiha seinen (youths of the body-faction). Kan, for instance, refers to angura theatre directors
including Betsuyaku Minoru as nikutaiha seiji seinen (Kan 2003, 177). Noi refers to the prevalence of
happenings and events featuring the naked body in the late 1960s as the “‘nikutai no hanran’ of the late
1960s” (Noi 2002, 176).
22 Dancers return, revisit, and repeat to store movement in the body and to re-surface it. They also attempt
to “re-member” the body and forget the ways in which it has been formatted over the years (through
habitual use, in daily life, and in dance), in order to arrive at something different, other potential move-
ments of the body. I am thinking about what Adrian Heathfield calls a “re-membering of the forgotten”
(Burrows and Heathfield 2013, 144).
Works cited
Agamben, Giorgio. 2009a. “What Is the Contemporary?” In What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays, translated
by D. Kishik and D. Pedatella, 39–54. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
———. 2009b. “What Is an Apparatus?” In What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays, translated by D. Kishik
and D. Pedatella, 1–24. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Asahi Shimbun. 1972. “Yonnenburi no butō koen. Hitasura gyōshoku mezasu. Danjiki de shinya no keiko.
Zen-ei no ‘kyōso’ Hijikata Tatsumi.” October 24, 1972 (evening edition).
Barthes, Roland. 1988. Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bataille, Georges. 1984. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Bowers, Faubion. 1974. Japanese Theatre. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company.
Burrows, Jonathan, and Adrian Heathfield. 2013 “Moving Writing.” Choreographic Practices 4, no. 2: 129–
149. doi: 10.1386/chor.4.2.129_1
Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2003a. “Before the Image, before Time: The Sovereignty of Anachronism.” In
Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and Out of History, edited by C. Farago and R. Zwijnenberg,
31–44. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
111
Sara Jansen
———. 2003b. “Artistic Survival: Panofsky vs. Warburg and the Exorcism of Impure Time.” Common
Knowledge 9, no. 2: 273–285.
Gunji Masakatsu. 1973. “Shi to iū koten butō.” Bijutsu techō 25, no. 364 (February): 121–126.
Hijikata Tatsumi. 1970. “‘Nikutai no naka ga gekijo da.’ Saikin no hapuningu nakami ga nai nā.” Interview
by Kimura Eiji. Yomiuri Shimbun, November 19, 1970.
———. 1998. “Kazedaruma no hanashi.” In Hijikata Tatsumi zenshū [The Collected Works of Hijikata Tat-
sumi], Vol. 1: 151–158. Tokyo: Kawade Shobō shinsha.
Hijikata Tatsumi, and Shibusawa Tatsuhiko. 1998. “Nikutai no yami wo mushiru.” In Hijikata Tatsumi zen-
shū, Vol 2: 9–14. Tokyo: Kawade Shobō shinsha.
Hijikata Tatsumi sakuhinshū. 1973. “‘Hangidaitōkan dainiji Ankoku butōha’ kessei kinen kōen. Shiki no
tame no nijūnanaban.” Bijutsu Techō (February): 109–152.
Hosoe, Eikoh. 1987. “Hijikata Tatsumi wo kataru.” Asubestokan Tsūshin, 2: 10–27.
———. 2016. “Hosoe Eikoh.” www.sfmoma.org/eikoh-hosoe-does-photography-reflect-truth/
Ichikawa, Miyabi. 1972. “Nikutai ga shisō ni shōka. Hijikata Tatsumi no ‘Hangidaitōkan’.” Yomiuri Shimbun,
October 31 (evening edition).
Ishii Tatsurō eds. 1998. Shiki no tame no nijūnanaban [Twenty-Seven Nights for the Four Seasons]. Keio Univer-
sity Research Center for the Arts and Arts Administration.
Ivy, Marilyn. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago and London: The Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Kan Takayuki. 2003. Sengo Engeki. Shingeki wa norikoete iru ka. Tokyo: Hyōronsha.
Kristeva, Julia. 1986. “Word, Dialogue, and Novel.” In The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi, 34–61. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Kobayashi, Saga. 1998. “Daibutai ni tatsu. Shiki no tame no nijūnanaban [Twenty-Seven Nights for Four
Seasons].” Keio University Research Center for the Arts and Arts Administration: 30–38.
Mainichi Shimbun. 1972. “Hijikata Tatsumi ga yonnenkan no chinmoku yaburu. ‘Tōhoku’ shirīzu de chōki
kōen.” October 25, 1972 (evening edition).
Noi Sawaragi. 1998 (2002). Nihon. Gendai. Bijutsu. Tokyo: Shinchōsha.
Rancière, Jacques. 2012. “In What Time Do We Live?” InThe State of Things, 9–38. London: Koenig Books.
Sas, Miryam. 2011. Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return.
Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard Univeristy Press.
Smith, Terry, and Saloni Mathur. 2014. “Contemporary Art: World Currents in Transition Beyond Glo-
balization.” Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, 3:1: 163–173. http://contemporaneity.
pitt.edu
Sontag, Susan. 1962. “Happenings: an art of radical juxtaposition.” In Against Interpretation and Other Essays.
New York: Picador.
Sports Nippon. 1972. “Yoga gyōja? Yonnenburi no kōen ‘ankoku butō no kyōso’ Hijikata Tatsumi. ‘Tōhoku
Kabuki desu.’” November 2, 1972.
Suzuki, Shiroyasu. 1973. “‘Hangidaitōkan:’ Kyokushiteki kansō.” Bijutsu techō 25, no. 364 (February):
123–126.
Tokyo Chūnichi Sports. 1968. “Ankoku koso ga waga sekai da.” November 2, 1968.
Tokyo Shimbun. 1972. “Josei sanka, monogatari-sei mo tsuyoku dasu. Hijikata Tatsumi ga dainiji ankoku
buto-ha wo kessei.” October 24, 1972 (evening edition).
Waguri, Yukio. 1998. “Watashi to ‘Shiki no tame no 27 ban’. Shiki no tame no nijūnanaban [Twenty-Seven
Nights for Four Seasons].” Keio University Research Center for the Arts and Arts Administration: 24–30.
112
13
OHNO KAZUO
Biography and methods of movement creation1
Lucia Schwellinger (translated by

Charlotte Marr and Rosemary Candelario)
Childhood and his beginnings in dance

Ohno Kazuo was born October 27, 1906, in Hakodate, a seaport at the southern point of Hok-
kaido as the oldest son of the family. Hakodate was considered a very modern town in Northern
Japan that is strongly influenced by the West. Ohno’s parents were from relatively well to-do
families; his father’s family worked in the fishing industry of the Northern Ocean. Even though
his family lived through tough times every now and then, Ohno and his eight siblings grew up
in a relatively comfortable home. When Ohno speaks about his family, he mostly talks about his
own egotism and the boundless kindness of his mother. His main thoughts are thankfulness and
guilt toward her, she who always had understanding for him until her death (Ohno 1989, 73).2 He
credits his tendency to speak in dream images to her influence because she would tell him ghost
stories written by Lafcadio Hearn, which stimulated in him a visionary view of reality (Ohno
1989, 64). Her religiosity molded Ohno’s life as well. At the moment when one of his younger
sisters was struck by a train and mortally injured, his mother, who was at home, was said to have
had a vision of a procession of Buddhist monks. As a follower of Amida-Buddhism, she took
her kids to Christian services every now and then because there was no Buddhist temple in the
vicinity of their town. Ohno was twenty-four years old when he was baptized, and the Christian
faith has constituted the basis of his thinking ever since.
Ohno got a late start with his dance training, although he had decided years earlier that
he wanted to go into movement education. After graduating from high school and working
as a substitute teacher at an elementary school in Hakodate for one year, he went to Tokyo
in 1926 to study at the Japanese Sports Club’s School for Gymnastics (Nihon tai’iku-kai taisō
gakkō, present-day Nippon Sports Science University). After finishing his studies, which were
interrupted by fourteen months of military service, he got a job as gymnastics teacher at the
private mission school, Kantō Gakuin, in Yokohama.
In Hakodate, Ohno had never seen a western-style dance or theatre performance. At the
gymnastics school he got to know neuer Tanz. It was not this first encounter with western dance
that was to become the guiding light for his future career, however, but rather an experience
from shortly before graduation. On the initiative of a friend, Ohno went to a performance by
the internationally acclaimed Spanish dancer, La Argentina,3 who had a guest appearance at the
Imperial Theatre:
113
Lucia Schwellinger
We sat in the last row of the third balcony of the Imperial Theatre, and from the first
moment I was fascinated with the dance of La Argentina, her magic hit me like a light-
ning bolt. I can never forget this encounter.
Ohno in Haerdter and Kawai 1988, 57
Ohno was so deeply impressed that for the first time he felt the desire to become a dancer himself.
Yet, this was only possible in 1933, after he had married and was awaiting a transfer to the Baptist
Sōshin Girls School. In preparation for his new job, Ohno took classes in Ishii Baku’s studio for
a year. There he found himself a beginner among many renowned and respected dancers. . . .
The following year Ohno saw Harald Kreutzberg perform, and was deeply impressed. Though, in
contrast to the performance of La Argentina, he was not so much touched on the personal level
but was in awe of Kreutzberg’s skill and the connection between “inside” and “outside,” form
and expression (see Ohno 1989, 73–74).4 It might have been this connection with the “inside”
that allowed Ohno to refer to Kreutzberg as a “teacher for life” even though he generally rejected
technical training (Ohno 1989, 226).
In order to study the German import Ausdruckstanz, Ohno joined the Eguchi/Miya dance
studio in 1936, where he soon advanced to teaching assistant. Even back then, he had already
begun to distance himself from the lessons of his teachers and to communicate his own style. His
second son and later dance partner, Yoshito, was born in 1938. In the same year, Ohno was called
to active service again, and returned only in 1946 after his deployment to Manchuria and New
Guinea. Besides his dance lessons, he also went back to teaching at the Baptist girl’s school, a post
he maintained until the early 1980s.
Ohno did not celebrate his stage debut as a student of Eguchi and Miya, but appeared as a
guest in the show of Hijikata [Tatsumi]’s future teacher Andō Mitsuko. Soon after, in the fall of
1949, he gave a performance at Kanda kyoritsu kōdō Hall, on the basis of which Hijikata dubbed
his dance “medicine dance.”5 It was the first of four shows with several shorter pieces that Ohno
presented before meeting Hijikata personally for the first time.
...
The years of ankoku butō-ha and the films of “Mr. O”

...
In retrospect, it was the death of his mother in 1962 that was the decisive experience in his
development. Her last words allegedly were “a flatfish swims in my body,” which Ohno inter-
preted a few years later as a bequest on which he should base his dance. He believed to discover
with this flatfish, which rests nestled on the ocean floor until it suddenly sets itself in motion,
the embodiment of “the gestalt of life itself ” (Ohno 1989, 116). That is, in connection with the
mother, the flatfish reflected the image of an embryo inside the womb, nurtured by the mother
through the placenta.
From this image Ohno developed a complete “cosmology” by the end of the 1970s in which
the womb was a microcosm of the evolution of the entire universe whereby the devotion of
one’s life to the creation of new life is central. He saw his role as a dancer to be to recognize the
continuity of life and the related emotions such as gratefulness, guilt, etc., and turn them into
movement.
Even though this way of thinking was only at its infancy during the early 1960s, and Ohno,
like Hijikata, moved in circles of avant-garde artists (notwithstanding his middle class work and
family life) he occupied from the beginning a singular position. On the one hand, the age differ-
ence and his already well-advanced personal style of movement made him an equal partner with
114
Ohno Kazuo
Hijikata, even though he worked under his direction. On the other hand, his concentration on
his own “soul,” and his personal memories and emotions, produced a separation from the outside
world and prevented his assimilation into a slowly growing company.
Thus, Ohno absorbed fewer influences in terms of style and method from other artists and art
movements than Hijikata. As a proponent of improvisation, he even stood out from the younger
dancers in the free experiments of ankoku butō-ha, because he actually possessed an individual
movement vocabulary that evidenced neither his assimilation with the group nor borrowed
movements from different dance styles. In extreme cases, his concentration on his “inside” was
at times so complete that he entered his own world and would involuntarily extend the perfor-
mance past the set time as he continued to dance between the rows of the audience.
...
During the time when Hijikata began to develop his method of “metamorphosis” with
Hangidaitōkan, Ohno and his son both retired from the stage except for some guest appearances.
Ohno describes the following years as a time of uncertainty. As much as he wished to continue
his dance career, he was unable to create a new piece for the stage (Ohno 1989, 209). Yet, he did
do three movies, and moreover, he taught butoh several times a week in a little studio near his
house in Kamihoshikawa, a section of Yokohama.
In accordance with his rejection of technique, Ohno saw class only as assistance for finding
one’s own personal dance. Therefore, he taught neither technique nor movement phrases, but let
the participants improvise freely. One of his longtime students, Uesugi Mitsuyo,6 said that some
classes remained in complete silence all evening. Often, he played records of different music styles
from Bach to the Beatles, quoted from books or talked about people’s everyday lives, emotions
regarding life and death, etc., out of which he slowly developed his own cosmology. When at
the end of the class Ohno would prepare a meal in order to close the evening with conversation,
Uesugi often found the transition from the imaginary universe to the real studio confusing
(Uesugi 1994, 17).
Ohno’s class was more like a meditation session where music and spoken words were supposed
to help [participants] abandon reason and thoughts about the appearance of one’s own body in
favor of emotional experiences out of which movement could emerge. The real environment was
mostly blocked out, depending on an individual’s readiness and ability to concentrate. Neither
structure nor content of Ohno’s classes have significantly changed over the past twenty years, even
though they have changed from being free of charge private lessons for relatively few students
to relatively popular workshops with a large number of foreign participants who do not live in
Japan for any extended period of time for whom an English translation is provided.
The movies mentioned earlier, The Portrait of Mr. O (O-shi no shōzō, 1969), The Mandala of
Mr. O (O-shi no mandara, 1971), and Mr. O’s Book of the Dead (O-shi no shisha no sho, 1973–1976)
were all directed by Nagano Chiaki. Ohno’s students also performed in the last two. For the most
part, they were shot outdoors, for example, in the mountains, by the temples of Kanagawa and
Gunma, and on the crater lake Shikotsu-ko in Hokkaido.
None of the movies had a story to it, rather, everyday movements were executed without
any situational context, distorted through the costumes, white makeup, and props. Scenes in The
Portrait of Mr. O, for example, include Ohno dressed as a woman in white riding around on a
little motor bike, running through a temple garden with his long undulating hair in the rain, or
wrapping up the bloody carcass of a fish in toilet paper. Mr. O’s Book of the Dead, again, presents
him in front of a temple, sporting a wig and a loin cloth of flowers, while in other scenes the
members of the company walk in a somewhat surreal procession through the countryside with
artificial flowers in their hair, or Ohno sits with a lady’s hat and an umbrella in a wheelbarrow
amidst a herd of pigs.
115
Lucia Schwellinger
...
During these years, Ohno started to develop his aforementioned “cosmology” from per-
sonal experiences, memories, and thoughts that were instigated, at times, by reading or look-
ing at images. Similar to Hijikata’s concept of the Japanese body, Ohno’s cosmology relied
less on careful consideration than on the associative connection of individual motifs. While
Hijikata adopted concrete forms from drawings, photographs, etc., and directly extrapolated
techniques from the fine arts as design tools for his butoh, for Ohno, paintings and the like
were more like triggers or projection screens for visions. Exemplary of this procedure are
Ohno’s thoughts about a postcard that was likely decisive for the choice of the crater lake
Shikotsu-ko as filming location:
When it was settled that I was going to be in Nagano Chiaki’s Death Book of Mr. O I
happened upon a postcard of Shikotsu-ko in the middle of Hokkaido. As my eyes got
pulled into the “moss gully,” I looked at it for a long time, and then, for no particular
reason, I saw the figure of a highly decorated general who sat on a chair. . . . Gully and
lake had melted into something like an angel, the landscape had a soothing impact on
me. “In heaven, a couple becomes an angel” (Swedenborg). Meanwhile, Mount Taru-
mae puffed smoke into the air like a person who is imperturbable.
Ohno 1989, 154, ellipses in original 7
Ohno identified the angel with his dead parents, the general with his father, leading him to
deduce a kind of communication with the dead. Such visions during everyday events became
decisive aspects of Ohno’s further career. These visions not only motivated him to pursue certain
themes, but also guided the production design of his works. It was not uncommon that Ohno felt
guided on stage or during rehearsals by a foreign hand – like Mary Wigman’s “witch” – pushed
onto the stage by a “monstrous” piano, facing an audience of dead people at the theatre, etc. This
was how Ohno mystified everyday banalities and turned them into transcendental manifestations,
something that became visible in his movement, too.8
Admiring La Argentina
Just like La Argentina’s performance tour fifty years earlier, it was another specific event that occa-
sioned Ohno’s return to the stage. In 1976, he saw an abstract painting by Nakanishi Natsuyuki at
an exhibit and suddenly saw the “gestalt” of La Argentina in it. At this point, Argentina had been
dead for 40 years, and Ohno had never talked to her nor seen her again after that performance in
1929. The vision was even more overwhelming as he had often tried to conjure up the image of
her, to no avail (Ohno 1989, 99–100). He took the unexpected “encounter” with La Argentina as
an opportunity to return to the stage in order to show his high esteem for the dancer.
This admiration, based on the event at the Imperial Theatre so many years before was now
mixed in with his view of the universe and a transfiguration in accordance with the Christian
ideal of selflessness. Ohno saw La Argentina’s commitment for the art, for the revival and trans-
mission of almost forgotten dances, as a contribution to creation she made, she who died so young
and so selflessly devoted herself to the art for so many (Ohno 1989, 41). Ohno did not define
“creation” as an event that was finished in the distant past, but as a retransmission of the juice and
wisdom of life across generations.
The cornerstone for a further mystification was most of all the connection of Christian ideals
and the veneration of the dead, which subsequently influenced Ohno’s works as well as his under-
standing of himself. This influence became apparent, for example, in the change of his studio name
116
Ohno Kazuo
to “Holy hall of the white grave” (Hakurin seidō). Additionally, one section of his planned homage
to La Argentina was based on the memory of one of his students who had drowned in the ocean.
In 1977, Ohno celebrated his comeback at the Dai-ichi seimei Hall with an almost 90 minute
long solo, Admiring La Argentina (Ra Aruhenchīna-shō). Knowing that an evening of such magni-
tude needed a frame, Ohno asked for Hijikata’s and Ohno Yoshito’s assistance in the overall design
of the show. Just like all of his works since then, Admiring La Argentina was only set in terms of
its general structure and the characteristic movement vocabulary of each of the sections, while
Ohno improvised specific movements and paths through space.
Admiring La Argentina began – reminiscent of his part as Divine – with Ohno’s entrance from
the audience as an old woman. In fact, the piece from 1960 Divīnu shō (Divinariana) was inte-
grated into the opening scene of Admiring La Argentina in a modified form, with the addition of
“Birth and Death” (Shi to tanjō) as a subtitle. According to Goda [Nario], the costume was less
shabby than 17 years previously. Another novelty was that Ohno raised both his hands for some
gestures while he danced between the rows of the audience (Goda 1994, 21). Wearing various
costumes, Ohno danced in sequence to organ music and live piano music by Bach, Puccini Arias,
and Argentinean tangos. Although the full sound of the organ or the dramatic expression of
the arias seemed to suggest big and wide gestures, Ohno’s movements were held to a minimum.
Ohno wanted to let La Argentina live again through his dance without either trying to hide his
own age or attempting to imitate the young Spaniard.
Unlike Hijikata’s method of metamorphosis, Ohno did not identify with La Argentina in a way
that would eliminate his own identity, but concentrated on relationships that hinted at a takeover
by a foreign identity. Ohno’s performance notes show that for the first section, with a change of his
costume, he would be reborn as a young girl (La Argentina), shortly thereafter he would be born to
La Argentina, and in yet another section he would take her inside of him. A takeover is also indicated
by thoughts about his soul being picked up by “the chirping of little birds” or being “buried in a
flower,” and equally that he thinks to be more beautiful than a flower he looks at, an idea that possi-
bly refers to the connection between the improvisation motif and the dance (Ohno 1989, 106ff.).9
Even more than the premiere of Admiring La Argentina in Tokyo, Ohno’s real breakthrough
came with his performance at the Nancy International Theatre Festival in 1980. During the
festival the German director Werner Schroeter suggested the making of a film, in which Ohno
improvised along a riverbank outside the city. Afterwards, Ohno went on a European tour that
took him to Strasbourg, London, Stuttgart, Paris, and Stockholm. Ever since then, Ohno has
accepted multiple invitations to performances, festivals, symposiums, workshops, presentations,
etc., almost every year all over the world.
Audiences and critics in the West were particularly impressed with his seemingly natural
androgyny and its aesthetic. Ohno’s fine and almost unnoticeable movements gave the impression
of a fragility and proximity to death that had hitherto been unknown in dance, as described in
the following performance review:
What Kazuo Ohno does has nothing to do with travesty. . . . Why be shocked when an
old man copies the object of his reverence with only a few nuances? Death resonates in
all his poses. When Kazuo Ohno . . . moves his slender body, . . . when he crouches, it
seems as if a gentle breeze could blow him away like an autumn’s leaf, a morbid scent
of chrysanthemums fills the air alongside his moving tenderness.
Fischer 1982, 21, ellipses in original
While butoh slowly became known in Europe as a new dance style (Kasai Akira and the group
Sankai Juku also appeared for the first time in Europe at Nancy), Japanese critics evaluated
117
Lucia Schwellinger
Admiring La Argentina as a new beginning in the history of butoh, which simultaneously indicated
the end of Hijikata’s ankoku butoh.10 On the one hand, Ohno’s improvisational solos showed an
alternative to the ongoing imitation of typical forms that had led Hijikata’s group choreogra-
phies into a crisis. Even though Admiring La Argentina was produced by Hijikata, it became the
piece that allowed Ohno to step out of Hijikata’s shadow as a formative figure of butoh in his
own right. On the other hand, Ohno was not representative of the younger generation, who like
Sankai Juku, for example, emigrated to the West after their initial success. Ohno, as the older
master and maverick, did not raise suspicions that he would adjust his dance to European tastes
for mere populist reasons.
Although Ohno’s work maintained a proximity to death, the concept of darkness, which had
long been so characteristic for butoh, lost its significance. One reason is the association of the
term with the early years of butoh, when Hijikata made social taboos and the dark landscape of
northern Japan central themes of his dance. Moreover, Ohno’s “cosmology” that was founded
on motherly love did not see death as a taboo that needed to be broken, but as a fundamental
condition of being alive. As Ohno solidified his cosmology, the image of the social outcast, as
embodied in the prostitute Divine, lost its significance over the years. This is evident if you
look at the progression of Admiring La Argentina where the performance of death in the first
section becomes increasingly abstract. On the occasion of the opening night in 1977, a spectator
remarked on the beginning section, subtitled “Commentary on Divine – Birth and Death,”
that Ohno “had deepened the darkness with every moment.” As a culmination of the androg-
ynous sense of the body in ankoku butō, he saw Ohno drown in a “pitch black lake,” which he
compared to the bed, soiled with excrement, in which Divine died (Nagao Kazuo in Ohno
1989, 269). For the audience in Nancy, it was less about the horror of such death, rather than
a kitschy-beautiful performance of an elderly woman.11 The change is also apparent in Ohno’s
notes from the 1980s, where he calls the beginning section merely “Birth and Death” while the
allusion to Genet’s Divine is dropped (see also Ohno 1989, 106). Finally, about a 1992 perfor-
mance of Admiring La Argentina in which Ohno was dressed in a magnificent black-and-white
gown, Goda wrote that Ohno depicted an “abstract death” instead of the miserable death of
Divine (Goda 1994, 21).
The consolidation of the “cosmology”

...
Ohno developed his method over the next years on an increasingly abstract level, as we have
already seen in regard to Admiring La Argentina. . . . The figure disappeared ever more frequently
behind abstract terms such as creation, birth and death, or the dead. On one hand, the perfor-
mance became more objective because it was derived from a more universal object, on the other
hand, it was accompanied by a stronger focus on oneself.
...
For a while, the concept of forgiveness determined Ohno’s view of his relationship with
his mother. In Tokyo, following the success of Admiring La Argentina, he dedicated the piece
My Mother (Watashi no okāsan) in 1981 to her. Thus, all three themes that formed the basis
for the elements of Ohno’s cosmology came together: the veneration of La Argentina, his
Christian faith, and love for his mother. This thematic development found concrete expres-
sion in the use of an artificial flower as a prop, the use of which in Admiring La Argentina,
and even more so in Call of Jesus and My Mother expanded the symbolism to include love
and forgiveness.
...
118
Ohno Kazuo
The aforementioned aspect of forgiveness in Ohno’s relationship with his mother is based on
the elevation of the mother role to one of self-sacrifice. He observed how she met his childish
egocentrism with forbearance, which caused him to feel guilt mixed with gratefulness (Ohno
1989, 73).12 Beginning with A Little Table or the Fetus Dream, Ohno integrated a little table (o-zen)
in his works – traditionally used at important ceremonies like birth, marriage, etc., in Japan – and
used it to symbolize the devoted mother. As such, for Ohno the table embodies the personal
story of every single person, and in connection with the idea of forgiveness, he sees it also as a
place of security.
For My Mother, Ohno ordered a table with one crooked leg in order to give the impression of
instability and fragility. In the context of Ohno’s “cosmology,” where death does not signify the
end of life but is an always present constant, the table’s intentional imperfection can be interpreted
as a symbol of Ohno’s view of life. The very fact that Ohno uses the prop at the most disparate
occasions, be it a short improvisation or a film, supports this idea. The identification with the
mother’s womb, in particular, is signified by a rope that Ohno used to connect himself with the
table as if through an umbilical cord.
...
Minimization of movement
After he solidified his butoh in intellectual and structural terms, Ohno Kazuo began, especially
after . . . Water Lilies (1987), to minimize the dimensions of his movements even further. This was
less an attempt to adjust to his physical abilities but rather to preserve his concentration on the
“soul.” That is, in connection with the understanding that the focus on oneself is also the focus
on all people, Ohno believed that movement that was too big or too fast endangered his ideal of
the body-soul-unity, which requires that movements be directed by the soul. The effect of this
minimization is described in a review of Water Lilies in Toronto:
The gestures are more implosive than explosive. It is the emotions that are on a grand
scale, uplifted by the music (for example, Kathleen Battle singing Schubert), and the
emotional nudity of the performers. It is remarkable that such small gestures can com-
municate such monumental emotions.
Gildiner 1990, C5
...
Improvisation basics
Because of Ohno’s disposition to improvise, it is impossible to note kata or something similar for
his movement. His method of working without any specification in regards to form nonetheless
led to the development of characteristic properties of movements, which limit the movement
vocabulary to variations of ever recurring poses, so that a sort of standardization becomes notice-
able. In spite of the apparent differences between Hijikata’s shaping [of movement] according to
defined criteria and Ohno’s free improvisation, it is possible to recognize similarities both in their
approach to finding movement and in the effect.
One of the commonalities with Hijikata’s method of developing movement vocabulary is, for
example, showing specific images, which require a change to a new environment and perspective
that lies outside the realm of everyday experiences, like the images of an embryo in its mother’s
womb or the tread of a deceased person. While for Hijikata this change of perspective constitutes
119
Lucia Schwellinger
a mental “metamorphosis,” in which one’s own existence is replaced with the object of identi-
fication, in Ohno’s work this object serves as a starting point for the analysis of the relationship
between one’s own existence, the object of identification, and its environment. Hence, movement
is not a (predictable) coordinated reaction to an imagined sensory perception, but a manifesta-
tion of the analytical process whose continuation will be determined only at the moment of the
initiation of movement:
“Understanding” must rise out of movement, movement must give rise to understand-
ing. . . . I think the fact that movement emerges (shaped by the individual) is due to
the relationship between the lifeforce, the understanding of being alive, and the world
in which we live.
Ohno 1989, 30–31, ellipses in original
Pictures serve as aids to make the relationships between birth, life, and death emotionally accessi-
ble. Ohno prefers to work with images that illustrate the possibility of living in seemingly adverse
circumstances. Instead of dividing body and individual into single parts by giving them separate
tasks to perform, his selection of images shows an individual integrated into the environment
and equipped with all the essentials for life. The act of imagining physical contact with this
environment or source of nourishment, as well as the consciousness of interdependence with one
another is supposed to trigger emotions, which are subsequently transformed into movement.
Conversely, moving the body can trigger emotions, which then deepen the understanding of the
relationship and once again prompt movement. Ohno sees a dance like that as a continuous act
of creation, supported by the will to live, while the entire body is an expression of the soul. When
Ohno, in the face of the impossibility of ever grasping life as a whole, speaks of “puzzlement”
[konwaku] as his technique (Ohno 1989, 35), he describes his ideal of a discovery process made
visible, which does not have the objective of achieving a specific result.
Based on this principle, for example, the switch of perspective to that of an embryo does
not necessarily lead to a dance in the pose of an embryo with strongly bent extremities, but to
movements that express the emotions regarding the mother as the source of life. As an initiator
of movement, emotion is a significant factor that has to prevent a particular dance becoming set
or routine, even in the face of repeated rehearsals and performances.
Since I do not really rehearse movement that I would have to memorize, but always
search for movements by way of improvisation, and those movements, even if they are
the same ones, originate in terms of content from a rise in energy, I think it absolutely
necessary to prevent any decline of that emotion. If it nevertheless wanes, one must
endure and let oneself be spurred on by the boundless beauty of wilted flowers as an
aspect [sugata] of life that has to do with the birth of life. . . . A dance as something
weak that tries to pull itself upwards. Precisely a dance of wilting, I think. A bizarre
combustion, as if one detailed and reassembled a junk car and made it run again. I would
like to model myself on the birth of life.
Ohno 1989, 36 f., ellipses in original
On one hand, the abandonment of fixed forms allows for a performance without any risk in
terms of dance technique, but on the other hand, it poses the danger of arbitrariness as well as
failure of the required concentration. In February of 1992, Ohno experienced this himself when
he alone had to carry the first evening of a four-day event “Dreams of 10 Nights” (Yume jū-ya)
at the theatre Terpsichore (Terupushikōru) after his son got sick. After half an hour he suddenly
120
Ohno Kazuo
stopped the show announcing that he could not dance that day (Nakamura Fumiaki quoted in
Ōno, Ōno and Nakamura 1992, 27).
Ono’s perception of the global interconnection of life, just like Hijikata’s reference to literary
sources, does not come from careful consideration. Rather it consists of associative linkages of
single phenomena from Ohno’s personal experience, which he included in his “cosmology” as
examples of universal phenomena. Consequently, several images tend to overlap or connect to
image-chains with intersections of individual parts. At this point, Ohno’s method meets Hijikata’s
“fragmentation” of the body and the simultaneous concentration on individual elements: The
depiction of the entire universe through separate, individual experiences that can evoke different
emotions stands in opposition to the simultaneous grasping of multiple images. For Ohno, this
multiplication of tasks for the dancers results in the minimization or alienation of the representa-
tion, which deprives the audience of a specific interpretation. Here is an example of the overlap
of images from “The Dead Sea” section of the eponymous piece. The section is based on the
main motif of the piece, an unexpected view of the mountainsides by the Dead Sea covered
thickly with animals:
A trumpet sounds. The march of animals and the woman who is close to death. These
[images] both overlap at some point and create a chain of mountains around the Dead
Sea. . . . Do the animals feel an incredible love for the eternally dying woman? . . . The
lady gathers up her skirt to respond to the incredible love.
Ohno 1989, 152, ellipses in original
Reading Ohno’s text and rehearsal notes on this section, one notices how numerous images come
into contact with one another.13 Because the weasel-like creatures living in fox holes get their
nourishment from puddles and organic matter in the mountains, Ohno sees the mountain range
as a mother’s womb, which the animals slowly devour. He identifies with them as a creature
himself that as an embryo grew through feeding off the placenta and in essence “ate the life of
the mother” (Ohno 1989, 167). He again compares the mountain and the mother with the slowly
dying woman because both offer themselves as room and board. He appropriated the image of
the dying woman from a poster of a theatre company that he saw during the festival at Nancy.
It showed a woman dressed in white standing in the ocean surrounded by numerous children –
for Ohno they correspond to the weasels – who the woman tries to save from drowning with
outstretched arms.
Moreover, Ohno connects the woman with the image of a “dead angel,” named after a copper
sculpture that stands in front of a doll museum in Monte Carlo. He also calls a little doll inside
the museum “dead angel” because it was carelessly left on the edge of a vitrine, apparently for
lack of space. This comparison was inspired by a text in Hotta Yoshie’s three volume work Goya
(1976), in which the author describes his fascination with an insignificant painting at the Push-
kin Museum in Moscow that neither hung at an advantageous spot nor was it mentioned in the
catalog. He characterized the painting as one that “lay dying, as long as it has existed” (“Ankoku
butō” 1983, 18). Ohno also saw a “dead angel” in an elderly Russian exile he encountered in
New York; her white clothing, head covering, and bouquet of flowers stirred in him the associa-
tion of the “ghost of La Argentina” (Ohno 1989, 166).
...
[The ghost motif returns in the “Viennese Waltz” scene from The Dead Sea.] In his text with
the same title, Ohno again mentions the image of the woman in white who stands in the ocean
(Ohno 1989, 160). Moreover, he notes of this section, which was performed to the waltz Küns-
tlerleben (“Artist’s Life”) by Johann Strauss:
121
Lucia Schwellinger
I imagine a scene in which a flock of ghosts pours out of an abandoned castle as if in

competition with the flowers. When I danced this waltz in Europe, it was like strange
ghosts of the dead stared at me, it was a feeling as if beauty and splendor suddenly blos-
somed in the midst of misery.
Ohno 1989, 169
The ghost motif comes from the stories by Lafcadio Hearn that Ohno repeatedly heard as a child.
Ohno recalls that he was afraid of looking at his mother as she told the stories because in his
imagination her body and those of the ghosts overlapped. At the same time, he associates a sense
of security with this memory, when he nestled against his mother in a combination of fear and
anticipation (Ohno 1989, 164). . . . On top of that, and calling to mind his vision of a general
prompted by the postcard depicting the crater lake Shikotsu-ko, he sees a “death ghost” of an
aborted fetus fathered by a general, whom he again identifies with his own father.
The various ghosts in “Viennese Waltz” reflect Ohno’s idea of the unity of life and death in
that the menacing ghosts of Lafcadio Hearn’s stories or the ghosts of the dead are directly iden-
tified with the intimacy of his parents. With the image of the abandoned – and therefore falling
into ruin – castle from which the ghosts well up like flowers, Ohno emphasizes his theme of
creation out of destruction. In particular, the aesthetic comparison of ghosts with the beauty of
flowers implies a light atmosphere, which is reflected in Ohno’s facial expression and movement
dynamic.
...
While Hijikata looks for the common denominator of overlapping images in characteristic
movement, form, or surface structure, Ohno identifies multiple things with one another when
he recognizes a unity of life and death in their appearance or function. Whether he speaks about
a broken car that runs again after being completely rebuilt, of the bare and yet ideal living envi-
ronment that the mountains by the Dead Sea provide, of the doll that is attractive for the very
fact of being superfluous, or of La Argentina’s ghost, he always uses them as metaphors for the
creative process that only becomes possible through the act of (self-)destruction.
From the unity of the opposites, creation and destruction, Ohno further derives the unity of
contrasting emotions like happiness and sadness, hope and despair, etc. And just like the afore-
mentioned multiplication of images, this leads again to a minimization of expression. Although
Ohno neither freezes his facial expression like a mask by keeping the muscles perfectly still, nor
contorts his features into a grotesque expression, one is not often able to interpret his mien as a
specific emotion.
The mobilization of the body solely through emotions and not through formal guidelines
according to specific criteria, and the renunciation of technical dance training, have the effect
that movements are dependent on personal habits and that one’s flexibility or bodily control is
not significantly improved [by Ohno’s practices]. Thus, the basic posture is for the most part
an erect unconscious everyday bearing, whereby the knees are not completely straightened and
the upper body is not completely upright. In this pose, Ohno can initiate any movement while
expending relatively little energy. Moreover, the lack of concrete rules for parts of the body in
regard to dimension, sequence, or frequency – which could otherwise enforce symmetry – leads
to a preference (in Ohno) for the right side that is prevalent except, for example, in the dance
“The Time of Creation.” As a general rule, the right side is particularly emphasized in that Ohno
initiates movement of the right arm by lifting his shoulder and turning his head to the right.
Head and shoulder tend to remain in this position for a long period of time.
...
122
Ohno Kazuo
Basic motor patterns

The functional use of body parts points to the unity of idea and action. The main focus is
primarily on the coordinated initiation of the movement of head and hands. In other words,
the orientation of head and hands is largely comparable; in some cases, the torso follows suit by
bending forward or turning at the waist. Even changes of location on stage or pose are for the
most part initiated by the movement of head and hands in the respective direction.
The hands mostly move in the diagonal planes (Zwischenflächen) just in front of the body,
where they may cross the middle of the body or each other.14 They often touch or seize other
body parts, the costume, or props, whereby at times they may be taken behind the body.15 The
hands remain weighted in sitting, kneeling, and reclined positions. This speaks to a functional use
of the hands just like in everyday life. Wrists and elbows almost always stay bent so that they spa-
tially direct the movement, and so that the arms get turned for arch-like movements. In between
larger arm gestures, sometimes it is only the wrists and fingers that move.
Although Ohno does not have a fixed movement vocabulary, he consistently employs similar
poses. Generally, whenever the hands are on the level of the lower face, or when they are extended
at a distance from the body at least at shoulder height, the fingers are almost straight and the palms
tend to be facing front or up. If they move below the shoulders or closer to the body, the palms
face down or towards the body. Then all the fingers, or only the middle finger, are bent inward,
or thumb and index finger make a circle. Just like the hand gestures, the positions of the fingers
are sometimes different for the right and left hand.
Locomotion is accomplished mostly with steps of various paces. Although the turning in and
out of the legs is mentioned only once in the description for “Viennese Waltz,” similar to the
arm gestures, this can be frequently observed during sideways motion, as can a grapevine step.
Despite changes of direction during a grapevine, the orientation of the torso can remain the same
as the body twists at the waist. Alongside a vertical split of the body into a left and more strongly
mobilized right side, the twist at the waist results in a similar split along the horizontal axis of
the body into a lower and a more strongly mobilized upper body, with the occasional deviation
from a frontal orientation. Gestures of the legs that are not accompanied by a change of location
tend to be small steps or jumps in place, leg rotations in and out, and stomping of one leg after it
circumscribes a wide arch to the front.
In most cases, the upper and lower body are initiated simultaneously and with simi-
lar dynamics. A stomp is accompanied by powerful, uncontrolled arm movements, calmly
executed steps occur with moderate gestures. Even when the emphasis is clearly on head
and hand movements, the gestures of the right arm, or with a change of pose or location,
respective body sections that are not in use are not actively kept still, but contribute by
shifting the weight through bending the knees, putting weight on the hands, or minimally
counterbalancing with the left arm, etc. Delegation is subordinate to coordination.16 Ohno’s
functionality is a fundamental difference from Hijikata’s more formal concept based on the
idea of “fragmentation.”
The pause for Ohno is certainly another important phenomenon of delegation. Often the
entire body holds still, sometimes one hand barely moves, or the upper body is kept still during
locomotion. The active pause, which interrupts the well-paced flow of movement or goes against
the direction of the movement of a different body part, requires a quick and controlled change of
muscle tension. In more recent works, a general slowing of the pace and a tendency to maintain
a constant tension is noticeable.
Besides delegation, the lack of a stronger movement control holds true for the spatial organi-
zation of hand and foot movement, locomotion, change of position and direction. As mentioned
123
Lucia Schwellinger
in connection with articulation and the shift of the gravitational center, the use of diagonal planes
(Zwishcenflächen), respectively diagonals and arches, is dominant. Looking at the pathways of
locomotion, Ohno only rarely covers a relatively great distance from the backstage wall towards
the front edge of the stage in a straight line, nor does he consistently follow any other lines, either
diagonal or parallel to the downstage edge. Mostly he moves along arched pathways that change
direction, open circular lines, and short diagonals. The body’s front thus changes its orientation
on stage constantly: frontal or diagonal to the audience, during locomotion, and during changes
of position even facing the back wall.
While Hijikata’s audience watched closed lines of dancers and frequently looked at a frontal
orientation over a long period of time, which resulted in them literally being con-front-ed with
what happened on stage, Ohno’s pathways that do not stick to a specific orientation allow a vari-
ety of perspectives. Hence, the audience is not directly subjected to the show on a physical level.
Ohno’s improvisations have more of an associative-emotional effect, which among other things
contributes to the fact that Ohno’s dance is easier to appreciate for a broader audience.
Notes
1 This chapter has been created from translated excerpts from Schwellinger 1998, specifically the chapters
“Ōno Kazuo: Biographie” and “Ōno’s Methoden der Bewegungsgestaltung.”
2 For example, Konno Yuichi, in “Ankoku butō e no chinkonka,” 76.
3 La Argentina, whose real name was Antonia Mercé, was born in Bueno Aires in 1890 and died in Bay-
onne, France in 1936. Trained in classical dance, she specialized in Spanish folk dances, which she stylized
and refined. Through countless international tours, she was internationally known by the end of the
1920s. She was also enthusiastically celebrated in Tokyo, where she performed January 26–30, 1929.
4 Kreutzberg (1902–1968) performed in the Tokyo gekijō Theater April 26–30, 1934.
5 Eds: In Schwellinger’s full book, this footnote is cross-referenced with footnote 10 in the “Hijikata Tat-
sumi Biographie” chapter, in which she references the 1960 pamphlet “Naka no sozai/sozai,” which was
created for the Hijikata Dance Experience no kai. That pamphlet has since been translated into English:
Hijikata, Tatsumi, “Inner Material/Material,” trans. Nanako Kurihara, TDR: The Drama Review 44, no.
1 (Spring 2000): 36–42. Kurihara translates this as “drug dance.”
6 Uesugi Mitsuyo quit a ballet company to train with Ohno after she saw him in a joint performance
of the shingeki groups Bungakuza and Theater Echo (Teatoru ekō). She participated in Ohno’s group
pieces, and since 1975 has primarily worked as a soloist. Since her return from a three-year stay in France
in 1990, she occasionally takes part in Ohno’s workshops.
7 The “moss gully” links Lake Shikotsu-ko with the volcanic Mount Tarumae. Through the reference to
the Swedish philosopher of nature and Theosophist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), Ohno refers to
Shibusawa Tatsuhiko’s “Cosmography of Dreams” (Yume no uchū-shi ).
8 Ohno saw a recording of Mary Wigman’s solo, Hexentanz from 1926; the episode with the concert
piano occurred during rehearsals for Admiring La Argentina (Ohno 1989, 195, 209). For the episode
with the piano and Ohno’s movements see Schwellinger’s full chapter, “Ōno’s Methoden der Bewe-
gungsgestaltung” (Ohno Kazuo: biography and methods of movement creation, 1998). Ohno saw dead
people in the audience in 1986 during a performance in Buenos Aires (“Ohno Kazuo to shintai gengo”
1992, 24).
9 For the last example Ohno added the term kankotsu dattai (literally: to exchange bones and to steal the
uterus) to the literature. Originally, it meant a takeover in a positive sense, i.e., to use a poem from past
time as a model and write a new poem based on the old one but with its own value.
10 Konno Yuichi, in “Ankoku butō e no chinkonka.”
11 See, for example, European reviews of the performance in Hasegawa 1980, 24-25.
12 Another comment suggests that this was not always correct (Ohno 1989, 65).
13 See Ohno (1989, 40, 44, 50ff., 145–173).
14 Eds.: In this chapter Schwellinger is influenced by “Inventarisierung von Bewegung” (“inventory of
movement”), a method of movement analysis developed by Claudia Jeschke in cooperation with
Cary Rick. “Zwischenflächen” in this method are the planes of motion which are neither the sag-
ittal nor the frontal nor the transverse plane. For more on this see Schwellinger, “Zur Methode der
124
Ohno Kazuo
Bewegungsanalyse: Inventarisierung von Bewegung,” in Die Entstehung des Butoh: Voraussetzungen und
Techniken der Bewegungsgestaltung bei Hijikata Tatsumi und Ōno Kazuo (München: Iudicium Verlag, 1998),
17–21.
15 A typical example is his handling of the o-zen table and the cord that Ohno uses as a symbol of the
womb. In this scene he often winds the cord around the table and/or himself, strikes the ground with
it, pulls the table behind him, etc. (See, for example, the video Aru byōin no episodo and in Ka-chō-fū-getsu,
video Zen’ei buyō no sekai.) The paper flowers mentioned in the Biography chapter were mostly held
overhead, or held at an angle in front of the body as if an extension of the arms.
16 Eds.: “Delegation” and “Koordination” are also terms from “Inventarisierung von Bewegung.” “Del-
egation” means the succession of moving or pausing of body parts, and if a body part is initiating a
movement, following the movement of another body part or keeping it actively still. “Coordination”
refers to the movement of the joints like bending, stretching, turning, etc., and the movement of the
extremities towards and away from the body (communication from the author, August 17, 2017). For
more on this see Schwellinger, “Zur Methode der Bewegungsanalyse: Inventarisierung von Bewegung,”
in Die Entstehung des Butoh:Voraussetzungen und Techniken der Bewegungsgestaltung bei Hijikata Tatsumi und
Ōno Kazuo (München: Iudicium Verlag, 1998), 17–21.
Works cited
“Ankoku butō e no chinkonka.” 1983. Yasō 9 (July): 70-86.
Fischer, Eva-Elisabeth. 1982. “Theaterfestival München ’82: Ein Hauch von Tod.” Süddeutsche Zeitung
(June 2): 21.
Gildiner, Alina. 1990. “Striking Images Convey Ebb and Flow of Emotions.” The Globe and Mail (September 29):
C5.
Goda Nario. 1994. “‘Okāsan’ to yobikakeru tachisugata no utsukushii Ōno Kazuo no butō.” Weekly Asahi-
graph 3746 (March 4): 19–21.
Haerdter, Michael and Sumie Kawai, eds. 1988. Die Rebellion des Körpers: Ein Tanz aus Japan. Berlin:
Alexander.
Hasegawa Roku, ed. 1980. “Ōno Kazuo Nanshii engeki-sai.” Special issue, Dansu wāku 28 (Winter): 24.
Ohno Kazuo. 1989. Goten, sora o tobu. Ōno Kazuo butō no kotoba. Tokyo: Shichō-sha.
Ōno Kazuo, Ōno Yoshito and Nakamura Fumiaki. 1992. “Butō to iu hyōgen hōhō.” Gendai-shi techō 35,
No. 6 (June): 18-33.
Schwellinger, Lucia. 1998. Die Entstehung des Butoh:Voraussetzungen und Techniken der Bewegungsgestaltung bei
Hijikata Tatsumi und Ōno Kazuo. München: Iudicium Verlag.
Uesugi Mitsuyo. 1994. “Ōno Kazuo to watashi: ‘Anta, shishamo ni makete imasu yo!’.” Weekly Asahigraph
3746 (March 4): 17.
125
14
WHAT WE KNOW AND WHAT
WE WANT TO KNOW
A roundtable on butoh and neuer Tanz
Kate Elswit, Miyagawa Mariko, Eiko Otake, and Tara Rodman
KATE ELSWIT (KE): The connection of butoh with early twentieth century German modern
dance or neuer Tanz feels both known and unknown at the same time. On the one hand,
there is the acknowledgement of particular German teachers and Japanese students that has
grown over the past few decades to almost-requisite in the majority of texts on butoh. Key
English-language texts to develop this argument include Klein (1988); Fraleigh (1999); and
Sas (2003). This one-directional flow has been complicated in recent years by scholarship
that highlights how the European avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1930s were already draw-
ing extensively on Asian practices that had traveled from Japan and elsewhere, from theatre
to art and decorative objects. Sondra Fraleigh and Tamah Nakamura summarize that this
early period of butoh aesthetic “loops historically from Japan to the west, and goes back
to Japan” (Fraleigh and Nakamura 2006, 13). On the other hand, there remain questions
around these kernels of genealogy that have to do among other things with how this lineage
and its influences have manifested in the work itself, such as the relationship between the
aesthetics of dance theatre or Tanztheater and of butoh, given that both developed as forms
of rebellion out of Axis countries after World War II. Such considerations often come
down to various culturally-loaded understandings of expressionistic and neo-expressionistic
practices. Another set of lingering questions thread through both the facts of historical con-
nections and the reflections on practice; these have to do with the story of the butoh-neuer
Tanz connection itself. It is also useful to ask what these myths are and what they do, in
other words, the stakes inherent in how particular affinities have been traced and narrated.
In this roundtable, I have the privilege of discussing these histories and the concerns
they raise with Miyagawa Mariko, who is an expert on Ohno Kazuo; Tara Rodman,
whose research focuses on the circulation of modernist performance between Japan,
Europe, and the United States, specifically Itō Michio; and interdisciplinary choreog-
rapher Eiko Otake, who trained in this lineage, studying with both Hijikata and Ohno
as well as Mary Wigman’s student Manja Chmiel, although she herself does not identify
as a butoh artist. Our conversation offers perspectives on the direct connections of tech-
nique and aesthetics, the indirect cultural contexts in which these took place, as well as
the mythology that has come to surround the two. These three threads of connection
are interwoven through the discussion that follows. The first section, “Teachers, Students,
and Terminologies,” establishes key points of historical grounding in terms of identifying
126
What we know and what we want to know
individual people and also the language with which their work was described. Then
“Tracing Artistic Forms and Features” delves into greater detail of a few examples in which
the question of influence can be traced through shared aesthetic interests and features.
Finally, “Transnational Stories During and After World War II” frames these concerns
of direct and indirect genealogies within a global political context, including the histor-
ical alliance of Germany and Japan. Our purpose is to bring multiple perspectives into
conversation in order to provide a series of anchor points as well as some provocations
regarding what we know and what we want to know about the intertwined histories of
butoh and neuer Tanz.
Teachers, students, and terminologies

EIKO OTAKE (EO): This is where I fit into this history: Two of my dance teachers, Hijikata
Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo, had studied with Japanese modern dance pioneer Takaya
Eguchi, who went to Germany to study dance with Mary Wigman. Ohno Kazuo was
his assistant teacher. Ohno also studied with Miya Misako, who also had connections to
Germany. Ohno was very much interested in Vaslav Nijinsky and La Argentina, and he
mentioned Wigman, too, during his classes. In both studios, I saw a lot of Nijinsky pho-
tos, and because of the Nijinsky photos, Koma and I went to the Ueno Dance Collection,
which is part of the performing arts center in Ueno (the equivalent of the Library for
the Performing Arts in Lincoln Center, but much smaller, at the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan).
Koma and I went there to look for more Nijinsky photos. There we also saw photos of
Wigman, and we were particularly impressed by Dore Hoyer.
In those photos we saw strength. Hoyer was long, whereas Wigman was more square. I
remember seeing a small photo of Hoyer in Ueno; she was in a Humphrey-ish deep plié,
and showed much more movement than Wigman. Somehow I knew that Hoyer killed
herself. Hoyer was a romantic idea to me: mentally disturbed, a broken spirit. She seemed
to be another version of Nijinsky. I was interested in something so fragile that it almost
breaks, in which you can see society’s push and pull being worked out. I was interested in
the literature part of it, the psychology of the humanity: the individual against society and
particularly fascistic nations. In stories like Hoyer’s I could sense the stuff that destroys
people, how humans start to break down, how those systems affect how you speak, how
you chew. In a way, Dore Hoyer was my first female teacher – specifically not Martha
Graham, and not Doris Humphrey. Also, reading Simone de Beauvoir I found connec-
tions to Wigman’s body as a woman’s intellect.
KE: Teacher-student relationships in the 1920s to 1950s are key features of the historical framework
that binds butoh and neuer Tanz. Eiko’s own story crosses with many of the most familiar
components of this framework: Hijikata and Ohno are connected to German-style modern
dance first by means of Ishii Baku and Eguchi. Eguchi and his sometimes-less-mentioned
wife Miya first began to take classes from Masao Takata and Seiko Takata, students of Italian
ballet instructor Giovanni Vittori Rosi and later the matriarch of American modern dance
Ruth St. Denis. They went to Germany after Masao’s death to study under Mary Wig-
man in the early 1930s. Hijikata later studied with Eguchi’s students Katsuko Masumura
and Andō Mitsuko. Ohno too studied with Eguchi both before and after the period in
which he was drafted into the army, but first with Ishii. Ishii began studying with Rosi and
then with Yamada Kosaku, before touring his own performances in France and Germany
in the early 1920s, where he not only saw Mary Wigman perform, but also integrated
127
Kate Elswit et al.
eurythmics into his dance poems. Hijikata and Ohno met in the early 1950s, prior to their
performance together in Crow, a modern dance by Mitsuko in this “German” style. These
markers of pedagogy in times and places are also intertwined with formative tours and other
accounts of influence. Ohno’s biography, for example, notes that he first sought out this
dance training after having seen Harald Kreutzberg, who had been Wigman’s student, tour
Japan in 1934, as did Gertrude Bodenwieser (for an expanded overview, see Shiba 2006). In
Eiko’s version, I find Hoyer specifically interesting, as a reminder of how multi-generational
these entanglements were as well.
MIYAGAWA MARIKO (MM): Looking at articles before and after World War II concerning modern
dance in Japan, Eguchi and Ishii both published books and magazines. In Eguchi’s magazine,
Gendai-buyo (Modern dance), we can find the influence of German modern dance. In the
first volume of this magazine in 1953, the title used the German “Moderne Tanz” and also
the English “Modern-Dance,” and there are also photos of Wigman, Laban, and Kreutzberg
inside. We can also find the traces of German modern dance in Eguchi’s writings. In an
article explaining how to create modern dance, Eguchi used, for example, the term “icosa-
hedron” that is common in Rudolph Laban’s method. After World War II, Eguchi began the
initiative for Japanese modern dance, and many modern dancers became members of the
Japanese Art Dance Association. Ohno was also a member. He was student of Eguchi and
Miya, and as a leading disciple, he gave alternative lessons. So in a way, we can say that Ohno
incorporated Eguchi’s modern dance methods.
But I wonder what type of gestures Ohno had learned from German-based modern
dance. There are two difficulties to interrogating this point: first, by becoming a butoh
dancer, Ohno may have changed his style, and second, there were few films of Eguchi or
Miya in early 20th century. This renews my feeling that we know very little about this
relationship. Even though we say that Hijikata and Ohno leave the Japanese Art Dance
Association after Hijikata’s performance Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors), what did they really
take in as the technique of German modern dance? I usually point out that the one
part of Ohno’s Admiring La Argentina, which is the called “Quejas de bandoneón,” was
highly influenced by German Modern dance, but except his costume looking similar
to that of Kreutzberg, how can we describe the traces of history in this dance? It needs
more research, but maybe it starts with movement: particular gestures, taking steps by
crossing bent legs, also the leg movements that draw curves (I saw steps like this in the
revival of a short piece by Miya that a contemporary dancer performed in 2014 at the
New National Theater Tokyo), the way the arms swing down, and the instability of
body center – these all belong to dancers of modern dance too. We can also point out
the connections to other heritages of physical gesture in their writings as well. Ohno
trained in this German modern dance but also he studied gymnastics and after World
War II, he also became familiar with French pantomime. There is an example about the
pantomime of J. L. Barrault in a 1960 article by Ohno about ways of using the body,
“Nichijō no koto kara kangaerareru hyōgen no memo” (Notes for expression conceivable
from daily life) (Ohno Kazuo, 1960). Here, Ohno referred to Barrault’s text, especially
to explain a particular tread of the foot and position of the chest in a walking posture.
Even years later, for example in a 1990 archival video recording of a lesson by Ohno,
Ohno still referred to the position of chest (even if at that time he didn’t mention the
name of Barrault).
TARA RODMAN (TR): Eiko’s reference to Nijinsky is a crucial point in this too. I know he was
an important (imaginative, if not concrete) influence on Itō Michio, and my sense is that he
occupied a significant place in the story and the affective pull of the new dance movement
128
for many Japanese dancers. Selma Landen Odom has written about Nijinsky’s connection
to German dance, via Jacques Dalcroze (2014). But overall, he is suggestive of perhaps an
alternative genealogy – one that is similarly predicated on the weird expressiveness (and
expressive weirdness) of the human body as is Ausdruckstanz and butoh – but representing,
for our purposes, a different way of tracing this history.
KE: It would be useful to talk about the various terminology that is coming up here as we sort
through some of these traces. My interest in this comes first as a historian of German dance,
which has its own contested history. Because of dance’s close relationship with German
fascism, the history of German dance between the teens and early thirties was rewritten
after the Second World War in another project of cultural reworking. For example, the term
“Ausdruckstanz” was not regularly used until the postwar period, when it took up what
Susanne Franco calls a “falsely monolithic image” of ideological and aesthetic affinity with
expressionism (Franco 2007) that ultimately restricted how the scope of German dance’s
experiments with physicality in the first part of the twentieth century is understood (see
Elswit 2014). Here the butoh connection is fascinating because it archives an alternate view
of this historical moment. The katakana used by butoh artists for this German modern dance
practice uses a version of the incorrectly-conjugated phrase “neue Tanz” (which should
be either “der neue Tanz” or “neuer Tanz”), whereas later words such as Ausdruckstanz
only show up in English translation of those texts. This suggests a fork in the road at the
point when German modern dance traveled to Japan in the early 20th century. Another
such example is the legacy of these practices in Israel. But of course neither Japan nor
Israel function as static archives either, but are instead places in which practices continued
to develop and change. And, as Mariko’s history so clearly shows, there is no version of this
story in which “German” or “Japanese” modern dance are ever singular as isolated national
practices, or even paired solely together either, but rather belong within a fuller picture of
transnational circulation.
MM: I would also like to further interrogate how German dance was changed and described
in Japan before, during, and after World War II – “neuer Tanz,” “Expressionist dance,” or
“modern dance?” – and how the Japanese public reacted to this dance. To consider this,
Eguchi’s magazine, Gendai-buyo (Modern dance), Ishii’s Buyo Nippon (The Japan Dance),
and also criticism that appeared before World War II are useful. The words used by butoh
dancers themselves could also be important material.
TR: From my research, it seems that a lot of the terms Mariko suggested are in play. Itō Michio,
Ishii Baku, and Yamada Kosaku all use shinbuyō (new dance) to describe their observations in
the West. Shinbuyō covers both activities in Germany, as well as US practitioners – Isadora
Duncan, and later others. Itō, Ishii, and Yamada, as well as journalists in the Yomiuri and the
Asahi, also use the katakana, “neue tanz,” when specifically referring to new German dance,
as practiced by Wigman, primarily. It’s worth noting that knowledge of Expressionism as a
movement arrives in Japan very early. Almost as soon as Yamada Kosaku returns to Japan
from his studies in Germany, he organizes an exhibition in Tokyo for Der Sturm group in
1914. In reviews of Ishii, as well as of Kreutzberg, the adjective hyōgenteki (expressionistic)
appears frequently; however, I don’t really see hyōgenshugi (Expressionism). My read on this
is that the language of describing this type of dancing as expressionistic has circulated along
with these dancers, but critics are not necessarily ascribing these dancers to the movement
itself, with a capital E. I am having trouble locating examples of clear (katakana) use of Aus-
druckstanz before the war, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist! As in the United States,
critics as well as the three artists above all use “The Art of the Dance” (buyōgeijutsu) as a clear
term denoting the new dance movement.
129
Kate Elswit et al.
Tracing artistic forms and features
TR: One thing I’m particularly interested in is how music plays into the butoh-neuer Tanz
relationship – and perhaps suggests a recurrence of formal/aesthetic approach, rather than
a direct connection. To me, eurythmics is a lost part of this story because it gets absorbed
so broadly. Ishii actually learns Dalcrozian eurythmics from Yamada well before he goes to
Europe himself. Much as it does in Europe and the United States, eurythmics also ends up
permeating many approaches to education in Japan. After Ishii comes back from Europe,
having seen Wigman, he drops music from his own work; it is at this point that he also stops
using the “dance poem” title to describe his work. We again see this tension between music
and dance in butoh: it’s hard to think of Ohno’s pieces without music, but Hijikata abandons
music, citing, as did Wigman, the desire to explore the body as a singular tool of expression.
Faint lines of connection are here, but I’m more inclined to recognize this as suggesting a set
of parallel circumstances, reinforced – and perhaps, over-determined – in historical narratives
by the many tantalizing points (and almost-points) of pedagogical transmission.
KE: And here also we are dealing with multiple definitions of “the body” – for example Hijikata’s
mind-body framing of Noguchi Taiso. If we explore the parallel nature of these circumstances,
in German dance history, eurythmics is cited as holding an important place in the building
blocks of modern dance, because of the way its proponents proposed more attention to the
internal rhythms of the body, which were then synched to that of the cosmos by means
of music. But then there is always a moment, usually associated with Laban, when euryth-
mics are understood to be inadequate because the body’s own rhythms supersede musical
rhythms. Do you think these two phases operate similarly in the context of Japanese modern
dance and butoh, or is it somewhat different?
TR: It is a bit harder to comb out the strands in Japan than in Germany, where Laban clearly
supersedes Dalcroze, with Wigman’s move from one institute to the other as the clear signal
of this shift. Yamada and Ishii are very much working from a Dalcrozian basis, especially
initially. And then Eguchi Takaya, Kuni Masami, and Shigyo Masatoshi study with either
Laban or Wigman. But the shift from Dalcroze to Laban-Wigman is as much a question
of timing as dance ideology; dancers went abroad when they were financially able to, and
then made connections with the teachers who seemed most important when they arrived.
However, back in Japan, these threads seem much more mixed, as different dancers go and
come back, integrating what they have seen and learned abroad with the flows of modernity
in dance (both its practice and its theorization) materializing in Japan.
Another thing I am always drawn to is the (perhaps apocryphal) historical tidbit that the
aesthetic of shaved heads in butoh is inspired by Harald Kreutzberg. While Hijikata was only
6 years old when Kreutzberg performed in Japan in 1934, for Ohno, the spectatorial experi-
ence was clearly significant, as Kate has noted. From the Emperor Meiji’s famous haircut in
1873, the history of hair in modern Japan intertwines with a history of the political seesaw
of embrace and rejection of the West. The shaved head, which can also carry connotations
of doing penance, thus becomes part of the performance of weirdness central to so much of
the butoh aesthetic. So many of Hijikata’s dances explored what it meant to be Japanese – or
perhaps, put another way, were attempts to slough off the cultural and corporeal residues of
a body raised in Japan, but as butoh has circulated, its aesthetic has frequently been taken
(and promoted) as an embodiment of something particularly Japanese. The shaved head is
part of this assertion of a Japanese essence, even as the supposed connection to Kreutzberg is
repeated. The shaved head, to me, signifies something central to how butoh both developed
130
and has been mythologized, and indeed, marks a pattern that characterizes the story of neuer
Tanz as well. Namely, that the international circulation of dance again and again plays back
into either nation-based histories, or into the construction of nationally-marked forms, an
identificatory claim that is located, as essence, in the physical bodies of performers. (Also of
note is that Ruth Page is on tour with Kreutzberg, and she is never mentioned. At the time,
she is performing pieces that also fit into the category of “modern.” But as she becomes
more central to the ballet world, she gets written out of modern dance narratives, both in
the United States, and it seems, in Japan).
KE: Tara’s point about the shaved head both asserting a kind of national essence at the same
time as it recalls Kreutzberg is fascinating. Do you have a sense for when the connection to
Kreutzberg’s shaved head first appears? Or how that gets developed? To the point about why
Page disappears from some of the discussions of modern dance, I have always gotten the sense
of Ruth Page and Harald Kreutzberg as two divas who happened to tour together, rather
than any kind of deep artistic collaboration. The programs seem to be about 45 percent Page
doing her thing, 45 percent Kreutzberg doing his thing, and then a requisite 10 percent joint
material. Even in the collectible photos of that 10 percent, they still seem like they are in
the midst of two simultaneous but different performances, rather than some kind of stylistic
melding that pushed them both. But what do the Japanese reviews from that tour say? I’d
be interested to know whether Kreutzberg appeared to audiences in Japan at the time to
be something fundamentally different from Page, as the oral history that comes later would
suggest. If on the other hand, reviews at the time responded to both of them as more akin,
then that the next question is when Page dropped out of the recounting of that tour.
MM: For shaved hair, there are also images of soldiers, Buddhist monks, and the embryo.
The aesthetic of Kreutzberg had a huge influence on Japanese dancers in 1930s. In that
one article I mention, Page was not regarded as a “modern dancer” but the writer described
her career as that of a ballerina. For Kreutzberg’s performance in Tokyo, critics had com-
pletely opposite opinions; some applauded him, but others wrote negative reviews. To me, it
is interesting that, in the process of reception (both before and after World War II), Japanese
critics focused on only Kreutzberg as well. It is not only in the reception by butoh dancers,
but also in these writings by modern dancers and critics, that Page did not frequently appear,
especially after World War II. So why did Japanese dancers tend to omit the visits of Page,
who came to Japan twice?
TR: In terms of the reception of Kreutzberg and Page in Japan, Kate, you’re right; they are
differentiated from the beginning. Both are received quite positively, but reviews in the
Yomiuri and the Asahi all devote far more space to Kreutzberg, who is hailed as a pre-eminent
dancer of the modern era, and is praised for his natural movement and expressiveness.
Interestingly, Ishii Baku reviewed one of their performances in the Yomiuri (Ishii 1934).
He observes that Page performs a classical repertoire, and then some pieces that resolutely
turn to the newly emerging dance art (kurashikku kara shinkō buyō geijutsu he no omoikitta
keikōburi dearu). Kreutzberg’s dancing, meanwhile, has several decidedly dramatic works,
and because of that, Ishii believes he is the more popular performer. He notes that because
of this quality, Kreutzberg’s pieces might better be called “silent dramas” or “pantomimes”
(mokugeki) rather than “dance” (buyō). What’s interesting here is that the question of
whether dances should be classified as silent dramas, pantomimes, or something else is
central to Ishii and Yamada’s own early experiments. So in extending this classification
question to Kreutzberg’s dancing as well, Ishii is asserting a fundamental similarity
between his own work and that of the German dancer. When the prominent dance
critic Ushiyama Mitsuru reviewed the same Kreutzberg-Page recital, he identified it as
131
Kate Elswit et al.
“vanguard” (kyūsenpō) dance – a label that Ishii, of course, understands as applying to

his own work as well. Thus here, terminology becomes a way of locating oneself within
an international movement, and of asserting alignment.
This question of what spectators understand themselves to see, and how they artic-
ulate it, seems central to the connection between pre-war German modern dance and
butoh. It’s another way of getting at the shaved head story. As far as I have found, it
is Susan Blakely Klein (1988) who asserts that the shaved head can be traced back to
Kreutzberg. I’m not sure if this appears in the Japanese literature. But many critics
and scholars see Kreutzberg in particular as a ghost of/in butoh. To reference only two
prominent examples, both Sondra Fraleigh (1999 and 2010) and Miryam Sas (2003) see
Ohno in Kreutzberg and Kreutzberg in Ohno, identifying the dancers’ gestures, gaze,
and presence as ghostly echoes of each other, in an entanglement of corporeal resem-
blance that supplements, and even, perhaps, supersedes, a narrative of chronological
lineage.
Transnational stories during and after World War II

KE:What if we shift attention to the stakes of this story’s telling, rather than accepting it
as background? Take how nationalistic and anti-nationalistic sentiment play into the
postwar project of Japanese cultural reworking. By this I mean that it could have been
important that German dance was “outside” and prewar in establishing a mythology
of butoh’s own origins, as distinct from Japanese modernism. For example, Hijikata
famously touches on this national imaginary when he writes in 1960 about his desire
to study this particular form of dance because it was German and therefore fulfilled his
need for something hard or tough (Hijikata 2000[1960], 36).
Here are two extreme examples of this argument: In 1990, Eva van Schaik provoc-
atively proposed that “any supposed ties between prewar Ausdruckstanz and postwar
Japanese butoh are purely hypothetical, if they exist at all” (von Schaik 2013[1990],
52–53). She suggests that this show of respect towards European teachers coincided
with a rejection of the “‘coca-cola’ mindset,” in other words that the investment
in German dance was related to reclaiming a form of Japanese culture less tainted
by American influence. Building a more robust argument of this nature about Hiji-
kata specifically, Dind draws a connection between the European influences Hijikata
claimed, including French underground literature, and his strong distaste for the sugar
associated with American soldiers (Dind 2016). While both the van Schaik and the
Dind texts may be more speculative than historically reliable, it is nonetheless worth
taking this as a starting point for the larger question of: what else, beyond the trans-
mission of skills and techniques associated with physical practice, might be at stake in
narrating such affinities.
MM: French researcher Sylviane Pagès investigated the relationship between butoh and German
expressionist dance, although she only focused on the case of France. She argues that the dis-
covery of butoh in France reveals the fact that French dance history has concealed the influ-
ence of German expressionist dance after World War II. Even though many French dancers
who trained in German expressionist dance were active in France in the postwar period, in
order to create the myth of the “explosion of contemporary dance” (la nouvelle danse française),
French discourse suppressed the German expressionism of the past, and concluded that the
French dancers made these new dance movements from a tabula rasa (Pagès 2015, 220–245).
Later in the 1980s, when butoh arrived in France, French artists and observers rediscovered
132
the gestures of the past, the gestures of expressionism. Thus, butoh has a power to bring the
hidden history of German modern dance in France to light. I think that Pagès’ argument is
interesting because she says that contemporary dancers find in the gestures of butoh dancers
the gestures of expressionism that are suppressed or completely forgotten. Drawing on the
work of Hubert Godard, Pagès argues that what were transmitted from Expressionism to
butoh were not dance forms or styles, but gestures and their ground (in the gestalt psychol-
ogy sense of figure and ground). What is being indicated here by the term “ground” is all
the processes for generating gestures, what Godard called “pre-movements” – the way of
adjusting one’s posture so as to enable action, the way the dancers employ their senses, and
the dancer’s relationship with gravity and space (Pagès 2015, 16–17).
KE: That’s a fascinating argument that also ties to so many recent arguments about how we need
to look to the ways in which practices that are passed from body to body may archive rela-
tionships with the potential to contradict or extend affinities expressed verbally.
Eiko, on the subject of affinities . . . In a 1998 interview with Deborah Jowitt, you
talk about your rebellion, meaning that you could not romanticize your own teachers;
however, German dancers, including newer generations such as Dore Hoyer, became “like
kind of romantic figures for our soul” (Otake and Koma 1998, 26). I’m interested in what
this romance was and how it manifested. One of the more classical forms of romance that
produces travel is the exotic, but I get the sense from you that in this case you are using it
for something that feels familiar. And I’ve seen you talk about there being a similar “smell”
between Germany and Japan.
EO: By “smell,” I mean a feeling that comes from the knowledge of the war and the history of
totalitarian regimes. With “romantic” in that Jowitt interview, I meant the sense of attrac-
tion without precise knowledge; the sense of “the other.” We went to Germany not from a
knowledge base, but out of a curiosity. The fact that Hijikata and Ohno talked about it was
probably very influential. But we wanted to go somewhere, so we thought we might as well
go to Germany. It’s not like I sat down and thought about those things, but it makes sense.
It was not so much that we wanted to study with or dance like Hoyer or Wigman; we were
attracted to their stories. That made us want to go to Germany. We had the romantic idea
of going to Europe, also inspired by people from a few generations before us like Ogai Mori,
a well-known writer from the Meiji period. He was a high-ranking doctor in the military
who went to Germany to study, and famously wrote Maihime (Dancing Girl). I wasn’t going
to go to Italy or France. I was interested in Spain, but wouldn’t go because of Franco. My
colleagues were coming to America on grants, but I was never interested in American mod-
ern dance: too much freedom, too many smiles, too many tears, too American. I saw Graham
on stage and saw Duncan on film. We spent time at the American Center in Tokyo, where
we found Dance Magazine, but unlike the photos of Wigman and Hoyer we found at Ueno,
that was just information for us, dance critics’ names and contact information.
At Ueno we saw shape and line, a hardness of life, conflict; that dance was not as straight-
forward. We saw parallels to being Japanese in different ways. Not that I admired Ger-
many, but I could smell it. If you think of important Japanese modern dancers, many
of them are from the far north. Baku Ishii is from Akita. Kazuo Ohno went to junior
high and high school in Akita (from Hokkaido). He lived with his uncle who went to
America and came back. Eguchi is also from Akita, which I associate with coldness, star-
vation, starvation deaths. Japanese modern dance already has a flavor of twisted darkness –
hardness of the life, not about sun. There is a similar darkness to Germany: cold, damp, hard-
ness. Tuberculosis. There was also the issues of accountability about the war. Japan never
apologized, but Germany did.
133
Kate Elswit et al.
KE: I know you talk about this at length in the Jowitt interview, but can you say a bit about your
experiences there?
EO: We arrived in Munich via the USSR in 1972. This was the year of the Munich Olympics.
The city had a vibrant youth culture. We corresponded with Wigman, but she was too sick
to teach at that time. Someone suggested we contact Manja Chmiel in Hannover, and we
went there. Wigman wrote back, and said: good that you are studying with Manja. In Frankfurt,
we had a presenter who had been a good friend of Hoyer. She didn’t like our performance
(Koma was throwing eggs), but she did show us all her photos of Dore Hoyer. While we
were in Germany, we befriended Pina Bausch and Susanne Linke. We met Jochen Schmidt,
the Frankfurter Allgemeine dance critic, who brought us back to perform in Germany fre-
quently until he passed away. I think the rawness and nakedness of our aesthetics, the sense
of the existential in our work was what made us successful in Germany. At the same time,
I studied in Germany for only 6 or less months, and that was more about finding my and
our voice as artists. The telling thing is that I am still in touch with many of my American
friends such as Anna Halprin but not with people in Germany any more.
MM: I am interested in teachers who studied in Germany in 1920–1930s, Eguchi, Miya, Ishii –
although Ishii’s position is a little bit different – and how they behaved during and after the
war period. Miya wrote a book in 1995 called Rikugunshō haken gokuhi jūgun buyōdan (War
dance group sent by the Japanese army ministry), and also there was an exhibition in Yoko-
hama in February 2017 that showed the photo of Eguchi and Miya dancing for soldiers at
the battlefront (Sakaguchi and Nishida 2017). This shows that Eguchi and Miya supported
the war by visiting the front to comfort soldiers, as well as Ishii creating performances that
enhanced national prestige. I think these actions could be regarded as a cooperation with
militarism or totalitarianism in some respect. Of course, it was necessary to continue their
artistic activities and almost all Japanese were in the same situation and cooperated with the
wartime regime. Away from the front, at home, dance was also part of a method to train the
“healthy (or robust) body,” and Ishii wrote a book about how to teach the dance to children.
This became part of textbook for teaching children Yuugi. Yuugi was a kind of dance which
contains the elements of gymnastics and music, and was performed by students of elemen-
tary school. In the pre-war period and during World War II, this Yuugi was connected to the
ideology of Japanese government manifest in slogans like “fukoku-kyōhei,” enriching the
nation and building up the military. They needed to strengthen Japanese people, and dance
was also involved in this plan (see Tsuboi 2002).
One difference from German dance’s case is that these kinds of actions weren’t officially
interrogated after World War II, as Eiko says. Japanese modern dancers didn’t discuss their
responsibility, the way the connection between German modern dance and Nazi ideology was
discussed. Even if war criminals were prosecuted, a problem still remains in Japan, which was
that it was difficult for most of the people in Japan who had cooperated with the war effort,
and most of the people who went off to the battlefront – even if they were conscripts – to
interrogate their own war responsibility. After the war, Japanese modern dancers went back to
the same methods, including German based modern dance, and restarted their creations (the
cover of a magazine edited by Eguchi in 1953 clearly shows this point, with the title written
in Japanese and German). It is also interesting in comparison to what you bring up about
rewriting the history of German dance, Kate. I am curious whether there was any reconsidera-
tion in Japan about this dance after the war: How could the Japanese keep this method really
influenced by German dance? Did views on it change? What was maintained of those German
influences and what was not in the post-war period of the Japanese dance scene? And if butoh
maintained some elements of German dance, how could it be regarded as a rebellion?
134
TR: I agree with Mariko that a major point of difference is the issue of war collaboration and
responsibility. As she says, nearly everyone in Japan was involved in the war in some way
or another. In Japan, mobilization for empire – a goal, which had been ongoing since the
end of the 19th century and which the vast majority of the population embraced – segued
quickly and smoothly into mobilization for war. And so the general populace, including
artists, scholars, journalists, and so on, by and large found a way to either actively contribute
to the war effort, or to continue to pursue their own professional goals, by way of assisting
the war effort.
MM: I want to add in the example of Ohno here. He studied Modern dance with Eguchi and
Miya after studying one year under Ishii, but he was forced to pause his career due to military
service. At that time, Ohno was not a professional dancer, so he had to serve in the Japanese
army, and during this long period from 1938 to 1946, he could not take any lessons. Hijikata,
by contrast, was too young to go to the military service and so he stayed in Akita prefecture,
where he writes that he saw the Hitlerjugend who visited in 1938. It also seems interesting
that Ohno choreographed the opening ceremony for the National Sports Festival (athletic
meet) in Kanagawa prefecture in 1955 and its title was Bi to chikara (Beauty and Strength). I
can’t help but recall the 1925 film Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (Paths to Strength and Beauty)
by Wilhelm Prager, which was translated as Bi to chikara e no michi in Japanese. Now, I know
nothing about Prager’s film, but if the aesthetic of Prager’s film celebrated what would later
become associated with Nazi ideals of good proportion, orderly marching, force, and so on,
it is a curious connection that Ohno’s mass gymnastics (mass game) had the same title. Does
it show us that an aesthetic of the pre-war period continued after 1945 in Japan? I know
the film is not as linked to the Nazis as something like Leni Riefenstahl, but Prager’s position
seems unclear. Do you know something about this point?
KE: Something like Prager’s film is very much linked to the German physical culture movement
and the obsession with health and pushing the body that then makes an appearance in Nazi
ideology (see Kant 2011) – I think of this as a kind of moving bodies to move minds – but
the same ideas were also important drivers for the development of modern dance too. They all
fall into the same idea soup and cannot be so easily disentangled. But the examples you bring
up have me wondering about the state of other German cultural practices in Japan after the
fall of the Axis powers. I presume dance is not the only artistic or cultural form to travel that
would have been identified as “German” in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century.
So we have talked about the butoh-neuer Tanz connection in terms of teacher-student
histories, of aesthetic affinities, and also some of these national and transnational contexts in
and around the World War II. But, looking beyond dance, what interdisciplinary compari-
sons are we missing that might be helpful to placing this question within a broader post-war
context?
TR: This is speculative, but printmaking and architecture are the first areas I would investigate
in attempting this type of interdisciplinary comparison. Printmaking, of course, has a very
long history in Japan and was immensely influential in the West. The wood cut print also
has a renaissance in German expressionism, which was undoubtedly informed by Japanese
prints, but explicitly echoed earlier German traditions. In postwar Japan (and continuing
today) there has been a resurgence of interest in the woodblock print, a resurgence that
most obviously plumbs Japan’s own past, but perhaps also offers a model similar to dance
for considering a historiography of affinity between Japan and Germany. Taking a different
tack, architecture might offer a parallel way to think about the question of form and fas-
cism, and what artists/architects/intellectuals do with the legacy of World War Two artistic
production and with the notion of nationalist aesthetic essentialism.
135
Kate Elswit et al.
MM: Another place to look would also be to follow-up on the more general influence of German
physical culture. It’s not just in this short time period, but the gymnastics taught in schools,
for example, had a connection to German or European physical culture in 19th to 20th
century.
TR: So, if Kate’s initial prompt pointed us to the stakes behind the familiar narratives of lineage
and chronology, what has emerged for me from this discussion, particularly resonating with
Eiko’s recollections, is that we might envision the connection between early twentieth-century
German dance and butoh as, in part, a lateral link. Although we can (and must!), of course,
place these two movements historically, the sense of affective affiliation that seems to drive
the link between the two, seems as much about a sense of familial, corporeal, national history
resemblance, as it is about concrete links of transmission. If Eiko recalls a particular affective
pull to Germany, and the earlier generation of German dancers, then that move is reiterated
in critical accounts, such that the ways of seeing pre-war German dance and butoh overlap,
and perhaps even begin to co-constitute each other.
Works cited
Dind, Julie Valentine. 2016. “The Sought For Butoh Body: Tatsumi Hijikata’s Cultural Rejection and
Creation.” Transcommunication 3, no. 1: 49–68.
Elswit, Kate. 2014. Watching Weimar Dance. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fraleigh, Sondra. 1999. Dancing into Darkness: Butoh, Zen, and Japan. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
———. 2010. Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Fraleigh, Sondra and Tamah Nakamura. 2006. Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. New York: Routledge.
Franco, Susanne. 2007. “Ausdruckstanz: Traditions, Translations, Transmission.” In Dance Discourses: Keywords
in Dance Research. Edited by Susanne Franco and Marina Nordera, 80–98. London: Routledge.
Hijikata Tatsumi. 2000 (1960). “Inner Material/Material.” Translated by Nanako Kurihara and reprinted in
TDR: The Drama Review 44, no. 1: 36–42.
Ishii Baku. 1934. “Page and Kreutzberg’s Dancing.” Yomiuri Shinbun, April 30, 1934.
Kant, Marion. 2011. “The Moving Body and the Will to Culture.” European Review 19, no. 4: 579–594.
Klein, Susan Blakely. 1988. Ankoku Butō: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Dark-
ness. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series.
Odom, Selma Landen. 2014. “The Dalcroze Method, Marie Rambert, and Le Sacre du Printemps.” Modernist
Cultures 9, no. 1: 7–26.
Ohno Kazuo. 1960. “Nichijō no koto kara kangaerareru hyōgen no memo.” In Pantomime Jan Nubo Recital
program, 2–3.
Otake, Eiko and Takashi Koma. 1998. “Interview with Eiko and Koma.” New York Public Library for
the Performing Arts Dance Division Oral History Archive interview with Deborah Jowitt. MGZMT
3–2124.
Pagès, Sylvianne. 2015. Le butō en France: Malentendus et Fascination. Pantin: Centre national de la danse.
Sakaguchi Katsuhiko and Nishida Rumika. 2017. “Rescuing Archival Materials from Oblivion: Crisis of
Primary Source Materials” Dance Archive Network 2 (March 17, 2017). www.kazuoohnodancestudio.
com/common/pdf/DANnews_fixB2.pdf
Sas, Miryam. 2003. “Hands, Lines, Acts: Butoh and Surrealism.” Qui Parle 13, no. 2: 19–51.
Shiba, Mariko. 2006. “Modern Dance in Japan: The Influence of the Western Culture and What Japan
Created on its Own.” Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 1: 117–125.
Tsuboi Hideto. 2002. “Senjika wo odoru shintai: Shōkayūgi kara ‘Kokumin buyō’ made.” Gendaishisō 30,
no. 1 (July): 222–241.
von Schaik, Eva. 2013 (1990). “The Mistrust of Life: Relations in Dance: Connections between Butoh,
Ausdruckstanz and Dance Theatre in Contemporary Experimental Dance.” Reprinted in The Pina
Bausch Sourcebook: The Making of Tanztheater. Edited by Ray Climenhaga, 49–54. New York: Routledge.
136
15
OIKAWA HIRONOBU
Bringing Decroux and Artaud
into Japanese dance practices
Yoshida Yukihiko (translated by Bruce Baird)
Oikawa Hironobu is a multidisciplinary artist with experiences in ballet, theater, and mime with
whom Ohno Kazuo and Ohno Yoshito and Hijikata Tatsumi worked during the 1960s. In par-
ticular, Oikawa’s mime teachings and perhaps more importantly his unique theories of Artaudian
embodiment provide intriguing glimpses into little discussed physical influences that were circu-
lating at the time butoh was being developed.
Oikawa was born in 1925 in Aomori prefecture, Hachinohe, to a family of physicians. When
he went to Tokyo at the age of 19, he studied medicine at Juntendo University. He learned anat-
omy, Goethe’s morphology, and Haeckel’s theory of evolution. These experiences endowed him
with expertise about anatomy and medicine. Diagrams and drawings of the human body appear
often in Oikawa’s sketches, and from them we can surmise that his early medical studies were an
important part of his development.
After World War II, Oikawa began to study humanities, and enrolled in French courses at
Gakushuin. There he studied with Miyake Noriyoshi, and one of the leading lights in Moliere
research in Japan, Suzuki Rikie. Miyake was to later assist him in going to France, and Suzuki
introduced him to the latest currents of French theater. He participated in experimental theater
performances and played the leading role in a Tokyo University classroom production of Ben
Jonson’s Volpone.
In order to focus on his theater studies, Oikawa transferred to the Stage Arts School (Butai
Geijutsu Gakuin). There he studied with such luminaries as Murayama Tomoyoshi, Okakura
Shiro, Hijikata Yoshi, Yamamoto Yasuhide, Ito Michio, and Akita Ujaku. After this study, Oikawa
established the Bread Society Theater Troupe (which was unrelated to the late Meiji troupe of
the same name). Later, he debuted as a ballet dancer for the Kaitani Ballet Company, and later
still joined the Komaki Ballet Troupe. Fearful that the academic side of his experience going to
waste, he transferred back to the Gakushuin University philosophy department, where he studied
philosophy and religion.
Eventually, he studied in France from 1954 to 1956. He gained admission to the ballet school,
Paris Conservatoire de Léo Staats (teacher of Bejart), but at the same time, he intended to study
western mine and theatre, and also had the vague hope of looking for traces of Artaud. In
the mornings, he studied ballet; in the afternoon, he went to Ecole de Movement of Etienne
Decroux, teacher of Jean-Louis Barrault and Marcel Marceau. Nights were entirely devoted
to going to the theater, where he saw Brecht, Barrault, Villar, Comedie Francaise, Odeon, and
137
Yoshida Yukihiko
Italian theater. Late at night he voraciously read whatever he could get his hands on. Decroux
was apparently impressed by the fact that someone had come from Japan to study with him,
but Oikawa was bewildered by Decroux’s analysis of purely geometrical movements that were
so different from the symbolic expression of Marcel Marceau. The acting techniques of Delsarte
were also added into the mix. Ballet at the conservatory was difficult. He had to overcome the
limits of his body, and train and refine his technique, and he initially felt reluctant to have to
dance in front of the other dancers. But for some reason, whenever he would do a solo in front
of Decroux, he would be praised, which made him all the more bewildered.
One day while sitting at a coffee shop in the Latin Quarter, he felt a vague dissatisfaction.
What came to his mind was everyday human movements and Japanese folk art. While turning
these over in his mind, he realized that he was already mentally making preparations to go back
home. At last he discovered his path. As he recalls,
From the beginning, didn’t I come here to seek the traces of Artaud? However, Artaud
had already died, and the people in Paris had long ago forgotten him. Only a woman
poet from Marseille spoke of Artaud as if he was alive. So that was it, he was still alive!
And he was clearly showing me the way to stand between East and West. I made up
my mind right then and there. Artaud had seen futurity in the meridians and acupunc-
ture points of Daoism. He was suddenly shown the ‘great teachings’ of the triangle
of breathing, muscles, and high regard for the cavities of the body and the cross that
controls the body.
Oikawa 2014
So, Oikawa left France and returned to Japan.

After returning to Japan, Oikawa was active in many genres, including ballet, mime, theater,
performance, and fashion. After an initial period in the prewar era of being overshadowed by
classical Japanese dance and modern dance, ballet experienced a boom after the war. Oikawa
was among the young dancers who broke away from the prewar generation of ballet teachers to
pursue new currents in ballet (influenced in part by the Bolshoi Ballet and Balanchine), as part
of a movement retroactively called the Creative Ballet Movement. With Hayashi Yoko, he created
Ballet Tokyo, where two of his students were Horiuchi Kan and Ohno Yoshito. During this time,
Oikawa studied tai chi, yoga, and facial expressiveness from the anthropologist Yamazaki Kiyoshi.
From Yamazaki, Oikawa concluded that the face is a window into everyday psychology, in which
he could see the depths of the human heart. Personality analysis and the world of unconscious
also lay there. At that time, there was also a yearly conference of folk arts at the Nihon Seinenkan.
Oikawa would attend and study Japanese folk arts. At the same time, he was infatuated with
comparing daily actions and stage techniques.
At the time, Oikawa was one of the few people who could teach the Decroux system in
Japan. In 1960, he started the Japan Mime Research Lab and Mime Studio with Ashihara Eiryo,
and the modernologist Yoshida Kenkichi. Ohno Yoshito, Kasai Akira, and Ishii Mitsutaka studied
pantomime with him, as well as Hijikata Tatsumi. Before Forbidden Colors, Oikawa had taught
Yoshito mime gestures. About Hijikata, Oikawa says that “I didn’t teach him ballet directly, but
did teach ballet to the Unique Ballet group, and he appeared in the First Ballet Tokyo perfor-
mance” (Oikawa August 19, 2015). Jean Niveau (Oota Junzo) was another student. Also the
younger dancer Yoneyama Mamako who was to be known later for her mime, and also Zushi
Akiko who later went to Brazil. When Marcel Marceau first visited Japan, he came to the Mime
Studio, where he met Ohno Yoshito. They also performed a series of experimental ballets in the
project [Amorous] Adventure Society.
138
Oikawa Hironobu
In 1961, they did a series of three performances, called Mime Series Recitals, and then a show
called Ballet Plus Mime. They also performed an experimental ballet based on the poetry of
French poet Rimbaud’s “Flower” (from Les Illuminations). Later through the 1960s, the Mimo
Sapiens performances delighted spectators including Donald Richie, Mishima Yukio, Hijikata,
Domoto Masaki, and the members of Tenjo Sajiki. In one of the Mimo Sapiens performances,
they did a Hamlet with Oikawa in the leading role and Ohno Yoshito as Ophelia, and a rock band
as accompaniment.
Eventually Oikawa began to consider leaving the world of ballet and mime. He writes,
I threw away the mime and ballet I had learned in Paris. The only thing left was the
Artaudan way of looking at the body that I got from Barrault. I got it from Barrault,
because this was something Barrault got directly from Artaud that Artaud didn’t write
in his book. It was a goal of mine to understand Artaud’s thought, not through words,
or concepts, but through his bodily techniques such as breathing, and his way of talk-
ing, and through his hints, and connect what he was searching for with eastern bodily
methods. For this reason, I established the Artaud-kan (Maison d’Artaud) in 1968.
Oikawa 2008, section 6
The ideas of Artaud had entered Japan from France early in the postwar era, and even today,
there are people researching him from various angles. But Oikawa was not just active in the
western forms of theater such as ballet and mime, he also made contributions to theater, film,
performance, fashion, thought, and criticism.
According to Oikawa, in order to interpret Artaud, Barrault produced the triangles in Figure 15.1.1
These three symbolic elements correspond to whether the performer breathes in, breathes out, or
holds the breath, or rather to whether the performer puts power into the muscle, takes power out
of the muscles [relaxes the muscles], or retains power in the middle. Each of these compares to
masculine, feminine, and neuter/intersex, or to the three primary colors of blue, red, and yellow.
Just as one can create green by mixing yellow and blue, by combining and overlapping one can
transform into an infinite number of colors (Barrault 1951, 57).
Barrault explained the ideas of Artaud and put them into practice in his postwar theater.
Oikawa took notice of these same passages of Artaud and constructed his bodily expression on
them. His guiding principle was the analysis of Artaud’s triangle reproduced in “Affective Ath-
leticism,” and Barrault’s discourse on it. If we looked at this from today’s perspective, we must
recognize that Oikawa was a groundbreaker in Artaud research in Japan. And an experimenter
on the basis of that research.
Based on Artaud’s interest in Eastern bodily methods, Oikawa began to research qigong and
tai chi. He encountered the 99 Form of tai chi in Taiwan and studied tai chi with Wang Shujin.
Breathe Breathe
Male Female Blue Red
in out
Hold breath Intersex Yellow
Figure 15.1 Oikawa’s interpretation of Barrault’s triangles.
139
Yoshida Yukihiko
Later Oikawa studied Yoga, and qigong. He also did ten years of Zen with the abbot Ota Dokan
of the Seishoji temple. More than that, he experimented with Artaud’s view of the body and
presented works to the public. He writes,
the core of my own method called the Artaud System is in performance, and dance and
theater are annexed to this. During the 1980s and 1990s I nurtured playwrights, dancers
and other performance artists, but the Artaud System is a philosophy of performance.
Oikawa August 19, 2015
Then in 1968, the Maison d’Artaud was established. The Ohnos, Hijikata, Kasai, and others
participated in these performances, and Oikawa claims that the butoh artists honed their skills
through these performances. According to Oikawa, Hijikata and the others did not intentionally
start to talk about Artaud, but Hijikata apparently told Oikawa in conversation that he was inter-
ested in Artaud. Hijikata said, “It’s great that you have an interest in Artaud, I have an interest in
the inner body” (Oikawa April 23, 2015). Oikawa kept piling up interactions with the Ohnos,
as if he had particularly good relationships with them. As time passed, Oikawa came to think
about his own theories through Ohno. As for the Ohnos, they kept on interacting with him
while creating butoh. You can understand why Sylviane Pagès says that one of the elements in
the background of the reception of butoh in France was the background of mime (Pagès 2009
and 2015, 4–41, 281–390 and 9–21).
Stephen Barber says that Oikawa made the provocative claim that Hijikata stole butoh from
Oikawa (Barber 2005, 28). Hijikata happens to have addressed Oikawa in 1987 essay, “Monsieur
Oikawa and Me” (Hijikata 1987). From the title you can see you that Hijikata is treating Oikawa
as something Western (exotic) and noble. He sums up Oikawa’s artistic world and his way of
doing things, and sublimates them in his own language. He details their love-hate relationship,
and even if the essay could be taken quite critically, Hijikata maintains his distance and appraises
the work of Oikawa. At the same time, he writes about the reasons why he did not have much
interest in Oikawa’s world and he is sarcastic about those who are swayed by Oikawa. In the
end, Hijikata says, “I think I will make use of this person” (Hijikata 1987, 329). In Hijikata’s
characteristically strange and convoluted language, this is probably as close as one can expect to
an acknowledgment of the debt Hijikata owes to Oikawa. Hijikata also wrote an essay about
Artaud, “Artaud’s Slipper,” in which he aggregates Artaud’s life into the moments before his
death (Hijikata 2005). Here is the record of what Hijikata sensed in Artaud, which differed from
the interpretation of Oikawa. Hijikata had such a reputation that it it is not surprising that it was
said of him that he stole Oikawa’s ideas. And he may certainly owe a not fully acknowledged
debt to him, but it is a fact that he did not rely on solely Oikawa’s thought, but formed his own
original philosophy of the body, and produced and influenced those around himself through his
own ideas.
In the end, the connection between Oikawa and butoh remains tentative but undeniable.
Many of the early artists spent time studying directly or indirectly with Oikawa, and his introduc-
tion to Japan of the mime of Decroux and the ideas of Artaud contributed to the artistic ferment
of 1960s Japan. Furthermore, the existence of these same two elements within the fiber of butoh
must have contributed to the enthusiastic reception of butoh overseas in the 1970s and 1980s.
Note
1 Editors’ note: Compare these three triangles with Barrault’s five triangles in Jean-Louis Barrault, Reflec-
tions on the Theater (London: Hyperion, 1951), 58.
140
Oikawa Hironobu
Works cited
Barber, Stephen. 2005. Hijikata: Revolt of the Body. London: Creation Books.
Barrault, Jean-Louis. 1951. Reflections on the Theater. Hyperion.
Hijikata, Tatsumi. 1987. “Musshū Oikawa to Watashi.” HTZ: 326–329.
———. 2005. “Arutō no surippa.” HTZ 1: 258–259.
Oikawa, Hironobu. Interview by Yukihiko Yoshida, May 9, 2014.
———. Interview by Yukihiko Yoshida, April 23, 2015.
———. Interview by Yukihiko Yoshida, August 19, 2015.
———. 2008. “1960 nendai no ‘gensō to kūkan.’” Accessed on April 27, 2018. https://sites.google.com/
site/oikawahironobu/Home/oikawa-60s
Pagès, Sylviane. 2009. “La réception des butō(s) en France.” PhD diss., Université Paris.
———. 2015. Le butō en France: malentendus et fascination. Pantin: Centre national de la danse.
141
16
FOUNDATIONS AND FILIATIONS
The legacy of Artaud in Hijikata Tatsumi
Samantha Marenzi
The year 1938 saw the publication in Paris of The Theater and its Double, a collection of essays by
Antonin Artaud. Compared to the extraordinary consequences that the contents of the book
would have on theater during the second half of the twentieth century, its first appearance was
overshadowed in the following years by the war and the Nazi occupation. In addition to this, in
1938 Artaud was locked up in a mental institution, where he stayed until 1946.
The Theater and its Double is an odd book. It contains many stories, beside the manifesto
announcing theater as a place where life can be rebuilt. Not a place where one imitates life, but a
place to materialize the forces stirring behind the appearance of reality and behind domesticated
art forms. The editions of the book mark some of the stages in Artaud’s experience: his disap-
pearance inside French mental institutions, his return to life and writing, his teachings for gener-
ations to come all over the world. When it was reprinted in 1944, some people who recognized
the author as a master approached him and obtained his liberation from the Rodez psychiatric
hospital, taking charge of his destiny and saving themselves from the cultural void caused by the
war. They were young actors, poets, writers. Until Artaud’s death in 1948, they formed a small
community of disciples around him. They participated in the activities of the late Artaud, who
came back to Paris as a martyr and a saint, now freed from the contract with a society that tor-
mented him. He let poetry invade daily life, and this invasion, which almost defeated the need
for the ritual of performance, was still called theater: “the state, the place, the point, at which to
grasp the human anatomy, and through it cure and rule over life” (Artaud, Pasi 1996).1
In 1958, ten years after the author’s death, the book started penetrating the most diverse theater
cultures thanks to its first English translation, and to the influence that it had on groups like the
Living Theater, the American company that was the symbol for political militancy, the overflow-
ing of theater into life and the subversive use of the body outside of the protective fence of the
stage. Its influence was not simply conceptual, because The Theater and its Double does not hit just
the brain – it reaches the eyes too and generates visions; it appeals to the guts and provokes sensa-
tions; it speaks to the heart, as Artaud wished for his actor, an athlete of the emotional muscles, to
be able to control passions and thus provoke them. The actor is an athlete of the heart: his own,
that of the spectator,2 and, we can add, that of the reader. This book is like a performance: it stays
in one’s memory and from there it evokes a new theatre, different each time.
In 1965 the book was translated into Japanese, bringing Artaud’s words into the environ-
ment of the postwar avant-gardes, among intellectuals in search for a cultural identity within
142
Foundations and filiations
the Americanized country of the postwar period, crossed by waves of protest marking political
movements as well as artistic research. It was a receptive environment, where Artaud joined a
constellation of highly influential French writers: Jean Genet, Georges Bataille, even Isidore
Ducasse, whom the surrealists had rediscovered and who was loved by Artaud. To the power of
literature, the subversive themes of homosexuality, eroticism, crime, blasphemy, and revolt against
social coercion, Artaud added the science of the stage.
This essay explores the deep influence of Artaud on Hijikata, his butoh, his writing, and his
role as an intellectual, an influence I define as foundation and filiation. By foundation I mean the
creation of a method, the theorizing, the fine tuning of the language and the literature that relate
to butoh: a set of proficiencies that spawns not just a new style but a new dance culture. Filiation
then comes to stand for the transmission of human legacy, where technique is used to transfer a
tool for the transformation of one’s body and conscience. In this case the filiation is active in two
directions, towards the past with the acknowledgement of the voice of the “fathers,” and towards
the future with the transmission of this voice to the “sons.”
Foundation
When the book appeared in Japan, Hijikata Tatsumi’s elaboration of butoh, often viewed as a
realization of the Theater of Cruelty,3 was in its experimental stage, pushing the research on
movement to the boundaries of dance, art performance, happenings, and avant-garde action.
Removed from the codes of these forms, beyond the scandalous impact of his debut (Kinjiki,
1959), there was his rigorous research allowing the dialogue between technique (in search for
new movements and new relationships between dancer and audience) and writing: his own
writing as well as that of the authors influencing him, and the intellectuals sharing his adventure
and creating an environment where these tensions could thrive.
Hijikata was familiar with Artaud even before the 1965 translation became available. At the
end of the 1950s, together with Ohno Kazuo, he studied mime with Oikawa Hironobu, founder
in Tokyo of the Artaud-kan. Oikawa had studied in Paris with Jean-Louis Barrault and Étienne
Decroux, where he assimilated the techniques of the environment in which Artaud had trained as
an actor. By training the link between imagination and movement and using literary suggestions,
Oikawa put together a teaching method that very much influenced Hijikata and that to this day
is known under the name of Artaud System (Barber 2005, 27–28).
As is known, Hijikata was also initiated to the complexity of Artaud’s experience by the writer
Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, a French scholar, who was taken to court for his Japanese translations of
Sade. For Hijikata, who described him as “the last of the literati” (Sas 2003, 37), Shibusawa was
a guide to Artaud’s thought. Prior to and together with the direct access to his texts, the French
poet penetrated butoh through Shibusawa’s stories, the nights of conversations with this figure
who looked at Artaud from a perspective that was neither theatrical – thus not limited to the
rising myth of the theater of cruelty – nor philosophical – based on the idea that books are vehi-
cles of abstract concepts. Shibusawa’s mediation brought Artaud inside Hijikata’s work under the
thundering sign of Heliogabalus, the protagonist of the 1934 novel by Artaud, Heliogabalus: Or, the
Crowned Anarchist. In the early 1960s Shibusawa wrote a text about the Roman emperor, widely
based on Artaud’s interpretation, and quoting some of its passages (Shibusawa 1987, 42–76). Then
in 1968 he translated the novel. In the same year the image of Heliogabalus made an appearance
in Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: Rebellion of the Body.4 Along with the representation of the
young priest who entered Rome carried on a litter in the middle of a bizarre procession, and the
dance with the great golden phallus, the principles collected by Artaud in the book penetrated
the performance.
143
Samantha Marenzi
For Artaud, Heliogabalus was the genesis for numerous themes that, stripped of narrative
fiction, found their completion in his writing after he was interned. One of these themes is
the magic power of word sounds, which allows words to stop being only the vehicle for logic
meanings, and the act of utterance to have an effect on reality. Artaud sought this effectiveness in
theater and later, especially after his internment, in poetry. Another aspect that gained importance
in the following years was the link between insurrection and madness and thus the political value
of insanity, which marked the accusatory violence of his last pieces. The book also exposes the
clash between culture and power, and places culture in a subversive position against the social
order. Finally it reveals the idea of the body as prisoner of the organs that chain humans to the
rational world. The liberation from the organic functioning of the body was Artaud’s warning in
the final text of his life, To Have Done with the Judgment of God, which also marked the last stage
of Hijikata’s work, to be discussed below.
Filiations
During Artaud’s time in the Rodez psychiatric hospital, he was subjected to more than 50 elec-
troshocks, described by him as repeated deaths in which he lost his body and his memory. In
the face of this death experience he used his tools as an actor and a poet to regain mastery over
himself, his thought, his body, his history, and his destiny. In Rodez he started practicing breath-
ing exercises that developed into vocalizations, declamations, and finally poetry. In 1945 Artaud
started writing and drawing again. He wrote letters to reconstruct relationships and be reborn to
the world, and he wrote cahiers where he deconstructed and reconstructed his history, his anat-
omy, his language, to be reborn in a new body inhabited by consciousness. Artaud experienced
that, beside organs, bones, muscles, nerves, the body is made of memory, and also voices, thoughts,
culture, images, and imagination. In his drawings and notebooks, which he filled with fury5 until
his death, the demons are as real as the people he lost. Ghosts and memories mingle to give birth
to poetical figures between biography and poetry: Artaud calls these figures the “daughters of the
heart to be born”; they are old female friends, grandmothers, a sister who died as a child, some
disappeared women, some who were only dreams. He invokes them, draws them, locates them
in his body, lets them speak, and calls them consciences that escaped the body, to which he tries
to bring them back. And in some way they did come back because Artaud later attributed their
characteristics to the young poets and writers who went looking for him after reading his letters
and the new edition of The Theater and its Double, and finally freed him from the mental institu-
tion. His return from the mental hospital, which represents a return from insanity, coincides with
a return to theater, no longer separated from life.
Through the link between body and writing, Artaud created a space where reality and fiction,
life and artistic creation co-exist. In this space he moved to regain his body, removing it from the
control of society, politics, and the psychiatric institution.
While Artaud lets the body penetrate his writing and his poetry, Hijikata lets poetry and writ-
ing penetrate his body and his dance. When Hijikata writes about dance, he does not describe
it but sets the poetry in motion. An example of this is his choreographic notes, which are not
transcriptions of movement but one of the levels on which dance can exist. His scrapbooks, filled
with cutout images, notations, signs, are a method to create both choreographic language and
thought, to generate associations between distant elements, to gather sources and reformulate
them in view of their transformation into real movement.6 Another example is his use of poetry
to transmit the movement, his way to guide the dancers through a word bearing not only a literal
meaning but real consequences in body, space, and imagination. Ashikawa Yoko, the dancer who
was the symbol of the corporeal metamorphosis investigated by Hijikata in the 1970s, describes
144
their dance training by underlining the importance of Hijikata’s words, “which he uttered in
a stream like poetry. When we danced, the images were all derived from his verbal expression.
Without the words we could not dance, so it was like following a poem” (Hoffman et al. 1987,
16–18).
In the passage from dancer to teacher and choreographer the question shifts from transform-
ing one’s own body to forging words and images able to transform other bodies, that is, other
memories and other consciences. Artaud also made this shift and chose one pupil during the last
years of his life: Colette Thomas, a young actress, who perfectly embodied the role of the daugh-
ter of the heart,7 in life and in Artaud’s theater. For Artaud, too, poetry had become a technique
to transform bodies and consciences, and thus people and not characters. This parallel is a sign of
a double legacy: as a dancer, Hijikata is influenced by what Artaud writes about, as a teacher and
choreographer, and as a writer, too, he adds an interest in how Artaud writes and how he changes
reality through his words, transforming the past (biography and source of inspiration), the present
(life, language, body, and creation), and the future (pupils and readers).
The intermingling of body and writing requires rigour. Once they reached this point of con-
tact, both Artaud and Hijikata talked of rebirth. They both worked for the disruption and the
reconstruction of the body on the level of anatomy, thought, memory, and movement. They asked
themselves how the body is shaped, what it is composed of, what it is affected by, and what it
can be, what it can do. They both saw the possibility for regeneration: by casting off their origins
they were born into a new body.
There is an assonance in Artaud and Hijikata involving the process of transformation of
their own personal history, the overlap of artistic and biographical reality where the story of
the past turns into myth. This is evident for example in the book Ailing Dancer, Hijikata’s
“autobiography” as well as a representation of a world of invention seen through the deceitful
appearance of things, a book in which the environment and the events mold the characters and
at the same time induce physical metamorphoses. Published in 1983 by the same publishing
house as Artaud’s translations, it is symptomatic of how Hijikata, in this as in other texts, works
on his life story in the same way he works on his body and his dance, following the idea of
transformation. The same shift emerges when Hijikata talks about a dead sister inhabiting his
body,8 who crouches down to make him dense when he gets up and is connected by a fine
thread to the biography of the dancer, who told the story of a sister who disappeared, sold by
his parents to work as a prostitute to allow him to dance. This is very probably a mystification
but it offers a glimpse of the myth that Hijikata built for himself, and of the way this imagery
turns into dance. By mixing memory and imagination Hijikata acts on the double level of
the reinterpretation of his family history and his body as a space occupied and inhabited by
one’s demons. Hijikata had probably read or heard about Artaud’s texts in which the daughters
appear, but what is truly interesting is how concretely they both represent the effect of one’s
memory on the body: the presences coming from the past have a real impact on the body in
the present.
Miryam Sas, who analyzed the relationship between Hijikata and Artaud, and between butoh
and surrealism, has underlined the identification, on the part of Hijikata, of one of the central
nodes in the Artaudian adventure: the union of metaphysics and matter.9 This indication comes
directly from Hijikata, who wrote an essay on Artaud in 1971. The text Artaud’s Slipper is both
magical and lucid (translation in Sas 2003, 39–40). The monologue with which Hijikata ends the
text contains the words allegedly spoken by the slipper Artaud held in his mouth (actually in his
hand) at the time of his death. Hijikata knows Artaud’s human adventure, and in this case again he
transforms the details into a story. A transformation that enhances the meaning of events instead
of changing it. He also acknowledged the universality of a principle that Artaud considered as a
145
Samantha Marenzi
disease of the West, the disease he personally confronted in the theater, in the mental hospital, in
life, and in poetry: the split of body and thought.
In the same year Hijikata wrote Artaud’s Slipper, two texts spreading Artaud’s writing after the
internment were translated into Japanese: 1971 saw the Japanese translation of Van Gogh: The
Man Suicided by Society (1947). It is a stunning text in which Artaud launches one of his fiercest
invectives against psychiatry to vindicate the seers that society has reduced to silence. In that
same year, the first volume of his Complete Works was translated. It collects the writings of the
1920s and a foreword written by Artaud in August 1946, three months after his return to Paris.
Some of the “daughters of his heart” appear in it, and among them the little sister, one of the
first ones to be born from the notebook pages. Artaud presented the works under two words:
theater, which is a crematory or an insane asylum, and cruelty, which is their massacred bodies.10
After his internment, Artaud went back to using the definition Theater of Cruelty but the words
corresponded to a new meaning.
We do not know what else Hijikata read of the last writings by Artaud, or which themes were
known to him through the mediation of the francophone intellectuals. What we know is that
from the end of the 1950s until when he wrote his text, his exploration of Artaud’s thought was
nourished by Oikawa’s practical teaching and Shibusawa’s guidance in the writings and in the
cultural environment of the French poet. It included the reading of The Theater and its Double
and the perception of its impact on theater in the whole world; of Heliogabalus as an amulet-book
synthesizing all the important themes of body and language; of the book about Van Gogh and
the explosive text introducing the Complete Works. Next to these texts and those of the surrealist
years, there was the knowledge of Artaud’s biographical and clinical events, enough to go beyond
fascination. After the references to the image of Heliogabalus in his solo performance of 1968 and
the contemporary photography project Kamaitachi realised in collaboration with Hosoe Eikō,
Artaud remained an important reference but entered an invisible layer of the work of Hijikata
who, after 1973, never danced in public again.
The references to Artaud become explicit again when Hijikata meets the sound of his voice, the
voice of the poet, and of the actor. In the beginning of the 1980s Hijikata listened to the reading
of To Have Done with the Judgment of God, recorded by Artaud in November 1947 and censored by
the French public radio. The violence of the texts is enhanced by the power in Artaud’s voice, his
actual scream and breath. Hijikata received a copy from Uno Kuniichi, a student of Gilles Deleuze
who was educated in Paris in the environment of Artaud’s reinterpretation by post-structuralist
philosophers especially interested in the poet’s late writings and his psychiatric adventure, sparking
an explicit wave of renewed interest in Artaud. With Uno, Hijikata worked on his last project,
interrupted by his death in 1986: Experiment with Artaud. Artaud’s voice became a real source for
Hijikata (as for other theater people all over the world). Beyond the dark assonances between his
imagery and the poet’s legacy, in that fierce theater made only of sound, the dancer recognized
himself. In 1984, when the experimental dancer Tanaka Min asked Hijikata to make a dance for
him, he used that recording. The performance, titled Performance for the Establishment of the Pure Love
Butoh School, brings together the idea of foundation and filiation, two words that reverberate in the
title of the performance and in the language used by Tanaka to talk about his meeting with Hijikata:
Since Hijikata stung my eyes, I became his son. I am still intensely irritated. I wish to
become an artist who shoots an arrow to everyday life. Hijikata constantly whispers
strategy into my ears, and I would like to introduce him to all of you hardly standing
on enfeebled legs. . . . Lastly, I would like to declare that Min Tanaka is a legitimate son
of Tatsumi Hijikata.
Hoffman et al. 1987, 65
146
Later Tanaka used Hijikata’s voice in numerous performances. In his experience, these two
voices intertwine. In the 1996 special issue of Yuriïka dedicated to Artaud, Tanaka pub-
lished a text under the title “Antonin-Hijikata.” Two years later he staged a trilogy based
on The conquest of Mexico written by Artaud in 1933. In 2002, on the occasion of Tanaka’s
performance Infant Body out of Joint in Montreal, Uno Kuniichi pulled the threads of this
net together by introducing the performance with a speech titled Body-genesis or Time-catastrophe –
About Min Tanaka, Tatsumi Hijikata and Antonin Artaud. The same Uno who had brought
Artaud’s voice to Hijikata. That same voice,11 after the dancer’s death, was edited as sound
background to the video fragments documenting his Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People:
Rebellion of the Body.
Several among Hijikata’s students and dancers claim Artaud’s legacy for themselves, in part fil-
tered by Hijikata, in part nurtured by personal readings and suggestions. For example, Murobushi
Kō, who studied with Hijikata from 1968 to 1970, cultivated a corporeal memory connected to
Artaud, which allowed him to write that he can feel, while dancing, the right hand of the poet
grabbing his rib, next to the heart, a hand taken from the image of the old Artaud in photographs
of his last years that wrung the dancer’s guts.12 But the only one to trod the path traced by the
“crowned anarchist” is Kasai Akira, who collaborated with Hijikata during the 1960s and then
set out on his own autonomous journey in dance. Very interested in the power of word sound,
in which he recognizes in Artaud’s corporeal writing and he uses as a movement energy by prac-
tising Rudolf Steiner’s eurythmy, Kasai considered the figure of Heliogabalus as the archetype of
his dance, and he saw Artaud’s book as a true manual for dancers, a text that is not heretic but
orthodox, because it speaks the truth.13 On the basis of this statement, it is possible to read, if not
the influence, the way in which Artaud’s writing acted on the creation of a new dance and a new
language, escaping all definitions of the existing choreographic dictionary, dedicated to the denial
of the expression of concepts and feelings.
Hijikata delivered Artaud to the memory of his dancers, by creating a link between past and
future. He followed the example of a poet who saw reality concealed behind appearance and used
the tools of theater to reveal and live that reality. But Hijikata let him pass through his body, his
dance, his writing, his voice, overturning the legacy into a new foundation.
Notes
1 The excerpt (translated by C. Schumacher in Artaud on Theatre, Methuen, London, 1989) is taken from
Aliener l’acteur (Deranging the actor), one of the five texts that Artaud wrote about theater in 1947, in
part meant for the public reading in Galerie Pierre during an exhibition of his drawings.
2 Artaud defines the actor as an athlete of the heart in An affective athleticism, in The Theater and its Double.
About the heart of the spectator see Ruffini, Franco. 1994. Teatro e Boxe. L’“atleta del cuore” nella scena del
Novecento. Bologna: Il Mulino.
3 Various scholars have dealt with cruelty in butoh, using the Artaudian paradigm to read into Hijikata’s
experience. In this essay, though I chose to trace a different path, I am indebted to the studies by Kurihara
Nanako (1996); Michael Hornblow (2006); Orlando Vincent Truter (2007); Catherine Curtin (2010);
Efrati Benjamin (2012).
4 For the image of Heliogabalus in Hijikata’s dance see Baird, Bruce. 2012. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh:
Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits. New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press, pp. 105–136.
5 In Artaud’s Œuvres Complètes published by Gallimard and edited by Paule Thévenin, (indicated by O.
C. followed by the volume in Roman numerals), the Cahiers de Rodez (February 1945–May 1946) cor-
respond to the volumes from XV to XXI, the Cahiers du retour à Paris (May 1946–January 1947) to the
volumes from XXII to XXV. The notebooks written from February 1947 to March 1948 appeared in
two volumes edited by Évelyne Grossman under the title Cahiers d’Ivry, Gallimard, Paris 2011.
6 For more about Hijikata’s scrapbooks see Kurihara (2000), Wurmli (2008), Morishita (2015), and the
essays collected in the Dossier Butoh-fu. Dance and words edited by Marenzi (2016).
147
Samantha Marenzi
7 About Artaud’s mythical daughters and his real female students, see my book: Marenzi, Samantha. 2013.
Antonin Artaud e Colette Thomas. Personaggi della vita e persone del teatro. Roma: Bulzoni.
8 Kitayama Kenji gives a glimpse of the mysterious assonance between Artaud’s daughters and Hijikata’s
sister, embodied presences that respond to their denial of biological, familial, cultural origins. The pro-
posed interpretation goes in the direction of incest, and includes them among the themes that reverber-
ate from Artaud to Hijikata even beyond the latter’s readings. Cf. Hijikata, un autre Artaud ou un autre
qu’Artaud, report given to the Society of French language and literature at the University of Seijo, July
2003.
9 See also De Lamberterie, Domitie. 2012. La métaphysique de la chair. Antonin Artaud et la danse butō.
Avion: Éditions du Cénacle de France.
10 Two preparatory versions of the Préambule appear in O. C. XXII, pp. 429–432 and in O. C. XXIII,
pp. 45–47. The definitive version appeared in 1956 in O. C. I*, pp. 7–12.
11 The dancer Koseki Sumako said: “Butoh is Artaud’s voice at the end of his life.” L’Autre Journal, March
26, 1986, p. 55.
12 Akihiro Osawa, Scènes No. 1, Revue de l’espace Kiron. March 1985.
13 Kasai dedicated various projects to Heliogabalus, among which a choreography for a group of Italian
dancers including myself. The sentence here quoted is taken from my notes (Rome, Aug. 8, 2009).
About this see also, D’Orazi, Maria Pia. 2011. “Akira Kasai, il fantasma di Eliogabalo. Tre studi su
Artaud.” Biblioteca Teatrale, No. 99–100.
Works cited
Artaud, Antonin. 1956–1994. Œuvres Complètes. Edited by Paule Thévenin. Paris: Gallimard.
———. 2004. Œuvres. Edited by Évelyne Grossman. Paris: Quarto Gallimard.
———. 2011. Cahiers d’Ivry. Paris: Gallimard.
Artaud, Antonin. 1996. Aliéner l’acteur, Le théâtre et la science, Trois Textes. Edited by Carlo Pasi. Bologna, Il Pomerio.
Aslan, Odette, Ushio Amagatsu, and Béatrice Picon-Vallin. 2002. Butō(s). Paris: CNRS.
Baird, Bruce. 2012. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits. New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan Press.
Curtin, Catherine. 2010. “Recovering the Body and Expanding the Boundaries of Self in Japanese Butoh:
Hijikata Tatsumi, Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud.” Contemporary Theatre Review, 20, No. 1.
de Lamberterie, Domitie. 2012. La métaphysique de la chair. Antonin Artaud et la danse butō. Avion: Éditions
du Cénacle de France.
D’Orazi, Maria Pia. 2011. “Akira Kasai, il fantasma di Eliogabalo. Tre studi su Artaud.” Biblioteca Teatrale,
no. 99–100 (July-Dec.): 79-105
Dumoulié, Camille. 1996. Antonin Artaud. Paris: Seuil.
Efrati, Benjamin. 2012. “Fonctions de la cruauté dans l’oeuvre de Tatsumi Hijikata.” http://miracle.nu/pdf/
Efrati_Memoire_Hijikata_maquette_finale.pdf
Hoffman, Ethan, et al. 1987. Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul. New York: Aperture.
Hornblow, Michael. 2006. “Bursting Bodies of Thought: Artaud and Hijikata.” Performance Paradigm 2
(March 2006): 26-44.
Kitayama Kenji. 2003. “Hijikata, un autre Artaud ou un autre qu’Artaud”. Report given to the Society of
French language and literature at the University of Seijo, July.
Kurihara, Nanako. 1996. “The Most Remote Thing in the Universe: Critical Analysis of Hijikata Tatsumi’s
Butoh Dance.” PhD diss. New York University.
———. 2000. “The Words of Butoh.” The Drama Review, 44, Spring.
Marenzi, Samantha. 2013. Antonin Artaud e Colette Thomas. Personaggi della vita e persone del teatro. Roma:
Bulzoni.
———, ed. 2016. “Butoh-fu: Dance and Words.” With contributions by Samantha Marenzi, Akira Kasai,
Bruce Baird, Takashi Morishita, Stephen Barber, Katja Centonze, Maria Pia D’Orazi. Teatro e Storia.
(Nuova Serie) 37.
Morishita Takashi. 2015. Hijikata Tatsumi’s Notational Butoh: An Innovational Method for Butoh Creation.
Tokyo: Keio University Art Center.
Osawa, Akihiro. 1985. Scènes No. 1, Revue de l’espace Kiron, March.
Ruffini, Franco. 1994. Teatro e Boxe. L’“atleta del cuore” nella scena del Novecento. Bologna: Il Mulino.
148
Sas, Miryam. 1999. Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 2003. “Hands, Lines, Acts: Butoh and Surrealism.” Qui Parle, 13, No. 2 (Spring/Summer): 19–51.
Shibuswa Tatsuhiko. 1987. “Kyōtei Heriogabarusu aruiwa dekadensu no ikkōsatsu” (The Mad Emperor
Heliogabalus, or a Consideration of Decadence). In Shinsei Jutai (Divine Conception), 42–76. Kawade
Shobō.
Tanaka Min. “Antonin-Hijikata.” Yuriïka, 28, no. 382 (December 1996): 214-215.
Truter, Orlando Vincent. 2007. “The originating impulses of ankoku butoh: Towards an understanding
of the trans-cultural embodiment of Tatsumi Hijikata’s dance of darkness.” Thesis, Rhodes University.
Wurmli, Kurt. 2008. “The power of image: Hijikata Tatsumi’s scrapbooks and the art of Butō.” PhD diss.,
University of Hawaii.
149
17
BUTOH’S REMEDIATION
AND THE ANARCHIC
TRANSFORMING POLITICS OF
THE BODY IN THE 1960s
Peter Eckersall
“Human beings desire transformation” (The Play 2012, 202). The desire for transformation and the
many ways one might understand this was expressed in numerous artistic and political outpourings
in 1960s Japan. Following on from a rapidly transforming society in the early postwar era, one that
saw the wholesale reconstruction and reinvention of urban space, and changes in community and
national sentiment, the very idea of transformation was an enduring postwar narrative and a defin-
ing feature of life in the 1950s and 1960s. Although unresolved trauma and political adventurism
was deeply embedded in all facets of the postwar era, transformation was measured, not by elegiac
comparisons to the wartime past, but by a sense of complexity, innovation, growing consumerism,
and intermedia practices that in many instances were felt as bodily experiences.
Butoh and anti-art

What the art historian Kuroda Raijee calls the “anarchy of the body” as a condition of the 1960s
saw many artists adopt bodily tactics in their work as a sign of “direct action” (chokusetsu kōdō).
Much of this work is associated with the “anti-art” (han geijustu) movement that began in the
annual Yomiuri Independent Exhibitions (Yomiuri Indépendant or Anpan) running in Tokyo from
1949 until 1964, when the exhibition series was discontinued. In late the 1950s and early 1960s
this exhibition often featured works that moved from the visual to the performative and showed
interest in embodied practices in order to transform the surrounding environment. The term
han geijutsu was coined by the critic Tōno Yoshiaki to describe a trend of purging the optimistic
progressivism and aestheticism of the art of the 1950s. It was originally applied to work of the
artist Kudō Tetsumi who exhibited at the Twelfth Yomiuri Independent Exhibition in 1960.
Groups making anti-art performances from the early-to-mid 1960s include Kyūshū-ha, Neo
Dada, Group Ongaku, High Red Centre, and Zero Jigen. Han geijutsu performances tried to
negotiate an implicit boundary separating art and life and breach it with bodily acts. Such art
rejected all forms of authority, including the modern gallery system. In an implied encounter
with the viewer, many han geijutsu works stressed participation in a wider discourse of art that
connected objects to a sensory experience: art running into the streets, interrupting daily life, and
provoking performative responses (Eckersall 2013, 16–20).
150
Butoh’s remediation
Kuroda writes: “While the methodology and aesthetics of the creators differed greatly it can
be stated that there were practically speaking no anti-art performances that did not include the
concept of anarchy” (Kuroda 2010, 527). His conception of anarchy is one that provokes a form
of collective bodily disorder that accords with the idea of transformation: anarchy of the body
“vivified corners of urban spaces, and having abandoned the extant leftist ideologies and organ-
izations [artists] formed their own groups [to] carry out ‘direct actions’ . . . han geijutsu was an
avant-garde movement targeted towards ‘society’ going beyond the realm of ‘art’” (Kuroda 2010,
523–524). There is an attempt to reorder the perceptible experience of reality in its reawakening
of the sensory essence of the body as a site of transformation in personal, political, and aesthetic
terms, all bound together by action.
Neo Dada Organizers – a group of artists who staged disruptive and playful actions in small
studios and on the streets of Tokyo (1960–1963) – were an important example of this idea.
Instigated by Yoshimura Masunobu, Neo Dada members included Akasegawa Genpei, Shinohara
Ushio, and Arakawa Shusaku, all of whom were major artistic figures in the 1960s whose work
spanned activities in Japan and the United States. “Suspended between art and guerrilla war-
fare” (Chong et al., 2012, 124), their performances included wrapping their naked bodies with
handbills advertising their exhibition while walking through the streets of Ginza. Yoshimura
and Shinohara often included violent actions such as cutting the surfaces of their artworks and
smashing objects as a process of their art. Shinohara made ‘boxing paintings’ where he punched
walls and canvases while wearing boxing gloves dipped in sumi ink. In these ways, the idea of
action (akushon) was developed in their work. As the art historian William Marotti argues, akus-
hon was an idea linking artistic practices with wider concerns: “the practice of ‘akushon’ . . . came
to encompass experiments investigating the very notion of artistic practice as a general category
of action.” Marotti shows how this art began to look “beyond the ‘art’ institutional frame to a
general consideration of the possibilities of action – and even direct action” in a reference to the
political sphere (Marotti 2006, 611–612).
In fact, many artists in the period were involved in performance practices that extended
beyond or blew away the authority of artistic institutions. Ritual performances (called gishiki)
by Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension), for example, were often staged to arouse a sense of confron-
tation with the everyday public. Similar to art happenings, their strange half naked processional
walks were a rejection of Japanese order and conformity. Founded by Katō Yoshihiro and Iwata
Shin’ichi in Nagoya in 1960, Zero Jigen’s performances were bizarre and unruly:
Venues for their ‘rituals’ included not only downtown streets but the Yamanote line
train and Tokyo tram carriages, public baths, river beds, cemeteries, shrines, May Day
meeting places, popular theatre, angura theatre and strip clubs, and the performers truly
began to take on the air of third-rate actors.
Kuroda 2006
Another example is Hi Red Centre’s famous Street Cleaning Event (1964), staged as a parody
of a Japanese government directive for people to present a clean image of the city in preparation
for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. Looking like hygiene scientists or engineers in white lab
coats and carrying cleaning brushes and buckets, Hi Red Centre’s founders Akasegawa Genpei,
Nakanishi Natsuyuki, and Takamatsu Jirō were joined by collaborators as they carefully washed
the footpaths of Tokyo and cleaned the cracks between the pavements. A nearby sign read:
“Cleaning Event. Be Clean! Campaign to Promote Cleanliness and Order in the Metropolitan
Area.” Unlike Zero Jigen’s standout unruly performances, the intention of the Street Cleaning
Event is to make daily life and art indistinguishable from the each other. Although, using humor
151
Peter Eckersall
and surprise, Hi Red Centre’s work had a serious aspect that what about exposing the gestures
and performative posturing of institutions. Their art and performance works copied and enlarged
mainstream institutional images and practices as a way of exploding the authority of these insti-
tutions and their targets included government, universities, and the judiciary.
Butoh’s emergence in 1959 as a politics of embodiment and an activity that was at least
in part drawing on ideas of spontaneity, action, parody, eroticism, and confrontation was an
essential aspect of this desire for transformation and on the edges of the han geijutsu, Neo Dada
and ‘Happenings’ performance crowd. Looking back, we can now see that butoh’s emergence
was shaped in and by the interdisciplinary and corporeal, expressly action fixated environment
in the arts.
Thus, this contribution aims not to revalidate butoh as a preeminent challenge to modern and
contemporary dance (although butoh certainly was that), instead it hopes to briefly situate butoh
in an intermedial context that offered political perspectives on the question of the body and the
desire for transformation. We can now see that butoh’s importance was not only as a transgressive
innovation in dance but also one that mutually benefited from its connections to visual arts, film,
music, poster art, and new media.
Bodies and counterculture politics

Butoh is also connected to prevailing discourses of the body that evolved in 1960s radical
politics and the student movement. The dramatic incursions and corporeality of mass demon-
strations and the focus on sensation and experience that was shared among radical student
protestor groups was the basis for what Suga Hidemi, a former activist and specialist of ideo-
logical perspectives on the 1960s, sees as a dynamic corporeal vision of culture (bunka ni taisuru
doutai shiryoku) that would break Japan out of the strictures of its leftist postwar orthodoxy
(Suga 2005, 3–8). In June 1960, a mass of bodies occupied the streets around the Japanese
parliament building (Diet) to protest the resigning of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and
Security between the United States and Japan (shortened in Japanese to Anpo Jōyaku, or
AMPO). Although the demonstrations failed to prevent the treaty’s renewal and the protesters
eventually dispersed, the incident left many with bitter feelings of betrayal and the fragmen-
tation of leftist political groups that followed saw the development of a plethora of new left
forces and directions of activity. These groups were not unified by a central party organization
or adherence to orthodox Marxism, rather, the students in the new left often saw themselves
as guerrilla activists who trained their bodies and minds to violently overthrow the Japanese
state. To draw on Suga’s work again, the culmination of street protests, university occupations,
and group actions that were a common feature of life in Japan in 1968 and 1969, while often
addressing local issues and concerns also needs to be understood as a part of an international
revolution of radical politics centered on the body (Suga 2003, 6). For example, new modali-
ties of protest with their rhetorics of purifying violence and acts of bodily confrontation were
seen at the core of new left movements in Europe, the Americas, China, and South-East Asia
as well as Japan. While local contexts and motivations differed, they all shared a common goal
of politics expressed through the body.
In Japan we can see evidence of this in documentary films of student protests that were
becoming increasingly violent in the late 1960s. Using newly developed portable film cameras
documentary filmmakers covering the protests sometimes adopted subjective and immersive
critical perspectives in their work or blended fiction and realty as in the work of Ōshima
Nagisa, whose Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Shinjuku Dorobo Nikki, 1969) staring underground
theatre artist Kara Jūrō, freely mixed fictional scenes that were filmed in the midst of real
152
street demonstrations. Ōuchida Keiya’s Chikatetsu Hiroba (Underground Plaza, 1970) followed
‘folk guerrillas’ gathered at the underground plaza linking the west and east exits of the
Shinjuku railway station in February 1969. While the demonstrations attracted thousands of
people, what is remarkable about the film is the way that Ōuchida (who also filmed butoh
performances) tries to always film from inside the action. Using dramatic swirling camera
moves and montage-style editing, the film attempts to communicate a sense of the visceral
nature of the protest and impart an embodied experience of its corporality to the spectator
(Eckersall 2013, 81–105).
Butoh against alienation

Although Hijikata Tatsumi and the butoh artists of the 1960s generally did not have direct
connections to the protest movement, some of Hijikata’s writing on butoh during that time is
expressly Marxist in tone and shows us how the focus on activating bodily presence and sensation
was also seen as a political gesture. In his essay, “To Prison” (Keimusho e), Hijikata notes that butoh
is a site for the rehabilitation of the alienated human condition: “I am a body shop; my profession
is the business of human rehabilitation, which goes today by the name of dancer.” His dance, as he
sees it at the time, is “a naïve battle with nature” and a protest against the “alienation of labor”
in capitalist society (Hijikata 2000, 44–45). Action and movement as a direct force of resistance
to capitalism as expressed here in relation to butoh also equates with the way that protest actions
were not only about making politics visible but aimed to trigger feelings and emotions and col-
lective forms of embodied resistance to the state (Eckersall 2013, 100–102). As Yoshikuni Igarashi
writes: “By taking the beatings of police batons on their heads and being sprayed with tear gas,
rally participants presented themselves both as victims of the state’s repressive powers and as agents
for the resistance against it” (Igarashi 2007, 123).
Hijikata was photographed in close proximity to a late sixties protest rally by the pho-
tographer Fukase Masahisa. Along with other art photographers such as Hosoe Eikoh and
Moriyama Daidō, Fukase copiously documented the 1960s in terms that highlighted bodies
in action, erotic nudes and everyday people in the changing landscapes of postwar Japan.
In this particular image, Hijikata is shown walking against a stream of young riot police in
their protective gear and helmets and carrying batons. Hijikata is wearing typical butoh
garb of a torn red kimono, knee-high white stockings, disheveled hair, and, oddly, carrying
a watermelon in a string bag. The police are not in riot formation but seem to be either
walking to, or away from, a street action. They look at Hijikata with suspicion and per-
haps distaste. Meanwhile, the artist himself looks directly forward, avoiding the gaze of the
police. The image is uncanny and open to multiple interpretations. Stephen Barber reads
the image in the context of Jean Genet’s visit to Japan in 1969 and Genet’s taunting of the
riot police at a Tokyo demonstration. Genet was a well-known source of inspiration for
Hijikata’s attempts to deform the body and play with notions of criminality, sexuality, and
gender ambiguity. And while Genet throws himself into the danger of the demonstrations,
Barber is not impressed by Hijikata’s own departure from the scene, suggesting that the
photograph depicts Hijikata “swallowed-up in his own insular concerns” (Barber 2006, 63).
However, looking at the bodies in the image also suggests a different reality – the contrast of
two embodied states; one being the youthful and anxious looking riot police and the other
the unruly and defiant figure of Hijikata. Their difference shows how the intersections of
politics and art are embodied: “In a moment of passing, a critical space between two expe-
riences of humanity is opened, and two versions of history and two events become visible
and intersect” (Eckersall 2013, 7).
153
Peter Eckersall
Remediation into image

Of course, butoh is an expressive medium that has long attracted photographers who some-
times collaborated with particular performers and groups. As a result of this, an important
part of butoh has always been its remediation into image. Well known is the fact that Hijikata
worked with Hosoe Eikoh on the Kamaitachi series of photographs that was first released as
a limited edition book in 1969 and is now a seminal example of butoh photography. With
Hijikata leaping through the air in rice fields in the backwater landscapes of Akita and pulling
faces for laughing peasants, he revives the spirit of the ‘sickle tooth weasel,’ something that is
both playful and strange. These images project the idea of butoh into a rural phantasm-like
landscape, a fiction of a premodern body connected to the earth and the changing seasons.
Hosoe also photographed images of Hijikata’s company in urban settings. His arrangements
of half-naked bodies standing in lines with hoods on their heads that he set off balance in
the composition or his close-up images of parts of the body in high-contrast – three arms
reach into a prone back in one of the most celebrated images – almost abstract black and
white, grainy prints that convey the transgression and animal physicality of butoh. From these
photographs, we can appreciate much of the radical proposition for the body that Hijikata
imagined. These photographs and poster art by Tadanori Yokoo and others are emblematic
of butoh’s transgressive nature. They acted not only as a form of advertisement for coming
performances or documentation. Much more important is how these images made by artists
who were friends and collaborators of Hijikata stand as an extension of the spirit of butoh
carried into other media.
Remediation is a concept that describes how art works can “put the viewer in the same space
as the objects viewed” and is a helpful way of thinking about how this extension of butoh into
visual arts also takes us back to the body (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 11). A term associated with the
new media theorists Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin to describe how one might experience
immersion in media, remediation can also apply to the corporeal experience of bodies in artistic
and political actions in the 1960s. Remediation in the new media sphere finds an effective precur-
sor in the butoh ‘cine dance’ (shine dansu) works by experimental filmmaker Iimura Takahiko. In
these early 1960s films of Hijikata’s performances of The Masseur (Anma, 1963) and Rose Colored
Dance (Bara Iro Dansu, 1965), Iimura wanted to make the audience experience the sensation of
butoh as a form of visual poetry inspired by Japanese Dada poets (see Eckersall 2013, 45). Using
a wind-up super-8 camera that had limited filming time, Iimura created impressionistic and
anarchic sequences that captured the flights of movement of the dancers in blurry, extended, and
fragmented arrangements.
The films, like the photographs, above, are remediations of the embodied experience into
image. The difference here is that this is a moving image that captures scenes from the dance and
then extends it into abstract sequences of blurring bodies, flaying clothes, and distended surfaces.
For Iimura, “‘the body is one kind of media’ amidst the filmic reconstitution of the dance” (in
Eckersall 2013, 55). It is also a way of extending the dance itself and taking butoh outside of a
fixed temporal expression, one that is limited to the time and immediacy of its performance. In
this way, Iimura’s films are a clear example of a medium that is between film and dance – neither
one nor the other but combining aspects of both around the sensation of embodied action, some-
thing very close in mind to the idea of chokusetsu kōdō-direct action. Their subjectivity puts the
viewer in the middle of the performance, once again as a demonstration of the way that embodied
practices in the 1960s aimed to constantly shift the perspective of the viewer. By making them
participant and taking the performer outside of themselves a new kind of radical subjectivity
(shutaisei) situated in and through the body was born.
154
Hijikata at Expo 70
Richly dark and expressive images of butoh performers were captured in films and pho-
tographs throughout the 1960s by filmmakers and photographers such as William Klein,
Donald Richie, Hosoe Eikoh, and Iimura Takahiko. Ironically, however, butoh’s trajectory of
remediation, and in a strange way, its coming together with the remnants of anti-art, are seen
in the conflation of avant-garde arts and public spectacle that was the monumental event of
Osaka Expo 70 (Banpaku). Running from March to September 1970 and with attendances of
64 million people, it is estimated that around half the population of Japan attended the Expo
World Fair. The Expo theme of “Progress and Harmony for Humankind” shows Japan at its
most utopic moment in modern history, with high economic growth, full employment, and
amazing technologies and arts that were a primary feature of Banpaku. The artistic program of
Expo was curated by the sculptor and visual artist Okamoto Tarō, and many han geijutsu artists
and groups contributed ideas, art works, and performances. (Those who did not were often
members of a loose group of artists and activists who staged events and performances under
the name of Hanpaku – “Against Expo”). Among the many science-fiction and Metabolist
inspired pavilions at Expo was the Astrorama Midori Kan, a multi-colored, stickle patterned
geodesic dome containing an immersive cinema sound and projection system that was said to
be the most advanced of its day.
Although like many artists, Hijikata was critical of the popularization and commercialization
of Expo and was quoted as saying that Expo was the enemy of underground arts (in Merewether
and Hiro 2007, 28), he also featured in one of the films made for projection in the Midori Kan,
a work called The Birth. Shot with a five-lens 70 mm camera that captured a greatly enhanced
“fish-eye” in-the-round perspective, Hijikata appears as a wild shaman dancing in the mist of
the volcanic smoke of Mount Iō and in erotic scenes shot with his butoh company at his Asbestos-
kan studio in Tokyo. Stephen Barber has written widely about butoh on film and writes that
The Birth had an “incoherent scenario” written by the poet Tanikawa Shuntaro. Hijikata’s
appearance as a “monstrous and grotesque” figure was especially requested by Tanikawa. Barber
notes that
other sequences displayed primal natural landscapes, and fragments of cities, about to
be destroyed. A further sequence . . . showed Hijikata’s Asbestos Hall dancers, filmed
from above, naked and apparently engaged in sexual acts, the images superimposed with
images of hell from paintings by Bosch and others.
Barber 2012, 2
The film was what Barber calls “part-miracle, part-malediction . . . sensorially engulfing” (ibid).
Banpaku was a watershed moment for the arts and the anti-Expo people were right in their
critique of its appropriation and containment of radical artistic ideals. To be an anarchic body
immersed in the sensation of intermedial experience meant something different after Expo. The
desire for transformation was everywhere but no longer directed to radical ends. By watching
the film of Hijikata in the Astrorama, everyone could experience his performance, but doing so,
they would no longer be called to action.
A question that follows then is how would butoh develop in a social context that was becom-
ing less defined by the example of bodies resisting the status quo and where the tactic of immer-
sion was seen as mass spectacle rather than an avant-garde sensibility and dramaturgy of the
counterculture? Also where talk of alienation (Tanaka Min is perhaps the exception) largely
leaves the discourse of butoh to be replaced by nativist Tōhoku Kabuki references and practices
155
Peter Eckersall
tending towards an apolitical trance-like sublime on the one hand and outrageous Dionysian
erotic displays on the other. Arguably, by the end of the 1960s, the active disturbance of butoh
was substantially reduced as it became much more widely known.
Coda – Gekidan Kaitaisha and the politics of shintai

After the 1960s the wait for a new awareness of embodied performance took some time and
we needed a new vocabulary and politics of the body to emerge. In the 1990s the work of
Gekidan Kaitaisha (Theatre of Deconstruction) revived the idea of a transforming body as a
site of political action. Kaitaisha draws some of its influences from butoh and Hino Hiruko
who is one the group’s leading members traces her own training back to Hijikata’s workshops.
Her guidance in the training and choreography of Kaitaisha makes an explicit link between the
style of ankoku butoh developed by Hijikata and the training and performances practices seen
in Kaitaisha’s work. Under the direction of Shimizu Shinjin, Kaitaisha have also explored the
politics of deconstruction and connected this with an idea of the body being able to confront
society in ways that are close to Hijikata’s early thinking about butoh as a way of reinvigorating
sensation and resisting alienation.
Kaitaisha’s works in the late 1990s and early 2000s often included filmed images of war pro-
jected over the stage in ways that sometimes made the bodies of the performers invisible. The
series of works Bye Bye: Phantom (2003–2006) were some of the most extreme of these as they
featured a massive projection of footage showing a US bombing run on a local target in Afghan-
istan during the misnamed “War on Terror” started by George W Bush after the attacks of 9/11.
The images showed a pilot’s view of the ground as seen from the cockpit of his plane; the film
was reportedly sourced from peace activists, and it was assumed that the footage was not nor-
mally available for public view. It showed the plane’s arrival at the target and the weapons being
released followed by an image of white light “flaming out” as the target was destroyed. We could
hear the pilot excitedly reporting over his radio that the unseen enemy combatants were “toast.”
Shimizu placed these bodies in a space of vulnerability and annihilation in order to have them
bio-politically recognize their precarious state and then haplessly and energetically fight back.
Adam Broinowski, who was a member of Kaitaisha during that time, suggests that Shimizu used
the combination of war images and bodies to rethink the dominating power of neoliberalism.
He compares Shimizu’s dramaturgy of showing “marginalized bodies surviving in the globalized
media operation” with Hijikata’s concern “with the colonial peripheries of Empire as a ‘corpse
being stood up’ (by earth, atmosphere, elements, energy, memory)” (Broinowski 2016, 150–151).
Clearly Kaitaisha’s use of media and their tactics of immersion are an entirely different register
to the intermedial experiences of the 1960s. Kaitaisha’s work is about contemporary media as
an extension of biopower and their work is broadly didactic. The bodies fight for survival in a
situation of war that no longer has bodies on the ground directly confronting each other. Artists
working in the high technology and mediatized conditions of the 21st century – and by dint of
the visceral nature of the performance also the spectators of this work – are no longer able to
participate vicariously, as an extension of the camera’s abstract mobility, as in the example of cine
dance. To do so would be voyeuristic and to condone disembodied violence. Here the objecti-
fication of the body in relation to the bombing technology is seen as a precursor to the drone.
Shimizu talks about how shintai, as a Japanese word for the culturally conditioned body,
replaced the rebellious primal image of the body as flesh or nikutai in butoh performances in the
1960s. Nikutai was used by Hijikata to describe the raw state of the body in ankoku butoh (see
Centonze 2010, 114–118). Shintai (bodies) by contrast, according to Shimizu, show us how “vari-
ous permutations of this opposition between something ‘becoming’ and something ‘constructing’
156
could be reconciled” (Shimizu 2010, 21). Sympathy for Deleuze and Guattari’s attempt to con-
nect the material aspect of embodiment with revolutionary ideas is evident in these comments.
The body in the work of Kaitaisha has material dimensions; it is not representational and each
person “speaks” with or through the agency of their performance. The physical acts that are
often difficult and demanding high levels of fitness are real, and the bodies of the performers get
tired. This is an example of what Noda Manabu calls the postwar Japanese body “ill at ease”
(2007, 272). But is it also an example of how the politics of butoh have changed, and if we are to
consider butoh on its political terms, then the formation of butoh as an incarnate “rebellion of
the flesh” needs to be updated to include an awareness of these political bodies. In contemporary
society, everything is subjected to immersion and experience is no longer connected to resistance.
The potential in Kaitaisha’s work is for the performed actions of the body to show a political
practice that revives the energy of resistance. Because of this, I think of Kaitaisha as one of the
most important legacies of butoh and one that shows us an important characteristic of butoh as
a politics of the body as it needs to be for our time.
Works cited
———. 2012. “Hijikata in Astrorama.” 3: AM Magazine, 25 October. Accessed January 15, 2017. Accessed
February 28, 2010. www.3ammagazine.com/3am/hijikata-in-astrorama/
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge MA: MIT
Press.
Broinowski, Adam. 2016. Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan: The Performing Body During and after the
Cold War. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Centonze, Katja. 2010. “Bodies Shifting from Hijikata’s Nikutai to Contemporary Shintai: New Gener-
ation Facing Corporeality.” In Avant-Gardes in Japan: Anniversary of Futurism and Butō: Performing Arts
and Cultural Practices between Contemporariness and Tradition, edited by Katja Centonze, 111–141. Venice:
Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina.
Chong, Doryun, Michio Hayashi, Mika Yoshitake, Miryam Sas, Yuri Mitsuda, Masatoshi Nakajima, and
Nancy Lim. 2012. Tokyo, 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
Eckersall, Peter. 2013. Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan: City, Body, Memory. London and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Hijikata, Tatsumi. 2000. “To Prison.” The Drama Review. 44.1: 43–48.
Igarashi, Yoshikuni. 2007. “Dead Bodies and Living Guns: The United Red Army and Its Deadly Pursuit of
Revolution, 1971–1972.” Japanese Studies. 27.2: 119–137.
Kuroda, Raiiee. 2006. “Zero Jigen to wa nani ka.” In Zero Jigen: Yoshihiro Kato to rokujū nen dai. [“What is
Zero Dimension.” Zero Dimension: Yoshihiro Kato and the 60s], Photographs and edited by Minoru
Hirata. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha.
———. 2010. Ningen no ana-kiszumu 1960s nendai: Nihon geijutsu ni akeru pafoomansu no chikate sui myaku
[Anarchy of the Body: Undercurrents of Performance Art in 1960s Japan]. Tokyo: Grambooks.
Marotti, William. 2006. “Political Aesthetics: Activism, Everyday Life, and Art’s Object in 1960s’ Japan.”
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. 7.4: 606–618.
Merewether, Charles, and Rika Iezumu Hiro (eds.). 2007. Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experiments in the Pubic
Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950–1970. Los Angeles: Getty Trust Publications.
Noda, Manabu. 2007. “The Body Ill at Ease in Postwar Japanese Theatre.” New Theatre Quarterly. 23.3:
272–282.
The Play. 2012. “Reaction in Summer ’68: Do it without Happenings (1968).” In From Postwar to Postmodern
Art in Japan 1945–1989, edited by Doryun Chong, Michio Hayashi, Kenji Kajiya, Fumihiko Sumitomo.
New York: The Museum of Modern Art.
Shimizu, Shinjin. 2010. “Through the International Collaborative Production: Dream Regime.” In Three
Essays + Exchange, 20–24. Cardiff: A Chapter Book.
Suga, Hidemi. 2003. Kakumei Teki na, Amari ni Kakumei Teki na: ‘1968 Nen no Kakumei’ Shiron [Revolution-
ary or Not? The Theoretical History of the Revolution of 1968]. Tokyo: Sakuhinsha.
———. 2005. 1968. Tokyo: Sakuhinsha.
157
18
BODIES AT THE THRESHOLD
OF THE VISIBLE
Photographic butoh
Introduction: doubtful presence and photographic mobility

In her landmark study Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (2005 [1993]), Peggy Phelan argued that
performance art exists only in and of its initial enactment. Recordings lack the immediacy, pres-
ence and full power of the original. Although critiqued by Philip Auslander (1999), Joel Anderson
(2015), and others, Unmarked is worth returning to. Phelan states that bodily “presence is theatre’s
promise as well as its doubt, and in this theatre imitates love and its illusions” (121). Whilst Phelan’s
suggestion of an opposition between theater and its mediated reproductions is not so commonly
articulated today, there has been less consideration of photographic mediation as it applies to dance.
As an art form predicated on bodily movement, dance would seem particularly resistant to doc-
umentation via still photography (Ewing 1987; Marshall 2008). Yet while Hijikata Tatsumi and
Ohno Kazuo were insistent that their practice was a modern form of buyō (dance), much of their
early work was closer to performance art and happenings than concert dance. One might posit
then that, as in the actions described by Phelan, there is a similar doubtful, erotic “promise” of
“presence” which is both evoked and problematized within butoh and its images. As Anderson says
of theater, photography functioned within butoh “not as a surrogate” but “as a partner” in which
what moves between different stages, frames and images is a doubtful, at times ghost-like presence
which is “neither live nor dead” but which oscillates between these poles of life and death (2008,
31–34). Such a fugitive presence is by definition difficult to capture or visualize, in photography or
dance. It establishes forms – or their formlessness – in a manner which resists instantiation.
I argue that the affinities and exchanges between butoh dance and photomedia rest on a series
of mobile, contradictory affiliations which are evoked through images of bodies subjected to frag-
mentation and change. Audiences access the body via its shifting fragments, pieces and ruptures,
and in the transit between forms. There is a dispersal of bodily form across – and into – media:
the body as a fluid, changeable structure which morphs through unstable iterations of flesh and
emulsion. Rebecca Schneider has characterized such exchanges as an “inter(in)animation” across
various materializations of actions, and their location in time (Marshall 2017, 72–90; Schneider
2011). In Phelan’s terms, butoh and its images gesture towards an understanding of subjectivity
which exceeds “the ideology of the visible” (2005, 1). In butoh, the subject is located in the space
between that which is seen, and that which cannot be visualized. Post-war Japanese photography
was itself devoted to articulating a grammar of the invisible, and it was these shared concerns of
158
Bodies at the threshold of the visible
visibility/invisibility, an interest in the subconscious (a major source for such invisible subjective
and sensual forces), and in corporeal part-objects, which drew the projects of butoh and post-war
Japanese photography together. In this exchange, the body itself became a kind of media, a site
for the reproduction and generation of near dead, or deathly, images on the border of visibility.
The relationship between butoh and photography was a reciprocal one, with key figures in pho-
tographic practice closely associated with butoh from its inception.
Butoh’s pre-eminent photographer: Hosoe Eikoh

Leading Japanese photographer Hosoe Eikoh knew Hijikata’s wife and dance partner Motofuji
Akiko, and was present at what was later identified as the first butoh performance, namely Kinjiki
(Forbidden Colors, 1959), titled after Mishima Yukio’s novel. Hosoe’s collaboration with Hijikata is
the longest and most important in butoh, setting the context for other photographers like Hanaga
Mitsutoshi (1983); Nakatani Tadao (2003); Ethan Hoffman (1987); Laurencine Lot (2005; Rancilio
1985); Nourit Masson-Sékiné (1988); Ōtsuji Kiyoji (who documented Kinjiki); Torii Ryōzen (who,
together with Hanaga, documented Nikutai no Hanran); Tōmatsu Shōmei (who collaborated with
Maro Akaji and the latter’s wife and dance partner on the erotic photobook OO! Shinjuku, 1969); and
William Klein (who was introduced to Hijikata and Ohno by Hosoe, and worked with the pair in
the streets for Tokyo 1961; Asbestos-Kan 1987, 12–13; Hosoe & Hill 1986; Parr & Badger 2004, 290).
Hosoe also worked with Ohno from 1959, but the prints were not represented via unified
exhibition series or publications until later. Hijikata and Ohno did however both collaborate
with Hosoe on a photo-project shot at Tokyo’s docks and abattoirs as early as 1960 (Figure 18.1).
Hijikata was later featured with Motofuji in Hosoe’s 1961 photobook Man and Woman (Otoko to
Onna; Figure 18.2; Feustel 2011), and the pair also appeared in Hosoe’s 1962 study of Mishima,
Barakei: Ordeal by Roses. In 1970 the photographer made a sequel to Man and Woman entitled Hoyo
(Embrace), featuring Hijikata’s dancers Ashikawa Yoko, Tamano Koichi, Nimura Momoko and
Kobayashi Saga. When Hijikata’s studio Asbestos Kan was scheduled to close, Hosoe contacted
Motofuji and shot the 2003 series Ukiyo-e Projections with her dancers in the venue. Hosoe’s most
significant butoh photo-series though was Kamaitachi (1969), discussed below.
The body at the limits of visibility: VIVO,

“subjective documentary” and butoh
Katja Centonze characterizes the relationship between butoh and photography as “intertwined
in ‘elective affinity’” (2012, 218), using Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s metaphor for how aes-
thetic relations may be likened to variable chemical reactions between differently charged, yet
related, art forms. Catriona MacLeod explains that such aesthetic affinities are based upon an
imperious “natural law and necessity,” like physical chemistry, while simultaneously being elec-
tive and mobile, available for artists to “manipulate” according to their desires (2009, 14). Cen-
tonze clarifies that the “natural law” of corporeal desire was seen by Hijikata and his peers as tied
to the concept of nikutai, or the “body belonging to violence, provocation and carnal desires,
aiming at the emancipation of the impulses” (2010, 115–117). This shared affinity for the nikutai
body joined photographic artists with butoh dancers.
As curator Alexandra Munroe has observed, much of the Japanese avant-garde addressed
itself to the:
grotesque and absurd imagination of the primal forces of sex, madness, and death. A
preoccupation with the aberrant forms of human nature [which] . . . pervade[d] . . .
159
Figure 18.1 Hijikata Tatsumi and dancers, from the 1960 pamphlet for Dance Experience, photograph by
Hosoe Eikoh. Courtesy of Hosoe Eikoh.
contemporary fiction of . . . Mishima . . . the films of Japan’s New Wave directors . . .

and the plays of Tokyo’s leading underground dramatists . . . spectacles peopled with
dwarfs, giants, naked women, deformed men, and live grotesqueries of all description.
Munroe 1996, 189
Butoh and Japanese postwar photography were focused on such diverse and challenging con-
structions of the body. From Tōmatsu Shomei’s disturbing photographs of the aftermath of
Japan’s assault by atomic weaponry (in which a grotesquely melted bottle is likened to a survivor’s
160
Figure 18.2 Otoko to Onna (Man and Woman) #24, by Hosoe Eikoh, 1960; featuring Hijikata Tatsumi
(1960), photograph by Hosoe Eikoh. Courtesy of Hosoe Eikoh.
skin; Parr & Badger 2004, 274–277), through to Man and Woman, reconfigured human forms
recur, at once damaged yet aesthetic, sensual yet violent.
Centonze’s characterization of the relationship between butoh and photography as a flexible,
bipolar series of exchanges is apt given the heady environment of the 1960s. Hijikata, Hosoe,
Mishima and others shared discussions, drinking sessions, publications, prints and collaborations,
generating multidirectional affinities and relationships. As Hosoe put it: “between photographer
and dancer, who moves whom – the cooperative relationship – is not so clear. The beauty of
my approach is that the photographer and his subject neither pair off against one another, nor
coalesce” (Ko-e 2010).
Aside from a mutual concern with the reconfigured body, butoh dancers and their photogra-
pher-colleagues were linked by the influence of Surrealist photomedia and translations of Surre-
alist writings by critic Takiguchi Shūzō (Sas 1999). A key source was Surrealist Georges Bataille’s
championing of indistinct, “formless” structures such as he identified in Jacques-André Boif-
fard’s photograph Big Toe (Krauss 1985; Mundy 2001). The French Surrealists and their Japanese
sympathizers strove to realize that most paradoxical of situations, where one sees, or intuitively
perceives, that which is in some sense invisible because it has no stable form or shape. Author
and photographer Nourit Masson-Sékiné opens her own influential photo-and-text compilation
Butoh: Shades of Darkness (1988, 8; Figure18.3) with a print by Hanaga, showing Ohno Kazuo
peeking out of a field of black coterminous with his hair, which encroaches upon his whitened
visage. Ohno’s wrinkled thumb is visible below, problematizing the otherwise depthless space.
Ohno’s mouth is agape, the black of the background flowing into his orifices. The viewer cannot
determine if the formless Ohno is receding into the shadows, or moving out of them. This is
ankoku butoh or “darkness dance” at its poetic apotheosis: a body made of shadows which eats
space and darkness, even as these forces consumes the dancer’s flesh. As Hijikata put it, dancers
“pluck the darkness from within their own bodies and eat it” (2000, 51).
While many members of the postwar Japanese avant-garde worked with each other, this does
not mean that all butoh photographs necessarily conform to, or echo, butoh’s own concerns
161
Figure 18.3 Ohno Kazuo in La Argentina, directed by Hijikata Tatsumi, 1977, photograph by Hanaga
Mitsutoshi. Courtesy of Hanaga Tarō.
equally. Takiguchi for example was at pains to distinguish the collaborations of Hosoe and Hiji-
kata from those instances of “generic . . . staged photography” which too readily sweep aside the
paradoxical act of visualizing that which resists visibility (Hosoe et al. 2005).
What was at stake in these debates is the positioning of the realist model of photography as
a primarily mimetic art that transparently represents reality, versus the shared potential of both
Surrealist photography and butoh to exceed visualization. This was a widely discussed topic not
only within butoh, but also photographic circles. Taki Koiji – founder of the photo-magazine
Provoke with which Hosoe was associated – claimed that:
The act of expression is the ceaseless rendering of the invisible visible. That which
is visible, that which structures the everyday, passes for reality. The act of expression
requires a transition from a world of apparent certainties to a world in which we cannot
even locate ourselves.
Parr & Badger 2004, 266
Takiguchi defined Kamaitachi as closer to “the original meaning of the term ‘happening’” or
performance art than to what was ordinarily implied by “staged photography” because in such
frightening and unpredictable photo-corporeal collaborations, the outcome can neither be fully
known, nor rendered within simple formal boundaries. For Takiguchi, Kamaitachi represents that
supreme paradox of the photographic medium, an image which acts to “penetrate” below the
surface of the visible and make visible that which cannot be seen (“a world in which we cannot
162
even locate ourselves”). Hijikata’s dance was predicated on the same logic, wherein “that thing
which is form emerges as it disappears; form becomes vivid in disappearing” (2000, 76).
Photographic butoh therefore functioned in opposition to the postwar school of Japanese
Realist photography championed by Domon Ken, and inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Mag-
num organization. Cartier-Bresson famously proposed that photography should condense real-
life events into a single, objective “decisive moment,” coalescing narrative into an immediate,
legible journalistic icon (1952; Reason 2011, 283). The rhetoric of post-war visual arts as a whole
was moreover dominated by Clement Greenberg’s proposition that modernism was defined by
ever more reductive formal experimentation: painting about painting, or photography devoted
to the study of light and shadow such as that pioneered by Edward Steichen through to László
Moholy-Nagy (Baird 2012, 98–99). The members of Provoke and of Hosoe’s VIVO photography
group (1959–1961) defied both principles. Neither objective nor formalist, they called their
work “subjective documentary,” drawing from the post-war environment to produce idiosyn-
cratic, psychologically dense imagery (Parr & Badger 2004, 266–307). Mishima commended
Hosoe as an artist who “peered into the viewfinder . . . waiting for some kind of metamorphosis
to overtake the objects” which he saw in the camera. Mishima likened this transformation to an
almost chthonic “reversion” to those “primary images” which existed as indistinct forces and
pulsions within what Mishima – echoing the Surrealists – called “the subconscious” (Hosoe &
Mishima 1985). For Mishima and the Surrealists, the subconscious was that psychic resource
of desire, sexuality, violence and creativity which birthed the ankoku of life and carnal nikutai.
Repeating Breton’s dictum that the eye exists in a “savage state,” Hijikata reflected that “the
camera’s eye is brutal,” suggesting that he could work with Hosoe because he was “fortunately
an avid reader of the Marquis de Sade” and hence shared with the dancer an appreciation of the
violent, primal urges of the body and the soul (Baird 2012, 108).
Intermediality, bodies as media, and photographic theatre

Hosoe described his collaborations with Hijikata as “photographic theatre” or “body theater
(nikutai gekijō),” implying a dynamic, corporeal project whose final drama was manifest within
the published photobook or exhibition, rather than within an initial performance in real space
(Centonze 2012, 226–227; Hosoe & Howe 1991). The palpably “fleshy” aspect of the Hosoe’s
prints was sometimes literally signified by Hijikata, who stamped posters and images with his
hand dipped in ink (Holborn 1986, 32). Hearing about a dance named after his novel, Mishima
met Hijikata at a special performance of Kinjiki (Baird 2012, 32), after which Hijikata showed
Mishima some of Hosoe’s photographs. Mishima subsequently contacted Hosoe in the hope
that, as Hosoe put it, he might “become a dancer himself” via the medium of photography, thereby
entering the realm of nikutai gekijō – an honorary butoh performer within the photographic
frame, his status moving towards that of one of Hijikata’s handprints (Hosoe & Mishima 1985).
Not only did the presence within the photographic frame of butoh performers and their
colleagues render photographs as a form of corporeal dance, but Hijikata and his peers’ use of
photomedia on their stages transformed the dancers into media or mediums. Keijijogaku (Emotion
in Metaphysics, 1967), for example, featured prints of a naked man with his back to the viewer
laid out across the rear of the stage. The image states one of Keijijogaku’s central themes, namely
Hijikata’s interest in vulnerable bodies such as those which have turned away from us to expose
their undefended, sculpturally complex backs. Hijikata had previously explored this concept of
“a dance of the back” (2000, 39) in his first photo-sessions with Hosoe (Figure 18.1). One print
shows the dancers from behind, shoulders hunched and tensed such that the heads are obscured,
each body lined up before a decapitated carcass (Morishita 2012). On Keijijogaku’s stage, as in the
163
earlier photographs, the bringing together of live flesh and photography served not only to link
media at the level of affinities (photomedia bodies meet dancerly bodies), but also to intermingle
and confuse them (dancerly bodies become media, vulnerable meat, and plastic flesh). In Rose
Color Dance: To Mr. Shibusawa’s House (Barairo dansu: À la maison de M. Civeçawa, 1965), Hijikata
brought onstage a large portrait photograph of shimpa female impersonator Hanayagi Shōtarō,
who died that year (Baird 2012, 77–91; Asbestos Kan 23). Here the image of the deceased actor,
grainy and distant, shared the literal space with the live dancer, posing the question which is real,
or which is alive? Both were transformed bodily forms visible to the eye, animated by corporeal
forces connected to sexuality and the boundaries between life and death.
It was moreover common for dances to be staged at the openings for exhibitions, and in some
instances these events themselves became the subject of later photographs. Hijikata for example
performed at the opening of Kamaitachi (Holborn 32), whilst Masson-Sékiné recorded Hijikata’s
former pupil Nakajima Natsu dancing at the launch of Body on the Edge of Crisis: Photographs of
Butoh Dance Performed and Staged by Tatsumi Hijikata (Asbestos Kan 1987), two years after Hiji-
kata’s death. The confusion regarding priority, and the distribution of corporeal presence across
and within performances and prints, echoes that produced by the intrusion of the Hanayagi’s
portrait within Rose Color Dance. These co-joined live and mediated performances both reaf-
firmed photography’s status as a mirror to life, whilst reinforcing its distortions, elusions and novel
corporeal configurations, an ideal space for “subjective documentary” and the “law” of nikutai.
Presence rested as much across these relationships, as within specific materializations.
If, as Roland Barthes has suggested, photography is linked with the past tense and with death,
recalling an ancient “cult of the Dead: the first actors . . . playing the role of the Dead . . . a
body simultaneously living and dead” (1981, 30–31; Marshall 2017, 83), then this is brought to
the fore within such events by the deployment of photography, and the affinities it reveals with
the dancing body. Both Hijikata and Ohno linked the butoh body to a deathly yet animate
choreography – a dead sister within his flesh for Hijikata, or the moment when “the dead begin
to run” for Ohno (Marshall 2013, 66–67). Butoh might be considered in this sense as a revival of
photography’s cultic origins, a concept also found in French Surrealist writings about photogra-
phy (Sas 1999; Marshall 2009, 2017; Breton 1960).
Photographers did not simply inspire dance practice (Hosoe’s studies of the back inform-
ing Hijikata’s set), nor did dancers simply participate in projects controlled by photographers
(Ashikawa in Embrace). Rather there is an interpenetration at the level of body and form which
animated both choreography and photography. It is hardly surprising that Hijikata’s later, mature
works of 1972 onwards took the form of an imagistic, mediated translation project. Dance was
generated and notated through the use of scrapbooks made up of images and texts which Hijikata
had sourced from art historical books, magazines and photomedia in a manner which recalled the
compiling of words, photographic reproductions and sketches in Surrealist texts such as André
Breton’s 1928 publication Nadja, or indeed Japanese photobooks themselves (Morishita 2015a;
Krauss 1985; Mundy 2001; Parr & Badger 2004, 266–307).
Seen in light of these cross-art collaborations, butoh is not a project confined to dance or to
the literal body, but rather to corporeal forms, be these living bodies or their refracted, mediatized,
semi-human or dead kin (Kosuge 2013). As Iimura Takahiko put it, the body is but “one kind
of media” (Eckersall 2012, 212). Iimura was Japan’s leading exponent of Expanded Cinema,
or cinematic projection as a form of mediated yet live performance, and he was responsible for
popularizing the term “intermedia” in post-war Japan (Ross 2014, 44–53). He collaborated on a
pair of “cine-dance” works with Hijikata in 1963 and 1965. European dance critics of the 1920s
had seen the origins of performance lying in the totalizing combination of dance, music and mise
en scène which characterized ancient Bacchic rites (Marshall 2007). Iimura echoed these ideas,
164
claiming that the performative interweaving of media “destroys preordained spatial and temporal
restrictions imposed onto the medium,” such that a “Dionysian celebration” is “triggered when
one medium violates another” (1966). Comparable Dionysian overflows from one media into
the next were widespread not only within Iimura’s work, but in butoh photography – as with
Hanaga’s depiction of Ohno (Figure 18.3) in which “spatial and temporal restrictions” are con-
fused, or in the “Dionysian” fusion of meat and back in Hosoe’s early phototheatre (Figure 18.1).
A case study of photographic butoh: Kamaitachi

The violent, subjective reimagining of flesh by dancers and photographers, as bodies morphed
across a realm devoid of “apparent certainties,” reached its height in Hosoe’s third major series
involving Hijikata: Kamaitachi (Sickle-Weasel). Photographed in 1965–1968, it was exhibited as
Totetsu-monaku higekitekina kigeki: Nihon no butōka, tensai “Hijikata Tatsumi” shuen shashin gekijō
(An Extravagantly Tragic Comedy: A Photo Theater Staring a Japanese Butoh Dancer, Genius
“Hijikata Tatsumi,” 1968),1 before release as a deluxe photobook with inky black platinum
prints laid out in gatefold sheets to the right of blocks of blue paper. The physically demanding,
theatrical poses depicted in Kamaitachi are notable for their variable discontinuity and fungibil-
ity. Hijikata moves from sexual predator to clairvoyant, accursed clown to wind spirit, goblin
to corpse. What Hijikata is, and what proper form or image he should take, never stabilizes.
Kamaitachi thereby transgressively conflates bodies and identities. As with all reproducible media,
the photographic-series was an unfixed object. In addition to the original exhibition and book
noted above, Hosoe has presented the images in various combinations and forms, including as
a decorated scroll unrolled before the viewer – recalling the semi-animated painted scrolls or
“Nara picture books (ehon)” of early modern Japan which featured demonic transformations
(Morishita 2015b; Koyama-Richard 2010, 11–24). In these depictions, flesh and self dance across
a series of fugitive assemblages. Only movement across the photographic void offers something
like relief. The mobility of dance seeps through the pores of filmic montage and across the space
of the exhibition.
Kamaitachi began inauspiciously with a number of portraits of Hijikata for a 1965 editorial
assignment entitled Virility Series (Hosoe & Hill 1986). Included in Kamaitachi is a frame from
Virility showing a distracted Hijikata seated in a white kimono with a child’s rattle by his side,
whilst a reflective glass ball, a straw hat, a woman’s shoe, and a second rattle, rest on the floor beside
him. These objects presage the later child abduction within Kamaitachi, confusing the temporal
order. Is the seated figure recalling events from the past or the future? The first photographic
scenario focuses on a sexual encounter between Hijikata and model Sai Asako, which were later
set amidst additional images taken surrounding Kogan-ji Togenuki Jizo Temple and Tokyo’s
Sugamo area. Hosoe had been considering returning to the under-developed Tōhoku region of
Akita prefecture, to which he was evacuated as a child, in 1944–1945. Upon discovering that
Hijikata moved as a youth from Akita to Tokyo in 1952, the pair set out to explore the north,
spending much of their time in Ugo-machi.
Re-ordered several times for exhibition and publication (Baird 2012, 251),2 the 1969 pho-
tobook moves the viewer from Tokyo’s shabby shitamachi backstreets and stalls before suddenly
relocating to desolate rice fields ringed by mountains. The disorientating spatial trajectory of
the journey is echoed in the layout and images. The diptych following Kogan-ji includes on
the left a tilted print that funnels movement and the viewer’s line of sight down the side of
Asbestos Kan. The dancer, head bowed, drags Sai open-mouthed behind him, abducting her
via a door. The driving angles are replaced in the paired image on the right with a frontal
view photographed within an entirely different, darkened and shallow internal space. Sai’s
165
torso is parallel to a sheet on the wall behind her, while the dancer is bent awkwardly before
her groin, possibly recoiling. This solicits from her a partially veiled expression of ecstasy
or pain. The pairing, Hijikata’s revolted or active pose, and the covering of Sai’s eyes by her
uplifted, crossed arms, renders the encounter ambiguous, suggestive of sadomasochism, if not
rape. Moreover Sai’s open-mouthed stare at the camera before they enter the building, echo-
ing Hijikata’s own glance towards his photographic audience in the first image of the book,
produces a sense of self-reflexive voyeurism, of actors who turn away or towards the camera
to stage their pleasure or pain. Hijikata is depicted as alternatively watching or being watched,
and it is his unstable, shifting provocations performed for various audiences in diverse locales
which propels the action.
The next image shows a screaming Hijikata, his face whitened and his hair in a ragged
bun, tearing along a concrete path between urban gardens. The buildings behind him blur
into an over-exposed void. The following print shows Hijikata fully transformed, a bent
demonic figure perched on a silhouetted rice-drying rack which rests beneath scratched, grey
skies. Hijikata moves into a mythic realm, with urban Tokyo replaced by the bleak traditional
village of Tashiro. Within this rustic setting, Hijikata is surrounded by shadowy peasant
structures of wood and grass – “old minka houses . . . deep oshiire closets and [the] shady
corners of everyday rural life” (Muñoz 2011, 167) – that lie amongst desolate grey to black
muddy rice paddies. Hijikata acts as a dangerous sprite, the twisting of his visage bringing
laughter to farmers and children. He plays with the latter before pulling a girl into patch of
flowering weeds. Sporadic bursts of freneticism and physical contortions emerge, the dancer
alternating between a grimacing, hunched gait, and hyper-extended, gangly leaps. At times
he is lost in endless expanses of shadow. One print consists of nothing but black ink. As Bruce
Baird observes, “What is telling about the photographs is the stories they only half show . . .
as with so much else about Hijikata, there is an iceberg of detail,” of narrative and of visual
legibility, which is left deliberately “unrevealed” or otherwise funneled into the inky vacuum
of the prints’ ground (2012, 107). Space sucks inwards and expands outwards, personages
adopt poses, change and contort, skies blacken and fields transform into baked expanses of
jagged clots. Confusingly visualized, the series evokes an aporia of selfhood and of the body
of Hijikata which rages at its heart.
At times, Hijikata incarnates the kamaitachi of the title, a zephyrus demon (a “whirlwind” or
“dust devil” in Takiguchi’s words) who steals children (Holborn 1986, 32; Hosoe et al. 2009).
Hijikata is dressed in a dirty kimono, jaws clenched and head thrown back, as he abducts a
screaming baby across a fetid field strewn with dead rice (Figure 18.4). Soon after he is sprawled,
face down in hard clods amongst the fields. The closing image finds him imprisoned within the
coffin-like frame of a broken rickshaw (Figure 18.5). Divested again of context, and suspended
within a space which gnaws at him, the dancer dissipates into the ankoku of butoh. Hosoe was to
take a similar image of Hijikata’s corpse in 1986 (Tanemura 1993).
In his introduction, Takiguchi emphasizes the kamaitachi’s contradictory nature: at once
animal (a weasel) and a wind-borne “vacuum,” akin to that which lies at the heart of the
camera. It therefore sucks into it spirits from out of bodies and the earth. Hijikata concurred,
claiming that the images arose “from a phenomenon of the skin ripping and blood spurting
forth . . . it’s a photographic collection taken with the purpose of slashing space,” this practice
having corporeal and choreographic effects (Baird 2012, 109). Takiguchi’s essay also echoes
Mishima’s preface to Barakei by situating the work within a Surrealist context, quoting Breton’s
contention that the “eye exists” in a “savage state,” preying on reality to reveal the darkness
hidden within.
166
Figure 18.4 From the Kamaitachi series [#31, Gendai shichosha version, 1969] featuring Hijikata Tatsumi
(1965), photograph by Hosoe Eikoh. Courtesy of Hosoe Eikoh.
Figure 18.5 From the Kamaitachi series [Final Plate, Gendai shichosha version, 1969] featuring Hijikata
Tatsumi (1965), photograph by Hosoe Eikoh. Courtesy of Hosoe Eikoh.
From photography and back into dance

As critics have observed, the landmark performance of Hijikata Tatsumi to nihonjin: Nikutai no Hanran
(Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: Rebellion of the Flesh, 1968) had its genesis in the danc-
er’s ruminations on Japanese cultural identity, modernity and embodiment prompted by Kamai-
tachi (Baird 2012, 105–111; Muñoz 2011, 176–179). Nikutai no Hanran included in its opening a
sequence drawn directly from Kamaitachi, namely Hijikata’s entrance on a catafalque as the lord of
misrule or the sadistic Roman emperor Heliogabalus, discussed by Antonin Artaud (Marshall 2013,
74–75). Here, as with Hosoe’s photographs at the abattoirs (Figure 18.1), photography acted as a
space for the rehearsal of dramaturgical problems to which Hijikata returned in the dance.
The link between Kamaitachi and Rebellion of the Flesh was further established by the fact that an
excerpt of Tanemura Suehiro’s review of the exhibition was distributed at the theater (Baird 2012,
123, 253; Centonze 2012, 229–230; Marshall 2013, 79). The review was later published on the
poster for Shizukana Ie (Quiet House, 1973), reflecting Hijikata’s adoption of it as a butoh manifesto.
Tanemura compares the dancer to a dripping, “deformed,” carnivalesque or Bakhtinian “fool”
who had “supervised” such “glorious revolts of the body” as the nineteenth century Japanese
dancing plague ehjanaika. Tanemura found Hijikata’s performance evoked “the scent of blood and
pus,” emphasizing the corporeal nature of butoh photography itself, and which was brought to the
fore in the subsequent performance of Rebellion of the Flesh. Hijikata came to theorize the poetic
brutality of the conditions of life in Tōhoku as central to his own practice, the rhetoric of his 1985
lecture “Kaze Daruma (Wind Daruma)” first being realized in the iconography of Kamaitachi.
The intense period of photographic collaboration within butoh of the 1960s placed the medi-
ated, deathly, liminal body and its mobile, fetishistic part-objects (backs, phalli, starved ribcages,
endlessly morphing forms) at the heart of butoh practice. The butoh body was but “one kind of
media,” which shifted and reconfigured itself through a violently conflicted yet vital eroticism. The
elective affinity between photomedia and butoh has given rise to a dazzling array of photobooks,
exhibitions and collaborations. Whilst this two-way cross-contamination of dance with the pho-
tographic took many forms, Hosoe’s work with Hijikata provided a model which later exchanges
have evoked or built upon. These early projects provided both a justification for, and a series of
possibilities whereby, bodies might disappear into the inky blackness of the filmic emulsion only to
barely emerge through newly configured, scarcely visible materializations and transitions. Photo-
graphic butoh constitutes an erotic deferral of presence (Phelan 2005, 121), and of fragmentation,
which streams through the pores of the body and into the grain of scattered prints and images.
Notes
1 Some sense of the exhibition is provided in a two-page spread reproduction of the complete series in
Hosoe & Holborn (1999, 32–33).
2 I use here the 2005 limited, numbered facsimile edition of 500 pressings, with additional English transla-
tions. Eight additional images from the series are included in the 2009 edition, which closes with Fig. 18.5,
and yet other prints appeared in the 1987 Asbestos-kan exhibition (cover, 96–9); Masson-Sékiné (1988,
61); and Tanemura (1993).
Works cited
Anderson, Joel. 2008. Theatre and Performance Photography: Documentation and the “Unlive.” PhD diss., Queen
Mary University.
———. 2015. Theatre and Photography. London: Palgrave.
Asbestos-kan. 1987. Body on the Edge of Crisis: Photographs of Butoh Dance Performed and Staged by Tatsumi
Hijikata. Tokyo: Parco.
168
Auslander, Philip. 1999. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge.

Baird, Bruce. 2012. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits. New York: Palgrave.
Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill & Wang.
Breton, André. 1960. Nadja. New York: Grove.
Cartier-Bresson, Henri. 1952. The Decisive Moment. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Centonze, Katja, ed. 2010. Avant-gardes in Japan. Venice: Cafoscarina.
———. 2012. “Encounters Between Media and Body Technologies: Mishima Yukio, Hijikata Tatsumi, and
Hosoe Eikoh.” In Gellhorn et al., eds., 218–237.
Eckersall, Peter. 2012. “Catastrophe in Association: Butō Cine Dance as Cross Media Performance Art.”
In Gellhorn et al., eds., 207–217.
Ewing, William. 1987. The Fugitive Gesture: Masterpieces of Dance Photography. London: Thames & Hudson.
Feustel, Marc, et al. 2011. Eikoh Hosoe: Theatre of Memory. Exhibition & online catalogue. Sydney: Art Gallery
of New South Wales. www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/media/downloads/files/AGNSW_Hosoe.pdf
Gellhorn, Barbara, et al., eds. 2012. Enacting Culture: Japanese Theater in Historical and Modern Contexts.
München: Iudicium.
Hanaga, Mitsutoshi. 1983. The Butoh. Tokyo: Gendai Shokan.
Hijikata, Tatsumi. 2000. “Various Essays.” TDR 44 (1): 36–81.
Hoffman, Ethan. 1987. Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul. New York: Aperture.
Holborn, Mark. 1986. Black Sun: The Eyes of Four: Roots and Innovation in Japanese Photography. New York:
Aperture.
Hosoe, Eikoh, & Ronald Hill. 1986. Eikoh Hosoe. Carmel, CA: Friends of Photography.
Hosoe, Eikoh, & Mark Holborn. 1999. Eikoh Hosoe. New York: Aperture.
Hosoe, Eikoh, & Graham Howe. 1991. Eikoh Hosoe: Meta. New York: International Centre of Photography.
Hosoe, Eikoh, & Mishima Yukio. 1985. Barakei: Ordeal by Roses. New York: Aperture.
Hosoe, Eikoh, et al. 1961. Man and Woman (Otoko to onna). Tokyo: Camerart.
Hosoe, Eikoh, et al. 2005. Kamaitachi. Numbered 500 facsimile reprint of the 1969 edition with additional
English translations. New York: Aperture. Perth: Collection of Edith Cowan University.
Hosoe, Eikoh, et al. 2009. Kamaitachi. New York: Aperture.
Iimura, Takahiko. 1966. “Special Report! Seismic Rumbles from the Underground.” Reproduced on http://
post.at.moma.org/sources/3/publications/89
Ko-e. 2010. “Hosoe Eikoh.” Ko-e Magazine. www.koemagazine.com/2010/01/hosoe-eikoh/
Kosuge, Hayato. 2013. “Transformed and Mediated Butoh Body.” Hiyoshi Review of English Studies 62 (3):
51–73.
Koyama-Richard, Bridgitte. 2010. Japanese Animation. Paris: Flammarion.
Krauss, Rosalind, et al. 1985. L’amour fou: Photography and Surrealism. New York: Abbeville.
Lot, Laurencine. 2005. Carlotta Ikeda: Danse butō et au-delà. Paris: Favre.
MacLeod, Catriona, et al., eds. 2009. Elective Affinities: Testing the Relationship between Word and Image.
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Marshall, Jonathan W. 2007. “The Priestesses of Apollo and the Heirs of Aesculapius: Medical Art-His-
torical Approaches to Ancient Choreography after Charcot.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 43 (4):
410–426.
———. 2008. “Pathos, Pathology, and the Still-Mobile Image: A Warburgian reading of Held by Garry
Stewart and Lois Greenfield.” About Performance (8): 180–206.
———. 2009. “The Archaeology of the Abstract Body: Parascientific Discourse and the Legacy of Dr
J.-M. Charcot, 1876–1969.” French History and Civilization: Papers from the George Rudé Seminar (3):
92–111, www.h-france.net/rude/rudevolumeiii/MarshallVol3.pdf
———. 2013. “‘The World of the Neurological Pavilion’: Hauntology and European Modernism ‘mal
tourné’.” TDR 57 (4): 73–79.
———. 2017. “Absence, Presence, Indexicality: The Mise en Scène of ‘the Heart of Neolithic Orkney’.”
Theatre Research International 42 (1): 72–90.
Masson-Sékiné, Nourit, et al. 1988. Butoh: Shades of Darkness. Tokyo: Shufunotomo.
Morishita, Takashi, et al. 2012. Hijikata Tatsumi + Nakanishi Natsuyuki: The Back. Tokyo: Keio University
Art Center.
Morishita, Takashi, et al. 2015a. Hijikata Tatsumi’s Notational Butoh. Tokyo: Keio University.
Morishita, Takashi, et al. 2015b. The Art of Hijikata Tatsumi. Exhibition. Tokyo: Keio University.
Mundy, Jennifer, ed. 2001. Surrealism: Desire Unbound. London: Tate.
Munroe, Alexandra. 1996. Japanese Art after 1945. Yokohama: Yokohama Museum of Art.
169
Muñoz, Ignacio. 2011. Melancholy Sites: The Affective Politics of Marginality in Post-Anpo Japan. PhD diss.,
Duke University.
Nakatani, Tadao. 2003. World of Tatsumi Hijikata. Tokyo: Purodakushon.
Parr, Martin, & Gerry Badger. 2004. The Photobook: A History. Volume 1. London: Phaidon.
Phelan, Peggy. 2005. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge.
Rancilio, Cesare, ed. 1985. “Buto.” Special issue, Scènes: Revue de l’Espace Kiron 1 (March 1, 1985).
Reason, Matthew. 2011. “Still Moving: The Revelation of Dance in Still Photography.” In Barbara Sparti &
Judy Van Zile, eds., Imaging Dance. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 275–303.
Ross, Julian. 2014. Beyond the Frame: Intermedia and Expanded Cinema in 1960–1970s Japan. PhD diss.,
Leeds University.
Sas, Miryam. 1999. Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains. London: Routledge.
Tanemura, Suehiro, et al. 1993. Hijikata Tatsumi: Three Decades of Butoh Experiment. Tokyo: Yūshisha.
170
19
THE BOOK OF BUTOH; THE
BOOK OF THE DEAD
Uno Kuniichi (translated by Bruce Baird)
“Whatever you do, you cannot say anything that will help you understand that you are you.”
– Ailing Terpsichore (HTZ 1: 61)
The dancer Hijikata has left behind marvelous book which is unlike any other book in the world.
Ailing Terpsichore is, more than a book, an event itself. It is almost as if we should ask what is writ-
ten there and in what kind of language. Ailing Terpsichore is not dance theory, nor the biography of
a dancer, nor the script of a dance, but rather rejects all such limits, and is simultaneously theory,
biography, poetry, narrative, and script. It is not the case that it is a comprehensive book created
by a means of integrating a lot of elements. Through infinite differentiation of the ordinary but
severe ecology and climate (of a village) that swirls around a child’s body, the result is an expensive
butoh book that knows no bounds.
This book endlessly records the innumerable images and incidents that pass through the body
of a child. Not as memoir. The time born from the narration dissolves the past and present.
The immediate future is imperiled; I was surrounded by something that resembled the
atmosphere of fluttering butterfly wings. Even the vapor that surrounded me (that was
like I was silently watching a small snake melt) approached the hermetically sealed space
along with the butterfly. For the shape of such an I, there is no childhood and no past.
There is not even anything like something one would have no choice but to invent.
HTZ 1: 73
The body and time that are dissolved into a world which is endlessly differentiated, are in
that instant scooped up by the written words, and immediately returned to chaos. In this way,
this book becomes part of the crowded universe of Hijikata’s butoh; it becomes a map. And an
apparatus.
Ailing Terpsichore is the kind book that you cannot read unless you find a way to read it while
reading it over and over again. It is not that it has difficult circumlocutions or words whose
meaning one doesn’t understand or that it is full of hidden riddles. However, it excludes all the
ceremonial processes we rely on when we read a book, the personalities and points of view that
establish the narrative, the redundancy, the allotment of significance, the explanation of situations
171
Uno Kuniichi
which serve to establish the descriptions of temporal and spatial coordinator axes, the speed of
events, the stability of relative perception, the psychological units. All are excluded. We do not see
any economizing concepts that might accompany the transmission of something. This has nothing
to do with the finesse of expression nor with devices or schemes of literary style. Each sentence
seems to have the density of poetry. But it is not written as the prose poem, through great leaps
and condensed metaphors predicated on the “authority” of poetic language. Ailing Terpsichore was
through and through written as prose to record events faithfully. Certainly, this prose poem is so
fast as to be difficult to read without the presumption of the density and speed of poetry. How-
ever, the language continues to record from start to finish while always moving as minute particles
of sensation. Metaphor is as rare as possible. It is not permitted [for the reader] to linger on any
character, word, or rhythm. There is something in the speed and directionality of the narrative that
keeps the reader at bay. The book shifts focus in dizzying ways, as if it is only a bundle of direc-
tionality and speed. It seems as though transmission, explanation, and even the fact of being a work
are not at issue. A determination to record like the wind runs through this book. Language has
become like the line of the wind, or the continual flashing of light, or the music of feelings. And
we can only wonder at the fact that it is taken to its logical conclusion without any compromise.
Hijikata read French poets with his own sense of smell, and had an extraordinary interest in
and understanding of surrealism, but Ailing Terpsichore, which might look like it is full of the sur-
real, does not look like depaysement, or collage, or automatic ecriture. This book clearly records as
traces of indestructible movement a fundamentally different orientation from the desire to create
a fountain of images similar to world of dreams while methodologically extracting and regulating
the unconscious. There is not even one event that could become a static image, and turned into
a work of art, and thus become the subject of contemplation.
The world visible to the “I” (who appears to be child in a Tohoku village) lacks all things that
could become coordinates, such as a fixed center called “I,” relationships between specific people and
that “I,” the topography which might serve as a staging ground for those relationships, even scenery,
and even an era. Rather it is not that it “lacks” these, but that the language spurts out in excess and
without pause, at a different level of perception than would even accept such coordinates. There is no
“I,” and no “the body of I” (my body). “The body of I” has dispersed in all directions like a thread
and transformed into formless divisionless space. Ailing Terpsichore is not even a hymn to the body, it
is proof of the absence of the body. This is because, to the extent that the body extinguishes form,
the lifeform is intimately pierced and replenished by flows, feelings, shadows, and different things.
I am beset by the feeling that I am already being caused to dance by something. I

became like matter which has suddenly lost its life, possibly because I was enveloped
in steam. Probably, the condition of my body itself not feeling gravity also taught me
the gesture of rapidly eating the forms which suddenly floated into my thoughts. It
appeared that any crevice where affection and discernment might enter my conduct
completely disappeared. I guess I even forgot my hands and feet and even my body
itself, as if the body was not my own thing to possess.
HTZ 1: 15
The “body” is always being encroached on by something else and losing its contours. It is
pierced by and eaten by rays of light, steam, shadows, sugar, medicine, bugs, animals, smoke,
ghosts, tatamis, sliding doors, sugar candy, dogs, and cats. And each of these things in turn exists
being shined on and pierced by other things. The bodily sensation that the “body” can be grasped
as one’s own thing disperses into the universe without “affection” or “discernment.”
172
The book of butoh; the book of the dead
I was only thinking about the way that this body will likely continue to be eaten away
unless some unusual event does not immediately occur in the sky.
There were always one or two gods that would rip you to shreds no matter which
house you went to, and no matter which house, there was always someone sitting there
who couldn’t suppress the violent passions of their soul, and they would scream in a
shrill voice while gripping those nostalgic fire tongs. I guess I had the feeling that I
could understand these people, who taste the all the particulars of being on the brink
of cowardice, so I looked at them.
It is certain that the things which I quickly found out, when compared with this
situation, were almost all damaged and not more than the corpses of forms. Because
the roots of humanity had already crumbled away from the people around me, it could
seem as if it was OK for me not to do any thinking.
HTZ 1: 17
Hints and fragments of the world, things, a mother, ghosts all capture the “I’s body” in an
intimate darkness. The original form of butoh spreads its roots within the darkness in which
“the sniffling sound of snot faintly resembles the spirit.” And within that original form an even
deeper darkness suffers.
A feeble person who slept and woke over and over was always moaning in a dark corner
of the house. You could say that I learned from the lessons of this feeble terpsichore
my habit of turning loose my body on the tatami like a fish. It appeared that her body
was made with the contours of doing something like desiring, but even so, it was cap-
tured by a darkness that was like something ruptured and ripened somewhere. She[/I]
probably didn’t remember the darkness on the other side that no one knows, this dark
resurrection which is like a beginning.
HTZ 1: 18
The form of darkness that lies at the origins of Hijikata (who says he learned his dance
observing sick people) was just such a darkness. Sickness is a horizon event, which inter-
rupts the image. Sickness is certainly darkness. It is not accompanied by sensitivity, sor-
row, or tragedy. The weight of the body with ailing organs, which lies down completely
exhausted, melts into the organless darkness. The body with ailing organs escapes from
those organs, and becomes a part of the vast thick darkness, and undulates. Accordingly,
“the shadow directs the light to breathe.” Undoubtedly, all people came from this darkness
and live constantly soaking half their bodies in this darkness. It is only that our conscious-
ness and our language and even our unconsciousness cannot successfully go down into that
darkness.
That thing I can see is certainly a horse or a cow, but is it indeed a dark hole, or probably
something that went into the hole and now I can’t see it anymore?
HTZ 1: 20
It is possible that in the “dancing darkness” that Hijikata always saw, people only saw images or
the theme ankoku butoh (dance of darkness). So, it is possible that Hijikata (who didn’t set foot on
stage for a long time) has surpassed ankoku butō and was secretly polishing a method for being loyal
to the darkness. The world in which Ailing Terpsichore was written pours into the present without
any mediation, and creeps into the future. Like warped yeast, it is a past which refuses direct time.
173
Uno Kuniichi
It is probably best to think that to this person who lived an extraordinary temporality, the ten plus
years he “didn’t appear on stage” were lived in a way that is incomprehensible to our imagination.
In that universe, there was nothing like a confrontation between the “I” and the world, much
less a harmony. There is no conflict between powers. It is just the soft cruel world spreading
forth without end with everything permeating everything else, and substituting with everything
else. It is not an “I,” but a tactile sense like the wind continuing to talk. He depicts fully, nimbly,
and brutally, the chaotic sensations that whirled around his young body without mixing in any
children’s stories. The open and continuous (to the point of absurd) receptivity exists as a strange
density of all the various phenomena that visited his young body and as a disposition that links
them all overcoming nearness and farness. He is not the kind of genius who struggles, triumphs,
and then controls things. He is the kind of genius who has sensitivity to the particulates of the
world created everywhere of commonplace things, and gets entangled with everything.
The[/His] body is certainly not settled into a fixed form and dimension. The body and per-
ceptions of the young boy scatter in all directions and expand and contrast in the atmosphere. It
is as if several bodies have been turned over and over, consumed, and released into the atmosphere.
The I which applied a charcoal fire mold to my shin always felt distressed towards my
body as if I were being suspected of something. When I would step into this suspicious
territory, I would embrace a strange space-time. It is likely that the I who was wearing the
shell of chaos, wanted to be treated as the body that had thrown that off. The I (that stored
up something like a marching band at his side and in his face in which his furrowed brow
was connected directly to a gap in the sky) sometimes showed a nimble panic. When the
sun would cloud over, his feelings would cloud over, and in just that way come to resemble
his body. Like a frog with only half a body, I would press my back against a fence.
HTZ 1: 33–34
The young boy’s body extends all the way to the sky; it becomes chaos without distance or
dimensions. In the same way, the young man inside Hijikata wrote Ailing Terpsichore in a chaotic
space which is neither past, present nor future. The young man moves continually in a terrible
chaos surround by the dead who routinely appear suddenly. It is not the case that the expression
of gloom, the laid-bare sadness, the desires and rage of adults are liquidated into nature. It is just
that they become countless mosaic pieces in the same whirlpool that have been dissolved on the
same scale as nature. In that place, women and sick people always give off a certain strange thick
scent. There is a heavy, gentle, stagnant, sluggish flow there. Ailing Terpsichore is a medium for
just such a universe. Robust grim laboring men construct this chaotic universe around a certain
powerful core. To the children of this universe (who don’t yet have their own bodies and who
are spread out infinitely over the universe), the men feel like thick-headed pieces of wood. It is
as if only the women and infirm live trembling as half fluid fragile bodies of deviation about to
melt on the edge of the chaos, exposed in all their fragility.
Artaud said, “For the body, organs are useless.”
Man is sick because he is badly constructed.

We must decide to strip him in order to scratch out this animalcule which makes
him itch to death,
god,
and with god
his organs.
174
For tie me down if you want to,

but there is nothing more useless than an organ.
When you have given him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatisms and restored him to his
true liberty.
Artaud 1995
From a completely different starting point, Hijikata knew the inescapable reality of the
body without organs. It appears that his “body without organs” is a completely differ-
ent one from Artaud’s. Or if we assume that Artaud (surrounded by a system and ideals
which severely rejected the body, and within the agony of schizophrenia) could only rarely
affirmatively realize the “body without organs,” then perhaps Hijikata thoroughly created
a geography in which this body could live as if there was only this “body without organs.”
It is because Hijikata shared such deep sympathy with Artaud, that sometimes he had to
vomit out, “You know, after all, I am not Artaud.” It is not a matter which one of them was
greater. It is because the “body without organs” does not have “organs” that it can pass
through various states, and take on various shapes. This is not a discovery of only Artaud.
Surrounded by a system which distanced the body, Artaud had no choice but to actualize
the self-awareness of the “body without organs” in hasty destructive inclinations, and had to
search for its models in the far-away places of Mexico, the empire of Heliogablaus, and the
island of Bali. I have a feeling that for Hijikata the “body without organs” was a more direct
concrete thing. It is for that reason that his version of the “body without organs” took on
different aspects. Hijikata also lived an era of revolt, violence, and destruction. Because the
“body without organs” is always and everywhere rejected, it has to don a mask, arm itself,
and be slathered with negative will, and scream out. But in Ailing Terpsichore, one cannot help
but think that there is no armament, no mask, no negation. The universe is differentiated
into subtle differences and groups of movement, and has changed into a milky way in which
there is no division of life and death. Certainly, generation is not clouded in some hazy myth,
but lived as a concrete reality. In order for this book to always be witness to generation, it
has to be difficult to read.
And by being a book which is through and through a book concerning generation, Ailing
Terpsichore also becomes a book about death, a “Book of the Dead.” The dead are always appear-
ing suddenly at any time and place in this book. This young boy who wants to come in contact
with all things and wants to become all things, again and again mimics the dead.
I was certainly and clearly sucking up through my pores, a wind which was probably
blowing on the skin of the dead. Who was it who was encouraging it [/me], “just a
little bit more, just a little bit more,” and being cleansed by the transparent wind, and
exposed to consolation? Is it because it is only the dead who can sleep contently when
the light of a thunderbolt goes behind their eyes?
HTZ 1: 84
On account of the painful injection that came from that damp earth, even though I was
full of lies, I became a body unable to lie. The things that are propped up all around
that body, seemed as if they had completely died, leaving only the dark texture of me
behind. Even after this thing called I dies, I guess the shape of me folding my arms over
my chest will remain. Around me the voice(s) of rumors could be heard.
HTZ 1:104
175
Uno Kuniichi
Everyone disappeared from the house. Even the taciturn person suddenly disappeared
who turned his/her shoes backwards and waved them. It is just submerged earthworms.
I have a feeling that I saw a corpse person striding along with giant steps wearing the
form of an unfamiliar clear stomach. I also have the feeling that I have seen a corpse
in the shape of a long slender stomach tying off the slender stomach and somewhat
regretfully disappearing.
HTZ 1:120
More than being a hymn to life, the “body without organs” is an infinitely intimate requiem
for death. Hijikata’s hoarse voice (squeezed from his throat like bundle of thick darkness) still
reverberates in my ears, from the time when he acted the voices of dead spirits who were visiting
the village like the wind. The dead, the corpses of the dead, the gaze and voice emanating from
the dead – these are all indispensable parts of the climate surrounding the young boy’s body like a
whirlpool. The way of life in which the body is released from the organs necessarily has a strange
relation to death. While passing through the variations of death again and again, one drives away
the limitations of the body in the darkness or in the whirlpool. It is as if death is one of the forms
of the “body without organs.” Just as Artaud’s “cruelty” and “theater,” Hijikata’s “darkness” and
butoh [/dance] are some of the infinite variations of the body without organs.
And in the end, is there not one more thing that should surprise us: that all of these things are
contained within a language? While being a particularly hard book to read, is not it the case that
Ailing Terpsichore is after all constituted on the premise of a deep trust of the ecology of language?
Of course, that language almost invariably rejects the stability and economy of significance. But it’s
not that significance is directed toward the void and sucked up by it. Language is replenished by
something which is neither thought nor analysis nor description. It is not nonsense, but trying to
connect language to the whirlpool of events, without causing it to coagulate into meaning. Nev-
ertheless, language is not at all the event it self, nor reality itself. Language is strictly separated from
the world by a wall. Or rather language itself is that wall. In Ailing Terpsichore, this wall of language
has become as thin as possible and as soft as possible, but we do not see the naiveté that on account
of that thinness and softness it has been able to grasp the reality of life. On the contrary, this wall
is confirmed as a thin excessively strong membrane. It is never forgotten that it is a written world.
Language is oriented toward the darkness and to an almost unbearable turbulence. That turbulence
swallows the individual specimens of death. And language itself possesses a peculiar power to wake
up death. The power humans possess as language sometimes severs life, causes it to stagnate, and
corrodes it away. If language is to repel death and preserve life in the face of the terrible turbulence,
just how should we employee language for that purpose? We must draw near to larger turbulence,
and merge the small turbulence inside the individual with the larger turbulence. But what should
we do so that the two turbulences should not short circuit and explode? I think that Ailing Terpsichore
is a book about life and death with a certain deep wisdom. Its language is inhuman, kind, wild, and
as fast as the wind; it does not try to follow any creeds, aesthetics, or systems. There was once an
author who played a role in Hijikata’s debut, who raised the topics of health, muscle, power, and even
the Emperor, and armored himself with many layers of keenness and weakness, and finally, could
not help but be atavistic through the ritual of seppuku.1 Hijikata’s life was completely different from
that author’s life. He did not need anything outside himself. Because he himself was completely
outside. He did not need any circuitousness to compensate for his inside by clinging on to some
sort of outside. For that reason, there was no reason to give the body any special privileges, or to
idolize it. In Ailing Terpsichore, there are no weapons, no masks, and no armor. There is nothing fixed
and nothing claimed. The world is detailed without end, just as it is, but it always escapes. And that
which always prevents this movement from being extinguished is language.
176
Note
1 Translator’s note: Uno here refers to Mishima Yukio’s suicide in front of the Japanese self-defense forces
on November 25, 1970.
Translated from
Uno, Kuniichi. 1986. “Butō no sho, shisha no sho.” Yurīka no. 237 (18 July): 30–37.
Works cited
Artaud, Antonin. 1995. “To Have Done with the Judgement of God.” In Watchfiends and Rack Screams:
Works from the Final Period. Clayton Eshleman ed. translated by Bernard Bador. Boston: Exact Exchange.
177
SECTION 2
The second generation

20
“OPEN BUTOH”: DAIRAKUDAKAN
AND MARO AKAJI
Tomoe Aihara (translated by Robert Ono)
Introduction
Dairakudakan (大駱駝艦, lit. “The Great Camel Battleship”) was founded in 1972 by actor and
dancer Maro Akaji (born 1943) and is now widely recognized as one of the most representative
butoh companies in the world. Men and women, half naked and covered in white paint, swarm
around a throne on which sits Maro, whose appearance in many of the Dairakudakan’s works, as
a formidable man in a long dress with a white face is, according to Maro, an image of a midwife.1
And that exactly is his role.
Following in the footsteps of ankoku butoh that blossomed in the 1960s, Dairakudakan’s works
are often described as spectacular, grotesque, nonsensical, sordid, and humorous. Critics have also
called their drama full of imagery, being picturesque and ceremonial at the same time (Kissel-
goff 1987). While most butoh companies feature solo dance or small groups, Dairakudakan is
arguably the only company in the world today that produces large-scale performance with more
than 20 members on stage. It is also one of the most enduring companies; they have produced a
performance every year, except for 1992 and 1994.
This chapter provides an overview of Dairakudakan and Maro Akaji’s activity that spans more
than five decades, and aims to point out several of its characteristics.
The formative years of Dairakudakan and

tenputenshiki
Maro Akaji was born in 1943 and started acting while he was a middle school student. A few
years later, as a high school student, he discovered the dancer Hijikata Tatsumi (1928–1986) in
a magazine article and was shocked by his appearance and talent. Although he was accepted
to Waseda University in 1962, he withdrew right away to enroll in a drama school. Besides
acting, he also enjoyed the stimulating new art and political movements that could be wit-
nessed every day in the streets of Tokyo. In 1964, he joined the drama company Budou no
Kai (ぶどうの会), where he met Noguchi Michizō (1914–1998). Then, in the following
year, Maro became one of the founding members and actors of Jōkyō Gekijō, a project led
by Kara Jūrō (born 1940), who would later become an important figure in Japanese under-
ground theater scene.2
181
Tomoe Aihara
The underground theater scene in Japan was at its height during the 1960s and the 1970s
and is contemporaneous with the Western movement of experimental theater led by figures such
as Jerzy Grotowski, who stressed the “physical” quality of theater. The actors’ body was now
becoming a focal point of theater, instead of leaning heavily on the script.3 Maro’s body was
known for its ferocity at Jōkyō Gekijō, as one critic described it as “a body of rampaging actor, as
if he chops his way through the jungle with a hatchet” (Tomioka 1970, 40). Kara cherished such
quality in actors, the quality he named “the privileged body,” which could hold the stage just by
its own existence. Maro was definitely one of the “monsters” with such quality. Maro, however,
left Jōkyō Gekijō after six years. On his departure, critic Senda Akihiko remarked “Maro Akaji
was neither just a unique actor, nor was he merely a great specimen of ‘body.’ Rather, he was a
zeitgeist” (Senda 2007:49). By then Maro was already a symbolic figure of underground theater
and its time.
Incidentally, it was also in 1966 that Maro met Hijikata Tatsumi. The encounter took place
while Maro was practicing for a show at a cabaret to fund his project, with dancers such as Kasai
Akira, Ishii Mitsutaka, and Nakajima Natsu, who were already working with Hijikata (Maro
2011).4 Maro moved into Asbestos Hall and started to practice with him while performing at
cabarets. However, he never participated in Hijikata’s performance; his career still centered around
Kara’s company. It was in 1971 that Maro finally left the company due to growing differences
of their style. Kara, now an awarded playwright, started to focus heavily on words (Maro 2011).
In 1972, the year after leaving Jōkyō Gekijō, Maro founded Dairakudakan. Members included
Amagatsu Ushio, Tamura Tetsurō, Ōsuga Isamu, Murobushi Kō, Bishop Yamada, and a few oth-
ers. While Amagatsu, Tamura, and Ōsuga were experienced actors, Murobushi and Yamada fre-
quented Asbestos Hall and were familiar with Hijikata’s butoh (Harada 2004). Like Maro himself,
Dairakudakan is a unity of theater and butoh. Maro, who does not consider himself a disciple of
Hijikata, keeps some space from Hijikata’s butoh by describing the style of his company with a
motto tenputenshiki (天賦典式), which, in Maro’s own words, means “being born in this world is a
great talent in itself.” According to Maro, Dairakudakan is neither a theater nor a dance company:
I called it tenputenshiki, partly because I owed a lot to Hijikata. He called his style butoh,
so I could not use the same term. Yes they are similar, with white paints and all. Yes I
am influenced by him. But my style is less strict, you know.5
Maro does not hesitate to admit Hijikata’s influence. Maro often recalls practice sessions he had
with Hijikata. For example, in one such occasion, they were practicing how to “walk” right.
Watching Maro strive, Hijikata yelled: “Why do you push your left leg forward? Why are you
walking on your right leg?” Obviously, Maro could not walk anymore. Hijikata had jerked Maro
with words, who had no sense of doubt about his motion. And this is when Maro became aware
of the concept “stray body.” What happens when the body is deprived of objective and relativity?
What kinds of movement are possible then?
We usually move with an objective, like going forward and such. But what happens
when we lose all the relation, and have no exit? That is the ‘stray body.’
Maro 2016
As apparent from the above, Maro states that he had learned “diverse viewpoint” towards the
body from the words of Hijikata.6
182
“Open butoh”: Dairakudakan and Maro Akaji
The newly formed Dairakudakan was very male-oriented. Most of the founding members
were male, and according to Bishop Yamada, it was a “phallic company” where both the creative
process and daily conversations were full of sexual associations (Yamada 1992).7 Many of the
earlier pieces featured scenes alluding to sexual intercourse and birth, and the props often resem-
bled male and female genitalia. It was, in short, a carnival or orgy of eroticism. A representative
piece from the period of overt masculinity would be Yōbutsu shintan 陽物神譚 (The Chronicle of
the Phallic God, 1973). In this story of Heliogabalus, the guest star Hijikata played the emperor,
while Maro played Satan with his skin painted blue. Critic Ichikawa Miyabi comments that
although this piece is “a grotesque and nonsensical example of butoh” that features white men
and women, it succeeds in “demonstrating, in the form of nothing but the body, the possibility
of nonsensical actions of an ugly crowd turning into something holy, through the act of sacrifice”
(Ichikawa 2000, 87). According to Yamada, who performed a homosexual duo with Hijikata
in this piece, they were able to create a space that celebrates the “energy of primary colors,”
which became “one of the highlights of Dairakudakan, and one of the unforgettable moments
of Ankoku butoh” (Yamada 1992). The audience was covered with straw, gold dust, and chicken
feathers pouring down from the ceiling of the tent.
Coincidentally or not, this became the last official performance of Hijikata. After the stage,
Hijikata started to evaluate and organize his methods through choreographing his students,
especially Hakutōbō.8 Meanwhile, as Murobushi remarked, the members of the newly found
Dairakudakan were ready to expand their horizons further, since they were “motivated to dis-
perse themselves, rather than limit themselves within a certain style” (Aihara 2002, 240). The
performance, where Hijikata shared the stage with the second generation of butoh artists, such as
Maro, Amagatsu, and Murobushi, was a symbolic piece for Dairakudakan, and at the same time,
it seems to have signified the coming of the next butoh phase.
One person, one school: Maro Akaji as an incubator

Dairakudakan started out as a small company of less than 10 members, but thanks to a growing
audience and popularity, members doubled and tripled within a couple of years. This is when
Maro suggested each of the founding members to start their own company. This idea of Maro,
the one he calls “one person, one school,” promptly encouraged the members to form their own
butoh groups.
Founded Name Founder(s)
1974 Ariadne no Kai Carlotta Ikeda (1941-2014)

1975 Sankai Juku Amagatsu Ushio (1949-)
1975 Dance Love Machine Tamura Tetsurō (1950-1991)
Furukawa Anzu (1952-2001)
1975 Hoppo Butoh-ha Bishop Yamada (1948-)
1976 Butoh-ha “Sebi” Murobushi Kō (1947-2015)
1977 Toho Yaso Kai (Byakkosha since 1980) Osuga Isamu (1946-)
Figure 20.1 Butoh groups derived from Dairakudakan during the 1970s.
183
Tomoe Aihara
Representative butoh companies were thus quickly formed over the course of five years.
When a new company was to be launched far from Tokyo, such as “Sebi” and Hoppo
Butoh-ha, Maro and the members of Dairakudakan, and sometimes even Hijikata, would
pay a visit to put on a performance, and to celebrate with drinks. Maro would occasionally
direct, choreograph, or make an guest appearance in the works of these new groups, one
such case being Sankai Juku’s very first performance in 1977, Amagatsu shō あまがつ頌
(Ode to Amagatsu).
It did not take long for these groups to perform outside of Japan. Ariadne no Kai and
Murobushi Kō were the first to do so in 1977, for a proposed performance at a cabaret in
Paris. Murobushi, who also served as Dairakudakan’s producer, says his performances abroad
were part of his scouting to prepare for future Dairakudakan tours and assess the feasibility
of the much larger company traveling to Europe (Aihara 2002). The cabaret show itself was
rejected but they managed to remain in Paris through January 1978, and were able to pres-
ent a butoh show that lasted for a month. It is widely believed that this was the first butoh
performance to be recognized in Europe. In 1980, Sankai Juku participated in the Nancy
International Theatre Festival and Festival d’Avignon. Ohno Kazuo was also at Nancy, where
his performance shocked the European audience. During the 1980s, Carlotta Ikeda, Muro-
bushi Kō, and Amagatsu Ushio would spent most of their time in Europe and lead the butoh
scene there.9 Since all these groups derive from Dairakudakan, it could be said that, at least
retrospectively, Maro was the major “incubator” of butoh performers who would follow in
the footsteps of Hijikata.
The departure of its founding members definitely had a significant impact on Daira-
kudakan. The process of creation itself had to be altered. In its formative years, the central
members, such as Maro, Amagatsu, and Murobushi would collaborate to come up with new
ideas, sharing their diverse backgrounds. But now, Maro had to take full control over the pro-
cess. One of the outcomes of this new venture is Kaiin no uma 海印の馬 (The Sea-Dappled
Horses), a representative piece of the company that was first performed in 1980. Maro calls
this “a monumental work that defined our style of butoh” (Sankei Shimbun 2004). Indeed,
one can see in this piece many of the characteristics that are still evident in performances of
Dairakudakan today.
The piece features Maro encountering numerous monsters while searching for a phantom
horse.10 When the piece was performed in 2004, the dance critic Ishii Tatsurō, remarked as
follows:
Old wooden shutters hung from the ceiling encompass the stage. Some twenty
male and female dancers, painted white, led by Maro Akaji, perform spectacularly
following the sound of Japanese drums. Fallen warriors and their women flirt
around, while women in scarlet dresses with large ribbons appear and dance (yes,
Maro also appears in this costume, and gives the audience a good laugh). . . . The
last scene was especially overwhelming, in which Maro, hunchbacked like a blind
man, moves incessantly surrounded by crowd of dancers clad in black, holding a
lantern.
Ishii 2004
The performance consists of nine scenes. In the first scene, all the dancers, except for Maro,
appear almost completely naked with white paint covering their body, and perform a grotesque
group dance, twitching their bodies with eyes wide open. This is followed by much more serene
184
dances by women in kimono and white, long dresses. Subsequently, in the middle of the perfor-
mance, we can see Maro and female dancers wearing mini dresses hopping and jumping. This
scene is rather facetious, although the atmosphere is somewhat gory. In the end, Maro appears
white and naked, merely covering his genitals, on the far end of the stage covered in scarlet
carpet, almost like a sacred, monstrous figure. This last scene, which overwhelmed Ishii, is full
of sublime-ness.
Figure 20.2 Dairakudakan Temputenshiki, Paradise (2016), photograph by Kawashima Hiroyuki.
185
Tomoe Aihara
Maro explains that this piece is a “dance-prayer,” originated from the idea that “danc-
ers could only pray when they face reality, which is full of wars and criminal acts” (Asahi
Shimbun 2004). Compared to the earlier works of Dairakudakan, Kaiin no uma features less
carnivalesque and erotic factors, but the piece itself has a clearer framework and narrative
structure, while it is still full of humorous, grotesque, and sordid aspects. Similar points are
made by Anna Kisselgoff regarding the performance of Kaiin no uma in American Dance
Festival of that year:
Yet The Sea-Dappled Horses is also visionary theater-powerful, theatrical, largely gro-
tesque, as much a nightmare as a dream. It twists the epic and brings it down, fre-
quently with street-wise humor . . . The Sea-Dappled Horses is all imagery. It begins
with the creation of the world and ends with hell and the spirit figures dear to Japanese
ghost stories.
Kisselgoff 1982
Kaiin no uma can be labeled, at least partially, as the piece that established the style of Dairakuda-
kan to this day, the style that can be characterized by its mythical atmosphere and sordidness.
Moreover, the piece came to define the structure in which the dance plays out. In Kaiin no uma,
five out of nine scenes are performed by groups of dancers. Maro, who is the centerpiece of the
stage, does not become part of these groups, but rather associates himself with these groups, as
an independent dancer. This kind of structure was impossible to achieve during the earlier years,
since dancers were intertwined deeply with each other to form the piece. But since Kaiin no uma,
the company structures its stages through contacts between Maro and ensemble of dancers with
certain anonymity. For the past 25 years, Kaiin no uma has been performed in the same manner,
with minor changes among the members.
It was with this piece that Dairakudakan first performed abroad in 1982, at the American
Dance Festival and Festival d’Avignon. This was arguably the first occasion for Americans to see
butoh (Kisselgoff 1987). Although several butoh artists had made appearances in the United
States prior to this festival, it was in fact Dairakudakan that introduced butoh to the Ameri-
cans.11 Ever since, Dairakudakan has performed vigorously abroad, so far in thirty-four cities
in thirteen different countries.
The methodology of Dairakudakan

Although Maro has never published an official document on his methodology, Maro’s practice
often revolves around three concepts during workshops and similar occasions. They are: (1) “gath-
ering gestures” Nichijō no naka kara no miburi no saishū 日常の中からの身振りの採集, (2) “the
molded phase” Chūtai 鋳態, and (3) “the space body” Uchūtai 宇宙体 (Maro 1997).12 These are
all practical and concrete concepts that are utilized to build up the style of Dairakudakan’s butoh.
Gathering gestures
This concept points to the incorporation of “gestures” into butoh. These gestures must be differ-
ent from practical actions we take in our daily lives. Maro explains the difference between actions
and gestures using coffee cup as an example:
You pick up a coffee cup. That is a procedure. That action is both natural and empirical.
I call such actions pseudo-actions. They are realistic. They are the principle.
186
We always look for usefulness in things. That is the reality. That is the principle. But
when you are creating dance that is not enough. Perhaps we should look for something
on the other end of usefulness.
Maro 2016
To Maro, actions are daily movements, often performed with tools, and are nothing more than
realistic, pseudo-actions that serve as a principle. Rather, he pays more attention to “gestures,
which are indefinable, purposeless movements that are parallel to actions” (Maro 2016). If so,
when can one observe gestures? Maro explains:
For example, life is full of small accidents. You find that a page in a book is torn. You
stumble on a stone while walking. In those moments you are baffled for a second.
Sure, those moments would usually pass, and you would never remember them. But in
butoh, that blank, broken moment is the door to the ‘gestures.’
Maro 1997
There are words, and we explain everything with words. That is usually enough, but
we also have ‘gestures.’ And once we lose words and start moving, all of a sudden the
movements seem so important. This now becomes dance. I start moving my hands,
start exploring, and now it is like I’m signing. When movements lose their meaning and
go astray, we try to use our words cover for the loss. But that is when I feel sorry for
‘gestures.’ We need to take good care of them. I mean, we are moving a lot. We should
cherish the movement.
Maro 2016
Moments of surprise, involuntary movements, and irrational gestures we incorporate in our con-
versations, are all sources of “gestures” Maro tries to gather. These “movements that lost their
meaning and went astray” will further be deformed and arranged into new movements of butoh.
This is what is meant by “gathering gestures.”
The molded phase

The “molded phase,” the term coined by Maro, naturally signifies the combination of
“mold” and “phase.” Maro explains, “We keep on doing things [movements], we give a sign,
and then we stop. Simply put, it’s a stop-motion.” Physically, it is a moment of complete
stop that is without any movement. However, “molded phase” is not the same as a simple
pause. Maro adds:
It can happen to anybody. You are walking, and then you stop suddenly. There, you can
feel your density is increasing. But really there is no way to explain what kind of density
it is. That is the fun part. The moment you start moving again, the density is gone. So,
the question is, what happens if you try not to break off the density, and capture it alive
once you stop moving.
As the word “mold” suggests, the energy that flows during the movement quickly coagulates
once one pauses. This is the moment in which Maro feels the increase of “density.” Also, for
Maro, it is crucial to maintain this density after the movement has been resumed.
187
Tomoe Aihara
Maro believes that his idea of “mold” could be applied widely. According to Maro, all factors
of environment, such as illness, impairment, climate, emotion, and time, could be considered as a
“mold.” Our body, which is an outcome of this “mold,” is already a form of butoh (Maro 1997).
The space body

The “space body,” another coinage by Maro, is the basic posture of butoh in Dairakudakan. It
means to “empty” oneself, thus allowing forces from the outside to move the body. Maro explains
the emptiness of the body as follows:
Although you are ‘empty,’ you are still full of senses, emotions, and all that sort of things.
I aim to remove those things as well . . . You have to get rid of them. You just have to
be vacant. And that is the basic state.
One should turn his/her body into an “empty bag” in order to transform the everyday body into
the body of butoh, free of all usual habits.13 This idea of “empty bag” is based on the concept
designed by Noguchi Michizō, the founder of Noguchi Taisō. Noguchi is another important
figure in Japanese theater during the 1960s and the 1970s, with his unique concepts and man-
nerisms influencing a wide range of performers. Maro was a student of Noguchi for a year before
he met Kara and Hijikata. Maro admits that he was largely influenced by this mentor, who has
changed his “views toward the body 180 degrees.”
Noguchi states that the body of a living human being is a “bag of skin, full of some sort of
liquid, where bones and organs float around” (Noguchi 1972, 19). Here, the human body is not
a structure of muscles and bones, but a bag (skin) full of liquid. The basics of Noguchi Taisō is
to be lax, let the weight take control, and “shake and shuffle” the “water” within. Noguchi also
stresses the importance of bodily senses: “What is inside is you. Movement is the change within.
What is observed on the outside is merely the result of it” (Noguchi 1972, 34).
One example of Dairakudakan’s mannerism based on Noguchi’s view of the human body
would be that of the “wave (undulation),” seen during the group dance in the piece Paradise[
パラダイス], first performed in 2016. In a workshop hosted by Agatsuma Emiko, a member
of Dairakudakan, in preparation for this piece, the participants practiced the “wave” movement
in the following manner.14
First, each person stands in an upright, silent position. Then, undulation would begin at the
soles of the feet, climbing its way up to the lower and upper body. This vibration will then force
the dancers to move forward, one step at a time. The aim is to form a large, integrated wave
that would sweep across the stage, with numerous dancers undulating simultaneously. Agatsuma
stresses that the key here is to feel the water within and “let the wave pass through your center,”
so the feet will be pushed forward, instead of moved forward (Agatsuma 2016). The objective of
this group dance is not to achieve a unified, selfless movement, but to construct an integrated
movement on top of individual bodies.
Maro transcends and diversifies Noguchi’s concept of “water” to achieve a higher state
of butoh. “Things enter our empty body, and start moving. That is how we experience the
as-yet-unknown gestures,” explains Maro (1997). He would transform a set of movements, led
by things inside our body, or our empty bags, into butoh. The work Virus ウィルス, first per-
formed in 2012, for example, is about movements led by a virus that dominates the human body.
For example, you would imagine something is living inside of you. Then it will start to
move you. At the end of the day, that’s the easiest way. You just need to relax.
188
Maro substitutes his “body” with “space,” and lets something that inhabits the space lead his
movements. “We think of our body as mass. But what if it is a space, a completely empty void?
And what if this space had density?” questions Maro (1997). Furthermore, Maro uses the word
“passive” to explain the state of being made to move:
In a way, it’s very oriental; very Japanese. It’s like you don’t have the subject I. The
Western way is always more active, you know, I do such and such, and so on. In a way
we are the opposites. We are passive. We let in. It isn’t I, but what makes I possible . . .
There is someone else out there, someone that would make us become aware of our self.
One way of putting it, is that butoh is passive. It is negative rather than active. I
believe there is a lot of receiving involved. Being active can make things smaller. When
you are being active, you can only think from within your vessel. When you are pas-
sive, on the other hand, there is less order. You would accept anything. And that means
both good and evil things. But we are, in fact, both good and evil. There is no need to
change that.
I am moved by someone when I become passive and “empty.”15 This is the method to secure
one’s potential to transform into anything.
Conclusion: open butoh

With the new studio Kochūten established in Tokyo in 1997, the company has been engaging in
a new activity since 2001, which shares the name with the studio. In each performance, a different
member of Dairakudakan will serve as the choreographer under Maro’s supervision. The studio
offers sixty seats, and usually all the seats are sold out for each performance that would last for a
week. On average three performances are scheduled for each year; so far, twenty-two members
have choreographed fifty-four works. Nine of them were performed abroad, the first of them
in New York, in 2002.
Usually the choreographer has more than five years of experience at Dairakudakan, and the
choreographer would also incorporate his/her solo into the performance. But besides these basic
rules, choreographers are given carte blanche. A week before the performance, the work will be
previewed by Maro and the members. This process is called Maro sōken [麿総見] where Maro
gives some last-minute advice. Some works of the members include Swan Lake [白鳥湖 2010]
by Muku Naomi, a former ballet dancer, and a comical repertoire Flesh Song [肉のうた 2014],
an all-female performance, by Agatsuma Emiko. Maro recounts:
For example, how is the world different when it is viewed from the eyes of a girl, rather
than a man like me? I just want to see how that person sees the world.
This method is helping Dairakudakan to produce numerous experimental performances, which

are very much different from the works produced by Maro himself. And since Kochūten pro-
vides the members an opportunity to work as a choreographer/director, they are able to expe-
rience rich creative dialogues with fellow dancers, where they communicate through physical
language.
Another aspect of Kochūten is that it may act as a catalyst for the “mother ship,” or Daira-
kudakan. Through the creation of its members, who are familiar with the company’s style, Maro
will be able to observe the results of his own methodology in a more objective manner. This,
of course, could urge Maro to re-evaluate his style, while the experience and responsibility that
189
Tomoe Aihara
comes with it could be very much educational for its members. No other butoh group uses
this kind of method to coach its members, or to maintain a healthy environment within the
organization.
Moreover, Dairakudakan has been hosting a retreat every summer since 2002 in Hakuba vil-
lage. Experience in dance is not mandatory to participate in this event, which consists of lectures
and workshops. At the end of a retreat, everyone performs together with the company members.
This, again, is a truly open space of butoh.
During the 1960s, while butoh was still in the cradle, Maro took the stage as an actor while
he was also influenced by Hijikata. As a result, Dairakudakan was formed as a crossing point
of butoh and theater. At the beginning, Maro decided to call his style tenputenshiki, rather than
butoh, to keep some space between himself and Hijikata. Nevertheless, Dairakudakan is widely
considered today as a representative butoh company, and Maro did in fact expand the horizons
of butoh. The following words of Maro should, in part, explain the qualities of Dairakudakan, a
company that “opened” butoh:
I have to stand there with a body that can fight with the time we live in. If not, then
the body is not erotic enough.
You have fun, and you play. You don’t stop. This is the same with religion, or any-
thing really. If you stop, you are stuck.
I think there are more possibilities in human body. I think I can discover something more.
The midwife we see on stage is indeed a midwife of butoh. This midwife gave birth to the next
generation of butoh dancers and will probably keep doing so.
Notes
1 To be precise, it is the midwife who appears in A Thousand Years of Pleasure [千年の愉楽], a collection of
stories by Nakagami Kenji (1946–1992). “I like this scary old woman who would tell young delinquents
how she had delivered them into this world” (Maro Akaji, interview by author, July 9, 2016).
2 Kara Jūrō is a playwright, director, actor, novelist, and one of the representative figures in Japanese
underground theater scene. His experimental stage performances during the 1960s drastically changed
the course of Japanese modern theater, which, until then, was mostly comprised of translated Western
plays.
3 Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double was published in Japan in 1965 and has influenced many
people of the theater scene.
4 Cabarets existed throughout Japan at that time. Actors and dancers performed at these venues to sustain
themselves economically. Maro, along with Kara, and dancers who worked with Hijikata, often per-
formed kinpun (gold dust) shows, which gained some popularity.
5 Maro Akaji, interview by author, July 9, 2016. Unless otherwise noted, all of Maro’s words are taken
from the same interview.
6 Maro, on the other hand, states that he has learned practical bodywork from Noguchi (more details
about Noguchi later in the chapter).
7 The company’s obsession with phallic symbols can be seen in the titles of their pieces from the period.
Two pieces from 1974, for example, are Sumera dai kōgan 皇大睾丸 (The Great Imperial Scrotum), and
Danniku monogatari 男肉物語 (The Tale of Male-Meat).
8 This marks the starting point the third phase in Hijikata’s career, according to Ichikawa Miyabi. Maro
believes that during this period Hijikata was “trying to clarify his methods, and organize them into a
system” (Maro Akaji, interview by author, July 9, 2016).
9 It must be noted, of course, that performers such as Ohno Kazuo and Iwana Masaki also played an
important role in disseminating butoh in Europe.
10 Although kaiin is a Buddhist term that signifies the wisdom of Buddha, the piece does not relate itself
to a certain religion.
190
11 For example, Eiko & Koma had made their debut in the United States in 1976. Although they do not
define their performance as butoh, Eiko recalls that the term butoh was nonexistent in the United States
back in 1976 (Otake 2015).
12 Although the English translations for these concepts are not yet established, the author has contacted the
company, and reached an agreement on November 18, 2016, that henceforth these English terms will
be used officially.
13 Agatsuma Emiko, a member of Dairakudakan (joined 1999), looks back on her own experience: “When
I attended a workshop at Dairakudakan for the first time, we were asked to become empty. Your expe-
rience did not matter. Everyone had to be empty, like an empty leather bag on the street. There’s no
good or bad at pretending to be a bag, you know. That is where we start” (Agatsuma Emiko, interview
by author, May 26, 2016).
14 The workshop was carried out on May 26, 2016, in Tokyo. Three young dancers of the company also
led the practice.
15 On being moved, dancer Muku Naomi (joined 2005) explains that “it is crucial for the butoh of Daira-
kudakan to ‘let yourself be moved’ and not fight it” (Muku Naomi, interview by author, June 3, 2016).
Works cited
Agatsuma Emiko 我妻恵美子. Interview by author, May 26, 2016.
Aihara Tomoe 相原朋枝. 2002. “Butoh Dancers Outside Japan” [日本国外における舞踏家の活動を
探る]. Ochanomizu University Studies in Arts and Culture 55: 237–246.
Asahi Shimbun. 2004. “Remembering Hunger: The Prayer-Dance” [飢え思い返し祈りの踊り]. April
12, (evening edition).
Harada Hiromi 原田広美. 2004. Butoh taizen [舞踏大全]. Tokyo: Gendai Shokan.
Ichikawa Miyabi 市川雅. 2000. Miru Koto no Kyori [見ることの距離]. Tokyo: Shinshokan.
Ishii Tatsurō 石井達郎. 2004. “The Divine amidst the Vulgar” [卑俗の中に浮かぶ神々しさ]. Asahi
Shimbun April 3.
Kisselgoff, Anna. 1982. “Visionary Grotesques of Japanese Modern Dance” The New York Times July 18.
———. 1987. “Dairakudakan’s Theater of Raw Images” The New York Times April 19.
Maro Akaji 麿赤兒. 1997. “On Butoh of Dairakudakan and Tenputenshiki” [大駱駝艦・天賦典式の舞
踏について]. Dairakudakan, unpublished.
———. 2011. Kaidanji: Maro Akaji ga Yuku [怪男児麿赤兒がゆく]. Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun Shuppan.
———. Interview by author, July 9, 2016.
Muku Naomi 鉾久奈緒美. Interview by author, June 3, 2016.
Noguchi Michizō 野口三千三. 1972. Gensho Seimeitai to Shite No Ningen [原初生命体としての人間].
Tokyo: Mikasa Shobō.
Otake, Eiko. Interview by author, January 10, 2015.
Sankei Shimbun. 2004. “Establishing Butoh Methodology: Back to Basics with Kaiin no uma” [舞踏の方
法論確立「海印の馬」で初心に.]. April 13, (evening edition).
Senda, Akihiko 扇田昭彦. 2007. Kara Jūrō no Sekai {唐十郎の世界}. Tokyo: Yūbun Shoin.
Tomioka Taeko 富岡多恵子. 1970. Koi to Geijutsu: Jusan-nin no Sakka {行為と芸術十三人の作家}.
Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha.
Yamada Ippei 山田一平. 1992. Dansaa ダンサー. Tokyo: Ōta Shuppan.
191
21
GROWING NEW LIFE
Kasai Akira’s butoh
Megan V. Nicely
Pollen moves the past into the future. Its fine powder is the seed of reproduction, generating new
life. Transmitted by the wind, insects, or other animals, its multiple pathways are unpredictable,
guided by desire, perception, and chance. Interspecies interactions and random acts of nature are
openings to the other that also result in pollen’s movement. For instance, insects attracted to the
bright colors and scents of flowers temporarily assemble with them in an exchange whereby
obtaining nectar’s nutrients also results in pollen dispersal. Wind and weather dislodge, carry,
and relocate these small grains as well. Thus a series of temporary relations chart an open map of
possibility for new life to grow. Deleuze and Guattari call these openings to the other becomings
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987). In their example of the orchid and the wasp, neither is a fixed
identity, nor in a hierarchical position. Instead, the encounter is both the becoming-orchid of the
wasp and the becoming-wasp of the orchid. Connecting to what is outside involves certain risks
to an organism’s known stability, and as destabilizing processes are challenging for humans. Even
in practices like butoh that are openings to the more-than-human, its histories and discourses
are more often marked by recognizable stage events and artistic figures than by experimental
processes. Random trajectories and unexplained variations are difficult to account for and can
threaten the internal politics of certain narratives. However, by considering butoh’s seeds as pollen
that dissipates and takes root in unexpected locations, alternate and nonhereditary modes of trans-
mission of the kind Deleuze and Guattari propose can then be studied. By including anomalies
within its narrative, butoh as a practice can continue to grow.
Kasai Akira’s acclaimed butoh work Kafun kakumei (Pollen Revolution, 2001–2004) is an
example of this human ability to grow “new life” (Yafonne 2001). Through a series of con-
nections across histories, gender representations, and cultural identities, the work evokes social
change through generative chaos. Combining pollen – as an organic transformative agent and as
an homage to Hijikata’s butoh-fu, and revolution – as a radical paradigm shift in human perception
that in Asian culture links to fate, destiny, or karma (Pollen Revolution Program 2001b), the work
argues that butoh moves through bodies to alter consciousness. A pollen revolution is a change
brought about by human openings to outside environmental forces, a process that for Kasai
requires that a dancer sacrifice their material body to the performance moment (Pollen Revolu-
tion Program 2002b). The work vibrates with intensity and urgency, exhibiting a kind of anarchy
of the body that mirrors Kasai’s vision of a society without a central authority (Kasai 2013). Small
gestural movements, full body articulations, and moments of disorientation comprise the work’s
192
Growing new life
Figure 21.1 Kasai Akira. Pollen Revolution (2004), photograph by Chelsea Mosher.
three distinct sections. Moving throughout the visual and kinesthetic elements is a sound score
of traditional and popular music, interspersed with electronic tones and further punctuated by
vocalizations uttered by Kasai from the stage. At times, as if ingesting nutrients to further fuel his
performance, Kasai’s face contorts and his mouth opens and closes. At others, his body seems to
be engulfed in and carried by invisible forces. As one respondent to the work noted, “This was
not a demonstration of his agility, strength, or mastery of technique, but rather a demonstration
of his body as a voice for forces of life and existence that cannot be verbalized” (Collins 2004).
Needless to say, audiences have not always understood Kasai’s butoh approach and aesthetic.
At his first appearance at the San Francisco Butoh Festival with My Own Apocalypse (1994), he
was heckled from the audience by another butoh artist who is said to have yelled in Japanese,
“You’re not doing butoh, you need to stop” (to which Kasai responded, “How dare you say that.
This is my dance. This is my life.”) (Flournoy 2009). New York Times critic Jennifer Dunning
found “almost no resonance” aside from “butoh mockery” in Pollen Revolution, and of Butoh
America (2009) Gia Kourlas, also for the New York Times, wrote that the scenes “failed to build a
tangible portrait of ‘Butoh America’ – whatever that is.” How and why does Kasai’s work chal-
lenge certain butoh tenets?
To answer these questions I turn to pollen, which is a useful metaphor for understanding butoh’s
non-linear genealogy and Kasai’s often contested position within it. An early practitioner alongside
Hijikata Tatsumi and a main performer in his early works, Kasai is often faulted for his fast moving
and non-image-based approach. At times his performances are even denied as being butoh.1 Draw-
ing on Kasai’s philosophies, teachings, stage performance of Pollen Revolution, and its precursor
Exusiai (1998) in which I was a dancer, I challenge this judgment. I argue that Kasai’s affinity
with Hijikata’s philosophies, particularly regarding the body’s connection to language, indicate a
reworking of closely related principles toward different effect. If Hijikata sought to reform the
body by breaking language’s written structures, Kasai instead subverts fixed identities by access-
ing language’s vocalized, vibrational qualities. With the example of Kasai, I pose an alternate
193
Megan V. Nicely
trajectory of butoh influence based not in individual figures and forms passed down from a sin-
gular authority but instead a more rhizomatic one that examines how concepts spread, assemble
with other elements, and develop in new ways.
Pollination
Trained in classical ballet and modern dance, Kasai encountered experimental performance while
a college student in early 1960s Japan. He first worked with Ohno Kazuo but was not drawn to
Ohno’s use of imagination and slow motion movement, which he found too personal (Kasai 2013).
He then began working with Hijikata and is responsible for suggesting the term ‘butoh’ to describe
the particular kind of experimentation they were engaging (Kasai 2013).2 Kasai was a main dancer
in Hijikata’s earliest performed experiments such as Anma: aiyoku o sasaeru gekijo no hanashi (The
Masseur: A Story that Supports Passion 1963), Barairo dansu (Rose-Colored Dance 1965), and Keiji-
jogaku (Emotion in Metaphysics 1967), whose themes engaged in metaphysical questioning of form
and selfhood inspired by European writers and artists such as Genet and Beardsley. However, Kasai
notes that after Rose-Colored Dance Hijikata’s focus shifted away from European sources. Instead, he
invoked critiques of Japanese society (San Francisco Butoh Festival 1997) in order to support his
practical and political interest in developing a Japanese avant-garde performance form, rather than
simply adopting and advancing the Western modern dance then practiced in Japan
Shortly after these developments, in 1971 Kasai formed Tenshi-kan (House of Angels or Angel
House), a studio dedicated to butoh and esoteric studies whose name is taken from Rome’s Castel
Sant’Angelo, significant for housing paintings, prisoners, and the dead (it was originally a mau-
soleum). Duality, here captured in the friction between artistry as both freedom and entrapment,
remain consistent themes in Kasai’s work. In 1979 Kasai moved to Europe to more fully immerse
himself in a culture whose philosophic and artistic traditions in his estimation are based in cre-
ating and reconciling dualisms (see Kasai 2013). His move was further prompted by Hijikata’s
Figure 21.2 Kasai Akira in Emotion in Metaphysics by Hijikata Tatsumi (1967), photograph by Takai Tomiko.
194
Growing new life
question to him, “What is the consciousness of a table?” (Kasai et al. 2007). Kasai spent many
years working to answer this kōan regarding the nature of the human body – an inquiry Hijikata
held as well. Residing in Germany for the next six years, Kasai trained at Stuttgart’s Eurythmeum,
returning to Japan in 1985 to teach eurythmy and in 1991 reopening Tenshi-kan as a eurythmy
school. He returned to performing in 1990, initially with eurythmy works and then in 1993
to butoh performance and international touring. Since then Kasai has collaborated with artists
both nationally and internationally. Pollen Revolution marks his most prominent US appearance.
Initially titled simply Kafun (Pollen), the piece premiered in Tokyo and San Francisco in 2001.3
It was subsequently re-introduced as a solo for Kasai under the full title Pollen Revolution in 2002
at New York’s Japan Society and in 2004, supported by the MAPP Fund, the piece toured to
major US cities such as Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The work acts as a kind
of manifesto for Kasai’s philosophies on dance, the body, and life. In an extended program note,
Kasai observes that there is a human drive to create life within one’s own body, but there is also
life in science, technology, and information. Further, while these forces in today’s age may give
one person the power to destroy the world, an individual may also save it from destruction. This
can happen by dancing (which was the way Kasai found to engage the above kōan). Creation and
destruction are the conflicting life forces that fuel his performances. He is deeply committed to
dance as instructive and knowledge-producing and, if attended to correctly, sees it as a force that
can change society. For Kasai, dance holds the potential to “create infinite life within the [my]
body” (Pollen Revolution Program 2002b), and thus plays an important role in humanity’s future.
Pollen Revolution activates these and other dualistic forces through a series of identity-based
transformations.4 Catalyzed by Kei Shii’s sound score, the hour-long piece opens with Kasai
dressed as the maiden from the kabuki dance-drama Musume Dōjōji (adapted from the earlier
Noh play Dōjōji), whose true identity in the original story is revealed to be an angry demon. In a
long red kimono, black obi, ornate wig, and white face makeup, and placed against a white scroll
that covers the back wall and floor, Kasai slowly turns to face the audience. The figure recalls a
history of men performing female roles in Japanese theater as well as more contemporary gen-
der-fluid performances. Other dualities such as pure and sinister, and light and dark, unfold as the
piece continues. The silence is punctuated by the recorded sounds of traditional Japanese wood
blocks, flute, and vocal cries, and later a samisen. These serve as time markers not only within the
performance itself but also across history. To these sounds Kasai performs graceful hand positions,
first in place and then while moving in suri-ashi. However, as in the Dōjōji story, all is not as
it initially appears. The sonic landscape soon is pierced by ominous electronic tones, and with
this the quality of Kasai’s gestures shifts, as if he is sensing or conjuring something invisible yet
tangible in the air. The section accelerates in tempo and intensity as Kasai makes quick direction
changes, crouches on the ground, and vibrates his hands as if wringing further guidance from the
ether. The figure seems to become crazy and disoriented as Kasai tosses up his arms and opens
his mouth, producing hissing vocal sounds (on the final night of the run he tore off the wig
completely). As the section ends and the lights dim, three kōken-like figures enter to remove his
attire, a further reference to traditional Japanese theater and a signal for further transformation.
Cool blue-white light opens the second section as Kasai, now in black pants and top, runs
and tumbles off the front edge of the stage. Righting himself, he moves slowly at audience-level,
gesticulating with his arms and mouth before rolling back onto the performance area. Spectator
interaction and breaking of the fourth wall are common ways that Kasai connects to energies in
the space. As he continues, angular, percussive gestures and quick shifts between forms cleave his
body, accompanied by synthesized music. Similar to the first section, Kasai embodies historical
citations that recall figures and events, now from the 20th century. For instance, a small contracted
form on the floor reminds one of works by Murobushi Kō, while a penché is reminiscent of
195
Megan V. Nicely
Martha Graham’s iconic image. I recognize a balance on the head and feet as my own position
in the earlier work Exusiai, and hands angled sideways and down recall Nijinsky’s archaic stance.
These forms seem to arise from nowhere to then be shattered, creating reverberations. The shapes
produce kinesthetic affect not only due to their speed of arrival and departure, but also because
the historical associations linger and inflect the work’s meaning for onlookers. Repetitions of
hand gestures from the piece’s first section, now in a different context, also appear. Kasai jumps
and rolls through three diagonals of white light on the otherwise dark stage as this section builds
in intensity. Then, as the lights widen to reveal more of the area and the music score drops out,
Kasai faces the audience to speak Japanese words and utter other sounds. Stripping down to black
tights, he transforms once again, moving out of the modern age and into an unknown future.
In the final section, Kasai dons a white men’s dress suit, and the pink make-up around his eyes
appears more pronounced. Eerie music accompanies Kasai as he briefly moves behind the stage
backdrop, then expands his movement repertoire to include Noh-like stomps and additional
mouth and arm gestures. At one moment he announces: “New York” and “Lexington Avenue”
(close to the Japan Society location), at which point a rap music number kicks in amidst the
synthesized sounds. This sonic backdrop gives Kasai’s movements a new interpretation. While
not street dance per se, the beat causes Kasai’s body to move with more frenetic urgency as white
particles start to fall from the ceiling and pink pools of light appear on the stage floor. This is
the final moment of transformation, and Kasai seems to be driven into the future by all that
has come before, re-mixed in a series of overlapping references. As Kuniyoshi Kazuko describes
the work, “The image did not invoke any semblance of the human body. He danced as if he
was smashing his whole body into pieces” (2004). The evening’s two encores further support a
reading of history as a project of sampling, honoring, and mixing rather than simply smashing
its linear narrative or adhering to direct genealogical transmission. The first bow is set to a Jap-
anese female pop song and the second to Elvis’ “It’s Now or Never.” These music choices and
the accompanying movement fragments simultaneously reference and mock butoh bows, which
have become a part of the full performance (such as in the work of Sankai Juku). With these
gestures, Kasai acknowledges that there are more forces at play in the present moment than are
generally seen or recognized.
Vibration
Kasai’s butoh is best understood as a vibrational connective quality with the potential to both
destroy a body and alter the course of human society. I base this view on my role as one of five
dancers in Exusiai, a prequel to Pollen Revolution and Kasai’s first collaborative work with Western
dancers. While researching the piece, Kasai engaged us in long conceptual discussions regarding
the organic forces found in minerals and planets that, pitted against the inorganic energy of
machines, would end in an apocalyptic vision generated by the friction between them. Here,
birth and death were equally possible, and for Kasai dance intentionally engages this risk. Dance’s
purpose is not to liberate an individual into the universe but instead to bring forces down to a
material body, where they confront one another (Kasai 1996). As performers in the work, we
were asked to connect to the proposed elements by practicing without Kasai’s guidance for a
number of months. We worked to embody the concepts through group improvisations that exer-
cised our connections to each other. In Kasai’s view, choreography comes not from an internal
place or image but instead from outside, where it shocks the dancer into action, and thus we were
only given specific choreographic forms shortly before the performance. He taught the forms to
us using this approach by quickly demonstrating and having us immediately respond with the
same form. “Greater strength comes out of the choreography if there is no room for [verbal]
196
Growing new life
images to intervene,” he notes, since these might carry the dancer away from the moment (Kasai
2013). He faults the slow image metamorphoses of much butoh dance, preferring to move with
great speed and precision, saying, “I can’t stand dance without much movement” since moving
slowly risks the body’s entanglement with the continual onslaught of words and thus renders it
an object (Kasai 1996, 25–26).
However, words are also present in Kasai’s approach, as when he notes, “Let us ask ourselves,
what is dance? Supposing that we define dance, or butoh, as the act of connecting one’s body
with one’s language” (Kasai 1996, 21). Here, Hijikata’s use of language to access the body-mind
becomes relevant, even as his philosophies differ from Kasai’s in terms of temporality and desired
result. Hijikata’s primary technique for activating language’s potential to disrupt the socialized
body is called butoh-fu.5 This surrealist writing poses unlikely juxtapositions that, when read and
embodied by dancers, manifests in unique forms and a new corporeality. For instance, in the
exercise for “pollen” as taught by disciple Waguri Yukio, words suggest a choreography for incre-
mentally undoing the human form by awakening to an image that gradually saturates the body.
Here, by opening to what is other, the boundary between inside and outside disappears until
both the body and the air around it become pollen (Waguri 1998–2004; Calamoneri 2012).6
Importantly, the butoh-fu are also a mechanism for recording corporeal experiences in language so
that specific movement qualities can be activated.7 The fu are often described as a cuing system.
Words encounter the dancer’s subconscious body-mind and awaken a response then rendered.
The language is crafted so as to challenge learned ways of sequencing and alter lived conscious-
ness by demanding new logics in the progression of thought-image to action. Their transmission
can be considered both written and oral. Nakajima Natsu links their pedagogy to earlier Jap-
anese movement traditions such as kabuki, Nihon buyo, bunraku, and Noh, whose music is more
language-based and comes from religious chanting and storytelling. Western music, in contrast,
is more melodic and yields other kinds of movement structures. Hijikata’s butoh is thus intended
to counter the Western dance available in Japan after World War II by drawing on Japanese oral
and dance traditions to create a new kind of “action language” whose forms and content are
determined by linguistic structures and their use (Nakajima in Sakamoto 2012, 203).8
It is unclear whether Kasai ever practiced Hijikata’s butoh-fu, but his work is similarly based in
understandings of an oral tradition. As noted, Kasai worked closely with Hijikata and likely ascer-
tained language’s power in relation to the body from their encounter. However, these ideas are
also reinforced through his own studies of eurythmy. Developed by Rudolf Steiner in the early
20th century, eurythmy is a theory of movement whose purpose is to make the inner forms and
gestures of language and music visible by harmonizing the human body with life forces to evoke
transformation. When performed, eurythmic work appears similar to that of Isadora Duncan in
its flowing formless movement and diaphanous costuming. This aesthetic at times also appears in
Kasai’s work. Referred to as “an art of the future” where “conscious Imagination arises” through
the movement of the soul, eurythmy understands movement as immortal, and humans as only
instruments for activating forces from previous lives to create a new world (Steiner and Usher
2006, 3). Steiner espoused, “We are created out of sound” – not sounds made by us but the sound
that is already (Steiner and Usher 2006, 11).9
Similar ideas are present in Hijikata’s butoh (see Hijikata in TDR 2000a, 2000b). Ghosts, ances-
tral forces, and imagination act to move human bodies in new ways. However, Steiner’s notion of
sounds already present yet invisible signals a more vibration-based encounter that resonates long
after an initial sound is heard. These ripples or after-effects are the forces that can then be used
to act – or dance. In Kasai’s butoh workshops, dancers practice eurythmic principles in what he
calls “voice power” by repeating vowel sounds: A, E, I, O, U, accompanied by arm gestures and
pliés, sending the energy of the voice out of the body and into the air. Students then repeat the
197
Megan V. Nicely
Figure 21.3 Kasai Akira Solo Dance Recital. Courtesy of the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive, Keio University
Art Center.
sounds, eliminating one vowel but maintaining the intensity and keeping the voice power on the
inside. This progression continues until there is silence but the power remains. Kasai instructs
that the voice power inside the body can now be used to move and even brought outside the
body, where it connects to other forces. This opening to the other fuels his live performances,
as discussed earlier. Kasai’s understanding is that voice power is food to sustain life, but it is also
the ability of the body to nourish itself by extending beyond itself and connecting to others.10
It is important to note that for Kasai eurythmy is a training tool and means for humans
to become connective. However, it is not butoh. Eurythmy is both a pedagogic and spiritual
practice. Using it to connect to other forces without a predictable outcome is the risk that
198
Growing new life
transforms the training tool into butoh performance. In contrast to Hijikata who re-wrote lan-
guage as a way to subvert the socialized body, Kasai uses the vibration of spoken words so that,
“The reverberation of the sounds of the words is listened to with the whole body as you move”
(Kasai 2013). In this way, the body is open and receptive to the outside environment while also
having internal clarity – which seems quite different than the overwhelm and confusion found
in many accounts of Hijikata’s approach. Voice power creates a separation between the body and
language by externalizing sound and using its vibrational force. Kasai calls where new bodies
are formed the “between-space,” which becomes a way of moving beyond the known human
body-mind. As Kasai puts it, with vocal practice the “I” is subsumed into a larger and ancient
energy where all the words ever spoken exist after an “I” dies (Kasai 1996). Butoh is then what
becomes possible from this state.
Transmission
“Dance is not something possible,” notes Kasai. “If it is possible, it is not dance at all” (Kasai 1996,
22). Dance instead is the materialization of the unknown, or the virtual, in live performance.
Hijikata makes a similar statement when he notes, “Every revolt is a dance. Every dance is, as
long as it is a dance, a revolt” (Hijikata Tatsumi Memorial Archives 2009, 42). For Kasai, butoh
dance’s particular power to actualize change in the social order is by materializing the encounter
between language and body. For social change to occur, the physical body must be awakened
through conflicts so as to release affective power and create something new.11 Butoh thus asks the
liberated dancer to return to the physical body and be imprisoned there in order to act on the
material world. As Kasai observes in the program notes for Pollen Revolution, today
the dancer is not faced with the question “What will I dance with my body?” The
question s/he faces is “What is my body?” or rather, “What is the nature of this matter
which forms my body?” . . . This transformation in dance is a completely different
dance impetus from Modern Dance which ties dance to a personal expression. Here the
inner aspect of a human being is not being danced. What is being danced is the inner
aspect of the physical matter itself which existed long before the human “I” existed.
Pollen Revolution Program 2001b
Kasai faults much dance today for reducing dancers to mere form rather than igniting the unique
forces that a body as material can produce (Kasai 1996). He sees most speaking in dance today
as representing the same problems as the written text in that they are used to convey meaning
rather than for the power they possess in potential. Such linguistic objectification does not pro-
vide freedom as vocal sounds do. However with voice power, dancers are free to communicate
with other bodies and cultures in part because voice power is both something outside us as pure
energy and also something that we cultivate through our senses so that we can connect to other
bodies. Voice power is thus both outside us and also our own power. It changes the function of
the sensory organs so that they gather energy rather than solidify information (Kasai 2011c).
Ongoing transformative processes can be applied not just to dance training, but also to under-
standings of the field of butoh as well. If pieces like Pollen Revolution are deemed mere representa-
tions or mockeries of butoh rather than butoh itself, it may be because audiences seek what is
recognizable and known rather than considering alternate paradigms for experience. Kasai’s work
employs citation, fluid identities, and symbolic references in much the way that Hijikata’s early
works did (see Baird 2012; Curtin 2011). However, these markers are less to awaken memory
than to suggest a future consciousness. For instance, his piece Nobody’s Money (2011), performed
199
Megan V. Nicely
in New York during Occupy, drew on the power of Akasegawa Genpei’s 1,000-yen incident
(1963) in which the artist printed fake bills that eventually landed him in court for counterfeit-
ing. During the performance, Kasai threw stacks of currency with his own face imprinted on
it and a zero value denomination as a critique of the current economic climate and devaluation
of human life. The earlier art incident was activated in this performance by sampling it and
placing it in a new context, which is the way that energy moves. Kasai sees butoh in Commedia
dell’Arte, Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan, Vaslav Nijinsky, Hijikata Tatsumi, and other historical
events (Kasai et al. 2007). Thus specific cultures, people, dance genres, or historical moments do
not represent butoh so much as temporarily make it legible.
In sum, Kasai’s work has consistently engaged the power of specific locations, people, and
historic events, remixing them to create something new. Temporary connections produce fric-
tion and release energy that can be used for dance. It is generative. As Kasai notes, creativity and
the body cannot be produced from something that already exists; they must instead arise from
nonexistence. The process of making is never complete but rather ongoing due to the tension
between the body and the work. If critics see Kasai’s performances as lacking in butoh-ness, and
written histories and spoken rhetoric discount his contributions as anomalies, they only reveal the
limitations Hijikata already recognized in language and the body. For butoh as a field to continue
to grow new life, practitioners must instead attend to multiple pathways and variations in its con-
cepts and their development. Dancers have a very particular task in this regard. They must break
meaning in both words and dance – either through vocalization or by reaching a state of chaos
– rather than solidifying into form (Kasai 2011b, 26–28). For dance, physical movement is thus a
question, not a goal or outcome. Inquiry involves certain risks and temporary relations. Butoh’s
seeds are transmitted by openings to the outside, so as to bring these potentials into actualization.
By creating an open field in which to pollinate, new life can continue to grow.
Notes
1 The most recent example of this point of view was Kan Katsura’s Facebook post of July 5, 2016. Here,
Kan and seven friends agreed that Kasai’s dancing is not butoh but instead butoh as metaphor. What
Kasai is doing is “trying to die onstage.”
2 While Kan Katsura mentioned this to me at a gathering in Brooklyn, New York in 2008, Bruce Baird drew
my attention to an earlier source in which Kasai claimed credit for the term (Morishita Takashi, ed. 2004).
3 In the June 9–10 performance in San Francisco the work was a duet with European dancer Petra Ver-
meersch and the final section was to the music of Pink Floyd.
4 I first saw the work in 2001 in San Francisco. However, my detailed description here is based on record-
ings of three consecutive nights of performance at the Japan Society, New York City.
5 English-language readers can now access translations of Hijikata’s unusual writings and choreographic
methods (see Hijikata 2015; Kurihara 1996, 2000; Baird 2012).
6 Tanya Calamoneri references Waguri’s pollen exercise as an example of gradually “becoming saturated
with the image” or “becoming other.” In 5% increments one is gradually consumed in a final state of
ecstasy (Calamoneri 2012, 189–193).
7 While Hijikata’s fu are the score or choreography for a dance, individual movements were somewhat
different depending on each dancer’s embodied solution. His dancers kept their own notebooks in
which they recorded not only Hijikata’s words but also their own images and other notes used to recall
the dance. Costume en Face (2015) is one example. A further step of documentation is a DVD and related
iPhone app of the fu developed by Waguri (1998–2004, 2011).
8 Many experimental artists in the United States and Europe, such as those in Fluxus, were also experi-
menting with language as a source of art-making.
9 Steiner himself drew a distinction between eurythmy and dance, stating that in eurythmy “everything
is pushed back into the impulses generating the movements of the person, which are grasped with full
consciousness, so that it is actually the soul which moves in the limbs, whereas in dance the soul gives itself
over to the limbs and the limbs then create the required form in space” (Steiner and Usher 2006, 49).
200
Growing new life
10 Rosemary Candelario shared with me a similar feature in SU-EN’s work, where she uses sound, images,
and smells in her teaching precisely because they extend beyond the body (Candelario 2016).
11 The understanding that matter can release forces relates to Jane Bennett’s notion of “vibrant matter,” or
the affective force of things (Bennett 2010).
Works cited
Baird, Bruce. 2012. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, Duke University Press.
Calamoneri, Tanya. 2012. “Becoming Nothing to Become Something: Methods of Performer Training in
Hijikata Tatsumi’s Butō Dance.” PhD diss., Temple University.
Candelario, Rosemary. 2016. Email Communication, September 1.
Collins, Kristen. 2004. “Akira Kasai: Pollen Revolution.” Time-Based Arts Festival, September 18. Accessed
March 2, 2012. www.tbafestival.blogspot.com/.
Curtin, Catherine. 2011. “Rose-Coloured Dance: The Politics of Cross-Dressing in Hijikata Tatsumi’s
Ankoku Butoh.” Contemporary Theatre Review 24, 4: 472–486.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by
Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dunning, Jennifer. 2005. “Channeling a Flow of Movement and Word.” The New York Times, October 8.
Accessed June 8, 2010. www.nytimes.com/2005/10/08/arts/dance/08eury.html.
DuRoche, Tim. 2004. “But Oh, Is It Butoh?” Time-Based Arts Festival, September 22. Accessed March 2,
2012. www.tbafestival.blogspot.com/.
Flournoy, Brechin. 2009. Interview with Author. San Francisco, CA, December.
Fraleigh, Sondra Horton. 1999. Dancing into Darkness: Butoh, Zen, and Japan. Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press.
———. 2014. “Permission and the Making of Consciousness.” In Dance, Somatics, and Spiritualities, edited
by Amanda Williamson et al., 239–259. Bristol, UK and Chicago: Intellect.
Gross, Monika. 2009a. Interview with Author. Brooklyn, NY, September.
———. 2009b. Interview with Author. Brooklyn, NY, October.
Grosz, Elizabeth A. 2008. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Hijikata Tatsumi. 1965. Rose-Colored Dance. Videocassette.
———. 2000a. “From Being Jealous of a Dog’s Vein.” TDR: The Drama Review 44, 1: 56–59.
———. 2000b. “Wind Daruma.” TDR: The Drama Review 44, 1: 71–81.
———. 2015. Costume en Face: A Primer of Darkness for Young Boys and Girls. Written by Moe Yamamoto.
Translated by Sawako Nakayasu. Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse.
Hijikata Tatsumi Memorial Archives and Keio University. 2000. The Iconology of Rose-Colored Dance:
Reconstructing Tatsumi Hijikata. Tokyo: Research Center for the Arts and Arts Administration, Keio
University.
———. 2009. Hijikata Tatsumi’s Rebellion of the Body: Images and Document of Butoh 1968. Tokyo: Research
Center for the Arts and Arts Administration, Keio University.
Japan Cultural Profile. 2008a. “Japan: Butoh as Postmodern Dance,” October 30. Accessed November 9.
www.culturalprofiles.net/japan/Directories/Japan_Cultural_Profile/-10608.html.
———. 2008b. “Japan: Post-Butoh,” October 30. Accessed November 9. www.culturalprofiles.net/japan/
Directories/Japan_Cultural_Profile/-10609.html.
Kan Katsura. 2016. “Facebook Post,” July 5. Accessed July 5. www.facebook.com/kanbutoh.
Kasai Akira. 1975. Improvisation. DVD. Hosei University, Tokyo.
———. 1995. My Own Apocalypse. The San Francisco Butoh Festival. Videocassette. Cowell Theater, San
Francisco, June.
———. 1996. “Dance Closely Related to Matter.” Translated and edited by Toshiro Kuwabara. Nikutaemo
2: 18–39.
———. 1998. Exusiai. The San Francisco Butoh Festival. Videocassette. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,
San Francisco.
———. 2001a. Pollen Revolution. With Petra Vermeersch. The San Francisco Butoh Festival. Videocassette.
Theatre Artaud, San Francisco, June 10.
201
Megan V. Nicely
———. 2001b. Pollen Revolution Program. The San Francisco Butoh Festival, June 9–10.
———. 2002a. Pollen Revolution. DVD. Japan Society, New York, April 25–27.
———. 2002b. Pollen Revolution Program. Japan Society, April 25–27.
———. 2004. Pollen Revolution Program. University of Michigan Musical Society, October 13.
———. 2011a. Interview with Author. Translated by Kae Ishimoto. Tenshi-kan Studio, Tokyo, Japan, Jan-
uary 14.
———. 2011b. Karada to iu Shomotsu [Book of the Body]. Excerpts translated by Atsuko Keating. Tokyo:
Shoshiyamada.
———. 2011c. Workshop, November 18–19, Cave, Brooklyn, NY.
———. 2013. “Artist Interview: A Look into the Choreographic Art of Akira Kasai, Fifty Years after
Entering the World of Butoh.” Interviewed by Ishii Tatsurō. Performing Arts Network Japan, February
26. http://www.performingarts.jp/E/art_interview/1301/1.html
Kasai Akira and Gozo Yoshimasu. 2010. Spheres, Flashing Souls: Requium. DVD. Keio University, Tokyo,
June 6.
Kasai Akira, Murobushi Kō, and Ohno Yoshito. 2007. Cave Artist Talks Program: A Life of Dance. Brook-
lyn, NY, October 31.
Kourlas, Gia. 2007. “A Quest to Put Butoh on the US Map.” The New York Times, October 27.
Kuniyoshi, Kazuko. 1986. “Butoh Chronology: 1959–1984.” TDR: The Drama Review 30, 2: 127–41.
———. 2004. “Contemporary Dance in Japan: New Wave Dance and Butoh after the 1990s.” Accessed
November 8, 2008. www.jacc.org_%20related/butohdancejapan.html.
———. 2008. “Butoh in the Late 1980s.” Kobo Butoh Website. Accessed November 8. www.xs4all.
nl/~iddinja/butoh.
Kurihara, Nanako. 1996. “The Most Remote Thing in the Universe: Critical Analysis of Hijikata Tatsumi’s
Butoh Dance.” PhD diss., New York University.
———. 2000. “Hijikata Tatsumi: The Words of Butoh.” TDR: The Drama Review 44, 1 (April): 12–28.
Kurihara, Nanako and Jacqueline S. Ruyak. 2000. “Hijikata Tatsumi Chronology.” TDR: The Drama Review
44, 1: 29–35.
Lee, Chee Keng. 1998. “Hijikata Tatsumi and Ankoku Butoh: A ‘Body’ Perspective.” BA thesis, National
University of Singapore.
Morishita Takashi, ed. 2004. Hijikata Tatsumi no butō: Nikutai no shururearusumu, shintai no ontorojī [Tatsumi
Hijikata’s Butoh: Surrealism of the Flesh, Ontology of the Body], Tokyo: Keio University Press.
Munroe, Alexandra, Yokohama Bijutsukan, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art. 1994. Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky. New York: H.N. Abrams.
Ness, Sally Ann. 2008. “The Inscription of Gesture: Inward Migrations in Dance.” In Migrations of Gesture,
edited by Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness, 1–30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sakamoto, Michael Andrew Y. 2012. “An Empty Room: Butoh Performance and the Social Body in Crisis.”
PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles.
San Francisco Butoh Festival. 1997. “Symposium: ‘German Arts and Influences of Butoh Dance.’” Moder-
ated by Yukihira Goto. With Sondra Fraleigh, Akira Kasai, Delta Ra’i, Yumiko Yoshioka. Videocassette.
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, August 18.
Sas, Miryam. 2011. Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Segal, Lewis. 1996. “Dance: Kasai Explores the Reaches of Performance in ‘Seraphita’.” Los Angeles Times,
March 26.
———. 2004. “Dance Review: A Life, and Body, Devoted to Art.” Los Angeles Times, October 22, E26.
Steiner, Rudolf and Beth Usher. 2006. Eurythmy: An Introductory Reader. Forest Row, England: Sophia Books.
Ulrich, Allan. 1995. “A Rare Chance to View Butoh Japan’s Movement Theater Draws a Different Audi-
ence.” San Francisco Examiner, June 17, C1.
Waguri, Yukio. 1998–2004. Butoh Kaden. Tokyo: JUSTSYSTEM. CD ROM.
———. 2011. Butoh Kaden. iPhone app.
Yafonne. 2001. “The Nijinsky of Butoh: Akira Kasai Returns with New Life.” AsianWeek. San Fran-
cisco, June 13. http://asianweek.com/2001_06_08/ae2_akirakasai.html. Accessed November 8,
2008. Archived at Internet Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20010804223540/http://asianweek.
com/2001_06_08/ae2_akirakasai.html
202
22
LIGHT AS DUST, HARD AS STEEL,
FLUID AS SNAKE SALIVA
The Butoh Body of Ashikawa Yoko
SU-EN
A body of infinity
Her presence is fierce, almost beyond human. Under her feet, the ground cracks open. We sense
a heavy weight, yet also the speed of light. Limbs contrive the impossible. Her body challenges
gravity. Every second, every moment, a decision is made. A decision to stand, or to fall. She places
her body exactly where she has to be in this universe. Her body is eaten by insects, they crawl
under her skin. And yet – she devours the world.
I have a strong physical reaction whenever I see Ashikawa Yoko dance – on stage, in the Tomoe
Shizune & Hakutobo1 studio where we rehearsed, and in the teaching sessions when I felt her
strong presence directly in my flesh. I have seen her dance on stage on many occasions since 1988,
but I have only seen the choreography of Hijikata Tatsumi for her on film. Even in those old,
shadowy videos, Ashikawa communicates her physicality and passion. Her dance terrifies me and
makes me joyful at the same time. I sense urgency. I sense a moment of infinity.
My body and I as a person were challenged directly by Ashikawa in the years 1988 to 1993
in Japan, when I was a student at the Tomoe Shizune & Hakutobo studio in Tokyo. I was trained
to be a dancer through Ashikawa’s choreography and Tomoe’s vision. My thinking has been
formed through being active in this lineage internationally as a butoh dancer and choreographer
since 1992. I write this text in love and faith. Ashikawa’s words and body have changed my life.
Being part of Hijikata’s body

Human beings are in constant interaction with the physical reality around us. Human creation
is a way to process this relationship. Resistance forces art forms to make a leap in their own evo-
lution. Hijikata’s ankoku butoh2 is such a leap. Inseparable from the politics and social context of
Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, it was also a fierce creation of a rebellious reality that transcended
the norms and definitions of its environment. A situation with two simultaneous realities makes
life and art disturbingly interesting. Japanese avant-garde artistic expression was pinned between
East and West; between the traditional body and the modern body; between aesthetic and artis-
tic values; between life/nature and civilization; and between the conceptualizing body and the
organic body. From this an explosive dance form emerged – the premiere of Hijikata’s first butoh
203
SU-EN
performance Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors) in Daiichi Seimei Hall transfigured the performance
world of Tokyo in 1959.
Hijikata’s ankoku butoh was a process involving many bodies together in space. When does the
body become artistic material? Is it in the ideas of the creator? Is it is the process of training, cho-
reographing, and transferring those ideas into another body? Is it when the dance is put on stage?
Ashikawa was the body through which Hijikata realized his artistic vision. The explosive artistic
and human relationship of Hijikata and Ashikawa lasted some 20 years until his death in 1986.
Ashikawa, born in Chiba Prefecture in 1947, joined Hijikata’s home and studio Asbestos-kan3 in
1967. She was an art student at Musashino Art University. At Asbestos-kan, the butoh students
lived, trained, and worked. Some also had jobs in the floating world: burlesque, dance cabaret,
and night clubs. Ashikawa describes her encounter with Asbestos-kan in her essays “Searching
for the Other Person in the Body” and “A Room with a View of the Grave”:
While I wandered like a cat in downtown Shinjuku, I happened to arrive at the house
of the dark dance of Butoh in Meguro. Hijikata Tatsumi lived there. At first everything
took me by surprise. Hijikata paid a strange attention to his body. For example, when
he went to the public bath, he didn’t come back for about 3 hours, and while his upper
garments were all normal, he wore only women’s underwear. However, soon I under-
stood that it was a method of training his body, and I longed to undertake this method
of training.
1990, 15
The things I heard in Hijikata’s studio were almost always impossible to understand, but
the fact that they were so incomprehensible was in itself thrilling. From the time I came
to stay with Hijikata and the several men who were living there together, I realized that
even when they were speaking in this difficult language, which seemed so wrapped up
in mystery, they were hard at physical training, competing against each other in a contest
of beauty and ugliness which reached the last recesses of the flesh.
n.d., 1
Hijikata had many students and followers, and he taught and guided them differently according
to their talents and abilities. The opportunity to create work with an artistic talent such as Ashi-
kawa gave new momentum to his choreography and he concentrated on creating the butoh-fu4
choreography and method through her body. Ashikawa was trusted to assist him, to take choreo-
graphic notes for performances, and to teach butoh-fu and the choreography to the other dancers
at Asbestos-kan.
Choreography5 in the lineage of Hijikata’s work has a very strong relationship to words. The
butoh words are born out of the reality of the body and the incitement for the dance. In Hijikata’s
work method, the way I understand it through Ashikawa’s teaching and work, the words provide
the intentions, and the dancer embodies the reality/shape/essence of the words. The process of
this creation could include the use of pictures, stories, the teacher showing the form, experiments,
improvisations, or concrete observations in daily life (for example, being silent a whole day or
watching the smoke from the boiling pot for hours or crawling on legs and arms as an animal for
a week), to reach the goal. After passing through several phases of fierce discipline, a new cho-
reography or material is ready. Only when the merging of words and body is complete is there
dance. Hijikata’s and Ashikawa’s intense artistic relationship demanded strength, motivation, and
intelligence, both intellectual and physical, from both. Complete trust was placed in the other.
They fearlessly entered unknown territories, where no answers were given, just more questions
204
Light as dust, hard as steel
posed. Ashikawa embodied ankoku butoh and provided the resistance for the dance form to
develop. We can only understand the work of Hijikata by seeing him dance. And, we can only
understand his work by seeing Ashikawa dance.
Ashikawa reflects upon the training process in her essay “Searching for the Other Person in
the Body”:
One day, he asked us, “What is the furthest thing?” When nobody could reply, he said
“It’s a body.” I was wondering about this when I stood on the floor, I understood it. I saw
that existence itself is full of shame. In the face of this shame, I couldn’t even make a fin-
ger move. It was not a matter whether I could dance or not. After struggling, I noticed
there was no other way but self-abandonment. At last, I noticed and found where my
body was, after I felt the shame of my existence. Therefore we need a remedy to let our
existence become shameful, and the remedy itself is words, existence is driven by words.
1990, 15
Beyond technique, beyond body

The dance of Ashikawa gained fame as she became the main performer in Hijikata’s butoh. The
Hakutobo Company was founded by Hijikata in 1974 with Ashikawa as the main dancer. In
1974 she was awarded the 6th Annual Award of the Buyo hihyoka kyokai (Dance Critics Associ-
ation) and the association’s 7th Annual Award the following year. In 1978 Ashikawa danced in
Hijikata´s choreography Yami no maihime junitai – Ruburukyu no tame no juyonban (Fortnight for the
Louvre Palace – Twelve Phases of Dancing Princess of Darkness) at the Festival d’Automne á Paris, Ma
exhibition – Time and Space in Paris, which was one of the early events that presented butoh
overseas. She participated in the Japan Arts Festival in 1983 where she danced the leading role
in Hijikata’s Nippon no Chibusa (The Breasts of Japan).
In many of Hijikata’s works, Ashikawa danced the central part, appearing in one solo after
another, accompanied by the ensemble in minor parts. Each solo contains a story of the smallest
detail of daily life as well as the most remote phenomena of the universe. We see layers and layers
of questions regarding body, culture, as well as absurd stories, silliness, and fantastical ideas. I would
now like to reflect on some of my favorite dances I have seen on film.
In Hitogata (Human Shape), choreographed by Hijikata in 1976, Ashikawa dances a little
demon in one solo, dressed in a short red padded kimono, a wig on her head, Ashikawa moves
beyond the common sense of what human limbs can become. The tension and erasing of tension
makes her movements very light and very quick. Her jumps and kicks remind us of an insect that
is suddenly on the other side of the room. There is also a playfulness, a fooling around energy
that challenges the spectators’ intellectual approach as to how to perceive dance. As a being
made of dust in a later solo, Ashikawa is paper thin and fragile as a leaf. Her breath seems to be
the color grey, and there is a smell of old paper – as in an attic in an old house. Her flesh has a
transparent quality. Her body is light as dust, yet shows a being that has lived many decades. In
the end, Ashikawa sits on a raised part of the stage, suddenly lighting up an imaginary cigarette,
becoming the old lady next door.
In the opening solo of Geisenjo no Okugata (Lady on a Whale String), choreographed by
Hijikata in 1976, Ashikawa, dressed in black with a headpiece resembling a fin, dances in front of
a large, hanging, metal ring. Her body changes from being as hard as a steel pillar, into a hang-
ing, empty condition where the intention to stand is undermined. She might be a piece of meat
hanging on a hook. Her body becomes this hook. She masters an isolation technique, cutting her
body into chunks, like a chair losing one leg and falling apart. In the next short solo, Ashikawa
205
SU-EN
Figure 22.1 Ashikawa Yoko in Hitogata (1976), photographer unknown. Courtesy of Morishita Takashi
and the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive, Keio University Art Center.
is elegantly costumed in a red gown and cap. The dance has influences from burlesque, often
incorporated in those days. In the beginning, her body is firmly positioned at center stage and
unwilling to move from there. Suddenly she shifts into a snake type body, the snake arms being
so fluid, slipping away like snake saliva. There is one snake, then another – and suddenly 1,000
snakes in her body. The transparent quality in her arms provides a new definition of arms, far
206
from the everyday tools we use. In the last moments of this dance, Ashikawa stands frozen, her
hands to her face. Her breathing ceases. All bodily processes are harnessed internally. A moment
of utmost loneliness. Grief embodied.
Ashikawa’s dance and body is so immersed in a task that it is larger than her own intentions,
and beyond any technique. She pulls the spectator into her body, through her skin, behind her
Figure 22.2 Ashikawa Yoko in Geisenjo no Okugata (1976), photograph by Nakatani Tadao. Courtesy of
Nakatani Tadashi and the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive, Keio University Art Center.
Figure 22.3 Ashikawa Yoko in Geisenjo no Okugata (1976), photograph by Nakatani Tadao. Courtesy of
Nakatani Tadashi and the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive, Keio University Art Center.
207
SU-EN
face. This ability to show a landscape, induce smell and color, to change the space, to change from
something very hard into something very soft, gives us a hint of the essence of ankoku butoh. We
are bewildered at the power of human existence and the essence of living. Ashikawa as a dancer
continues to develop and change over time. Transcending form, human existence, and every
intention of art, Ashikawa is one of the world’s astonishing dancers of transformation.
The extended Butoh Body

Having been a member and student of the Tomoe Shizune & Hakutobo studio for several years
showed me how the choreographic philosophy is an extension of daily life. To explore and define
one’s identity as a dancer and artistic body, the concept of the Butoh Body6 is under constant
investigation. The Butoh Body means the inside quality and intention of the existence and con-
dition as it is placed on stage. The Butoh Body is an extended body. It is a living artistic organism,
in intense interaction with the world around it. This body cannot be seen without the space
around it, it cannot live without all the other living beings, it cannot move without the tension
of different realities. The Butoh Body does not exist without other bodies.
After the death of Hijikata in 1986, Ashikawa continued his work with the dancers in the
group. In this instance the Butoh Company Hakutobo comprised Ashikawa and the other
female dancers.7 The company eventually relocated from Asbestos-kan in Meguro to their own
headquarters in Kokubunji and later to Nishi-Ogikubo, in the western suburbs of Tokyo. The
transmission of Ashikawa’s artistic body into her dancers’ bodies took the work in a new direc-
tion. This long-term process with a committed group of dancers produced the possibility of
developing work, in which every person/body is as important as the others. The members, all
quite different as persons and with different talents for dance, all contribute to the work. The
rich material of existing choreographies and phrases from Hijikata were stylized and developed
in this process. Words changed, phrases were taken apart and re-organized, and new material
was created in the process. The emphasis was on the quality of the Butoh Body as the starting
point of the choreography. The extended Butoh Body of Hakutobo is unique and would not
have been achieved without the complete dedication of the dancers. I and some other devoted
students had a unique opportunity to be part of this process. The community living of Hakutobo
and shared finances, at that time earned through burlesque performances, provided the practical
infrastructure for the artistic productions.
Art, punk, and color through the body

Ashikawa’s own choreography, starting in 1987, was a vivid, explosive step. She choreographed
and directed a series of productions in which two Hakutobo performers were the lead butoh
dancers in each work, mainly at the tiny performance space Plan B in Nakano, Tokyo. Dance
journalist and critic Kuniyoshi Kazuko described the work Hifu ni naru Inu Doke (Skin Clock for
Those Wishing to Become a Dog):
The provocative method of the year-long series Skin Clock for Those Wishing to Become
a Dog, which began in January 1987, was the rawest of sketches, a wild scrawl which
repudiated any inclusive flow towards completion cutting remorselessly through time
yet coming together from the most incongruous direction, and was a fire-bell to the
flesh, which if left to itself would immediately show a nostalgic yearning for stability.
The violent fragmentation and bold composition of these performances sustained a
208
highly charged atmosphere which spurned whatever discourse attempted to insinuate

itself. Though seemingly an outright desertion of butoh, I saw this series as a biting
critique of butoh the part of Ashikawa.
1990, 5
In the following years Ashikawa choreographed a series of productions directed by Tomoe with
each Hakutobo dancer as the main performer – their debut performance.8 Performances such
as Nichi-rin (Sun Wheel), with lead dancer Ashikawa Shoko, and Getsu-rin (Moon Wheel), with
lead dancer Ashikawa Megumi, both from 1988, show Ashikawa’s dedication to forming this new
generation of strong dancers. She put equal emphasis on the solo parts for the main dancer, and
the intricate ensemble parts, and together the performance grew to an integrated whole. The
choreographic language demands that each dancer’s part adds artistic material to the pieces, and
therefore the dancer must train to have the skills to do that. These many performances contain
edgy, funny, and beautiful dance, and we can sense Ashikawa’s background in formal visual arts
in their expression. The choreography vibrates of art, punk, and color; young and fresh, still with
dignity and a serious investigation of butoh.
In all Ashikawa’s choreography, costumes, stage art, music, and spatial design are crucial. Ashi-
kawa designed the costumes and all the dancers constructed them. Stage sets were created by
collaborating artists or by the company. All the dancers needed the skills required to work with
various materials in order to create what was needed. The visual aspect as well as the choreog-
raphy was never considered to be final. The choreography or spatial placements would suddenly
change as the final rehearsals took place on stage. In some cases there would even be shouted
commandos from the side stage during performance or Ashikawa would even throw 5 yen coins
on stage if we made a mistake.
From 1988 to 1990, Ashikawa was summer lecturer at the American Dance Festival Inter-
national Dance School, and also performed internationally with Suzuki Tadashi’s theatre pro-
ductions and appeared in Yoshida Kiju’s Madame Butterfly in Lyon, France. The next stage in
Ashikawa’s choreography developed in close relationship with Tomoe Shizune, the company’s
artistic director from the middle of the 1980s. Tomoe, having his background in music, defined
the body in relationship to space and sound and in this way expanded the outline of the Butoh
Body. In Nyushoku no Onna (Milky Woman) from 1988 with Ashikawa Seisaku as a lead dancer
and Shumu (String Universal Dream) from 1988, directed by Tomoe and choreographed by
Ashikawa, we see this exciting progress. With Ashikawa’s intense training, all the dancers had
developed a Butoh Body quality and virtuosity. The work is not underground anymore; and
Shumu, ready for a larger and international audience, toured to the Netherlands. I would like to
reflect upon Ashikawa’s central solo in Shumu, which I have seen her dance in several versions
on stage and on film.
She stands alone, separated from all of us. She places herself at the very center of stage and of
time and space. Her costume is a dark brown gown, a kimono worn back to front, her hair softly
fluffed out around her head. Her dance reveals the past, present, and future. She slices time and
eats space. Her body is surrounded by the space, not swallowed by it and not fighting it. Body
and space are one. Through her face, she conveys utmost raw beauty, like a sculpture shaped in
rock. This rock has cracks in it. It is made rugged by rain and wind. There is an animal, an old
lady, a child. They are all connected through time. This solo, unique to Ashikawa, is a turning
point between Hijikata-style butoh-fu and the aesthetic influence of Tomoe. Ashikawa´s body
seems to have reached the essence of the dance rather than the intention of shape. Her dance has
qualities that reach beyond butoh.
209
SU-EN
The body of the impossible

A great teacher does not give up on you. She interferes, disturbs, and challenges you until there
is a shift, a change. She forces you beyond limitations and fear. Ashikawa, with Tomoe’s artistic
vision as fuel, is such a teacher.
In the Butoh Body of Ashikawa, the teaching, choreographing, and performing are insepara-
ble. The teaching of Ashikawa aims concretely and immediately at achieving the artistic for the
stage.9 She challenged the Hakutobo dancers and we other students to take butoh further; not
just repeating shapes from the past. There was a sense of speed and urgency – and no time to
intellectualize. The dance emerged from her body and that body was transferred to us. Ashikawa
referred sometimes to pictures from art books and described physical reality through words or
displayed the actual objects. She also danced with us, and we followed, pulled along by her intense
energy. The existing Hijikata butoh-fu was still used as a base, but seen as tools for something
new. Many existing phrases were re-used, colored by new material and choreographic ideas, and
they emerged as very different. The smell, texture, color, and qualities were central. Sometimes
she took us outdoors, placing us in a certain environment. This infused reality into the dance we
recreated in the studio. We were told to look at “real” things. Underlying the training was the
question “Why are you doing this?” The training was encompassed in straight-forward questions,
and we dancers were expected to show an actual change in our performance. We can say, “Yes,
I understand” easily. However, if this change cannot be perceived in the body or in the space in
performance, then it has yet to happen. We had to struggle to put her abandonment of intention
into our performance. If one of us did not reach the point she aspired to, Ashikawa would angrily
run out of the studio, leaving us in uncertainty until she returned with new energy.
Even if I could not understand all of this at the time, I can share some important notes from
training with Ashikawa:
To go on stage is to fall into unknown space.

We must create an uncertain situation in the body, enter the danger.
We need to find extreme detail and chaos at the same time.
Try the impossible!
We must look at the real world and find the interesting things.
Look for the things we cannot see . . . like the layers of paint in a painting.
Just do it!
Turn the body upside down/inside out.
Don’t think you know anything . . .
Dance is not something to keep for yourself!
Don´t be serious, it is all a game!
To be taught and choreographed by Ashikawa is to stand on the edge of a volcano. She rocks the ground
beneath our feet. Her words, sharp as knives, reach for that point of transformation in the dancer’s body
beyond tears, where the Butoh Body is alive and sparkling. I celebrate this each time I go on stage.
Creative challenges for the body

As the Butoh Body is transmitted from body to body, from teacher to student, the method
naturally changes. The materials, choreography, and phrases start to be alive in another person’s
210
body. In one way this happens in a second, but takes years until it reaches clarity. I trace my
own work to Ashikawa’s Butoh Body, and back to the original source of Hijikata’s butoh-fu.
But it is not a fixed method or form. I cannot teach another person’s method or dance another
person’s dance. Aiming for change and making the next performance are the keywords of
Ashikawa’s work.
Here is a summary of my reflections on the Butoh Body transferred from Ashikawa:
Butoh materials cannot be copied, but must be reborn again and again in the student’s/dancer’s
body. If there is no passion or fire, it is just empty shapes.
The learning process is not something to master alone, the teacher and the group provides the
resistance for the Butoh Body to become alive. Years and years of hard training with one’s
teacher is the only way.
Butoh materials contain limitations at first, but lead to ultimate freedom beyond shape. This
training is not for the weak-hearted or for the person who wants a quick and easy solution.
The Butoh Body must dance on stage. Without an audience it does not exist. We must offer our-
selves as dancers, as bodies to the audience, which provides resistance for the dance to become real.
The method from Ashikawa and Tomoe provides tools for challenging the body, for creating
a dancing transformative body for stage and infinite possibilities of choreographing new work.
This method holds the secrets to give birth to “something” out of “nothing,” to make even the
dirt and the darkness shine. There is tension. It is creation.
Nature screams and whispers

Hifu Uchu no Magudara (Magdalene of the Skin-Cosmos, 1989), directed by Tomoe and choreo-
graphed by Ashikawa, was performed on only one occasion. I saw it on stage at Togamura Fes-
tival, where I helped out. In this beautiful performance we hear how nature whispers, speaks,
sings, and screams. The entire Hakutobo Company performs. The main roles are danced by
Ashikawa as the Old Tree, dressed in dark brown and Ashikawa Uzumi as the Young Tree,
dressed in spring green. The visual image is so simple, yet provides a profound realization of
the connection between humans and nature. The choreography, the costumes, stage sets, and
also the music composition by Tomoe connect the body to the ever-ongoing process of life and
death in nature. The Young Tree is born out of a seed from the Old Tree. They exist together
in the forest surrounded by other living beings. There is a storm and the Old Tree fractures
and falls. The Old Tree has left this life, and now the Young Tree has to live on by herself. The
spirit of the Old Tree comes back and dances around the Young Tree. Death is not the end, just
the start of another existence. Ashikawa’s dance has evolved and aged. She dances on the border
between life and death. Her transparent fingertips, the spiral shaped lines through her body,
her breath as a black hole, the twisting power through her flesh, the layers of skin around her
bones all make me consider my own existence. I am moved to the core of my being. What can
we do in this short moment on this planet and in this life? What does it mean to be human?
The living body grows just like a tree. Roots, branches, leaves. Insects eating its inside, birds
building nests at the top. Wind blowing and tearing at it. When I investigate my place in this
universe, placing my body clearly, and listen with wonder, secrets are revealed.
From 1990 and onwards, Ashikawa appears less and less on stage, and mainly in a shorter
solo with Tomoe and Hakutobo in Renyo (Far from the Lotus), directed and choreographed by
211
SU-EN
Tomoe, and presented internationally, and then retired from being lead dancer but still having an
important role with the company.
Her own words from the article “A Room with a View of the Grave”:
Memory, recollection, and the unconscious belong to the class of things gathered and
made, while ideas which belong to the body can travel to any depth or distance, to the
farthest extremes of light and dark. If one can return again and again from where one
has gone, if one can know the route of going and returning, one can be reborn at will
from the edge of darkness.
n.d., 1
The Butoh Body is a living body. Time passes, realities shift. Still, life remains. Light as dust, hard
as steel, fluid as snake saliva, the Butoh Body of Ashikawa Yoko dances on!
In loving memory of Seki Yumiko, fellow student in the group Gnome. I would like to extend
my deepest gratitude to Ashikawa Yoko, and the members of Hakutobo at the time I had the
privilege of being in the training: Ashikawa Uzumi, Ashikawa Mito, Ashikawa Shoko, Ashikawa
Megumi, Ashikawa Akeno, Ashikawa Seisaku, and Irizawa Hisashi. I also would like to extend
my deepest gratitude to Tomoe Shizune, the artistic director of Tomoe Shizune & Hakutobo.
Thanks to Gilles Kennedy, Richard Hart, and Miyagawa Rieko.
Notes
1 Tomoe Shizune has been the artistic director of the Hakutobo company since the mid-1980s.
2 Ankoku butoh: Hijikata’s name for his dance. Generally translated as “Dance of Darkness,” meaning what
is unexplored and unknown to us.
3 Hijikata’s and his wife Motofuji’s home and studio in Meguro.
4 Butoh-fu: Hijikata’s notational butoh. The dance follows a set choreography and score, based on his
method.
5 Choreography: the Japanese words furi, furitsuke or the English word “text” would be used for the overall
choreography. For the shorter sections the English word “phrase” could be used.
6 The Butoh Body: Japanese word is butoh-tai.
7 In the period described, Hakutobo comprised seven dancers, six women and one man. The dancers all
had stage names and also took the family name of Ashikawa, similar to the conventions of traditional
Japanese performing arts. Some of the dancers now use other names, some remain with Tomoe Shizune
& Hakutobo, and some have stopped dancing.
8 Debut performance: hata-age kōen meaning “raising the flag.” A performance presenting a dancer to the
world as part of the lineage and as an independent dancer.
9 Participation in Gnome and Hakutobo performances, training by Ashikawa Yoko, Tomoe Shizune, and
the Hakutobo dancers, 1988–1993. Received the stage name SU-EN at Kaze no Cho (Butterfly of the
Wind), the debut performance of SU-EN Butoh Company in 1992 at Tiny Alice in Shinjuku, Tokyo.
SU-EN’s notebooks from training 1988–1993. Documented discussions regarding training, performance,
the Butoh Body, and the development of the Tomoe Shizune method in the Hakutobo studio.
Works cited
Ashikawa, Yoko. No date (probably 1989). “A Room with a View of the Grave.” Unpublished. Translation
by Richard Hart.
Ashikawa, Yoko. 1990.” Searching for the Other Person in the Body” originally released in Kikan Shicho,
no. 7. English version released in Tsubushi Butoh Journal No. 1. Translation by Tsubushi Butoh Journal,
Kevin Starbard, and Nohara Yuriko.
212
Kuniyoshi, Kazuko. 1990. “Butoh in the late 1980s,” transcribed lecture from Orientation Seminars on
Japan #19, translated by Richard Hart. Japan Foundation Amsterdam.
Performances
Hitogata (Human Shape), 1976, video.
Geisenjo no Okugata (Lady on a Whale String), 1976, video.
Hifu ni naru Inu Doke (Skin Clock for those Wishing to Become a Dog), 1987, video.
Nichi-rin (Sun Wheel), 1988, video.
Getsu-rin (Moon Wheel), 1988, video.
Nyushoku no Onna (Milky Woman), 1988, on stage at Jean Jean, Shibuya, Tokyo and video.
Shumu (String Universal Dream), 1988, several versions in several locations, and video.
Hifu Uchu no Magudara (Magdalene of the Skin-Cosmos), 1989, on stage at Togamura Festival and video.
Renyo (Far from the Lotus), 1992–1993 on stage in U.S. and Japan, several versions and on video.
213
23
THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE
OF BUTOH
The challenge of Bishop Yamada in Hoppo
Butoh-ha and Shiokubi (1975)
Kosuge Hayato
Letting himself be seduced by the report of a performance by Bishop Yamada, the poet Yoshioka Minoru,
“thoughtlessly” got on a train in Tokyo that was bound for Tsuruoka in the Shonai area on October 10,
1975. Only the critic Ichikawa Miyabi travelled with him on the train. However, when they reached
their destination, many butoh admirers, including Amazawa Taijiro, Matsuyama Shuntaro, Nakanishi
Natsuyuki, and Ikeda Tatsuo gathered in a large granary at the foot of Dewa Sanzan (a range of three
mountains: Gassan, Haguro, and Yudono), which is considered one of Japan’s most sacred places, a place
where the gods dwell. Their purpose was to watch the inaugural performance of the Hoppo Butoh-ha
(Hoppo Butoh School) – a work entitled Shiokubi. The granary being used as an auditorium was full of
enthusiasts from all over the country, as well as local people. Later,Yoshioka remembered:
I was fighting starvation and cold with rice balls made by the performance staff. But the
party afterwards was charged with an atmosphere of excitement. A dancer was singing
on a table where a young woman was kicking sake bottles and dishes. It was certainly
a memorable night in the history of butoh. A turkey was huddled in the shadows, as if
in a dreary washing place.
Yoshioka 1987, 87
Many young audience members slept bundled together after the performance and went home at day-
break. The image of ill-prepared Tokyo artists and intellectuals enjoying a performance in rural Japan,
but fighting off hunger and then huddling together to ward off the chill of a northern autumn night
encapsulates so many of the tensions that were at work between urban and rural Japan (and at work
in butoh itself ) in the 1960s and 1970s. Using the performer Bishop Yamada and his group Hoppo
Butoh-ha as a lens, the chapter will look at the tension between the urban and the rural in butoh.
Crises of the pastoral: Sanrizuka, Minamata, and Hansen disease

Before turning to a close examination of Hoppo Butoh-ha, we must first consider its social back-
ground and especially the tension between urban and rural in Japan during the 1960s and 1970s.
One feature of the relationship was the displacing of societal stress from urban to rural areas in
214
The expanding universe of butoh
much the same way that Imperial Japan once displaced urban stress to colonized Asian coun-
tries (Kasai 2001, 25–27, 141). Three infamous examples are Sanrizuka, Minamata, and Hansen’s
disease. For example, using the principle of eminent domain, the central government seized the
land of the local farmers of Sanrizuka, a district in the southeastern part of the city of Narita for
the construction of a new international airport. The farmers were fiercely opposed to the land
seizure, and like the Edo-period peasants’ revolt (Ikki), were motivated by the need to defend
their livelihood and families. The farmers – and even the women and older people – carried
bamboo spears, spread human feces on the ground to deter riot squads, and chained themselves
to the watchtowers. These events demonstrated the farmers’ militancy and strong attachment to
their land. As a consequence, construction work on the airport began in 1969, but its opening
was delayed until 1978.
In addition, environmental pollution – at its worst between 1965 and 1975 – became a
major issue. The most infamous water pollution case involved Minamata disease, named after
Minamata City, in the far southwestern corner of Japan, on the beautiful Yatsushiro Sea. The
disease was caused by ingestion of organo-mercury compounds discharged into the water as
effluent by the Chisso Corporation, poisoning the local fish population, which was a major food
source for the local populace. The pathology of this disease is characterized by the degeneration
of nerve cells, including numbness in the extremities, clumsiness in minute movements, tremor,
and ataxia. The patients were all rural victims of rapid industrialization, just like the farmers of
Sanrizuka.
Thirdly, a campaign was waged against the powers-that-be to restore the dignity and humanity
of the forgotten victims of Hansen’s disease (leprosy). In this case, discrimination was blatant, and
most institutions treating Hansen’s disease were built in remote rural places. The patients there
led miserable lives, ostracized in their villages and often forced to wander, homeless, before finally
being compelled to live in sanatoriums, as if they were criminals.
Rural Japan in the 1970s

After the success of the Osaka Expo in 1970 and the reversion of Okinawa in 1972 – and
even though “double-digit economic growth ended abruptly in the fall of 1973” with the
oil crisis (Gordon 2009, 285) – the general mood in Japan in 1975 was still optimistic. A few
years earlier, in 1968, Japan had become the second largest economic power in the world,
its GNP outstripping that of West Germany. Many Japanese companies introduced new
technologies and plowed large investments into industrial plants and equipment. Given these
circumstances, the proportion of the population living in rural areas fell rapidly, because so
many people were moving from the countryside into cities and changing their lifestyles
(Inoki 2000, 164).
Despite the very real incidences of the despoiling of rural locales mentioned above, or perhaps
precisely because of them, institutions began campaigns to romanticize the rural as a place where
urban individuals could and should find themselves and discover their own origins. In the mid-
1970s, people could afford to travel back to the countryside (but not in the traditional sense of
going out into the world [risshin shusse] and then being welcomed home with the red carpet), or
on a sightseeing excursion. A National Railways tourism campaign entitled “Discover Japan”
became widely popular through the mega hit song “Ii Hi Tabidachi” (Departure on a Fine Day),
sung by Yamaguchi Momoe in 1978. As Marilyn Ivy has pointed out:
Discover Japan capitalized on personal dramas of encounter unfolded along classically

narrativized points of separation, quest, encounter, and return. Rather than the rush
215
Kosuge Hayato
to view and photograph famous sights collectively . . . , Discover Japan advocated a

solitary, small-scale form of travel, in which landscapes became settings for miniature
dramas of national-cultural and subjective discovery.
Ivy 1995, 35
This trend drastically changed the image of rural Japan, from the place to escape from or nostal-
gic homeland, toward the place of origin or the destination for travel for “discovering myself ”
(Ivy 1995, 40).1
Hijikata’s response to the urban rural divide

Although butoh was created in Tokyo, and shaped by the social and political urban culture of the
1950s and 1960s, Hijikata responded to the tension between the urban and the rural in the late
1960s and 1970s. In 1972, Hijikata drew on his interpretation of the aesthetics of rural Tohoku
in Hosotan (A Story of Smallpox), which was the first piece in the dance series, Shiki no tame no
nijūnana ban (Twenty-seven Nights for Four Seasons). The performance begins with the sound
of wind and the cawing of crows. The scene is apparently in the remote and impoverished
northeast, where Hijikata was born, with songs by Goze, poor blind women who travelled the
country singing and playing the samisen. The sixth scene in the performance is the climax of
this dance piece, lasting twenty minutes. Supine throughout the scene, Hijikata appears to suffer
from Hansen’s disease, although it is described as “smallpox” in the title.2 He is half-naked with
chafed, unhealthy skin; he never stands up and he moves his legs slightly in a feeble and sickly
way, with quivering limbs also reminiscent of Minamata disease. This dance could be interpreted
as Hijikata presenting a butoh version of anti-authoritarian aesthetics in rural scenes, such as the
memory of a rustic prostitute, and a sufferer of Hansen’s disease. Hijikata’s artistic experimenta-
tion with violent body movements as well as the rediscovery of indigenous elements from the
rural countryside attracted many young aspirants. This expansion might be derived from the fact
that the essence of butoh could be found both in urbanity and locality/rurality, and the tension
between them.
Bishop Yamada in the Hijikata studio and Dairakudakan

Around 1968, suffering from free-floating anxiety in an unstable political and social setting,
Bishop Yamada left a prestigious private high school in Tokyo halfway through the term, and
went to work as a physical laborer. During this period, having recently seen Hijikata Tatsumi and
Japanese People, he jumped at the chance to become an apprentice at Hijikata’s studio. Bishop
described his feelings at that performance, as follows:
I was really excited at that time. Perhaps because I was very young, the sight sent chills
of delight up my spine. It was my first experience. I was moved! I was struck all the
more because I had been self-conscious about my own body while doing manual labor.
Hijikata’s body was quite different from the naïve popular image of a hard, muscular
laborer’s body. I felt as if I were being showered with powerful emotion.
Yamada 2016, personal interview; Kosuge 2017, 32
He worked for Hijikata in cabaret shows, and in many pornographic and B-grade films.
Among the latter was Kyofu kikei ningen (Horrors of Malformed Men) directed by Ishii Teruo
216
and released in 1969, in which he appeared with Hijikata. The original story, written by
Edogawa Rampo, the first modern mystery writer in Japan, tells the tale of a young medical
student who travels from circus sideshows to a desolate island and discovers that his father is
a web-fingered madman who is surgically remaking normal human beings into misshapen
monsters in order to make a paradise for them, as an act of revenge on the society that has
bullied and isolated him. Hijikata acted the part of the malformed father, with his disciples
appearing as the victims. Bishop witnessed his master’s dyed-in-the-wool realism in the
depiction of malformed bodies in the film (Yamada 1992, 70). Well known as a Japanese
cult movie, it demonstrates Hijikata’s strong interest in different places and non-ordinary
bodies and minds. A couple of years later, in 1972, Bishop left Hijikata’s circle to participate
in the new dance company Dairakudakan, run by Maro Akaji, who had come from Situation
Theater.
Just as Yamada was leaving for Dairakudakan, Hijikata’s butoh became strongly conscious of
his northern birthplace, especially through the 1972 performance of Hosotan. Since then, butoh
has been discussed in the context of this northern area; in other words, Hijikata has been regarded
by critics as rediscovering the indigenous bodily movements of northern rural Tohoku as part
of his anti-authoritarian practice. One prominent critic, Ichikawa Miyabi even when so far as
to say that Hijikata’s main concern was to oppose “urban idiot culture” (Ichikawa 2004, 149).3
Influenced by that discursive environment and by Hijikata’s words, it might be said that just as
Bishop Yamada had not just thought about the working class, but had actually become a laborer,
so also Yamada did not just talk about rural areas and movements, but was the first disciple to
actually move to a rural place and put his master’s idea into practice, reflecting the potential of
butoh as a site-specific performance. See Figure 23.1
Hoppo Butoh-ha in Tsuruoka

After “the long days of the phallus” (Yamada 1992, 220) ended, and overwhelmed by a terrible
sense of emptiness and his own miserable physical condition, Bishop set off in the end of 1973
to the foot of Mt. Haguro in Tsuruoka, seeking resilience through the power of mountains.
Tsuruoka is located in the Shonai region, in the western part of Tohoku, and is famous for its
ethereal mountain atmosphere. The Yamabushi or ascetic mountain priests still practice austerities
there, simulating the experience of death in order to acquire holy or magical powers from the
mountain spirits.4 In addition, a number of sokushin-butsu, the dead bodies of Buddhist monks
who mummified themselves, primarily during the Edo Period, have been preserved in several
temples in the area.5 These ardent monks rejected food and water and gradually starved to death
as they prayed. Their mummified bodies are still worshiped as emblems of a strong faith and as
protecting deities.
In this lush, green part of northern (Hoppo) Japan, Bishop opened a studio for “Hoppo”
Butoh-ha. In his own way, Bishop was responding to both the larger societal discourses of the
rural as well as Hijikata’s personal mythology about the north. By actually moving to Tsuruoka
and opening a “northern” butoh school, he in effect enacted in real life what advertisements
and performances only staged. He rented a large two-story granary in the Banden area of Inaoi-
cho, where rice fields stretch as far as can be seen, in the direction of Mt. Gassan. He imme-
diately started refurbishing the building and the Hoppo Butoh-ha studio was completed in
September 1974. He held a big reception in October; Hijikata Tatsumi, Maro Akaji, Murobushi
Kō, Amagatsu Ushio, Osuka Isamu, Tamura Tetsuro, and many other supporters came to join him
and to perform themselves.
217
Kosuge Hayato
Figure 23.1 Bishop Yamada in the dressing room at the cabaret in Matsuyama in summer 1973,
photographer unknown. Courtesy of Bishop Yamada.
Shiokubi (1975)
Following Batta-ou (The King of the Grasshoppers), which toured the Tohoku area from April
to July 1975, Bishop produced Shiokubi (Salted Heads, i.e., dead heads preserved with salt) for
the formal inaugural performance of Hoppo Butoh-ha.(Figure 23.2) The performance was pre-
sented three times in three days, starting on October 10, 1975, at the Hoppo Butoh-ha studio
in Banden. The running time was approximately 135 minutes. An audience totaling 1,800
218
Figure 23.2 A promotional poster for Shiokubi (1975). Courtesy of Bishop Yamada.
people came from all over the country to see the performance. The performers, who were
called “messengers from hell,” included Bishop Yamada and Hoppo Butoh-ha, Maro Akaji and
Dairakudakan (Murobushi Kō, Amagatsu Ushio, Osuka Isamu, Tamura Tetsuro), Ashikawa Yoko
from Hakutobo, Tamano Koichi and Harupin-ha, Mori Shigeya, and local dancers. Hijikata
choreographed Ashikawa but did not perform himself. Although Bishop Yamada was the main
director and choreographer, his job involved inserting each performer’s dance into the overall
composition, because most of the dancers were independent and their own bosses (Yamada 1992,
250–251). His most important task, therefore, was to create a “vessel” and to determine the flow
for the various contributions by the other dancers. His main concept for the “vessel” for the
dancers was a large coffin and large round openings on a raised clay stage. Amazawa Taijiro, a
poet, described the scenes in this performance:
At the back of the stage, silent heads appeared one by one until there were five, floating
in the blue light. The heads were shaved, and their unmoving eyes were blazingly wide
open with thick kumadori makeup [a style of Kabuki makeup that emphasizes emotion].
They came to the front of the stage and danced, but the reflections of their vibrant
naked bodies and physical minds already seemed like an illusion. The essence of their
existence was in the head or dead head or head preserved with salt. In the meantime,
from a “hole” in the middle on the stage, the leading head gradually peaked out, and
then rose until it fully appeared. These “holes” – openings with their edges secured by
straw mats – were hanamichi, openings through which the dancers could enter and exit
the stage. And of course signified the abysm that leads to hell. Dancers appeared there
and disappeared; in other words, those holes represented the womb of all incarnations
219
Kosuge Hayato
of beauty and devilry, as well as the entrance gates of darkness. The success of Shiokubi
lay in the centripetal force of these holes, and especially in the splendid and remarkable
figures that appeared from them.
quoted in Yamada 1992, 247–248
The scene described by Amazawa was followed by a group dance by young members of Hoppo
Butoh-ha, and then by solo dances performed by Mori, Tamano, Yuki, and Ashikawa. When the
scenery changed, an unpainted coffin suddenly appeared in the dark. Maro and four dancers from
Dairakudakan were crouching in the coffin; they danced with their backs to the audience for
15 minutes to the music from Carmina Burana. On their backs were painted Hokusai’s wave-like
patterns in blue and white, and they wore colorful painted antlers on their heads.
Why did Bishop create the shio (salted) kubi (heads), and what was their significance? Although
shio (salt) has abundant cultural connotations, Bishop chose this word for its somatic sensations. He
remembered finding every dish too salty when he first came to Tsuruoka, and wrote that this was
his main reason for using “salt” in his first performance (Yamada 1992, 254). This somatic sensa-
tion also influenced Hijikata, who was born in Akita Prefecture. In a passage dedicated to Hoppo
Butoh-ha, Hijikata mentioned sour salted eggplant to connect Tsuruoka with “sourness,” expect-
ing Bishop to be a “sour Butohist” (Hijikata 1998, I: 348). The word kubi (head), when combined
with shio, strongly suggests the head of a defeated soldier or executed criminal, as their heads were
sometimes preserved in salt and shown to the public in premodern times. However, Bishop hit
upon the word suddenly, without any connection that he was aware of (Yamada 1992, 254).
More importantly, what is the butoh body that Bishop discovered in the northern part of
Japan? Perhaps as a reflection of and contribution to the discourse tying butoh to northern Japan,
many contributors to the program thematized the “northernness” of the performance and the
company. Among them Shibusawa, in the essay “Temptation of the North,” introduced Hijikata’s
remark that butoh preferred the northern part of Japan or “Hoppo” because the starting point
for butoh was the posture of being huddled up with cold (Shibusawa 1975). Both Ichikawa
Miyabi and Gunji Masakatsu said that northern areas covered with snow and ice symbolized
“death” in “Dancers in the Northern Boundary” (Ichikawa 1975) and “Dead North Butoh”
(Shiseru Kita-no Butoh, Gunji 1991b). We can say that Shibusawa, Ichikawa, and Gunji all took
the essence of butoh to lie in the emaciated shriveled body shivering in the cold, and that they
discovered the essence of butoh in rurality by taking this emaciated body as a characteristic of
the Tohoku body on the basis of connecting that image to the idea of “death.”
Perhaps indicative of his position betwixt and between the rural and the urban perspec-
tives, Hijikata contributed a beautiful but enigmatic essay, entitled “Give a Turkey to Hoppo
Butoh-ha,” to the program. He wrote:
The piece of vacant land overgrown with weeds where you [Bishop Yamada] are living
now is a strange and obscure choice, whether the land is yours or another’s. In any case,
you should keep a turkey on a field of sand. You should create a community frantically
running about to escape from turkeys chasing them. The turkey in a full red costume
will chase and peck the grain-like blood cells of excited dancers . . . It is my favorite
childhood dream to keep a turkey on a field of sand in a rural area.
Hijikata 1998, I: 346–347 6
Hijikata turned his words into deeds. He sent a turkey to Hoppo Butoh-ha and urged them to
rise with the bird out of one of the openings on the stage. This did not happen for technical
reasons, but the turkey was kept in the studio until the end.
220
The local people reportedly found these dancers and their dances strange and disturbing; some
people thought they were ultra-left wing activists from Rengo sekigun (the United Red Army)
or even more frightening monsters, such as cannibals (Yamada 1992, 233). In 1975, although
the political student uprisings of the late 1960s were past, people still vividly remembered the
Asama-Sanso Incident, in which five members of the URA holed themselves up with a hostage
for ten days in a remote mountain-lodge in February 1972. Soon afterwards, it was revealed that
this group encouraged such severe self-criticism that they had lynched and killed twelve mem-
bers in the mountains of Gunma Prefecture. As the URA often conducted army training deep in
the mountains, local residents easily connected Bishop and his disciples with extremist groups or
the cannibals of popular mythology.
Hoppo Butoh-ha in Hokkaido

The following year, in the spring of 1976, Bishop left Tsuruoka and moved further north to Otaru
in Hokkaido. He rented a three-story red brick building, constructed in 1906, which became
the model for Kobayashi Takiji’s short novel, Fuzai Jinushi (An Absentee Landlord). It was refur-
bished as a tavern and studio called Umineko-ya (black-tailed gull tavern). He also opened a
small theatre, Gyoran-kan (fish basket house), in the neighborhood. Hoppo Butoh-ha was active
in Hokkaido for about seven years (1976–1983), together with the all-female butoh-company,
Suzuran-toh (Lily of the Valley Party) directed by Yuki Yuko, who was a disciple of Hijikata’s and
the only woman among Dairakudakan’s founders. In his memoirs, Bishop called it a very good
start and described how it rapidly became famous; however, customer traffic decreased suddenly
in October due to the anticipated severe winter, or “Hokkaido time.”
His years in Tsuruoka and Hokkaido made Bishop Yamada assume that the roots of butoh lay
in the indigenous northern region, as seen in Shiokubi. During their Hokkaido years, Bishop and
Yuki presented many performances inspired by the climate, such as Sakana-no Nioi-no suru Ojo
(Princess with the Smell of Fish, by Suzuran-toh, 1977), Hokke-ko (Study of Atka Mackerel, by
Suzuran-toh, 1978), and Gekka-no Une (Ridges in a Field under Moonshine, by Bishop Yamada,
1982). These activities, however, seem to have represented a desperate struggle for Bishop. At
the end of this experiment, he concluded that it was almost impossible to expand butoh outside
urban areas. As a result, he left Hokkaido and returned to Tokyo around 1984. He recalled that
this was mainly for financial reasons and because rural communities did not understand the value
and cultural potential of butoh during this period. Thus, butoh incorporated into its expression
the movements and body rooted in life in rural Japan, but was not interwoven into the popular
lives and the history of Otaru, as was the case with folk arts. Perhaps Bishop’s miscalculation
lay in not taking fully into account the diversity within the rural areas. A dialogue between an
Umineko-ya master and a stranger in Muramatsu Tomomi’s novel Umineko-ya-no Kyaku (Guests
of Umineko-ya) conveys the atmosphere:
GENTLEMAN: What is Hoppo-Butoh ha?

MASTER: Do you know the Dance of Darkness?
GENTLEMAN: I don’t know . . .
MASTER: Well it is hard to explain. I cannot say, it’s
a kind of avant-garde dance, and it is hard to
explain to amateurs.
GENTLEMAN: Amateurs . . .
MASTER: I mean there are people who have nothing to do with these kinds of dances. I cannot
explain anything to those people.
GENTLEMAN: OK.
221
Kosuge Hayato
MASTER: Hijikata Tatsumi, Maro Akaji, Bishop Yamada . . . you probably never heard any of
those names.
GENTLEMAN: Are they the Dance of Darkness?
MASTER: There are many schools in the Dance of Darkness and Bishop Yamada opened Hoppo
Butoh-ha based on Otaru . . . But everybody has left and only one dancer remains.
Muramatsu 1986, 17–18
Returning to Tokyo, Bishop met Hijikata after an interval of ten years. Bishop and Yuki appeared
in Takazashiki (Jumping Spider) choreographed by Hijikata in Sogetsu Hall in 1984, two years
before Hijikata died. After this performance, Bishop sometimes staged shows in local cities and
outside Japan, but gave up trying to build rural centers.
Philosophical/urban and local/rural

Under the Meiji government (1868–1912), a primarily agricultural nation previously controlled
by hundreds of semi-independent feudal lords was reconstructed as a highly centralized govern-
mental system, creating a unipolar culture. This political and social trend continued up to the
1960s and proved so successful that the cultural norms of urban Tokyo are generally regarded as
reflecting a “universal,” ubiquitous, and sophisticated standard connected to the Western culture
that Japan imitated in its modernization, while rural cultures are assumed to be indigenous,
particular, and uncivilized. This dichotomy seems to be rooted deeply in the minds of modern
Japanese society.
Hijikata felt a powerful longing for urban western culture at the start of his career, to the
extent that he was quite familiar with the works by western surrealist artists such as Henri
Michaux, Willem De Kooning, and Francis Bacon, and he was also deeply interested in Jean
Genet and Andre Breton. Such influence can be clearly seen in his butoh-fu (butoh notation).7 On
the other hand, Hijikata incorporated indigenous Tohoku images as seen in Hosotan in 1972 and
after. Thus, butoh has both “universality”/urbanity and locality/rurality as its essence.
The most likely explanation of this dual nature of butoh is due to the discrepancy between
the philosophical purpose behind the creation of butoh and the artistic approach to the body.
As previously mentioned, from the time of the Meiji Restoration, when Japan promoted “Civ-
ilization and Enlightenment,” it wanted, at least in theory, to incorporate Western culture and
make it a norm for all of Japan. Tokyo, where the central government was located, took in West-
ern culture immediately, and this resulted in the equation: Western = Universal = Metropolis
(Tokyo). Inevitably, the corresponding equation was: Indigenous = Local = Rural (Tohoku). It is
probably correct to say that even today, this is the fundamental understanding of Japanese people.
The ambiguity of butoh lies in the fact that when one thinks of its essence, one’s understanding
wavers between these two equations. It is probably safe to say that the “universality” that Japan
has been striving for since the Meiji era is a fake, prejudiced, constructed, and standardized “uni-
versality,” but butoh certainly has a genuine universality and urbanity if we return to the sense of
universality as that mentality that all people originally possess, or to the sense of urbane as that
which arises from city culture. This genuinely universal and urbane nature of butoh probably
derives from its purpose as the philosophical quest to discover what the body is and how it can
be represented. Kasai Akira argued that butoh should not be categorized as dance but rather as
an attitude or spirit of one’s own body. He called butoh the “art of the spirit,” as well as the art
of the body, considering both classical ballet and traditional Japanese dance as forms of butoh
(Kasai 2004, 62). Bruce Baird interpreted the universality of butoh as an opportunity to under-
stand other types of suffering:
222
The universality of suffering offers the universal opportunity to try to understand the
pain of another person. Butō . . . provides an opportunity to examine one’s self, and to
try to understand the world of (and particularly the suffering of ) others.
Baird 2014, 5
Butoh’s locality/rurality, on the other hand, is based on an artistic approach that finds style in
unordinary, unconventional, and unexploited bodies and body movements, favoring an eccentric,
unsophisticated, and premodern or personal local or rural location; for Hijikata, this was espe-
cially Tohoku.8 However, this is not to say that Hijikata liked indigenous culture itself; rather,
he preferred the non-city elements as something that could arouse a bodily consciousness that
is usually forgotten. He set “domesticated” (kainarasareta) urban ordinary manners against rural
everyday lives as he says:
Everyday life has butō-ness, you know. For example, when you are a kid and subject to
your parent’s anger, and you get beaten. You run away. They chase you. You run out-
side. When the people in the neighborhood are watching, you are conscious of yourself
playing the role of a child actor, there is butō in that moment.
Hijikata 1998, II: 16
Hijikata here had found “butoh-ness” in the habitual and “domesticated” lives in Tohoku, as well
as in personal and indigenous consciousness, as is shown in the childhood memory described in
Yameru maihime (La danseuse malade).
It should be noted, however, that, as Bishop Yamada realized from his Tohoku experiences,
Hijikata’s Tohoku as an artistic resource is not a real place, but was created and performed as a
never-never land according to his butoh method. Bishop recalled his impression when he saw
a collaboration between Hijikata and a Goze, Sugimoto Kikue, and he felt Hijikata seemed so
shallow in comparison that he realized Hijikata’s Tohoku is artistically created and therefore it is
only a quasi-Tohoku:
In front of a real Goze woman, Hijikata is only a toy and plastic. Goze is the “real body”
and Hijikata is a “kyo-tai” (performed body). Hijikata’s is fake, but it is OK because
butoh is how to create that performed body.
Yamada 2016, personal interview; Kosuge 2017, 66–67
Bishop and Hoppo Butoh-ha accepted the challenge of presenting their butoh as site-specific,
rural performances. While one might consider his experiment in actualizing Hijikata’s mythic
northern butoh in the real world to ultimately have been a failure, as butoh has continued to
spread throughout Japan and, indeed, all over the world, others have taken up the challenge of
localizing butoh in rural areas. Today one can find butoh thriving in both urban environments
and remote landscapes. The expansion of butoh reflects its ambivalent combination of urban-
ity and rurality – on the one hand, thematizing the Northern (Hoppo) area as the Urheimat
of Hijikata’s “darkness” and, on the other hand, emphasizing a ubiquitous, transnational, and
nomadic nature detached from any cultural values. Butoh has remained amorphous and capa-
ble of expanding its cultural articulation. Gunji Masakatsu described his admiration for Hoppo
Butoh-ha after a visit to Otaru in autumn 1980:
The aspiration of Hoppo Butoh-ha is the journey to hear the voice of butoh and to
confirm the bodies of butoh. It flashes across my mind that I want to believe in the
223
Kosuge Hayato
young dancers’ journey: that they went to meet the Sun in the North where it is dead
because they couldn’t wait for it to be born.
Gunji 1991b, 269
Notes
1 In fact, perhaps anticipating this trend as early as 1969, Hijikata collaborated with Hosoe Eikoh to pub-
lish a photographic collection, Kamaitachi, in which they set out to capture invisible memories of their
hometown using Hijikata’s body and Hosoe’s camera.
2 A sanatorium for people with Hansen’s disease was once located in the place where Hijikata constructed
his dance conservatory, Asbestos Studio (Motofuji 1990 40–41). The description of Hosotan refers to
Kosuge (2013, 56–60).
3 Another example, among many, is Gunji Masakatsu writing in 1985 that the essence of Hijikata butoh is
rooted in Tohoku climate (Gunji, 1991a, 264). In 2004, a special edition of Butai Hyoron entitled “Hiji-
kata Tatsumi and Tohoku” contains articles and dialogues dealing with the relationship between Hijikata
Tatsumi and Tohoku (Mori 2004).
4 Hijikata was interested in Yamabushi practices because he greatly aspired to create a style of dance in which
the other self would watch his dying body, as Naito Masatoshi, a photographer, reports (Naito 1987, 134).
5 Hijikata refers to the coexistence of death and life in “Dance of the Mummy” in a program essay written
for a performance of Murobushi Kō (Hijikata 1998, I: 349–352).
6 In fact, Hijikata quite often related his wild fancies and never took any concrete steps to realize them.
Bishop Yamada is not sure Hijikata really had such dreams (Yamada, telephone interview, May 2, 2017).
7 As for images and analysis of butoh-fu, see, for example, Morishita 2015.
8 “Locality” naturally includes rural locality, suburban locality, and urban locality but all of these are associ-
ated with “rurality” in the sense of unsophistication and unfamiliarity with the manners of “Yamanote-
Bunka (urbane high culture).” In Japanese terminology, inaka-mono (country bumpkin) sometimes can
be used to refer to rustic people even if they are born in a big city.
Works cited
Baird, Bruce. 2014. “The Becoming-Universal of Butō.” Keio University Art Center Newsletter: Artlet. No.
42: 4–5.
Gordon, Andrew 2009. A Modern History of Japan. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gunji Masakatsu. 1991a. “Butō to iu buyō no kisetsu.” Gunji Masakatsu sakuteishu Vol. 3: Genyo-no michi.
Tokyo: Hakusuisha.
————. 1991b. “Shiseru kita no butoh.” Gunji Masakatsu sakuteishu Vol. 3: Genyo-no michi. Tokyo:
Hakusuisha.
Hijikata Tatsumi. 1998. Hijikata Tatsumi Zenshu. 2 vols. Edited by Suehiro Tanemura, Yoshihisa Tsuruoka,
and Akiko Motofuji. Tokyo: Kawadeshobō.
Ichikawa Miyabi. 1975. Performance Program of Shiokubi. Tsuruoka: n.p.
————. 2004. “Nikutai ga shiso ni shōka.” Hijikata Tatsumi no butō: Nikutai no shururearizumu, shintai no
ontoroji. Edited by Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kawasaki, and Research Center for the Arts and Arts
Administration, Keio University. Tokyo: Keio University Press.
Inoki Takenori. 2000. Nihon-no kindai 7: Keizai seicho-no kajitsu 1955–1972. Tokyo: Chuokoron.
Ivy, Marilyn. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity. Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Kasai Akira. 2004. “Hijikata Tatsumi o kataru: Ishiki no henkaku o mezashita butō-ka.” Hijikata Tatsumi-no
butō: Nikutai no shururearizumu, shintai no ontoroji. Edited by Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kawasaki,
and Research Center for the Arts and Arts Administration, Keio University. Tokyo: Keio University
Press.
Kasai Hidemichi. 2001. Tohoku: Tsukurareta ikyo. Tokyo: Chuokoron.
Kosuge Hayato. 2013. “Transformed and Mediated Butoh Body: Corpus Moriens in ‘Hijikata’s Earthen Statue
Project’.” The Hiyoshi Review of English Studies. No. 62: 51–73.
———. 2017. “Bodies Heading for the North: A Dialogue with Butoh Dancer Bishop Yamada.” The
Hiyoshi Review of Humanities. No. 32: 27–78.
224
Mori Shigeya, ed. 2004. Butai Hyoron Vol. 1. Yamagata: Tohoku Geijyutsu Koka Daigaku Tohoku Bunka
Kenkyu Sentā.
Morishita Takashi. 2015. Hijikata Tatsumi’s Notational Butoh: An Innovational Method for Butoh Creation.
Tokyo: Keio University Art Center.
Motofuji Akiko. 1990. Hijikata Tatsumi-to tomoni. Tokyo: Chikumashobō.
Muramatsu,Tomomi. 1986. Umineko-ya-no kyaku. Tokyo: Asahishinbunsha.
Naito Masatoshi. 1987. “Hijikata butoh to Nihon shinwa-no kozo.” Gendai-shi Techo, (November): 134–137.
Shibusawa Tatsuhiko. 1975. Performance Program of Shiokubi. Tsuruoka: n.p.
Yamada Ippei. 1992. Dancer. Tokyo: Ota Shuppan.
———. 2016. Interview by Author, May 21.
———. 2017. Interview by Author, May 2.
Yoshioka Minoru. 1987. Hijikata Tatsumi sho: Nikki-to inyo-ni yoru. Tokyo: Chikumashobō.
225
24
MUROBUSHI KŌ AND HIS
CHALLENGE TO BUTOH
Katja Centonze
Dance/Death as a political choice: the 1960s

Murobushi Kō (1947–2015) occupies a key position in articulating butoh’s original intention
of corporeal revolution. One of the unique traits of Murobushi’s work is that he persevered in
exploring the political quality inherent in Hijikata Tatsumi’s butoh. Murobushi also attempted to
challenge the image of butoh itself and to continuously remap corporeality. He opted for dance
envisaged as a practice of radicalism and resistance and attempted to demonstrate that making this
decision implies a certain responsibility, which puts us in the uncomfortable condition of facing
corporeality and spectatorship (Centonze 2009). Hence, in Murobushi’s case, dance is a paradox
that unfolds already as a political act, while being apolitical. Crucial to this aesthetic enterprise is
the coupling between dance/corporeality and death, which guides the performer and the audi-
ence towards the raw experience of risk, danger, and crisis. The body stands out as a place where
critical forces come into play, and the ground on which problematic conflicts interact.
Murobushi says he started to dance when he decided to die (Murobushi in Centonze 2016a),
and he started to dance/die when he encountered Hijikata’s corporeality and writings. The core
of Murobushi’s art becomes the oxymoronic essence of dance, which according to Hijikata is
“the corpse standing straight at the risk of its own life” (cf. Centonze 2017, 204). In his teens
Murobushi was devoted to Nietzsche, French literature (in particular to Rimbaud’s poetry),
Artaud, and Beckett. He frequented dance clubs and jazz cafés in Shinjuku. During the tumultu-
ous 1960s, Shinjuku’s streets were the main stage for avant-garde happenings and demonstrations
against Security Treaty-driven postwar domestic policy and Japan-U.S. alliance politics. In 1966,
he entered Waseda University, which was dominated by student activism.1 His devotion to poetry
writing was transformed in these years into a curiosity for the rebellious and critical body: the
nikutai (cf. Murobushi 2011).2 Fascinated by the actions of avant-garde artists, such as High Red
Center, he formed with university fellows the experimental group Mandragora, whose happen-
ings expressed anti-nationalism and anti-imperialism.
Nevertheless, it was in Hijikata that he discovered a possible solution for his questions about
corporeality. At the recommendation of Nakanishi Natsuyuki, Murobushi went to see Hijikata
Tatsumi and Japanese People: Rebellion of the Body (1968) and was deeply impressed. Months later
he visited Hijikata at his studio with his school friend Bishop Yamada. They were immediately
recruited by Hijikata for the shooting of Arai Misao’s Onsen ponbiki jochū (Hot Spring Spa Maid
226
Murobushi Kō and his challenge to butoh
Pimps, 1969) and were subsequently also featured in Ishii Teruo’s Kyōfu kikei ningen (Horrors of
Malformed Men, 1969). Murobushi practiced only for a short time under Hijikata, and only
in the films and the kinpun shō, the gold-painted body cabaret shows, which contributed to the
livelihood of the butoh dancers and to performative experimentation.
In 1972 Murobushi was a founding member of Dairakudakan along with Tanigawa Toshi-
yuki, Ōsuka Isamu, Amagatsu Ushio, Tamura Tetsurō, and Bishop Yamada, gathered around the
charismatic and influential Maro Akaji. Important female members included Carlotta Ikeda,Yuki
Yuko, Furukawa Anzu, and Mizelle Hanaoka (Yoshioka Yumiko). In 1974 Murobushi edited and
published the first issue of the butoh newspaper Hageshii kisetsu (Violent Season) (Centonze 2009,
167). He also started to direct and produce the female company Ariadone no kai centered on
Carlotta Ikeda (who was trained in Graham modern dance technique), choreographing among
others the trilogy Mesukazan (Female Volcano 1975–1977).3 In 1976 he founded his male butoh
company Sebi4 and established his butoh studio, Butō Garan Hokuryūkyō, in the mountains of
Gotaishi (Fukui). Throughout the 1970s the work of Ariadone, Sebi and Dairakudakan over-
lapped, as fluid exchanges of dancers and services were carried out between the “mother group”
Dairakudakan and the different companies formed by its individual members (Okamoto 2016).5
Beginning in 1980, Murobushi’s choreography of Ariadone and Ikeda attracted increasing atten-
tion, such that he contributed to shaping the image of butoh overseas, which was particularly
associated with Ikeda in the press.6 Jean Baudrillard described their butoh as the “theatre of
revulsion, convulsion and repulsion” (Baudrillard 1985, 38).
At the same time as he worked with these companies, Murobushi also continued to create solo
works. Over the next two decades, his influence outside Japan grew exponentially and he became
a point of reference for the notion and practice of butoh. In 1986 Murobushi and the Italian
dancer and visual artist PierPaolo Koss founded the mixed-gender Ko Murobushi Company.
Their transcultural butoh fostered interactions between Japanese and western dancers, and gained
visibility with important productions like Panta Rhei (Maison de l’Unesco, 1986). Beginning in
1991 Murobushi began to spread his influence to Central and South America, touring also with
Kusanagi Urara while choreographing their intense duets. Murobushi’s influence on the inter-
national dance scene cannot be underestimated. He inspired countless overseas butoh dancers,
such as Yvonne Pouget (De Giorgi 2012). Since the late 1990s Murobushi played an important
role in reorienting butoh with respect to contemporary dance, while shaping bodies of young
contemporary dancers (Centonze 2010, 2014).
Shugendō, yamabushi: a further step towards the outside

Pivotal to Murobushi’s corporeal landscape was a centrifugal attitude which pushed him to
continuously experiment with new ways of challenging his body, and which was presented in
his manifesto as the concept of “butoh of the outside” (1986). With respect to this, during his
university years, Murobushi’s concern for blurring identities, gender hybridity, anti-social forces,
and self-sacrifice (as conceived by Georges Bataille) found a new cognitive source in the itinerant
yamabushi (mountain ascetics), who cultivate shugendō, folk beliefs based on arduous body tech-
niques that may bring the practitioner close to death. He was interested in Honda Yasuji’s survey
on yamabushi in relation to Japanese folk performing arts and in 1970 joined several extended
ascetic trainings as a lay participant at Yudonosan in the site of Dewasanzan.
Yamabushi, or liminal beings (Miyake 2001, 79), were feared in the past for their transforma-
tional power. Their environmental practices – principally articulated in exposing the ascetic to
untamed nature – included rituals of death and rebirth, dietary rules and fasting, risky mountain-
climbing and long distance walking, fire and waterfall-rituals, and retreat into dark and
227
Katja Centonze
narrow caves. Shugendō leads to a peculiar command over the body, and the yamabushi, by under-
going extenuation, heighten their physical capacities and refine sensorial perception while cross-
ing the borders between human, animal, and divine.
Although these are disciplines strictly connected to mountain worship, Murobushi did not
approach these techniques for mystical or religious purposes, but in order to expose his body
to terror and peril, exploring collapse and enduring pain. In addition to the corporeal avant-
garde strategies put forth by Hijikata based on the metamorphic body and non-human agency
(Centonze 2016b, 2017), these corporeal experiences were to have a strong repercussion on the
(kin)aesthetics and the economy of movement of Murobushi’s performances, where superfluous
dynamics are avoided.
Miira and sokushinbutsu

Murobushi explored shugendō as a form of resistance to social order, to cultural categorization.
He discovered the nucleus of his performance, the apotheosis of the corporeality of the outside,
in the miira (mummy) or sokushinbutsu, “the ascetics who sought to achieve salvation and immor-
tality through self-mummification” (Raveri 1990–1991, 250). Proscribed from the Meiji period
onwards, self-mummification, the attainment of Buddha-hood in this body, was the ultimate
goal of a yamabushi (Miyake 2001, 65, 78). Miira were buried alive in coffins or in tiny chambers,
sometimes sitting in a lotus posture, and disinterred usually after three years.7 If the mummifica-
tion process was incomplete, the corpse would be disemboweled and dried with candle smoke
and incense. These destabilizing and disruptive figures incarnate the apogee of ambiguity and
hybridity. The miira debunk the category of age and gender, and, above all, they disintegrate time
logic. The miira may be considered as anti-establishment catalysts who cast doubt on the cul-
tural difference between life and death and engender a new form of power, while indicating the
need for a new social and political body in historical situations of upheaval (Raveri 1990–1991,
257–260).
Drawing on the idea of the miira, Murobushi viewed dance as a playground for investigating
the limits of the body, a heterogeneous body which trembles on the edge between life and death.
His radical ideas about dance practice led to experiments in self-entombment in performance,
rather than in a spiritual process. The miira corpse presents an extreme challenge to borders of
physicality and becomes a symbol of the apex of contradiction shivering between presence and
absence in performativity, visibility, and invisibility, and points at the highest form of self-sacrifice.
These eternally preserved corpses, the ultimate objectification of the body, may denote oscilla-
tions between human and thing, organic and inorganic, and embody to the nth degree, the idea
that, as Murobushi says, “our own body is the first ‘Other’ and the first ‘alien thing’ we confront,”
and that dancing is “being outside” of the myth of identity (Murobushi 2015).
Komusō and the acéphale

In Komusō (1976), his first official miira performance, he confined himself in a coffin where a
fire was kindled. He then faced the audience sitting with his legs crossed in front of the open
box in a fetus-like position with high flames behind him. His mouth is wide-open in a dilated
mute scream of terror (or is it a laughter?), and his clenched fists seem like they are affixed to
his darkened face. His black-painted8 head and naked, stiffened body are covered with ashes,
smeared with mud and different materials are applied, which hang from his ‘carbonized corpse’
like epidermal shreds. His feet are in a contrived en de dans position, while his leg painstakingly
lifts. For Murobushi, Komusō consecrated his distinguishing characteristics as a self-defining artist.
228
Komusō are mendicant Zen monks who cover their heads with woven reed hoods that com-
pletely cover their faces like an overturned basket. This procedure of concealment is a form of
erasing one’s identity. The headless body (acéphale) is a peculiar aspect of early butoh (Centonze
2017), and Murobushi made a trademark out of wrapping the head. The process of removing
the face, of wiping out one’s connotations may be connected to the concept of “effacing” and
obliterating one’s presence, which appears in Foucault’s discourse on Blanchot and the outside
(1987, 13). What Foucault refers to in language and thought, Murobushi applies to his dance
politics and corporeality, or to be precise, Murobushi mirrors his ‘dance of the impossible’ in the
philosopher’s biopolitics.
Murobushi defines himself as the “miira poet” and aims at the laughing miira (Murobushi
1995). He detects the paradox the miira embodies: “If we look at it, we see how it continues to
metamorphose moment by moment . . . The miira is not dead, it seems as if, being resolute in
death, it lives while continuing to embody death” (2009, 2). He refers to Hijikata’s concept of
dance as the standing corpse and adds:
The whole life is a process of collapse, and collapse itself is dance. . . . Obviously, there
is something like the impossibility of movement in the body of the miira, but how shall
we move starting from such a condition? This has become my theme. While untying
this [condition], how can we invent movement? [Therefore] I trained in electric baths.
2009, author’s translation
Murobushi underlines the transcultural aspect of practices of mummification, disrupting them

from a discourse of national identity, and contrasts the rhetoric built around Tōhoku and butoh’s
origins with his artistic exploration achieved in Fukui, which he views as an international
ground, as the entrance and exit to other countries (ibid.). Referring to Komusō, Hijikata (1987,
227–228), declares that he has discovered in Murobushi’s strange dance a new form of Buddha’s
holy remains, a new miira, a new butoh, which he considers very close to the starting point of
his own butoh.
Hinagata and Lotus Cabaret

Mainly choreographing Sebi and Ariadone and dancing under the project name Lotus Cabaret,
which suggests his sense of life-risking cabaret dance mixed with humor, Murobushi created
the series Hinagata (1977–1982) in relation to self-entombment. The term hinagata may be
referred to as “shapes of eternal darkness” and is one of Murobushi’s poetical shifts composed
by a peculiar combination of Japanese signs. It may also indicate, for example, the “stratification
of multi-dimensional darkness.” In this series Murobushi continues to explore physically and
intellectually the eternal darkness one might experience in an ignited coffin, the economy and
states of the body in a lightless burial chamber, where the senses may be overturned, and the eye is
de-authorized and reoriented. His written manifesto “Hinagata” (1977) addresses corporeality in
relation to the verge, edge, corner, madness, self-sacrifice, and eroticism, and Murobushi declares
that he kills himself in the place of butoh. The text in the “Hinagata” manifesto is followed by a
quotation from Thus Spake Zarathustra, the passage about chaos and the dancing star in the pro-
logue (1939, 13–14), demonstrating that this dance is envisioned in light of Nietzsche’s thought.
This creates connective associations among the Übermensch Zarathustra, the wandering yama-
bushi, and the sokushinbutsu mummies.
In January 1978, under the name “Mesukazan and Sebi,” Murobushi, Ikeda, and Yoshioka pre-
miered The Last Eden in Paris, and put butoh firmly on the map in Europe. As this performance
229
Katja Centonze
is discussed elsewhere in this volume in detail, I will limit myself to two observations. Divided
into ten tableaux, The Last Eden alternated trios, solos by Murobushi and Ikeda, and duets by
Ikeda and Yoshioka. In their solo parts, Murobushi enacted his miira, adding also a scene of a
cross-dressed mummy, and Ikeda danced scenes taken from Mesukazan (Murobushi 2009). The
second tableau, where he appears in an ignited coffin, presents the living mummy identified with
Miroku (Maitreya Buddha), the future Buddha to come, worshipped in the millennial cult and
Buddhist eschatology. Centered on the body as the door to the otherworld, it combines elements
from western and Japanese mythology, religion, and esoterism.
Murobushi and Ikeda themselves unwittingly contributed to another stereotype of butoh,
which Murobushi later drastically opposed. The miira corpse with its aesthetics of burnt skin
dropping from the body might be easily confused and coupled with the images of the ignited
cadavers left after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki leading to an immediate identifica-
tion by the French audience of butoh with the atomic bomb. As was suggested some years later,
Murobushi’s body, the incarnation of the physical suffering, and his mummy evoked the universal
image of prisoners of the concentration camps and of the mannequins exposed in the museum
of Hiroshima (Palmier 1985, 27–28).
Zarathustra
Without a doubt Murobushi’s representative choreography for Ariadone is Zarathustra (and its
subsequently altered re-stagings). In some versions, it enacts a complicated reworking of the myth
of Ariadne, Dionysus, and the Bacchantes. Retracing themes treated in The Last Eden, but reor-
ganized into an organic and aesthetically polished style, Zarathustra unfolds in eight tableaux of
oneiric and hallucinatory scenes highlighting the ambiguity between dream, illusion and reality,
madness and violence. In its Tokyo premier, Z-A 1980 Zarathustra, a gigantic iron Minotaur is
decapitated and female dancers appear from behind the dead man/bull as Nijinsky’s fauns. In
its European stagings the half-naked and white-painted bodies of the female dancers, moving in
slow-motion, are a vessel wherein the memory of the past transforms into the memory of the
future, and into a book of conundrums.
Nietzsche’s prophet Zarathustra is considered as the body that bridges East and West, and an
explicit identification of the dancers with Zarathustra is made. In order to deepen their knowl-
edge of the alterity (of the West) they descend holding Ariadne’s endless thread. And thus, for
Murobushi, the descent along Ariadne’s web is an intercultural process of acquiring knowledge,
which testifies to his feverish eagerness to escape attitudes of exoticism and to level differences in
a reciprocal process of acquaintance, between him, the stranger, and the Other, who is his double.
Murobushi seems to re-enact Nietzsche’s fight with his enemy who is himself. Zarathustra was
also informed by Murobushi’s idea that “the first dancer was an ironsmith” (Murobushi 1992).
Eventually, Murobushi’s miira/hinagata works were presented in Japan in a transnational light
and in an explicit association with Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts. On the invitation postcard
for the 1981 opening performance of “Shy,” his tiny drinking place/theatre, is written: “Koh
Murobushi presents RHIZOME de lotus Cabaret.” Besides this clear reference to the rhizomatic
thought of Deleuze and Guattari (1996), Murobushi’s restless mobility later finds complicity in
Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of nomadism and de-territorialization. There is a constant attempt
in Murobushi to reach the outside from the fringe, and to approach this politics of thought in
his active corporeality. Nevertheless, in my opinion, Murobushi was necessarily bound to the
process of reterritorialization (Centonze 2016a), which probably entered into conflict with the
“nomadic absolute” (Deleuze and Guattari 1996, 494) in his everyday life, whereas he achieved it
in his performative corporeality and the economy of movement (cf. Centonze 2009).
230
For the recreation of Zarathustra (2005) Murobushi weaves into his choreo-speculative lab-
yrinth, among others, the re-examination by Deleuze (1997) of Nietzsche’s dancing thought
concerning Ariadne.
Murobushi’s non-human theater and reterritorialization:

quick silver on the Edge
In my opinion, Murobushi’s ideal goal lies in the 1960s corporeality of the nikutai, preserving
its constituent elements of rebellion and anarchism, visible in his productions in the 2000s. The
apotheosis of Murobushi’s political body placed outside, its outrageousness and insurrection takes
on a more concrete shape beginning at the end of the 1990s, when he concentrates again on solo
productions like Edge (2000), Experimental Body (2004), quick silver (2005), and Krypt in Kama-
kura (2012). At this stage we see exacerbated his negation of art and the project of dance as a
preservation of incisive radicalism. His devotion to anti-dance is empowered and articulated as
a strategy to avoid associations with both butoh and contemporary dance categories. He recants
love, ecstasy, and trance, and the accent is laid on the political rapport and the critical distance
among the dancer, his body, and the spectators (cf. Centonze 2016b). His philosophical investi-
gations find their embodiment in his denouncing corporeality, and it becomes more obvious that
his dance posits a philosophy, while challenging cognitive practices. His choreographies pay more
attention to challenging forms of crisis and dissident corporealities as shown by his male com-
pany Ko&Edge founded in 2003 (Centonze 2009), whose members are Meguro Daiji, Suzuki
Yukio, and Hayashi Sadayuki, who is succeeded by Iwabuchi Teita.9
In this later phase he usually appears half naked and sometimes silver painted, wearing only
a pair of trousers, or in only a suit he normally takes off on stage. His dance focuses more on
non-emotional corporealities crossing the edge between the organic and inorganic, including
Figure 24.1 Murobushi Kō, quick silver (Azabu Die Pratze, Tokyo, 2006), photograph by Awane Osamu.
Courtesy of Awane Osamu.
231
Katja Centonze
Figure 24.2 Murobushi Kō, Krypt (Kamakura, 2012), photograph by Awane Osamu. Courtesy of Awane
Osamu.
processes for which the performer animates the inanimate and renders inanimate the animated.10
In quick silver, dance and identity develop distinctly as intoxication, the experience of contagion,
and freedom (cf. Murobushi in Centonze 2010, 127; Centonze 2011, 277). His toxic silver body
is the thermometer measuring the audience’s attention and tension. Practices of self-intoxication,
which prevent the body from corroding, are typical in the miira procedures. Murobushi envisions
a corporeal identification with the extremely volatile and toxic mercury, a poor conductor of heat
and fair conductor of electricity and the only metal that reaches liquid state and dissolves other
metals. Mercury is the symbol of speed and mobility, the First Matter embracing gender fluidity
in alchemy, and an important element in shugendō tradition (Miyake 2001, 182). In Murobushi’s
later theatrum chemicum we encounter an exasperation of restlessness rubbing against the immo-
bility achieved in his stone-hard metal-body in order to approach the impossibility of movement
(typical of the cadaver) displayed in a context where his transformational identities are in a fight
among themselves.
His engineer-like operation on movement, resistance, and attrition in relation to corporeality,
identity, and territory appeared palpably in his extraordinarily vehement quick silver, performed in
Lecce in 2007 during the transcultural project “Atnarat,” which critically examined corporeality
in butoh and tarantism in order to overturn the concept of dance (Centonze 2011, 224–229).11
It was obvious that he was violently coping with the host territory’s identity, while being in fric-
tion with his own. The aggression against his own body reached its apex when he crashed into
the cameraman, which is quite unusual for Murobushi. In contrast, his more balanced Atnarat,
enacted on the following day in collaboration with Elektra Ballet, seemed a (re)conciliation with
the alter and a re-evaluation of his Dionysos and Ariadne who encounter Arachne.
There are several notable aspects of Murobushi’s dance including the extraordinary, fall-
ing technique, the masterly shivering, his elevation and elasticity, the conformation and
232
maneuvering of his spine. His characteristic walking on all fours like a feline is a telling exam-
ple of how he constructs the movement without imitating the animal, while his body voices
the process of devenir contemplated by Deleuze and Guattari (1996). Murobushi’s extremely
detailed dynamics and anti-dynamics manifest an extensive multiplicity and intriguing out-
come based on contradictions. Repetition in contrast to repertory unfolds in its pervasive
plurality and among the fundamental principles sustaining his dance are: taoreru (falling) and
keiren (seizures). His paralyzed and contracted body suddenly falls on the ground from a ver-
tical position, heavily and rigidly like a compact block, like an unanimated object.12 These
collapses, abrupt precipitations, seem to be without intervention on behalf of the executor,
and contain his concept of zero speed. His body smashing impetuously to the ground, often
followed by keiren when landing flat on the floor, provokes a violent impact, which resonates
and produces a compact, loud bump. Generally speaking, keiren may be envisaged from an
anti-capitalistic perspective as contesting neoliberalism and the politics of society of sur-
veillance. Butoh’s keiren escapes choreographic rules, but is disciplined. This dance strategy
of disturbance makes clear the non-integrity of our body, while disrupting its culturally
constructed relation to identity and to the object in a disintegration of the vectoriality of
language and naming (Centonze 2016c, 2017).
Decisive are the sounds engendered by his body: his frightening vocalizations, as those pro-
duced in quick silver (Lecce), are not human. He crouches down like a quadruped and with
impressive take offs, raises his forelimbs, followed by a rapid extension of the hind limbs. In
Murobushi’s dance these elevated vertical jumps fly out of the crevices of ontology, while he
emits lacerating primal screams hailing out of the cracks of his conflictive body, which provoke
cracks in the audience, lacerating their bodies. The flexibility of his spine enables him to land on
the floor and then to repeat the jump and landing over and over again.
Murobushi stops the dance before dancing. He creates obstacles and abrupt interruptions,
which disrupt the performative act and its fictiveness, thereby processing and performing
through corporeality crevices in ontology and fiction. In that respect, important elements, to
be grasped by the audience, are the spoken or murmured interjections, self-ironic comments
about his movement, which edge in and abort the potential narrativity intrinsic to stage art, as
when he suddenly stops and reflects (Centonze 2009, 172–174). At the end of his improvisa-
tion at the Tokyo Experimental Performance Archive (2014), when he drags his inert body out of
the high tension scene, looking at the audience, he says unexpectedly: “Kaerimasu” (I am going
home), provoking spontaneous laughter among the audience. When facing one’s own body,
the conflictive rapport creates a corporeal resonance in space capturing and electrifying the
audience’s bodies standing on the edge. Both the beholder and the performer are immersed
in an electric bath. Murobushi also shifts the border of the stage which separates the spectator
from the performer, such as when he falls off the stage, as happened in Edge (2003) at Teatro
Rasi (Ravenna, Italy).
Murobushi creates fissures between thought and dance, as when he lay down and buried his
face in the cracks of the dry earth in the outdoor part of quick silver (Lecce), singing in a dis-
torted version some verses of the popular song Santa Lucia (Centonze 2011, 226). The core of
Murobushi’s dance politics is that these cracks are provoked by and intrinsic to the shivering of
the body. As he states, spasm is chasm, deviation and digression, momentary and unreachable,
the evidence of our lacerated body (1979). Keiren displaces and places the dancing body outside
fiction, brings it close to silence, resonance, and exchange, and is a form of knowledge never
to be achieved, and the dancing body is incognisable (Murobushi 1996). For Murobushi these
spasmodic contractions, which combine the antinomy of tension and release, are “the exhaustion
after an impossible resistance,” the failure of it, but its only strategy (Murobushi 2012).
233
Katja Centonze
Conclusion
Murobushi contests forms of butoh that wink at the audience, betraying the essence of dis-
turbance. Constantly in collision with the narrativity of the homogenous Japanese identity,
Murobushi’s corporeality attempts to erode from within the kokutai, the body of the Emper-
or-centered state, which implies a construction of embodied nationalistic identity. He was not a
political activist, but an artistic activist, and his dance stands out as a denouncement, more than
an act with a particular political aim. His anti-nationalistic and anti-fascist sentiment addressed
evolving forms of Japanese nationalism in the current society of advanced globalization, and the
impossibility of his identity is fostered by socio-political theories.13
One of his last performances was his contribution to the dancing museum project 20 Dancers
for the XX Century (2015), directed by Boris Charmatz at Tate Modern. Even in such a revo-
lutionary project, which questions dance conventions, he seemed to be restricted by limits. I
wonder if he was the only one among the performers who attacked with his teeth and bit the
rope which separated the performance space from the exhibition space.
In his fight with his body, which articulates in an open self-criticism, Murobushi threatens his
own body as in a self-ignition, while putting fire on dance. His dance unfolds as a falling into
one’s own grave, as delineated in Enthusiastic Dance on the Grave (2013) and in his solo Ritournelle
(2013). This was Murobushi’s butoh: always questioning, always challenging, until the very end.
Notes
1 Murobushi refrained from joining any student movement. Nevertheless, he was arrested after Zenga-
kuren’s successful demonstration in 1968 against the opening of the military hospital at Camp Ōji for
treating patients injured in Vietnam. For a report on the demonstrations, see Jameson (1968).
2 I intentionally do not translate nikutai as “flesh.” The agency of nikutai in the 1960s was central to
avant-garde counterculture and the corporeality of nikutai proposed by Hijikata is of particular note. My
research is based on the diverse constructions of the body in Hijikata’s strategy of performance and lit-
erature by analyzing terms of corporeality (Centonze 1998, 2010, 2016b). Murobushi, passionate reader
of an extensive literature, was aware of the high value of Hijikata’s writing in relation to performativity.
3 The early trilogy of Mesukazan was directed by Maro. Regarding Ariadone no kai, some sources define
Ikeda and Yoshioka as the co-founders, whereas others, Murobushi and Carlotta as its co-founders.
4 The members of Sebi (fire on the back) included among others Kato Masamichi and Okamoto Yoshi-
fumi. Fire related names are frequent in Murobushi’s and Dairakudan’s activity, and they also integrated
the use of fire on stage.
5 The osmotic relation among these groups makes it difficult to trace precise historical data. Moreover,
Dairakudan’s work was based on a choreographic method in which each dancer presents his/her own
choreography under one umbrella structure.
6 For several reasons, problems of authorship between Murobushi and Ikeda will arise.
7 For the code of ascetic behavior and mummification process of the uncorrupted bodies see Raveri
(1990–1991).
8 In contrast to the general practice of painting the body white, during the 1970s and early 1980s, in his
miira performances Murobushi cultivated the kuronuri practice of painting the body black.
9 For Meguro’s experimentation, see Centonze (2010, 2014, 330–331). For the shift from butoh to con-
temporary dance of Suzuki, see Centonze (2010, 122–128, 2014, 331–332); for the interrelation between
butoh and Japanese contemporary dance, see Centonze (2010, 2014).
10 The struggling rapport between the performer’s corporeality and the brass-panel-bodies in Bibō no aozora
(Beautiful Blue Sky) is a significant example (Centonze 2009, 174–181).
11 This project, Torcito Parco Danza I, was conceived by Annamaria de Filippi, Andrea Pati, and myself.
12 His “free falls” are in opposition to the technique of release and self-protection as carried out in
modern/contemporary dance techniques, or in judo. It should be noted that during his workshops,
Murobushi explained and demonstrated how to fall to the ground in a way accessible to amateurs
as a precaution against injury. Conversely, he himself was beyond such “safe technique.” Oda (2016)
234
describes the dancer’s unique falls as “hotokedaore,” literally, fall of Buddha, a terminology borrowed from
nō technique, which indicates falling backwards like a statue of Buddha.
13 Murobushi’s counter-discourse is underpinned by an extended literature, among which are studies of
intellectuals such as Karatani Kōjin, Asada Akira, Matsuura Hisaki, Osawa Masachi, Nibuya Takashi, and
Uno Kuni’ichi.
Works cited
Baudrillard, Jean. 1985. “Théatre de la revulsion.” Scenes Revue de l’Espace Kiron: Buto. No. 1: 40 (March).
Centonze, Katja. 1998. Butō, l’a(na)rchidanza. Master thesis. Venezia: Università Ca’Foscari.
———. 2009. “Resistance to the Society of the Spectacle: The ‘nikutai’ in Murobushi Kō.” In Danza e ricerca.
Laboratorio di studi, scritture, visioni, 1, edited by Eugenia Casini Ropa, 163–186. http://danzaericerca.cib.
unibo.it/article/view/1624.
———. 2010. “Bodies Shifting from Hijikata’s Nikutai to Contemporary Shintai: New Generation
Facing Corporeality.” In Avant-Gardes in Japan: Anniversary of Futurism and Butō: Performing Arts and
Cultural Practices between Contemporariness and Tradition, edited by Katja Centonze, 111–141. Venezia:
Cafoscarina.
———. 2011. “Topoi of Performativity: Italian Bodies in Japanese Spaces/Japanese Bodies in Italian Spaces.”
In Japanese Theatre in a Transcultural Context: German and Italian Intertwinings, edited by Stanca Scholz-
Cionca, and Andreas Regelsberger, 211–230. München: Iudicium.
———. 2014. “La danza contemporanea giapponese: Il corpo tra tecnologia e natura.” In Mutamenti
dei linguaggi della scena contemporanea in Giappone, edited by Bonaventura Ruperti, 314–348. Venezia:
Cafoscarina.
———. 2016a. “Ko Murobushi Faces Murobushi Kō: A Stranger in His Home Country and in His Body.”
Theatre Arts. http://theatrearts.aict-iatc.jp/201602/3962/.
———. 2016b. “Critical/Seismic Bodies in Hijikata Tatsumi’s Writing Practice and Dancing Practice.” In
Teatro e Storia. Butoh-fu Dossier, 37, edited by Samantha Marenzi, 127–138.
———. 2016c. “Letteratura invaghita del corpo: La danza di Hijikata Tatsumi riflessa nelle parole di
Mishima Yukio.” In Riflessioni sul Giappone antico e moderno II, edited by Maria Chiara Migliore, Antonio
Manieri, and Stefano Romagnoli, 439–462. Roma: Aracne.
———. 2017. “Hijikata Tatsumi’s Sabotage of Movement and the Desire to Kill the Ideology of Death.” In
Death and Desire in Contemporary Japan: Representing, Practicing, Performing, edited by Andrea De Antoni,
and Massimo Raveri, 203–231. Venezia: Edizioni Ca’Foscari. http://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/it/
edizioni/libri/978-88-6969-150-8/
De Giorgi, Margherita. 2012. “‘To Be Renewed Again’ Esperienze di butō in Europa: Yvonne Pouget,
Imre Thormann e Xavier Le Roy.” In Arti delle performance: orizzonti e culture 2. Afterword by Matteo
Casari. Bologna: Università di Bologna, Dip. di Musica e Spettacolo e ALMADL. http://amsacta.unibo.
it/3565/#
Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. “The Mystery of Ariadne According to Nietzsche.” In Essays Critical and Clinical,
edited by Gilles Deleuze, 99–106. Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1996. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated and
foreword by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1987. “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from the Outside.” In Foucault|Blanchot, edited
by Michel Foucault, and Maurice Blanchot. Translated by Brian Massumi and Jeffrey Mehlman, 7–58.
New York: Zone Books.
Hijikata, Tatsumi. 1987. “Miira no butō: Murobushi Kō.” In Hijikata, Tatsumi, Bibō no aozora, 227–231.
Tokyo: Chikumashobō.
Jameson, Samuel. 1968. “Report from Tokyo.” Chicago Tribune, 48, (March 31).
Miyake, Hitoshi. 2001. Shugendō: Essays on the Structure of Japanese Folk Religion. Edited and introduction by
H. Byron Earhart. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies The University of Michigan.
Murobushi, Kō. 1977. “Hinagata.” Hokuryūkyō 1, (March 3), edited by Kō Murobushi and Shō Sumi. Fukui:
Butō Garan Hokuryūkyō.
———. 1979. “Keirenteki.” Ko Murobushi Archive. www.ko-murobushi.com/jpn/biblio_selves/view/8
———. 1986. “‘Soto’ no butō sengen purorōgu.” Ko Murobushi Archive. www.ko-murobushi.com/jpn/
biblio_selves/view/10
235
Katja Centonze
———. 1992. “‘Saisho no butōka wa, kajishi datta’ to boku wa kaku.” Ko Murobushi Archive. www.
ko-murobushi.com/jpn/biblio_selves/view/12
———. 1995. December 20. Unpublished notes typewritten by Watanabe Kimiko.
———. 1996. “In silence no tame.” Unpublished notes typewritten by Watanabe Kimiko.
———. 2009. “Murobushi Kō.” Body Arts Laboratory Interview Vol. 6. Interview with Yamazaki Kōta,
(April 15). http://bodyartslabo.com/interview/murobushi.html
———. 2011. “Artist Interview: The Body at Its Physical Edge. A Solitary Presence among Butoh Art-
ists, Ko Murobushi. Ātisuto intabyū Nikutai no Edge ni tatsu: Kokō no butōka, Murobushi Kō.”
Interview with Ishii Tatsurō. The Japan Foundation. Performing Arts Network, (October 28). www.
performingarts.jp/J/art_interview/1109/1.html
———. 2012. “Watashi wa keirensuru dansā dearu.” Unpublished notes typewritten by Watanabe Kimiko.
———. 2015. “Midnight.” Unpublished notes typewritten by Watanabe Kimiko.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1939). Also sprach Zarathustra. Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen. Introduction by Peter Gasts
and afterword by Alfred Baeumler. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag.
Oda, Sachiko. 2016. “Kemonoburi no hito.” Theatre Arts. http://theatrearts.aict-iatc. jp/201602/4089/
Okamoto, Yoshifumi. 2016. “Interview by Katja Centonze.” Murobushi Archive Shy Café, Waseda,
(October 5).
Palmier, Jean-Michel. 1985. “A l’aube de la nuit des temps.” Scenes Revue de l’Espace Kiron: Buto, (1): 26-34.
Raveri, Massimo. 1990–1991. “In Search of a New Interpretation of Ascetic Experiences.” In Rethinking
Japan, edited by Adriana Boscaro, Franco Gatti, and Massimo Raveri, 250–261. Sandgate: Japan Library
Limited.
236
25
OSCILLATION AND
REGENERATION
The temporal aesthetics of Sankai Juku
Iwaki Kyoko
Amagatsu Ushio, the founder and artistic director of Sankai Juku, is an artist who ruminates
through the process of sedimentation: dripping and dropping superfluous thoughts. Opposing
the western classical ballet tradition, in which narratives are constructed through a dialectic
development, or, differing from the collective brainstorming methodology of Hijikata Tatsumi,
whereby a pool of literary and iconographic imageries are thrown pell-mell into the creative
vessel, Amagatsu, conversely, peels off redundant concepts, aesthetics, and semiotics. This method
of “creative filtration” has been adopted from his very first work Amagatsu-shō (1977): A meta-
phorical tale of an amagatsu, an ancient Japanese doll that used to be placed by a child’s bed as a
talisman (Amagatsu 2015, 23).
Moreover, since many of Amagatsu’s choreographies are variations of the same theme, one
could cogently argue that, for more than four decades since the founding of his company in 1975,
Amagatsu has been committed to the same reflexive sedimentation for the sake of discovering
what he calls the sokei: an archetype of humans (not in terms of Jungean psychology, but more
to do with physical bodies), which, like Leonardo Da Vinci’s L’Uomo Vitruviano, could become
the guideline for measuring the forms, movements, and the overall physical aesthetics of his dance
(Amagatsu 2015, 20).1 By the same token, although there are many other interpretations in terms
of why shironuri (powdering the bodies in pallid white) is adopted in butoh performances, for
Amagatsu, it has to do with highlighting the dancers’ bodies as mere archetypes – an anonymous
“canvas of bodies,” that is devoid of “personal features and characteristics of the profane world”
(ibid. 108).
Quotidian aesthetics and social topicalities have never seeped into the theatrical cosmogony
of Sankai Juku. For Amagatsu, immediate social components responding to the zeitgeist are
cheap auxiliaries, which do not form the quintessence of an artwork. However, it is too simple
to deduce, from here, that Amagatsu’s works conversely approach the realm of mysticism and
spiritualism. In fact, countering those critics who assert that ‘obscurantism’ is taken as a ‘creed’
in Sankai Juku, Amagatsu has not spoken in mystical language in interviews and conversations
conducted over the past decade-plus years (Crisp 2008). Rather, most of his words are supported
by references from natural science such as anthropology, cosmology, paleontology, or evolutionary
biology. In contrast to those ready assumptions that a certain form of spiritualism is practiced in
Sankai Juku, the choreographer has admitted that dancers meditate no more than a professional
237
Iwaki Kyoko
athlete preparing for a run; Amagatsu, himself, swims three times a week but also never meditates
(Iwaki 2017).2
Before expanding the argument on Sankai Juku’s aesthetics, however, at this point it is impor-
tant to provide the basic facts of Amagatsu and his company. Amagatsu Ushio, born in 1949 as
Ueshima Masakazu, is the leader, choreographer, designer, and dancer of Sankai Juku (Mountain
Ocean Laboratory), which he formed in November 1975. Amagatsu’s stage name as well as the
company name, were suggested by Maro Akaji: the leader of another butoh company Dairakuda-
kan (Great Camel Battleship), in which Amagatsu participated for three years before forming
his own company. When the two Chinese characters, mountain and ocean, are paired together,
they suggest the name of Shan hai jing (Guideways through Mountains and Seas): a Chinese
classical text, which compiles various mythologies from the pre-Qin era.3 On April 27 and 28,
1977, Amagatsu-shō the first piece by Sankai Juku was presented at Nihon Shōbō Kaikan, Tokyo.
However, not satisfied with the overall quality of it, Amagatsu deployed much of its content to
develop another show the next year: Kinkan Shōnen. His second piece was a great success, and
caught the attention of Gérald Coste, the then French Cultural Counselor based in Japan. It
was Coste who introduced Sankai Juku to France, and thanks to him, from 1982, the company
have had a long and fruitful relationship with Théātre de la Ville, Paris, through which they have
co-produced new shows every other year (Kuniyoshi 1986, 138–141). And, fully utilizing the
artistic prestige of Théātre de la Ville for the next four decades, Sankai Juku has been one of the
most well-known and well-traveled butoh companies in the world.
Isolated from the everyday world, yet not entering the realm of spiritual mumbo jumbo,
Sankai Juku has managed to speak to the audiences of more than seven hundred cities across the
globe. It is arguable whether there is a ‘universally’ valid aesthetics that speaks to the world, but
through the decades of global-trotting, Amagatsu argues that, at least in his own terms, he has
understood that, there exist both “universality as well as differences” across all cultures:
During the 1980s, I was experiencing a different culture, literally, on a day-to-day

basis. . . . Yet, from that experience, I realized that, as a Japanese man, I have fundamen-
tal feelings, which could be shared universally, yet, on the other hand, there are things
that I cannot share but could appreciate as differences.
Amagatsu 2015, 15
In 2007, when I conducted a yearlong interview session for drafting his biographical book,
Ushio Amagatsu, des rivages d’enfance au butō de Sankai Juku (2013, translated into Japanese in
2015), Amagatsu affirmed that he has reached three “rudimentary (chisetsu-na)” questions which,
according to the choreographer, should transcend cultural differences, and which Amagatsu
distilled into the crux of his oeuvre: “What is life and death?” “What is time?” and “What is a
human body?” (Amagatsu 2015, 97). At the outset, the three questions seem like distinct entities.
However, when continually communicating by the same choreographer for over a decade, one
naturally begins to understand that these questions are deeply entangled at the root. That is, since
the issue of life and death is connected to the question of time, and, because the interrogation of a
human body is inseparable from the investigation of immortality, one could argue that, the three
questions converge to form a single philosophical quest: reflections on time.
Rigorous guardians of butoh have attacked the elegant and sophisticated aesthetics of Sankai
Juku as an unduly purified form of dance that “abstracts butoh’s immanent modality” (Gōda
1984). They have been accused of adding “a designer sophistication to the style” (Roy 2003).
Indeed, compared to the provocative words used to describe Hijikata’s ankoku butoh, such as “a
ritual of a heresy” (Mishima Yukio), “terrorism and scandal” (Shibusawa Tatsuhiko), and “a
238
Oscillation and regeneration
terrifying comedy” (Takiguchi Shūzō; Morishita 2004), Amagatsu’s artistic language seems by
comparison too elegant and luminous – especially after he started to work in France from 1980.
Yet being a second-generation butoh choreographer, who was born by the tranquil seaside of
Yokosuka after the Second World War, and an artist, who developed his career by being supported
by Gérard Violette, the former director of Théātre de la Ville, Amagatsu felt more comfortable
presenting his works at “the catacombs of Rome and monuments of Paris,” rather than repre-
senting the pains and struggles of the former butoh choreographers: quite simply, they were not
in his artistic blood (Brandon 1990, 90).
This comment may raise the question that perhaps Amagatsu’s choreographies should not be
described as butoh at all. Yet countering this common critique, Amagatsu asserts that since his
initial encounter in the early-1970s with Hijikata and Maro has inscribed indelible marks on his
artistic vision – which is exemplified, for instance, by his references to French literature such as
Arthur Rimbaud, and his many collaborations with the artist Nakanishi Natsuyuki – he has the
right to call himself a butoh artist, by origin.
Notwithstanding the fact that some critics condemned his delicate aesthetics, its utter beauty,
has transfixed many more. Especially after the success at the Théātre de la Ville, the “refined
and polished aesthetics,” which communicated well to the sophisticated dance and theater con-
noisseurs in Paris, attained an aura of symbolic capital, so to speak, which, on the one hand,
reassured Western audiences that nothing too unexpected would happen on the stage, and on the
other, captivated non-Western audiences with its French undertone (Brotman 2007, 50). Greatly
owing to this aesthetic sophistication, the artworks of Sankai Juku have been analyzed, primarily,
through their visual components such as costumes (a loincloth wrapped over a shironuri body, or
a cape of a child transforming into a graceful dress of a dance macabre performer); stage settings
(from countless tuna tails amassed to form a mural in Kinkan Shōnen, to a pool surrounded by
corridors with floating eggs in Unetsu); light designs (various angled lights suggesting the passing
of time in Toki, or the twinkling of stars embellishing the moonless backdrop in Tobari); and, of
course, the bodies, which are often described as analogous to carved figures: “classical Greek
sculpture” (Sirvin 1986) or “the relief sculptures of an ancient Indian temple” (Hariki 2006).
In contrast to these numerous cosmetic analyses, however, Sankai Juku’s artistry has been
rarely assessed through temporal components. To be more precise, although Amagatsu’s above-
noted rudimentary questions are more or less related to the concept of time, most butoh studies
have decided not to focus on the temporal language that Amagatsu adopts: what he calls “the
unadulterated time (seiso-na jikan),” which he aims to envisage on the stage (Kage 1983, 79).4 The
term seiso-na epitomizes various ambiences that Amagatsu stages, such as simplicity, purity, relax-
ation, and gentleness. In addition, the term describes a mode of time, whereby distinct temporal
qualities are synchronically experienced and regenerated at each instance. Rather than assem-
bling the past moments to accumulatively reach the future, every moment “oscillates (kyōshin)
and resonates (kyōmei)” between “dynamic and static, silence and noise, darkness and light,” to
compose an unmarked and unknown instance (Amagatsu 2015, 78, 93). Just like various kinds
of microscopic matter start their lives through gentle vibrations of an ovum, in many works of
Sankai Juku, time vibrates, or, to be more precise, oscillates, between seemingly dichotomous
modes of time.
The theory of “oscillating time” is one of the temporal components that Amagatsu often
adopts in his works (Maki 2003, 19). For example, in Unetsu: The Egg Stands Out of Curiosity
(1986), time goes back and forth between the opposing concepts of birth and death. The two
notions are juxtaposed, firstly, by applying water and sand as settings: “the water evokes ori-
gin . . . and the sand could be considered the last of all objects” (Amagatsu and Fukuda 1994,
3). However, the oscillation between birth and death is more vividly represented by a critical
239
Iwaki Kyoko
moment, in which the egg-shaped object, held up by Amagatsu, who looks like an ancient
timekeeper, is demolished, instantaneously, by water pressure. In the second “tableau” (a term
that Amagatsu uses for suggesting scenes) of the piece, Amagatsu silently gesticulates with
an egg-shaped object, eloquently using his tentacle-like fingers tinted with scarlet rouge. His
movements convey to the audience the feelings of anticipation, expectation, and hope towards
an unborn life. Though caught within the laws of gravity, the egg that vertically stands on the
ground seems “to be in a very relaxed state” (Amagatsu 2015, 60). Later on in the fourth tab-
leau, Amagatsu holds up this self-composed egg against a gentle water cascade at the stage left
upstage, and, after a few seconds, the egg, no longer able to bear the water pressure, is shattered
into pieces (Shiota 2003, 212).
The destruction of the egg concurrently symbolizes birth and death. As Amagatsu asserts,
“creation and destruction occur at the same time” (Amagatsu and Fukuda 1994, 3). If the water
cascade is interpreted as the birth canal of a mother, the egg is broken for the sake of a newborn
life; if it is considered as a flow of mortal time, then, the demolition suggests death – the being can
no longer bear the struggles of life that fall upon it. In other words, the moment of the destruc-
tion epitomizes the oscillating time, as it were, in which death is not placed at the accumulative
end point of life, but is represented in tandem with life. In Unetsu, or, in fact, in all works of Sankai
Juku, there is no linear structure of narratives; thus, a certain moment does not become obsolete
with the passing of time.
Every moment seems to be ephemeral as well as eternally recurrent, as on the stage, time freely
travels back and forth between prehistoric past and cosmological future. Put differently, one could
argue that, in the works of Sankai Juku, the concept of time is not represented in an accumula-
tive linear or cyclic format, but rather is experienced as a pendulum pattern. In Judeo-Christian
tradition, time is a one-way path in which the future fundamentally differs from what has gone
before. To use a biblical image, time progresses from Creation to the Judgment Day. In contrast,
in the artworks of Sankai Juku, time is a sequence of oscillations between what many modern
people think as opposite temporal archetypes such as “night and day, winter and summer, drought
and flood, age and youth, life and death” (Leach 1966, 126). In other words, more often than not,
the boundaries between the seemingly distinct concepts of time are blurred in their works: the
paired temporal components coexist side by side.
As if to suggest the absence of a solid border between what are generally considered as oppo-
site time components, especially in recent works, the minimalist stage of Sankai Juku is loosely
compartmentalized by, for instance, scrims painted with red and blue veins (Kara・Mi – Two Flows
2010) or swaying black curtains creating Mondrian-like color blocks (Umusuna – Memories Before
History 2012). Another representation of oscillating time could be observed in Toki: A Moment in
the Weave of Time (2005). On the stage floor of this work, which reminds one of “an ancient ruin
site,” a thin layer of sand is spread, and on top of the sand stands, in an asymmetrical array, “seven
slabs reminiscent of the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey” (Hariki 2006). Between
the slightly tilted slabs, the dancers strike postures, which are reminiscent of “an ancient Indian
Brahmin monk in meditation” (ibid.).
The monks are segregated in individual shacks, tormented by their own anguish. However,
when the dancers start gliding forward against the deep black of the backdrop, their movements
suggest that they are also experiencing a collective time as they all reach for the thin metallic ring
hung above – a life devoted to higher spirit, or simply a life spent under the sun. The slabs could
also imply a menhir, a ring of standing stones like the Stonehenge, which could have been used
to measure time in ancient times: to predict eclipse, solstice, equinox, and other celestial events.
Just from this brief analysis, one can understand that Sankai Juku’s stage components are rendered
to juxtapose different scales, qualities, and concepts of time.
240
Oscillation and regeneration
When questioned by theatre critic Watanabe Tamotsu on “why his body strikes a perfect
balance yet seems so carefree at the same time,” Amagatsu responded that, when dancing his
solos, he simply “look[s] afar” (Watanabe 2009, 3). What Amagatsu specifically means by “afar”
is that, he is trying to utilize his body as a catalyst, as it were, through which the audience can
acknowledge the existence of a time beyond a human lifespan. For example, his physical arm
length might only be around a meter-and-a-half long, however, virtually, Amagatsu’s arms could
defy space-time and touch the moon:
You point at a faraway star on the stage. Then, in the next moment, you move that
finger to the nearby star. Physically speaking, I am only moving my finger for a few cen-
timeters. But when you think about the distance that I moved at the endpoint . . ., one
understands that, in a split second, my finger has travelled for a hundred-million light
years that exist between the stars. . . . When a dancer becomes capable of controlling
this “thread of consciousness,” then, the dancer can spread his consciousness outside of
the theatre, through the Earth’s atmosphere, and even reach outer space.
Amagatsu 2015, 125
In the same manner, when a dancer whirls, like a Sufi Dervish dancer in Umusuna, Amagatsu
intends to represent time that travels back to prehistoric age. As the title of that scene clarifies,
the spinning movement comes to signify a moment in which “Tout ce qui naīt (All is born).” In
other words, the spinning movements are presented not for the sake of formal beauty, but in order
to symbolize and visualize the existence of another dimension of time. In Shijima: The Darkness
Calms Down in Space (1988), the stage connotes a desert landscape with dry air, amber sand, and
ossified mammals. Reminiscent of a ritual dance praying for rain, Amagatsu dances a duet with
his shadow projected behind him. The identical physical features and synchronic movements,
presented by Amagatsu and his larger shadow, metaphorically imply an existence of recurrent
time. By seeing parallels between the dancer and the shadow behind, one understands that what
Edward T. Hall calls the “silent thought” is, physically, inherited from ancestors and passed on
to descendants (Hall 1973). That is, analogous to those young Balinese dancers who “learn
dancing techniques from their mothers, . . . who manipulate the children’s bodies from behind,”
Amagatsu, dancing in front of the shadow, becomes a man who represents his individual life as
well as his accumulative ancestry (Amagatsu 2015, 130).
The luminous tableau vivant of Sankai Juku is constructed so as to convey multivalent layers
of gentle and calm seiso-na jikan (unadulterated time). And, to reiterate, in Sankai Juku’s works,
this qualitatively delicate time does not consist of a linear structure, but, rather, is constantly
oscillating between seemingly dichotomous temporal concepts: night and day, the past and the
present, the unborn and the newborn, the prehistoric and the cosmic time, and so forth. Through
the continuous oscillation, time is regenerated at each new “birth” on whatever plane; and, thus,
to borrow from Mircea Eliade, their artworks are capable of eliciting “an ontology uncontami-
nated by time and becoming” (Eliade 1971, 89).
A butoh artist such as Hijikata did not avoid the everyday in his aesthetics. Rather, in his
works, quotidian pains constitute the marrow of his choreography. Conversely, Amagatsu aims
to elicit a time-space that is uncontaminated by humdrum struggles: a time which can transcend
the agonies of a human lifespan. Unlike numerous contemporary political theater artists and
troupes that readily respond to the zeitgeist, for Amagatsu, art should avoid taking on a political
tenor. Although some may criticize this as an escapist attitude, at least for Amagatsu, art becomes
most powerful when it incarnates a purified time-space, which could tentatively shelter fallen
men and women. Many wonder why they feel both intoxicated and detoxified after attending
241
Iwaki Kyoko
a performance by Sankai Juku. Perhaps it is because, through the temporal aesthetics of Sankai
Juku, the audience succeeds in dispelling the hassles of quotidian life and becomes indissolubly
connected with ancient and cosmic rhythms.
Notes
1 All translations for Jūryoku to no taiwa: Kioku no kanata kara Sankai Juku no buto e (Dialogue with the Gravity:
From Far Before Memories to Butoh of Sankai Juku) are provided by the author unless otherwise indicated.
2 This was before Amagatsu was diagnosed with cancer in Autumn 2017. Since then, he has recreated
earlier productions, such as Unetsu: The Egg Stands Out of Curiosity (1986), for younger members of his
company.
3 See Richard E. Strassberg trans. and ed. A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways Through
Mountains and Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
4 A handful of scholars have written essays that focus on the temporal aesthetics of Sankai Juku. See, for
instance, Sonia Delmas. “Penser le temps avec Deleuze et Sankai Juku.” Kokusai Nihongaku (International
Japanese Studies) Vol. 7, October 2009; and Tachiki Akiko. “Tokeru jikan, bi to sōgon no gishiki kūkan
(Dissolving Time, Ritual Space of Beauty and Solemnity).” Dance Magazine, August 2001, 60–62.
Works cited
Amagatsu Ushio. 2013. Ushio Amagatsu, des rivages d’enfance au butō de Sankai Juku. Arles: Actes Sud.
————. 2015. Jūryoku to no taiwa: Kioku no kanata kara Sankai Juku no buto e (Dialogue with the Gravity:
From Far before Memories to Butoh of Sankai Juku). Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.
————. 2017. Interview by Kyoko Iwaki, May 11.
Amagatsu Ushio and Gan Fukuda. 1994. Unetsu: Sankai Juku. Tokyo: Libro Port.
Amagatsu Ushio and Guy Delahaye. 2003. Sankai Juku. Arles: Actes Sud.
Brandon, James R. 1990. “Contemporary Japanese Theatre: Interculturalism and Intraculturalism.” The
Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre Own and Foreign, edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte et al. Tübingen:
Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen: 89–99.
Brotman, Joanna. 2007. “Review: Beyond the Metaphor of Mirrors.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art.
Vol. 29, No. 3: 46–50.
Crisp, Clement. 2008. “Sankai Juku, Sadler’s Wells, London.” Financial Times. (November 21).
Eliade, Mircea. 1971. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History. Translated by Willard R. Traks.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gōda, Nario. 1984. “Yōshiki sei o chūshō ni shinten Sankai Juku Jōmon shō (Developing the Modalities to
Abstractions: Sankai Juku Jōmon shō).” Weekly on Stage Newspaper. (April 13).
Hall, Edward T. 1973. The Silent Language. New York: Anchor Books.
Hariki, Yasuhiro. 2006. “Confronting ‘Nothingness’: Fear and Trembling Sankai Juku’s Toki – A Moment in
the Weave of Time.” Asahi Shinbun. (March 16).
Kage, Hitoshi. 1983. “Butō wa naiteki na netsu o sonomama katachi ni suru (Butoh Embodies Its Immanent
Heat as It is).” Asahi Journal. (August 26): 76–79.
Kuniyoshi, Kazuko. 1986. “Butoh Chronology: 1959–1984.” TDR: The Drama Review. Vol. 30, No. 2:
127–141.
Leach, Edmund. 1966. “Two Essays Concerning the Symbolic Representation of Time.” Rethinking Anthro-
pology. London: University of London The Athlone Press: 124–136.
Maki, Yūsuke. 2003. Jikan no hikaku shakaigaku (Comparative Sociology on Time). Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.
Morishita, Takashi. 2004. Tatsumi Hijikata’s Butoh: Surrealism of the Flesh Ontology of the ‘Body’. Tokyo: Keio
Gijuku Daigaku Shuppan.
Roy, Sanjoy. 2003. “Sankai Juku.” The Guardian. (June 21).
Shiota, Yasuko. 2003. “Sankai Juku sakuhin ‘tamago o tateru koto kara – Unetsu’ ni okeru kūkan enshutsu
(A Work by Sankai Juku ‘The Egg Stands Out of Curiosity – Unetsu’ and Its Spatial Direction).” Ningen
Bunkaron. Vol. 6: 211–220.
Sirvin, René. 1986. “Nuit blanche.” Le Figaro. Vol. 4, No. 3.
Watanabe, Tamotsu. 2009. “Amagatsu Ushio to Mitsugorō to.” Tosho. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, (June).
242
SECTION 3
New sites for butoh

26
“NOW WE HAVE A PASSPORT”
Global and local butoh
Rosemary Candelario
“Twenty Years Ago We Were Crazy, Dirty and Mad.”
Those words, the title of a 1986 essay by Bonnie Sue Stein in TDR: The Drama Review introduced
many Anglophone readers to butoh.1 At the time, the form was still quite new to audiences
outside Japan, having only been in the international spotlight a few years since Ohno Kazuo’s
performance in France at the Nancy International Theatre Festival in 1980 caused a sensation
and brought critical attention to the “new” avant-garde dance from Japan. Published the year of
Hijikata Tatsumi’s death and only a year after the first butoh festival in Japan, Stein’s article pro-
vided a much-needed orientation to the dance, highlighting butoh’s two central figures, Hijikata
(1928–1986) and Ohno (1906–2010), and including detailed information about and photographs
of Sankai Juku, Dairakudakan, Tanaka Min, Nakajima Natsu, Eiko & Koma, and others, all of
whom had by that time performed to critical acclaim in the United States. The overall impression
is one of a vital, active, and international dance community. In addition to the touring companies,
Eiko & Koma had already been living in New York City almost ten years when the article was
published, and Sankai Juku was already well established in France. Thirty years later, all of these
dancers are still active, though to be clear Eiko & Koma have never used the term “butoh” to
describe their work, and Tanaka has since rejected it.
The quotation from Nakajima abbreviated in the title of the article and quoted above gets
at central issues of butoh’s international circulations, which are operative even today. In full,
Nakajima says, “Twenty years ago we were described as crazy, dirty, and mad – and now we have
a passport,” conveying the sense of how a once marginal performance genre is now circulating
globally, with all the excitement and risk entailed in this newfound mobility. The primary risk
of butoh’s circulations was the assumption of an essential Japaneseness, accurate or not, that
too often accompanied the dance, especially on its international travels, and Stein’s article is not
exempt from that. For example, she emphasizes what she sees as the impenetrability or mystical
nature of butoh, writing: “The work of these Japanese artists is so thorough and so ‘Japanese’
that Westerners sense a searing honesty . . . Spectators who may not like it . . . still respect the
experimentation and the performance skills required” (1986, 112).
My concern here is to develop a way to think about butoh’s history and contemporary prac-
tices that frames the passport Nakajima spoke about as formative, rather than incidental, to butoh.
245
Rosemary Candelario
At the same time, I do not wish to gloss over the essentialism that characterized Stein’s – and many
other critics – initial reception of butoh. What does it mean for butoh to have a passport? How
does butoh migrate? What exactly is migrating, and for what purpose? Where is butoh granted
entry? When butoh is adopted and adapted by people from different geographic, cultural, and
socio-political backgrounds, what exactly is transmitted? Is it something essentially Japanese?
Something inherently avant-garde? In light of butoh’s continued mutations and migrations over
the last three decades since Stein’s article was first published, it becomes urgent to address these
questions. The marginal status butoh had at its inception no longer adequately characterizes the
form given the international prestige attained by companies such as Sankai Juku and Dairakuda-
kan. The proliferation and increasing ubiquity of butoh training methods demands an attention
to the multiplicity of contemporary butoh practices.
In what follows, I point briefly to the international influences on the key figures of butoh and
the form’s development. I then propose three mechanisms that characterize butoh’s international
circulations: butoh diasporas, butoh pilgrimages, and new local butohs. I illustrate each with
examples of contemporary dancers who exemplify – and complicate – butoh’s roots and routes.2
The implications of such an approach include an attention to what the dance might be able to tell
us about twenty-first century cultural flows. Moreover, in setting my sights on butoh outside of
Japan, I seek to illuminate the stakes and political-aesthetic investments in the extension, revision,
and re-contextualization of butoh’s legacy.
Diasporic lineages: international influences and

the initial butoh diaspora
Hijikata’s 1959 dance, Forbidden Colors (Kinjiki), a duet between Hijikata and Ohno Yoshito,
loosely based on the homoerotic Mishima Yukio novel of the same name, is considered the first
butoh performance. One could, however, argue that the history of butoh began long before
1959. As Françoise Lionnet and Shuh-mei Shih have noted, “cultures are always already hybrid
and relational as a result of sometimes unexpected and sometimes violent processes” (Lionnet
and Shih 2005, 9). In butoh’s case, the form could only have developed in the wake of the cir-
culation of ideas and bodies between Japan and Europe that began with the Meiji Restoration
and continued through the mid-twentieth century. Both Ohno and Hijikata trained in modern
dance with teachers heavily influenced by the German modern dance of the 1920s and 1930s.
Ohno was famously inspired as a young man by the Spanish dancer Antonia Mercé, known as
“La Argentina,” while Hijikata mined myths and memories of his rural Japanese childhood even
as he drew on European writers and artists like Jean Genet, Antonin Artaud, Francis Bacon, and
Hieronymus Bosch. These myriad influences were processed and channeled into Hijikata and
Ohno’s dances in the 1960s and 1970s, which were developed in the context of a rapidly chang-
ing Japanese society, a vibrant avant-garde, and a culture of mass protest.
If butoh could not have developed as it did without an established and active cultural exchange
between Japan and European countries, it is also questionable how much the dance would have
grown or thrived without the global circulation of the form that has produced over three dec-
ades-worth of workshops and performances all around the world. Dancers who had studied with
Hijikata and/or Ohno began to travel outside of Japan already in the 1970s, though the term
“butoh” did not necessarily accompany them. Eiko & Koma performed in Germany, the Neth-
erlands, Switzerland, and North Africa from 1972 to 1974. Ishii Mitsutaka went to Germany
around the same time, and intersected with Eiko & Koma in the Netherlands in 1973 where
the three of them formed the short-lived Linden Gracht Dance Laboratory. Eiko & Koma later
spent six months in the United States in 1976 and then moved to New York in 1977, where they
246
“Now we have a passport”
billed their work as “Japanese dance in the avant-garde manner,” never using the name butoh.3
Having spent mere months with Hijikata and a year all together with Ohno, Eiko & Koma were
not interested in attaching themselves to a larger movement. When Murobushi Kō, Carlotta
Ikeda, and Yumiko Yoshioka went to France in 1977, however, they did call their work “Buto.”4
These initial international performances were well-received, but it was not until Ohno Kazuo
and Sankai Juku performed in France in 1980 that the idea of “butoh” as a specific form with
multiple proponents took widespread hold outside of Japan.5
Despite butoh’s international roots and its status as part of the Japanese avant-garde, this his-
tory was not necessarily evident to early butoh audiences and critics in Europe and the United
States, even those who may have been familiar with visual artists who were contemporaries
with Hijikata and Ohno. Instead, audiences and critics saw the dance primarily through a lens
that presumed what was on stage represented something fundamental about Japan. This kind
of reception was not unique to butoh. Barbara Thornbury (2013) has argued that “Japan” has
been discursively constructed for Americans since the post-war period through exposure to Jap-
anese performing arts. In particular, she argues that the way these performances were presented
and interpreted for American audiences through coverage in major media outlets like the New
York Times had an impact far beyond the actual performance halls, producing a discourse that
determines how Japan is understood in the United States.6 American audiences, she suggests,
came to understand Japanese performing artists as purveyors of a timeless and ahistorical cultural
heritage, an understanding that was then transferred to any artist that was seen as “authentically”
Japanese, even if their practices were not traditional. Although Thornbury’s writing focuses on
Japanese performance in the United States, a survey of early reviews of butoh in Europe shows
similar processes in operation.
If mainstream Western reception of butoh conceived the form as “essentially” Japanese, some
Japanese scholars have made similar moves. According to Bruce Baird, Takechi Tetsuji almost
immediately read butoh in terms of wet-rice agriculture, while Gunji Masakatsu read butoh as
related to Japanese shamanism.7 Beyond these interpretations that tie butoh to specific aspects of
Japanese culture, other discursive moves attempt to define butoh primarily within the geographic
borders of Japan. For example, Tokyo-based dance critic Kuniyoshi Kazuko has created an oft
circulated and cited “Genealogy of Butoh.” Her detailed lineage is unquestionably a valuable
document, but its linear nature assumes Japan as an originary center, the only place where butoh
could be born, and where butoh inherently lives. If dancers depart Japan for multiple years, they
are marked with a broken line that suggests a tenuous link to both the country and butoh. What
is not evident from the genealogy is the frequency and trajectory of the listed companies’ and
dancers’ travels; their repeated departures and returns are masked by solid lines that anchor them
discursively to Japan. Moreover, the lineage does not account for non-Japanese artists, or for
Japanese artists working in sites other than Germany, France, or the United States, such as Katsura
Kan in Greece and Thailand, Waguri Yukio in Indonesia, and many others.
Besides foreclosing attention to butoh’s circulation beyond Japan, Germany, France, and the
United States, the aforementioned linear/lineage model of the form does not address what exactly
is being passed on. William Marotti (2001) and Bruce Baird (2012), for example, both insist on
understanding butoh in its artistic, political, and historical context. Lineage, on the other hand,
suggests a tradition, if not a tautological trajectory. In some cases, such as Waguri’s Butoh Kaden
DVD-ROM, which details Hijikata’s butoh-fu (butoh notation) as documented by Waguri in
rehearsals, the dance is indeed promoted and understood as a set form passed down from master
to student.8 This view is far from widely accepted in the butoh community, however (or even by
Waguri himself ). Instead, the meanings and techniques that circulate and are adopted and adapted
under the idea of butoh are manifold, including but not limited to a challenge to the socialization
247
Rosemary Candelario
of the body, an oppositional performative stance, a postmodernist critique, an emphasis on shock,

an impenetrable Other, and a universal communion.
This essay intervenes in such a butoh genealogy by drawing attention to practices that exceed
it. Other scholars challenge the use of a lineage model to structure the form in the first place,
arguing that such a practice does nothing more than highlight “key names [and] implies hier-
archy, linearity, and determinism.”9 Others point out that for all its limitations, lineage is still a
predominant structure in the teaching and performance of Japanese arts, even in the diaspora,
and thus cannot be ignored. Instead, these scholars call for methods that could adequately visually
represent the complexities of butoh’s times, spaces, and relationships, such as a digital “perfor-
mance map.”10
My response to this conundrum is to coin the term butoh diaspora to grapple with the global
circulation and successes of both the dance form and its proponents. The term attempts to
account for the transnational movements – including touring, teaching, and extended residency –
of second- and third-generation Japanese dancers trained in butoh who may or may not call their
own work by that name. A butoh diaspora conveys not only the short- and long-term move-
ments of Japanese born and trained dancers away from Japan, but also an active and ongoing
connection back to Japan that may be imagined and/or material and may be promulgated by
the dancers, their students and audience, or both.
Dairakudakan was one of the first butoh groups to perform in the United States, appear-
ing under the auspices of the American Dance Festival in 1982. Maro Akaji spent the better
part of a decade participating in Hijikata’s dance experiments before he founded Dairakuda-
kan in 1972. Early and ongoing touring of his Tokyo-based troupe and its spectacular style
has made the company one of the most well-known butoh proponents around the world,
prominence that has given them a leading role in the butoh diaspora. Their performances
have inspired countless spectators to become dancers, and have drawn many non-Japanese
dancers to Japan on what I call butoh pilgrimages (discussed further below) to study at the
company’s semi-regular Summer Intensives. Moreover, Maro’s “one dancer, one company”
philosophy has contributed to the proliferation of butoh companies. Maro’s commitment
to developing his dancers as choreographers includes presenting their work through a com-
pany-within-the-company called Kochuten, while also encouraging his dancers to spin off
their own companies.
Beyond this sense of the dispersion of butoh outside of Japan and to an increasing num-
ber of dancing bodies – Japanese or not – using the term “diaspora” also admits theoretical
complexities such as Iwabuchi Koichi’s notion of “recentering globalization,” which not only
challenges a western-centric model of globalization, but also demonstrates how Japan’s cultural
power – sometimes referred to as “soft power”11 – works to consolidate and elevate Japanese
national identity even as it is exported across national borders (2002).12 Like Iwabuchi, Lionnet
and Shih do not discount the persistence of the national in the transnational, nor do they see
transnationalism as a homogenizing force. Instead they see it as “spaces and practices acted upon
by border-crossing agents, be they dominant or marginal” (2005, 5). Within this understanding,
they recast the focus on minority subjects’ relationships to one another, rather than to a dominant
power, in a process they call “minor transnationalism.” Given butoh’s status as a marginal practice,
and Japan’s complex history as both an Imperial power and subject of American occupation
and ongoing Orientalization of the (undeniably modern) country as exotic and traditional, this
dynamic horizontal orientation can be a productive position from which to examine butoh.
Furthermore, applying these ideas to butoh, even while recognizing the form’s varied aesthetic
and political influences that largely reflect Japan’s efforts over more than a century to effect a
modernity parallel to and contemporaneous with western nation-states, we cannot fail to take
248
into account Japan’s history as a regional Imperialist and the ways that the “similar but superior”
attitude of the early 20th century may still be in play.
Katsura Kan provides an apt example for this kind of approach to the butoh diaspora. Since
establishing his multinational troupe, Katsura Kan & Saltimbanques, in 1986, he has worked with
what he calls ”minority dancers” all over the world, in Africa, the Mediterranean, Asia, the United
States, and Australia. Nominally based in Kyoto, he spends eight or nine months of each year
abroad, devoting the majority of his time to building and nurturing butoh communities through
workshops and performances. Kan has been at the forefront of a movement to expand butoh
internationally, believing that the dance can and should be globalized. However, he also asserts
that this process cannot be based on a replication or imitation of a (presumed) Japanese body or
Japanese culture. Instead, he has advocated for the creation of new local butohs that draw from
the dancers’ own cultural references. In the 2000s, for example, Kan focused on the creation of a
hybrid Beckett Butoh Notation; for him, the writings of Samuel Beckett provide sources analogous
to Hijikata’s surrealist “butoh notation” (butoh-fu) that can inform the movement for his Western
dancers. Performances of Beckett Butoh Notation between 2007 and 2009 included W-Quad, a
relatively faithful version of Beckett’s 1981 television play, Quad; a group dance to a recording of
the text Not I (1972) accompanied by projections of mouths that echoed the role of the Mouth
in Beckett’s live productions; and a group dance inspired by That Time, with multiple dancers
embodying Beckett’s single actor and three voices. In the program notes to a 2009 performance
in Los Angeles, Kan wrote:
Considering Beckett to be a “choreographer” we perform research into the process of

transforming Beckett’s Textual Vocabulary into Butoh Body Language. More particu-
larly, we want to examine Beckett’s “atmospheres,” (i.e. air, fragrance, breath, fart) and
transform them into movements. We want to use the body as a vessel of sound and
smell, which embody and express, space and non-space, sound and silence.13
One final point to note about butoh diasporas is the way the form also had a circulation separate
from the bodies of Japanese dancers on tour or settling in other countries. Notably, from as early
Figure 26.1 Katsura Kan’s Beckett Butoh Notation “Not I” (Highways Performance Space, 2009), photograph
by Moses Hacmon facesofwater.com. Featuring Heyward Bracey, Rosemary Candelario, Pamela Herron,
Katsura Kan, Melissa Lohman, Eric Losoya, and Vangeline.
249
Rosemary Candelario
as William Klein’s 1964 book Tokyo, which included photos of Hijikata and Ohno Kazuo and
Yoshito, butoh has circulated through photographs and books. Hosoe Eikoh’s 1969 Kamaitachi,
featuring photos of Hijikata in northern Japan, has become a legendary text of not only butoh
but also 20th century Japanese photography. Later books such as Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul
(Holborn and Hoffman 1987) and Butoh: Shades of Darkness (Viala and Masson-Sekine 1988)
became important sources of information and inspiration for dancers around the world, along
with other media such as the 1989 documentary by Edin Velez, Butoh: Dance of Darkness, and
Waguri’s Butoh Kaden. Finally, YouTube, internet discussion boards, online groups, and websites
have become important ways for people to learn about butoh, connect to other dancers in Japan
or other countries, and develop and share their own practice. In this sense, the butoh diaspora
shares much in common with Arjun Appadurai’s sense of how cultural forms migrate through
mechanisms such as media-scapes in addition to the movement of people across borders (1996).
Butoh pilgrimages and new local butohs

Conceptualizing butoh and butoh dancers in the kind of transnational motion acknowledged by
the idea of a butoh diaspora demands that we pay attention to where dancers and the dance form
travel and what happens in those locations. What is circulating through these travels, workshops,
and performances, I suggest, is a collection of assumptions about and approaches to movement
that are then taken up by dancers, some who seek further training in Japan through a butoh
pilgrimage and some who adapt their training to their own specific cultural and geographical con-
texts through the creation of new local butohs. I coined the term “butoh pilgrimage” to describe
dancers who travel to Japan to seek out butoh teachers and study with them over a period of
time – from a week to a number of years – after which they usually return to their home coun-
try. These pilgrimages may, or may not, involve a search for the authentic; for example there is a
belief, at least among some dancers in the United States, that one can’t really be a butoh dancer
without having studied in Japan. “Pilgrimage” also nods to the way that some students reify their
teachers as “butoh masters” (and indeed some teachers play into or encourage this).
The companion term, new local butohs, provides a framework to think about choreographers
who have trained with Japanese butoh dancers, but who have adapted that training to their own
cultural contexts in order to develop their own particular performance modes that work through
local or personal problematics. This term points to the innovations and adaptations that are con-
stantly being enacted by contemporary butoh practitioners, and ultimately to the vitality of the
form. These two mechanisms may, but need not, go hand in hand. For example, many dancers
travel to Japan for short-term butoh training, without ever creating their own take on butoh.
Of course even these butoh pilgrims sometimes bring innovation and adaptation to the form,
through mistranslation or other intentional means.
The dancer SU-EN is an early example of both a butoh pilgrimage and a new local butoh.14
Although she did not travel to Japan specifically to learn butoh, once she encountered butoh, it
became the center of her experience there. She spent eight years living, training, and performing
in Japan with Ashikawa Yoko, Hakutobo, Gnome, and Tomoe Shizune. She returned to her native
Sweden in 1994, when her work on investigating the “nordic Butoh Body” began in earnest.
Some of SU-EN’s works are site dances which take place outdoors in striking Scandinavian
settings: in pieces such as Cracks (2008) or Luscious (2009), bodies emerge from the snaggy harsh
beauty of the Swedish landscape only to be incongruously showered in brightly colored flowers.
At other times the body’s artificiality and impermanence is emphasized in pieces such as Scrap
Bodies (1998), which takes place as its name suggests in a scrap metal yard. SU-EN’s training
methods are also tied to the specificity of the Swedish landscape, with her seasonal “camps”
250
taking place in rural Haglund Skola, at the converted old village school complex that the SU-EN
Butoh Company calls home (SU-EN n.d.). Whereas Katsura Kan prefers to look for parallels
to Hijikata’s butoh notation in literature, SU-EN seeks hers from the Swedish environment. At
her butoh camps, she teaches what she calls “body materials” like stone, insect, rubber, water lily,
and rotting process.
Diego Piñón, too, spent an extended time living in Japan and studying with dancers such as
Ohno Kazuo, Ohno Yoshito, Tanaka, and Nakajima. Later he developed Butoh Ritual Mexicano
as a consciously intercultural blend of “Mexican energetic traditions, Japanese Butoh, ritual
dance, modern dance and contemporary theatre” that claims to “[express] the spirit of the Mex-
ican land . . . in every piece” (Diego Piñón Body Ritual Movement).15 Watching Piñón dance,
this background is evident as he at times seems indistinguishable from the conventional image of
the Japanese male butoh dancer: a compact, sinewy body covered in white makeup, almost naked,
head shaven. As his performances proceed, however, Piñón often conveys his cultural heritage
through his choice of music, costuming, and props. In the 2006 performance ekua itsi – behind the
mirror, for example, Piñón begins in stereotypical butoh mode, moving to atmospheric sounds of
clanking and echoes. Soon, however, his character begins to morph through the use of costumes
and props, suggesting at times a syncretic Catholic supplicant, a farmer, and a flamenco dancer.
In the end of the piece, Piñón strips back down to his almost naked butoh body, but a song sung
in Spanish in the background is an aural reminder to the audience of what they can no longer
see. Like SU-EN, Piñón also offers seasonal training opportunities that allow dancers to experi-
ence his Mexican butoh in situ at his home base in the mountain town, Tlalpujahua, Michoacán.
Interestingly, Piñón has recently begun calling his work Body Ritual Movement. Using the same
initials as Butoh Ritual Mexicano, this new name seems to erase the specificities of “butoh” and
“Mexican” in favor of more generic terms that “cultivate a deeper connection to our shared
Figure 26.2 Workshop participant performance at BRM Tlalpujahua Celebración de Quince Años
(15th Anniversary celebration of the BRM Center in Tlalpujahua) (2016). Courtesy of Diego Piñón.
251
Rosemary Candelario
humanity,”16 although the description of the work remains largely the same. Perhaps this is a
result of his diasporic teaching that largely happens in the United States.
Indeed, new local butohs are themselves in motion, both products of and participants in trans-
national practices. Dancers like SU-EN and Piñón further contribute to the butoh diaspora by
teaching internationally. Their work has moreover become the destination of butoh pilgrimages
to sites outside of Japan. Whereas Piñón’s students are largely Mexican and American, when I
attended SU-EN’s summer camp in 2015, dancers came from Sweden, South Africa, Bulgaria,
Israel, Ireland, and the United States.
Conclusion
Paying attention to these diasporas, pilgrimages, and new local forms reveals how butoh seems
to be able to travel across borders where it can be made to work through local specificities while
retaining strong historical, affective, and materials ties to Japan. These processes and relationships
become visible when we pay attention to what is happening to the form beyond the model of
Japanese lineage and outside the borders of Japan, by tracing routes of the butoh diaspora and
butoh pilgrimages, and by focusing on new local butohs. For example, it becomes evident that
butoh has not so much become global as it has become multiply local through its circulations
around the globe. Even though some people purport to practice a “universal” butoh, many
practices demonstrate butoh becoming more specifically local. Moreover, the mechanisms I have
discussed in this chapter highlight the ways that butoh continues to adapt to new circumstances
and how Japanese and non-Japanese dancers alike contribute to the explication of contemporary
butoh practice. “Crazy, dirty, and mad” may be the qualities that attracted people to butoh in the
first instance, but its passport is the mechanism that has allowed it to circulate and thrive.
Notes
1 Thanks to a revised version of the essay in Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright’s Moving History/Dancing
Cultures: A Dance History Reader (2001), those words – “Twenty Years Ago We Were Crazy, Dirty and
Mad” – continue to introduce Anglophone dancers to butoh, often in undergraduate dance history or
world dance courses. The 2001 version of the essay, however, is revised to focus only on Hijikata and
Ohno and ends with an account of Hijikata’s 1986 death, thus providing a more fixed (and finite) history
for butoh. The quotation from Nakajima abbreviated in the title of the article has a different implication
in this context. In the 2001 revision the phrase “twenty years ago” seems to fix the form in the past,
as something already finished. Instead, the opposite is true: butoh continues to flourish, attracting new
dancers, audiences, and scholars around the world.
2 I nod here to Janet O’Shea’s “Roots/Routes of Dance Studies,” in The Routledge Dance Studies Reader,
2nd ed., edited by Alexandra Carter and Janet O’Shea (London: Routledge, 2010), 1–15.
3 It is difficult to determine if this phrase came from the dancers themselves or from presenters. In any
case, the phrase was often misconstrued by critics in the United States; rather than seeing a parallel
between Eiko & Koma and avant-garde performance in the United States, they instead interpreted
“Japanese dance” to mean traditional, and often compared Eiko & Koma to noh and Zen Buddhism.
For more on how essentialism often adhered to butoh and other avant-garde Japanese performance
practices, see Candelario (2016).
4 Marcelle Michel. “Danse Retour au Japon primitif,” Le Monde, January 27, 1978.
5 See Sylviane Pagès’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 27) for a detailed analysis of the reception of butoh
in France and how French ideas about the country and the form played a large role in the dance’s success
there.
6 In addition to Thornbury, see also Kitano (1969); Harootunian (1993); and Palumbo-Liu (1999).
7 Personal communication, June 17, 2011.
8 For a detailed and complex reading of the DVD-ROM, see Rosa Van Hensbergen’s chapter in this vol-
ume, “Waguri Yukio’s Butoh Kaden: Taking Stock of Hijikata’s Butoh Notation.”
252
9 Michael Sakamoto, Butō’s Corporeal Acts group email communication, October 3, 2012.
10 Katherine Mezur, Butō’s Corporeal Acts group email communication, October 4, 2012.
11 For more on soft power see Douglas McGray, “Japan’s Gross National Cool,” Foreign Policy 130 (May–
June 2002): 44–54.
12 Iwabuchi was mainly concerned with how Japanese cultural power worked in East and Southeast Asia,
but it is also certainly at work elsewhere, for example in the United States and Europe with the trans-
formation in manga and anime discourse.
13 Program notes for “Global Descent,” April 24–25, 2009, at Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica,
California. I co-produced the show with Heyward Bracey and performed as well.
14 See the two essays by SU-EN in this volume, “Light as dust, hard as steel, fluid as snake saliva: the butoh
body of Ashikawa Yoko” and “SU-EN Butoh Company – body, nature, and the world.”
15 The website has recently changed, and some of this language is no longer available on the current site.
16 This phrase is commonly used in BRM workshop descriptions. See, for example, www.intlculturelab.
org/index.php?g=coneyisland2.
Works cited
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Candelario, Rosemary. 2016. Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma’s Asian/American Choreographies. Mid-
dletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Harootunian, H. D. 1993. “America’s Japan/Japan’s Japan.” In Japan in the World, edited by Masao Miyoshi
and H. D. Harootunian. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Holborn, Mark, and Ethan Hoffman, eds. 1987. Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul. Reading, PA: Aperture.
Kitano, Harry. 1969. Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice.
Iwabuchi, Koichi. 2002. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Lionnet, Françoise and Shu-mei Shih. 2005. “Introduction: Thinking Through the Minor, Transnationally.”
In Minor Transnationalism, edited by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, 1–26. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Marotti, William. 2001. “Nihon no 1960 nendai zen’ei geijutsu undo to Hijikata Tatsumi, sunawachi
Hijikata Tatsumi no buto o hyoka suru shomondai” (Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese Avant-garde Art
Movements of the 1960s; Problems in Evaluating Hijikata Tatsumi’s Butoh). Choreologia 24: 48–53.
Palumbo-Liu, David. 1999. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, 1st ed. Palo Alto, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Piñón, Diego. 2017. Body Ritual Movement. http://butohritualmexicano.com/.
Stein, Bonnie Sue. 1986. “Butoh: ‘Twenty Years Ago We Were Crazy, Dirty and Mad’.” The Drama Review:
TDR 30, no. 2: 107–126.
————. 2001. “Butoh: ‘Twenty Years Ago We Were Crazy, Dirty and Mad’.” In Moving History/Dancing
Cultures: A Dance History Reader, edited by Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, 376–383. Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press.
SU-EN. N.d. SU-EN Butoh Company. www.suenbutohcompany.net/.
Thornbury, Barbara E. 2013. America’s Japan and Japan’s Performing Arts: Cultural Mobility and Exchange in
New York 1952–2011. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Viala, Jean, and Nourit Masson-Sékiné. 1988. Butoh: Shades of Darkness. Tokyo: Shufunotomo.
253
27
A HISTORY OF FRENCH
FASCINATION WITH BUTOH
Sylviane Pagès (translated by Sherwood Chen)
Since the late 1970s, one of butoh’s deepest evolutions – as much aesthetic as economic – occurred
in its export from Japan to North America and Europe. Dancers such as Eiko & Koma or Ishii
Mitsutaka traveled to Germany and the Netherlands in the 1970s, while France also quickly
became a landing ground for butoh. Beginning in 1978, significant prestigious productions in
France1 generated media shockwaves and an aesthetic impact on the French choreographic scene,
serving as an important step in the global export of butoh. Drawing on my previous research
on the reception of butoh in France, including an examination of the chronology of butoh in
France and the sites of butoh activity, its critical reception, and its impact on contemporary dance
(Pagès 2009c, 2015), I will analyze the stages of the French fascination with butoh, the reasons
for its success and its effects.
Initial reception in France
An instant success
Upon its arrival in France at the end of the 1970s, butoh immediately met with public and crit-
ical acclaim, sparking widespread fascination and critical discourse. The first butoh performance
recognized as such was Murobushi Kō’s Le Dernier Eden: Porte de l’au-dela (The Last Eden: Gate to
the Beyond) in collaboration with Carlotta Ikeda, performed at the Nouveau Carré Silvia Monfort
theater in Paris in January 1978. That same year, also in Paris, both Ashikawa Yoko and Tanaka
Min presented solos during the Festival d’Automne.2 Public shock was all the stronger considering
that these dancers performed extremely close to the audience in the heart of the Museum of
Decorative Arts during the exhibition Ma, espace-temps du Japon (Ma: Space-Time in Japan).3
These initial butoh productions were repeated a number of times and were attended by a notable
cadre of artists, presenters, curators, and intellectuals including Michel Foucault, Roger Caillois,
Jean Baudrillard, Henri Michaux, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari.4
Soon after, in 1980, the Festival Mondial du Théātre de Nancy (World Theater Festival at Nancy)
offered further opportunities to discover butoh through performances by Ohno Kazuo, Kasai
Akira, Amagatsu Ushio’s Sankai Juku, and, yet again, Tanaka. Despite the varied reception of
these artists – Amagatsu and Ohno kindled a new aesthetic shock, whereas Kasai would pass
almost unnoticed – the word butoh acquired broader recognition and began to be perceived as
254
A history of French fascination with butoh
an artistic movement, categorizing artists who would claim this label alongside those who would
refuse it, such as Tanaka.
From 1978, most of these performances were met with a high degree of media coverage,
reported on by both the national daily press5 and specialized dance journalists,6 as well as being
broadcast on the country’s major television network.7 These first performances were equally met
with public acclaim. Photographs from that time capture packed houses,8 with an enthusiasm
reflected equally in the press coverage of the time: “Word of mouth moves quickly in Paris. We
literally cram into the small theater of the Nouveau Carré where the Japanese are performing”
(Dupuis 1978, 200).
Widespread impact
In a matter of a few years, particularly from 1978 to 1985, a number of butoh artists were invited
to France, allowing French audiences to discover butoh’s aesthetic diversity, ranging from the
intimate performances of Iwana Masaki, Koseki Sumako, or Uesugi Mitsuyo, to the grandiloquent
spectacles of Dairakudakan or Byakko-sha. Amongst these invited artists, some passed totally
unnoticed, or their work was not categorized as butoh, such as Miura Isso’s company Butoh-sha
(with lead dancer Koseki Sumako), active in France from 1977. Thus a history of butoh in France
takes shape that highlights certain artists while forgetting others, the latter either because they
created stronger links to other countries, such as Ishii Mitsutaka or Kasai in Germany, or Eiko &
Koma in the United States, or simply because some artists passed unnoticed.9
Thereafter, butoh performances increased, thanks to regular domestic touring opportunities
in numerous French cities and the development of two networks: an institutional network that
supported companies such as Sankai Juku10 and Ariadone,11 and a vibrant underground network
which resulted in regular invitations to artists like Tanaka, and gave rise to the permanent resi-
dence of Iwana in rural Normandy.
Ripe opportunities
One cannot underestimate how butoh’s reception was favorable to the construction of the butoh
phenomenon that encompasses media, aesthetics, and intellectual discourse. Butoh’s arrival in
France from the late 1970s in fact coincided with a period of French fascination with and curi-
osity about Japan, as much for its films (Ozu Yasujirō, Mizoguchi Kenji) and literature (Mishima
Yukio, Kawabata Yasunari) as for Zen Buddhism (Eco 2003). The 1970 publication of Roland
Barthes’ L’Empire des signes (Empire of Signs) was significant to this newfound interest in Japan.
From the earliest stages of its debut in France, butoh did not escape the notice of curious intellec-
tuals. Without a doubt, the intelligentsia’s attention to butoh contributed to its swift recognition.
The prestige of the French venues and festivals initially willing to present butoh also legitimized
it within a radically shifting artistic landscape. The Festival d’Automne and the Nancy Festival
tried to open the French performing arts scene and its audiences to international avant-garde acts
by curating physical theatre companies from the United States, Asia, and Latin America. By being
presented at these major multidisciplinary festivals, butoh benefited from a French receptiveness
to the avant-garde and to the wider world. The theatre and visual arts worlds quickly joined in
in welcoming butoh. Above all, though, it was the dance field – under major reconstruction and
development at the time – that was to thereafter become butoh’s biggest supporter. Butoh arrived
right at a critical juncture in the development of contemporary dance, and at a high point in the
public visibility of contemporary dance (Filloux-Vigreux 2001; Germain-Thomas 2009). New
venues entirely dedicated to contemporary dance appeared at the turn of the late 1970s into the
255
Sylviane Pagès
1980s, and were swift to present butoh programs.12 Modern and contemporary dance criticism,
equally in full bloom at the time, was eager to follow these initial butoh performances in France.13
Aesthetic shockwaves
Butoh’s arrival provoked a true aesthetic shock to choreographic practices, which until then had
been dominated by ballet, neoclassical dance, and the notable, ubiquitous presence of Maurice
Béjart. But it also created shockwaves in the contemporary dance world, which leaned more
towards the North American abstractions of Alwin Nikolais and Merce Cunningham.14 (Pagès
2009a). Butoh came across as new and radical within the existing aesthetic context, with recog-
nizable characteristics such as the color white, slowness, and nudity, which thwarted erotic antic-
ipation, epitomized by Ikeda flagrantly emphasizing her exposed breasts while wearing a pair of
horseshoes as a bra in Le Dernier Éden. Slow movement performed in close proximity between
performer and audience further accentuated the nudity, revealing every inch of the body. Above
all, however, butoh proved to be most subversive in its processes of generating movement, its
presence on stage, and its use of gravity. By assuming the fetal position and squatting close to
the ground, butoh collapsed (the typical body) carriage and lowered the dancer’s physical center
of gravity, rejecting a postural control which dominated movement patterns of the time. Many
butoh works demonstrated an unstable verticality and a fragile posture, as opposed to the tri-
umphant, athletic bodies in Béjart’s choreography or the erect bodies of Cunningham’s dancers.
Muddling the lines and form of the dancing body, butoh could not be further from Western
classical and contemporary corporeality. Whereas the French choreographic world remained
dominated by “beautiful” skintight costumes and unitards showing the lines of the body, the
legibility of the butoh dancer’s body was broken-up by rags, scraps of clothing, or makeup and
detritus applied to the skin. The clarity of the body’s lines broke especially in how hands and feet
were used, contradicting predominant usage in ballet or contemporary dance on French stages
in the late 1970s.
Butoh treated the body in its totality, inclusive of the extremities of the feet, hands, and face,
all of which became visual focal points. The feet were often flexed, tensed, or curled as much as
possible, never pointed nor aligned to an extended leg. The hands, often hooked, at times clawed
or feline, were neither the large, open, extended hand with spread fingers frequently used by
neoclassical choreographers, nor the contemporary dancer’s outstretched hand as simple exten-
sion of the arm.
Finally, the legibility of the body was disturbed by the nature of the corporeal approaches
proposed by the projects undertaken in butoh. Despite butoh’s diversity of approaches, there
was a common predominant emphasis on sensorial work and the applying of imagery as chore-
ographic motor, rather than a concern for delineating a body’s lines in space. Like Georges Bat-
aille’s concept of l’informe (Bataille 1987), this process of metamorphosis would ultimately shatter
traditional binary categories – human/animal, man/woman, young/old – thus upsetting ways
of understanding and perceiving the world, and unsettling form as much as troubling gender.
Fascination and misinterpretations: the construction of a butoh “brand”
Waxing poetic while misunderstanding culture and history

As a consequence of their fascination, French critics invented a poetic discourse, often metaphor-
ical, but bereft of precise sources. Carried away by a longtime fascination with and ignorance
of Japan – harkening back to the Japonisme of the 1860s (Wilkinson 1992) – French written
256
discourse on butoh lacked historical references, resulting in numerous misinterpretations. Butoh

was perceived within a context of misunderstanding the language and the Japanese avant-garde15
in two different ways: by an association with Hiroshima (De Vos 2006a; Pagès 2009c) and through
a lens of exotification (Pagès 2011).
The strongest association, but also the most problematic, was the one which linked butoh to
the atomic bombings in Japan. The recurring trope of butoh as a “dance born from Hiroshima’s
ashes” was ubiquitous and formulaic in French journalism, implying that the nuclear tragedy was
the catalyst for the apocalyptic style of this “dance of darkness.” Even if butoh’s emergence was
indeed a product of post-war Japan’s massive socio-cultural upheavals, linking it to the atomic
bombings is rather tenuous and obscure. Butoh cannot be merely reduced to a representation of
nuclear tragedy. Far from wanting to represent mass carnage, Hijikata Tatsumi’s research addressed
the morbid and the macabre within the dancer herself. With whitened, spectral, and deformed
bodies, butoh triggered an interpretative slippage from macabre to massacre, constituting a memo-
rial site for the contorted, complex memory of the atomic bombings in Japan.16
This stereotype contributed to locking butoh into an intransigent Japanese otherness. Accord-
ing to French critical discourse, only Japanese bodies damaged by atomic horrors could ever
claim to embody such a dance. In attempting to solidify their view of the art form as having a[n
essential] Japanese identity, critical discourse ran the gamut of Western depictions of a diametri-
cally opposed Japan: strange, foreign, “oriental.” In a word: Other. Consequently, butoh’s success
in France cannot be explained without this exotic interpretation, a blend of fascination and
misunderstanding portraying this dance as some type of radical alterity. Through their repetitive
and stagnant nature, critical platitudes formed a discursive envelope that obscures, extends, and
reinvents the oeuvre and practices of butoh.
Butoh reinvented
Several phenomena contributed to the construction of a butoh cut off from its history: con-
current programming of artists from different generations, a lack of knowledge of Japanese
art history and language, and ultimately, an exotic, ahistorical portrayal of butoh that was just
as ignorant of its founders’ ties to Tokyo’s 1960s avant-garde as it was of their modern dance
training.17
Without historical depth, butoh fell prey to reinvention. For example, critical discourse was
almost exclusively focused on Ohno, omitting for a long time the figure and role of Hijikata.
Due to his seniority among butoh dancers at the time, and significantly having danced on French
stages unlike Hijikata, Ohno was considered in the eyes of the critics the true butoh master, and
became a legendary figure (Pagès 2009b, 12–14).
The favored aesthetics of Sankai Juku

Despite butoh’s aesthetic diversity – from Tanaka’s performances to Ohno’s cross-dressing, from
Dairakudakan’s kitsch grotesquerie to Sankai Juku’s sophistication – an image of butoh formed
and ossified around several stereotypes: skin painted white, shaved heads, contorted faces, tor-
mented bodies, slow movement, etc. Regularly performing in Paris and touring extensively
throughout France, Sankai Juku’s overexposure contributed to this construction of reductive
codes. Their whitened bodies, often slowly evolving amidst spectacular set designs, fed exotic
perceptions of this strange, mystical, and evocative dance seen as some sort of ceremony or ritual.
However, it was as much the prism of Hiroshima, and the interpretive shift from macabre to
massacre which ultimately favored works portraying tormented bodies. Other butoh aesthetics
257
Sylviane Pagès
were less well-received; the outlandish works of Dairakudakan rarely circulated in France prior
to the aughts,18 and the frenetic dances of Akira Kasai were only recently recognized.
If this clichéd image of butoh had an impact on presenters’ choices and on critical and public
reception, it seemed equally to have had an impact on the practices themselves. One of the key
traits of how butoh was received in France is that critical discourse and choreographic practice
are inseparable. Butoh progressively insinuated itself into the French choreographic landscape via
the increase of both Japanese and non-Japanese artists in France identifying their work as butoh.
As performance opportunities increased, though, the aesthetics of butoh congealed and became
standardized. Indicators such as nudity or slow movement became reproduced “codes,” often
unquestioned and at times not even necessary to the process of experimentation or choreography.
Fruitful misunderstandings: butoh’s establishment and new directions
Butoh’s impact on dance in France: a detour for expressionism

All these misunderstandings nevertheless proved to be productive, stirring up strong interest
in butoh amongst contemporary dancers working in France. The first sign of this interest was
French dancers travelling to Japan to “go to the source,” training directly with a master. Ohno
had the strongest draw, with pioneer trips by choreographers Catherine Diverrès and Bernardo
Montet in 1983, followed subsequently by numerous others.19 Travel to Japan thus became
antithetical to what was then considered the formative journey of an entire generation of la jeune
danse française20 from the 1970s and 1980s: pilgrimage to New York.21 Traveling to Tokyo to
study butoh offered an aesthetic alternative within a French choreographic context dominated
by classical dance and American abstraction.
The butoh welcomed in France was uprooted and cut off from its historical link to German
modern dancers; similarly French contemporary dance largely obscured its own origins as it
emerged into full bloom.22 These origins were profoundly impacted by the work of German
dancers including Mary Wigman and Jean Weidt. The exotic framing of butoh positioned it as
something radically different from contemporary dance,23 thus obscuring common movements
and shared histories. A fascination for faraway places muddled the fact that French modern danc-
ers and butoh dancers actually shared common methods to generate movement, performative
states which I shall call “expressionist movement.” Butoh and Japan thus constituted a rounda-
bout opportunity to reintroduce and make visible the close, but obscured connection between
contemporary French dance and expressionist movement (Pagès 2010).
Why then would one would have traveled all the way to Japan to search for a way of dancing
and a dance legacy which was still living and active in France? Modern dancers suffered from
a double invisibility: on the one hand they were eclipsed by the dominant American aesthetics,
on the other hand they were part of a German expressionist aesthetic that was expunged as a
result of painful wartime memories. The prevalent myth of the self-taught dancer contributed
further to this erasure in a choreographic field in its prime. In forming la jeune danse many danc-
ers in effect claimed a sort of tabula rasa and hence contributed to the myth of the “explosion
of French contemporary dance.” Butoh’s arrival and its reception in France thus found itself
at the intersection of two historiographic myths: that of the “explosion of French contempo-
rary dance,” along with its refusal of an expressionist-influenced modern dance; and that of a
reconstructed history of butoh, by way of the fantasy of Hiroshima and exotic perceptions, that
cuts off butoh’s strong ties to the Japanese disciples of Mary Wigman. The erasure of German
expressionist aesthetic therefore plays a crucial role in how butoh was received during this
artistic period.
258
A new appetite for butoh

French interest in butoh nonetheless has persisted since its arrival, lasting for almost forty years.
Programming and critical enthusiasm have not waned, nor has the curiosity of contemporary
dancers. With many Japanese dancers settling in France, butoh has progressively established itself
as a regular resource for dancers. Significantly, it has worked its way into higher dance education
in institutions including the Conservatoire national supérieur de Lyon (National Conservatory of
Music and Dance in Lyon, CNSMDL) and the Centre national de danse contemporaine d’Angers
(National Center of Contemporary Dance, CNDC), the latter notably under the directorship of
Emmanuelle Huynh,24 who was responsible for bringing Murobushi, Kasai, and Tanaka to teach
there. Huynh contributed equally to the French recognition of Kasai, who was little known in
France prior to Spiel, their 2012 performance collaboration in Angers.
This enduring fascination for butoh has since the aughts taken new directions through recon-
sideration of its avant-garde aspects. In this way, Hijikata has been rediscovered as the founder
of butoh, along with his performance work and his involvement with the Tokyo avant-garde of
the 1960s.25 This new fascination operates through citation and appropriation by contemporary
dancers who have never practiced butoh.26
This new interest in butoh emerged as part of a broader trend in French contemporary dance
in the first two decades of the 21st century to rediscover and reconstruct American avant-garde
works from the 1960s by claiming the influence of postmodern dance and Judson Church
(Ginot 2003; Perrin 2012), by questioning representation, by generating anti-spectacles, and by
becoming interested in improvisation scores. If Ohno’s butoh offered an alternative to American
choreographic models in the early 1980s, Hijikata’s butoh and his ties to 1960s avant-garde artists
offers rich new references and a new examination of otherness as a means to galvanize today’s
creative processes.
To this day butoh remains a reference for an entirely new generation of choreographers, some
who have studied at the CNDC, such as Beryl Breuil, others trained by Zaitsu such as Laurence
Pagès and Bleuène Madeleine, or, like Camille Mutel, trained by Iwana. From classes at the
CNDC to regular training over the past fifteen years by the likes of Iwana and Zaitsu, butoh’s
establishment has always and inevitably fed the process of contemporary artists in France. One
can observe familiar elements in improvisation methods widely practiced in today’s dance edu-
cation, or in somatic practices which explore intensely minute perception, developing knowledge
through feeling to intensify movement. Yet again, butoh and contemporary performance seem to
intersect in their common methods and concerns.
In France butoh seems to function as a foundation, an ever-present reference, and an ongo-
ing practice. Even if butoh performance and practice in France has often been determined by
codes under the weight of its success, it nevertheless remains an active reference and destabilizing
resource for contemporary dance in fertile turmoil. Examining butoh’s arrival on French soil
encourages the development of a transnational dance history of cultural transfers, allowing in
effect an analysis of how butoh was “invented” and constructed by the French gaze, as much
as it allows historiographic re-examination of la nouvelle danse française. This meeting point thus
demonstrates a necessity to intersect dance history with cultural history in order to grasp the
migratory complexities of movement.
Notes
1 Le Carré Silvia Monfort and the Festival d’Automne in Paris.
2 Ashikawa performed in Hijikata Tatsumi’s Yami no maihime jū ni tai (The Twelve Stages of the Terpsichore of
Darkness). Tanaka performed his solo Drive.
259
Sylviane Pagès
3 Ma, espace-temps du Japon at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, October 11 through December 11,
1978, as part of the Festival d’Automne.
4 Guattari would notably invite Tanaka to dance at La Borde psychiatric clinic in 1986. This performance
was filmed by Joséphine Guattari and François Pain in Min Tanaka: danseur du butō (Salvatierra 2008).
5 An article about The Last Eden appeared in the newspaper Le Monde on January 27, 1978. The newspa-
per Libération featured a full page on the work on February 3, 1978.
6 Coverage in publications including Les Saisons de la danse, Pour la danse, Art Press, etc.
7 La danseuse japonaise, a story broadcast on TF1’s news, October 19, 1978. Duration: 3:15. Archived at
INA (Institut national de l’audiovisuel).
8 Particularly a number of photographs taken by critic Jean-Marie Gourreau. Archived at the media
library of the Centre national de la danse, Pantin.
9 Artists including Saï, Ushiyama Hiro, Yamada Setsuko, Kunishi Kamiryo, and Eji Ikuyo are some of those
forgotten from this period. Their names appear only in performance calendars or program notes.
10 From 1982 until the time of this publication, Sankai Juku has been commissioned by the Théātre de la
Ville in Paris to make a new work every other year.
11 Carlotta Ikeda based herself in Bordeaux. Murobushi Ko made numerous round trips between France
and Japan.
12 These venues included the Montpellier Dance Festival, Théātre de la Ville in Paris, Maison de la danse de
Lyon, etc.
13 Through the 1970s, specialized journals including Les Saisons de la danse and Pour la danse were receptive
to modern dance. The theoretical journal Empreintes was founded in 1977. Critics such as Marcelle
Michel and Lise Brunel championed contemporary dance in the national daily press, working towards
its mainstream recognition.
14 Nikolais and Carolyn Carlson achieved visibility and recognition in 1968 during their respective French
premieres at the Paris International Festival of Dance. Carlson became the official Etoile-chorégraphe
(prima ballerina-choreographer) of the Paris Opera in 1974. Nikolais was appointed in 1978 to direct
the Centre national de danse contemporaine in Angers, France’s first educational institution of contemporary
dance (Mayen 2012).
15 Japan Studies in France significantly developed from the seventies onward. The exhibition Japon des
Avant-gardes occurred in Paris in 1985–1986.
16 France has remained particularly silent in not commemorating the events of Hiroshima. When public
reference to Hiroshima appeared in 1959 more prominently in Alain Resnais’ and Marguerite Duras’
film Hiroshima mon amour, it is a fragmentary memory, primarily visual and sensorial, crafted from crea-
tive license. This memory then reared its head in the late 1970s through the body of the butoh dancer,
perceived as the Japanese body of a suffering atomic victim.
17 Editor’s note: This may also have included an ignorance of French influences on butoh, such as Genet,
Artaud, etc.
18 Maro Akaji was only invited intermittently to France, in 1982 and 1997, and in 1987 as the choreog-
rapher for the solo Chiisako danced by Carlotta Ikeda. He would have to wait until 2007 when, due to
the efforts of la Maison de la culture du Japon, the company began to present its work regularly in Paris.
19 Including Pierre Doussaint, Isabelle Dubouloz, Santiago Sempere, Sidonie Rochon, etc.
20 Editor’s note: Literally “young French dance,” this is an alternative term for Nouvelle danse française (new
French dance), born in the late 1970s as young French choreographers came in contact with American
and German forms of modern and contemporary dance.
21 Including Dominique Boivin, Kilina Cremona, Jean-Claude Gallotta, Jacques Garnier, Mathilde Mon-
nier, Hervé Robbe, Karine Saporta, etc. (Mayen 2012; Dardy-Cretin 2007, 221–232).
22 For example, including dancers Françoise et Dominique Dupuy, Jacqueline Robinson, Jerome Andrews,
Karin Waehner, etc. (Robinson 1990).
23 Butoh’s reception in France plays a part in the long history of exotification of dances which come from
abroad, as researched by Anne Décoret. Décoret emphasizes how much the etymology of the word
exotic signifies what is foreign to, outside of, or external to – exo in Greek – the Western world and, by
extension, outside of “Western dance” (Décoret-Ahiha 2004).
24 From 2004 until 2012.
25 Hijikata’s body of work, inclusive of his writing, have been introduced by researchers Patrick De Vos
and Odette Aslan (2002), and by film screenings by the Vidéodanse festival at the Centre Pompidou and
the Cinémathèque de la danse.
26 Visitations (2005) by Julia Cima proposes a series of solos from dance history’s legends – Isadora Dun-
can, Maurice Béjart, Dominique Bagouet, Merce Cunningham, Vaslav Nijinsky – and opens with a
260
reprised excerpt of Hijikata’s solo Hosotan. La Danseuse malade (2008), by Boris Charmatz, uses texts
from Hijikata. The choreographer Xavier Le Roy in Product of Other Circumstances (2009) explains on
stage his process of trying to become a butoh dancer within two hours. In presenting his collection of
material, and through ordinary methods including online searches, reading of works, or the imitation of
a dance, he returns, through the pretext of butoh, to questions he asks in his other pieces about an artist’s
work and working conditions.
Works cited
Aslan, Odette. 2002. Butō(s). Paris: CNRS.
Barthes, Roland. 1970. L’Empire des signes. Genève, Paris: Skira.
Bataille, Georges. 1987. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard.
Dardy-Cretin, Michèle. 2007. “Annexe VI: la danse contemporaine en France dans les années 1970.” In
Michel Guy: secrétaire d’État à la culture 1974 –1976, 221–232. Paris: Comité d’histoire du ministère de
la Culture.
Décoret-Ahiha, Anne. 2004. Les Danses exotiques en France. Pantin: Centre national de la danse.
De Vos, Patrick. 2006a. “Danser après la bombe,” Europe 926–927: 141–154.
De Vos, Patrick. 2006b. “Hijikata Tatsumi et les mots de la danse.” In Japon Pluriel 6, edited by Estelle
Leggeri-Bauer, Sakae Murakami-Giroux and Elisabeth Weinberg de Touchet, 87–99. Arles: Philippe
Picquier.
Dupuis, Simone. 1978. “Danses des ténèbres . . .” In L’Année de l’Opéra et de la danse: 1978, edited by Sylvie
de Nussac. Paris: Calmann-Lévy.
Eco, Umberto. 2003. “Le zen et l’Occident.” Revue d’esthétique 44: 49–64.
Filloux-Vigreux, Marianne. 2001. La Danse et l’institution: genèse et premiers pas d’une politique de la danse en
France 1970–1990. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Germain-Thomas, Patrick. 2009. “Politique et marché de la danse contemporaine en France (1975–2009),”
PhD dissertation, Paris: EHESS.
Ginot, Isabelle. 2003. “Un lieu commun.” Repères: cahier de danse 10: 2–9.
Mayen, Gérard. 2012. Un pas de deux France-Amérique: 30 années d’invention du danseur contemporain au CNDC
d’Angers. Montpellier: L’Entretemps.
Pagès, Sylviane. 2009a. “Le moment Cunningham: l’émergence d’une référence incontournable de la danse
en France . . .” Repères: cahier de danse 23: 3–6.
Pagès, Sylviane. 2009b. “Ōno Kazuo, ‘le plus vieux danseur du monde’. Légende d’une verticalité épuisée.”
Repères, cahier de danse 24: 12–14.
Pagès, Sylviane. 2009c. “La reception des butō(s) en France: Représentations, malentendus et désirs,” PhD
dissertation, Saint-Denis: université Paris 8.
Pagès, Sylviane. 2010. “Résurgence, transfert et voyages d’un geste expressionniste en France: une histori-
ographie discontinue et transnationale. Le butō entre le Japon, la France et l’Allemagne.” In Mémoires et
histoire en danse, edited by Isabelle Launay and Sylviane Pagès, 373–384. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Pagès, Sylviane. 2011. “La construction exotique du butō en France.” L’Ethnographie 5: 125–136.
Pagès, Sylviane. 2015. Le butō en France, malentendus et fascination. Pantin: Centre national de la danse.
Perrin, Julie. 2012. “Une filiation déliée.” In Histoire(s) et lectures: Trisha Brown – Emmanuelle Huynh, edited
by Emmanuelle Huynh, Denise Luccioni and Julie Perrin, 227–292. Dijon: Les Presses du réel.
Robinson, Jacqueline. 1990. L’Aventure de la danse moderne en France: 1920–1970. Paris: Bougé.
Salvatierra, Violeta. 2008. “La performance dansée et l’intervention dans le monde social: du devenir col-
lectif d’autres publics de danse,” Master’s thesis, Saint-Denis: université Paris 8.
Wilkinson, Endymion. 1992. Le Japon face à l’Occident: images et réalités. Bruxelles: Complexe.
261
28
THE CONCEPT OF BUTOH
IN ITALY
From Ohno Kazuo to Kasai Akira
Maria Pia D’Orazi
Butoh in Italy has passed through three stages since it was first introduced to the country in
1980: An early period of aesthetic seduction, when Butoh began to spread to Italy in the eighties
and was seen as a totally new vision of a bodily reality; an era in the nineties when Japanese
dancers began to teach their own personal methods and techniques in Italy and original Italian
books came out; and finally a third stage, starting in 2000 and still ongoing, that introduced the
possibility of creating an Italian butoh by developing the teachings of Japanese dancers. The
history and landscape of butoh in Italy are wide and varied, but in this essay, I will focus on three
particularly influential Japanese founders. The first of these is Ohno Kazuo, who toured Italy in
1983, and gave the first butoh workshop at Rome’s “La Sapienza” University in 1986. The second
is Iwana Masaki, who gave a series of extensive workshops in Rome starting with that of Theatre
La Comunità in 1991. And the last is Kasai Akira, who gave his first workshop in Rome in 1998.
In particular, Ohno’s presence ignited curiosity about butoh’s originating principles and his way
of dancing became the model of a style based on improvisation. Iwana brought with him a pre-
cise training system, dispensing with the false mythology of improvisation and concentrating his
attention on the dancer’s physical preparation. And Kasai questioned all the acquired certainties
and set the ground for a new Italian beginning.
Because the first Japanese butoh dancers arrived in Italy by way of France, the 1980 Interna-
tional Theater Festival in Nancy is an important date. Jean Kalman, a French lighting designer
and festival representative, went to Japan and arranged for the appearance at the Festival of Ohno
Kazuo in 1980s. He was joined by Kasai Akira, Amagatsu Ushio’s Company Sankai Juku, and
the outsider Tanaka Min. Interestingly, Ohno was presented in the theatre program as the founder
of “modern Japanese dance.”
Ohno was seventy-four years old. He appeared in Admiring La Argentina in a flower-adorned
hat and a long black dress, all crochet and lace. He was a male dressed as a female chasing the
spirit of flamenco on a tango beat. He was an old man showing his half-naked body. He was
a fool speaking with imaginary presences, crowding the space around him with ghosts. Yet his
indecipherable motions held such concrete precision as to leave no doubt about their being real.
The public was literally enraptured by his presence. It was his personal triumph, the beginning
of a personified legend, and the starting point of butoh’s international success. Le Monde critic
Colette Godard described him as “a ghostly body that life grabs by means of imperceptible
262
The concept of butoh in Italy
movements,” moving as “a bird being carried on the wind” or “a life story going hand in hand
with death,” and wrote that he had “apparently found at the sources of nature the basis for an
extremely elaborated technique which has been imitated by others” (Godard 1980a, May 21).
As one representative of butoh, there was Ohno, always present and true to himself, moving in
a natural way, passing through different ages and gender identities and ignoring the limitations
of his own age.
On the other hand, there was the totally naked dancer Tanaka. There was nothing fragile
about him. He was “a creature made by silt ready to come into being pressed by a powerful
inner energy that leads toward trance” (Godard 1980a, May 21). There was also a man with
“transvestism passion,” Kasai Akira (Michel 1980, May 27). And finally, Sankai Juku, with bodies
shaved and painted white, and with their slow and soft movements “vibrating with an intense
energy that holds back the muscles’ impulses” while “they play precious movements of the art of
seduction . . . mating, rest, and war” (Godard 1980b, May 30). They possessed bodies that were
no-longer human, and all-too-human at the same time, each of them able to become something
else and undergo endless transformations.
Ohno’s affinity with European cultural sensibilities as well as his age played a central role in the
first diffusion of butoh. It was a real shock at the time to see an old man dancing. Furthermore,
Ohno was dressed in western attire and dancing to Bach and Puccini arias sung by Maria Callas;
his movements were not ordinary but reminded us of gestures from everyday life, and the dance’s
dynamic never moved too far from dance’s received notions of time: he was never too slow, nor
too still; nor did the deformation of his body trespass the boundaries of accepted aesthetic canons.
Thus, Ohno’s appearance transformed that which was disturbing in butoh (and in the perfor-
mances of the other dancers) into something familiar, thereby letting people draw near to it.
Capitalizing on their success in France, Sankai Juku and Tanaka were the first butoh perform-
ers to visit Italy (Rome) that same year. They were followed by Carlotta Ikeda (Polverigi, 1982),
Murobushi Kō (Polverigi, 1983), and Ashikawa Yoko (Reggio Emilia, Milan and Rome, 1983).
Following the lead of French reviewers, Italian reviews mainly focused on the metamorphic qual-
ities of the dancers and their strong power of bodily communication. Moreover, the press took
for granted the fact that butoh was related to the post Hiroshima landscape as pointed out by
Roland Barthes (Barthes 2002) and Jean Baudrillard (Baudrilliard 1985). Ohno came to Italy for
the first time in 1983, brought there by Maria Perchiazzi three years after she had first approached
him in Nancy and volunteered to produce him, having been so moved by his performance. That
tour took him to Parma and Milan, and over time he performed all over Italy. As was the case
in France, Ohno was welcomed as the master who invented butoh (Guatterini 1983) and as the
artistic father of Sankai Juku (Pasi 1983).
Eventually, Ohno came to Rome University in 1986 to give the first Italian butoh workshop
and two performances: “Admiring La Argentina” and “Dead Sea.” His workshop was the first
contact with butoh technique for the Italian audience, and he was again introduced as butoh’s
founder. Nevertheless, he did not demonstrate the kind of technique that participants expected
to learn by imitation as with any other dance school. He gave an image like “be an insect” to the
students and invited them to dance freely relating to that, since dance – he said – is the result of
a personal experience that is impossible to reproduce. The technique of butoh’s founder seemed
to be a non-technique. And Ohno was like no other butoh dancer. Moreover, his shows were
all built on improvisation, and this brought about a double misunderstanding: on the one hand,
the idea that improvisation was the essence of butoh; on the other, that one could dance with
no specific preparation. These contradictions became the seed for the future development of the
Italian study of butoh.1 That is, Ohno was an extraordinarily well-trained dancer and a human
263
Maria Pia D’Orazi
Figure 28.1 Ohno Kazuo, Dead Sea (Rome, 1986), photograph by Marco Tambara.
with a huge reserve of personal experiences. Looking at him, it seemed to be easy to transform
the body by realizing a connection between a given image and personal imagination. So the
risk for dancers who were inspired by his model – taught in Italy by dancers like Tadashi Endo
or Takenouchi Atsushi – was often the external imitation of butoh forms or a kind of retreat of
dancers into their own bodies and emotions.
This perception of butoh was changed completely by the arrival in Rome in 1991 of Iwana
Masaki, an independent solo dancer then established in Paris. Iwana was the beginning of a wave
in the beginning of the nineties in which several Japanese dancers started to hold workshops in
Italy.2 His butoh teaching process eventually brought about the birth of different generations of
dancers who sometimes use the label of butoh and sometimes incorporate butoh body work in
their artistic practice. In some cases, this resulted in a pedagogical continuity, which gave birth to
264
established schools. This is true for Iwana at first in Rome (from 1991 to 2004) then in Naples
and Milan; Yoshioka Yumiko collaborating with the Lerici-based dance association Gest-azione,
led by Annalisa Maggiani (from 1995); Kasai in Rome (beginning in 1998); Onishi Sayoko, who
founded a butoh academy in Palermo supported by Ohno Yoshito (2005); and Takenouchi Atsu-
shi, who established a permanent teaching course at Spazio-NU in Pontedera (2015).
Iwana’s workshop was a turning point for several reasons. First of all, the way it was organ-
ized. It was a two-week workshop lasting five hours a day with Iwana performing every night,
so that participants could experience butoh training and then directly observe how the teacher
transformed the exercises into dance. The long duration gave the participants the chance to enter
deeply into the concrete world of butoh work. And it was an exceptional situation, since butoh
in Italy has been mostly organized by independent producers with no economic support, and
this often determined the short duration of workshops.3 Secondly Iwana’s way of teaching was
more objective and detailed compared to the one experienced with Ohno, a way that seemed
Figure 28.2 Iwana Masaki, Jokanaan (Rome, Sala Uno, 1998), photograph by Emilio D’Itri.
265
Maria Pia D’Orazi
Figure 28.3 Iwana Masaki, Jokanaan (Rome, Sala Uno, 1998), photograph by Emilio D’Itri.
to be less mysterious and more practical. The workshop title was “The Internal Landscape” and
the proposed training system was based on a classification of different “bodily states.” Every state
included a character (boy, woman, warrior, old man, spirit), and a corresponding image for the
energy to realize it (a narcissus for the boy, a lotus flower for the woman, swimming upstream
towards a waterfall as enemies surround one for the warrior, a cloud of alcohol dispersing through
air for the spirit). Iwana explained that the ability to change form and the sensibility towards the
space around our bodies are necessary yet insufficient conditions for dancing, because dance is
always a compromise between the dancer’s desire and his/her physical condition. The exercise
thus became a kind of initiation to dance, a way to listen one’s body in order to recognize and
reveal original physical and spiritual means.
I participated in Iwana’s first workshop in Rome and served as his Italian producer from 1994 to
2004. Silvia Rampelli, who represents one of the most original artistic Italian contributions to the
personalization of butoh’s legacy, also participated and even attended Iwana’s first Italian workshop
in Orvieto. Rampelli collaborated with Iwana in his first project with European dancers – the
performance Yomotsu Hirasaka (The Slope between life and death, 1995) – and founded with Iwana
the company Habillé d’eau in Paris in 1996 together with Muronoi Yōko.4 The company worked
only one season, producing the performance Misogi in Paris in 1997, but Rampelli kept the name
and refounded Habillé d’eau in Italy in 2002, with Alessandra Cristiani, Andreana Notaro, Elis-
abetta Di Terlizzi, and Francesca Proia.5 The debut performance of the new company, Studio per
Attis, won the prize “Enzimi Danza 2002” for its originality. Other award-winning productions
followed: Refettorio was awarded the Scenario Prize 2003 at International TeatarFest di Sarajevo
(2004), Ragazzo cane (2005) premiered at La Biennale Festival of Venice 37 under the direction of
Romeo Castellucci, and Stato secondo won the project “4 Cantieri per Fabbrica Europa” (2008).
Rampelli is committed to researching the “elementary structures of action” – as she named her
public body research events since 20146 – and the “nature of the performing act” (D’Adamo 2012,
14), and currently refuses the label of butoh for her work. She described her meeting with Iwana
as a “shocking meeting in terms of the perception of the self, of being and acting,” since Iwana
266
“entrusts to his pupils the experience of responsibility for action” (D’Adamo 2012, 43) and a vision
of dance as an “original process of opening” (D’Adamo 2012, 45). Along with Iwana, Rampelli
represents the main influence for the first generation of Italian butoh dancers, which essentially
developed in Rome around the activity of the Liòs Company and the NON-Company.
Liòs Company has been a project of a dance collective that started in 2000 by a group of dancers
who shared in common training with Iwana not only in Italy but also in long summer workshops
in Normandy, as well as the rare workshops held by Rampelli and Muronoi.7 Its members Stefano
Taiuti, Alessandra Cristiani, Marie Thérèse Sitzia, Samantha Marenzi, Flavio Arcangeli, Maddalena
Gana, and Manuela Giovagnetti organized the international butoh festival “Trasform’azioni” in
Rome from 2000 to 2010.8 Since each of them produced at least one solo for the festival every
year, beginning in 2000, we can begin to talk about an Italian butoh style. Their way of dancing
seems to have incorporated the “bodily state” proposals by Iwana, his improvisational style, and a
kind of dynamics created by quite slow movements, stillness, and sudden explosions.
The first Italian print resource on butoh, Butō, la nuova danza giapponese (D’Orazi 1997),
appeared late in the Iwana era. It traces the historical context of butoh following the main
publications in western languages then available,9 tells about an experience of prolonged study
with Iwana Masaki, and offers a collection of texts written by Japanese dancers. The opening
essay introduced the concept of dance as a way to reveal an immanent original landscape written
on the “flesh body,” the nikutai – that holds personal and universal memories as matter, and is
opposed to the “physical body” (shintai) corresponding to individual’s social role: “The body left
to the necessity of its own impulses can regain a state of innocence, where its reaction to the envi-
ronment is not contaminated by acquired habits and behaviors” (D’Orazi 1997, 7). That is, the
nikutai is a natural primordial non-dual authentic body where each act comes from an intention
deeply rooted in a state of being and the body is not used as a tool to express something. This
book became a point of reference for the early Italian dancers involved in butoh.
What is clear according to this view of the Italian butoh scene is the strong imprinting by Iwana espe-
cially in regard to the style of dancing – in terms of the dynamics of movement and the use of bodily
state images – that sometimes clouded dancers’ own bodily research. That is, Iwana-trained dancers
Figure 28.4 Kasai Akira, Seraphita (Rome, Teatro Greco, 1998), photograph by Emilio D’Itri.
267
Figure 28.5 Kasai Akira, “Rhinoceros” (Rome, Teatro Furio Camillo, 2009), photograph by Emilio D’Itri.
Figure 28.6 Kasai Akira, portrait (Rome 1998), photograph by Emilio D’Itri.
often ended up using the form of the master’s internal landscape rather than their own. This is the
reason why Kasai’s arrival on the Italian scene in 1998 was a kind of storm.10 His fast-moving style
was a totally new butoh proposal in Italy and pushed dancers to search again for the nature of butoh.
When Kasai started to teach in Italy, he explained that he could not teach Japanese butoh, but
he could help to build an originally Italian butoh. Hijikata and Ohno, through their example,
only demonstrated that butoh is possible, and that it can be found anywhere. That way, though
born in Japan, butoh retains universal possibilities. According to him, the ancestors of butoh are
Nero and Heliogabalus, Lautréamont, Genet, Marquis De Sade, Jesus Christ made man, Artaud,
Nijinsky, and Isadora Duncan, all of whom bore a divine spark within their material body. Or,
in the language of dance, all those who brought consciousness into the body and gave to imag-
ination the same value as reality (D’Orazi 2011). His workshops pointed at butoh as a way to
connect motion to the energy of bodily sensations and to the energy of words. In the later case,
his meeting with Steiner’s eurhythmy, which connects body and consciousness through the use
of words, was a way to deepen the research of butoh and to build a new horizon for the future.11
Especially after the experience of being choreographed by Kasai in “Eliogabalo Project”
(see Figures 28.7 and 28.8), the dance style of the aforementioned Lios Company underwent
Figure 28.7 Alessandro Pintus, “Eliogabalo Project,” directed by Kasai Akira (Rome, Teatro Furio Camillo,
2009), photograph by Emilio D’Itri.
269
Maria Pia D’Orazi
Figure 28.8 Alessandro Pintus, Flavio Arcangeli, Manuela Giovagnetti, Marie Thérèse Sitzia, “Eliogabalo
Project,” directed by Kasai Akira (Rome, Teatro Furio Camillo, 2009), photograph by Emilio D’Itri.
a transformation of atmosphere and dynamics.12 Currently, the company has disbanded and
each dancer is experimenting and performing a more personal approach to dance. One of the
members, Stefano Taiuti, developed an original style by combining his experience with mime
and butoh, which gave him “a different way to live the act of dancing and a breathless range
of spiritual body experiences.”13 He performs solo works presented in art galleries, theatres,
urban environments, nightclubs, and television. Currently, he signs his productions as Zeitgeist
(the company he formed in 2003). Another former Lios member, Alessandra Cristiani, focused
her work on the “possibility of investigating and perceiving the subtle nature of the body phe-
nomenon”14 and continues working with Habillé d’eau, as a solo performer, or in collaboration
with other theatre companies (lately with Fortebraccio Teatro for Metamorfosi, 2015). As a solo
270
performer, she won the “Scenari Indipendenti 2008” prize with her project devoted to photogra-
pher Francesca Woodman La fisica dell’anima (The physic of the soul). Her teaching activity –
largely inspired by Iwana’s system – has lately introduced elements of eurhythmy drawn from
Kasai. Marie Thérèse Sitzia elaborated her system of training named “Phenomenology of the
presence” and is working as a solo dancer or in collaboration with other theatre directors. She
won the prize devoted to original projects of young dancers, named “Tracce-EXPLO,” with
Genealogia di un pesce (Genealogy of a fish, 2008). Maddalena Gana is performing with the Giano
company founded in 2004 together with the actor Giordano Giorgi “to explore the intimate
essence and the concrete form of matter,”15 and has developed a relationship between body and
sound, collaborating with live musicians. Belonging to the same generation is Alessandro Pintus,
who studied mainly with Iwana, Tanaka, and Kasai. He founded the NON-Company group
(in 2001)16 and uses a personal method of training largely inspired by physical manipulations
of Tanaka and Hijikata technique as reconstructed by Waguri Yukio (Waguri 1998). One of his
stated goals is investigating by means of butoh Italian cultural roots.
In 2001, the first Italian volume devoted to Ohno was published (D’Orazi 2001). It was a
reconsideration of Ohno that explored his relation to Hijikata and butoh techniques and meth-
ods. Even though Hijikata and Ohno point in two different directions of working – improvisa-
tion and choreography – both seem to share the same vision of dance as a sequence of “bodily
states,” a succession of psychophysical changes related to image-content, whether the composi-
tion precedes the performing act – as in a choreography – or the two happen simultaneously – as
in improvisation. That is, dance has not so much to do with a sequence of motions, as with a
series of internal variations. It is not important if there is a story guiding the dancers’ actions.
The important thing is the nature of the dancers’ presence, how the dancers change their energy
by working on the hidden side of the motion. Roberta Carreri, an Italian actress of Odin Teatret
Figure 28.9 Alessandra Cristiani, “Flower” (Rufa Rome University of Fine Arts, 2016), photograph by
Eleonora Cerri Pecorella.
271
Figure 28.10 Marie Thérèse Sitzia (Rufa Rome University of Fine Arts, 2016), photograph by Eleonora
Cerri Pecorella.
Figure 28.11 Maddalena Gana, “InPrimia” (Rufa Rome University of Fine Arts, 2016), photograph by
Eleonora Cerri Pecorella.
Company directed by Eugenio Barba, talking about her experience at Ohno Kazuo Dance Studio
once said:
There is one thing that was especially clear: the real dance is not the one you can see
watching the body moving on the stage. The real dance is what happens inside the
dancer’s body. The actor, as well as the dancer, is a medium that lets pass through his or
her body the energies produced inside to join with the spectators and let them dance
by themselves.
D’Orazi 2001, 112 17
And, this “bodily state” concept is a kind of key for understanding butoh’s influence on the
Italian stage.
In 2002, when Ohno decided to place a copy of his archive in Europe, the Ohnos renewed
their connection with Maria Perchiazzi to establish a connection to Eugenia Casini Ropa of
Bologna University. The Ohno Archive opened in 2002 guaranteeing at least one event a year –
such as a conference, poster exhibition, performance, and book translation – devoted to promot-
ing the knowledge of Ohno and to deepening the discussion about butoh.18
Some years later, the first Italian book on butoh founder Hijikata was released (D’Orazi
2008). It reads Hijikata in terms of a heretical total body who dared to live a total life (Il corpo
eretico):
The body is the incarnation of a person, but Hijikata looks around and all he sees
are corpses, individuals no longer in contact with themselves, who have made theirs
the restrictions imposed by their cultural environment, setting limits to their men-
tal, spiritual, and sentimental existence, never experienced in full. Defining butoh
dance as “the corpse rising to his feet, with a desperate desire for life,” Hijikata
exhorts the dancer to reach a full awareness of that same body that looks vacant
and unattended in everyday life, handed over to an organization that determines its
needs, wishes, and salvation modes: unaware of its potential, afraid of the strength
of his drives and of the mystery of its functioning. His butoh is the heresy of a
total body.
D’Orazi 2008, 19–20
As the reader can see, Kasai re-invigorated the world of butoh with his ideas, resulting in, among
other things, a reinterpretation of Ohno and new attention paid to Hijikata. Kasai brought again
to Italy the awareness of the potential meaning of dance. According to him, three conditions need
to occur, given which even a ballet dancer can be part of butoh:
A dancer should have the instruments to perceive his own body, because butoh is the
awareness of the material existence of our body. He must live his present days, because
butoh moves on with the world, it is not a new tradition, it is always evolving. And his
dance should be criminal, for butoh is always fighting power.
D’Orazi 2011, 88
Butoh can restore a body deteriorated by the “super-national power of computers and infor-
mation technology” and “find a way to preserve the essential energy of dance” (D’Orazi 2016a,
149). According to Kasai the task of butoh is nowadays “to create a new body through the power
of the word” (D’Orazi 2015, 142). Actually, the dancer has to come back to the birth point of
273
Maria Pia D’Orazi
the body, that is, the same point where spoken language originated, the point where a flow of
energy precedes the emission of a sound becoming word. For “in this era of falsehood, dance is
no longer for dancers only, it is for everybody” (D’Orazi 2016b, 57). In Italy, the research is still
ongoing and has attracted a number of young and old pupils. But the possible results of Kasai’s
scattered seeds are still wide open.
Notes
1 The author was among the participants at that workshop and soon after devoted her graduation thesis
to Ohno. This was the start of thirty years of research about butoh (largely as independent researcher)
as well the start of thirty years of producing the activities of Japanese butoh dancers in Italy.
2 The main in order of arrival are Ohno Kazuo, Iwana Masaki, Murobushi Kō, Nakajima Natsu, Maro
Akaji, Kasai Akira, Tanaka Min, Yoshioka Yumiko, Yoshimoto Daisuke, Carlotta Ikeda, Tadashi Endo,
Horikawa Hisako, Sumako Koseki, Muronoi Yōko, and Takenouchi Atsushii.
3 The first workshop of Iwana was in Orvieto in 1990 organized by the dancer Rossella Fiumi. The one
in Rome the next year was organized by the theatre director Maria Inversi, who met him in France. But
the first appearance of Iwana in Italy was in 1989 with the performance Awahi (Bi-Duality) at the space
Dark Camera.
4 The performance was premiered in Rome at Furio Camillo Theatre, with Monica Camilloni, Irena
Kulka (from Switzerland), Giuliana Majocchi, and Silvia Rampelli.
5 The company is still working today but in a different composition, the only constant member is Ales-
sandra Cristiani.
6 The title has been used on the occasion of a public collaboration with theater director Romeo Castellucci.
7 Beginning in 1997 Muronoi Yōko (1959–2017) started to give workshops in Rome, and her work with
“natural movements,” as well as her research into the origins of movement left a strong mark in the first
Italian generation of butoh dancers.
8 The author collaborated at this Festival mainly as producer of Iwana Masaki and Kasai Akira and occa-
sionally gave her contribution as butoh scholar. The report of this experience is included in a book about
the Festival (D’Orazi 2010).
9 The main ones included the Die Rebellion des Körpers (Haerdter 1986); the landmark volume Butoh:
Shades of Darkness (Viala 1989) and the American Ankoku Butō (Klein 1988); the The Drama Review vol-
ume devoted to butoh (vol. 30, n. 2, Summer 1986) and the aesthetic analysis of butoh made by Vicki
Sanders for Asian Theatre Journal (vol. 5, n. 2, Fall 1988).
10 Kasai arrived in Rome in 1998 invited by the author. But Kasai’s regular teaching activity began in 2004
and is still ongoing with at least one project a year.
11 Both in terms of identity – as each nation has a specific language and language builds the body – and in terms
of building the body for dance: in the same way Hijikata used words with the aim of making dancers
aware of their body and transforming their physical condition.
12 In 2009 Kasai realized, in collaboration with the author, the Heliogabalus Project for Liòs and NON-Company
after a month-long artistic residency in Rome. All the dancers attended his workshops for about ten
years. For a more detailed report about this experience, see D’Orazi 2011.
13 Stefano Taiuti, dancer, choreographer, performer; https://stefanotaiuti.com/c-v/
14 Alessandra Cristiani, performer; www.alessandracristiani.com/biography/
15 Giano. Compagnia di teatro e danza; https://gianoteatro.wordpress.com/storia/
16 Non Company; http://alessandropintus.com/
17 Carreri also said, “Katsuko Azuma, Natsu Nakajima and Kazuo Ohno showed me a completely new
way of feeling my body, not from the outside but from within. They made me discover what I now call
the ‘internal body,’ revealing parts of myself that were hidden even to me” (Carreri 2014, 231–232). The
Italian director Eugenio Barba is the founder of ISTA-International School of Theatre Anthropology,
“a multicultural network of performers and scholars” searching for the “technical basis of the performer
in a transcultural dimension,” in order to “understanding the fundamental principles which engender
the performer’s presence or scenic life” (www.odinteatret.dk/research/ista.aspx). ISTA hosted the butoh
dancer Nakajima Natsu twice (in 1990 and 1996) and Ohno (in 1994).
18 Conversation by the author with Eugenia Casini Ropa, December 2016. For the archive activities, see
also, Elena Cervellati essay (Cervellati 2015).
274
Works cited
Barthes, Roland. 1978 (2002). “L’intervalle.” Le nouvel observateur. In OEuvres complètes, Vol. 5: 475–477.
Paris: Seuil. (October 23).
Baudrillard, Jean. 1985. “Théātre de la revulsion.” Scènes: Revue de l’Espace Kiron 1 (March 1).
Carreri, Roberta. 2014. On Training: Traces of an Odin Teatret Actress. Edited by Frank Camilleri. London and
New York: Routledge.
Cervellati, Elena. 2015. “Alimentare la presenza. L’Archivio Kazuo Ohno in Italia.” In Butō. Prospettive
europee e sguardi dal Giappone, edited by Matteo Casari and Elena Cervellati, 67–76. Bologna: Diparti-
mento delle Arti. http://amsacta.unibo.it/4352/.
D’Adamo, Ada. 2012. Il corpo insorto nella pratica performativa di Habillé d’eau. Rome: E&S Editoria e Spettacolo.
D’Orazi, Maria Pia. 1997. Butō, la nuova danza giapponese. Roma: E&A Editori Associati.
———. 2001. Kazuo Ōno. Palermo: L’Epos.
———. 2008. Il corpo eretico. Padova: CasadeiLibri.
———. 2010. “Il demone di Mezzogiorno. A proposito di Trasform’azioni e del Butō.” In Trasform’azioni,
rassegna internazionale di danza butō. Fotografia di un’esperienza, edited by Samantha Marenzi, 21–57. Roma:
Editoria&Spettacolo.
———. 2011. “Akira Kasai, il fantasma di Eliogabalo. Tre studi su Artaud.” In Biblioteca Teatrale, Vol.
99–100: 79–105. Roma: Bulzoni.
———. 2015. “Il Butō in Italia e l’esperienza di Akira Kasai.” In Butō. Prospettive europee e sguardi dal Giap-
pone, edited by Matteo Casari and Elena Cervellati, 133–147. Bologna: Dipartimento delle Arti. http://
amsacta.unibo.it/4352/.
———. 2016a. “Building the Dancing Body: Akira Kasai from Butoh to Eurythmy.” In Teatro e Storia, Anno
III, Vol. 8, 139–150. Roma: Bulzoni.
———. 2016b. “Un funamblo sospeso tra due mondi.” Introduction to Akira Kasai. Un libro chiamato corpo,
13–57. Dublino: Artdigiland.
Godard, Colette. 1980a. “À Nancy La mort complice.” Le Monde (May 21).
———. 1980b. “Sankai Juku.” Le Monde (May 30).
Guatterini, Marinella. 1983. “Kabuki? No preferisco il flamenco.” L’Europeo (3 Marzo).
Haerdter, Michael and Sumie Kawai, eds. 1986. Butoh. Die Rebellion des Körpers ein Tanz aus Japan. Berlin:
Alexander Verlag.
Iwana, Masaki. 2002. The Intensity of Nothingness: The Dance and Thoughts of Masaki Iwana. Paris: La Maison
du Butoh Blanc.
Klein, Susan Blakely. 1988. Ankoku butō. New York: Cornell University.
Michel, Marcell. 1980. “Et toujours Pina Bausch.” Le Monde (May 27).
Ohno Kazuo. 2006. “Kazuo Ohno Long Interview.” Dvd. Tokyo: NHK Enterprise.
Pasi, Mario. 1983. “Kazuo Ohno mima anche la crescita di un fiore.” Corriere della sera, (23 Febbraio).
Sanders, Vicki. 1988. “Dancing and the Dark Soul of Japan: An Aesthetic Analysis of Butō.” In Asian Theatre
Journal, 5 (2), Fall, 148–163.
Schechner, Richard, ed. 1986. “Butoh.” The Drama Review, Vol. 30, No. 2, Summer, 107–170.
Viala, Jean and Nourit Masson-Sekine, eds. 1988. Butoh: Shades of Darkness. Tokyo: Shufunotomo.
Waguri Yukio. 1998. Butō Kaden. CD-ROM. Tokushima: Just System.
275
29
GERMAN BUTOH SINCE
THE LATE 1980s
Tadashi Endo, Yumiko Yoshioka, and
Minako Seki
Rosa van Hensbergen
Dressed in a floor-length white dress, framed against a hovering mirrored square, Tadashi Endo
moves backwards unfurling both arms into the air. He watches the passage of his hands overhead
like small winged creatures, one fluttering up then returning, followed by the other. These hands,
seemingly filled with a life of their own, are what draws his movement out. But they also draw,
in this gesture of upwards escape, the memory of Pina Bausch’s iconic opening scene in Café
Muller (1978).1
Two dancers dressed in white stumble through a forest of chairs, discovering clearings in
which their arms are thrown upwards in expressive release. These arms are moved not by hands,
as in Endo’s performance, but by impulses sent out from heaving chests.2 Endo’s memory of their
movements in Ikiru–Homage to Pina Bausch (2010) is haunted, in the life of its hands, by another
performance: Ohno Kazuo’s Admiring La Argentina (1977).3 Like Endo’s homage, Ohno’s is in
remembrance of a dance watched years before. The ghosted forms of Antonia Mercé’s floreos are
legible in the fragile movements of his fingers – but as something part lost, slipping away. This
something is both distant in time and space, and lodged inside Ohno’s body as a “meeting [he]
cannot forget” (K. Ohno 1992, 98). Ohno Yoshito singles out this quality in his father’s hands
as a departure from German Expressionism: Whereas, “Modern Dance [mainly the German
Expressionist strand], which Ohno [Kazuo] started out learning, opened the flesh-body [nikutai]
outwards,” his hands would dance “like willow trees” hanging inwards (Y. Ohno and Ohno
Kazuo butō kenkyūjo 1999, 51).4
When Endo shifts the expressive impulse from the chest to the hands, he makes a space for
Ohno in the memory of Bausch’s dance. He also, in a matter of seconds, traces a history of butoh’s
involvement with other dance forms: here flamenco and German Expressionism.5 Gesturing
in several directions at once – to two scenes at a distance from one another in place and time,
and to the same scenes overlaid in Endo’s interior world – produces a very specific suspension
“between.” The word Endo uses for between, “MA,” is an already naturalized transcription of the
Japanese term. It can take on a metaphysical flavor when used out of context – a “world beyond
time and words: that is MA” (Endo 2017) – or even a mystical one: “in both a local and global
sense,” as “the mysterious spaces in between” (Fraleigh 2010, 17).6 But when asked to explain
what “ma” meant, Endo’s anecdotal response was tellingly located in the very specific site of a
276
German butoh since the late 1980s
German history. “Ma” was, he suggested, like standing on the Berlin Wall the day it fell – that
was the right place to be, neither East nor West, but in the “no man’s land” between the two.7
I would like to suggest in what follows that German butoh dance since the 1980s has inhabited
more than one “between,” and that these register the traces of specific histories. My focus, here,
is on the work of Tadashi Endo, Yumiko Yoshioka, and Minako Seki, who variously characterize
their work as “between” or “MA.”8 This is not an exhaustive account, and there are many other
dancers who have played an important role in building a German scene – Furukawa Anzu, delta
RA’i, and Yuko Kaseki, to name a few. But this scene is also, and always has been, built on itiner-
ancy. Germany, and Berlin in particular, remains a throughway for European butoh.
Butoh’s migratory patterns since its early days have always been bound up with economic
conditions, and its movement to Germany can be read in such terms, as the result of a recent
“butoh market” (Mikami 2015, 173, 2016, 145), or the “in-transit-ness” of a “mobile art labor
force” (Mezur 2014, 221, 220). But those conditions run back past a “post-boom economic con-
text” (Mezur 2014, 220) to butoh’s rocky beginnings in 1960s Japan. They also run back through
a history of butoh’s involvement with other dance forms, which include flamenco, cabaret, or the
Happening, as much as German Expressionism.
The 1986 publication, Butoh: Die Rebellion Des Körpers: Ein Tanz Aus Japan, which accom-
panied the first German butoh festival held that year at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin,
established German butoh in terms of its relation to German Expressionism (see “Introduc-
tion,” Haerdter and Kawai 1986). At the same time, it provided a nuanced account of the
divergent strands within butoh, and of Hijikata’s central role in particular – making available,
for example, Hijikata’s last lecture “Kaza Daruma” (35–54) to a German speaking audience
well over a decade before the publication of an English translation (Hijikata 2000).9 This
constituted a slight departure from the way in which butoh had been framed (with little ref-
erence to Hijikata) in its neighboring France up to that point (Pagès 2009, 155–158).10 The
1986 festival, with its accompanying publication, did not mark butoh’s first appearance in
Germany – dancers like Kasai Akira, Ishii Mitsutaka, and Ohno Kazuo had traveled there from
the late 1970s and early 1980s – but it can be seen as incipient in shaping the German scene.
Rewinding to butoh’s first European landing in Paris can help set the stage for what followed
in Germany since the 1980s.
Paris, 1978
The first European butoh performance was the fall-out of a failed cabaret.11 It was the winter of
1977–1978. Carlotta Ikeda, Murobushi Kō, and Yumiko Yoshioka (performing as Mizelle Hana-
oka) had turned up in Paris with plans to stay for three months. They had a free apartment and a
promised run at an up-market cabaret, but after the first night, evidently not to the owner’s liking,
they had a free apartment, no income, and a lot of time on their hands instead. It would have
been easier to pack up and go. Paris was lonely and expensive, and a performance opportunity
was nowhere to be found. But the shame (haji, as Yoshioka recounts) of returning to Tokyo with
nothing but failure to show for it was far worse than the hardship of sticking around. Eventually
an opportunity came up to perform at the Nouveau Carré Silvia-Monfort. It seated 99 peo-
ple, Yoshioka recalls with exactitude, and after the first few days the seats were packed nightly
from 10.30 p.m. for a four-week run, from January 27 to February 25. The performance, LE
DERNIER EDEN―Porte de l’au-dela, was such a hit, stirring cries of Enfin du jamais vu! (“Ko
Murobushi Archive” 1978), that it was invited to the Ampitheatre Roupnel in Bourgogne from
February 27 to February 28. The remarkable reception of this performance was critical to butoh’s
dissemination across France and Europe more widely (Pagès 2009, 47–48).
277
Rosa van Hensbergen
Yoshioka, roaming between Paris and Berlin for nearly a decade before settling in the latter,
considers her own inheritance of early butoh to be captured by Hijikata’s late-phrase: “there
is a Tōhoku even in England” (Hijikata 1985, 17; also see Mikami 2015, 34; Inata 2008, 552).
Hijikata suggests that being rooted (in his home region “Tōhoku”) is itself transposable to an
abstracted locale. Place names become placeholders for the idea of localization, whether familiar
or foreign. But they also always carry the traces of these displacements as specific suspensions
between – whether Endo’s between Bausch and Ohno, Hijikata’s between Tōhoku and England,
or Yoshioka’s between Paris and Berlin. Displacement is also what lays bare commonality. As
Yoshioka suggests, the “butoh body” is a common body: “everybody has memories which are
common,” and this commonality is the “butoh body” (“eX . . . it! Archive & Media” 2017).
Within a half-decade of butoh’s French landing, the locales in which it was performed in
France had evolved from small underground theatres to large-scale performance venues (Pagès
2009, 65). And while this evolution did not rule out butoh’s continued presence in underground
theatres and alternative spaces, the German scene maintained a more alternative profile. The 1986
Festival venue, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, while not small-scale was still relatively young (estab-
lished as an art venue in 1974) and committed more to visual than performing arts. Similarly, the
expansive estate, Schloss Bröllin, in which the eX . . . it! Festival, organized by Yoshioka and delta
RA’I since 1995, takes place is far from a conventional performance space.12 Many of the spaces in
which butoh performances currently occur – studios like Tatwerk, Tanzfabrik, and DOCK 11 &
EDEN – are not set up in traditional proscenium format. And whether coincidentally or not,
German butoh’s lively presence in alternative spaces has also kept it closely tied to another dance
tradition with which it shares a history.
The tide of internationalism that brought butoh to France was not only coincident with the
introduction of Pina Bausch (in 1977), but with a “double opening up” to American contem-
porary dance (Pagès 2009, 62–63). The latter’s rejection of the proscenium stage can be read in
terms of its close dialogue with the visual arts. Butoh’s Happening-style performances of the
1960s, often created in collaboration with visual artists (see, for example, Baird 2012, chap. 3),
have also left their trace within contemporary German butoh. The creation of immersive envi-
ronments, whether in non-proscenium or more traditional stage spaces, in contemporary Ger-
man butoh can be read as a gesture both towards its 1960s heritage and towards the American
contemporary dance with which it entered Europe:13 The eX . . . it! festival is specifically built
around an “eXchange project for Butoh and contemporary dance” (Yoshioka and delta RA’i
2017). But what this double gesture effects, as Endo’s channeling of Ohno and Bausch at once, is
an immersion in the present scene that simultaneously displaces its viewing elsewhere.
West Berlin, 1988

The eX . . . it! Festival was established after Minako Seki split from the dance collective she
had formed with delta RA’i and Yumiko Yoshioka in 1987, Tatoeba-théātre Danse Grotesque.
Tatoeba-théātre Danse Grotesque’s first performance, Von Hinter der Mauer (From Behind the Wall
[1988]), was choreographed with Tamura Tetsurō, Seki’s teacher and co-founder, with Furukawa
Anzu, of Dance Love Machine.14 Furukawa was particularly influential in shaping the German
butoh scene – training dancers like Yuko Kaseki and Kim Itoh and performance artists like Melati
Suryodarmo. A video of this first performance at the West Berlin communal arts venue, ufaFab-
rik, makes visible some of the specific ways in which German butoh exists between specific places
and histories (“Von Hinter Der Mauer [From Behind the Wall]” 1988).
The performance opens onto a darkened stage, the sound of cicadas coming through a din of
electronic music. There is a shadowy outline moving behind glowing squares of red-plastic shōji
278
[a traditional sliding door], as a semi-translucent wall. A white-suited man stands, head hanging
heavy like a melancholy clown. The shōji slides back, a woman in kimono guiding it with her
hand from where she sits in a white-walled recess. Two interiors face one another, from behind
a wall. There is the Japanese interior on the one hand, and the darkened stage and white-suited
man on the other. A flickering of the gaze between one and the other sets up the dynamic of
this performance’s opening.
The music changes, and both stand, the man in profile, the woman facing front, raising their
right arms synchronously to cover one eye with a clenched fist, then the other. Then both hands
unfurl and furl in a slow-motion game of peekaboo. Only they do not see one another. As this
sequence accumulates, it begins to suggest something of a tension particular to the work of
butoh. Between a rich interior world, a seemingly trance-like absorption in an invisible imagi-
native totality, and an extreme openness to the exterior, a responsiveness to surrounding stimuli
that makes distant entities seem proximate enough to rub up against, or even enter, the surface of
skin. Seki spoke of a “wall inside the body” as part of this performance.
These dancers could be marking their movements in the privacy of their own rooms, search-
ing around in their muscle memories for the next move. The rooms could be as distant from
one another as Berlin and Tokyo. But they could also be responding to each other with their
bodies, dwelling in a shared intimacy. They are both here and elsewhere. This produces a respon-
sive movement in the attention of the viewer, from a total absorption in one of the figures to
a shared attention in the relation of both, or a flickering from one to the other. It is like being
caught between watching a solo and duet, as in the close-eyed sequence at the beginning of Pina
Bausch’s Café Müller – watching neither one dancer nor both, but one and both at the same time,
suspended between two moments of attention.
Both Seki and Yoshioka have been working on body methods that enable plural forms of
attention since the early days of Tatoeba-théātre Danse Grotesque. Seki makes use of Noguchi
Michizō’s theories of the “hanging body” and “water bag body,” which use gravity to condi-
tion a relaxed responsiveness. This pendant body is primed to react impulsively to internal and
external stimuli simultaneously, strung between the “consciousness” and “unconsciousness,”
the “micro-” and “macro-cosmos” (Seki 2017a). Yoshioka’s “body resonance” training also
works with Noguchi methods to “shake off unnecessary tension.” It “neutraliz[es]” the body to
a “close-to-zero state” so that it can “catch waves from profound layers of the body” and the
outside world (Yoshioka 2017).
This fine-tuned body can reverse itself instantaneously, can seem to move in one direction and
then move in another. As though whichever way it moved, it had already been displaced. This
betweenness can also be turned to dramatic and playful effect. Around 9m40s into Von Hinter der
Mauer (From Behind the Wall), the first trio arises. The three come together in a swaying motion
accompanied by a fluttering of hands that is echoed in the work’s finale (at around 1h20m). The
fluttering of their hands is gradually accompanied by the exaggerated facial expressions of people
wailing (though there are no audible wails), and then the slightly staggered shift to extreme but
silent laughter, before wails once more take over. Finally, the trio breaks up as a couple (Seki and
RA’i) spiral off into a slap-off, and a single woman (Yoshioka) luxuriates stage right in a lounging
pose like a figure from an ukiyo-e. The reversibility of the wailing and the laughter, particularly
striking in Yoshioka’s mask-like expression, suggests itself in the rainbow-shaped mouth. As
though someone really had turned a frown upside down.
The laugh-cry is a repertorial move that occurs elsewhere in their work, and has its roots in
Tamura and Furukawa’s choreography for Dance Love Machine (see for example “Hidamari
[Sunny Place]” 1989, 38m–48m; choreographed with Furukawa). Tamura’s interest in the every-
dayness of ‘“humanity,”’ his sense that ‘“anything that happens is good, whatever it is,”’ is behind
279
Rosa van Hensbergen
his exploration of human emotions like laughter and tears (Harada 2004, 424–425, 423). The first
performance in which Seki performed, Kibun-teki (Feeling), and the one with which she came to
the 1986 Festival, she recounts, involved a scene in which Seki, Tamura, and Furukawa, sitting at
a table, moved through cycles of laughter, tears, and sleep. In the shift from laughter to tears there
is at once a dramatic transition from extremes of affected feeling, and a curious consistency in the
energy expended and received between the silent wail and its still silent antipode, the laugh. It is
not the laugh that is funny, but the something that can’t be pinned down between the laugh and
the wail, the confusion as to whether what we are seeing is dramatically the same or its opposite.
The awkwardness of being caught between a laugh and a cry is made acute in a performance
that rattles internally with cultural distances. At one point, elderly versions of Seki and Yoshioka
mumble Japanese while snatching a low table from one another, in a scene that hovers between
Western slapstick and Japanese rakugo (“Von Hinter Der Mauer [From Behind the Wall]” 1988,
36m–39m). This playing up, but also setting aslant, of Japaneseness, might be immediately
funny in Japan, but it takes some time for the laughter in the German audience to warm up.
Tatoeba-théātre Danse Grotesque plays with these instabilities and risks, with awkwardness and
displacement, as part of what grounds its performance worlds in the specific spaces of Germany
circa 1990.
Vienna, 1989
Tadashi Endo’s hovering between Ohno and Bausch locates as much as it dislocates, discovers
the common ground as much as the stylistic divergences. The sense of an emotive force that
carries across distance and difference from one work into another, of an encounter that cannot be
forgotten – “a meeting I cannot forget” (Ohno 1992, 98); “I can never forget this scene” (Endo
2017b) – is itself bound up with certain tenets of German Expressionism.15 Mary Wigman’s con-
ception of “absolute dance” was specifically invested in a transcendence of the individual dancer
through “feeling”; a move which conversely risked re-allocating German national character to
that very site (Manning 2006, 45). The dislocation of this national ground in Endo’s work, how-
ever, opens the space for “feeling” as a between-space in which encounters are always already
deracinated. The feeling that carries from La Argentina to Ohno, from Ohno and Bausch to
Endo, is not rooted in any national locale. As Endo writes in his “MAMU” manifesto, co-written
with Ko Murobushi: “MAMU is an other country,/born in the chaos of crossings and activites,
[sic]/MAMU is another body” (Endo 2017a). MAMU is also another language, situated between
Japanese and German.
When Endo met Ohno Kazuo at the first ImPulsTanz festival in Vienna in 1989, he had already
been living between Germany and Austria for over a decade. This was not his first exposure to
butoh,16 but it was the meeting that stuck: “I met butoh, and butoh was Kazuo Ohno.” In fact,
“meeting” butoh in Ohno happened outside of the workshop in which Endo participated. At
the end of the first day, Ohno approached him with a request: he had an interview scheduled, but
needed someone to translate from Japanese to German and vice-versa, would Endo be willing to
help? Endo had not realized what he was signing himself up to in saying yes. Ohno’s enigmatic
responses to the interviewer, translated by Endo word for word, left the interviewer nonplussed.
The Austrian journalist could not make head or tail of the suggestion that a dream about Ohno’s
mother transforming into a caterpillar or the image of a “rain mandala” whose insides poured
with rain could be a response to the question “what is butoh?” So Endo, having stumbled a few
times, decided to feel his way around what Ohno meant, communicating what he gleaned to be
the words’ sense. When the interview ended, Endo sheepishly admitted to having taken liberties
with the literal translation, but to his surprise Ohno reassured him: “you know, that is butoh.”
280
Butoh was to be found in the surplus of interpretation necessary to the communicative

attempt – the “feeling” of what had been originally meant, rather than in a dogmatic adher-
ence to “forms” or “techniques” of translation. It was to be found in the unexpected place of
fumbling between languages more than in the testing out of new movements in a workshop.
Fumbling between languages might even, as an intensive workshop led by Endo in the winter
of 2016 suggested, become its own form of butoh. The Japanese phonetic alphabet was divided
between members of the group, who then worked on articulating the precise sound of each
character in movement. It was an improvisational exercise, but one in which the question of
whether the precise feeling of the character had been communicated or not was at stake. “Ki”
was distinct from “shi,” for example, in the sharpness and speed it required. The feel of language
in its somatic dimension bears communicatively, and this communicative surplus is configured
in terms of a common “feeling” in Endo’s work. Reviewers have responded in corresponding
terms, feeling it to “speak directly to [their] hearts,” leaving with “the feeling” they had had
their “heart touched by someone or something” (see MA – in Edinburgh, Scotland/UK – 2005
Endo 2017d).
Encountering butoh at a distance from Japan, Endo has been active in promoting and work-
ing with European butoh dancers since the early 1990s. Within several years of his first “meet-
ing,” Endo set up the MAMU festival, which at first ran annually from 1992 to 1996, and then
bi- or triennially from 1999 to 2004. It brought a string of European as well as Japanese butoh
dancers, starting with Ohno, to offer workshops and performances in Göttingen (Endo 2017e).
Staging an exchange between European and Japanese dancers, festivals like MAMU and eX . . .
it! are also specifically engaged in channeling butoh’s influence back into a wider German per-
formance scene.17
When place names fall away

Seki, Yoshioka, and Endo take “transformation,” “dancing in between,” and “ma,” as moveable
terms for describing a lifelong work-in-progress. “Butoh” is understood as no less open a frame-
work. The last thirty years have seen it traversed through collaborative exchanges with artists
as varied as jazz musicians and flamenco dancers – in each instantiation “butoh” takes on new
shades. These instantiations do not occur in a historical vacuum, but in constant dialogue with
the characters of its past. Dairakudakan transforms through its offspring in Ariadone and Dance
Love Machine into their joint lovechild in Tatoeba-théātre Danse Grotesque. Ohno Kazuo com-
municates the feeling of butoh to Endo, like a mother to a child. For “when conversing with our
mothers, we’ve no need to voice our thoughts to discern each other’s feelings” (Y. Ohno et al.
2004, 246). “Butoh” is inherited as a term to be worked with and against. As Katherine Mezur
puts it “they [Yoshioka, Seki, and Yuko Kaseki] keep their butoh brand (at a distance) and work
against it” (Mezur 2014, 219).
Distances are built within the name “butoh,” as they are within the performances staged under
its sign. “Tōhoku” becomes “Berlin,” “England” becomes “Japan,” and in this shifting of distant
grounds place names eventually fall away. Butoh becomes, like Endo’s “MA,” “an other country.”
This abstraction through displacement fashions its own specific between. In the recent works
of Seki and Yoshioka, this between accommodates further and further distances. Seki’s ongoing
series Human Form involves the slow stripping away of a space-age costume in the gradual build
up to an ecstatic nude finale (“Human Form” 2016, 28m–52m). All that is left is the body
unrooted by costumes or props. Yoshioka’s 2015 piece with TEN PEN CHii Art Labor, Mi-LAI
Future, places bodies in monochrome underwear on a stage with a two-storey wall, covered in
projections that look like computer code (“TEN PEN CHii Art Labor: Works” 2017). With no
281
Rosa van Hensbergen
markers to geographically locate them, these bodies are both displaced and at home in this no
man’s land. For even a present body can be as distant as the “end of the world.”
Notes
1 Compare in particular 1:50–2:00 in Endo’s extracted version of Ikiru – Homage for Pina Bausch (Endo
2017c) with 3:36–3:56 of Café Muller (Bausch 2017).
2 Bausch also uses movements which begin with the arms, but the repeated use of undulations in the chest,
say in propelling herself away from the wall, produces a quality quite distinct from that of Ohno’s hand
movements. See for example 1:40–2:00 in the clip of Ohno’s Admiring La Argentina (K. Ohno 2017b).
3 The title word “Admiring” varies according to the language, from “shō” to “Homage” or “Hommage.”
Similarly, Endo’s title varies between “Requiem” and “Homage” or “Hommage.”
4 Ohno Yoshito’s suggestion, here, does not take into account the nuances within German modern dance,
nor in the ways in which it influenced the work of Japanese dancers. As Kuniyoshi Kazuko suggests,
Ohno may have specifically been drawn to Eguchi and Miya over Ishii because their dance turned
towards the “self ’s interior world” rather than outwards in the more “pantomimic” style of Ishii (Kuni-
yoshi 2012, 64). Pina Bausch likewise does not fall into a straightforwardly German Expressionist line-
age, and in this scene, in particular, indicated an intense awareness of her inner world – of the difference
it made whether she looked out or down behind closed lids (see Wenders 2011).
5 While Ohno was impressed by Harald Kreutzberg’s “sublime technique” when he saw him dance in
1934, La Argentina left such an impression “that he didn’t even notice her technique” (Y. Ohno et al.
2004, 184).
6 Mentions of “ma” in discussions of butoh are ubiquitous. Its naturalized use in relation to architecture
precedes even that of the 1978 “MA” festival in Paris (see Nitschke 1966), and it quickly caught on
within theoretical discourses in France thereafter (see Lucken 2014). The naturalizing of “ma” retains
the specificities of an interval that is both temporal and spatial (the character is present in both space
[kūkan, 空間] and time [jikan, 時間]), as well as a philosophical history specifically rooted in the Japanese
language: Watsuji Tetsurō’s theorizing of “relationality [aidagara],” for example, considers the presence of
“ma [間]” in “ningen [人間]” (human), and “seken [世間]” (social world) (Watsuji 1996, 19). While this
is not knowingly politicized in its butoh usage, when “ma” takes on a metaphysical or mystical shape that
binds ontology to etymology, and through it, nationality, it also opens itself up to critiques of the
kind that have attended Kyoto School philosophers (see Heisig and Maraldo 1995), Martin Heidegger
(see, for example, Leach 1999), and, in terms of German-ness rather than the German language, dancers
like Mary Wigman (see “Introduction,” to Manning 2006; Karina and Kant 2003). My emphasis, here,
is on a specifically rooted understanding of betweenness (or “ma”) as a vocabulary to describe ways
in which presence is displaced through the condensing of specific alternative histories in performance.
See Katja Centonze (2011) for a comparable discussion of “performative displacement” in relation to
Japanese-Italian collaborative exchanges. The word is so central to Endo’s butoh that he chooses to write
it in all capital letters as MA.
7 This chapter is based on three interviews, each of 1–2 hours: with Tadashi Endo on December 1 in
Göttingen, where I also took part in his “Butoh-MA” workshop from December 2 to 4, 2016; with
Minako Seki on December 4 in Berlin; and with Yumiko Yoshioka over Skype on December 13. Unless
otherwise indicated quotes are from transcripts of these interviews.
8 Yoshioka considers butoh as a dance of “transformation,” “creat[ing] a constant feedback loop between
[her] imagination and [her] body” (Yoshioka 2017). Where Seki calls her work “dancing in between,”
as the “communication between the conscious and subconscious . . . the boundaries between reality
and illusion” (Seki 2017b).
9 Butoh: Die Rebellion Des Körpers: Ein Tanz Aus Japan is presented as a dedication to Hijikata who had
passed away earlier that year (Haerdter and Kawai 1986). It contains, as well as Hijikata’s last lecture,
short writings and interviews by Ohno (49–60), Tanaka Min (77–84), and Ishii Mitsutaka (85–89), and
translations of essays on Hijikata by critics like Gunji Masakatsu (95–100) and Gōda Nario (141–44).
Lucia Schwellinger’s book (1998), published over a decade on, also offers a thorough account of Hiji-
kata’s work, and in particular frames methodological differences between Hijikata and Ohno.
10 Sylviane Pagès notes Hijikata’s “erasure” as being directly linked to the “myth” of Ohno (2009, 155) –
a clear example of which was the lack of Hijikata’s acknowledgement in the publicity surrounding
Admiring La Argentina (157). Pagès identifies Hijikata’s rediscovery to 1985, when a number of essays
282
started to emerge, but dates a more substantial reframing to the 2002 publication of Butō(s) (Aslan and
Picon-Vallin).
11 This was the first performance assigned the name “butoh,” and the first concrete “date” that can be given
to butoh’s European landing, though Miura Issō, who had connections to butoh, had in fact performed
the previous year (Pagès 2009, 52–54).
12 The eX . . . it! Festival takes place every four years over two weeks in August. Since 1995, it has played
with themes like a “stock-tak[ing] of the European butoh scene” (1995), relationships between butoh
and contemporary dance (2003, 2007), and the influence of the “digital age” on our “analogue human
existence” (2011) (‘eX . . . it! Archive & Media’ 2017).
13 It is also worth noting that one of the ways in which Pina Bausch’s work distinguishes itself from preced-
ing forms of Expressionist dance is in its dramatic use of immersive set designs. Examples in German
butoh of similarly immersive environments are best represented by Yoshioka’s collaborative works with
TEN PEN CHii Art Labor (see “TEN PEN CHii Art Labor: Works” 2017).
14 Dance Love Machine is an off-shoot of Dairakudakan, with whom Tamura and Furukawa had both
trained (Harada 2004, 422–430, 458–464). Seki joined in the early 1980s after watching a jazz concert
at which Furukawa performed. She had gone to see jazz pianist Yamashita Yōsuke, who had played at
the same concert, but ended up talking to Furukawa afterwards, who invited her to join a ten-day Dance
Love Machine workshop.
15 Ohno’s work retained closer ties to German Expressionism than Hijikata’s did. Ohno, for example, gave
a lecture demonstration at the previous Mary Wigman school as late as 1988 (see K. Ohno 2017a).
16 In 1972, on a trip back to Japan, Endo had been taken along to Hijikata’s Hōsōtan (Story of Smallpox),
by a friend. He had agreed to go mostly for the chance to meet well-known figures in the avant-garde
performance scene. But the experience left a sting, a strange pain that stirred up memories of visiting
his father’s family in Akita.
17 Butoh: Die Rebellion Des Körpers: Ein Tanz Aus Japan included an essay by dance critic Ichikawa Miyabi
which suggests some of the connections between butoh and dancers or mime artists like Maguy Marin,
Pina Bausch, Lindsay Kemp, and the Macunaima Company (see Ichikawa in Haerdter and Kawai 1986,
168–171).
Works cited
Aslan, Odette, and Béatrice Picon-Vallin, eds. 2002. Butō(s). Paris: CNRS Editions.
Baird, Bruce. 2012. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits. Palgrave Studies in Theatre
and Performance History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bausch, Pina. 1978 (2017). “Cafe Muller Pina Baush 2/3.” YouTube video, 16:51. Uploaded by Yasmine
Ramos, (February 15). Accessed January 5. www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcg4d6SEGCo.
Centonze, Katja. 2011. “Topoi of Performativity: Italian Bodies in Japanese Spaces/Japanese Bodies in
Italian Spaces.” In Japanese Theatre Transcultural: German and Italian Intertwinings, edited by Stanca Scholz-
Cionca and Andreas Regelsberger, 211–230. Munich: Iudicium.
Endo, Tadashi. 2017. “Butoh – MA.” Tadashi Endo, (May 2). Accessed www.tadashi-endo.de/index.
php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2&Itemid=5.
———. 2017a. “Butoh – MA.” Tadashi Endo. Accessed January 11. www.tadashi-endo.de/index.php?
option=com_content&task=view&id=2&Itemid=5.
———. 2017b. “IKIRU.” Tadashi Endo. Accessed January 11. www.tadashi-endo.de/index.php?option=
com_content&task=view&id=63&Itemid=6.
———. 2017c. IKIRU – Réquiem Para Pina Bausch. Accessed January 5. www.youtube.com/
watch?v=CuXPxuxKoH4.
———. 2017d. “In the Press.” Tadashi Endo. Accessed January 11. www.tadashi-endo.de/index.php?
option=com_content&task=section&id=2&Itemid=7.
———. 2017e. “MAMU Festival.” Tadashi Endo. Accessed January 11. www.tadashi-endo.de/index.
php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=1&Itemid=13.
“eX . . . it! Archive & Media.” 2017. Accessed January 12. www.exit.broellin.de/eX15/e-home.html.
Fraleigh, Sondra. 2010. Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Haerdter, Michael, and Sumie Kawai. 1986. Butoh: Die Rebellion Des Körpers: Ein Tanz Aus Japan. Berlin:
Alexander Verlag.
Harada Hiromi. 2004. Butō BUTOH taizen – ankoku butō to hikari no ōkoku [Complete Collection of Butō
BUTOH: Kingdom of Darkness and Light]. Gendai shokan.
283
Rosa van Hensbergen
Heisig, James W., and John C. Maraldo, eds. 1995. Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question
of Nationalism. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
“Hidamari [Sunny Place].” 1989. Accessed https://vimeo.com/156012563.
Hijikata Tatsumi. 1985. “Kyokutanna gōsha.” W-Notation no. 2: 2–27.
———. 2000. “Wind Daruma.” Edited by Nanako Kurihara. The Drama Review 44, no. 1: 71–79.
“Human Form.” 2016. Accessed www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs2pp5rQioQ.
Inata Naomi. 2008. Hijikata Tatsumi zetsugo no shintai [The Incomparable Body of Hijikata Tatsumi]. NHK
shuppan.
Karina, Lillian, and Marion Kant. 2003. Hitler’s Dancers. Translated by Jonathan Steinberg. Oxford: Berghahn
Books.
“Ko Murobushi Archive.” 1978. Accessed www.ko-murobushi.com/eng/works/view/38.
Kuniyoshi Kazuko. 2012. “Dai Ikki: Eguchi Takaya, Miya Misako Buyō Kenkyūjo jidai [First Period: Stud-
ying with Eguchi Takaya and Miya Misako].” In Ohno Kazuo: Butō to Seimei: Kokusai Shinpojiumu 2007
[Ohno Kazuo: Butoh and Life: Internatational Symposium 2007], edited by Akira Okamoto. Shichōsha.
Leach, Neil. 1999. “The Dark Side of the Domus: The Redomestication of Central and Eastern Europe.” In
Architecture and Revolution: Contemporary Perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Neil Leach,
150–162. London: Routledge.
Lucken, Michael. 2014. “Les limites du ma.” Nouvelle revue d’esthétique 13, no. 1: 45–67.
Manning, Susan. 2006. Ecstasy and the Demon: The Dances of Mary Wigman. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Mezur, Katherine. 2014. “Stranger Communities: Art Labour and Berliner Butoh.” Theatre Research Inter-
national 39, no. 3: 217–232.
Mikami Kayo. 2015. Utsuwa to shite no shintai: Hijikata Tatsumi ankoku butō gihō eno apurōchi [The Body as a
Vessel: An Approach to the Hijikata Tatsumi Ankoku Butō Technique]. Revised. Yokohama: Shunpūsha.
———. 2016. The Body as a Vessel. Edited by Ben Jones. Translated by Rosa Van Hensbergen. Birchington:
Ozaru Books.
Nitschke, Günter. 1966. “‘MA’-The Japanese Sense of Place in Old and New Architecture and Planning.”
Architectural Design 36 (March): 113–156.
Ohno Kazuo. 1992. Butō-fu: goten, sora o tobu [The Palace Soars through the Sky: Kazuo Ohno on butoh].
Shichōsha.
———. 2017a. “Kazuo Ohno: Full Biography.” (January 6). Accessed www.kazuoohnodancestudio.com/
english/kazuo/chro.html.
———. 2017b. Ōno Kazuo “Bi to Chikara” (Ra Aruhenchina Shō) [Ohno Kazuo “Beauty and Power” (Admiring
La Argentina)]. Accessed January 5. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cG4H4yeNHs0.
Ohno Yoshito, and Ohno Kazuo butō kenkyūjo, eds. 1999. Ōno Kazuo: Tamashii no kate [Kazuo Ohno: Pro-
visions for the Soul]. Firumu ātosha.
Ohno Yoshito, Kazuo Ohno, Toshio Mizohata, and John Barrett. 2004. Kazuo Ohno’s World: From Without
and Within. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Pagès, Sylviane. 2009. La réception des butō(s) en France: Représentations, malentendus et désirs [The Reception of
Butoh(s) in France: Representations, Misunderstandings, and Desires]. Paris: l’Université Paris 8.
Schwellinger, Lucia. 1998. Die Entstehung Des Butoh. Munich: Iudicium.
Seki, Minako. 2017a. “Workshops.” Minako Seki, (February 5). Accessed http://minakoseki.com/
workshops/.
———. 2017b. “About Me.” (May 2). Accessed http://minakoseki.com/aboutme/#1479642107046-
02e10dda-ff03.
Tamura Tetsuro, Yumiko Yoshioka, and Minako Seki. 1988 (2016). “tatoeba-Théātre danse Grotesque ‘Von
hinter der Mauer – from behind the Wall’ – Butoh Dance Theatre – Berlin 1988 at Ufa-Fabrik.” Vimeo
video, 1:26:54. Uploaded by delta R (February 19).
“TEN PEN CHii Art Labor: Works.” 2017. Accessed January 15. https://ten-pen-chii.org/video/.
Watsuji Tetsurō. 1996. Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku. SUNY Series in Modern Japanese Philosophy. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
Wim, Wenders. 2011. Pina. Film. Neue Road Movies.
Yoshioka, Yumiko. 2017. “Teaching.” Yumiko Yoshioka. Accessed February 5. www.yumiko-yoshioka.com/.
Yoshioka, Yumiko, and delta RA’i. 2017. “Idea and Curators.” eX . . . it! ’15, (February 5). Accessed www.
exit.broellin.de/eX15/e-idea.html.
284
30
SU-EN BUTOH COMPANY –
BODY, NATURE, AND
THE WORLD
SU-EN
Butoh – the dance of life and death.

Vibrant, creative, uncompromising, brutal.
The flesh dissolves.
Dirt shines.
Space cracks.
Time laughs.
Japan, 1988
SU-EN Butoh Company’s journey started with the encounter of a performance by Tomoe
Shizune & Hakutobo1 of Nyushoku no onna (Milky Woman), at Jean Jean Theatre, Shibuya.
The stage was lit by all shades of life, connecting performers and audience in Ashikawa Yoko’s2
choreography and direction and music by Tomoe Shizune.3 It was another world, a universe of
aesthetics that gave bodies and movement meaning. This was butoh. Ashikawa’s workshop at
Terpsichore, Nakano, was electric, the air quietly buzzing. Ashikawa spoke about the reality of
the performing body. Her presence transformed the space. Some Hakutobo dancers assisted her,
and there was a symbiosis, a united body. The same night, the young dancer that would become
SU-EN became a founding member of the student performing group Gnome,4 a butoh student
of Ashikawa, and an apprentice of Tomoe. These fierce dancers held the challenge of a life-time.
Kaze no Cho (Butterfly of the Wind)
Japan, 1988–1993
Daily confrontations with butoh involved training, choreography, and practical work around pro-
ductions. Confrontations with time and space produced the painful realization that our bodies do
not belong to us when we train and perform.5 Individual artistic visions are hostage to the body’s
limitations. The learning begins – to create costumes, to make props, to help in producing stage
sets, to understand lighting designs, and most importantly of all, to take on the humble task of
cleaning floors. This is a dangerous world, far from all other performing arts. The teacher is loved
and feared; the teacher demands all and everything. In a whirlwind of preparations, and with an
285
SU-EN
intensity of purpose, there were regular stage productions with Gnome and some Hakutobo per-
formances: always some new choreography to remember and new parts to dance. The exposure
to the immense array of Japanese performing arts was constant: traditional and contemporary
dance, theatre, and butoh companies. The Izumo Yoh school of Jiuta-mai, a dance form from
17th century Japan, beckoned in 1991 and culminated in the professional stage performing
nattori level6 in 1995. There were burlesque shows at night clubs with other Hakutobo dancers; a
direct and ruthless stage experience as half naked bodies were viewed with hungry eyes.
Tokyo, 1992
SU-EN Butoh Company made its formal debut in Kaze no Cho (Butterfly of the Wind),7 chore-
ographed by Ashikawa, directed by Tomoe, and produced by Tomoe Shizune & Hakutobo, who
bestowed the stage name SU-EN. This was an honor that involves a major commitment: to love,
challenge, and develop the butoh method of the Hakutobo lineage. Perched on the edge of survival,
the body now had a profound meaning to offer the world. The teacher’s unflinching discipline, bor-
derless energy, knowledge, and creativity sculpted a butoh dancer. This was the point of no return.
Encountering realities
Sweden, 1994
SU-EN Butoh Company moved to Scandinavia to establish butoh in Northern Europe as a
contemporary dance form. This demanded a fierce artistic drive, unflinching commitment, and
intense struggle. The struggle continues. As one of the first non-Japanese companies, SU-EN
Butoh Company plays a crucial part in developing butoh in the world. The company spans a
wide spectrum of activities including solo performances, ensemble choreography, workshops,
crossover art projects, dance films, community art projects, art exhibitions, seminars, and publi-
cations, as well as the curating of international dance and art events. Experimenting with new
meetings with audiences includes projects such as knocking on a stranger’s doors to be invited in
for indoor performances, as well as using public space as a creative venue for site-specific work.
National and international funding grants provide SU-EN Butoh Company with the oppor-
tunities to develop work from a long-term, professional perspective. International artists, lighting
designers, and composers contribute to the productions in a universe that vibrates with sound,
music, costumes, stage art, color, texture, and smells. Here the strong, mainly female bodies in the
company’s works challenge the shape and definition of the body.
Early works for stage were significant ensemble pieces and remained close to the Hakuto-
bo-style butoh aesthetics.8 The development of SU-EN Butoh Company evolved largely through
site-specific encounters and creations. Ashikawa’s instructions, “Be near the real thing,” guided
this process. The SU-EN Butoh Materials for the body, originating from something that exists in
the physical reality around us, were applied directly in the creative process. Two vital encounters
with the outward environment were with a metal scrapyard and a particle research center.
Scrap Bodies (1998): This solo premiered inside a building at a metal scrapyard.
From the program notes of Scrap Bodies:9
Stillborn beauty germinates from twisted metal, mountains of unwanted car engines,
barrels of magnesium spiral cut-offs.
This graveyard of matter gives birth to a choreography of infinity.
What does it mean to be a human?
286
SU-EN Butoh Company
The collaboration with Uppsala Scrapyard AB continues. The encounter with this space: the
recycling, the large mechanical cranes, the bulldozers all reflect our human relationship to civi-
lization. This project has produced still photos, the dance video Scrap Life (2006), and many live
events, where the dancers performed with trucks and scrap metal workers.
The solo Atomic (1999) and later the ensemble project Atomic Event (2000, 2001) researched atoms
and particle physics. Ashikawa’s teachings “Searching for the smallest unit of the body” initiated this
process. Atomic Event was presented inside the cyclotron room at the particle research center the
Svedberg Laboratory in Uppsala, with a researcher joining the dancers, video artist, and musician.
The encounter with the physical world and its realities and the inherent struggles that emanate
from this process become the working tools that create the choreography. The Body Materials10
at the core of the SU-EN Butoh Method11 emerge from this struggle with reality, and are docu-
mented in publications about the company (SU-EN and Kennedy 2003, SU-EN 2012).
Encountering nature
Sweden, 1997
SU-EN Butoh Company built an artistic center to guarantee creative freedom to build the
repertoire. All the company’s activities were moved to Haglund Skola in a forest landscape. An
old village school and surrounding buildings were changed into a sanctuary for the study and
expression of the body and art in butoh. This butoh center encompasses all requirements for stage
production: the dance studio, accommodation, office, the costume atelier and stock rooms for
scenography, the library of texts and other materials on butoh and other performing arts, guest
houses, and tool sheds. The life-style of the company values practical chores as well as training,
and full immersion in the artistic process and in nature is vital to embody butoh and to create
work for the stage. We hear nature speaking directly in the choreographies.
Fragrant (2005): This highly visual, multi-media work evolves from forbidden knowledge in
an aesthetic of delicate and lush flower art. Seven dancers in hand-painted costumes in blues,
Figure 30.1 Poster photo for Fragrant (2005), photograph by Henriette Lykke. Courtesy of SU-EN Butoh
Company and Henriette Lykke.
287
SU-EN
pinks, and purples are flowers that lure insects to them. More classical butoh aesthetics meet raw
Swedish nature and the botanical world.
Luscious (2009): This production celebrates life. It is performed on a large stage for a more
diverse dance audience. Luscious nature, sharp with dangers, sets the tone. The hand-painted
backdrop changes through the light from a stormy sky to a calm green forest. A voice artist and
ten dancers perform with two tons of earth, water dripping from the sky into growing plants.
Soot (2013): This solo moves from the previous lush performances into a sparse, harsh reduc-
tion of line. It merges a more classical style of butoh with a political perspective of the body as a
vessel for activism. This fragile choreography and dance is a fierce criticism of society and how
human beings disrupt nature’s balance.
From the program notes of Soot:
In a space of incompleteness
She senses her way
Following the fragrance of powdery black
Softly licking a barely visible wound
Listening through fingertips
Skin ripped, healing with an itch
What remains when pain leaves?
When civilisation falls asleep?
Bodies shimmering
Embracing the world
The forest, where trees, rocks, stones, plants, insects, and animals all create a society and civilization
of their own, provides a major influence in the choreographic language and working method of
the SU-EN Butoh Company. Every day is an interaction, a struggle with the forces of nature,
other living beings, climate, and seasons. This struggle creates a passionate relationship between
the body and the world.
SU-EN Butoh Method and Body Materials

Ashikawa’s and Tomoe’s method started a long-term exploration in response to the freedom of work-
ing in the company’s studio and headquarters. The SU-EN Butoh Method creates a dancing and
performing body, through the training of Body Materials. The Body Materials constitute the basis
for the training and the choreography, providing a resistance to the body. There is a struggle, and there
is no final solution. Being mainly organic inspiration from nature, each material has a specific ten-
sion, quality, texture, and speed. The rotting process, dark particles, electric lightning, cold, hot, stone,
mud, and slime are already known to our bodies. These different realities have their own logic and
rules. The choreography and dance are based on these “new” realities. The body becomes this reality.
The complex method comprises around 60 such materials. Some Body Materials are a direct
development from Ashikawa’s teachings of Hijikata’s butoh-fu,12 some are stylized and adapted,
some are new creations. The students of SU-EN Butoh Method also perform several demanding
phrases and choreographies based on the Body Materials, as well as exploring and challenging
them through butoh improvisation. The Body Material’s “rotten process” is one of SU-EN
Butoh Company’s original Body Materials:
rotten process
autumn
288
SU-EN Butoh Company
bacteria fool around in drifts of leaves

rot spreads inside the intestines
stomach, lungs
rotten air treks up the windpipe
the soft skin inside the lips rot
rotting air permeates the air outside, bad breath
the bad breath of autumn
a giant mouth gapes behind the body
bad breath blows through the space, initiating the transportation
To study as an apprentice is the very foundation of the SU-EN Butoh Method. Body to body:
Teacher to student. The company offers camps and workshops to participants from all over the
world, although a life of workshops is never enough to train to be a dancer. The SU-EN Butoh
Method requires approximately five years of focused training with the company as an apprentice;
it offers a path for high-level training of butoh that connects the roots with a development into
the future.13
The SU-EN “Butoh Body” in time and space

The butoh dancer’s aim is to reach the quality of the Butoh Body.14 The Butoh Body is the
intention and existence of the dancer as the body performs on stage. The Butoh Body is a living
body. It does not exist without the other bodies, does not breathe without the space surrounding
it. It cannot dance without the realities and tension of life and death.
Butoh time is infinity in a moment. Every second is condensed with an explosion. Time is
sliced, again and again. Time has already passed: it is present and it is future. The Butoh Body
exists in between all of this.
Butoh space is what is far away and far away inside. It is in the in-between, in the cracks of
the walls and floor. It is in the distance, in the soft sound of wind in the tree tops. It is found in
the moment of surprise. It is the world behind.
The Butoh Body comes alive when time and space are one.
The physicality of being

Going deeper into the Butoh Body, there is a point where the pure physicality of being starts to
emerge. The performances develop from a very personal and physical experience of life.
Headless (2001): Bones and skin are the costume. Pain and gravity are the choreography. It
is an intense personal experience and story, yet strong enough to become artistic material that
reaches beyond the individual.
From the program notes of Headless:
a head that is looking for a body

a body that is looking for a head
love which is looking for pain
pain which is looking for love
this is the land in between, the Bardo15
this is the space where the bones are exposed to
self-cannibalism and beauty at the same time
289
SU-EN
where the biting into the flesh

is an act of love
an act of life
Slice (2003): in this solo, the body is already part of death. It is developed in Performance Art con-
texts, using real fish guts on stage, with the final stage version incorporating an art video showing
the body immersed in fish guts. In the space, a large shark hook dangles.
From the program notes of Slice:
die whilst alive, dissection of the flesh

visceral desire commands and imprisons
an incision, one more
the shape dissolves
hanging
breathing from the shoulder and downwards
the dance of the ribs
the true face
devoured to the bone
a naked soldier, a slave of dissolving
unity and separation
dis-incarnation and secret fantasies
flying
the insect is crushed by the light
an incision, one more
a visceral walk
Chicken Life (2003) / The Chicken Project (2003–2004): This extended project places the human
body in direct relationship to the life of a chicken. It investigates human and animal relationships,
both in a philosophical and political way. The video is filmed inside a chicken coop, and the
stage version is performed in a chicken house set. The participants sign a contract to react only
as chickens once they step into the set.
Madness, beauty, and decay

SU-EN Butoh Company, now an established international dance company, retains the founda-
tion of all its work in the very first question that Ashikawa put to her students in training: “What
is the body?” The choreography in each new production investigates a new theme of physicality.
It evolves from the theme but can never exist without the studio, where rigorous training chal-
lenges the bodies to be able to perform the aesthetics. SU-EN Butoh Company dancers meet
the battle for each new performance.
Cracks (2008): The colorful ensemble choreography plays with classical butoh and burlesque
conventions. Five dancers appear as enigmas of the desert, the harsh space abundant with water-
melons. Its solo choreography Scratch dance ends with a cleansing ritual using saliva. The lighting
design transforms this production into living visual art.
Blush (2010): This is a love story between butoh and action painting. Four dancers use their
bodies to paint and splash in gold powder, with flower petals and rotten plums added as vibrant
290
SU-EN Butoh Company
Figure 30.2 From SU-EN Butoh Company production Blush (2010), photograph by Gunnar H Stening.
Courtesy of SU-EN Butoh Company and Gunnar H Stening.
materials. Surprising elements include influences from Bellmer’s artwork, Renaissance painting,
and glamorous and vulgar burlesque make-up.
Rapture (2011): Performed on a large stage, this work uses the poisonous bite of the tarantula
spider to initiate a desperate momentum for dancing. Nine dancers perform with twisted and
rattling limbs in a stage set made of straw, as in a field during harvest time. The madness is embod-
ied in a solo of dancing to exhaustion as screams of despair penetrate the theatre.
Voracious (2015): This art video and dance performance creates the smell and texture of a stage set
of decaying apples, which is very tangible to the audience. Five dancers in hand-painted gowns in
shades of black, red, and brown are fixed in a cycle of eating and being eaten. The voice of hunger
and desire echoes from inside the body. Cracked breathing and suffocated screams fill the space.
From the program notes of Voracious:
Desiring the world

She never has enough
Devouring the world
She must have a taste
Devoured by the world
Who eats whom?
Becoming the hunger
Her body is the world
Crawling towards freedom

Butoh could never have been born anywhere else than in Japan. Its roots, founders, and creators
need to be acknowledged and respected by future generations. Today, the world itself, how the
body and culture are defined, is naturally not the same as it was during the creation of ankoku
291
SU-EN
butoh.16 What is understood as butoh in the Japanese context is changing. To reach its full
potential and develop, butoh needs to exist in and interact with the contemporary world and
society. The deep universal artistic and human reasons that connect a dancer with their audience
through butoh are irrespective of cultural background. The most important element is the train-
ing with the teacher, and the devotion to the method as something larger than any individual
artistic vision. SU-EN Butoh Company is an experiment, a bastard baby born of two cultures.
This is a body between East and West, a sapling sown by the friction that kick-sparked ankoku
butoh into existence. We need to break away from culture, become homeless dissidents in exile.
We need to break from our own work when it becomes a burden of expectations. We need to
create a new context. SU-EN Butoh Company is now a powerful youngster after quarter of a
century on the international butoh stage.
Butoh is a human interaction with the world and creation. It is an act of resistance: resistance
to taking life for granted. It is an action to celebrate each human and all life forms on this planet.
A re-action to our small, greedy, human minds that so quickly forget the wonders of life. The
Butoh Body will be a body of this resistance. The Butoh Body is a living body. Connecting time
and space. Visiting past, present, and future.
Dirt shines. Space cracks. Time laughs.
I dedicate SU-EN Butoh Company’s work to the human body, struggling for freedom, crawling towards
equality and wonder. I would like to extend my gratitude to: my teachers of butoh, Ashikawa Yoko and
Tomoe Shizune, who never gave up on me. The dancers of Tomoe Shizune & Hakutobo for giving such
strong support throughout my training. My teacher of Jiuta-mai, Izumo Yoh for opening up new worlds
of the Japanese performing arts. Butoh students that struggled through the training in the Body Materi-
als. Butoh students that dared to perform in SU-EN Butoh Company productions. Composers, lighting
designers, visual artists, photographers, performance artists, and musicians that contributed to SU-EN Butoh
Company’s artistic work. Butoh spectators all over the world. Special thanks to Gilles Kennedy, Richard
Hart, Miyagawa Rieko, Rosula Blanc, Seki Yumiko, and Seisaku.
Notes
1 Tomoe Shizune & Hakutobo: Japanese butoh company in the lineage of Hijikata Tatsumi.
2 Ashikawa Yoko: major performer of butoh, choreographic assistant to Hijikata Tatsumi, the founder of
butoh.
3 Tomoe Shizune: originally a composer and musician, the artistic director of Hakutobo since the middle
of the 1980s.
4 Gnome, Karada Troupe, Butoh Kukan: the student group changed names during the years. A Hakutobo
dancer was always officially the director.
5 Training and apprenticeship period with Ashikawa and Tomoe 1988–1993. Regular performances
in Gnome, Butoh Kukan, and Karada Troupe and some Tomoe Shizune & Hakutobo productions.
SU-EN’s notebooks from training, 1988–1993. Documented discussions in the Hakutobo studio
regarding training, performance, the Butoh Body, and the development of the Tomoe Shizune
method.
6 Nattori: a license that entitles a student to teach and perform a Japanese artistic tradition.
7 Kaze no Cho (Butterfly of the Wind) debuted in Tiny Alice, Shinjuku. A hata-age kōen (raising the flag)
performance is when a dancer is presented to the world as part of the lineage and as an independent
dancer. It was choreographed by Ashikawa, directed by Tomoe, produced by Tomoe Shizune & Haku-
tobo. This performance marks the debut of SU-EN Butoh Company and its place in the Butoh lineage
of Ashikawa and Tomoe.
8 Umu (1994), Charila (1995), Shadows in Bloom (1996), and many more: Charila was initially a solo.
9 All program notes are from performances by SU-EN Butoh Company and are written by SU-EN.
292
SU-EN Butoh Company
10 SU-EN established the concept of ©SU-EN Body Materials in 1994 as the foundation of the ©SU-EN
Butoh Method: and used this ever then in ©SU-EN Butoh Company productions.
11 The first ten years of ©SU-EN Butoh Company and the ©SU-EN Butoh Method are described in the
book Butoh: Body and the World from 2003.
12 Butoh-fu: Hijikata’s notational butoh. The dance follows set choreography and score, based on his
method.
13 SU-EN Butoh Company has graduated two dancers; ©TO-EN in 2009 and ©KAI-EN in 2010. Their
names show the continuation of the lineage from SU-EN’s Butoh Body.
14 Butoh Body: Japanese word is butoh-tai, meaning the inside quality/condition and intention/existence
of the body as it is placed on stage.
15 Bardo: the state of in between death and rebirth, in Tibetan Buddhism. The Tibetan Book of Death is
Bardo Thödol.
16 Ankoku butoh: Hijikata’s description of his choreography; generally translated as “dance of darkness,”
meaning what is unexplored and unknown to us.
Works cited
SU-EN. 2012. SU-EN Butoh Company 1992–2012. Almunge: SU-EN Butoh Company Publication.
SU-EN, and Gilles Kennedy. 2003. Butoh: Kroppen och Världen/Body and the World. Västervik: Rye Förlag.
293
31
BUTOH IN BRAZIL
Historical context and political reenactment
Christine Greiner
Although traditional Japanese theaters have always exerted great fascination among us in Brazil,
nothing compares to the impact of butoh. Ohno Kazuo arrived in São Paulo for the first time
in 1986 and presented Admiring La Argentina, The Dead Sea, and My Mother. These performances
moved the audience and many artists changed their concepts of dance, despite the difficulties of
researching butoh outside Japan. In Brazil, just secondary sources were available – a few books
and articles written by foreign scholars (mainly from the United States and France), and terrible
copies of video performances. According to the flyer of the first tour of Ohno Kazuo in São
Paulo and Buenos Aires, Ohno himself was the creator of butoh dance, and the name of Hijikata
Tatsumi never came up. Therefore, it took some time for artists and researchers to get in touch
with more details about the butoh history and training. Between the late 1970s and the 1990s,
Brazilian artists moved to Yokohama to study with Ohno, integrating a circuit that transformed
Ohno into a guru. After 2000, inspired by films, texts, and photographs, both Japanese and Bra-
zilian dancers started offering workshops of their own version of butoh, without any specific
training. At the same time, there was a philosophical reenactment looking for new paths, beyond
stereotypes. In other words, we can conclude that butoh history in Brazil inspired a complex
genealogy of questions about an imaginary Japan, dancing bodies, exotic images, but also about
ourselves and our power of collective change.
The butoh experience avant la lettre

Before the great impact of Ohno in the 1980s, butoh was introduced in Brazil through two
independent events. They represented something like a butoh avant la lettre, which means: dance
experiences connected, in a certain way, to butoh history, but that have chosen not to use the
butoh terminology.
The first was the arrival of the dancer Ohara Akiko in 1961 in the Yuba community (located
at Mirandópolis, 600 km from São Paulo).1 This was not exactly an introduction of butoh in
Brazil, because it happened in a very specific condition inside Yuba; but still, it can be considered
as part of our butoh history. Ohara studied dance in Japan at the famous Andō Mitsuko Academy
as a colleague of Hijikata, in the 1950s. At that time, following the Second World War, American
companies such as the New York City Ballet, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Paul
294
Butoh in Brazil
Taylor performed in Japan. Ohno Kazuo worked at the Ando Academy as a guest professor,
giving classes on his very personal interpretation of German Modern Dance.
Ohara participated in this new trend of Western dance in Japan and left Tokyo in the early
beginnings of butoh. She knew Hijikata as a dance student and was invited by him to become a
member of his first experiments that avoided dance steps by introducing radical movements and
strong violence. At that time, she testified the early beginnings of the legendary performance
Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors).
Looking at Ohara’s dance at the Yuba community, it is very difficult to identify an explicit
reference to butoh. I had the opportunity to interview her three times (1997, 1999, and 2008),
and she explained to me that this aesthetical and philosophical distance was completely inten-
tional. For more than twenty years she made a strong effort to abandon the “dance of darkness.”
Therefore, her group at Yuba has been working from a different perspective, developing activities
with a tough daily routine in close contact with nature – cutting wood, preparing vegetable
gardens, and so on. The dancing body is not separated from the daily body at the community.
Despite the huge differences, this is one aspect that seems closer to Min Tanaka’s work in the Body
Weather Farm Project, where he decided to work with artists as well as Japanese farmers. These
experiences clamored for another point of view. They are looking for different ways of living
together, which means the choreographic result or the aesthetical research was not the priority. In
these cases, it is possible to consider the dance experience as a biopolitical apparatus to improve
the community bonds.2
The second example I would like to mention is Kusuno Takao (1945–2001), a Japanese visual
artist who settled down in Brazil in 1977 when he started working with Brazilian dancers and
actors from different cities (such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador). We never knew
details about Kusuno’s experience with butoh in Japan. He was a good friend of Carlotta Ikeda
and during the 1970s created sets for Maro Akaji and his group Dairakudakan. He met Ohno
Kazuo for the first time in Brazil, when his brother, the photographer and producer Kusuno Yuji,
invited Ohno to come to São Paulo, and since then, they have become good friends.
After observing his journey for almost thirty years, I have concluded that Kusuno created a
very particular (and relevant) movement, inspired by butoh and other Japanese trainings,3 and
this particular version of butoh dance was actually born in Brazil with the Brazilian artists.
Indeed, during the first years in São Paulo, he never mentioned the word butoh. He had intro-
duced, little by little, some exercises of body perception and carefully explored the creative pos-
sibilities of each interpreter. His first work Corpo 1 (Body 1) was presented in 1978 at the Teatro
FAAP (Armando Álvares Penteado Foundation Theater) in São Paulo, and was performed by the
dancer and choreographer J. C. Violla. It was very impressive, especially because Kusuno tried to
experience another timing, very slow, and the Brazilian audience was not used to this. However,
the most important research of this phase was developed with Denilto Gomes (1953–1994), a
Brazilian dancer who had a background of Laban training. He studied with the pioneer Maria
Duschenes (1922–2014), who introduced Laban methodology in Brazil. Gomes had previous
experiences in big productions, but also in underground performances, especially with the chore-
ographer Janice Vieira from Sorocaba (São Paulo state). Vieira’s daughter, the researcher Andreia
Nhür, wrote a master’s thesis analyzing the work of Denilton Gomes in 2008.
Other dancers and choreographers have studied with Kusuno, like Ismael Ivo, who became
internationally known as an important curator in Vienna, Weimar, and Venice. Ivo gave several
interviews4 talking about his learning experience with Kusuno, not exactly about butoh, but
mainly about processes of creation and consciousness of the body.5 There is a long list of impor-
tant artists that worked with Kusuno including J. C. Violla, Emilie Sugai, Patricia Noronha,
295
Christine Greiner
Dorothy Lenner, Key Sawao, Ricardo Iazzeta, Marcos Xavier, and José Maria Carvalho, among
others.6
It can be said that Kusuno also left important marks on theater directors like Antunes Filho,
who already had a special interest in Japan after contact with Suzuki Tadashi and Ohno himself.
Antunes Filho is responsible for the CPT (Center of Theatrical Research at SESC São Paulo) and
received Ohno Kazuo and Yoshito in São Paulo, helping to organize workshops, talks, and per-
formances with them. The “influence” of butoh in his repertoire was more visible in his piece of
1991, Paraiso Zona Norte (North Zone Paradise), inspired by the work of the Brazilian playwright
Nelson Rodrigues.7 There were no literal references to gestures, but a certain butoh mood, as part
of Antunes’ methodology to experience the actors’ body and a certain use of space and time.
In 2004, Foi Carmen (It was Carmen) was a tribute to Ohno Kazuo and to Carmen Miranda,
interpreted by the dancer Emilie Sugai, who worked with Kusuno for ten years. Antunes thought
about the myth of Antonia Mercé, the Argentinian dancer who inspired Ohno Kazuo; and the
image of Carmen Miranda, the Portuguese actress who became a symbol of Brazilian culture in
Hollywood. In some sense, these two women were inspiring specters.
In 1995, Kusuno and his wife Felicia Ogawa created the company Tamanduá, and for the first
time they presented their work as butoh. Kusuno was focused on the genesis of dance movement
in Brazil, which is why he invited an Indian (Siridiwê Xavante) to participate in the performance
O Olho do Tamanduá (The Eye of Tamanduá). After this piece, Kusuno and the company pre-
sented his last work Quimera, o anjo sai voando (Quimera, the angel go out flying, 1999).
These experiences were inspired by butoh images; however, it would be risky to consider
them as “butoh pieces.” A couple of months before Kusuno passed away, I talked to him, and he
explained that his biggest difficulty to really work with butoh in his company was the lack of
disciplined training (shugyō). Kusuno’s dancers used to come for a couple of hours each week and
then go back to their daily lives, as he didn’t have any financial support to pay the dancers. There-
fore, according to Kusuno, they didn’t have the chance to develop the necessary “concentration”
to learn butoh. This was also a symptom of the precarious condition of artistic work in Brazil,
without any financial support and huge difficulties to find a rehearsal space. So when I asked him
if he considered his work a butoh experience, he completely denied it. Despite his position, many
dancers that worked with him continue developing something they consider a butoh experience.
Brazilian dancers in Yokohama

Despite the previous experiences of Ohara and Kusuno, the starting point for the diffusion of
some important interpretations of butoh in Brazil happened mostly between the late 1980s and
the 1990s, when some Brazilian dancers decided to learn butoh in Japan.
In 1987, the choreographer Maura Baiocchi studied for five months with Ohno and Tanaka
Min. Back in Brazil, she held several workshops, and wrote a book on her experience entitled
Butoh: Dança Veredas D’Alma (Palas Athena 1995).8 Baiocchi brought Min Tanaka and other Jap-
anese choreographers to perform in São Paulo and Brasilia, and she was the founder, in 1991, of
the Taanteatro, Teatro Coreográfico de Tensões (Taantheater, Choreographical Theater of Tensions) in
São Paulo. At that time, she was particularly interested in the possible connections between butoh
and other subversive artistic experiences such as the theater of Antonin Artaud, the paintings
of Frida Khalo, the literature of Florbela Espanca, and the books of Friedrich Nietzsche, among
others. She has collaborated with choreographers such as Hugo Rodas and Regina Miranda, and
with theater directors, such as José Celso Martinez and the already mentioned Antunes Filho.
At the same time, but for a much longer period of research (from 1987 to 1990s), the actress
Ligia Verdi took weekly lessons at Ohno’s studio and attested to this strong experience, some years
296
Butoh in Brazil
later, in a master’s thesis O butoh de Kazuo Ohno (The Butoh of Kazuo Ohno 2000), at the Univer-
sity of São Paulo. Her research was not published, but several artists and researchers have read it,
especially because Verdi included great interviews with Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno and a detailed
description of their classes.
From 1991 to 1994, after finishing the undergraduate course on dance at the University of
Campinas, the dancer and poet Ciça Ohno also decided to study at Ohno’s studio. At the same
time, she had noh lessons with Kobayakawa Osamu of Tessenkai Kanze School, and seitai-ho and
do-ho with Masanori Sasaki and Tanaka Toshiyuki. In 2001, she and Tanaka created the Jardim
dos Ventos (Garden of the Winds), a cultural center (with courses and presentations) that became
a reference of seitai and do-ho in São Paulo. In their pedagogical project, they were not focused
on butoh. However, during the performances Rio Adentro (Inside the River 2015), Iki Respiração
(Iki Breathing 2014), and Tabibito Viajante (Tabibito Traveller 2009), there were traces of butoh
that can be identified through the possibilities of metamorphosis and the perception of different
levels of consciousness. According to Tanaka, it is not so much a question of butoh aesthetics, but
rather a specific understanding of body perception that enhances space-time intervals and the
awareness of inner movements like breathing.
Another example of a Brazilian choreographer who decided to study in Japan is Marta Soares.
In 1995, she received a Japan Foundation Grant for Artists to research at Ohno’s studio. At first,
she was supposed to stay six months, but she decided to extend her studies to one year. Soares
never classified her dance as a butoh dance, but she did consider butoh (as) a fundamental turn-
ing point in her work. After spending a decade in the United States studying dance with several
artists, the butoh experience radically transformed her understanding of body movement, con-
sciousness, and also her procedures of creation. The first piece she created, after arriving from
Japan, was Les pouppées (The Dolls 1997), inspired by the corporeal anagrams created in the early
1930s by the artist Hans Bellmer. After studying these images Soares sought another movement
form to further investigate the fragmentation of the body. The experience was focused on the
possibilities of the articulations and disarticulations of the body. This research on visual images
of the body continued in her choreography Homem de Jasmim (Man of Jasmine 2000). For this
piece she explored the poems of Unica Zurn, who was married to Hans Bellmer. Taking off from
Zurn’s writings, Soares choreographically tested the fragile boundary between life and death. In
addition to Zurn’s poems, Soares was inspired by the artist Francesca Woodman and her research
on formless bodies and metamorphosis. She gave movement to Woodman’s photographs not by
copying them but by exploring the potential movement of the body positions in the images,
which can be better recognized during the performance in the long moments of apparent pause.
By 2004, the feminine universe was always present in Soares work, and for O Banho (The Bath),
she researched the life of Dona Yayá, a rich Brazilian woman who, after being considered insane
in the early 1920s, was locked in her home until her death in 1960. Based on her previous
research on Bellmer, who was very interested in Jean-Martin Charcot’s writings on “hysterical”
women, Soares decided to use the metaphor of the bath, referencing the long baths used as ther-
apy at the Salpêtrière to “calm down” allegedly insane women. Looking at her repertoire, it is
possible to identify the presence of butoh, among the embodied images of all these women that
also lived on the edge of crisis.
Between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, other dancers decided to take lessons with Ohno
Kazuo and his son and partner Ohno Yoshito. However, most of them shared the same desire
of copying an exotic model of dance. Some of them studied with Baiocchi. But this tendency
could also be identified among Brazilian dancers who have never been in Japan, and decided
to create an imaginary and personal butoh, as they had become completely fascinated by the
powerful images.9
297
Christine Greiner
After 2000, the regular visits of Japanese “instructors” who lived abroad and had little or no
contact at all with Ohno and Hijikata, increased the wave of misunderstandings. Brazil was a col-
onized country by the 16th century, and from 1964 to 1985, the people suffered under the power
of the military dictatorship. Therefore, the search for gurus and masters could be considered an
important trace of our history, transforming “self-help butoh” into a popular cliché among us.
Looking for the same references

Another example inspired by butoh is the theatrical work of the Lume group, based in the city
of Campinas (in São Paulo state). The creator of Lume was the actor Luis Otavio Bournier
(1956–1995). He developed his studies of mimicry, theater, and dance in Paris. During his resi-
dence in France, he researched kabuki and butoh. At the same time, he became interested in the
Odin Theater methodology, working with theater director Eugenio Barba in Oslo. The desire to
experience different body training, especially the Asian ones, became an important characteristic
of his work.
The presence of butoh colaborators at Lume occurred at different moments: in 1995, Naka-
jima Natsu was invited as a visiting researcher; in 1997, Furukawa Anzu created a piece specially
for the group, based on the book 100 Years of Solitude, written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; and in
2004, Tadashi Endo choreographed Shi-zen. Despite these experiences, the Lume group does not
embrace butoh as a label. Butoh was considered one of the inputs of the very singular technique
and methodology the group has developed in the last twenty years. Except for Shi-zen, which
was closer to the butoh stereotype due to the orientation of Tadashi Endo, the other pieces seem
to be supported by their research of body singularities. A good example was Furukawa’s cho-
reography. She observed the material of each interpreter, trying to create connections with her
butoh experience, but she never imposed patterns of movement or aesthetical parameters related
to the butoh clichés. Therefore, the presence of butoh could be noticed through the little gestures
of the actresses Ana Cristina Colla and Rachel Scotty Hirson. What I have considered a precious
insight of this experience was the way Furukawa and these actresses constructed an unexpected
connection between their previous research on the gestures and narratives of different regions of
Brazil, and the meticulous strategy of butoh to deal with the construction of body singularities.
The butoh imagination

Besides these experiences that involved artists who actually attended butoh classes (in Japan or
in Brazil), there are also other kinds of experiences of Brazilian choreographers who had been
moved by butoh images, projections, and memories. The difference between these experiences
and those related to stereotyped butoh is clear. The aim is not to copy a model, but to establish
an encounter with the main questions.10
Coreoversações (Choreoversation), by Thiago Granato, is one of these examples. He started to
choreograph in 2008. Before that, he danced with choreographers from Rio de Janeiro such
as Lia Rodrigues and João Saldanha; and from São Paulo such as Cristian Duarte and Thelma
Bonavita among other important names of contemporary dance in Brazil. He also had the oppor-
tunity to study in France and Germany through different artistic residence programs. The main
idea was to propose imaginary encounters with the choreographers Lennie Dale (a member of
the subversive group Dzi Croquettes) and Hijikata Tatsumi.
Granato’s objective was not to recover literal gestures of jazz and butoh, nor to reconstruct
specific choreographies. He was exploring the possibilities of “talking” with the dead artists
during an imaginary encounter, getting inputs from their memories.
298
Butoh in Brazil
In order to do that, he chose the jazz experience as a starting point. Lennie Dale was consid-
ered a jazz pioneer in the 1960s, due to his great experience in American musicals before arriving
in Brazil, where he encountered bossa nova. But the political mark of his career was the Dzi
Croquettes group, created in 1972 by Wagner Ribeiro de Souza, Bayard Tonelli, Reginaldo Poly,
and Benedictus Lacerda. Inspired by the Carnival block of Piranhas, in Rio de Janeiro, the Dzi
Croquettes started its activities with a subversive humor in which all the participants dressed like
women. As I mentioned before, this was during the turbulent period of military dictatorship,
a historical moment with very rigorous moral codes, and an explicit approach to deal with the
body from a nationalistic perspective. Transsexuality and homosexuality were outside the scope
of the “normal statements.”
In Tokyo, during the 1960s, there was also a great interest in jazz. Hijikata was curious about
the choreographer Katherine Dunham, who was initiated in the rituals of Haitian vodou in
1950. In addition, there was also a significant presence of jazz musicians in Japan, and Hijikata
felt particularly moved by the way this musical genre represented a subversive manifestation
against racism.
In Granato’s work, the specificity of these different jazz experiences and their political actions
did not appear literally. But there was a “crisis of identity” proposed by the artist, who blurred
the boundaries between Dale, Hijikata, and himself, constituting a sort of fictional elective dance
community. The contrast between light and shadow, the undulatory movements of the body,
and the use of different scales of time can be considered part of his experimental choreography.
The last example I would like to mention is the Kinjikinstruction of Marcelo Evelin, which
is still being worked on. Evelin was born in Teresina, the capital of Piauí, which is the poorest
state of Brazil, located in the northeast region of the country. He lived in Amsterdam for twenty
years, and after 2000 he decided to go back to his hometown Teresina, where he created the
Dirceu Group.
In Mono, from 2011, Evelin and two dancers created three solos inspired by different artists.
At this moment, Evelin started his journey in search of Hijikata. In his solo, he danced with
puppets, which was a reference of his childhood, when he was forbidden to play with puppets (a
girl thing). But during the work, another aspect was brought to light: the indistinctive frontiers
between animate and inanimate bodies, and other issues presented in Hijikata’s research (for
example, sexual ambiguity).
Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors), as mentioned before, was the first performance of butoh, presented
in 1959. Like Granato, Evelin is not interested in any sort of choreographic reconstruction. He
explained to me that he was deeply moved by some “implicit instructions” in this piece that
suggested a precarious body state, like a foreign body coming from poor Tohoku to Tokyo, but
also a sexual and perverse body inspired by the novels of Mishima Yukio and Jean Genet. In a
certain way, he is creating a fictional encounter between Tohoku and the northeast of Brazil.
Kinjikinstruction will be the first part of a bigger project called “Diseased Dance,” inspired by the
last book of Hijikata, Yameru Maihime (Diseased Dancer). At the same time, he created in Teresina
a new space for artistic presentations and experiences. It’s called Campo (Field). Therefore, the
artistic research and the opening of a new space in the city to share processes of creation among
local and foreign artists, can be understood as part of the same flux of information, which means
this is not only related to the composition of new dances, but also connected to the generation
of a new understanding of art and community. It is a new landscape for the city and for the
dancing bodies. The empathy with Hijikata’s butoh is clear. Above all, Hijikata needed to find a
way to survive through his singular experience of movement, by connecting perception, thought,
and language. However, the environment was not separated. It was called simultaneously with
his multiple body memories. Evelin tried the same path, by reviving events (actual events and
299
Christine Greiner
imaginary movements) that continue to be alive in his body: a travel to Tohoku, an imaginary
narrative of a book that he cannot read, poor Teresina, precarious bodies, forms of political
resistance.
Philosophical approach and political reenactment

Rebecca Schneider (2011) is one of the important scholars who have been questioning how to
deal with the remains of performances and historical occurrences. The idea of reenactment doesn’t
mean to copy, recover, or imitate the past. As Schneider pointed out, historical events like war, are
never completed. Instead of finishing, they are carried forward by embodied memories that do
not delimit the remembered to the past. In this sense, reenactment means to capture a trace and
reenact it through the body memory. This has been also an important subject to the performing
arts. It is a choice between approaching live art as something that disappears (a presence and not
an archive), or as both the act of remaining and re-appearance.
Thinking about the remains of butoh in Brazil, and it seems that the most relevant experi-
ences are more connected to the idea of re-appearance and some sort of political reenactment.
Most of the available materials continue to be some sort of media documentation (fragmented
films and photographs). However, according to Ariella Azoulay (2008), there is always a
“contract” between photographs, the photographed persons, and those who see the pictures.
Azoulay employs the term “contract” to shed terms such as empathy or compassion. This
subjective contract is the “organizer of the gaze.” For her, photos are always changing. They
mean something else in different contexts, and therefore, they can activate different actions.
It is not about the expression of pre-existing conditions or “inner essences” supposedly
expressed in the photographed images. This idea can suggest another possibility of dealing
with historical sources.
Besides these epistemological debates, it is also important to recognize the role of the philo-
sophical approach proposed by Uno Kuniichi. In the last decade, Uno came to Brazil four times,
giving lectures in different cities (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Ouro Preto, Campinas, and Salvador).
After the translation of his book The Genesis of an Unknown Body (2012) into Portuguese,11 several
artists and researchers from different cities rethought their ideas about butoh.12
Everybody who has the opportunity to study the history of butoh knows that the dancing
body proposed by Hijikata (the dead body) has always been singular and situated. It was a radical
corporeal experience that did not make sense in a generic way, and should never be considered
an aesthetical model to be followed from a mimetic perspective with white body make-up,
contorted limbs, and grimacing expressions. These stereotyped choreographies continue to fas-
cinate the audience, but simultaneously it became possible to recognize different approaches,
much closer to the philosophical understandings of butoh. In 2011, during a public talk, at Sesc
Consolação (São Paulo), Tanaka Min affirmed he did not consider his dance as butoh anymore,
because butoh was not compatible with a certain system of art (including festivals, budgets, etc.);
and also because butoh was something that Hijikata proposed in a certain historical context, and
when he did, it was meaningful, but probably not anymore.
This was a radical conclusion but, from my point of view, very ambiguous. If butoh is not
compatible with the contemporary art market, it should be the perfect vehicle to question the
limits of neoliberalism as a powerful philosophical operator to reinvent bodies, movements, and
thoughts. In the Latin American context, this could be a different way to reenact the most polit-
ical aspect of Hijikata’s experience. In our case, we don’t have to deal with the remains of World
War II, but with other kinds of biopower that emerged from our colonial history and recent
dictatorship. Could we consider the reenactment of butoh as a powerful strategy to confront
300
Butoh in Brazil
neoliberalism, narcissism, and harmless art? Would we be able to reenact butoh history beyond
the limits of self-expression?
There is a Buddhist practice called shugyō (personal cultivation) in Japanese. This means a
practical project or training of the spirit by means of the body, which is another way to explain
how body movement and practice enhance thought, as several Western scientists and philoso-
phers have also proposed in order to explain the idea of an embodied mind. The philosopher Alva
Noë, for example, explained that we should think of sensorimotor skills as “proto-conceptual
skills,” as conceptual knowledge emerges from bodily movement and does not start as organized
discourse (Noë 2004, 183). Butoh has nothing to do with Buddhist practice, but the alliance
between mind and body is an important issue.
In this sense, I would like to propose that there are different approaches to deal with “butoh
training.” In some cases, the choreographers are interested in specific procedures such as: how
to articulate and disarticulate the body, how to experience the metamorphosis of bodily states,
among other components of butoh technique. However, the political reenactment of butoh is
something related to what the philosopher Brian Massumi has proposed as “intuition as a polit-
ical art”:
Intuition is not some mystical inner sense. It does not connote a deeper or more authen-
tic relation to self. And it is not the opposite of rationality . . . it is something per-
formed in the forming of perception . . . the embodied thinking-feeling in movement
is intuition.
Massumi 2015, 45
It is political because it is full of potential to change. It becomes a field of potentials. Most of the
Brazilian artists mentioned here do not have a deep knowledge of butoh history. But they feel the
embodied thinking-feeling proposed by Hijikata and have tried to experience it through their
own bodies and questions, looking for their own “crack.” According to Uno Kuniichi:
Hijikata dislocates himself as he takes on an extraordinary density and sensibility, the

experiences and thoughts of the body, retracing the ‘crack’ of the body . . . The expe-
rience of the body for him is above all the experience of this crack. His thought is
profoundly connected to this crack.
Uno 2012, 55
This political enigma of Hijikata’s dance deals with the singularity of life and death through a
dancing corpse that risks its life to stand up. Is it possible to reenact this proposal to avoid the
condition of bare life in abandoned places like Teresina? Is it possible to claim for this non-
productive movement the result of exposure of precarious bodies and precarious lives?
Notes
1 Yuba is an agricultural community created in 1935 by Isamu Yuba (1906–1976). The inhabitants cul-
tivate their own food, and inside the community, they are not supposed to use money. Besides the hard
work at the land, they learn different kinds of arts like music, dance, painting, and theater.
2 In 2008, I invited Ohara and Ohno Yoshito to perform during the exhibition Tokyogaqui (an imaginary
Japan, Sesc Paulista). They danced a short choreography of Hijikata and talked to the audience about the
late 1950s in Tokyo. According to both of them, at that moment, nobody understood what was going
on. They just followed Hijikata’s “strange” instructions.
3 As a warm up he used the suriashi walk from noh theater training.
301
Christine Greiner
4 Two examples of interviews were Programa Metrópolis October 2012, and Sesc TV, August 2015.
5 In 2002, I organized the Vestigios do Butō (Remains of Butoh) event with the Kusuno family at
Sesc-Consolação in São Paulo. Most of the dancers who collaborated with Takao Kusuno (have) pre-
sented their works, including Ismael Ivo and Renée Gumiel who recreated his piece As Galinhas (The
Chickens 1978), and the Tamanduá Company.
6 Among the participants of the Tamanduá Company, Emilie Sugai continued creating choreographies
after 2001 (such as Tabi, Totem, Hagoromo, and Lunaris), always inspired by Kusuno’s methodology. Key
Sawao and Ricardo Iazzeta created their own company “Key and Zetta” which became one of the most
important groups of contemporary dance in São Paulo. It was not exactly a butoh company, but the
experience with Kusuno was clearly considered a fundamental starting point for their work. And, finally,
Patricia Noronha is writing a PhD thesis at the University of São Paulo, about the importance of ma
(interval of space-time) in art, which is something she learnt from Kusuno.
7 Nelson Rodrigues (1912–1980) was a Brazilian journalist, and he is considered one of the most impor-
tant dramaturges of his generation.
8 This book is the author’s personal view of Ohno’s lessons and an effort to affirm the impossibility of
defining butoh.
9 A good example is João Roberto de Souza, known as João butoh. He is from São Simão, a small city in
the state of São Paulo, and considers himself the most important name of butoh in Latin America. He
never had any butoh training. He created his own style and the Ogawa Butoh Center. This dichotomy
between imitation and reenactment also motivated my first foray into research on butoh outside Japan,
and in 1998, I published Butō, pensamento em evolução, based on my PhD thesis to address this topic.
10 This idea of “encounters” between artistic questions has been developed by Miryam Sas, in her book
Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan, Moments of Encounter, Engagement and Imagined Return (2011).
11 I have translated his essays, after ten years of partnership, sharing seminars and research projects with Uno
in different places (mainly Tokyo, São Paulo, and Lisbon).
12 Among these is Eden Peretta (who wrote a book on the history of butoh, The Naked Soldier, and then
became a professor at the Federal University of Ouro Preto). The visual artist Ana Amelia Gennioli,
the performer and filmmaker Ernesto Filho, and the afore-mentioned Lume group (which proposed a
discussion about Uno’s research to deal with possible connections among butoh, Artaud, and Deleuze
and Guattari’s philosophy), and in particular Renato Ferracini, who wrote his PhD thesis inspired by
Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, trying to establish bridges between theory and practice in order to
think about creation as a construction of embodied singularities. By listening to Uno’s lectures, this
connection became stronger.
Works cited
Azoulay, Ariella. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books.
Baiocchi, Maura. 1995. Butō,Veredas d’Alma. São Paulo: Palas Athena.
Greiner, Christine. 1998. Butō, pensamento em evolução. São Paulo: Escrituras.
———. 2008. e Ricardo Muniz Fernandes (org) Tokyogaqui um Japão imaginado. Sesc.
———. 2009. “Hijikata Tatsumi – le corps mort vers la vie.” Ebisu Magazine, Études japonaises 40.41.
Tokyo: Maison Franco-Japonaise.
Massumi, Brian, 2015. The Power at the End of the Economy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Nhür, Andreia. 2008. “Procura-se Denilto Gomes, um caso de desaparecimento no jornalismo cultural.”
dissertação de mestrado, PUC-SP.
Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Verdi, Ligia. 2000. “O Butō de Kazuo Ohno.” dissertação de mestrado apresentada na ECA-USP.
Sas, Miryam. 2011. Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan, Moments of Encounter, Engagement and Imagined Return.
Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center.
Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains, Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactement. Abingdon,
UK: Routledge.
Uno, Kuniichi. 2012. The Genesis of an Unknown Body. São Paulo: n-1.
302
32
A SUN MORE ALIVE
Butoh in Mexico
Gustavo Emilio Rosales (translated by Jordan A. Y. Smith)
Desde el ocaso, un sol más vivo . . .

(From sunset, a sun more alive . . .)1
– Sandoval y Zapata
Under Mexico’s cultural prism, butoh expands its artistic density: in its aesthetic flow – in con-
tact with the dimensions of paradox, magic, and everyday absurdities that largely constitute that
entelechy we might term the Mexican – this contemporary form of dance integrates philosophical
and poetic aspects that transform it into a great sensorial power, which survives, defiantly, the
continual deaths of art in the post-apocalyptic ages. It is a sun of the sunset; a sun that faints, but
which in the process of dying becomes all the more alive.
I
They are seen wandering, with expansive delight, through the unheard of places of Mexico City
and numerous provinces of the Republic of Mexico. There too, as in other parts of the planet,
they are called butoh-ka, and they are the heirs of a historically recent artistic tradition, but one
that clearly serves as bearer of ancestral material. They may be born in various places around the
country or may hail from diverse nations. They are students and teachers and teachers recog-
nized as students of teachers with great seniority and great trajectory. They form a symbolic clan
in which the hierarchy of those practitioners who participated in the foundational stage of the
movement, alongside of Ōno and Hijikata, is recognized without dispute.
A brief retrospective will give an account of the intensity of circulation of protagonists and
programs related to butoh dance in Mexico. In early April 2017, Espartaco Martínez gave a
workshop and presented a work-in-progress, La Bestia (The Beast), at the forum La Bodega del
Teatro San Pancho, in Nayarit; he participated in the Festival Cuerpos en Revuelta2 in March
2016, organized by Eugenia Vargas and the Laboratorio Escénico Danza Teatro Ritual (Scenic
Dance Laboratory Ritual Theater), in the Museo Universitario del Chopo (University Museum
of Chopo) – an emblematic cultural space in Mexico City – along with Kumotaro Mukai,
in an astonishing duet, titled Ja yi me ma shi te.3 The aforementioned festival was a remarkable
accomplishment for the artistic weight of its guests and the transcendence of its performances
303
Gustavo Emilio Rosales
Figure 32.1 Yumiko Yoshioka, photograph by Gabriel Morales.
and academic activities. In addition to the butoh-ka mentioned, participants included Hiroko
and Koichi Tamano (the legendary couple of mature performers, who offered their creation,
Aoi Hana, Blue Flower), Yukio Suzuki (Evanescere) and Natalia Cuellar (Xibalbá) from Chile,
along with Morishita Takashi, director of the Hijikata Archive, who gave a keynote lecture and
produced the photography exhibition, El butoh de Tatsumi Hijikata. People from Germany, Chile,
Colombia, and Argentina traveled to Mexico to be in Cuerpos en Revuelta. At the moment
these lines were written, the deadline has just passed for the call to participate in Butoh Variations,
Experimental Scenic Platform, a program that will be part of the activities of the second edition
of Cuerpos en Revuelta, to be held from May 16 to June 2, 2017, and which will consist of
the presentation of performances that in one way or another are assumed to be influenced by
butoh, but which do not necessarily adhere entirely to the genre. The 2017 edition of the festival
will feature special guests, Japanese teachers Atsushi Takenouchi (who will teach at the CDMX
and a workshop-retreat in Huehuecoyotl, Morelos), Kawaguchi Takao (who will analyze the
creative processes of Ohno Kazuo), Makiko Tominaga (Introduction to Butoh), and Kudo Taketeru
(The Force of the Primitive), in addition to having the participation of the Mexican artist Lola
Lince (Perceptions of the Principles that Return) and again Natalia Cuéllar (Butoh: Body, Biography
and Urban Memory). With a vehemence seldom seen in cultural management, as though there
were no tomorrow, and although the first edition of Cuerpos en Revuelta involved magnificent
efforts, Eugenia Vargas and her Laboratorio Escénico Danza Teatro Ritual made possible pres-
entations and workshops held in the Mexican capital in the last stretch of 2016 with the Japa-
nese butoh-ka Yuko Kaseki, Kudo Taketeru, and Ishimoto Kae. Additionally, the collective Shakti
ArtEscena S.C., under the direction of Adriana Portillo, organized in November workshops and
presentations of the Japanese master residing in Finland, Ken Mai. In June, the Experimental
Company of Lola Lince, based in the city of Guanajuato, organized a workshop and keynote
lecture-demonstration by the legendary teacher Nakajima Natsu, who for decades has been
working with high-profile Mexican dancers including their own Lola Lince and Isabel Beteta,
304
Figure 32.2 Ken Mai, photograph by David Uriegas.
with whom Nakajima created the beautiful solo dubbed Tras la sombra de los pájaros (Behind the
Shadow of Birds).
Admittedly I have wound up with a paragraph so long, populated entirely with enumerations
of what happened in Mexico with respect to butoh during only a scant few months. Yet I did
not even exhaust the facts: other figures were at work, other programs were held simultaneously
to those already mentioned. From this brief account, it is reasonable to consider that in Mexico
butoh has encountered an expanded aesthetics, the creation of job opportunities, the circulation
of knowledge, audiences, and analytical visions with respect to its cultural complexity.
I got to participate directly in one of these resonances, one particularly linked to the establish-
ment of analytical visions related to butoh’s cultural complexity. It consisted of an international
encounter called Raíces profundas de la danza (Deep roots of dance), organized by Isabel Beteta
and Katsura Kan in the Centro Cultural Los Talleres. The participants were Mexican and Jap-
anese artists and theorists. In addition to participating as a speaker, I edited a special issue of the
magazine I run (DCO Dance, Body, Obsession), which published the proceedings. Excerpts of
the contents of this special edition might function collectively as a reflective corpus related to the
diverse ways of thinking butoh today. It will be convenient to quote a few of these texts. Ishii
Tatsuro, dance critic and professor at Keio University, wrote:
I should mention that in Japan’s situation today it is easier to belong to contemporary

dance than to be a butoh-ka, since, even nowadays, Butoh hasn’t gotten a strong rooting
in the country and is still considered “underground.” It is even considered a peripheral
current in relation to the mainstream forms of dance. However, the body that was born
from butoh has grown around the world. Its influence is so far reaching that the points
of origin are difficult to trace.
Ishii 2015, 25
For her part, Inata Naomi, a researcher in philosophy and aesthetics who is a professor at Waseda
University and author of the book Hijikata Tatsumi zetsugo no shintai (Hijikata Tatsumi: Body
Never to Be Seen Again), stated, “Approaching butoh from a renewed perspective, capable of
transcending the borders of time and genre, will contribute in the years to come to increasing
the fecundity of this extraordinary discipline” (Inata 2015, 22). I conclude this survey of the
commentary presented with a thought from specialist William Marotti, researcher and historian
of contemporary Japanese arts at UCLA:
In its best instances, butoh as a critical performance means that it is especially well-
suited to shining a critical light on the present in a both broad and site-specific manner.
Butoh can engage the here and now in a manner with ramifications across multiple
scales, from local to global, from broad to highly specific. As a paradoxically anti-formal
form, whose critique goes beyond dance formalism to look at gesture, space, bodily
comportment and habit, butoh can be remarkably flexible and multi-situational.
Marotti 2015, 52
We must recall that the critical practice around butoh that was carried out in the Centro Cultural
Los Talleres – the most significant independent space for dance at the national level – in October
2014 (months before the corresponding edition of DCO), occurred in the context of a nation
convulsed by internal violence resulting from what several analysts have termed “narcopolitics,”
that is, the business link between drug cartels and senior government officials in the administra-
tion of Enrique Peña Nieto, a president accused of alleged acts of corruption, who seized power
306
A sun more alive
Figure 32.3 Isabel Beteta, photograph by Gabriel Morales.
under suspicion of electoral fraud and suspected conflict of interest with Televisa, the company
that owns and retains absolute control over the regionally dominant television network.
II
Butoh never managed to take root in its country of origin. It was scorned and displaced there.
Hijikata himself does not even garner in Japan the cultural heft of his contemporaries and col-
leagues, such as Mishima Yukio, but the strength of his artistic components, multiplied as they
were in erotic, poetic, and philosophical derivations, grew exponentially throughout the world
due to the itinerant apostolate of some of Hijikata’s first students and collaborators. This was
due both to the didactic mimesis of later generations of Japanese performers who, without
having known Hijikata or Ohno directly, spread their own versions of the original movement
internationally, as well as to versions that numerous non-Japanese artists have taken to cultivating
carefully over the decades.
In Mexico, echoes of the original ankoku butoh were received through refractions of Hijika-
ta’s own influence: Artaud’s philosophy of exacerbation, which arrived in 1968 at the Cultural
Olympiad by the incarnate filter of The Constant Prince, from Jerzy Grotowski, with Ryszard
Cieślak as a paradigm of the sanctified actor; an esoteric symbology mixed with the Grand
Guignol, which the Jewish Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky took to its peak in Mexico
with the filming of La Montaña Sagrada (1973), where Horacio Salinas presented a piece figu-
ratively infused with butoh structures; and also through the theatrical experiments of Abraham
Oceransky, a stage director steeped in artistic knowledge of Asia, who in the work Simio (1972)
mixed elements of butoh with neo-Dionysian theatrical inspirations, influenced primarily by the
likes of Julian Beck, Judith Malina, and the Living Theatre.
In 1981, the contribution of Sankai Juku to the ninth edition of the Festival Internacional
Cervantino – with Bakki, a show premiered at the Avignon Festival – caused a stir: newspapers,
TV, radio programs, and salón discussions all focused intently on “cutting-edge Japanese theater”
307
or “the Japanese theater of cruelty.” No one drew a connection between the collective directed
by Ushio Amagatsu (second generation after the original butoh) and the other dance in the fes-
tival (Martha Graham, Ballet Teatro del Espacio, and the Stuttgart Ballet).
Since then, Sankai Juku has returned to Mexico to offer three more major productions:
Unetsu, Hibiki, and Kagemi. It is no exaggeration to say that the public shock caused in Mexico
by the corporal poetics of this group, channeled through mass media communications, invig-
orated the circulation of basic butoh knowledge through the Mexican cultural sphere. Eight
years after Sankai Juku’s first appearance in Mexico in 1989, Ohno Kazuo was a guest of honor
at the Festival Internacional Cervantino featuring The Dead Sea and Water Lilies.
However, the authentic engendering and subsequent dissemination of butoh in Mexico, as
well as the emergence of original artistic expressions, have taken place in Mexico through inde-
pendent cultural management: a path of paths, such as “The Garden of Forking Paths,” conjured
by Borges, who boldly go on producing dancers and choreographers powerfully motivated by
this artistic genre, to the extent in which they find in it not only a source of artistic knowledge,
but also a means to enrich the constitutive condition of the performer – the individual who models
himself, transforming himself by action. This in turn engendered the consideration of the genre
as a potential episteme for the arts of motion; that is, art as an art of living, as a renewed foundation
of ethics, as was considered by Foucault during the final stage of his work.
The beginning of this significant movement of independent cultural management came in
1993 as a specific reaction to the telluric impact of the presentation of the Japanese company
Byakko-Sha in the courtyard of the National Museum of Anthropology and History (Museo
Nacional de Antropología e Historia). The then young dancer Diego Piñón, who had focused
his dance research on the ancient Mesoamerican ritual traditions still alive in Mexico – in
which the dance merges with the ceremonial ingestion of entheogens, to elicit what Mircea
Eliade called “archaic techniques of ecstasy” (Eliade 1964) – captivated by the sheer extraor-
dinariness of the spectacle, decided to dedicate himself entirely to the exploration of butoh,
on a route that led him to Japan, to study under Tanaka Min, Nakajima Natsu, Yoshito and
Ohno Kazuo, on several occasions. In a few years, Piñón obtained national and international
recognition for his qualities as an interpreter and his aesthetic explorations as a director, in
which, on many occasions, he managed to capture the communicative vessels functioning in
the sets of imagery from butoh and shamanism, and eventually became a highly influential
teacher in Mexico, the United States, and Canada. In his native Michoacán, he founded a center
for study and artistic production, Butoh Ritual Mexicano A.C. that is frequented by students
of diverse nationalities.
In the prologue to the book Eternity in an Instant: Butoh Dance in the Voice of Its Teachers (2014),
Diego Piñón affirms,
Recuperating the origins of butoh in Japan could provide another valuable metaphor
for us Mexicans, in the sense of being able to express from the depths of our being the
memories stored within the collective unconscious from the multiple colonizations of
which we as a people have been the object.
Segura and Guerrero 2014, 15
A stance that outlines the political focus that butoh has acquired in some Latin American coun-
tries, such as Chile and Mexico itself, has been broadly manifested and discussed in forums that,
also in Mexico, have been founded as part of this line of independent cultural management, espe-
cially in the Segundo Encuentro Latinoamericano de Butoh in Mexico (Second Latin American
308
A sun more alive
Meeting of Butoh, held August 2014), organized and directed by the dancer and researcher Tania
Galindo, with the participation of artists from Paraguay (Anaih Chamorro), Chile (Compañía
Fuchen, Lobsang Palacios, and Carla Lobos), Brazil (Joao Souza), Ecuador (Susana Reyes), and,
of course, Mexico (Edwin Salas, Tania Galindo, Diego Piñón, Lola Lince, Isabel Beteta, Coco
Villareal, and Eugenia Vargas). This program featured events in various cultural and outdoor
spaces in Mexico City, fostering not only the coexistence of artists who have in common the
professional practice of an aesthetic born in the East, in areas torn by the social problems that
afflict Latin America, but also the public appearance of butoh in Mexico as a definite style,
inclusive even of its contradictions. Thus, the cultural background formed by this meeting and
by the aforementioned Raíces Profundas de la Danza (Profound Roots of Dance) forum, laid the
foundations from which a couple of years later the Festival Cuerpos en Revuelta (Bodies in Revolt)
would be launched.
It is necessary to return to the mid-1990s, when the Argentine-Mexican dancer, choreog-
rapher, and cultural manager Tania Solomonoff – in collaboration with the Japanese producer
Sagara Yasuko – arranged for a visit to Mexico by Yan Shu, a group of young Japanese who
(at least at that time) addressed butoh with daring and aplomb. Its director, Kinya Zulu Tsuru-
yama, proved himself an expert in inciting participants to overflow their gestural boundaries,
generating with unprecedented eloquence expressive combinations with an extensive sensorial
range. That workshop included thirty participants, some of whom were already practicing
butoh on their own – such as José Pepe Bravo, Jaime Razzo, Roberto Martinez, and Tania
Solomonoff herself. I participated to be able to make a public account of the experience, a
story centered on the group’s non-ritualistic approach, as well as on its minimal use of allusion
or homage to the sources of the genre (in particular, the Hijikata paradigm). Briefly put, the
educational experience with Yan Shu, which culminated in a massive performance at Ex Teresa
Arte Actual in Mexico City, an unconventional theater space renovated from a church, threw
the doors wide open for the encounter with butoh via transversal paths to prevailing models.
Tania Solomonoff and José Bravo, certainly, two of the main figures in this workshop, have
utilized resources obtained through research related to younger and older Japanese teachers
of butoh, to successfully forge a particular aesthetic: the first, as a soloist who delves into con-
nections with the visual arts and musical experimentation; the second, in charge of his own
research laboratory called the Centro de Artes del Movimiento Butoyolotl (Butoyolotl Move-
ment Arts Center), which, as its name implies, assumes butoh as a starting point for weaving
various artistic linkages.
The transition point between millennia finds the butoh situated in Mexico as a practice both
established and divergent from the way it was used in its historical foundations (Razzo, for exam-
ple, leading his group, 0.618, offers something of a butoh in the dance halls: the admixture of
butoh with the popular dance known as danzón), and as a working dimension for the itinerant
masters of the first and second generations, especially Nakajima Natsu and Murobushi Kō. The
latter, in an interview with the recently deceased Mexican journalist and dancer Johana Segura,
stated in 2013:
Artists usually try to orbit around butoh. I have already spoken about the meaning of
butoh; its movements are not those of dance. Many have turned it into a contemporary
dance for commercial aims; have made it part of the system, one that must be broken
by new artists. I have already said that you have to start from zero. The most important
question is how? The zero is not dancing.
Segura 2013
309
The aforementioned interview between Segura and Murobushi directs us toward considerations
of how many Western artists and philosophers (Artaud, Genet, Jung, Nietzsche, Mary Wigman,
et al.) influenced the development of butoh. This question is something that Murobushi, who
died in Mexico in 2015, discussed fervently in several reports produced by Latin American
media. This is an important issue, as we can see by tracing a route through his journalistic state-
ments that Murobushi was a proponent of the idea of linking the potential episteme of butoh
with thinkers of post-structuralist philosophy, especially with Gilles Deleuze, from whom were
derived several ideas central to working on the idea of body from becoming (devenir), an inspiration
that was quickly taken up by Latin American disciples of Murobushi, especially by Rhea Volij,
the principal teacher and ballet dancer in Argentina, who in her classes proposes to deepen the
conceptual link signaled here.
It is certain that, in Mexico, the institutional study of butoh is almost non-existent, though
it is not entirely absent (the official research entity of the dance, Cenidid, lacks a basic program
on it) seeing as in April 2016, the book Cuerpo, Crueldad y Diferencia en la Danza Butoh (Body,
Cruelty and Difference in Butoh Dance), by philosopher and actor Jonathan Caudillo, a disciple,
of course, of Murobushi Kō, was presented at the Aula Magna of the National Center for the
Arts. The book, edited by Plaza y Valdés and the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature,
fortunately traces the historicist pattern of focusing on the philosophical treatment of butoh as a
subversive phenomenon, a form of frank resistance against the corporeal alienation experienced
within pan-capitalism (Caudillo 2016). To this end, I would add to the bibliography of that butoh
born in Mexico the aforementioned book published by (in)FLUIR and the special (trilingual)
edition of Revista DCO, both the efforts of independent publishing, as well as several articles
scattered through magazines and journals, random theses4 (Olmedo Castellanos 2007), and not
much more.
As should be obvious, one cannot say that in Mexico has done butoh poorly, though that
does necessarily not mean it has done butoh well. I mean to say that in Mexico, artistic research
Figure 32.4 Murobushi Kō, photograph by Eugenia Andrealli.
310
A sun more alive
motivated by butoh is being carried out with great courage, with numerous results that bear the
seal of genuine aesthetic inquiry, but which also suffer from the limitations that the arts suffer
generally – being displaced from a public fabric that has deteriorated atrociously as a conse-
quence of narcopolitics.
III
If we could establish the improbable existence of a subject called butoh or the buto-esque, we would
say without fear of vagueness that such a subject in Mexico has taken root – developing late in
historical time, perhaps, but nonetheless doing so quickly.
Mexico has always opened work ports for foreigners who arrive in this country to promote
it, artistically and pedagogically, with success; it has brought together renowned choreographic
collaborations, such as Las Mascaras de Lilith (The Masks of Lilith), Hyperbole de la Memoria
(Hyperbole of Memory, performed by Lola Lince and Nakajima Natsu), and Por donde salta
la liebre (Where the Rabbit Hops, by Rhea Volij and Isabel Beteta); it has welcomed grandiose
stagings, such as Edge, by Murobushi Kō, and Hibari to Nejaka, by Byakko-Sha; and it has been a
driving force for superb Mexican dancers (such as Rodrigo Angoitia and Raúl Parrao, who, along
with Valentina Castro, worked in Tokyo for the piece Edge 01, under the guidance of Murobushi
Kō) who travel outside of their native country in search of knowledge and the development of
creative stimuli.
But butoh is not an entity that has an independent life outside the imaginary of artists,
intellectuals, and publics interested in the evolution of that artistic performance form, originally
invented by Hijikata. One can best work with it if one understands it as a forceful yet changing
imaginative impulse capable of powerfully inspiring contemporary artistic work in at least three
precise ways: (1) as a philosophy of technique, in the structuring of a specialized use of the body;
(2) as an aesthetic defined by contrasts accentuated through dynamics, gestures, rhythms, and
scenographic fields; (3) as a path toward knowledge related to the poetic transformation of the
image of the body, which possesses sufficient conceptual amplitude to become at once a philos-
ophy, a rite, and a simulacrum.
Butoh-related activity in Mexico and the rest of Latin America is most fortunate to have this
conceptual amplitude, one that offers many horizons of transcendence and many constructive
possibilities, in that it has created a field of analytical and poetic perspectives on the body in crisis,
on the body in rebellion, on the body that seeks to emancipate itself from captivity and com-
mands. The history of butoh, as ancient and distant as it may be, is just about to be born from
the Rio Bravo to the southernmost parts of the American continent.
IV
As a kind of corollary, I would like to share an endearing memory. The event occurred at the
beginning of the nineties, in the courtyard of the National Museum of Anthropology of Mexico
City, which is quite a spectacle in itself. It was night. Spring had past, and the atmosphere was
overloaded with electricity. More than a hundred people came to witness Hibari to Nejaka (The
Lark and the Reclining Buddha), a work by the Byakko-sha group, created by Ōsuka Isamu. Dur-
ing the two hours in which the performance took place, the predominant sound in the public
area was a profound silence: it seemed that observers did not exist. At the end of the function,
the paralysis of those who watched was aggravated, but for a mere few seconds, when suddenly
an irrepressible urgency compelled us to rise up at once and en masse. We ran to the astonished
dancers to embrace them, to carry them, to squeeze them, to weep in their hands, among the
311
clothes or the skin of those who were at our side: we howled. I have not witnessed anything like
this again: a catharsis. This memory, the most vibrant, the most intense I have had in over thirty
years of assiduously watching theatrical performances, is made from butoh; it is, stricto sensu, what
butoh means to me: an act of profound revelation.
Notes
1 Translator’s note: this has been quoted by Octavio Paz in El arbol adentro (A Tree Within, New Directions
Press, 1987), wherein it was translated by Eliot Weinberger as, “Sun more alive in the west” (65). The title
of this poem follows Weinberger’s rendering.
2 Translator’s note: Cuerpos en Revuelta can mean “bodies in revolt,” “rioting bodies,” or “bent bodies.”
3 Translator’s note: this is the Spanish pronunciation of hajimemashite, the Japanese set phrase for “nice to
meet you,” which means literally, “(it) begins.”
4 For example, “La danza Butoh: Posible herramienta del entrenamiento actoral,” by Olmedo Castellanos.
Works cited
Caudillo, Jonathan. 2016. Cuerpo, Crueldad y Diferencia en la Danza Butoh. Madrid: Plaza y Valdés.
Eliade, Mircea. 1964. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Inata, Naomi. 2015. “¿Dónde está el origen del butoh?” Danza Cuerpo Obsesión Raíces profundas de la
danza: 7–22.
Ishii, Tatsuro. 2015. “El cuerpo como objeto.” Danza Cuerpo Obsesión Raíces profundas de la danza: 23–31.
Marotti, William. 2015. “Aquí o en algún lugar: reflexiones sobre la contemporaneidad global del butoh
(Here or somewhere: Thoughts on the global contemporaneity of butoh).” Danza Cuerpo Obsesión Raíces
profundas de la danza: 50–60.
Olmedo Castellanos and Irma Juana. 2007. “La danza Butoh: Posible herramienta del entrenamiento
actoral.” Licenciatura thesis, Universidad de Las Américas. http://catarina.udlap.mx/u_dl_a/tales/
documentos/lte/olmedo_c_ij/
Segura, Johana. 2013. “Una entrevista con Ko Murobushi.” In Fluir: Revista Mexicana de Danza Contem-
poránea: El arco entre dos muertes, (June 11). Accessed April 2017. http://revistafluir.com.mx/el-arco-
entre-dos-muertes/una-entrevista-con-ko-murobushi.html
Segura, Johana and Fabián Guerrero. 2014. La eternidad en un instante. La danza butoh en voz de sus maestros.
Mexico City: (in)FLUIR Ediciones.
312
33
GLOBAL BUTOH AS
EXPERIENCED IN SAN
FRANCISCO
Brechin Flournoy
Forward
Butoh. The very word has been known to elicit groans, quizzical looks, and/or ecstatic devotion.
During the 1980s and 1990s, even the most stalwart of fans identified butoh as the Dance of Dark-
ness, made familiar by images of bald heads and physical contortions performed at an agonizing
slow pace. White, painted bodies. Silent screams. Hypnotic, indelible imagery. Self-indulgence.
Spectacle. The walking dead. Butoh was the embodiment of darkness or light capable of igniting
powerful reactions of revelation, boredom, or disgust.
When I was first introduced to butoh in the mid-1980s, it was shrouded in myth and very,
very difficult to find. The network of teachers and artists seemed to exist underground, known
only to those who pursued butoh through a complicated network of personal connections. Most
of the teachers and artists were concentrated in Japan or Europe. In the United States, there were
a handful of butoh artists who brought the art form from Japan. For instance, on the East Coast,
Maureen Fleming taught and performed solo work in New York City; and on the West Coast
Koichi and Hiroko Tamano of Berkeley, California, taught and choreographed for Harupin-Ha,
their Bay Area–based dance company; and in Seattle, Joan Laage was teaching and performing.
Outside of these singular opportunities in the United States, a larger framework that an aspir-
ing student could plug into and learn, simply did not exist.
My first experience with butoh was in 1985, in Ohio. At the time, I was a peace-punk per-
formance artist, studying contemporary dance and arts administration at Antioch College. My
teacher, Professor Dimi Reber, took us to see Sankai Juku on their second U.S. tour. The com-
pany’s timeless use of space and theatrical grandeur was a revelation. Here was something utterly
new, different, and fascinating. It was a feeling of wonder that many people experience at their
first butoh performance.
Professor Reber later invited Maureen Fleming to teach a week-long residency at Antioch
College. Through Fleming’s instruction, we were introduced to a new interpretation of the
Mind/Body Connection – an original combination of alchemy with movement styles from
both Ohno Kazuo and Min Tanaka. For this young dancer, Maureen Fleming’s workshop was
an epiphany.
What began as my personal journey to study butoh in the late 1980s ended up manifesting
as the San Francisco Butoh Festival in the 1990s. Simply put, I wanted to study butoh and was
313
Brechin Flournoy
unable to go to Japan, so I designed a multi-week festival in which one could learn, watch, par-
ticipate in, and discuss butoh dance in a guided forum in San Francisco.
The roots of the festival were in San Francisco’s vibrant DIY (do-it-yourself ) scene of
the early 1990s. I was just out of college and self-producing dance performances with other
independent artists. The relaxed atmosphere, inexpensive living, and collection of talent in
the Bay Area was especially conducive to DIY initiatives. If you had an idea, you just had
to do it. This period bypassed the traditional performance model of producer/presenter/
artist in lieu of the artist as self-presenter model. And so, a lot of performance spaces and
art galleries popped up in people’s living rooms, garages, and loft spaces. Artists congregated
for specific projects. Community was the buzzword. Vision was our currency. Local funders
were generally supportive of these programs, which gave seed money to local arts companies
and independent spaces.
Out of this climate emerged Dance-Network (formerly d-net), an independent artist-run
organization founded in 1992 by Takami (Mochizuki Craddock) and myself. From 1992 to
1996, we produced dance concerts of our work, and showcases for others. We sponsored low-
cost workshops in fundraising, publicity, and documentation to equip independent artists with
the skills essential for self-production. Our mission was to empower the artist-administrator and
to promote dialogue and practice among artists and communities worldwide.
When I took my fascination with butoh dance to my d-net partner, Takami, she hadn’t
heard of it but appreciated the connection to Japan. Unbeknownst to her, at the time, and
coincidentally, she had a personal connection to the artists of Asbestos-kan through a dance
teacher from her youth. Fortunately, Takami’s connections to Japan established our credi-
bility with the primary artists in butoh. She traveled to Japan to meet with people, and she
worked diligently to convince people to trust our unknown project. To engage the support
of the Japanese Consulate, Takami took a book about butoh with her to a meeting with the
Consulate General.
Also significant was Takami’s tutelage about Japanese culture. Takami schooled me in
the cross-cultural aspects of presenting our guest artists, which was quite different from
American standards. My history was in the scrappy world of performance art, punk, and the
Lower East Side. I knew how to put on a show with few resources. Takami added panache
and class to our presentation style. She translated everything and hosted artists. She alone
elevated the experience for the artists so that they would endorse our project and return to
perform or teach.
I focused my energy on the design of the festival, cultivating American partners, fundraising,
and working with critics to better understand butoh. Between the two of us, we compelled sup-
port for our project one conversation at a time. When we started out, neither one of us expected
our audacious scheme to mushroom into a 501(c)3 with an international profile, a dedicated
student base, and critical acclaim.
The San Francisco Butoh Festival was launched as a one-week event; due to the overwhelming
success of the early years, the festival quickly grew to three weeks every summer. Each season,
audiences and participants saw performances in proscenium and outdoor settings; took work-
shops and master classes with venerable artists; discussed butoh’s history and future directions
in symposia; and (when available) performed student concerts directed by guest artists. Every
year, 1,500–2,000 people were exposed to, and directly participated in butoh dance through the
festival. Our goals were to shatter myths through education, to build bridges of communication
between artists of different cultures, and to nurture the American spirit of butoh. But where did
it all come from?
314
Global butoh in San Francisco
Tapping into the zeitgeist: the roots of the San Francisco Butoh Festival
In the 1980s, Sankai Juku was perhaps the most visible butoh company outside of Japan. Sankai
Juku first toured their breathtaking works in the United States in 1984, at the invitation of the
Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles. During their performance, the dancers hung from a build-
ing, suspended in the air by a rope tied around their ankles. While performing in Seattle, one
of the dancers fell to his death. This singular, tragic event ripped through the international arts
community, and further deepened butoh’s enigmatic reputation as the Dance of Darkness. When
the company toured their next piece, several years later, the audiences were considerably larger.
Three years before the launch of the first SF Butoh Festival in 1995, I approached Bay Area
theaters with the idea of presenting butoh in their programs, and immediately ran into two
myths: (1) that audiences weren’t interested in butoh, and (2) butoh dance was all the same – slow,
painful, dark. It quickly became apparent that the genre of butoh was misunderstood and readily
dismissed by the established art world. Presenters did not see the value of taking any risks when
presenting butoh artists. Critics didn’t have a strong handle on how to write about it. Because
of its underground status, the myth of exotic Orientalism persisted. And yet, when I went to a
butoh performance I saw more people in the audience, not less. It was apparent that a mainstream
audience for butoh was growing. The San Francisco Butoh Festival was designed to fill that void,
to dispel myths, and to explore the trends developing within the butoh genre.
The lineage of Bay Area butoh starts with resident butoh masters Koichi and Hiroko Tamano.
Koichi Tamano was born near the Ooi River in Shimada, Shizuoka. In 1964, at the age of 18, he
began studying butoh with Hijikata Tatsumi at Asbestos-kan. Tamano’s first performance was
Barario (Rose Colored Dance) in 1965. He studied with Hijikata for 10 years, earning the title
“bow-legged Nijinsky.” Koichi and his wife, Hiroko, danced in Hijikata’s company in the 1960s
and 1970s before emigrating to Berkeley, California.
Since 1978, the Tamanos have been the root and foundation of the butoh movement on the
West Coast. When they emigrated to the Bay Area, the Tamanos brought with them Harupin-Ha,
a company founded by Hijikata, as well as Hijikata’s style of butoh. Per Yafonne’s interpretation of
the term, “Harupin-Ha” refers to Manchuria and literally means “a studying station from Asia
to Europe, a place of journey for mixed cultures” (Yafonne 2000). Harupin-Ha have performed
through Japan, France, Germany, Mexico, and the United States. They have collaborated with
the Japanese musician Kitaro on several occasions. Through this work, the Tamanos cultivated a
new generation of American butoh dancers infused with the unruly energy of California. Many
Bay Area artists attribute the start of their careers to the Tamanos, including Shinichi “Momo”
Koga and Inkboat, Leigh Evans, Kinji Hayashi, and Molly Barrons. Thanks to their influence, we
could tap into a ready-made audience here in the Bay Area.
Early in the process of developing the festival, Hiroko Tamano invited Takami and I over to
her home to drink tea, watch videos from Asbestos-kan, and learn about butoh. It was the first
of many such encounters with first- and second-generation butoh artists. We were officially part
of the global butoh family.
If we were to bring butoh to a wider audience, it had to be done with the support of our artis-
tic elders. The Tamanos, Akira Kasai, Yumiko Yoshioka, Akiko Motofuji, Katsura Kan, Setsuko
Yamada, and others played a guiding role in the development of the festival with information,
resources, connections, and help. In the first festival, it was Maureen Fleming who suggested that
we add “San Francisco” to, what was at the time, just the “Butoh Festival,” thus sparking a trend
of identifying butoh festivals by city.
With the evangelical assertion that butoh is one of the most important artistic innovations
in the latter half of the 20th century, Takami and I sought out and cultivated partnerships with
315
Brechin Flournoy
other cultural emissaries connected to Asian culture, such as the Japan Foundation in New York,
and the Portland International Arts Festival, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, and AN
Creative in Tokyo, Japan.
With the help and blessing of these leaders, the San Francisco Butoh Festival became a hub for
people from around the world to study, perform, and digest butoh dance. Through this network
of first- and second-generation artists, we found and brought some of the field’s top artists to the
United States to teach and perform. Most of the artists we presented made their American and
Bay Area debuts at the SF Butoh Festival.
In the early days of the festival, pre-internet, I (snail-)mailed promotional brochures to com-
munity centers, arts institutions, individuals, and higher education learning centers in the United
States, Japan, Mexico, Canada, and Europe. Most of the addresses were found in the back pages
of Contact Quarterly. The first year, we didn’t know if anyone would be interested in the festival;
but then the registrations started to come in from around the world.
Takami was with the San Francisco Butoh Festival for four seasons, after which time she left
to concentrate on her own art. Takami founded MO-BU Dance, started a dance school, and
continues to teach and perform locally and abroad. Molly Barrons, a student of the Tamanos and
choreographer/performer, came aboard the San Francisco Butoh Festival as the Associate Pro-
ducer after Takami left. Molly was invaluable to the continuation of the festival in every respect.
The San Francisco Butoh Festival began as a guerrilla operation, then established itself as
the premier butoh festival in the United States with funding from the National Endowment
of the Arts, the San Francisco Arts Commission, Grants for the Arts, private foundations, busi-
nesses, and individuals. The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and Yerba Buena Center for
the Arts were two constant partners that provided key resources for our symposia and outdoor
performances.
Curating the SF Butoh Festival: themes and trends

The first San Francisco Butoh Festival debuted in August 1995 at Fort Mason’s Cowell Theater;
scheduled to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombings in Japan. Despite the
timing, the inaugural San Francisco Butoh Festival set out to bust two myths about butoh, namely
that all butoh was the same, and that it was a direct reaction to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, when in fact it is a more complex history.
The inaugural festival presented the work of four radically different artists. They were Koi-
chi Tamano (Hijikata-style), Oguri (Tanaka-style),1 the classical grace of Maureen Fleming, and
butoh pioneer Akira Kasai whose style was influenced by eurhythmy. The artists performed
radically different works, taught workshops, and participated in a symposium moderated by Alex-
andra Munroe. The inaugural festival, with the theme “Butoh’s Prism,” demonstrated that butoh
was more individualized and complex than first imagined. Any doubts about butoh’s appeal were
quickly dashed. We sold out the run in a 440-seat theater. On opening night people stretched out
down the 60 foot hallway out the door to the parking lot. The energy was palpable and it was
clear, butoh had arrived in San Francisco en force with all its intensity and conflicts.
Author Charles Boone reviewed the inaugural festival for P-Form Magazine (Winter
1995/96), wherein he captured a heated exchange during Akira Kasai’s performance of “My
Own Apocalypse.”
Any concerns I harbored about butoh lapsing so soon after its inception into a set of
too familiar practices – white body paint, grimaces – were blown away by Maureen
Fleming’s and Akira Kasai’s breathtaking performances. They broke every rule of the
316
genre, demonstrated the breadth and depth of present-day butoh, and provided views
of their own electrifying artistry.
His review continues to describe a confrontation between performers on opening night.

During Akira Kasai’s performance, “one audience member who decided become part of the
show was immediately taken on as a gladly accepted participant. When someone else . . . noisily
heckled, Kasai absorbed this hostile energy, including it as part of his show.”
The exchange happened in Japanese, so only a portion of the audience understood what was
said. The heckler had shouted abusive insults and condemned the performance, saying “That’s
not butoh.” To which Kasai incorporated his fury into his uninhibited dance, proclaiming out
loud “This is my Blood. This is my Life.” The authenticity of that heated exchange was at once
exhilarating and shocking. The air was electric; clearly, we tapped into the zeitgeist of butoh,
here in San Francisco.
At the festival, we learned that like American postmodern dance and release technique, butoh
is a deeply organic art form whose central principle is to “make your own dance.” Year after year,
in the workshops, students were encouraged to shed our ideas of traditional butoh, instead asking
the question, “what is American butoh?” We learned that the very point of butoh is to encourage
iconoclastic, individual expression. We were encouraged to find our own dance, be true to our
own spirits. And yet, within this level of self-expression, butoh is the act of “stripping all things
down to their bare essentials” (Yafonne 2000).
Leigh Evans, American butoh artist and yogini, remarked in an article published in Asian
Week that butoh
seems to express what the person is at the root, and the expression of the underbelly of
society . . . what are the things that don’t see the light of day, things that are buried?
For the Japanese, it’s like the image of the crippled rising from the mud. The images
for Americans are totally different. We have a different set of circumstances . . . butoh
allows me to go deeply inside of myself and listen, and allow the yearnings, desires, and
experiences to come forth in a way that none of the other forms I’ve worked with have.
Yafonne 2000
Like some American postmodern dance and release technique, butoh relies on imagery to source
movement, and places equal importance on the inner sense of movement and precise physicality.
SU-EN, a Nordic butoh artist and guest in our 2002 festival, described her process:
In my work I always focus on the body as a living body, an organism and a living
material. This body will be transformed, and this starting point for movement . . . The
challenge of the body – mental, physical, and existential – is the tool. The pain must be
real; the pulling of gravity must be real. I am deeply devoted to the quality of movement
and the true experience of the body.
Yafonne 2002
The San Francisco Butoh Festival artists came from Japan, Thailand, Mexico, Argentina, Sweden,
Germany, Canada, and the United States. Each artist brought new complexity to the definition
of butoh with their challenging, and often breathtaking dances, making it difficult to generalize
what butoh was, and is. Their performances demonstrated that butoh is a spirit; an energetic
force bound and released with exquisite physical control. Butoh is dynamic, ugly, transcendent,
powerful, enigmatic, funny, absurd.
317
Figure 33.1 Images from the 1995, 1996, and 1997 San Francisco Butoh Festival. Courtesy of Brechin
Flournoy.
Akira Kasai, Katsura Kan, Yumiko Yoshioka, Setsuko Yamada, Anzu Furukawa, Diego
Piñon, and Hiroko Tamano became the core curricular teachers – as it were. All the teachers
we featured at the festival were outstanding. To name only a few seems a disservice to them,
especially since many other people contributed their expertise to the event; however, there
were some teachers whose style and movement language resonated deeply with our partici-
pants. The teachers were also invested in helping us to create our own style of butoh.
These artists could see the seeds of something growing here, and so gradually, as the seasons
progressed, the festival started to include more opportunities for younger artists to showcase their
own choreography, and to perform with established artists. For example, in 1998, Akira Kasai
directed Takami, Megan Nicely, Kristin Leith, and myself in Exusiai, which was presented in
partnership with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Katsura Kan returned to the festival several
times to teach and perform. In 2001, Kan directed several Bay Area artists that studied with
previous Butoh Festival workshops to perform a group piece on the mainstage. Anzu Furukawa
taught choreography study. Setsuko Yamada directed a student performance. Hiroko and Koichi
Tamano directed a student choreography that performed for free on Ocean Beach.
One thing we understood is that butoh is not a fixed entity. It is in constant evolution. And so,
as the festival evolved, and our collective knowledge deepened, my curatorial strategy shifted from
historical inquiry to the cultivation of advancing participants from the classroom to the perfor-
mance space. In search of transcendent performances, the San Francisco Butoh Festival sought to
curate the top butoh artists, as well as to nurture emerging talents, and to grow the American spirit
of butoh (although Akira Kasai, asserted – in his classes, and in personal conversation – that “hip-
hop was American butoh”). Every festival and event was considered from a strategic point of view
and incorporated indoor and outdoor locations, large and small venues. As a dance student, myself,
I was particularly interested in creating a space that encouraged experimentation and total immer-
sion in butoh. In addition to the performances, there were symposiums and week-long workshops
and master classes. Every year, the festival had a free, outdoor performance. These curated events
frequently featured the professional artists in our student base. Additionally, we commissioned local
artists to collaborate on performance installations to expand our reach in the public’s imagination.
Each year, the festival focused on a different theme to more fully explore the history, influences,
and future of butoh. The 1996 Women in Butoh festival featured Akiko Motofuji, Setsuko Yamada,
Hiroko Tamano, and Saga Kobayashi performing original works before a rapt audience. Motofuji’s
work in the San Francisco Butoh Festival was named one of the Top 10 Dance Performances of the
Year in the San Francisco Chronicle. This recognition marked a change in how butoh was perceived. No
longer a fringe element in the Bay Area art world, butoh was recognized as a major artistic development
alongside performances by the San Francisco Ballet and other high-profile dance artists. In addition
to performances at Fort Mason’s Cowell Theater, we held a symposium at the Asian Art Museum, a
panel discussion with the artists, and a screening of short films from the Tatsumi Hijikata Archives. At
the Kabuki Theater (co-sponsored by San Francisco Cinematheque and the Asian Art Museum), we
held another film screening from the Tatsumi Hijikata Archives, introduced by Motofuji.
The 1997 festival, entitled German Arts and Culture in Butoh, featured Akira Kasai and
Yumiko Yoshioka in her American debut. The Asian Art Museum once again hosted a sym-
posium, co-sponsored by the Goethe Institut, with keynote speaker Sondra Fraleigh, as well as
a panel discussion moderated by Yukihiro Goto with Akira Kasai, Yumiko Yoshioka, Delta Ra’i
founder of Tatoeba Theatre-Danse Grotesque (Germany), and screenings of film excerpts from
the Tatsumi Hijikata Archives.
Global butoh was the theme of the 1998 festival, which brought Katsura Kan from Thailand,
Yan-Shu, Masahide Omori, and Abe “M” aria from Japan, Gustavo Collini Sartor from Argen-
tina, Diego Piñon from Mexico, and Kokoro Dance from Canada.
319
Figure 33.2 Images from the 1998, 1999, and 2000 San Francisco Butoh Festival. Courtesy of Brechin
Flournoy.
In the wake of the global butoh program, two honors were achieved that marked the first
time butoh had been recognized by the critical community. I was awarded the San Francisco
Bay Guardian GOLDIE Award for Dance – one of two dance artists awarded for 1999. And the
prestigious Isadora Duncan Dance Committee bestowed an award for “Sustained Achievement
in the Arts to the Festival” in recognition of our contribution to the arts. This marked the first
time, the IZZIEs recognized butoh, and its role in dance history. Since then, local butoh artists
have been more readily included in the IZZIEs: Koichi and Hiroko Tamano were recognized
with a Sustained Achievement Award in 2005 and Shinichi Koga’s INKBOAT has been awarded
several IZZIEs over the years.
The 1999 festival, Butoh Bash & Video Café, included a full-day marathon of butoh perfor-
mances with Bay Area and U.S.-based butoh artists and companies such as Leigh Evans, Judith
Kajiwara, and Dappin’ Butoh. The Video Café showcased a large collection of curated video
performances on a loop. Anzu Furukawa and Koichi Tamano and Harupin Ha also performed.
In 2000, the focus was on group works in butoh. Featured artists were VERWANDLUNGSAMT,
Anzu Furukawa’s German company, HARUPIN-HA, and Setsuko Yamada. Also featured were
new works by Leigh Evans and Shinichi Momo Koga.
Ironically, while butoh was enjoying growing popularity in the United States, butoh was
declining in popularity in Japan. It was considered old fashioned, and audiences were dwindling.
During the evolution from one generation to the next, Japanese artists eschewed the butoh label
and referred to their work as “Contemporary Japanese Dance,” “New Wave,” and “Post-butoh.”
Younger, predominantly Japanese artists had taken the lessons of butoh and gone on to create
their own style of dance with elements of American pop culture and hip-hop into their art. This
was most evident in the performance of Abe M’aria, whose raw, visceral energy was purely phys-
ical – no story, just energy – and in Nibroll, a multi-media collective from Tokyo, Japan. The tra-
ditional images of butoh were blown apart by coherent/incoherent, chaotic spurts of pure force.
As a curator, I had many discussions with artists and critics about how to present this evolution
to American audiences, who were still embracing traditional butoh and had a different under-
standing of the term “contemporary dance.” These discussions were reflected in the 2001 festival
theme, “Japanese New Wave and Traditional Butoh.” I balanced the audience’s expectations by
presenting artists who excelled at the classical style of butoh, while creating daring new programs
that posed questions about butoh’s artistic future. The festival featured Op.Eklekt (Kyoto), Yan-
Shu (Tokyo), NIBROLL (Tokyo), a solo performance by Kei Takei alongside “classic” butoh by
Katsura Kan and Diego Piñon. We also held discussion with the artists about the future of butoh
in Japan, and its influence on other artforms, moderated by Yukihiro Goto.
The 2002 festival with the theme Classic to Contemporary highlighted three sub-themes. “Past
to Future: Women in Butoh” featured SU-EN (Sweden), Kathy Rose (filmmaker/animator, New
York), and Hiroko Tamano. “American Butoh: New Visions” included Ledoh’s SALT FARM (SF),
Michael Sakamoto (LA), P.A.N (Seattle), Shinichi Momo Koga (Berkeley), Molly Barrons (SF), RK
Corral (LA), Megan V. Nicely (SF), Kinji Hayashi’s HUMAN SEWING MACHINE (Oakland), and
Helena Thevenot (Miami). “American Butoh II,” a series of free, outdoor performances included
Dean Street Foo Dance (NY), John Doyle’s Medicine Wheel Dance Project (Sausalito, CA), Deb-
orah Butler (MA), Red Junk-et Butoh Company (UT), and Julie Bectum Gillum (NC).
To summarize, the curatorial trajectory of the San Francisco Butoh Festival began with the
individuality of the first- and second generation-butoh artists. Then progressed to showcase
younger Japanese artists working with “post-butoh” ideas, and ultimately, in our final season, the
festival put a spotlight on the evolution of American butoh. The questions we posed changed
from “What is butoh?” to “What is the future of butoh? Does it exist anymore? If so, how does
it speak to us?”
321
Figure 33.3 Images from the 2001 and 2002 San Francisco Butoh Festival. Courtesy of Brechin Flournoy.
Popularizing butoh in the United States

Once established, the San Francisco Butoh Festival was recognized by the media, funders,
and artists to be the largest and most influential butoh festival – the de facto center for butoh
in the United States. We pushed the understanding of butoh and its significance forward in
many ways.
From 1995 to 2001, we were the only annual butoh festival of its kind in the United
States and the sole American presenter that provided consistent training with master artists.
Over the course of eight seasons, 105 dancers from around the world performed on our
stages for thousands of people. We connected an international community of practitioners
and enthusiasts by making butoh more accessible and by strengthening the connections
between students and teachers with which students had a strong rapport. To achieve this,
Dance-Network produced 2–3 technique and performance workshops per year, in addition
to the annual festival.
Dance-Network became a recognized authority on butoh dance, and the “go-to” organiza-
tion for information and referrals. Major performing arts institutions such as the John F. Ken-
nedy Center for the Performing Arts and media outlets, including international publications,
and the New York Times, utilized our expertise to connect them with artists and ideas about
butoh. We coordinated tours for butoh artists to universities and art festivals internationally.
We inspired similar butoh festivals in Portland, Oregon, Seattle and Olympia, Washington, San
Diego, New York, Thailand, and other places. Sixty percent of our students and audience trave-
led to San Francisco to participate in the festival. The students ranged from beginning dancers to
non-dancers to professional artists. They came from every region of the United States, Canada,
Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Each year we saw a growing percentage of students return on
a regular basis to continue their studies in butoh and then take the information back to their
communities and students. It was a proliferation that lasted for the eight years, and continues
to resonate.
Through our program, we took butoh out of the shadows and made it accessible to a great
many people. Through one-on-one discussions and symposia, we educated the audience and
media to look at butoh in a critical way, beyond prejudices and assumptions. Through ongoing
cultivation of funders and donors, we assigned monetary value to butoh and challenged the myth
that butoh was a fringe art form unworthy of support.
Many of the bonds that were formed through the festival carried into the 21st century, long
after we closed our doors in 2002. The legacy of the San Francisco Butoh Festival is found in the
connections that remain between artists, students, and presenters to this day. For the past decade,
international butoh artists have continued to teach and perform in the Bay Area. Bob Webb’s
“Bay Area Butoh” continues to stoke the flame with open showcases for butoh artists several
times a year. The Thailand Butoh Festival just celebrated its 15th season. While discussing butoh
and its past, present, and future with Akira Kasai, he made a statement in a private conversation
that sticks with me to this day: “butoh is not an art form; it is a phenomenon. It moves around
the world and lands in the place where people need it most.”
Rachel Howard, dance critic for the San Francisco Examiner, wrote,
Year after year, the festival had seldom been less than mind-blowing. It’s brought
together Japanese greats and American upstarts, and looked at this difficult-to-define,
post-WWII form from some surprising angles, turning up links to German Expression-
ism, say and venturing into the relatively uncharted terrain of “post-butoh.”
Howard 2002, 20A
323
Brechin Flournoy
Everything must come to an end

After nine major productions and numerous smaller projects, the San Francisco Butoh Festival
shuttered its doors in 2002. Initially I had wanted to end the Butoh Festival and re-open the
festival with a different title that better reflected this new evolution in arts. However, the political
climate in post-9/11 America made it difficult and expensive for foreign artists to come to the
States. At the same time, the Bay Area economy was ravaged by the first dotcom boom that ush-
ered in a wave of gentrification. The sudden influx of new money pushed the real estate prices
up, leading to the closure of many theaters, rising expenses, and a mass exodus of local artists to
other cities and countries. It was time to let the festival energy move to a new place, where it is
needed most.
We cracked some thick glass ceilings. Due to general misunderstandings about butoh, prior
to our work, the critical community didn’t consider butoh to be on a par with classical dance or
other well-known dance companies, with the exception of Sankai Juku. Butoh performances
were difficult to get reviewed. Foremost among the challenges was convincing critics that butoh
wasn’t a fringe artform that appealed only to a few. Our large houses helped to change their
perception about butoh’s popularity, as did the ongoing discussions with critics.
As the Founding Director and Curator, I consider myself the gardener in this larger story
about the butoh tree. Through the San Francisco Butoh Festival, we succeeded to bring butoh
out of the shadows and to connect the international community in an indelible way. Years after
the Festival’s closure, new butoh festivals are being planned around the world; artists and students
are connected across international borders; a new generation of contemporary dance artists and
butoh artists are emerging. It is a beautiful thing to see.
Note
1 At the time of the festival, these artists were self-identifying as butoh artists. Only later did the post-butoh
conversation come up. How they present themselves now is beyond my experience.
Works cited
Boone, Charles. 1995. “San Francisco Butoh Festival.” P-form, (Winter).
Howard, Rachel. 2002. “All-American Butoh Goes Out with a Bang.” San Francisco Examiner, (August 6).
Yafonne. 2000. “A&E: The Big Bang of Bay Area Butoh.” Asian Week, (August 3).
———. 2002. “Catch the Last Wave: The San Francisco Butoh Festival Moves On.” Asian Week, (August 2).
324
34
LEIMAY, CAVE, AND THE NEW
YORK BUTOH FESTIVAL
Ximena Garnica
I first met Shige Moriya, my partner, in the early summer of 2001 when we both attended a
butoh workshop in upstate New York led by Atsushi Takenouchi. I was at the workshop with
my friend Juan Merchàn, whom I met the year before when I mistakenly registered for my first
butoh workshop, believing that it was a buyō (classical Japanese dance) class. At that time, Shige
was already working, producing, and programing visual art and performance in a converted
garage space, CAVE, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Also during this workshop I met Zachary
Model, someone integral to the inception of the New York Butoh Festival. During that ten day
workshop in the Adirondacks we danced in nature, prepared meals, and partied together. All this
serenity was then disturbed by the shock of a car accident. Shige’s head hit the windshield, which
cracked like a spider’s web, opening a gash above his left eyelid. Juan sustained a back injury that
haunted him for years. Immediately after the accident, I kept Shige conscious by having him
count in Spanish for over an hour until the ambulance arrived. The memories of that workshop
continue to have an otherworldly quality for the four of us. It set in motion a chain of events
that led to the creation of the New York Butoh Festival.
Once back in the city, we were inspired by Shige’s work at CAVE, which was a hub for artists
working in media that cross pollinated the visual and the performing arts. Someone proposed
adding butoh training at CAVE, and soon we were hosting workshops taught by the leading
international butoh dancers both at CAVE, and throughout the city. A community of loyal per-
formers and spectators grew quickly. People started to identify CAVE as both a U.S. and world
center for butoh. This led to the New York Butoh Festival (2003–2009) co-founded by Jeff
Janisheski, Juan Merchàn, Zachary Model, Shige Moriya, and me. The festival was one of the
multiple activities presented and produced by Shige and me under the umbrella of our live-work
space CAVE and our organization LEIMAY.
In addition to the biannual festival, since 2001 Shige and I have continually invited butoh
artists to CAVE to teach, lead workshops, and give informal presentations. In 2008 we launched
the New York Butoh Kan Training Initiative (2008–2011), which offered two-week to one-year
long teaching residencies to butoh artists. This led to the establishment of the current LEIMAY
LUDUS. Other programs spearheaded at CAVE included a ten-year visual art gallery, visual artist
residencies, and fellowships for theater, dance, and performance artists.
In the following pages, I will attempt to reflect on why Shige and I embarked upon the
creation of the New York Butoh Festival and other butoh related educational and presenting
325
Ximena Garnica
programs. I will share how those endeavors relate to our collaborative and multidisciplinary
artistic practice, intercultural relationship, and situation as immigrants in New York City. I will
explain why although we have contributed to the dissemination of the work of butoh dancers,
we have been cautious about the institutionalization of butoh. I will explore what in the works
of some butoh dancers relate to the current focus of our work with the LEIMAY Ensemble and
how we frame our practice and develop our aesthetics through the growth of LEIMAY LUDUS.
How LEIMAY understands butoh

Although at times what follows might seem like a personal account, these reflections connect
directly to our relationship with butoh dancers, the origins and evolution of the New York Butoh
Festival, the New York Butoh Kan Training Initiative, and the impact of these interactions and
activities in our LUDUS practice, our work and direct community. Although I am the author,
the content of these pages has been discussed and shaped with Shige. Therefore I write from
the perspective of “we.” Shige and I deeply integrate our life, work, and art. This is our practice.
We live in a converted NYC garage, a live-work space built with our hands. That process
gave us the satisfaction and the power brought by the act of making something through labor.
Working with materials and in different seasons, we experienced how matter itself is affected by
physical and natural principles outside our human desires. Building walls, floors, rooms, a kitchen,
and bathrooms have been ways to experience how a thought or an idea materializes through
the manipulation of materials and how materials can simultaneously manipulate a thought or an
idea. How the inside can transform the outside and vice versa. How the power of thought and
imagination can materialize in a useful object. These experiences have developed in us a deep
appreciation for procedures and a curiosity in the transformation of materials, bodies, and spaces,
although perhaps in less utilitarian ways.
Figure 34.1 Ximena Garnica in Antigones (co-presented by LEIMAY, New York Butoh Festival 2007, as
part of Japan Society’s Kazuo Ohno 101 Celebration and Butoh U.S. Marathon), photograph by Dola
Baroni. Courtesy of LEIMAY.
326
LEIMAY
Figure 34.2 The Tamanos (co-presented by LEIMAY, New York Butoh Festival 2007, as part of Japan
Society’s Kazuo Ohno 101 Celebration and Butoh U.S. Marathon), photograph by Dola Baroni. Courtesy
of LEIMAY.
CAVE fluctuates between being our home, our studio, the LEIMAY Ensemble studio, and a
space for other artists; the private interweaves with the public, the personal with the social, and
sometimes all of those spaces exist simultaneously. For some people, CAVE was a gallery, for others
a center of butoh, for others the studio of the LEIMAY Ensemble, and for others an artist’s loft
where they slept while staying or living in New York. From the beginning, CAVE has been a vortex
defying categories. Live arts such as performance art, dance, experimental sound, and music were
intermingled with photography, painting, sculpture, and installation. CAVE is constantly re-shaping
in response to internal and external dynamics. CAVE has not been “legally occupied” (we are
currently battling to achieve a legal live-work occupation); this means that for over two decades we
have lived in a kind of exposed clandestinity. We believe this schizophrenic space has illuminated
our perception of harmony and has given us the opportunity to imagine many ways of being and
coexisting. Some of the elder butoh dancers we came across appreciated and were excited by this
kind of environment. Perhaps CAVE reminded them of the days of Hijikata and the development
of his ankoku butoh when they were surrounded by an atmosphere of subversion and intense energy.
Having access to space made possible the creation of the LEIMAY Ensemble, a group of
dancers, performers, and actors who work with Shige and me throughout the year to create
body-rooted ensemble-based performances. The LEIMAY Ensemble creates a common gram-
mar, developing mechanisms for the conditioning of our bodies and contributing to the growth
of a common aesthetic and artistic practice. As Hiram Pines described in a recent publication,
LEIMAY is a play on the Japanese word for dawn, but differs from common Western
usage in that it has a particular focus on moments: the moment the sun emerges, extend-
ing to include the moment of change from one era to another. For Shige and Ximena,
LEIMAY reverberates with liminal states, change, and transformation.
Garnica et al. 2016, 10
327
Ximena Garnica
The LEIMAY Ensemble has been rooted in questions of being, perception, and relationships; it
aims to unveil moments of connection and transformation. We are interested in exposing what
may be beyond our personae, beyond the individual with a social identity. We often question how
a body can exist and connect with its environment when it is stretched out of its social existence.
We are surrounded by a multiplicity of cultures, identities, languages, social classes, and beliefs.
The conditions of our habitat – we live in New York City, a concrete grid of electrifying energy
and often overwhelming stimuli; the fact that we are an interracial couple; that we communicate
in a second language, English, learned in adulthood; and that we have a domestic and work
partnership – have all influenced the way we value diversity, oppositions, and confrontations,
as well as the way in which we assert and defy our identities. In this habitat conflicts emerge.
However, instead of thinking of confrontation as something that only results in negativity, we
define confrontation as moments in which different forces collide or meet to make something
previously imperceptible perceptible or to give birth to something not there before.
Creating the conditions in which confrontations and transformations can take place, whether
through creating an artwork in any medium, perceiving an artistic work, curating an artistic
program, sharing a meal, partying, or engaging in the activities of transmission and sharing of
artistic practices became a guiding force behind the many facets of our work and our mode of
living. We value confrontation as a mechanism to find deep connections between ourselves,
people, spaces, and materials. We value confrontation as potential generative power to uncover
meaningful connections between our deepest selves and that which lays outside of us. We believe
that through the tension of confrontation in an environment of coexistence new ways of relating
and being emerge which transcend the personal. We have recognized that when these moments
of connection/confrontation appear, they are born deep within oneself and carry a powerful life
force of transformation in them.
Looking back to the late nineties, to our first encounters with dancers who referenced butoh
in their performances, and with those who self-identified, or were identified as butoh dancers,
we sensed in their dancing an energy that we associated with an impetus for change. Later on as
we kept meeting more dancers, we observed that some of them were able to tap into some kind
of force through their dancing, which although it originated from inside them, transcended their
personas and projected the power of subversion and transformation. That force is similar to that
found in the works of some of the visual artists and musicians who were part of the art exhibi-
tions at CAVE (such as Naoki Iwakawa, Hisayasu Takashio, Kenta Nagai, and Tatsuya Nakatani)
or that we encountered in the works of Anselm Kiefer, Richard Serra, Giacometti, or Andy
Goldsworthy. We sense this force in moments of the dance of Murobushi Kō and Kasai Akira,
or in the Constant Prince monologues of actor Ryszard Cieslak. This force is not indigenous to
butoh dancers but to self transcendence through extreme artistic craft leading to the ability of
transforming and being transformed. In a more personal dimension, this force is kindred to that
force which surfaces in some moments in which our Japanese and Colombian cultural identities
collide, dismantling our notions of self and belonging, dissolving social norms and systems of
beliefs, and compelling us to connect with each other from the place of fragmented selves.
Whenever we sense this transformative force distilled through craft, we are curious and want
to dig deeper. Consequently we wanted to meet those who tap into this force through their
work, and to see how it may flow among people. Thus we create opportunities and conditions
to meet, connect, sense, and exchange experiences and practices. Some of these opportunities
materialized into the New York Butoh Festival, the New York Butoh Kan Training Initiative,
and into the artistic collaborations with guest butoh dancers for the creation of works. Others
materialized in the CAVE Gallery, the SOAK Presenting Series, the Fellowship Program, and our
own artistic work and work with the LEIMAY Ensemble. Additionally I believe that because
328
LEIMAY
Figure 34.3 Murobushi Kō in Quick Silver (presented by LEIMAY, New York Butoh Festival 2007),
photograph by Dola Baroni, courtesy of LEIMAY.
Figure 34.4 Kasai Akira in Flowers (presented by LEIMAY, New York Butoh Festival 2005), photograph by
Piotr Redlinski. Courtesy of LEIMAY.
for many years Shige and I were not able to travel outside the United States, we had to focus on
making CAVE and New York the epicenter of our curiosities.
Our curatorial sense is deeply subjective and personal (and at times circumstantial), guided
by our curiosity to access and release this transformative force. Specifically as it relates to butoh,
in the beginning we connected with those dancers who identified themselves as butoh dancers
and who could afford to travel to New York and those who we could afford to bring to New
329
Ximena Garnica
York City. Then, little by little, we felt closer to those butoh dancers whose personalities and
values seemed to align with ours, to those who asked to come back, to those whose dance deeply
touched us, to those who were open to generative confrontations, and finally to those with whom
we could not only work with but felt we could share our home with.
As we reflect on our butoh-related curatorial choices, we call to mind the intimate perfor-
mances by butoh dancers we organized at CAVE and later large scale ones at the New York Butoh
Festival. We remember how at that time a myriad of questions were opened. Many performances
were deeply effective, showing a glimpse to an alternative way of being by tapping into the force
of transformation. This kind of experience, however, was not always the case and the results of
some performances – despite the good intentions of dancers – were predictable, narcissistic, and
pseudo-ritualistic. But rather than airing our grievances with some butoh dancers, I will focus on
reflecting on the moments that fully capture our curiosity, the moments that we hunt for in our
work with the LEIMAY Ensemble. Although these moments are not exclusively generated by
butoh dancers, these moments are always present even if only for brief instances in the works of
many of our more admired butoh dancers. Moments in which the body defies any definition – an
ambiguous body, the body of abstraction. Moments in which the body exhibits both the power
of its transformation and the power to let the body transform. Moments in which the body
seems to disappear and space itself is revealed. Our attraction to these specific moments is very
personal, and perhaps connected to our condition as immigrants, the constant assertion of and
contravening of our identities, our skepticism of certain societal systems of indoctrination, and
our belief in personal revolution as a catalyst for societal change. A body that resists any definition
is unpredictable, and even dangerous, as it is hard to control. A body that finds ways to connect
from a place of the fragmented self and not from a place of individual assertion has accepted its
state of evanescence and had developed mechanisms to exist and reinvent itself in a constant state
of flux. It will question paradigms, while searching for its location within its ecosystem.
We believe that for these moments to appear certain conditions are needed. In the context of
the performing arts, the body needs certain kinds of conditioning and experiences, and a personal
procedure needs to be developed. These conditions are not general and do not necessarily apply
to everybody. And the procedures to achieve these conditions vary among people. Long before
any encounter with butoh, I was curious about different approaches to training and making
work. I grew up in the theater, and since childhood I have been fascinated and at the same time
frightened by what gets uncovered in the studio. Bringing butoh dancers to share their practice
with us was, for me, a natural impulse, both in terms of the circumstances of our lives and our
curiosity about the work of particular butoh dancers. At some point we came to realize that those
dancers who had developed very personal procedures were the same dancers who were able to
conjure the moments Shige and I felt so attracted to (whereas others were fitting themselves into
some existing procedure).
It seemed to us that the butoh dancers we connected more deeply with were transforming
from the inside outwards. It matched Shige’s and my personal belief that change should happen
from the inside. An inside change is similar to that of creation, motivation, and spirit. Often,
people change according to many different external forces related to politics, religion, society,
culture. These changes come from the outside. Sometimes, if you’re changing from the outside,
you’re not really sure if that change is you, and it might not fit you well. That’s good enough
for some people, but not for us. Outside change happens to us through the implementation of
systems, such as those of society and education. While we understand the necessity for these
systems, many times, they are only providing answers rather than asking questions. Questions are
very important, and if you do not have any questions, then you are not able to find your own
answers. If a life is only constructed through the imposition of outside powers, it is very difficult
330
LEIMAY
to navigate: many people lose their way because when faced with a struggle they believe that
they are the problem and not that the system is the problem. Consequently, if you ask questions,
you will be able to see the problem more clearly and design a way to solve it through your own
means. Also, if you change from the inside, you know it’s you making the change. If we change
from the inside, we won’t forget. In this way we sympathized with some butoh dancers who
developed their own mechanisms to transform, and this is why we decided to investigate their
work. Some performers are interested in butoh from a purely formalistic perspective, others are
attracted from a philosophical or even therapeutic or spiritual angle. Some ended up replicating
the butoh they are attracted to from the place of the outsider. However, digging inside and ask-
ing radical questions of the self through physical craft is one of the most important things about
being a butoh dancer. While working with so many butoh dancers over the years, we have come
to learn that many of our favorites do not even identify themselves as “butoh dancers.” Many of
them hate to be called butoh dancers, because they feel constrained by ideas about butoh that are
shaped by society, education, systems, and outside powers.
The New York Butoh Festival

Years before the festival began, my friend (and New York Butoh Festival co-founder) Juan Mer-
chàn and I were organizing workshops throughout the city while Shige was presenting artists
referencing butoh in their works at CAVE. Juan had a similar immigration situation to ours
and could not travel outside of the United States. Therefore, we were all especially motivated
to bring the training and performances that we sought to us. Soon we were joined by Zachary
Model and Jeff Janisheski and with a DIY, spirit we launched the first festival. From 2003 to
2009, we presented and produced four incarnations of the New York Butoh Festival, showing
work by over 100 dancers from Japan, Sweden, Germany, France, Colombia, and the United
States. Over 8,000 people attended various sold-out events during these festivals. The festival
consisted of lectures, film screenings, conversations, performances, and workshops. Although
the festival was a grassroots undertaking, we partnered with various institutions throughout the
city including Anthology Film Archives, Japan Society, Noguchi Museum, CUNY Graduate
Center, Yale University, New York University, and Theater for the New City, among others.
Among those presented were Japanese artists such as Murobushi Kō, Kasai Akira, Ohno Yoshito,
Yumiko Yoshioka, Yuko Kaseki, Ishide Takuya, Yoshimoto Daisuke, Iwana Masaki, Kawamoto
Yuko, Taketeru Kudo, Waguri Yukio, and Osanai Mari. Since the festival was biannual, we also
organized workshops in the years between festivals and in the off-festival seasons. Through
those workshops we were able to meet many dancers, some of them who performed at CAVE
outside the festival programing. Many of them stayed with us at CAVE and shared nights of
drinking and conversation.
2009 marked the last New York Butoh Festival and a transition into a new phase for Shige’s
and my work as artists, curators, and producers. Shige and I were reevaluating the structure of
LEIMAY and the necessity for the continuation of the NY Butoh Festival. We had to both look
back at the history of CAVE as a home for the artistic community and supporter of multidisci-
plinary arts, and look foward to what we wanted for the future of the organization and artistic
collaboration. We also had to take into account that our interest and interaction with butoh for
those many years had forever changed our outlook and tools for producing and programing art.
This led, ultimately, to the end of the NY Butoh Festival and the inception of the LEIMAY Fel-
lowship program and the SOAK Presenting Series, which provides a space for artists to discover
their own problems and ask their own questions, without the idea of “butoh” dominating their
quest. We had an interest in maintaining a conversation with butoh dancers and history while
331
Figure 34.5 Yoko Kaseki in Tooboe (presented by LEIMAY, New York Butoh Festival 2005), photograph by
Piotr Redlinski. Courtesy of LEIMAY.
Figure 34.6 Iwana Masaki (presented by LEIMAY, New York Butoh Festival 2005), photograph by Piotr
Redlinski. Courtesy of LEIMAY.
LEIMAY
Figure 34.7 Waguri Yukio at CAVE (presented by LEIMAY, New York Butoh Festival 2007), photograph
by Dola Baroni. Courtesy of LEIMAY.
acknowledging its impact on the performing arts, as well as on LEIMAY’s development intellec-
tually and practically.
New York Butoh Kan Training Initiative

During one of the off years of the New York Butoh Festival, a turning point came when our
gallery closed in 2006 and I was finally able to leave the country. I went to Japan to study with
Kasai from 2006 to 2007. I was one of the twenty-four students who were chosen to participate
in a full-time, year-long dance program at his Tenshikan studio in Tokyo. I had longed for this
experience for many years. Once the year was completed, I returned to my New York home and
to the New York Butoh Festival, resolved to continue working with the same level of continuity
and rigor. This desire led to the birth of the New York Butoh Kan Training Initiative (NYBK),
which ran from 2008 to 2011. Compared to the short training sessions of previous three-day or
one-week butoh workshops we had hosted for many years, this endeavor featured training over
longer periods of time, up to one year.
The NYBK, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City
Department of Cultural Affairs, and with the generosity of many butoh dancers, featured over
333
Ximena Garnica
forty different butoh performers and Noguchi Taiso practitioners in residence teaching over
150 different workshops. Among the recurring guest teachers were Murobushi, Kasai, Kaseki,
Waguri, Imre Thormann, and Osanai. The NYBK facilitated rigorous physical training and
enriched students with first person historical context from international masters. It endeavored
to set forth an integrative training opportunity for the dancer, actor, and/or interdisciplinary per-
former involving routine studio practice for physical conditioning and also mental and sensorial
activation, creating thereby a platform for the future development of new work. The NYBK
furthermore allowed for the possibility to study with many different people, something that was
not possible in Japan.
The midpoint of the NYBK was marked by the collaboration between Murobushi, Shige
and me, and a group of local performers, in Furnace (2009). This piece was important because
we were co-directing and co-choreographing this work with one of our more esteemed dancers
and because it allowed us to create an ensemble based work with many of the people who had
had continuous participation in the NYBK and in previous workshops at CAVE. This work
confirmed to us the value of creating work with an ensemble and of group continuity.
The New York Butoh Training Initiative was envisioned as a four-year project; however,
some participants were consistent and others came for brief periods of time. Some were deeply
influenced by the practices shared in our studio, others became our collaborators. Some moved
on to make strong work in their own disciplines often unrelated to dance, while others made
work and took paths that were not always in line with our own aesthetics and at times contra-
dicted our intentions. Although the project was sustainable, contributing to the financial health
and recognition of our organization, we had to keep true to our motivations, and as planned
the NYKB culminated in 2011. Our desire for a group of like-minded artists to share in the
development of LEIMAY’s artistic and educational endeavors for an extended amount of time,
Figure 34.8 Furnace, a LEIMAY collaboration by Ximena Garnica, Shige Moriya, Murobushi Kō, and an
international group of performers (New York Butoh Festival 2009), photograph by Yana Kraeva. Courtesy
of LEIMAY.
334
LEIMAY
so that the cohesion of the practice and dynamic of the group can be examined and explored in
both the studio and performance was still latent. Although we continued to develop platforms
for artistic exchange with butoh dancers and other artists, and we kept learning and conversing
with a generations of artists who came before us, from 2012 on, the creation of new works and
the articulation of our practice has been our focus. Our goal became to develop ideas and meth-
ods that would suit our own purposes for the creation of our art. The LEIMAY Ensemble, the
development of the LUDUS practice, and the creation of a new body of work (the Becoming
Series (an in-progress pentalogy of stage works including Becoming -corpus (2013), borders (2016)
and Frantic Beauty (2017); and installation-performances including Floating Point –Waves (2012),
Qualia –Holometaboly (2014), and Qualia –Transcendence (2016) among others) are examples of
what resulted from this new focus.
As written in the borders publication,
LUDUS is LEIMAY’s theory and practice; providing a working foundation for artis-
tic projects. LUDUS, the Latin word for training, game, and play, involves two main
pillars: conditioning the body and developing theory and aesthetics. Through an
ongoing development of movement explorations and exercises, LEIMAY cultivates
the body’s physicality, voice, sensorium, imagination, and intellect. LEIMAY’s theo-
retical framework is rooted in questions of perception and relationships. This frame-
work aims to illuminate the connections between materials. LEIMAY considers the
body, at times dancer, actor or performer, to be a material in a composition that also
includes light, sound, strings, latex, smoke, and other various objects. For LEIMAY,
moments of connection make visible the life of the space-between. In these instances
materials are viewed as substance and spaces in a state of transformation, and it is
through these moments that we may reflect on our perception and placement in
the world.
The physical conditioning aspect of LEIMAY LUDUS is continuously being devel-
oped as a process of investigating, distilling, and developing movement-based practices.
LEIMAY performers work to access deep states of listening and to dissipate the urge to
express. LEIMAY performers work towards conditioning a body that is simultaneously
subject and object; a body that can be moved by the environment as opposed to a body
that moves itself. Physical and mental openness, strength, and pliability are needed to
trigger different states of transformation. LUDUS principles are discovered through
working practice, training systems, theoretical reflections, and aesthetic research.
Garnica et al. 2016, 18
The LEIMAY Ensemble currently has three core members: Masanori Asahara, Andrea Jones,
and Derek DiMartini. Other members are currently entering their second and third year in the
group. Besides creating new works with us (the third part of the Becoming Series, Frantic Beauty,
premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in fall 2017), core members lead regular classes
for the community and continue to contribute to the development of LUDUS. A new phase
seems to be developing for the ensemble. Structures have emerged which will start guiding the
dynamics of the work moving forward. Many questions of sustainability are arising, and we are
exploring mechanisms to continue this way of working and creating. As we continue the work
with the LEIMAY Ensemble, we are also focusing on the development of our work with different
materials and spaces through the creation of art installations and interdisciplinary projects. Our
subjects continue to question the ambivalence of human nature; the perception of the spectator;
the intervals between spaces, objects, and time; the energetic flow of spaces and bodies; and the
335
Ximena Garnica
tension between the organic and the inorganic. We continue to seek transformation as an aes-
thetic and the potential of what is yet to exist.
Our live-work space, CAVE, is about to enter its twenty-second year and our partnership is in
its eighteenth year. We maintain our conviction that art has the the power of personal revolution,
that our work is a way to tap into our inner selves as a means for remembering who we funda-
mentally are, while simultaneously discovering who we are now becoming. Although this might
sound only spiritual or esoteric, we approach this process through the physical investigations of
the body, materials, and their spatio-temporality by the creation of artistic works and procedures
to condition the body and to develop aesthetics. We look back at history, at the work of trans-
gressors, poets, and visionaries. While imagining the work buried in anonymity, we look into
those invisible threads that might connect us both past and present while creating the conditions
for new threads to emerge. We continue to look at our artistic creations and activities as oppor-
tunities to transform ourselves and to continuously look for our place within the flux of life.
Work cited
Garnica, Ximena, Shige Moriya, Hiram Pines, and Lucy Kerr. 2016. Borders. New York: LEIMAY.
336
35
IRAQI BODIES’ THE BALDHEADED
“Butoh”-inspired Iraqi
contemporary performance
J Dellecave
The 2000s and 2010s are proving to be an era of violent conflict and war unfolding in new locales
every day. During this time countless amounts of social and popular media images represent
peoples from war-torn Iraq and other parts of the Middle East. The usual onslaught of Internet
images bring faraway wars to the tidy rectangles of our laptop computers, neatly packaging the
diversities of war-affected humanity into generalized identity boxes – Arab, Muslim, Middle
Eastern, refugee. Within this fast-paced quick-to-change landscape, the general ethos and per-
vading stereotypes of what ‘these people’ look like are constantly in flux and overwhelmingly
negative. Popular amongst these images are the stereotypes of Iraqi as terrorist or Iraqi as victim
of war. This essay examines perhaps the least obvious and most obscure place for an intervention
into these visual media-perpetuated narratives, a contemporary Iraqi dance theater performance
inspired by Hijikata Tatsumi. With focus on the butoh-inspired choreographic work The Bald-
headed, I contend that choreographer Anmar Taha, director of the theatrical company Iraqi Bod-
ies, effectively countered negative stereotypes of Iraqis as aggressive and hyper masculine. Taha’s
The Baldheaded poignantly and powerfully conveys Iraqi experiences of war as universal iterations
of human suffering. Through embodied butoh-inspired images of Iraqi men as artists rather
than as terrorists or victims, Taha’s work illuminates compelling tensions between universalism,
whiteness, and the international concert stage.
Iraqi Bodies is a contemporary physical theater company directed by Taha and co-directed
by Josephine Gray (Figure 35.1).1 In 2009, following heightened violence in Iraq and being
wounded by a bullet in crossfire, Taha founded Iraqi Bodies in Sweden. He has since been creat-
ing pieces with various performers from both Europe and the Middle East. The Baldheaded was
Taha’s 2005 graduation performance from the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad and was per-
formed by him and six of his cohort from the Theater Department: Hayder Chokan, Ali Shukur,
Samer Disher, Muhanad Rasheed, Raed Kadim, and Ali Da’em (Anmar Taha, pers. comm.).2
The Baldheaded gained notoriety at the school and, according to Taha, quickly and unexpectedly
attracted international attention after winning the jury prize at the Philadelphia Theater Festival
in Jordan. The Baldheaded premiered in Gothenburg, Sweden, at the Pustervik Theater, on June
5, 2010, with a smaller but overlapping cast. Much of Taha’s current artistic explorations arose
from his early explorations of The Baldheaded and what he now terms “letting the body speak the
trauma of life” (Iraqi Bodies 2016a). Today Iraqi Bodies “explores the link between movement
and gesture, between dance and physical theater” and is influenced by the theories and methods
337
J Dellecave
Figure 35.1 Anmar Taha, photograph by Khalil Younes.
of Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, and others (Iraqi Bodies
2016a). Much like the performances of other internationally renowned contemporary theater
artists, the work of Iraqi Bodies currently employs collaboration with musicians, set designers,
and performers.
The edited video clip of Taha’s The Baldheaded reveals six hairless male dancers embodying
motifs of conformity contrasted with distortion.3 Each dancer has a bald head, white powdered
body, baggy black pants, and bare chest. During one moment, the homogenous sextet pitter-
patters stage left and turns suddenly to walk steadfastly forward en masse. They are not quite in
unison, but possess a similar cadence, all the while uttering sonically dissonant nonsense words
and exaggerating their breaths. When the bald men settle into a center stage clump, the wide
blue wash of light shrinks to a single stark white spotlight now encompassing all six men. This
keen use of focused pools of white lights, contrasted with the blue wash, dramatically enhances
the physicality of the performers throughout the performance. In another moment the theme
of anguish takes center stage. The uniform group pauses from the execution of concise asym-
metrical gestures, seemingly disturbed or in pain, their heads tilt slightly and kilter subtly. As the
clump descends to the floor, the twisted arms of the six white men reach skyward from their
concave torsos in cramped, claw-like positions, with fingers clenched and wrists cocked. An
ugly, dissonant uhhhh, uhhhh emanates from the living tableaux. On cue, the dancers melt to the
ground in grotesque positions. In low squats, they methodically rock from side to side, scream at
an unexpectedly high pitch as their hands cross their genitals in modesty, then huddle in a circle
as if participating in a secret game. They shuffle forward with a drone-like gaze and then part
ways: two turn stage right, while four turn stage left. The lights cross-fade and when the lights
refocus, the six dancers stand in a circle enclosed by a pool of light. Powder wafts from their
bodies as they stomp one foot with oomph.
Taha asserts that The Baldheaded is not butoh in style or genre but was instead influenced by
his academic study of Hijikata at the Institute of Fine Arts. During his studies he was drawn to
338
Iraqi Bodies’ The Baldheaded
Hijikata’s philosophical writings and performance photographs. Taha remembers, “there was one
image that resounded deeply in me of Hijikata as an old woman covered in black. I knew that
woman, it was my mother, my sisters, my aunts and so many familiar faces all bound together in
that one archaic figure” (Anmar Taha, pers. comm.). During our written interview Taha admits
that he felt resistance towards and was perhaps even frightened by butoh outside of academic
study. On the two occasions he interacted with butoh as an embodied form – once in a workshop
setting and once as a spectator of a butoh performance – he was unable to comfortably remain
at the performance or workshop and felt as though he had to remove himself. Taha also ques-
tions the possibility of authentic butoh experiences in a fixed amounts of time, and is therefore
suspicious of events such as butoh workshops or staged performances. He believes one cannot
train in butoh class, but that butoh is a philosophy and “way of life” which requires practice,
devotion, recent personal experience of war, and Japanese heritage (Anmar Taha, pers. comm.).
Writes Taha:
How is it possible to ‘learn’ or ‘experience’ ‘butoh’ in a week, even a month, workshop

if you at night are stuck at the computer or you still have in mind what is coming next
on your calendar? The two are at odds with each other. You cannot ‘attend’ butoh- it
is a philosophy if you will, to be practiced and devoted to. ‘Butoh’ also arose from war
so how can anyone or any country who has not experienced war very recently truly
resonate with that thin edge of life and death? I do not know ‘butoh,’ I cannot practice
‘butoh.’ All I sense with ‘butoh’ is the light and shadow, which I personally experienced
in war. . . . There can be no training of ‘butoh.’ Butoh is a concept and a way of life.
‘Butoh’ is also Japanese and I am not Japanese. Because of this I have very ambiguous
feelings about ‘butoh’ as a dance, or style, or practice, and is it possible to do ‘butoh’ if
you did not go through the horrors of Hiroshima.
Anmar Taha, pers. comm.
During the making of The Baldheaded the physicality of butoh was not a goal, nor was it actively
engaged or mentioned as part of the creative process. Taha muses, “Hijikata’s life and pictures had
simply let me know that it is possible to make beauty on stage from and through the horrors of
life” (Anmar Taha, pers. comm.). Taha writes, “as an aesthetic, [butoh] did not inspire the piece,
my circumstances at that time inspired the piece”; however, “butoh inspired The Baldheaded if by
butoh we mean the incentive of Hijikata to give physical shape to hidden memories borne from
terror” (Anmar Taha, pers. comm.). Taha’s circumstances during his time at Baghdad’s Institute
of Fine Arts included the omnipresence of death and corpses in everyday life and daily routines.
He relates “the contorted bodies in butoh” to “the bodies lying on the streets” that he frequently
encountered on his way to school (Anmar Taha, pers. comm.). Inspired by Hijikata’s explorations
of human darkness and beauty, Taha was similarly compelled by externalizing his experiences of
war, violence, and suffering through crafting theater out of what he terms “pure necessity” and
an honesty that in his opinion he has not been as successful in achieving since (Anmar Taha,
pers. comm.).
Though Taha was not compelled or inspired by the aesthetics of butoh, The Baldheaded still
visually exhibits the hallmarks of a globalized yet admittedly amorphous style of butoh.4 Iraqi
Bodies’ performers are male; nearly naked; slender and softly muscular; masculine yet not aggres-
sive; bald; and ghostly white. Thus Taha’s performance lends itself to yet another compelling
aspect of butoh-inspired performance in a global context. Butoh as inspiration provided Iraqi
Bodies the ability to enact the universal body or the body that lacks individual traits and which
was culturally unmarked and thus ethnicity-less.5 “Butoh,” a Japanese form, popular on the
339
J Dellecave
avant-garde international, often Western concert stage, provided a platform for the erasure of eth-
nicity and individuality in service of the universal. Thus, the cultural product of a butoh-inspired
Iraqi choreographer’s universal expression of war, reveals the ever-present tensions of universalism
and whiteness on the international Western stage. Taha ascribes a purity and inherent ethnicity
to “butoh,” yet when embodying Hijikata’s inspiration, the Japaneseness transmogrifies into the
whiteness and universalism of the international avant-garde. At the same time, this whiteness and
universalism allows the Iraqi men in Taha’s company to counter pervasive negative stereotypes.
Iraqi Bodies state on their website that “their work wishes to transcend any human differences
and instead create scenes to show a reality shared by all” (Iraqi Bodies 2016a). Yet Taha is very
critical and skeptical of globalized, universalized, and non-Japanese butoh. Though the mission
statement of Iraqi Bodies states that their goal is universal expression that overcomes difference,
Taha critiques the globalization and Western adoption of butoh:
The West has also adopted ‘butoh’ as a ‘style,’ just as it has adopted Buddhism etc. . . . I do
not believe that it is the ‘butoh’ practitioners in themselves that have promoted ‘butoh’
in forms of short workshops and performances here and there spread throughout the
world. Instead it is the active values of commerce used by the West that cannot handle
subtle and sensitive expressions found in art, ‘butoh’ being one of them.
Anmar Taha, pers. comm
In my virtual viewings of The Baldheaded the visual style and aesthetics appeared more Sankai
Juku-like than Hijikata-like (Taha n.d.a, n.d.b, n.d.c). The butoh-esque dancers performing
The Baldheaded are extremely homogenous, and hardly distinguishable from one another, never
mind identifiable as a concise ethnic group. As far as I can tell, the identification of Iraqi Bodies
as Iraqi occurs only through the name of the dance company (or to a knowledgeable person
through names of the company members). The name Iraqi Bodies accompanies, and therefore
inscribes, every video clip or article currently available about this choreography. Taha’s chore-
ographic intent connects to butoh beyond genealogical origin and surface visual elements. Yet
the de-ethnicization from the inspiration butoh, the re-racialization of the performers as white
(both from the powder and the concert stage), followed by re-ethnicization of the unmarked
dancers from the company name Iraqi Bodies, rejects the possibility of shared cultural roots while
drawing on universalism rooted in values of whiteness. This brings to bear important questions
about the possibility of war, suffering, and tragedy as unifying (while horrifying) human events
which enable artists to craft beautiful, powerful, meaningful, universal art without attempting to
transcend cultural differences.
Iraqi Bodies utilization of butoh inspiration but Western theater technique depicts Susan
Foster’s contention that, on the global stage, ethnically based techniques are commonly second-
ary to contemporary postmodern Western techniques. Foster contends that the foregrounding
of Western techniques in essence serves “to groom” the “universal body” thus creating a global
body that is not culturally marked (Foster 2010, 71). On the other hand, Thomas DeFrantz calls
into question whether the concert dance stage itself can ever be unmarked as a “white space”
(DeFrantz 2004, 198). In a rethinking of black bodies in performance (specifically the work of
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater), DeFrantz proposes a “counternarrative of public spaces”
including the dance concert stage (DeFrantz 2004, 198). DeFrantz challenges the notion of cul-
turally unmarked performance and instead questions whether culturally unmarked or universal
automatically equals white (DeFrantz 2004, 198). The consideration of the powdered, bald Iraqi
bodies on the Western concert stage as universal, or culturally unmarked, warrants further con-
siderations as whether the butoh-inspired The Baldheaded should additionally be considered an
340
Iraqi Bodies’ The Baldheaded
embodiment of whiteness. At what point and how did a Japanese avant-garde form acquire the
whiteness and universalist attributes of the Western concert stage? What are the implications of
butoh’s alignment with international universalism and whiteness? Would this alignment, in fact,
make more dance forms, more white? Or does it illuminate the fraught shortcomings of ethnic
and racial categorizations which have always already haunted embodied performance? While
Iraqi Bodies capitalizes on the literal powdered whiteness of butoh inspiration, their abilities to
transcend ethnicity in this performance illuminate that Western avant-garde international con-
cert stage is complexly both marked and unmarked with ethnicity, whiteness, and universalism.
Iraqi Bodies, these Iraqi bodies in The Baldheaded, literally young Iraqi theater students from
war-torn Iraq, are inextricably linked – because we know they are Iraqi from the mediated titling – to
larger and (currently) negatively stereotyped Middle Eastern, Arab, refugee, or Iraqi fig-
ures. The homogenizing, de-ethnicizing, whitening visual inspiration of butoh, also inextricably
linked to imperial violence, highlights the stakes of representation for contemporary Iraqi bodies
in performance. The theatrical elements of butoh render Iraqi male bodies unreadable as Iraqi and
therefore unthreatening, rather than as ferocious terrorists or helpless – negative stereotypes that
commonly circulate in Western contexts. An alternative to being marked as terrorists, and thus
marked as targets, or marked as victims in need of being saved, the lack of ethnicity and mascu-
linity serves to revision stereotypical depictions of Iraqi masculinity as aggressive and destructive.
This revision – from negative stereotype to unreadable ethnicity – provides insight into the cur-
rent trends that influence the global spread of butoh-inspired performances, in addition to being
a reminder that global atrocities akin to Hiroshima exist in the present day.
The importance and implications of this performance travel far beyond the discrete perfor-
mance of Iraqi Bodies in Sweden in 2010 or in Jordan in 2005 or the replayed video of the
performance on YouTube around the globe. Similar to butoh, the outward expression of the
horrors of war will be viewed by some as an artistic critique of the imperial invader (in this case
the United States and its allies). An Iraqi contemporary choreographer would be the perfect con-
tender to politically critique the United States via any artistic medium, particularly on the United
States and European dominated concert dance stage. The presence of a political dance theater
work by an Iraqi choreographer would eliminate the problematic of often white over-privileged
Westerners, interpreting and displaying the plights and struggles of people (often people of color)
elsewhere. The Baldheaded gives audiences around the globe the opportunity to experience what
an Iraqi theater-maker has to express about his first-hand experiences of war. Iraqi Bodies danc-
ing is compelling and noteworthy given their personal tragedies that surround the choreography,
the creative process, the inspiration for the work, and the performance as resultant in the success-
ful theater career of Taha. Iraqi Bodies’ inspiration from butoh, in this early choreographic work,
is a means to respond to the circumstances of war while countering pervasive negative images
of what an Iraqi looks and acts like. Iraqi Bodies performance in The Baldheaded demonstrated
a well-rehearsed and concise composition with clean lines, clearly intentioned movement, var-
iations of rhythmic structures, performed by skilled dancers complete with the lean muscular
bodies typical of contemporary concert stage dancers. The choreography contains dynamic and
unpredictable shifts of energetic states, at times comical, mesmerizing, and heartbreaking.
In the moment of current imperial violence, Iraqi dancers were struck by and inspired by
the Japanese dance form of butoh. The result of this intercultural, neocolonial complexity is
the performed paradox of the universalized, de-ethnicized, yet negative stereotype countering,
modern Iraqi body, shrouded in white powder, with no hair, technically not embodying butoh,
but inspired by Hijikata. Iraqi Bodies performance of The Baldheaded alters perceptions of con-
temporary Iraqi masculinity yet Iraqi Bodies’ choreographic products are sites of conflicting
social trends. Western-influenced theatrical productions are always tinged with power, yet part
341
J Dellecave
of artistic products’ complicity with power is that strands of contemporary performance (such
as the complex, butoh-inspired, Iraqi-crafted The Baldheaded, for example) are critical of power.
The indistinguishable baldheaded individual within the homogenous group in the spotlight of
the concert stage, swathed in white powder, affirms this statement and symbolizes that not all
Iraqi men are hyper-masculinized Muslim terrorists. As we traverse these war-torn time periods,
bombarded by the sheer speed of the Internet and images of social media, we zoom through a
vast array of culturally specific and media-promulgated stereotypes. We hurriedly travel from
Internet site to Internet site searching for contemporary Iraqi dance or perhaps for a moment of
understanding about war (even someone else’s experience of war). In the end we are blessed to
encounter the physical expressions of Iraqi Bodies – not quite the Iraqi bodies that are typically
fed to us on our computer screens, but nonetheless fascinating ones.
Notes
1 Since 2009, I have virtually followed Iraqi Bodies across multiple geographic locations. On June 15,
2016, I conducted an email interview with Anmar Taha, which I used for this article. In my role as vir-
tual follower of Iraqi Bodies, my guiding questions include: Why, in the 2010s, as a dance scholar who
writes about the relationship of political oriented dance to twentieth-century war, is this butoh-inspired
performance by an Iraqi refugee so compelling for me? How are the dances of Iraqi Bodies a new way in
which war-exiled artists perform social critique? What did I expect an Iraqi contemporary dance theater
company to do? How did Iraqi Bodies exceed my expectations?
2 There are multiple authorship claims to The Baldheaded by several of the performers in the original piece.
Taha explained in our correspondence that once the original student performers disbursed, some in Iraq
and some, such as Taha, in Europe, “many of those who were in the piece claimed that they had created
it because they saw that European festivals and programmers were interested in the work.” The multiple
claims of authorship are a source of soreness for Taha and an expected consequence in war-torn artistic
communities. Taha states his frustration at the circumstance: “If Iraq would have stood strong today,
without an invasion, there would still be functioning institutions and its people would have still stood
up for their morals. It would have been impossible to claim authorship of other people’s written texts,
performances, films etc., since the elders, teachers and colleagues would know who did what and there
would be records. All that is destroyed” (Anmar Taha, pers. comm.).
3 The Baldheaded is available on Vimeo and in several iterations on YouTube also under the title The Bald.
4 Prior to interviewing Taha, I had watched and shared this video with numerous dance scholars including
those with a specialization in butoh dance with overwhelming agreement that there was visual evidence
of butoh inspiration (perhaps even technique) in this dance.
5 The lack of ethnicity portrayed in The Baldheaded does not reflect the theatrical work that Taha has pro-
duced since 2010.
Works cited
DeFrantz, Thomas F. 2004. Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Foster, Susan. 2010. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Iraqi Bodies. 2016a. “Biography.” From Iraqi Bodies Official Website. Accessed June 30, 2016. www.
iraqibodies.com/
———. 2016b. “Creations.” From Iraqi Bodies Official Website. Accessed June 30, 2016. www.iraqibodies.
com/
Taha, Anmar. n.d.a. “The Bald.” Iraqi Bodies. Streaming video, 5:10. Accessed September 18, 2009. www.
youtube.com/watch?v=bXude1MR2Qg
Taha, Anmar. n.d.b. “The Bald.” Part 2. Iraqi Bodies. Streaming video, 5:26. Accessed September 18, 2009.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHJmRlZQROM
Taha, Anmar. n.d.c. “The Baldheaded.” Iraqi Bodies. Streaming video, 5:11. Accessed May 11, 2010. www.
youtube.com/watch?v=wysmq0n__do
342
36
“WE NEED TO KEEP ONE
EYE OPEN . . . ”
Approaching butoh at sites of personal
and cultural resistance
Jeremy Neideck
Introduction
This chapter will reflect on some of the complexities of transcultural performance making as
manifested during the Deluge project, a long-term collaboration between Australian and Korean
artists that aimed to combine aspects of butoh with p’ansori – a Korean form of epic narrative
expressed through song and verse. Written from my multiple perspectives as director, performer,
and researcher, this account draws on my analysis of Deluge’s development as a practice-led
research project that investigated the nature of transculturally collaborative performance-making
environments (Neideck 2016a).
Deluge was originally envisaged as a response to the devastating floods that caused widespread
damage and loss of life in South-East Queensland in early 2011. Deluge also drew inspiration from
The Flood (1947), a poem by one of Australia’s most celebrated writers and environmentalists,
Judith Wright. As is common practice in the Australian context, this project was undertaken
through a model of creative development, where iterative cycles of research, generation of per-
formance material, public showcasing, and critical reflection and feedback are undertaken prior
to the work being premiered. Twenty-one performing artists participated in these creative devel-
opment cycles over the five years of the project, with artistic practices ranging from butoh and
p’ansori to contemporary music, contemporary dance, physical theatre, traditional Korean dance,
and martial arts all forming part of the fabric of the finished work.
Deluge premiered at the Brisbane Festival in 2014 before touring to Korea as part of the Seoul
International Dance Festival (SiDance). The work was well received in Korea and enjoyed a sec-
ond season in 2015 at the invitation of the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture. This return
season was staged at the Namsan Drama Centre and was presented as a memorial for the 295
lives lost when the Sewol ferry sank in April 2014.
My two core collaborators on the Deluge project were Park Younghee and Tak Hoyoung, and
they were the only artists who participated in every one of the six cycles of creative develop-
ment. I first met Younghee while we were actors at LATT Children’s Theatre in Seoul, under the
directorship of Roger Rynd. Growing up in New Zealand, and building his performance-making
career in Sydney, Roger had by the time of his unexpected passing in 2010 established himself as
343
Jeremy Neideck
a leading figure in the artistic and cultural life of Seoul. Younghee joined LATT after spending
six years in Oh T’ae-sŏk’s Mokhwa Repertory Company, and from the age of 18 had trained in
p’ansori with Han Seongho, an officially designated National Human Treasure,1 and in Bongsan
talchum – masked dance drama from the Bongsan province – with the late Kim Seonbong, also a
National Human Treasure. It was through Roger that Younghee and I came to know Hoyoung,
who served as LATT’s resident acrobatics instructor. Hoyoung is a specialist in kungjung musul, the
martial arts of the Korean imperial court, and was a founding member of the Sadari Movement
Laboratory, where his performance training was in the corporeal mime of Étienne Decroux.
One day in 2006,Younghee was asked by Roger to workshop a vocal replacement for a musical
theme composed for the taegŭm – the largest of the Korean transverse bamboo flutes. The feeling
I had when listening to Younghee replicate the rasping, mournful timbre of the taegŭm was hard
to describe – an overwhelming sense of sadness and longing broken up by soaring moments of
hope. The sound of Younghee’s straining vocal chords evoked in me visceral responses like those
I had when first encountering butoh. It wasn’t long until I had developed an unshakable hunch
that the physicality of butoh, and the tortured and haunting vocal style of p’ansori had the poten-
tial to be combined in performance.
Locating my practice
For many years, Brisbane has been recognized as a popular destination for performers in Aus-
tralia who wish to gain training and experience in styles of performance that originate in Japan
(Gilbert 2001, 7), with butoh serving periodically as a subject for experimentation amongst the
“Australian avant-garde” (2). As butoh started to infiltrate the artistic landscape of Australia in the
early 1990s, warnings were sounded against using it as a “mysterious foreign spice thrown into
Western theatre in order to give it a new and dynamic flavour” (Marshall 1992, 6). Despite this,
butoh has continued to be presented in Australia as an expression of humanity’s most “primitive”
roots, by companies that display “fairly superficial philosophical engagement with the cultural
contexts” which gave rise to the form (Gilbert 2001, 5). Gilbert and Lo see this “legacy of mod-
ernist orientalism” as often manifesting itself as unacknowledged orientalist intertexts, suggesting
that the road to redress lays with attempting to understand “the connections between various
disciplinary histories of the Orient and the ways in which such connections are mapped and/or
resisted by the performing body” (2009, 165). Eckersall has proposed that the overuse and ori-
entalisation of butoh terminology has led to it being contested in Australia, with its “genealogy
and stability as a modality of body performance” being “undermined especially with respect to
radical and transgressive forms of experimentation” (2000, 145). This tendency towards oriental-
ism has led to butoh in Australia being a recurring site of exoticism for artists looking to recreate
the aesthetics of the form (Marshall 2006).
My first experiences of butoh were as an undergraduate student in Brisbane, watching the
work of local artists. I eventually sought out training at home and abroad with practitioners with
as diverse backgrounds as Yumiko Yoshioka, Lynne Bradley, Yumi Umiumare, Tess de Quincey,
Semimaru, SU-EN, and Maro Akaji’s Dairakudakan Temputenshiki. This led to the development
of some of my earliest independent performance works: Sketches of Blood (2008, 2010) and The
Oak’s Bride (2010) in collaboration with Ellen Rijs and Polly Sara, under the banner of Red Moon
Rising. In 2009 I studied p’ansori for several months at the National Theater of Korea with Oh
Min Ah – a principle actress with the National Changgeuk Company of Korea.2 At this time, I
was also a resident at the National Art Studio, where I first began attempting to combine p’ansori
with butoh in Strange Earth, a live dance and video installation in collaboration with video artist
Park Junghyun.
344
“We need to keep one eye open . . . ”
On my return to Brisbane, and as the Deluge project gained traction, I began reflecting on my
experiences with butoh and I started approaching my practice with a more critical eye. I began to
move past my initial flirtations with butoh, and the focus of my practice shifted towards creating
performance that directly engaged with participants from diverse cultural and linguistic groups.
As this happened I became aware of the importance of working on what Slimbach terms “per-
spective consciousness,” or the ability to “question constantly the source of one’s cultural assump-
tions and ethical judgments, leading to the habit of seeing things through the minds and hearts
of others” (2005, 206). It was hard, however, for me to escape the fact that my core collaborators
on the Deluge project were not Japanese, but Korean, and that no matter how problematic I came
to see my role as the primary butoh practitioner in the work, I had built a practice-led research
project around the combination of performance practices and forms of expression outside of my
own cultural heritage.
Clouds on the horizon

The focus of the earliest stages of the Deluge project was on the development of a unique per-
formance practice based on broad concepts of physical and vocal transformation. The approach
that I took to this relied heavily on skills sharing and cultural exchanges that drew on the cre-
ative practices of our large and diverse ensemble. Grau writes that this kind of reliance on a
“juxtaposition of cultures” (1992, 9) has limited use in artistic practice, an observation born out
during early cycles of the project as the goal of developing a new form of physio-vocal practice
was undermined by the constant, but unintentional reinforcement of the boundaries between
different performance practices and forms of cultural expression.
We exhibited the earliest version of Deluge in June of 2011 as part of a creative development
program facilitated by Brisbane’s independent performance incubator, Metro Arts. Younghee,
Hoyoung, and traditional Korean dancer Jung Minji joined five Australians, dancing in skirts
Figure 36.1 Forest – Deluge Cycle 1 (2011), photograph by FenLan Chuang. Pictured (L-R): Kat Henry,
Jana Penshorn, Terry Hesketh, Mark Hill, Tak Hoyoung, Park Younghee.
345
Jeremy Neideck
made of old curtains and bodices formed from fused shopping bags – human detritus floating,
freezing, and flying across a studio shared with local folk-rock band Autumn Sun, who provided a
sonic field in which we could explore the possibilities of combining physio-vocal transformation
with live music.
As a director, I was not entirely happy with the work, being disappointed in presenting what
I perceived as a compromising mosaic of performance practices when my goal was to generate
original performance material as a result of a transformative physio-vocal practice. The work did,
however, seem to strike a chord with our audience. Many English-speaking audience members
reported that even though their emotional connection to the work was strong, they were not able
to easily put words to their experiences. Korean audience members reported feeling han (䀅/恨).
Han is a complex term, and the difficulties of translating it are tied up both in the widespread
perception of its ineffability, and the contested view of it as a culturally Korean phenomenon
(Y. H-. Lee 2002, 21). Descriptions of it range from dispassionate dictionary entries that employ
terms such as “grudge,” “spite,” and “rancor” (Freda 1999, ¶12 and Willoughby 2000, 18); to
personal accounts of a feeling “crystallized in sadness at an impasse in the throat” (Trenka 2005
in Chu 2008, 97); to being identified as one of Korea’s “national ethos” (Y-.S. Lee 2004, 47), a
mythologized and valorized result of historical cycles of colonial oppression and liberation (Freda
1999. ¶12). The view of han as a discursive trope, or a “symbol that means diverse and divergent
things to different people according to their varied perspectives and intents” (Willoughby 2000,
17), is well established in the literature. Kockel (2012) has written that no matter their origin,
cultural forms and practices are only authentic so long as they fulfill their cultural purpose in
a given context (63). In unpacking the notion of perspective consciousness as a core transcul-
tural competency, Slimbach has insisted that “we are limited by the finiteness of our knowing,
[and that] our very knowing is distorted by the claims and prejudices of our racial, national,
and socio-economic identities” (2005, 214). In designing the Deluge project, I had created an
environment where I, a white Australian with some training and experience with butoh, but
no lived experience of its social or cultural contexts, was collaborating with Korean artists who
had specific and transferable knowledge of their own culturally specific forms of expression. I
was hyperaware of the complexity of this situation, and the likelihood that we were building our
collaboration on problematic assumptions that had the potential to distort not only the work we
were creating, but the relationships between collaborators.
In order to begin addressing this, I took Grau’s advice to allocate time for clarifying issues
dealing with “cultural boundaries in aesthetic communication” (1992, 19). The intention was
that by considering the aesthetic goals of the Deluge project from a place that considered our
historical perspectives and sociopolitical concerns, the transition into a studio-based exploration
of butoh and p’ansori would be grounded in shared experience. In this way the lived experience
of Korean forms of spirituality, philosophy, and identity shared with me by my collaborators
became a starting point for the next phase of our collaboration, and our work began to grow out
of a reality that we were beginning to construct together.
Lightning strikes
In February 2012, Hoyoung,Younghee, and I embarked on an intensive period of laboratory-style
exploration in a secluded Boy Scout hall in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland. Over the course of
our initial conversation on the first evening of the laboratory, I became acutely aware that neither
Younghee or Hoyoung enjoyed watching or performing butoh. During the first cycle of creative
development, I had assumed that their circumspect attitude to butoh was founded purely on aes-
thetic preferences that they were willing to overlook for the sake of our personal relationships.
346
It seemed, however, that something much more complex was going on, as revealed by Younghee
in an interview while reflecting on this period of the project:
Honestly speaking, I didn’t know much about butoh at all. I had seen a couple of video
clips, and I had heard about butoh from my seniors. But [not] the image [or inten-
tion] of butoh work and the training process about butoh work. Maybe also I had a
big prejudice about Japanese traditional arts – I don’t know. Honestly speaking, every
information was mixed together and gave me a huge prejudice. So, I didn’t know much
about butoh and I didn’t even want to know about butoh because I thought it looked
very weird and strange, and I couldn’t find any beauty from that. And I thought also
that it would be very hard to communicate with the audience through that form of
movement, because I couldn’t find any contact moments with the audience.
Y. Park, in interview 17 May 2013
In late 2011 while in Brisbane rehearsing for another project,3 Hoyoung,Younghee, and I attended
A Dance for All Seasons, a solo work by Helen Smith – a butoh dancer who has worked between
Australia and Japan for many years. Whilst Younghee and Hoyoung had expressed their appre-
ciation and enjoyment of the performance, we had not discussed our experiences of it at length.
As we now reflected on Smith’s work, Younghee and Hoyoung revealed their astonishment that
she could draw the audience into her world and connect with them, all the while seemingly
remaining cemented in the ethereal realm of butoh.
Her performance actually turned “upside-down” my prejudice. I mean, as a performer

she was absolutely beautiful. Watching her, it was stunning. But even though when
she made her internal gaze, I felt strongly connected with her performance. You know,
many butoh performers – there are lots of abstract images, or feelings of abstract images
there. So it is sometimes quite difficult for the audience. [It] puts the audience into a
very difficult position. But I felt that, for the first time – even though [the work was] still
abstract, it was understandable. I found that suddenly I realized my brain had started to
pull out common themes, or similar memories? Or create an imagination that matched
with her performance. So it was a very surprising experience. I thought “ah, it is actu-
ally possible, even though performers don’t look at the audience in a direct way, we
can still make a very strong connection together, and we can communicate with each
other.” So, yeah it was a very good experience – it changed my thoughts about butoh.
Y. Park, in interview, 17 May 2013
Rather than holding opinions based on what I assumed was a subjective revulsion of butoh’s
aesthetic tropes, Younghee and Hoyoung’s reluctance seemed to be embedded in a culturally
specific consideration of the audience and a reading of butoh as a performer-centered practice
that did not respect or consider the spectator.
Younghee repeatedly uses the word “prejudice” to discuss her early reactions to butoh. While
in interview neither Younghee or Hoyoung go as far as specifically acknowledging tensions
between Japan and Korea as factors in their reception of butoh, over the course of the Deluge
project we often discussed the conscious and unconscious biases that influence transcultural per-
formance making environments, including those biases that exist for many Koreans as a result of
Japan’s colonial legacy. Fascinating to me as an outsider to these historic and sociopolitical con-
cerns is that the founding mythologies of Hijikata Tatsumi’s ankoku butoh recount his “stillness,
eroticism, intensity, facial disfigurement, and gestural distortion” (Sanders 1988, 152) as playing
347
Jeremy Neideck
against the backdrop of his memories of the aftermath of World War II. Although this interpreta-
tion of butoh as “postatomic spectacle” has – perhaps rightly – been identified as overly simplistic
(Fraleigh and Nakamura 2006, 1), as has its links to Japan’s animistic and shamanic traditions,
these notions have become part of butoh’s narrative, and they have left clear marks on the nature
of the collaboration between me and my Korean friends.
Building a vocabulary
Many Korean performance practices can trace a lineage back to kut (shamanic ritual), where
supplicants are the ultimate focus of the singing and dancing shaman and audience members are
actively encouraged to participate (B.-H. Lee 1997, 53). Lee Yong-Shik (2004, 1) points to sha-
manism as playing a key role as a “carrier of traditional Korean culture,” with Howard asserting
that, regardless of their professed religious beliefs, many Koreans still believe that spirits ensure
“peace in the world beyond” (1998, 4).
It was the idea that through butoh the human body may connect to an invisible realm that
provided the first of the shared pieces of vocabulary for the Deluge collaboration, leading us
to seize upon the possibility of drawing parallels between the roles of the Korean shaman and
those of the performer in the theatre. We began to develop vocabulary with which to maintain
a dialogue between my understanding of butoh and the knowledge Younghee and Hoyoung
had of the ontological concerns that underpin the spiritualities, philosophies, and performance
traditions of Korea. This reframing of our process around the dual tasks of communication and
negotiation rather than the construction of an innovative physio-vocal practice meant that we
could identify exactly which performance qualities we felt were important to pursue in the
ongoing development of the Deluge project.
The first of these qualities related to our need to have the audience feel as if they were
being “drawn into” the work without the existence of obvious signs that the performer was
“reaching out.” Younghee used the word “hook” to describe the aspects of our performance
that connected to the audience, providing what would become a touchstone for our collab-
oration. We began to notate vocabulary as it emerged, interrogating it in respect to historical
context, connections to culturally specific ontological concerns, and concepts of space, time,
body, and mind. This reoccurring task provided us with fertile ground for studio-based
exploration.
Our discussions around butoh drew heavily on Maro Akaji’s essay Creating Butoh Drama,
familiar to anyone who has participated in Dairakudakan’s residential training intensives in rural
Nagano, Japan. The version of Maro’s pamphlet that I acquired while training with him in 2008
outlines three basic principles:
[The first] is collecting the elementary movements to develop one’s awareness of daily
behavior. The second principle is the idea of a body that is possessed by something or
someone. The last, but not least, important principle is that the body is not separate
from the space around it. The qualities inherent in the surrounding space became part
of the body.
Maro 2008, 1
As we explored these ideas in the studio, more concrete connections began to emerge between
butoh and the concepts of possession and transformation that underpin Korean shamanic prac-
tice.4 Primary among these was a sense of the facilitation of communication between the physical
and spiritual, or the visible and invisible worlds – a task that particularly resonated with Hoyoung,
348
who was intimately familiar with Decroux’s “struggle between the limitations of the body and
the unlimited possibilities of thought” (Baylis 2009, 279).
Key to understanding Maro’s butoh for us was the relationship between teburi and miburi: char-
acterized as the two possible forms of human movement. Teburi are those movements “led by our
hands” – the logical, convenient and fundamental motions by which humans grasp tools, gesture
to one another and carry out all manner of civilized activity. Miburi, however, is movement that
is “unconsciously taken or led by us that does not possess any purpose or meaning” (Maro 2008,
1). I knew from personal experience that Maro often described a metaphysical dichotomy drawn
between the conscious and unconscious world, the bright and the dark, the inside and outside,
separated by a “crack” or a point of rupture. Pursuing these “crack moments” became of primary
concern for us, and we devised performative experiments that drew on our diverse experiences
in order to find efficient ways to find them.
As we proceeded, stronger parallels started to become evident between the butoh dancer who
is able to prise open the doorway into the unconscious, invisible world, and the shaman who Eli-
ade described as able to “see what is hidden and invisible” (1964, 509) and communicate with the
supernatural world. We began to construct physical experiments that explored “repetitive vibra-
tions,” “rhythmic motions,” “violent distraction,” and “intense absorption” (King 1983, 52) in an
attempt to experience the ecstatic catharsis of shinmyŏng, a phenomenon which Lee Young-Shik
has described as having the potential of opening up connections to the spiritual realm (2004, 46).
The vehicle for this investigation was another of the metaphors central to the way we were
beginning to understand Maro’s butoh method – that of the space body (chutai), the idea that “the
body is not separate from the space around it” and that the “qualities inherent in the surround-
ing space become part of the body” (Maro 2008, 1). This metaphor hinges on the specifically
Japanese concept of ma, a richly ambiguous term which dictates that spiritual power is revealed
“in the gaps and intervals of time, space and being” (Pilgrim 1986, 266). Maro’s description of
chutai detailed the idea that, rather than the body existing as separate from the space outside of
it – both aspects of the body are identical and that the audience’s eyes are merely tuned see the
human-shaped slice of space that extends on an infinite plane in all directions.
Making these links between butoh and Korean philosophy and performance culture was a
major turning point in the process, and there was an overwhelming sense that I had finally cap-
tured the imaginations of my core collaborators, and in doing so, discovered points of interest that
we all wanted to explore. The pursuit of ways to physically and vocally investigate this threshold
between worlds became one of our primary challenges for the remainder of the laboratory.
The emergence of an image-based approach to the voice

One of the ideas that was continuing to drive the Deluge project was that butoh seemed to hold
great potential as a template for p’ansori voice production for our ensemble. As we explored
image-based methods of movement creation, and pursued ways to make “visible the invisible” –
a turn of phrase of Decroux’s that Hoyoung would often employ – we could reimagine both
breath and voice as physical materials being manipulated in space and time. Younghee seized this
discovery and, in response to our environment, prepared a series of vocal explorations focused on
finding ways to employ the imagination in activating the “breath held in the tanjŏn (the lower
part of the abdomen)” (Jang 2014, 12), so that we might begin cultivating our own voice for
the work. These vocal images, included the “steam breath” (the abdomen is a pot of simmering
water that emits a steady and controlled stream that can extinguish a single candle at a distance);
“river voice” (the voice is a mountain stream that gets ever wider and deeper, rushing through
submerged tree roots), “the dam” (the water of a vast river is suddenly constrained by a large dam,
349
Jeremy Neideck
causing the voice to be swallowed and violently churned), and the “vomit” (the dammed-up
voice suddenly bursts out of the body like a geyser). By using this image-based approach to vocal
production, Younghee’s aim was to find ways to approximate shigimsae, or the “harsh and thick”
p’ansori aesthetic (Howard 2006, 1:60) without necessarily going through the decades-long cycles
of voice-breaking that are generally accepted as the norm for professional p’ansori singers. By
taking into account the future inclusion in the project of performers who may not be familiar
with these culturally Korean ideas, Younghee selected and continually refined images that she
believed invoked human experiences of nature in order to work towards kŭnŭl, the complex vocal
quality that has the potential to evoke han and stimulate the collective, transcendent aesthetic
experience of shinmyŏng.
I thought I should actually approach it in a slightly different way – not just using a
traditional p’ansori method. I thought maybe I should just try it a different way. So, it
was more like pulling or scratching each of you from the bottom of your heart, or the
bottom of the soul. And it worked quite well. I remember the day that you two made
a proper “vomit sound” for example. It was a big surprise moment for me because I
know you, and I know Hoyoung. To make that kind of sound at that volume is not just
breaking your voice – actually it is the moment [when you need to] break down the
wall in your heart – it requires huge braveness.
Y. Park, in interview, 17 May 2013
These sessions took place both in and outside the Scout Hall. By venturing into the nearby
Kondalilla National Park, we could take images from the natural environment to incorporate
into the vocal and physical work we were exploring. It was also an opportunity for us to engage
in the long-established tradition in p’ansori practice of singing at the base of a waterfall in order
to attempt to project the voice above it (K.-H. Kim 2008, 53).
I-You-We
As a way of moving past the second cycle of creative development and bringing other artists
back into the collaboration, Hoyoung, Younghee, and I began to develop a language around the
way that we wished to position the audience, and strategies for reconciling what we individually
perceived as models of best practices in performance making. The framework we devised took
the title ‘I-You-We’, an approach to performance making which describes the dynamics of the
relationships between performer, ensemble, and audience:
I: The relationship the artist has with the self, built on physical awareness and discipline.
You: The relationship between selves built upon a keen awareness and connection to the
ensemble.
We: The relationship between the ensemble and the audience.
The seeds of this approach lie in Korean performing arts and in particular masked dance dramas
such as Bongsan talchum which are incredibly masterful in their rigor, but they have a history
of being performed without clear distinctions between performers and their audience (M.-H.
Kim 1997 24). P’ansori similarly exhibits an intimate relationship between the singer – who
traditionally performs solo – and the audience, who are offer up ch’uimsae, or “stylized cries
of encouragement” (Park 2003, 234) to the vocalist. This is not seen as a one-way relationship
with the audience doting on the performer. Instead, it is a way for the audience to identify more
350
closely with the work, opening themselves up to the cathartic process of shinmyŏng experienced
by those on the stage (NCKTPA 2004, 53).
These traditions have found their way into contemporary Korean theatre practice through Oh
T’ae-sŏk, regarded as one of Asia’s most original working dramatists and directors (A.-J. Kim and
Graves 1999). Based on practices taken from madanggŭk (dramas performed in outdoor spaces
such as courtyards and marketplaces) and kamyŏn’gŭk (masked dance dramas), Oh T’ae-sŏk has
pushed this traditionally high regard for the audience so far that his actors deliver most of their
dialogue directly facing them (11). This is not considered by Oh to be direct address, rather a
re-imagining of the audience as a mirror through which the actors can calculate the angle of
their gaze in order to connect to other members of the ensemble.
Keeping one eye open

Van Zile has observed that the Korean shaman walks a thin line between “two states of mind”
(1998, 148). The shaman uses the structured movement of the kut as a “balancing pole” with
which to enter into certain mental and spiritual states, as well as to determine if the desired effect
is being achieved: that the person receiving the ritual feels as if the spirits have been placated
(Y.-S. Lee 2004, 155). This dual-consciousness of being “in the moment” while trying to gauge
the effect of one’s performance is seen by Gaskell (2011) as central to the actor’s experience.
During the Deluge project, we referred to this phenomenon as “keeping one eye open,” a phrase
that emerged during Younghee’s description of some shamans who quite literally undertake their
rituals with one eye trained on their audience. In our work in the studio during our third cycle
of creative development, “keeping one eye open” moved from the literal to the metaphoric, as
the butoh-based physio-vocal practice we were developing required the performer to completely
invest in complex layers of images, often leaving the body distorted and without the faculties of
sight, hearing, or spatial awareness.
As a way of counteracting what she saw as the problematic inward gaze of butoh, Younghee
encouraged the ensemble to use the image of “making space” inside themselves for the audi-
ence to “come in” and experience the work. This required performers to imagine themselves as
avatars for the performance – beings that not only embodied the components of the work, but
connected to something greater. The act of inviting the audience into this gestalt also served the
purpose of inviting them into the world of the work. Whilst the later cycles of this project did
not focus on capturing data related to audience reception, this approach proved an incredibly
useful way of fulfilling the “We” relationship at times when it was not appropriate to connect
obviously and directly to the audience.
A metaphoric approach
My choreographic process is heavily reliant on the deconstruction of text into images that
can be employed in the transformation of the body. A search of Australian literature to use as
stimulus for the third cycle of creative development led to the discovery of Judith Wright’s
poem “The Flood” (1947), a text full of rich imagery that shifts between the effects of a
flood on a community in the Australian bush, to a story of a woman mourning the death
of her lover.
O descent of archaic darkness. O sun gone out.

To us who stare through the darkness into the long rain
no sun returns again.
351
Jeremy Neideck
I introduced fragments of “The Flood” as stimulus for the generation of voice and movement
in the studio, and as the cycle progressed, similarities began to emerge between the structure of
the poem and the five-part structure of certain sequences of kut, or Korean shamanic ritual.5
Mapping the five stanzas of Wright’s poem onto this structure became a significant dramaturgical
frame for Deluge, adding an imaginative layer over the work that the performers could use to
ground their performance – a layer of connection between flooding as natural disaster, and the
humans that are affected by it. Another influence of the dramaturgical framework of the work
became the pursuit of “crack moments” which we took to imagining as the interface between
the conscious and the unconscious worlds of butoh and Korean shamanic practice.6
Our working vocabulary, consisting of fragments from diverse performance practices and
forms of cultural expression, began to take shape as a rich series of conceptual metaphors falling
into three broad, but connected categories. The first of these categories are the philosophical
metaphors; those which had to do with the cultural and social context of the work. In this cat-
egory are the I-You-We device, that of the existence of parallel conscious and unconscious, or
visible and invisible worlds, and the ideas surrounding the connections to be made between the
roles of shaman and performer. Second are the embodied metaphors; those that pertain to the
physio-vocal practice as it is experienced by the performer in the contexts of training and perfor-
mance. These are the metaphors that it was possible to explore in action and provided the starting
point for the generation of performance material. Finally, were the dramaturgical metaphors;
those that dealt with the energetic or narrative structure of Deluge and framed the audience’s
experience. These metaphors (included in Figure 36.2) became the foundation to approaching
the creative concerns of the project as we moved toward the large-scale premiere of Deluge.
The relationship between the philosophical, dramaturgical, and embodied metaphors in the
act of performance is not a simple one. With relatively predictable and repeatable physio-vocal
responses to imagined stimuli, the embodied metaphors are those easiest to “rehearse.” Once
these are learned by the performer and refined by the director, the focus starts to shift back to
the overarching philosophical and dramaturgical metaphors. By relying on the vocabulary and
processes of the new and emerging culture that underpinned our collaboration, I could confi-
dently communicate my vision as director, and I could function throughout the remainder of the
project’s creative development cycles without necessarily having to claim special knowledge of or
ownership over forms of cultural expression such as butoh and p’ansori that were not supported
by my own historical contexts, sociopolitical concerns, or lived experiences.
PHILOSOPHICAL I-You-We
METAPHORS Miburi-teburi
Crack moments
Performer as mudang (shaman)
Keeping one eye open
Making space for the audience
EMBODIED Space body

METAPHORS Voice and breath as physical material
Swallowing and vomiting sadness
DRAMATURGICAL METAPHORS Kut structure

The Flood
Figure 36.2 Some of the metaphors developed during the Deluge project and described in this chapter.
352
Balancing cultural, relational, and aesthetic concerns

Interweaving diverse performance practices and forms of cultural expression relies not only on
exchanges of skill and the sharing of technique, but on understanding the cultural and historical
contexts, and ontological concerns that underpin them. This process of understanding is built
on a foundation of complex relationships between individual participants. One of the most
important discoveries of the Deluge project was that by shifting attention to the health of the
collaborative environment, the act of performance creation gave way to an active negotiation of
our relationships to each other and to the form and content of the work. Rather than requiring
all members of the ensemble to acquire masterful competence in the techniques of butoh and
p’ansori, we were attempting to, in the words of Fischer-Lichte (2009), describe a new perfor-
mance reality that interweaves elements from both practices.
While working together for a week in isolation in the Sunshine Coast hinterland during
the second cycle of creative development, Tak Hoyoung, Park Younghee, and I discovered ways
that we might connect butoh and p’ansori through their links to shamanism, and concepts of
space, time, and the body that are common to Korean and Japanese philosophies. These find-
ings allowed us, as the project’s three primary collaborators, to connect as an ensemble, laying
the groundwork for the development of a shared vocabulary of metaphors and an emergent
physio-vocal technique. By engaging in open and honest conversations that addressed our cul-
turally and socially based assumptions we could establish communicative protocols that helped
to ensure that cultural and linguistic differences were not interfering with the daily realities of
collaborative art production. We were also able to clearly define the performance qualities and
aesthetic hallmarks that we deemed as essential to the performance of Deluge. Many of these
performance experiments involved embodying and vocalizing the channeling of invisible forces
such as energy, images, and emotions. This led to a palpable sense of excitement amongst the
participants as we found ourselves, in the words of Fischer-Lichte “co-determining the perfor-
mance, and being determined by it” (2009, 392).
The interweaving of diverse performance practices and forms of cultural expression cannot
rely solely on exchanges of skills and technique between members of an ensemble. Time needs
also to be devoted to generating shared understandings of historic, sociopolitical, and ontological
concerns. In transcultural performance making environments, each collaborator threads their
way through sites of resistance and potential, co-creating a negotiated space in which they meet
their audience.
Epilogue
We’d had three hours sleep, which wasn’t too bad . . . just a few hours shy of our nightly average
over the last months. We were recovering from hosting a double-bill the night before: the final
showcase of the latest round of our Australia Korea International Cultural Exchange, and a work-
in-progress showing of our new work ⶕ㝖 <Shimchong>: Daughter Overboard! Fifteen artists had
worked at the Brisbane Powerhouse for over two weeks, half of whom had already put in two
weeks of remount rehearsals for Deluge. And now, at 8:35 a.m. on Sunday, 12 April 2015, five
Koreans and five Australians from three different projects were flying out of Brisbane for Seoul.
A strange sense of déjà vu had set in over the last week. It had only been six months since
our last international adventure. The winter of 2014 had seen us developing ⶕ㝖 <Shimchong>:
Daughter Overboard! for two weeks in regional Australia, on the border of New South Wales and
Victoria, before launching into three weeks of rehearsal for Deluge, followed by a one week season
at the Brisbane Festival. We closed Deluge on a Saturday night, and flew to Seoul two days later in
353
Jeremy Neideck
order to load in a 40-foot shipping container’s worth of second-hand furniture and bric-a-brac
into a function space under City Hall. This was the set of 㑩䀁 Underground, the queer, bilingual,
speakeasy cabaret that we had been invited to present at the HiSeoul Festival. Deluge opened at
SiDance five days after 㑩䀁 Underground closed, after which we embarked on a series of “one
venue one show” engagements. We were flying by the seats of our pants, unable to shake the
feeling that our old friend and mentor Roger Rynd was watching on, laughing maniacally.
As Chan E Park has noted, “striving for cross-cultural aesthetics is one thing, but measuring
it is another” (Park 2003, 100), and one of the most significant challenges of the Deluge project
was the attempt to measure the impact and value of the work on our audiences. The last of our
performances in 2014 was in the Box Theatre at Seoul Art Space_Mullae, a space almost half the
size of the Brisbane Powerhouse theatre, a space in which our technical manager was forced to
completely recreate David Walter’s striking lighting design, and our cast shaved minutes off the
show simply because there was not enough room for them to run. However, it was in this space
that we were the closest to our audience since our first creative development in the Whitlam
Studio at Metro Arts in 2011. From the tiny stage in Mullae, we could see and hear the emotional
impact the work was having, the gravity of which was only revealed in a post-show talkback.
Our final questioner posed a series of questions that revealed a depth of understanding that none
of us were quite ready for:
Do you know han?

Do you know about Sewol?
Do you know the story of Simch’ŏng?
Do you know about kut?
Afterward the elegant, smartly dressed questioner introduced herself as Cho Sunhee – the CEO of
the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture. We sat in the front row of the theatre as our team pulled
Figure 36.3 Elements – Deluge Cycle 5 (Brisbane Powerhouse, 2014), photograph by FenLan Chuang.
Pictured (L-R): Park Younghee, Sammie Williams, Jeremy Neideck, Amy Wollstein.
354
the set down around us, and Ms. Cho talked passionately about what the work had meant to her, how
important she thought it was. She asked us if there was any way for us to present it in April 2015 as
a public memorial to those who had lost their lives in the sinking of the Sewol Ferry. Our producer
had to run to stop our composer from making souvenirs out of the work’s fragile plywood pylons.
Stepping out of the cab and onto one of Seoul’s busiest streets six months later was a surreal
experience – and not just because we were greeted by our own faces on banners flying from
every street lamp. Families of the victims of the Sewol were leading mass demonstrations at City
Hall, demanding answers to what they insisted was a series of government cover-ups before being
dispersed by water cannons, the same kind of mass civil disobedience that would see the Korean
President impeached two years later. Some family members were huddled under clear plastic
tarps in front of the statue of King Sejong, sleeping in the driving rain of the Korean spring. Some
were on hunger strike. Some had taken their own lives.
The importance of having our work programmed as the only publicly funded performance
speaking to such a deeply felt national pain was hard to comprehend. It felt like no matter how
much exploration of the impact of water on the body we had done in a studio on top of a moun-
tain on the Sunshine Coast, we couldn’t possibly have anything useful to offer here, in a historic
theatre in the shadow of Namsan tower, wedged between a radio station and a cartoon museum
on the side of Seoul’s sacred southern mountain. It was hard to explain the feelings that flowed
from repeating movements we had practiced for five years. Roger once wrote:
As I watched you all yesterday – working, eating and playing – I was struck, not for
the first time, by the extraordinary nature of what we do. I imagined if some alien
anthropologist were to observe you at work they would see one of the most distinctive
aspects of humanity.
That we contrive to depict our existence through an aesthetic organisation of move-
ment and sound; that we dance and sing in harmony, and that the juxtaposition of these
two things is endlessly and rapidly mutable.
It is apparent that other creatures also dance and sing; and like us they do it for sex
and territory. Perhaps migrating whales sing for deep companionship. But we contrive
to do it. Imaginatively and logically; and we also do it for the transcendent spirit of the
act itself. To express from deep within, our joy and sadness, our han and jong.
R. Rynd, personal communication, 10 April 2009
Like han, chŏng (㊾/情, romanized by Rynd as “jong”) is said to be a complex and difficult feeling
to grasp for the non-Korean. It is a sentiment knotted with the full range of human emotion
(Yang 2006, 285), an embodiment of the connections between individuals. It is a human expe-
rience that cannot be manufactured, conditional on existing in the same place and at the same
time, and generated through recurring and shared experiences.
On the night of the one-year anniversary of the sinking of the Sewol, an ensemble of perform-
ers born in bordering time-zones thousands of kilometers apart, sat with their audience, folding
paper cranes and boats. We collected shoes and books and empty vessels and navigated our way
through terror, pain, and loss – attempting to weave a glimpse of hope out of the tattered remains
of what was left behind.
Notes
1 In 1964, the Republic of Korea’s Cultural Heritage Administration (formerly the Cultural Properties
Administration) began the process of appointing distinguished artists as holders of intangible cultural
heritage (Park 2013, 100). This was an attempt to preserve and promote traditional Korean art forms that
355
Jeremy Neideck
had only barely survived obliteration under Japanese colonial rule, and that risked falling into decline
in the period of economic and social reconstruction after the ceasefire that paused the Korean War – a
conflict that is technically still ongoing.
2 Ch’anggŭk is the presentation of the traditionally solo form of p’ansori using a large cast with sets and
costumes on a grand scale. For three months in 2013 I once again trained intensively with Oh Min Ah
and observed The National Changgeuk Company of Korea in rehearsal as part of an Asialink residency,
and as a recipient of the Brisbane Lord Mayor’s Young and Emerging Artists Fellowship.
3 㑩䀁 Underground. The first creative development of Deluge set a precedent for Younghee, Hoyoung, and
an ever-expanding family of artistic collaborators to travel periodically between Australia and Korea. For
a more detailed account of this, read Neideck (2016b).
4 Korean shamans are often understood as conforming to two distinct types, which Ch’oe (1989, 225)
defines as the “god-descended shaman,” for whom ecstasy and possession are seen as a reality, and “the
hereditary shaman,” who “learn their calling from their kin” and “generally do not enter into ecstatic
possession trances”. However, as Ch’oe goes on to note, their rituals have a “common basis and matrix
of belief,” and their ceremonies conform to a “general pattern,” which “leads to a replication of the
possession experience and the renewed ability to communicate with gods” (225).
5 Lee Yong-Shik’s description of a Chaesu kut of the Hwanghae region, for example, details several sequences
(kŏri) that follow a five-part structure: ushering of deities, transition, spirit possession, transition, and send-
ing of deities back to where they came from (2004 96–155). As Ch’oe Kil-sŏng notes, however, insertions
and deletions in the structure of kŏri lead to a great diversity in the length and makeup of Korean shamanic
ritual (1989, 221), and in many respects, the deliberate confluence of “structure and anti-structure” is
implicated in “the ability to communicate with the gods” (222).
6 See Neideck (2016a) for a more complete discussion of these connections.
Works cited
Baylis, Nicola. 2009. “Making Visible the Invisible: Corporeal Mime in the Twenty-First Century.” New
Theatre Quarterly 25 (3): 274–288. doi:10.1017/S0266464X0900044X.
Ch’oe, Kil-sŏng. 1989. “The Symbolic Meaning of Shamanic Folk Ritual in Korean Folk Life.” Journal of
Ritual Studies 3/2 (Summer): 217–233.
Chu, Seo-Young. 2008. “Science Fiction and Postmemory Han in Contemporary Korean American Lit-
erature.” The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States MELUS 33 (4): 97–121.
Eckersall, Peter. 2000. “What Can’t Be Seen Can Be Seen: Butoh Politics and (Body) Play.” In Body Show/S:
Australian Viewings of Live Performance, edited by Peta Tait, 145–153. Amsterdam: Rodopi Bv Editions.
Eliade, Mircea. 1964. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York:
Pantheon Books.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2009. “Interweaving Cultures in Performance: Different States of Being in-Between.”
New Theatre Quarterly 25 (4): 391–401.
Fraleigh, Sondra, and Tamah Nakamura. 2006. Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. New York and London:
Routledge.
Freda, James K. 1999. “Discourse on Han in Postcolonial Korea: Absent Suffering and Industrialist Dreams.”
Jouvert: Journal of Postcolonial Studies. http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v3i12/freda.htm.
Gaskell, Ian. 2011. “Oh Brave New Age: The Rhetoric of Holistic Actor Training.” Studies in Learning,
Evaluation, Innovation and Development 8 (2): 53–66. http://sleid.cqu.edu.au.
Gilbert, Helen. 2001. “Toil and Traffic: Australian Appropriations of the Suzuki Method.” Australasian
Drama Studies 39 (July): 76–91.
Gilbert, Helen, and Jacqueline Lo. 2009. Performance and Cosmopolitics. Ebook edition. London and New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Grau, Andrée. 1992. “Intercultural Research in the Performing Arts.” Dance Research: The Journal of the
Society for Dance Research 10 (2). Edinburgh University Press: 3–29.
Howard, Keith. 1998. “Korean Shamanism Today.” In Korean Shamanism: Revivals, Survivals and Change,
edited by Keith Howard, 1–14. Seoul: The Royal Asiatic Society Korea Branch.
Howard, Keith. 2006. Preserving Korean Music: Intangible Cultural Properties as Icons of Identity. Vol. 1. Farnham,
UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Jang, Yeonok. 2014. Korean P’ansori Singing Tradition: Development, Authenticity, and Performance History.
Ebook edition. Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press.
356
Kim, Ah-Jeong, and R. B. Graves. 1999. “Preface.” In Oh, T’ae-sŏk, The Metacultural Theatre of Oh T’ae-Sŏk,
translated by Ah-Jeong Kim and R B Graves, vii–viii. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Kim, Kyung-hee. 2008. “Theory of Pansori.” In Korean Musicology Series 2, edited by Yong-Shik Lee, 30–69.
Korean Musicology Series 2. Pansori. Seoul: The National Center for Korean Traditional Performing
Arts.
Kim, Moon-hwan. 1997. “The Essence of Traditional Performing Arts.” In Koreana: Korean Cultural Heritage,
Vol. 3: Performing Arts, edited by Joungwon Kim, 1st ed., 14–27. Seoul: The Korea Foundation.
King, Eleanor. 1983. “Reflections on Korean Dance.” In Korean Dance, Theater and Cinema, edited by The
Korean National Commission for UNESCO, 31–71. Seoul: The Si-sa-yong-o-sa Publishers & Arch
Cape, OR: Pace International Research.
Kockel, Ullrich. 2012. “Being from and Coming To: Outline of an Ethno-Ecological Framework.” In Rad-
ical Human Ecology: Intercultural and Indigenous Approaches, edited by Lewis Willilams, Rose Roberts, and
Alastair McIntosh, 57–72. London and New York, NY: Routledge.
Lee, Bo-hyung. 1997. “Sori.” In Koreana: Korean Cultural Heritage,Vol. 3: Performing Arts, edited by Joungwon
Kim, 1st ed., 48–57. Seoul: The Korea Foundation.
Lee, Yong-Shik. 2004. Shaman Ritual Music in Korea. Seoul: Jimoondang.
Lee, Young Hee. 2002. Ideology, Culture, and Han: Traditional and Early Modern Korean Women’s Literature.
Seoul: Jimoondang.
Maro, Akaji. 2008. Creating Butoh Drama. Tokyo: Dairakudakan Temputenshiki.
Marshall, Jonathan W. 1992. “Bodies across the Pacific: The Japanese National Body in the Performance
Technique of Suzuki and Butoh.” Antithesis 7 (2): 50–65.
Marshall, Jonathan W. 2006. “Dancing the Elemental Body: Butoh and Body Weather: Interviews with
Tanaka Min and Yumi Umiumare.” Performance Paradigm January, 1–20.
NCKTPA. 2004. “Musical Structure and Expressions of Pansori.” In Pansori, edited by NCKTPA, 31–60.
Seoul: The National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts.
Neideck, Jeremy. 2016a. The Fabric of Transcultural Collaboration. Dissertation, Queensland University of
Technology. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/93720/.
Neideck, Jeremy. 2016b. “The Cost of Cultural Ambition.” Currency House: Investing in Cultural Leadership.
Sydney: Currency House. August. https://currencyhouse.org.au/sites/all/themes/currencyhouse/pdfs/
neideck_ambition.pdf.
Park, Chan E. 2003. “Poetics and Politics of Korean Oral Tradition in a Cross-Cultural Context.” The World
of Music 45. Cross-Cultural Aesthetics: 91–103.
Park, Seong-Yong. 2013. On Intangible Heritage Safeguarding Governance: An Asia-Pacific Context. Newcastle
upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Pilgrim, Richard B. 1986. “Intervals (‘Ma’) in Space and Time: Foundations for a Religio-Aesthetic Para-
digm in Japan.” History of Religions 25: 255–277.
Sanders, Vicki. 1988. “Dancing and the Dark Soul of Japan: An Aesthetic Analysis of ‘Butō’.” Asian Theatre
Journal 5 (2). University of Hawai’i Press: 148–163.
Slimbach, Richard. 2005. “The Transcultural Journey.” Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad
11 (August): 205–230.
Van Zile, Judy. 1998. “Movement in Shamanic Contexts: An Inquiry.” In Korean Shamanism: Revivals, Sur-
vivals and Change, edited by Keith Howard, 153–186. Seoul: The Royal Asiatic Society Korea Branch.
Willoughby, Heather. 2000. “The Sound of Han: P’ansori, Timbre and a Korean Ethos of Pain and Suffer-
ing.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 32 (2000): 17–30.
Wright, Judith. 1947. “The Flood.” Meanjin 6: 21–23.
Yang, Inju. 2006. “Jeong Exchange and Collective Leadership in Korean Organizations.” Asia Pacific Journal
of Management 23 (3): 283–298. doi:10.1007/s10490-006-9003-6.
357
SECTION 4
Politics, gender, identity

37
BUTOH’S GENDERS
Men in dresses and girl-like women
Katherine Mezur
If one imagines the iconic butoh artist, the image might be of Ohno Kazuo’s small, gaunt figure
in a charming dress, with a flower held aloft and dark-lined eye make-up with rose-red lipstick,
against his powdered whitened skin, and sky-blue eyeshadow. Or next to Ohno, one might see
the famous photographs or cine dance films of Hijikata Tatsumi whirling in his satiny flamen-
co-like skirt or white female kimono. Or, one might have seen Kasai Akira’s skirted or evening
gown figure swirl and hover in an ecstatic leap or backbend. Or the image might be the gri-
maces of Ashikawa Yoko, and her chorus of women in puffy old kimonos and wigs, squatting
low and stomping about in their wooden geta. Or perhaps the ubiquitous butoh body image is
the white-powdered, nearly naked and wasted, male body, like Muroboshi Kō, with bent-knees,
caved in chest, and spider-like arms, with a toothless grin, his eyes making white slits as he rolls
his pupils into the upper lids. Every body, male or female or trans, genders butoh differently.
In butoh’s early experimental period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the artists’ earliest man-
date was to disrupt bodily prescriptions set up by the stringent postwar social standards. The male
artists aimed to provoke and fracture the gender, sex, and sexuality coordinates, forcing spectators
and beyond them, society, to question those set prescriptions. For butoh artists at the time, who
were overwhelmingly male, the very materiality of their bodies, everything that is cellular, was
their playground for gendering. The basics of hair, bones, flesh, and muscle plus all the additional
accoutrements and trappings of clothes, make-up, and objects, and movement (gesture, posture,
and locomotion) were (and still are) the stuff of butoh gender play/provocation. The male butoh
artists from the 1960s and 1970s, who rebelled against the tyranny of the Americanized gender
dynamics and postwar Japanese gender re-prescriptions, clearly chose radical hyper-gender acts
to satirize, disrupt, and transform the social norms. At the heart of butoh’s actions are socially
prescribed sexed/gendered bodies. The male or female performer/choreographer performs a
series of signature acts based on this hyper-gender. The men most often perform in dresses and
other super-fem accoutrements like wigs, shawls, or flowers. Women, in contrast, amplify the
feminine in a variety of modes like cute little girl-ness, old crones, or haunted female grotesques.
However, on a fundamental level, butoh’s seemingly anarchist corporeality did not disrupt the
mainstream heteronormative view of male and female sexualities in Japan.1 Sabine Frühstück
explains how throughout the twentieth century, Japan’s social normativity “centers on heterosexu-
ality and, through it, a gendered order of sexual matters and society” (2003, 197). Because Japan was
and still is a dominantly masculinist society, where men have better access to good jobs, education,
361
Katherine Mezur
and social status, and because of the postwar occupation and continuing military presence by
American military with its own gender and racial stereotypes, the fact that early male butoh artists
for the most part did not question male gender structures means that even butoh maintained a het-
eronormative structure with its division of male and female gendering practices and their politics.
However, picture this

It’s 1969. Hijikata (1928–1986) struts along a city street in white knee-hi socks, his long hair
loosely knotted up. As if off to a summer matsuri (festival) party, this skinny man wears a girl’s
yukata (cotton kimono), tied up and back with a sash, and he carries a watermelon in a netted
bag, a sure sign of summer. He gazes forward, as if he has disengaged from the mundane world
around him, and focuses on his own vision of a world turned upside down. In the opposite
direction, marching right to left, a line of riot-geared police march by behind Hijikata on their
way to contain an anti-government demonstration. A few break stride to look back at this passing
girlish boy wonder. While this photograph by Fukase Masahisa has been read in different ways,
especially citing Hijikata’s seeming indifference to the violent street political demonstrations of
that moment, here Hijikata demonstrates his contentions in broad gender stylization: he girls it,
not quite drag, not quite cross-dressed, but girl-like. He genders his butoh.
Picture also this

It’s 2015 in Aomori, Japan. As if the stage is a playground or field of summer grasses, Yuki Yuko
trips out into the light, her pink little girl dress with puffed sleeves; she flutters and bounces about
as she runs and skips to different parts of the stage. She wears a short-cropped wig with bangs:
the perfect 1950s schoolgirl idol. She peers out at the audience, as if searching for someone.
Disappointed, she cruises to another area. Tiptoeing on her red geta (wooden clogs), she skitters
a zigzag route to center stage, flouncing down to floor, a puff of white dust from her powdered
skin rises like a halo into the air. She rolls over into a curled butoh bug float – arms and legs bent
into her chest, her eyes half-closed: Is she an embryo, a shrimp, a doll? Yuki rolls up and skips
across the stage. Smiling softly, she genders her butoh.
Yuki and Hijikata gender their butoh with girl acts, their own blend of radical sweetness on the
surface of their bodies. The performance twists of female-likeness seem to offer the most power-
ful choreographic material. The I Love Butoh! Kamiyama Teijiro Photographic Collection, for example,
begins in the 1970s with Kasai Akira hovering and flying in his many dressed and skirted roles and
continues from Ohno Kazuo to Kurosawa Mika and others, up through 2011. Throughout Kami-
yama’s and other photography books, male and female performers emphasize female-like gendering
extremes. Despite the fact that on one level, butoh does not successfully disrupt heteronormative
structures, it seems that over time, in costuming and movement, gendering female-likeness maintains
its provocative and rebellious potential for evolving butoh gendering practice across many different
bodies. The question then arises, is there elasticity to female-likeness or a greater potential to disrup-
tion and provocation with this feminization of gender in butoh performances? I suggest that the very
surface or appearances of bodies in action and visual display are potent meaningful acts of power.
A careful aside
Because butoh artists so deeply concern themselves with the materiality of their bodies – flesh,
sweat, bones, muscles, tears, hair, scars, orifices, and leakages – their gendering processes are
nuanced and detailed. To focus this study, I deploy a feminist strategy of distinguishing “whose
362
Butoh’s genders
body” and making no generalizations about any of these bodies.2 I look at particular artists and
consider their performative gendering and what choices they made in their time/place contexts
and their relationship to earlier or contemporary butoh performers’ legacies. It is also imperative
to situate this gender study in Japan, from the second half of the 20th century to the present
second decade of the 21st century. Above all else, relationships of gender, sex, and sexuality,
however intertwined, are situational and dynamic. Moreover, I have to deal with two different
gendering streams of butoh: one for men, and one for women, each with complex gendering
across these different embodiments and imaginaries and aesthetic philosophies and skills. This is
complicated given Japan’s postwar history of American occupation and continued military pres-
ence, their postwar constitutional changes, and the skewed rise and fall of the economy. Into this
muddled politics of governance and livelihood, women and men have had to deal and struggle
differently because of these upheavals, which caused huge chasms and breaks in the social fabric
of Japanese daily life and notions of family. Amongst the many changes in state governance and
power, from the emperor’s divine mandate to fascist militarism to quasi-democracy, gender roles
re-materialized to match the hegemonic power of postwar American and Japanese mandates.
For a theoretical framework useful for both male and female performers, I borrow from
Jennifer Robertson’s research on Japanese gender representations, theories, and performance in
Takarazuka, kabuki, and 20th century Japanese women’s sexuality for a few specifics on Japanese
gender performance and discourse. Robertson explains how in Japan, gender is assigned accord-
ing to genital type, but, the “two genders, ‘female’ gender (femininity) and ‘male’ gender (mas-
culinity) are not ultimately regarded as the exclusive province of anatomical females and males”
(1989, 50). This means there is a creative slippage and shaping of gender technologies across
male and female sexed bodies. Linguistically to distinguish gender from sex, specific suffixes are
deployed: “Gender is denoted by the suffix rashii, with its allusion to appearance or likeness. A
female-like or ‘female’ gendered person is onnarashii, a male-like person, is otokorashii. The empha-
sis here is on the person’s proximity to a gender stereotype” (Robertson 1989, 51). Throughout
this butoh gender study, I use this “likeness” suffix to distinguish certain gender actions or
objects being close to that saturated stereotype of male or female likeness. This works especially
for butoh, where satirical gender acts are part of the provocation, and because so much of butoh
gendering by male or female sexed performers is in the magnetic field of female-likeness.
Butoh’s men and girl-likeness

Starting with Japan’s annexation of Manchuria in 1931, Marc McLelland suggests that war and
its aftermath transformed male gender and sexuality in four seemingly paradoxical ways. War led
“toward a reductive heteronormativity in discourse about sex and a polarization of gender roles.”
At the same time, war mobilization “resulted in increasingly homosocial situations that both
encouraged and facilitated homosexual interaction.” War also “required both men and women
to take on gender roles at variance with official ideologies” (McLelland 2005, 10–11). Finally,
McLelland suggests that Japan’s defeat and Allied occupation “served to discredit imperialist
ideologies regulating sex and gender while opening up new commercial spaces for heterosexual
and homosexual expression” (2005, 11).
The development of homosexuality and feminization, which connects to early butoh by
Hijikata and Ohno, was coupled with the emergence of the gei boi (gay boy) in entertainment
featuring cross-dressing and transgender performance. In the 1950s, according to McLelland,
“the popularity of such performers resulted in a process of ‘touristization’ in which . . . sub-
cultural bars, clubs and cabarets began to cater to a more mainstream clientele” (2005, 11–12).
Interestingly this gei boi as transgender performance was separate from male homosexuality, which
363
Katherine Mezur
maintained its difference from the transgender homosexual identity that was prevalent in the
entertainment world. In sum, there was a new current of male transgender performance in Japan
in the postwar era, existing alongside new gender stereotypes. We might consider then how the
“radical” corporeality of Hijikata’s early performances arose from these various contexts.
Teresa De Lauretis reminds us that the “sex-gender system . . . is both a socio-cultural con-
struct and a semiotic apparatus, a system of representation which assigns meaning (identity, value,
prestige, location in kinship, status in the social hierarchy, etc.) to individuals within the society”
(2001, 5). The sex-gender system is a powerful tool, which the butoh male founders and sub-
sequent male and female butoh artists made into their most radically provocative technology of
performance.
Could we consider that Hijikata and Ohno were performing a male gender revolt because of
their histories or experiences with repressive nationalisms, the forced militarization of their war-
time lives, and then the humiliation of American military occupation? Wearing dresses, female
kimono, suits, underwear, wrapped loin cloth, and sometimes smeary and caked white paste all
over their bodies, they were messy, dirty, and surreal, commuting between female-likeness and
male-likeness, Japanese-y kitsch, and disturbing frailty; they danced a corporeal revolt, and what
Stephen Barber calls “anatomical transformation and re-invented memory” (2006 63). Was this
also a queer gender revolt? Did Hijikata in his association with Terayama Shūji, Mishima Yukio,
and other male artists, flaunt socially prescribed corporeality to seduce and dare others into his
labyrinth of writing, cabaret, and corporeal invention?
While gender performance has been part of Japanese theatrical traditions for centuries, these
theatrical forms, such as bugaku, noh, kabuki, and bunraku, were also all male authored and male
performed, with a few brief exceptions, in particular Okuni Kabuki and her women courtesan
dancers in the early 17th century (Mezur 2005, 54–64). In these performance forms, there is a
tradition of radical gender play of female and male youth genders. For example, Okuni and her
women dancers freely played male youth roles (wakashū) and samurai, with mixed Christian and
Portuguese iconography, as well as female roles in the kimono and wig fashions of the times.
The later exclusively male kabuki blossomed after women were banned from the stage (1629)
and when female prostitution was legalized by the shogunate. Wakashū kabuki was famous for
its female-like bishōnen (beautiful boy) performers who took over the female roles and flam-
boyantly styled their female-like acts with longer kimono sleeves, and sashes across their shaved
forelocks (2005, 64–77). The onnagata or female gender role specialist has continued through
today with Bandō Tamasaburō V, who is not only a leader in the Grand Kabuki troupe, but also
a regular player of male/female-like roles outside of kabuki, such as Queen Elizabeth I, who is
a boy youth disguised as the Queen in Contradanza-Contradanza-Contradanza (Ors 1995). And
again in the play Nastasja (Wajda 1989) and the later film version Nastasja (Wajda 1994) Bandō
played both the female role of Nastasja and male role of Prince Mishkin. In these film and stage
performances, Bandō performs female-like male roles and male-like female roles. Another twist
on gendering, which started in the early part of the Meiji period and continues today, is the
exclusively female Takarazuka musical theatre. Their star actors, who play the male roles (tachik-
yaku), and their star actors, who play the female/girl roles (musume), are required to remain in
these gender roles while in the company.
Each one of these forms “genders” differently and there isn’t a direct genealogy of gendering
in Japanese performance. It may be more accurate to say that Japan’s male traditions had male
performers playing all gender, class, age, and race roles. Further, Japan’s society at large is male
dominated in most areas of business, politics, sciences, arts, and education. It follows that butoh,
even with its experimental base, is not an exception to this male body dominated world. Any
gender acts in the first decade of butoh performances came out of this male-bodied world. From
364
Butoh’s genders
the 1960s through 1990s, there was also the rise of gendered popular cultures such as boy (bishō-
nen) and girl (shōjo) literature, manga (graphic novels), anime, and performance. In the 1990s
through today, we can see these continuing separately gendered culture waves clearly indicating
the deeper gender politics of Japan as a whole.
Picture this
In Rose-colored Dance, Ohno and Hijikata perform sections in long dresses. I am struck by Hiji-
kata’s female-like choices, which came from different sources. In Rose-colored Dance, Ohno and
Hijikata developé their legs and tip, arching over into a long diagonal pose legs in the air, just short
of a twinned arabesque. They dip and sway in their long swirling skirts, falling around and over
each other. They almost, not quite, dance a Hollywood duo, like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire,
but they are twin Gingers. Or are they twinned Martha Grahams? Hijikata goes behind Ohno,
presses his face into his ear and then both pass by face to face, an intimate struggle of whose skin
is whose? Cut to the backs of the men with vaginas painted like flowers on them where with
each breath the vaginal lips expand. Hijikata borrows from multiple dance forms, and twists
them. Like girls, Ohno explores under Hijikata’s skirt, and Hijikata takes the skirt down over his
head, hiding Ohno beneath, in close, intimate suffocating violence. He presses and caresses, while
Ohno succumbs.
Picture this
Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: Rebellion of the Body is a catalogue of gendering, with several
male acts, including the golden penis section, where Hijikata performs a kind of nightclub thrust
and wiggle routine, with slippery hips and his loose hair flying with his flashing reflection in the
hanging mirror-like metallic set pieces. But, after his golden penis and g-strap dance, he emerges
out of a female kimono, worn backwards, with its long furisode, fluttering sleeves, whipping out
around him as he rises out of his canopied carriage. Later he whirls his satiny Flamenco skirts,
and then he walks, scampers, and prances about in his little girl kimono and geta. In these early
works Hijikata blows up the gendering. Even in a suit, Hijikata amplifies a gender caricature.
So what was Hijikata doing in his satiny dress with his partial flamenco-esque moves? Parody,
masquerade, or drag seem too simple for his fluid gender audacity. Hijikata and his associates
played with outrageously rebellious and subversive homosexuality and corporeal flamboyance
that shafted the Western based dance forms as much as they did the Japanese traditions of form
and grace. Perhaps we might consider his female gender acts the coordinated contrasts to his
molting naked cocoon in Story of Smallpox or his flying Christ in Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese
People or his giant swinging golden penis apparatus?
Butoh women and girl-likeness

At the time of butoh’s beginnings, sex and gender divisions were extremely narrow and strictly
defined. Sabine Frühstück (2003) and Nobuko Anan (2016) outline a history of female sex
and gender from the 1900s to the present. They argue that between 1900 to 1945 (the period
of Japan’s brutal militarization and colonization) women were urged to take part in lower level
manufacturing jobs and other factory production jobs in Japan. Young women were also bru-
tally recruited to be comfort women or sex slaves for the soldiers abroad. For a brief period in
the 1920s, there was a women’s movement in literature, popular culture, and sexology, which
was spread across classes through women’s magazines. This was destroyed in the interest of the
365
Katherine Mezur
colonizing fascist military regime, as it spread from Japan to Korea to China and southward.
Sadly, even with the end of Japan’s horrible aggression throughout Asia, women never regained
this moment of empowered brilliance. Instead the government returned to the pre-modern
“good wife, wise mother,” roles for women with the addition of “OL” or office ladies. During
the occupation, the following economic boom, and political protests, women, compared to men,
went through a very different postwar transformation. Not unlike other postwar nations, women
were both liberated and controlled as the future of that nation.
Within that general context, there was no conception of female sex for pleasure. In Frühstück’s
Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan, we learn that in the 20th century
modernization and military aggression set up a pattern of government control, exercised almost
exclusively on women’s bodies, through reproductive proscriptions. The government’s attitude
towards reproduction depended on whether the state needed soldiers and workers for war activi-
ties and when state authorities would deem it essential to make sure that a pure Japanese race was
maintained. Up until 1965, sex education was called “purity education,” which was changed to
“guidance in sexual matters,” whose emphasis was still on “the main aim of sex as reproduction
within the boundaries of marriage” (2003, 193). Frühstück re-enforces the theme through the
20th century: in numerous circumstances, such as birth control (whether by abstinence or with
condoms), the government set priorities in terms of a heteronormative goal of reproduction.
I think we have to re-read women’s participation in Hijikata’s early butoh performances from
within these sex and gender circumstances and systems. Women were shifted from serving the
nation in wartime as reproducers of state citizens to an equally heteronormative role serving the
nation to reproduce consumers, and to act as consumers themselves. Yet, the power of women
in the lives of butoh men is evident from Hijikata, who wrote about deeply mourning his sister
and drew inspiration from her, and Ohno, who dedicated so much of his movement inspiration
to his dead mother. They both turned most frequently to female gender acts to provoke, play,
and inspire.
We can also see early butoh’s genders shift toward a different gendering with the addition
of women performers from the late 1960s on. Women performers – who as Kuniyoshi Kazuko
points out, were the ones who developed butoh techniques such as te-boke (wandering hands),
ganimata (bandy legs), and beshimikata (facial grimaces) – were outfitted in old wigs and kimono
(Kuniyoshi 2004, 3). Perhaps butoh women had to push their female-likeness further, harder, and
beyond stereotyped gendering, into an even more extreme “other” corporeality. They did not
exaggerate “male-likeness” or even male-performed female-likeness, but chose the outrageous
side of girl-ness, where cute rubs up against the grotesque. This was perhaps related to the rise
of Japanese girl aesthetics, which expanded in the 1970s, and were “resistant to social construc-
tions of gender and sexuality” (Anan 2016, 4) that equated adult womanhood to wifehood and
motherhood. Early butoh women, such as Carlotta Ikeda, Furukawa Anzu, Yumiko Yoshioka,
Kobayashi Saga, and Ashikawa Yoko took their female-girl-likeness in outrageous directions.
Most butoh women, unlike their male counterparts, negotiated their gender processes under
male direction, but arguably were able to choose their degree of female gender radicalization.
Certainly, Ashikawa, one of the foremost stars of Hijikata’s group, twisted and bent her body into
radical female gender acts.
Picture this
In a section of the iconic work, Hōsōtan (Story of Smallpox), the female chorus, led by Ashikawa
Yoko, wear hiked up kimono, old wigs, and wooden geta. They swarm and clatter about the stage
in their bent legged crouched walk, with their chins thrust forward and bobbing, they look like a
366
Butoh’s genders
clutch of chickens. When they roll over, with their feet kicking in the air, they resemble beetles,
helplessly clawing the air to upright themselves. Powdered chalky white with patches over their
skin, they curl up into strange shapes of embryonic creatures, shaking in their exertion. Their
gendering processes extend the materiality of their female-likeness. Are they girls? Children?
Imaginary girl-chicks?
Female butoh artists like Nakajima Natsu, who began her work with Hijikata and Ohno,
experienced an exhilarating freedom when she trained with Hijikata’s image-driven, sweaty,
exhausting movement experiments. She recalled being entranced with his images and the mag-
netism of his presence and power (Nakajima 2000). Tamano Hiroko saw one performance and
decided to join a workshop/performance because she was so excited to see this radical physicality
and imagination (Tamano 2014). Butoh, for these first female trainees broke open their deeply
ingrained social female gender restrictions. They could play wildly with these distorted gestures,
postures, and grimaces. Tamano, Nakajima, and Yoshioka all found Hijikata’s intensive group
training totally self-absorbing and liberating compared to the prescriptions for Japanese women
of this post-occupation era. Nakajima and Tamano reminded me that they were very young and
without employment and these workshops and performances gave them a purpose and a place to
belong to (Nakajima 2000; Tamano 2014). Nakajima, Tamano, and Yuki did not stay with Hijika-
ta’s group but branched out on their own (Yuki 2015). Other women like Furukawa studied with
Maro Akaji and his group Dairakudakan for a short period of time but then left to form their own
groups (Furukawa 1999; Seki Minako 2011). Dissatisfied with the male-led butoh cliques, all of
these women went on to invent their own butoh genders (girl-like, super-femme-like, insect-like,
and so forth but never male-like), and let their own gendering practices create new choreography.
The female apprentices, like Ashikawa, took on the physically daring roles with intense pleas-
ure because they were outside their social regulatory female gender practices. Somatically, the
messy make-up, old costumes, the nudity, and the absurd postures, exposing their breasts and but-
tocks, felt daring and pleasurable in contrast to their restricted social female gender roles within
Japan’s male dominated art practices and social institutions. And yet, the politics of women
working harder on the cabaret circuit that kept Hijikata’s butoh supplied with revenue and the
risks the women took, being naked or sexually explicit, meant that their radical gender perfor-
mances had the potential for being more dangerous and damaging for them than the men. At
times, the women artists did a different kind of “drag” with their girl acts, which were perhaps
“safer” alternatives. Even if “safely” girly in bows and girl bangs and wigs, as in Summer Storm,
they expanded, proliferated, and challenged gendering practices of the times. Could they perform
abject and cute? Could they perform female grotesques and adorable dolls?
In Three Bellmers (3 人ベルメール), a title added to the film, A Summer Storm (Natsu no
Arashi), Ashikawa, Nimura Momoko, and Kobayashi wear the little girl kimono, hiked up around
their waists, and white powdered faces, and arms and legs, move in the squat ganimata walk.
They wear the iconic shōjo (little girl) black bobbed haircut with bangs, and squeeze their faces
in tight, tiny grins with their eyes pulled into white slits. How do they gender? They could be
dolls, referencing Hijikata’s use of Hans Bellmer, the artist who twisted female doll parts into
incongruous positions, sometimes without heads and multiple legs without arms. The women
bounce, scramble, and roll into butoh floats, as if their gendering girl-isms make themselves into
little wind-up toys as they spin and circle in and out of unison constellations. They are girly
gender toys, cute, satiric, silly, and estranged. Are they dolls, robots, pets? Do they break societal
codes? Ashikawa, Nimura, and Kobayashi were very aware that their girl-gendering flaunted the
carefully behaved, quiet, well-dressed office lady or mother image (Ashikawa video 1986). While
the shōjo image has a long history, their shōjo acts, suggest a radically sensuous girl beyond the
consumerist and reproductive model. Their girl genders fly in the face of the 1960s rebellions
367
Katherine Mezur
and failures. Here we see butoh women’s triumphs in the small belligerent acts of girl-gendered
butoh. Butoh women perform a radically expanded range of material female gendering, which
press female bodies into extra-ordinary dimensions.
Picture this
It’s 2011 Berlin. Kaseki Yuko and Seki Minako, both second-generation butoh artists influenced
by Furukawa, dance DORODORO QUARKS. They perform gender deformations by wearing
bulbous appendages attached to their bodies. They appear posthuman, between animal, human,
and thing. They queer-gender their bodies with stuffed stuff. To a blast of rock music, they tear off
these exterior limbs and bumps, and prance about in Japanese underwear: shitagi. Their shitagi are
male underwear: pale white short shorts and tank tops. Both women are skinny and flat-breasted
so they look like girl adolescents, pop dancing, and posing in Broadway musical-style photo-op
poses. Their verbal story-telling with low pitched male-language and girl-pitched sounds and
gestures amplifies their hyper-female gender play. A few years later, Kaseki juxtaposes sweet and
violent girl-ness in Shoot Jeez My Gosh (2014) when she wears a flowery girl-like dress and plays
war games, when she lifts her arm and then points it like an imaginary machine gun. She scans the
spectators with her “gun” and takes aim. As she shoots and shakes with the reverberations in the
soundscape of gunshots, she performs shooting and getting shot. Is she shooting herself?
Ohno’s gender worlds

The two previous sections dealt with the gendering typical of Hijikata and his butoh lineage.
However, no discussion of butoh and gender would be complete without reference to Ohno
Kazuo (1906–2010), who studied expressionist based dance under Ishii Baku and others and
served in the Japanese Imperial army. However, Ohno does not fit neatly within the gender
concerns of his contemporaries because of his highly personal approach to dance, which largely
comes from his generational difference. Ohno was a generation older than Hijikata, and while his
gendering processes may have arisen from their shared passion for radicalizing the entire schema
of corporeal representation and expression in the dance world, Ohno most frequently performed
his own female-like gender roles strongly influenced by his memories of La Argentina and his
relationship with his mother. This butoh has in turn been a strong influence on many Japanese
women butoh artists and international dancers, men and women alike.
I think if we look closely at Ohno’s female-like gendering over decades, the patterns of female-
like acts emerge as a gestural patterning of soft rounded arms with striking angular poses and
femme fatale twists. His muscular yet small body purposefully focused on female persona, built
from his female-like gender acts. Ohno was careful to wear his female-like roles and then perform
them, much like the kabuki onnagata, where the actor shapes his body with the costuming, props,
and then creates a repertoire of female-like gestural vocabularies, attuned to a role-type. His hair,
decorations, hats, and shawls are vital physical controls for his gender actions: The flower or bow
in his hair makes him tip his head coyly, on an angle. His skirt and shawl allow him to grace-
fully curve to the floor, or his high heels inhibit his walks and runs, by making him take small
steps. He forced himself to trip lightly, to hesitate, to create a movement sequence of gentle and
sensuous delicacy from these inhibiting objects. These gestures then feed his male role actions.
Even in a suit or underwear, Ohno’s female-likeness saturates his actions. He keeps his female acts
gendering his other gender acts.
Carrying his signature flower aloft over his head or with it pinned to his hair or hat, it is Ohno
in his butoh girl female drag: his carefully chosen dress, shoes, hat, flower, and thick make-up.
368
Butoh’s genders
Perhaps even in his suited sequence in La Argentina, he performs his female gender role in male
girl drag. He performs his layers of “dress.” For the opening of La Argentina, which is his role
of Divine, the prostitute, Ohno wears a long dark velvety dress, with romantic tulle ruffles and a
short coat with a white lacy collar, and his signature flower hair pin. Was he hiding in the light?
In high heels and long dress, Ohno scampered, doing his tripping walk-run, girlish, childlike,
with sudden stops for posing, and especially looking back, to make sure someone is looking, his
gendering could have arisen from those silent films where female stars seemed to move in flickers,
cutting to close ups of their demure faces, beautiful even in distress, like Ohno’s peering from
beneath his hat or kissing and then clinging to the stage wall or curtain.
In The Dead Sea (1985) Ohno wears a pale yellow dress that hangs to just below his knees. He
is a young woman or girl when he trips about the stage in his girl dress pumps. At some point he
falls and crumples and has to rise again, an elder or a ghost, in a different dress, with a different
bearing. The girl trips and poses in various spaces, lifted up up on his toes, but death crumples the
girl into the elder woman. Ohno rises to the striking of the gidayu shamisen, a harsh, but poignant
note from a bunraku puppet play. The elder woman in an old wig now, with her long dress and
cape, robelike and heavy. Ohno fills the cape with his long outstretched arms, almost hawk-like
the female-like elder now slow carves the space, doubling the gesture patterns, as if he/she has
to remember where to go next. She is also dying. Ohno seems engulfed by the Dead Sea. His
female-like monarch seems to sink with great weight into the sea. His gendering passes death.
Picture this
Its 2016 Los Angeles. It’s the retro-gendering by Kawaguchi Takao in About Kazuo Ohno – Reliving
the Butoh Diva’s Masterpieces. Walking out of the performance one audience member remarked
on how moved she was but “you know he just wasn’t old enough. With Ohno, age matters.”
That’s it, I thought, you cannot imitate and re-perform age or gender, through memorization of
mediated gendered gestures. But Kawaguchi did copy and queer the gender roles. Kawaguchi
performs the diva beneath Ohno’s diva. In a startling moment of screened gender artifice, Kawa-
guchi projects Ohno Yoshito, Ohno’s son, dancing the tiny doll puppet of Ohno-as-La-Argentina:
a crafted and haunted female-like gendering.
Picture this
In her 2000 version of Romantic Nights, Kurosawa Mika (1957–2016) performed an homage to
Ohno Kazuo, at Bank Art in Yokohama, where Ohno’s costume dresses hung like ghosts from
the cavernous ceiling. Kurosawa, who had studied with Ohno, dances in an elegant grey-blue
gown, with her pearl necklace cascading down her chest. She wears an oversized satin flower on
the side of her head, which is like Ohno’s signature flower or bow hair decoration. Her face and
arms are delicately powdered white and circle and twist in an Ohno-esque tango beneath his
hanging dresses. Kurosawa, with her long history in contemporary dance, performance art, and
butoh, performs this melodramatic female gendering in her crazed search for “someone.” She
trips, almost falls, and keeps frantically searching. She moves with her long white gloved arms,
circling in on herself. Kurosawa inflects her gendering with Ohno’s Argentina and Dead Sea: her
sweet childlike female-likeness shifts through haunted layers.
Ohno himself gendered in layers. He was all about the exterior performance first: for Ohno
the tiniest detail of the bow in his hair, the powder on his hands, his heeled shoes, the flow of his
dress as he sank to the floor, must exemplify the absolute artificial female-like other. That artifici-
ality that fiction must come from the inside out: from imagination (Ohno Workshop Yokohama
369
Katherine Mezur
1991), Ohno’s genders performed this imaginary. That is, he gendered with the sense of knowing
from the inside and looking from the outside at himself, that he played the exquisite artificiality
of whichever female-like role he was dancing. Ohno was explicit and “out there,” with every ges-
ture and every ounce of his flesh tuned to his gender project of synthetic simulation, which must
engage the audience, in their hearts and through their senses beyond the real. In his workshops,
Ono explicitly drove everyone over this edge of “real” to this dense fiction of like-ness, where one
had to move into imagination (Ohno Workshop Yokohama 1990). While his global touring and
unusual longevity as a performer contributed to his public renown, his gendering process and his
rigorous emphasis on the imagination of our bodies, gave Ohno’s butoh female-ness its iconic status.
Whether Ohno, Hijikata, Ashikawa, Yuki, Kurosawa, Kasai, Nakajima, or one of countless
other butoh dancers: there is nothing certain about butoh’s genders, except that female-likeness
haunts every body, with its sensuous, sweet, and violent politics.
Notes
1 For an in-depth historiography of sexology and social control see Sabine Frühstück’s Colonizing Sex
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
2 The purpose of this chapter is not just to focus on the activities of women artists and female bodies;
after all, the way male performers gender butoh was (and continues to be) an important part of butoh.
However, it is worth noting that when many other researchers have written about “bodies” within butoh
studies, they have primarily considered male bodies, media, and performance, but referred to those bodies
in generalized ways that ignore issues of gender (see for example, Baird, Barber, Centonze, Eckersall,
Kuniyoshi, and Sas).
Works cited
Anan, Nobuko. 2016. Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls’ Aesthetics.
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ashikawa, Yoko. 2011. “芦川羊子 Yōko Ashikawa (1986).” YouTube video, 4:56. Uploaded by netjoy,
October 12. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb7nSr8BnGs
De Lauretis, Teresa. 2001. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Frühstück, Sabine. 2003. Colonizing Sex. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Furukawa, Anzu. 1999. Interview by author, San Francisco.
Kamiyama, Teijiro. 2014. I Love Butoh! Tokyo: Gendai Shokan Publishing Co.
Kuniyoshi, Kazuko. 2004. “Contemporary Dance in Japan: New Wave in Dance and Butoh after the
1990’s.” Translated by Kyoko Yoshida, edited by Autumn Patterson. Minneapolis: Walker Arts Center,
Arts West: 1–10.
McLelland, Mark. 2005. Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age. New York: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers.
Mezur, Katherine. 2005. Beautiful Boys/Outlaw Bodies: Devising Kabuki Female-Likeness. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Nakajima, Natsu. 2011. Interview by author, Tokyo: 2000.
Ors, Francisco. 1995. Contradanza-Contradanza-Contradanza. Nuria Espert, dir. Tokyo: Saison.
Robertson, Jennifer. 1989. “Gender-Bending in Paradise: Doing ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ in Japan.” Genders 5
Summer: 50–69.
Seki, Minako. 2011. Interview by author, Berlin.
Tamano, Hiroko. 2014. Interview by author, Berkeley.
Wajda, Andrzej. 1989. Nastasja. Live performance. Tokyo: Benison Pit Theatre.
———. 1994. Nastasja. Film. Written by Fyodor Dostoevsky, directed by Andrzej Wajda. H.I.T., Say-to-
Workshop, TV Tokyo.
Yuki, Yuko. 2015. Interview by author. Aomori, Japan.
370
38
DEATH RITUALS AND
SURVIVAL ACTS
Hata Kanoko’s “butoh action” and alternative
inter-Asian transnationalism
Chiayi Seetoo
It was an evening in July, hot and sultry. I sat on one of the little stools scattered on the ground
inside a tent, waiting for the first full dress rehearsal of Yellow Butterfly Flying to the South’s (Ch.
Huangdie nantian) butoh performance Body-Vessel of the Priestess (Ch. Zhugao zhi qi, 2011).1 The
tent perched on the hillside of Losheng Sanatorium, a leper colony in the Xinzhuang district of
New Taipei City, on the west fringe of Taipei, Taiwan. The live beating of cymbals, gongs, and
drums before the curtain recalled the atmosphere of traditional temple festivities of this region.
The curtain rose, and the warm, cheerful din was swept away by a dark, deathly chill. Seven
bodies powdered in white dangled upside down from a large net made of thick ropes hung over
the entire stage. Their hair, also powdered white, spread out like dry grass. The sound of a wild
thunderstorm came from the P.A. system, while the actual night wind continued to blow. A
feeble shriek or two sounded from among the bodies, and they slowly lifted themselves up, and
splayed back down, and up, and down. They wriggled through the ropes onto the stage floor,
collapsed, struggled to get up, did backbends and stayed there, tripped, fell, and got up again,
trembling. I later learned that this opening section is entitled “The Grand Catch of Fish” (Ch.
Da yu huo). It imagines the lost bodies from tsunami-hit Fukushima on March 11, 2011, drift-
ing across the ocean to the shore of the Losheng Sanatorium, to the tent stage pitched beside
the memorial pagoda that houses the ashes of those who have passed away in Losheng since its
founding in 1930.
Semiotic contradictions abound. Mourning and festivity coexist. These are characteristics of
Yellow Butterfly’s butoh, founded in Taiwan by Japanese butoh artist Hata Kanoko and fellow
Taiwanese experimental artists in 2005. Having based her butoh activities in Taiwan since 2001,
Hata Kanoko conceived her praxis as “butoh action” (Ch. wuta xingdong), which seeks to marry
butoh and social engagement. In recent years, her “butoh action” has centered on a sustained
engagement with the residents of Losheng and their protest against being forcibly moved by the
city government for the construction of a new Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) station and train depot.
Body-Vessel of the Priestess was the third butoh performance at Losheng.
Body-Vessel was also the first time the performance went “abroad:” it was brought “back” to
Japan, performing in Hiroshima on August 6 and 7, 2011, the anniversary of the A-bomb explo-
sion with which the United States ended the Pacific War. Mirroring the explicit engagement
371
Chiayi Seetoo
with contemporaneous issues and mourning across national borders, Yellow Butterfly attempted
to bring their production physically across space and place. Although the association of butoh
with Hiroshima and the A-bomb is a myth to be continually debunked,2 Hata Kanoko con-
sciously tapped into it. The fear and stigma attached to the memory of nuclear radiation in
Hiroshima – and those contaminated by it – was brought alive and then anxiously dispelled in
the recent crisis of nuclear radiation leakage from Fukushima’s tsunami-struck power plant. Hata
Kanoko scheduled the site-specific performance in Losheng long before the tsunami happened.
As the new crisis arose, she folded her later concern into the existing one by letting one filter the
other, letting two groups of audiences experience this mutual filtering.
In this essay, I introduce Yellow Butterfly’s “butoh action” that fosters the potential for an
alternative inter-Asian transnationalism. Carrying the legacy of Japanese postwar avant-garde
performance, Hata Kanoko’s butoh politics and its critique of modernity comes up against the
legacy of Japanese colonialism in Taiwan. As Losheng’s establishment and segregationist approach
to patients of Hansen’s disease were the policy of the Japanese colonial government, the forced
movement due to urban development is a reincarnation of state violence toward the socially
marginalized and abjected internal Other. In what follows, I trace Hata Kanoko’s transnational
journey and the aspects of regional history suppressed by dominant geopolitical discourse. I then
discuss Hata Kanoko’s butoh aesthetics and the kind of transnationalism being generated.
Transnational journey and “butoh action”

Born in 1964 on Rishiri Island, Hokkaido, Japan, Hata Kanoko began studying butoh in 1988
with Kuritaro (b. 1952), who is in the lineage of Hijikata Tatsumi’s students based in Otaru,
Hokkaido. In the 1990s, in addition to dancing with Kuritaro, she started creating her own butoh
performances and forming butoh groups with fellow artists. The turning point was her three-
month attendance at the third annual Cry of Asia festival in Manila, Philippines, in 1998. Held
by the Asian Council for People’s Culture, formed in the Philippines in 1985, Cry of Asia invites
performers and directors in the Asia-Pacific region to collaborate on creative works and give
workshops and presentations to local communities. It was also at Cry of Asia that Hata Kanoko
met Taiwanese artists Chung Chiao and Li Wei, who later invited her to Taiwan to give butoh
workshops. She furthermore encountered the people living in Smoky Mountain, a gigantic rub-
bish dump on the outskirts of Manila, who survive by scavenging recyclable materials for meager
compensation. Teaching a butoh workshop for the mothers of Smoky Mountain, Hata Kanoko
started to question her own butoh practice:
I came to this country (the Philippines), and I saw the cruelest living circumstances; I
saw the images of the mothers with their babies on their backs, begging amid the thick
emission of cars upon which one can barely open one’s eyes; and the kids who collect
stuff for sale from the rubbish dump, who have nowhere to retreat, nothing to rely
on, but make every effort to survive. In there, I saw “the other butoh” that I need to
compete with. The butoh I am striving for should be comparable to, and have the same
glow as, the “butoh on the street” that keeps flowing from the reality of everyday life.
Lin 2009c, 76
After this experience, Hata Kanoko reconceived her butoh as an “action” that sees no boundary
between “art” and “life,” and since then has called her style of “butoh action.”
Hata Kanoko’s butoh has evolved from creating and performing as she had been doing
in Japan, to developing themes and methods deriving from her experience in Taiwan. In 1999,
372
Death rituals and survival acts
Hata Kanoko came to Taipei and taught a butoh workshop, presenting The Dimensions of Worms
(Ch. Chong de cun fa) with Taiwanese workshop participants and musicians and poets from Japan.
Later, she presented the classical Japanese literature-inspired The Princess Who Loves Worms (Ch.
Ku ai chong de gongzhu). It was created with her butoh group El Jardin de Cuerpo and premiered
in Sapporo, Hokkaido, before being presented in Kyoto and Taipei.3 She decided to stay in Taiwan
in 2001, settling in the Shenkeng district of what is now New Taipei City. In 2002, she presented
the work The Pure Land of Collage (Ch. Pinzhuang jing tu) in Taipei, the first piece she created
after settling in Taiwan. This was the start of Hata Kanoko’s exploration of the “Taiwanese body”
through butoh (Lin 2009c, 76). The “Taiwanese body,” as she explored in this piece, is one of
pinzhuang or assemblage in collage, which not only reflects the hybrid nature of Taiwan’s culture
but also is seen in the creative and improvisational spirit of assembling materials from everyday
life such as the makeshift (and often illegal) housing made by many of the less well-off. It is “like
a body that keeps expanding in the same way housing built in atypical situations is assembled
and linked together one after another, or, like a body that does not have a center, growing and
spreading out endlessly like weeds” (Lin 2009c, 76–77). In 2003 she presented Hell of the Eye
(Ch. Mu zhi yu), a performance that came out of her workshop with Body Phase Studio (Ch.
Xin baodao shizhangzhe yituan), a theater troupe of blind performers formed in 2002. In 2005,
she formed the first butoh troupe in Taiwan, Yellow Butterfly Flying to the South Butoh Troupe
(Ch. Huangdie nantian/ Kocyonanten wuta tuan). Their first work, King of Moments (Ch. Shunjian
zhiwang), was danced by Hata Kanoko and two Taiwanese dancers, Li Wei and Li Pei-chi, in
Taipei, Tainan, and Kaohsiung (Pei-chi is a blind dancer from Hata Kanoko’s previous collabora-
tions). Yellow Butterfly maintains a fluid membership and performers vary in each production.
The legacy of Losheng Sanatorium and the protest movement

In 2005, Hata Kanoko began to participate in the Losheng movement, which lent a more dis-
tinct and sustained cause to her “butoh action.” The legacy of Losheng Sanatorium traces the
historical relationship between Taiwan and Japan and the lasting biopolitical violence in the
name of modern hygiene, and later urban development. Because Losheng harbors this history of
oppression under colonial legacy in addition to the present-day development ethos, Hata Kanoko
was inspired to reflect on the ideology and effects of modernity and Japanese imperialism, which
further informed her butoh praxis.
Established in 1930, Losheng yuan (“Losheng” literally means “Happy Life”) was founded
under Japanese colonial rule of Taiwan (1895–1945). In 1934, the Japanese government imple-
mented a Leprosy Prevention Law in Taiwan that sanctioned the government’s segregation and
even arrest of those infected with the disease. The segregationist approach taken by the Japanese
government followed the lead of other nations at the time. What fueled these stringent measures
of quarantine and even extermination of leprosy (patients were treated with sterilization and
abortion, even though the disease is not genetic) was in part the ideology of maintaining the
status of a modern, civilized nation. Contemporary discourses at the time frequently deemed
the existence of leprosy “uncivilized.” The first director of Losheng yuan, Kamikawa Yutaka
called the high number of leprosy patients in Japan (including its colonies) a “national shame,”
compared to other “civilized” nations where leprosy was almost nonexistent. It was all the more
intolerable because Japan had made impressive progress since the Meiji Reforms of the 1860s to
become one of the three most powerful nations in the world (W. Chen 2001, 30–31).
After World War II, the Chinese Nationalist government, which took over the governance of
Taiwan, continued the Japanese segregation policy until 1962. Although the law regarding seg-
regation was eventually lifted, social discrimination persisted and it was difficult for the patients
373
Chiayi Seetoo
to re-assimilate into mainstream society. Many of Losheng’s patients in fact had come to rely on
the sanatorium for the specialized medical care it could provide and chose to stay in what they
regarded as their “home.” They were free to go outside for needs and errands but still endured
stigmatization and discrimination. It was not until the 1990s that Losheng stopped taking new
patients.4
While the words “segregation” and “sanatorium” conjure images of cold isolation in a closed
institution, the current environment of Losheng is actually quite the opposite. The leper colony
stretches up a hill to form a vast green campus where the residents can move around in the open
air. Over the years, they have cultivated their own yards, grown plants, formed supportive neigh-
borhoods, and built a sense of community in the traditional ground-level housing that combines
Japanese and Taiwanese architectural styles.
Whereas Losheng was surrounded by farmland at the remote fringe of Taipei at its inception,
the expansion of the Taipei metropolis has brought growing commerce and population to the
area, increasing the demand for new, fast public transportation. In 1994, Losheng was chosen as
the site for a new MRT station and train maintenance depot. The residents were neither formally
informed nor consulted. In fact, from an engineering perspective, Losheng is poorly sited for
such facilities, as the vast hill on which it was built would need to be flattened to make way for
the maintenance depot. In 2002, construction began, forcing a large group of residents to be
moved hastily and stay in temporary housing for over two years. The issue attracted the attention
of various human rights groups, students, scholars, and architects in 2003, and they began to
petition for preservation of the site or an alternative construction plan. The residents of Losheng
also formed their own organization to protest against the forced relocation. Many street demon-
strations took place and artists like Hata Kanoko staged performances to support the movement.5
In September 2005, Hata Kanoko presented a solo performance as part of the artist-initiated series
of performances in Losheng Sanatorium to support its residents’ protest movement.6 In 2006,
Hata Kanoko presented her first evening-length butoh performance in Losheng, The Beauty of
Nature (Ch. Tianran zhi mei ), followed by Fleur du Mal (Ch. E zhi hua) in 2010, Body-Vessel of the
Priestess in 2011, A Ghost Festival March to the Underworld and Back (Ch. Losheng zhongyuan ji ) in
2013, and Ghost Circus (Ch. Youling maxi tuan) in 2014.7 In 2015 and 2016, Hata Kanoko and
Yellow Butterfly extended their action to the Orchid Island off the southeast coast of Taiwan in
support of the anti-nuclear movement by performing Flying Fish Circus (Ch. Feiyu maxi tuan).8
Barrel Woman (Ch. Zun nü)

A live musician plays buoyant, jazzy tunes on the electric bass. Two men in hemp cloaks (follow-
ing Taiwanese funeral customs) carry a big wooden barrel onto the stage, leave it at the center, and
go offstage. One hand slowly reaches out of the barrel; the palm swims in the air, wiggling like a
fish. Suddenly, the fingers curl up and freeze – the fish has turned into a claw. Then the “barrel
woman” stands up from inside the barrel. First, she lifts her clothes to cover her face and shows
her belly, its flesh shaking as if she were doing some kind of titillating belly dancing. Then she
jumps onto the rim of the barrel, squatting and protruding her buttocks (wearing only a white
thong) toward the audience. She stretches her legs sideways and switches between stretching out
and folding in her legs. Then she climbs up to stand on the rim of the barrel, doing all kinds of
contorted, whimsical, and often shaky moves, like balancing on one foot and making faces that
look like she is laughing and crying at the same time – as if she is ridiculing the world around
her but also deeply lost in her own world.
374
Figure 38.1 Hata Kanoko as “Barrel Woman” (Zunnü 樽女) in Body-Vessel of the Priestess (Zhugao zhiqi
祝告之器, 2011), photograph by You-Wei Chen.
Body-Vessel of the Priestess, the third performance Hata Kanoko staged in Losheng, importantly
articulates her approach to her butoh body. Her intent is to recall the history and entities (the
past lives) invisible (or forgotten) to the living, and to demonstrate the paradox of death rituals as
survival acts through an absurd mixture of Japanese and Taiwanese folk practices (an interest she
continues to elaborate in later works). The compound phrase zhugao 祝告 refers to ancient desig-
nations for “priest(ess).” Qi 器 means “vessel” or “container,” invoked to suggest the kind of body
Hata Kanoko’s butoh is working toward. To her, the butoh dancer’s body should be empty like a
vessel or even a “corpse” to allow other substances to fill it – in this case to allow “dead spirits”
to “possess” the body. In particular, Hata Kanoko draws from the ancient priestess (miko) in the
Japanese tradition in reflection on her own female corporeality (Hata Kanoko 2011; Yu 2011).9
This concept of body as an empty vessel for the dead also harbors a historical-political con-
sciousness of transnational dimension. Body-Vessel continues the idea in her previous works in
creating a temple festival that pays tribute to the dead. In Fleur du Mal, the dead range from all
the Losheng residents who have passed away over the years and their protest movement to the
long dead, unknown fighters in the historic conflict between Okinawa and Taiwan that connects
to Japan’s imperialist history. In Body-Vessel, the “festival” pays tribute to the Losheng patients of
different nationalities, Taiwanese, Chinese mainlanders, Korean, Japanese, and Okinawans who
passed away during the Japanese occupation and who no one commemorates, as well as the
Fukushima residents who died in the 2011 tsunami.
Actions drawn from Japanese and Taiwanese death rituals, temple festivals, and funeral
practices appear throughout Body-Vessel. The “barrel” (a container) out of which the “Barrel
Woman” (Hata Kanoko) crawls makes reference to a past practice in rural Japan where old peo-
ple kept themselves in large barrels (like coffins) while they starved to death in order to enable
younger villagers to survive on limited food. Moreover, some Koreans in Losheng were buried
with Japanese rituals against their will (Seetoo 2011b). In the episode “Bamboo and Sparrow”
(Ch. Zhu yu que), dancer Hsu Ya-hung performs a precarious balancing act on a thick piece of
375
Chiayi Seetoo
bamboo hung in midair above the stage in the tradition of Japanese geino (entertainment), as seen
in old-fashioned circus and temple festivals. Without a balancing rod, Hsu slowly walks back and
forth between the two ends of the bamboo, trembling, performing tricks, her body powdered all
white, her face dead-smiling. The background music first plays an old Taiwanese song, “Flower
in a Rainy Night” (Ch. Yu ye hua); the sorrowful tune laments a disheartened woman who is like
“a flower beaten down by the rain but that no one sees.” Later, the music changes to an old Man-
darin song, “The Story of the Small Town” (Ch. Xiaocheng gushi); the sweet female voice praises
the goodness of the small town, inviting outsiders to be its guests and make a visit.10 According
to Hsu, who has long been involved in the Losheng movement, the two songs are favorites of
the senior residents.
The section “Filial Daughters” (Ch. Xiaonü) features two female dancers performing a kind of
pole dancing that draws on a Taiwanese funeral practice. In many Han Chinese funeral customs
in Taiwan, people hire “filial daughters” to perform crying, often in hyperbolic fashion, as a way
to display the filial piety of the children of those passed away. It has also been a custom in Tai-
wan to hire pole dancers to “entertain” the dead and those attending the funeral. Hata Kanoko
incorporated pole dancing in her butoh after coming to Taiwan. She is attracted by its alignment
with her persistent concern for survival, particularly the affinity to her own existence as a female
performer. She makes reference to the history of some female butoh dancers, including Hijikata’s
dancers, performing at strip clubs as a way to make a living.11 Thus, Hata Kanoko is tapping into
desperate means of survival as sometimes the only option for females caught within the economy
of patriarchal consumption. The pole dancing Hata Kanoko adopts from Taiwanese customs
embodies the tripartite terms of survival, female corporeality, and spectacle of the death ritual. It
is a spectacular act particular to the melancholy and absurdity of specific female experiences at
the liminal site between life and death.
Beyond Hijikata towards alternative inter-Asian transnationalism

Some of the Losheng residents stated that seeing the tightly curled hands and contorted posture
that Hata Kanoko performs onstage made them think of their own infected bodies and pain
(Seetoo 2011a). In conceiving his butoh, Hijikata Tatsumi had sought inspiration from the states
of the “Other” of modernity – Japanese rural farmers, the landscape and atmosphere of Tohoku,
pre-modern folk practices, the children, the women, the disabled, the aged, etc.12 While Hata
Kanoko’s butoh inherits the discourse, politics, and performance of butoh’s critique of modernity –
most strongly from Hijikata – she also moves from experimenting with her own bodily states and
appearances to actual engagement with the social. Her method is to directly confront the struggles
in real life (Seetoo 2011b).
In Yellow Butterfly’s works, Japanese allusions and visual aesthetics are blended with Taiwan-
ese references and practices, which are further refracted through the use of butoh’s irony, humor,
darkness, contradictions, and metamorphosis. While they echo characteristics of transnational
migratory practices and aesthetic expressions, what distinguishes Hata Kanoko from most Euro-
pean and North American based discussions of migrant transnationalism is that as a solo butoh
artist from Japan, she represents not so much a migrant community negotiating with inclusion/
exclusion in the receiving country as an individual tapping into and invigorating a regional trans-
national network of experimental theater artists who share her concerns for social justice. Moreo-
ver, the direct confrontation with the struggles of real life with which Hata Kanoko distinguishes
herself from Hijikata’s butoh developed when she moved outside of Japan. This movement, too,
traces a certain regional legacy while fostering new praxis. Lin Yu-Pin has pointed out that the
post-Meiji interest in and movement back towards “Asia” as exemplified by postwar Japanese
376
avant-garde artists such as Kara Juro and Situation Theater (Jp. Jokyo Gekijo), and Osuka Isamu
and the butoh troupe Byakkosha shares similar concerns with Hijikata’s interest in “Tohoku,”
that is as a geographical projection as a strategy of critiquing Japanese modernity.13 In part, Hata
Kanoko’s move outside of Japan to the Philippines and then Taiwan can be understood in light
of this legacy of spatial and aesthetic movement “from the center to the margin,” from Tokyo to
other cities of Japan, and from Japan to Asia (Lin 2009c, 74–76). However, with her decade-long
residency in Taiwan and engagement with local politics, working and interacting with a network
of Taiwanese experimental theater artists and presenting works to Taiwanese audiences, Hata
Kanoko has forged her own trajectory of transnational engagement.
Hata Kanoko and Yellow Butterfly’s involvement with the Losheng movement became a
flashpoint where lines of transnational concerns intersected and sparked reflections on heretofore
under-investigated historical questions and relationships. The postwar permutation of modernist
biopolitical violence since Japanese colonialism was brought to the public attention with the
recent protest movement incited by the present-day MRT construction schemes. Hata Kanoko’s
involvement heralds another self-reflexive force that penetrates Losheng’s historical legacy and
its accompanying postcolonial entanglements, as well as their historical and contemporary ech-
oes and ramifications across wider geopolitical spheres. After Body-Vessel had physically traveled
“back” to Hiroshima for two more performances, Hata Kanoko and a few fellow artists went
further to join the tent theater performance led by Japanese director Sakurai Daizo in Fukushima
in September that year. All these actions operate outside of state and corporate frameworks; it
is a self-marginalizing position that the artists consciously inhabit in order to critique the state
and capitalism.14 Significantly, far from posing herself as a “superior” foreigner who comes in to
engage in political advocacy for the locals and appropriate local cultures, Hata Kanoko positions
herself as a fellow grassroots street artist performing for survival and exchange. Her butoh actions
are accompanied by her rigorous, self-reflexive critique of Japanese imperialism clearly articu-
lated in her statements, as well as her humble demeanor and capability to directly communicate
with her Taiwanese collaborators and audiences in Mandarin without a translator. In short, it is
as much about the work and the politics as the mode of action and interaction, its felt affect. In
this way, lines of contemporaneous concerns are stretched across space through a fluid linkage and
expansion of “minor” transnational resistive art praxes, breeding the potentials for an alternative
inter-Asian transnationalism, in quiet but persistent action.15
Notes
1 As Hata Kanoko worked in Taiwan, the performance titles and statements were presented in Chinese
language (which share some written characters, or kanji, with Japanese) through assistance from Japa-
nese-Chinese translators. In this chapter, I translate these texts from Chinese to English, with Roman-
ization according to their Mandarin pronunciation in the parentheses. A couple of phrases, though,
are spelled according to their Japanese or Taiwanese pronunciations, which readers should be able to
identify in the context.
2 Kurihara Nanako has pointed out how butoh has been erroneously essentialized and stereotyped (as
“Japanese,” “Eastern,” or “Zen Buddhist”), including being associated directly with the U.S. nuclear
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, particularly by American critics (Kurihara 2000). Another image
that may be attributed to this association is that of Ōsuka Isamu of Byakko-sha, who talked about his
mother’s experience during the bombing in Hiroshima, and whose left arm is atrophic because she was
pregnant with him when the atom bomb dropped. In Navel and A-bomb (Jp. Heso to genbaku 1960), an
experimental film made by photographer Hosoe Eikoh, Hijikata Tatsumi and other dancers are juxta-
posed with an image of an A-bomb.
3 The Spanish is used here to suggest a yearning for the revolutions in Latin American as in Chile, Argen-
tina, Cuba, etc., as Hata Kanoko worked in political movements that critique the state and institutions
in Japan (Hata Kanoko 2016).
377
Chiayi Seetoo
4 The segregation policy in Japan lasted until 1996 and was halted only because of the protests of Japanese
patients, who eventually won state compensation in 2001; Taiwanese patients who had been forced into
segregation during the Japanese occupation won the same compensation from Japan in 2005.
5 The Losheng protest movement still goes on today, as the demands of the protesting residents still have
not been met. After much negotiation, compromise, and a brutal police eviction of residents (many are
in their eighties and unable to walk well), the Executive Yuan’s Public Construction Commission final-
ized a plan in May 2007 that would preserve about 30 percent of the original residential area and build
additional housing elsewhere on the campus after construction of the depot was completed. However,
the residents face new dangers as the MRT construction continues, leveling a vast section of the hill and
showing signs of possible landslide that would affect the entire residential area. At present, the MRT con-
struction is still going on, and the remaining protesting residents and activists continue to work towards
preserving the site in entirety, mainly for its historical value and significance. They continue to negotiate
for an alternative construction plan and petition for officially designating Losheng as a “historical site.”
They are also working on collecting oral history and artifacts to create a museum.
6 A group of experimental theater artists who supported the protest movement of Losheng residents
independently staged “Music, Life, and Under the Tree 925 Action” (Ch. Yinyue, shengming, dashuxia
925 xingdong) in Losheng Sanatorium in September 2005.
7 For a study of Hata Kanoko’s dance works in Taiwan from 1998 to 2010, see Chen Yi-Chun’s thesis
(Y. Chen 2010).
8 Orchid Island has been the site for depositing nuclear waste from Taiwan’s nuclear power plants since
1982. The Fukushima nuclear disaster spurred the anti-nuclear movement in Taiwan in recent years.
9 In her performance statement, Hata Kanoko wrote: “‘Zhugao zhiqi’ is a symbolic phrase. It refers to
the body of the priestess and the dancer who is being possessed by the dead. The reason I search for
the body of the priestess is that ‘the look of the dead may not be just what we have seen. By exploring
this possibility, we can not only conduct dialogues with the dead but also bring the dialogues into the
future.’ Let the will of the dead lodge in the body, and let the body of the living turn into the ‘body/
corpse’ (Ch. yiti) of the dead. People can keep this ‘body/corpse’ alive, and as such, the body can become
the vessel for the living and the dead to make exchanges. This is not some Tale of the Arabian Nights.
Everyone carries a ‘body/corpse’ with them from when they were born.” In fact, the discourse of butoh
is imbued with the idea of contacting the spirits of the dead. Hijikata Tatsumi claimed his dead sister
lived inside him; Ohno Kazuo made a work commemorating his mother who had passed away in My
Mother (Jp. Watashi no okaasan 1981). Ohno also expounded the idea of the “dead body” into which the
dancer places an emotion that can freely express itself, reveal the “form of the soul,” and dances freely –
intending to revert to the original memory of the body and discover the soul stifled within (Viala and
Masson-Sekine 1988). For Hata Kanoko, it was in reflecting upon her own female corporeality that she
started thinking about the body of the priestess.
10 Both songs have rich and specific histories and gendered connotations in cultural and political
memory that may be relevant to the reading of the dance for Taiwanese audiences. “Flower in a
Rainy Night” was originally a children’s song whose music was composed during the Japanese
colonial era by Taiwanese song writer Deng Yuxian. The lyrics were later rewritten to portray the
sorrows of a heartbroken woman based on the story of a hostess in a wine bar in Taipei, who came
from the countryside and who was deserted by her boyfriend. The new song was circulated back
to Japan, and during the war it was recreated to become a patriotic military song that served to
encourage Taiwanese soldiers in support of Japanese military invasions. “The Story of the Small
Town,” sung by the famous Taiwanese popular singer Teresa Teng (Deng Lijun 1953–1995), came
out in 1979 as the theme song for the film of the same title directed by Li Hsing in the tradition of
Healthy Realism. In the film, a young man studies the craft of wood sculpting in the small town of
San Yi (known for wood sculptures) and falls in love with the master’s deaf mute daughter, who is
talented and good hearted.
11 Hijikata’s dancers also worked as cabaret dancers in the evenings as a way to finance his “art” dances.
Economic needs aside, cabaret dancing is also a way of generating a sense of detachment from the
body for the dancers, an experience of objectifying the body to realize the “dead body” on stage.
However, Paul Roquet has questioned the possible exploitative nature in this practice (Roquet 2003,
66–70).
12 In his 1972 piece Story of Smallpox (Jp. Hosotan), for example, he danced in a weak body, in continuous
inward contraction, by fasting and assimilating the deformed states of leprosy patients, as critic Goda
Nario notes (Lin 2009a, 34).
378
13 In 1967, the Situation Theater (Jokyo Gekijo), led by Kara Juro, began to tour in different cities of
Japan by performing in a temporarily pitched tent in public spaces; in the 1970s, they traveled abroad
to perform guerilla-style in other Asian and Middle Eastern cities: Seoul, South Korea (1972), Dhaka,
Bangladesh (1973), and the refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan amid the wars (1974). In 1980,
Osuka Isamu founded the butoh troupe Byakkosha with the aim of “exploring the relevance of Japan to
South East Asia,” embarking on a series of performances in Java and Bali, Indonesia, the Philippines, and
Taiwan. Such a “movement from the center to the margin” (from the Japanese perspective) concerns
physical space as well as theater aesthetics (Lin 2009c, 74–75).
14 Sakurai Daizo works as a director of Tent Theater in the legacy of postwar Japanese avant-garde
theater movement. He also met the same group of Taiwanese artists in the Philippines in 1994 and
had worked with them since, producing Tent Theater works in Taiwan and formed a Tent Theater
troupe Haibizi in Taipei in 2002. Later, it was renamed “Taiwan Haibizi” and solely run by Taiwan-
ese artists. Hata Kanoko and members of Taiwan Haibizi are both involved in Losheng movement
and each other’s projects. They collectively contribute to the labor of each production, from pitching
the tent, cooking, and making costumes and sets, to performance. Ticket sales is their only source
of income; for Yellow Butterfly’s performances staged in Losheng, they were reframed into a “gift
economy” in which audiences put money in red envelopes, or patrons’ names were written on red
strips of paper upon receipt of money and hung around the reception table as a gesture of thanks for
the contributions. Hata Kanoko considers the practice in concert with the humility of folk artists
who perform to make a living, to get “rice and vegetables,” also a kind of “direct” exchange that is
much different from the commodification of theater nowadays. The fluid network of transnational
artists mentioned in this essay mainly refers to those associated with Yellow Butterfly, Taiwan Haibizi,
Sakurai Daizo’s Japanese tent theater troupe, and the tent theater associates in Beijing (as Sakurai has
set foot in Beijing, working with the migrant workers there in recent years). In 2016, Taiwan Haibizi
was renamed again as “Haibizi TENT 16–18” to mark a timeframe of their current project. Lin
Yu-Pin traced the historical development of tent theatre in Japan (most notably Kara Juro’s Red Tent
since 1967), as well as Sakurai’s involvement in and departure from it (Lin 2009b). For a reference to
Taiwan Haibizi/Haibizi TENT 16–18, see http://taiwanhaibizi.pixnet.net/blog (Accessed August
28, 2016).
15 Hata Kanoko moved back to Tokyo from Taiwan in 2010. In 2013, she moved again from Tokyo to
Ryukyu and has since lived there. She continues the transnational actions with the fellow artists, as dis-
cussed in this chapter.
Works cited
Chen, Wei-Bin. 2001. “Jindai taiwan de laibing yu liaoyang: yi losheng liaoyangyuan wei zhuzhou”
(Hansen’s Disease and Its Treatment in Modern Taiwan: Using Losheng Sanatorium as a Main Thread).
M.A. Thesis, National Tsing Hua University.
Chen, Yi-Chun. 2010. “Feiqian nanguo de huangse hudie: riben wutajia qin kanoko laitai chuangzuo
shinian yanjiu” (The Yellow Butterfly Flying to the South: Japanese Female Dancer-Choreographer
Hata Kanoko, Her Works, and the First Butoh Company in Taiwan). M.A. Thesis, Taipei National
University of the Arts.
Hata Kanoko. 2011. “Zhugao zhiqi chuangzuo zishu” (Performance Statement to Body-Vessel of the Priestess).
———. 2016. Email with the author, December 30.
Kurihara, Nanako. 2000. “Hijikata Tatsumi: The Words of Butoh.” TDR: The Drama Review 44 (1): 12–28.
Lin, Yu-Pin. 2009a. “‘Foudingxing de shenti’: tufangxun yu ribenren” (‘Body of Negativity’: Hijikata Tat-
sumi and the Japanese). In Riben zhanhou xiaojuchang yundong dangzhong de shenti yu kongjian (The Body
and Space in Postwar Japanese Experimental Theater), 23–40. Taipei: TNUA Little and Limited Publishing.
———. 2009b. “Wangling ningshi de kongjian: yingjing dazao yu taiwan zhangpeng xiju” (The Space in
the Gaze of the Dead Spirits: Sakurai Daizo and the Tent Theater in Taiwan). In Riben zhanhou xiaoju-
chang yundong dangzhong de shenti yu kongjian (The Body and Space in Postwar Japanese Experimental Theater),
113–174. Taipei: TNUA Little and Limited Publishing.
———. 2009c. “Yi ‘yazhou’ zuowei fangfa de wuta: qin kanoko yu taiwan” (The Butoh That Uses ‘Asia’
as Method: Hata Kanoko and Taiwan). In Riben Zhanhou Xiaojuchang Yundong Dangzhong de Shenti Yu
Kongjian (The Body and Space in Postwar Japanese Experimental Theater), 61–82. Taipei: TNUA Little and
Limited Publishing.
379
Chiayi Seetoo
Roquet, Paul. 2003. Towards the Bowels of the Earth: Butoh Writhing in Perspectives. Davis, CA: Palupalu
Publishing.
Seetoo, Chiayi. 2011a. “Field Notes, July 4, 2011.”
———. 2011b. “Field Notes, July 28, 2011.”
Viala, Jean and Nourit Masson-Sekine. 1988. Butoh: Shades of Darkness. Tokyo: Shufunotomo.
Yu, Yi-Jen. 2011. “E zhi hua: qin kanoko wuta de esuo meixue” (The Flowers of ‘Akusho’: Japanese Butoh
Dancer-Choreographer Hata Kanoko’s ‘Akusho’ Aesthetics). M.A. Thesis, National Taiwan University.
380
39
WHEN THE “REVOLT OF
THE FLESH” BECOMES
POLITICAL PROTEST
The nomadic tactics of
butoh-inspired interventions
Carla Melo
My dance . . . flaunts its aimlessness in the face of a product-oriented society. In this sense
my dance . . . can naturally be a protest against the ‘alienation of labor’ in a capitalist society. . . .
Human remodeling will be accomplished only by getting involved with a dreaming lethal
weapon that has long ignored the poverty of politics.
– Hijikata Tatsumi
In this excerpt from an essay titled “To Prison,” Hijikata Tatsumi, in usual contradictory fashion,
managed to dissociate the notion of protest from a goal-oriented event, only to propose (a few
pages later) that he aimed at nothing less than a “remodeling” of the human – a transformation
which was to be enacted through a violently surreal tactic that rejected politics-as-usual. Could
this ambivalence, expressed by none other than the founder of butoh, be the reason why a well-
known Japanese butoh artist begged my former performance ensemble to “please” not use butoh
for “political purposes”?
Butoh has always been political. From its inception, in the midst of Japan’s postwar identity
crisis and political turmoil, to its myriad mutations across cultural and national borders, butoh has
developed as a plural and elusive mode of performance. Yet, in spite of butoh’s resistance to being
defined and codified, the only element that seems to connect the wide range of manifestations
under its globalized “umbrella” is a deconstruction of the codes inscribed upon the body. Clearly,
as the body becomes a site of transgression, it performs “political-ness” – even in butoh’s most
abstract or seemingly hermetic permutations.
In the last thirteen years as a butoh artist, I have been particularly interested in the exploration
of a kind of butoh that takes the space of agitprop while subverting its tactics, that is, I have been
moved by a desire to make the inherent political-ness of butoh more explicit, while attempting to
retain its potential depth and ambiguity. In this sense, my praxis has been focused on mobilizing
butoh as a mode of protest – on occupying public space to stage direct references to broader
political manifestations, while disturbing the coherent narratives of the movements behind them.
381
Carla Melo
It is important to note that what I am calling “my praxis” is a “butoh-inspired” exploration

that has developed out of a dialogical relation between my own hybrid reinterpretation of the
mode1 and the ways that a diverse and interdisciplinary group of collaborators heterogeneously
processed what butoh meant for them. As a collaborative act of ethical cultural appropriation and
re-imagining, this dialogue eventually produced a very specific aesthetic and politics that made
the performances of Corpus Delicti (2003–2008) known in a number of Los Angeles commu-
nities. Since co-founding and co-directing this ensemble, I have continued my butoh exploration
as a deviser of ad-hoc groups and as a solo performer in other sites across the Americas, including
São Paulo (Brazil), Montreal, Toronto (Canada), and Santiago (Chile).
In this chapter, I will briefly elaborate on the activist potential of butoh through analyses of urban
interventions performed in Los Angeles and Brazil. These reflections are guided by the same key
questions that have continuously instigated my butoh praxis: Could the polymorphous and polysemic
“dead body” of butoh – often described as a philosophy and process centered on “being” as opposed
to “doing” – be used for addressing specific political issues without losing its signifying power? Could
the metamorphic and porous butoh-body engage in political representation, since the last often relies
on fixed positionalities? Is there a history of mobilizing butoh for “political purposes”?
Tracing a genealogy of this phenomenon is a difficult task; the archive on such praxis is quite
scarce. In spite of the plurality of approaches to this radical art form, its performances largely
appear rather concerned with liberation at the level of self – their political power seems to lie
within butoh’s aspiration towards a psychophysical rebellion. That does not mean that butoh
rejects referents to broader social concerns. Hijikata himself deliberately referenced taboo topics
through the embodiment of marginal identities (1961, 44–48). Although explicit alignment with
political causes is rare, it tends to fall along a spectrum that ranges from independent guerrilla
actions2 to site specific performances that memorialize the dead,3 to butoh actions that sympathize
with wider social causes, including animal rights,4 disease visibility,5 and anti-war movements.6
Corpus Delicti Butoh Performance Lab (www.corpusbutoh.org), an example of the last cate-
gory, was founded by myself and my “partner-in-crime,” Joe Talkington, as an ensemble focused
on creating butoh-inspired urban interventions as forms of silent protest to the then impending
occupation/war on Iraq. Moved by a desire to historicize that crisis, our goal was to contextualize
it within a long list of US military interventions, while establishing links between that post-9/11
moment and the postwar Japan in which butoh had developed – especially since, as John Berger
has suggested, the two events could be viewed as markers of both the launching of US global
dominance, and the beginning of its demise (2007, 44). In this sense, our appropriation of butoh
was, at once, a signifier of this historical contingency, a vehicle for public mourning, and a trope
for the human costs of war. Although our work’s strategies evolved considerably along our five-
year trajectory, our initial tactic was to employ the ghost-like aesthetics of butoh as a metaphor
for the invisible bodies anonymously buried in mass graves as a result of US interventions.
In a strategically utopian gesture we put out a call: “Join us in dance to stop the war!”
Although my idea was to create “moving mass graves” that would randomly appear on the streets
of Los Angeles, those who responded to our invitation voiced the desire to join the first anti-war
march that took place on February of 2003. And so, dressed in rags collected in the trash bins of
LA’s fashion district, nearly thirty of us took to the streets. When our slow moving white-painted
bodies obstructed the barricade of police officers on motorcycles pushing the end of the march
on Hollywood Boulevard, they threatened to run us over if we did not move faster. I turned,
faced them, and raised my arms, walking backwards, at the same pace. True to our “flocking”
technique, the group followed me. Then, the crowd on the sidewalks began to cheer us to “go
slower!” as a few hesitant spectators left their safe spots and stepped in between us and the cops,
in a gesture of protection and defiance. Instantly, the space of the march was modified: it was
382
Revolt of the f lesh as political protest
no longer solely created by a linear movement forward, but also by a flux between sidewalk and
street. Although we were, within minutes, forced to end the confrontation and give in to the
cops’ orders, some of the passersby even joined our “flock” as we left the march. We seemed
to have literally moved people into action; so had we just reproduced the agitprop tradition?
According to Jan Cohen-Cruz:
Agitprop is a militant form of art intended to emotionally and ideologically mobilize its
audience to take particular action vis-à-vis an urgent social situation [with] emblematic
costumes and props, character types familiar to the broad range of spectators . . . and an
ideological resonance with the public spaces where they are presented.
Cohen-Cruz 1998, 13
Even though that performative moment seemed to fit this definition, the mode of participant-
spectatorship that emerged was far from the intended. Besides, spectators seemed to be mobilized
less by persuasion than through witnessing our vulnerability and disobedience. Also, as our per-
formance stood in great contrast to the overload of words surrounding us, it evoked images that
though similar, still contained a subtle variety of meanings. LA Weekly dance critic Sara Wolf,
who was also a participant, ironically described some of the reactions:
From the moment we head out, our group – now grown to 24 – commands attention.
Tourists’ cameras flash along Hollywood Boulevard. Applause erupts. Drivers pull over
to ask who we are. True to our intention, we trudge mutely onward without answering.
People speculate out loud that we’re the walking dead. Others say we’re angels. Or the
victims of 9/11. The shadows of Nagasaki. Iraqis fleeing a bombed-out village.
Wolf 2003, 12–13
Figure 39.1 Corpus Delicti, street protest performance. Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA (February
15, 2003), photograph by Hamidah Glasgow.
383
Carla Melo
The coexistence of “victims of 9/11” with that of “Iraqis fleeing” demonstrated that the
polysemic power of butoh had not been lost in a space dominated by well-defined messages. In
fact, the organizers, who got upset with our apparent “lack of clarity” and asked us to focus on
positive and constructive alternatives instead of dwelling in the “darkness,” spelled out this desire.
Little did they know that our inspiration was in fact a “dance of darkness.”
Notwithstanding the excitement of this debut, we took our processional appearances to varied
neighborhoods throughout the city, as originally envisioned. As we acquired some visibility, we
began to receive invitations to present within art and theatrical spaces. With a regularity that
went from bi-weekly to monthly, we moved from commercial promenades to inner-city streets,
from beaches to cemeteries, from indie theatres to galleries and museums,7 from avant-garde
wings of orchestra halls8 to performance art venues.9 Our numbers averaged ten in any given per-
formance and the fluid core group, formed by six to eight members, included butoh performers,
dancers, designers, writers, visual artists, and musicians.
Except for devised choreographed pieces in theatrical venues, gallery and urban performances
were largely durational and based on structured improvisation. Our basic structure interspersed
“flocking” as “empty vessels” with wild, more theatrical improvisations instilled with loaded
actions that viscerally engaged with signifiers of that war. Deploying a make-shift aesthetic, some
of us crafted “bombs” made from small water bottles, “dead babies,” with paper mâché and
wearable “tanks” out of cardboard, etc. Some of the actions included: “vomiting oil,” “water-
boarding,” and “corn-starching,” which literally involved using corn-starch to “bomb,” “bury,” or
“bless” a fallen body. The action also referenced the police procedure of outlining the contours
of crime victims, so the traces of our presence on the asphalt evoked a “corpus delicti.”10
As our aesthetics expanded in theatricality, with costumes and props that explored ambigu-
ity and grotesque surreality,11 our fluid characters and installations sought to problematize the
binarism found in guerrilla genres. Our “Lady Liberty” was a good example of a character that
defied expectations, as a closer look at our version of the icon would reveal that her crown was
made out of syringes. Once, while embodying her, I broke away from the flocking and used
the image of “becoming a tree,” wishing to convey a breathing, statuesque presence. As people
gathered around me, I “became human” and, in jerky spasms, tried to inject myself without
taking off the crown and without using my hands. I carried this action for a few minutes, until
someone actually helped her. Yet, interaction was not always incidental and the work not always
dark. Certain pieces deployed a fair dosage of humor as a way to incite participation and critical
engagement with the issues evoked; for instance, in an art gallery performance/installation titled
“Guantanamo A-Go-Go,” spectators were lead to engage in a grotesque Karaoke that potentially
foregrounded their complicity with what they stood against.
I believe that our effective subversion of traditional guerrilla theatre relied on the combination
of our “nomadic” presence, polysemic aesthetics, and improvisational language. Although some
members of the group felt that performing within art institutions constituted “selling out,” I found
that this migration across sites of varying cultural capitals could be quite subversive. Not only did
it kept us from being labeled, it also allowed us to reach a wider public while disturbing the limits
between avant-garde and political performance traditions. I was particularly invested in probing the
notion that guerrilla performance had to be didactic and clear in order to be effective. I also wanted
to challenge the ways in which poor, racially marked subjects were generally perceived as less capable
of understanding more abstract artforms. Not surprisingly, the incidental audiences that our work
tended to engage the most were those who had been least exposed to “modern art” – a label heard
at higher income areas, seemingly functioning as an easy way to detach.
It was with a similar motivation and theatrical language that I’ve (co)created butoh-inspired
collective and solo performances elsewhere. One performance that captured the particular
384
challenges of using butoh as a form of protest was staged in 2013 in response to the forced
displacement of marginalized subjects from “Praça Roosevelt,” a famous São Paulo square. As a
result of gentrification policies to “revitalize” the downtown area, an exotic dance club had been
recently demolished, and sex workers, homeless people, and a farmers market had been evicted
from the site after many decades of friendly conviviality.
Along with an ad-hoc group of female performers,12 I staged a site-specific carnivalesque
piece in honor of those who could no longer work there. Embodying the absence of sex work-
ers, six performers, including myself, had our white-painted bodies minimally dressed in brightly
colored underwear and/or slips and our faces masked with extravagant and grotesque make up,
while two other performers referenced the fruit sellers in bright clothes and head scarfs. Color-
fulness was key to a piece inspired by carnival parades – an intervention that staged how two
groups of displaced and stigmatized bodies could only reclaim a place so central to their liveli-
hoods and identities when moving together. As “prostitutes” we began across the street from the
square with our bodies laid against a metal fence that covered up the ruins of the strip club. Each
of us had a photo of the ruins pinned to our clothing, so as we slowly stood up, lined up against
the metal fence, we created a surreal image: it was as if each body had a hole that revealed the
hidden ruins behind the fence. The image clearly performed a strong identification with the site.
Then, carrying a carnival banner that read “Praça Roosevelt United” (signaling a sense of
belonging), I lead an improvised reclaiming of the square through a combination of flocking
and what I call “organized chaos”: a choreography evoking the search for one’s place as part
of a collective and environment. I chose to reference a carnival’s tradition of parading-groups
gathered under the banner of a neighborhood to reinforce the association between place and
identity that forced displacement disregards. Besides, as Bakhtin has taught us, a suspension of
social hierarchies is inherent to carnival (1968, 89). In using a popular tradition that carves out
Figure 39.2 Alegria e Elegia: Unidos da Praça Roosevelt Pede Passagem. Group street performance directed by
Carla Melo, resulting from workshop she gave at the Hemispheric Encuentro of Performance & Politics:
Cities/Bodies/Action: The Politics of Passion in the Americas (Praça Roosevelt, São Paulo, January 2013),
photograph by Tānia Farias.
385
Carla Melo
temporary room for outcast subjects within public space, our goal was to lend agency to those
whose absence we sought to embody. Similarly to Corpus’ tactics, I did not intend the we
“represented the Other,” but rather, embodied its absence in the presence of our grief, confusion,
and complicity with capital-driven logics that [re]produced the Other’s oppression.
What became problematic in this performance were the ways in which the normativity of
the female bodies involved and the excessive femininity that the minimal costumes signaled,
could trigger a hyper-objectification, in other words: no amount of grotesque make-up could
keep those bodies immune to the gaze, which magnified the exoticizing danger that lurks around
butoh. This danger could have been mitigated with a longer period of development, through
which the characters’ vocabulary and costumes could have evolved in complexity and become
less susceptible to exoticism. Of course, the display of flesh was deliberate as it fit both the carnival
theme and the work of the characters. Yet, the act of reclaiming the prohibited site could have
used a greater dosage of transgression, perhaps by adding males in drag or non-binary gender
subjects. This said, given the minimal hours of rehearsal, the piece also revealed the “magic” that
can happen when a “collective body” made up of performers in a heightened state of openness
becomes a conduit for varying affects that flow in response to a cause, each other and the unpre-
dictable environment, to the point that seemingly choreographed moments emerge and disappear
amidst the chaos and vulnerability of not-knowing.
The urgency of certain causes, financial limits, and a philosophy of democratic access to butoh
as protest create ensembles of varying levels of training and understanding of its “trance-forma-
tive” potential. Nonetheless, these factors also allow protest-butoh to remain open to unknown
paths. It is precisely the goal of wandering “aimlessly” (to evoke Hijikata) that makes the butoh I
have co-developed with other artists, multi-dimensionally political. Butoh becomes protest when
its explicit politics dances in those liminal space between outrage at asymmetries of power and the
Foucauldian lesson that power is everywhere, between the abstract and the literal, the public and
the private, the individual and the collective. This is where (as feminists reminded us) not only is
the personal political but the political intensely [trans]personal. Some say, “the revolution starts
within.” Butoh-as-reinvention-of-guerrilla-theatre suggests that the limits between within and
without, between micro- and macropolitics may be that which halts revolutions at every level.
Notes
1 My praxis is also informed by my position as a Latina in North America.
2 A protest against art censorship in front of MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art, LA). See http://
esteeochoa.com/art-in-the-streets/.
3 Suzuki Ikko and Kawachi Kirara annual performance at a site that survived the 1945 bombing of Eastern
Tokyo (see Broinowski 167); Daisuke Yoshimoto’s tribute to the Armenia genocide. See www.wroclaw.
pl/en/wroclaw-for-armenia-in-commemoration-of-genocide-events.
4 Several butoh artists have performed within Greenpeace protests; another example is SU-EN’s The
Chicken Project: animal right’s related work, based on “living as a chicken” (see Crump, 62–63).
5 Vangeline theatre performed on the streets of New York along with a protest to bring visibility to Lyme
disease. See www.truth-out.org/news/item/25963.
6 Broinowski created solo anti-war performance/protests (see Broinowski 168–183).
7 Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
8 REDCAT: Walt Disney Hall, LA.
9 Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica.
10 Latin: “crime evidence.”
11 Thanks to the talents of Krystine Kryttre and Talkington; they crafted most props, sets and costumes.
12 Erica Ocegueda, Rosemary Candelario, Marta Haas, Mary Notari, Christina Baker, Laissa Rodriguez,
and Alejandra Jimenez.
386
Works cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1968) 2009. Rabelais and His World. (Hélène Iswolsky, Trans.) Bloomington: Indiana
University Press. (Original work published 1965)
Berger, John. 2007. Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. London: Verso.
Broinowski, Adam. 2016. Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan: The Performing Body During the Cold War
Era. London: Bloomsbury.
Cohen-Cruz, Jan. 1998. Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology. London: Routledge.
Crump, Juliette. 2006. “One Who Hears Their Cries: The Buddhist Ethic of Compassion in Japanese
Butoh.” Dance Research Journal 38 [1/2]: 61–73.
Hijikata, Tatsumi. (1961) 2000. “To Prison.” Drama Review 44 [1]: 43–48.
Wolf, Sara. 2003. “Angels on the Boulevard: Butoh Call.” LA Weekly, February 20.
387
40
BUTOH BEYOND THE BODY
An interview with Shakina Nayfack on
transition, evolution, and the spirit at war
The following is extracted from a series of interviews with the butoh practitioner, theatre director,
performing artist, and trans-activist Shakina Nayfack. She is author of the book Butoh Ritual Mex-
icano/ Alchemy Is Dancing (2010), a transfeminist, transborder, and transhistorical ethnographic
analysis of her experience training under Diego Piñón in Tlalpujahua, Mexico.1 As we spoke
about the connection between her transition as a transgender woman and her work with Piñón,
our conversation moved us beyond the body and into the realm of alterity, spirit, and magic – a
critical consideration, we agreed, for understanding the transformative power of butoh work. We
both addressed the impossibility of talking about both butoh and the transgender experience in
a linear academic format. Butoh is the dance of the ineffable – that which cannot be spoken but
must be encountered, witnessed within the dance. As Shakina put it, “butoh is the kind of thing
that reveals itself in poetry more than prose.” As a “magical process, there is something really third
about it, really other, something beyond conventional understanding, beyond an easily graspable
form of language.” The ways in which Shakina’s transition experience corresponds with her
butoh journey is itself a kind of living poetry that transcends form. Here I offer verbal fragments
for encounter, attempting to do justice to Shakina’s experience and beliefs, and to butoh more
broadly, by resisting notions of fixedness, totality, and linearity while still foregrounding her voice
and transfeminist, trans-butoh spirit.
The borderlands of form and spirit

JACQUELYN SHANNON: How did butoh factor into the development of your trans identity?
SHAKINA NAYFACK: I saw the first 10–15 minutes of Body on the Edge of Crisis in high school
. . . a time where I was out as gay and fighting a lot of discrimination, feeling very volatile
and radical.2 When I saw Dairakudakan’s Sea-Dappled Horse-bodies writhing and throbbing
against the rope with their tongues out – that was how I felt inside. When I was 20, entering
graduate school, another student passed [the film] along. I put it on [and] into the first 10 min-
utes I ran my hand through the ashes in my incense tray, smeared [them] on my face and
started dancing in my apartment.
(. . .)
My trans identity and work as a butoh artist were really defined by 9/11. I was searching for
a way to stay in the moment of 9/11 and mourn what I was seeing and also resist the war cry.
388
Butoh beyond the body
Butoh made a lot of sense for me in that way politically because of its origin in Japan . . . I
felt that we too were experiencing in our country this great loss, this experience of becom-
ing other, this terrifying death from the sky, and an overwhelming sense of . . . oppressive
patriotism. Butoh seemed to me to be a way to move through that, to dance beyond gender,
beyond my body.
(. . .)
With butoh I could enter . . . a state of transcendent liberation where I no longer felt bound
by [social and cultural] constructs. No matter how much in my waking life I would be
conflicted by my maleness or my body size and shape, there was a way in the dance that I
could experience a kind of freedom. I used my body to get out of my head, but I also felt
like I was getting out of body, moving beyond limitations I had placed on my body.
Revolution of the flesh

JS:I want to talk a little bit about Revolution of the Flesh (2011) with Raul Pizzaro (Figure 40.1).
You connected over feeling betrayed by your bodies and “needing to transcend physical
form through art.”
SN: Raul is this incredibly gifted painter who has a rare form of muscular dystrophy that,
while increasingly degenerative, has allowed him to live to be 40 years old . . . We both
had bodies that didn’t do what we wanted them to do. His was decomposing and mine
was . . . a trapped encasement that was false in relationship to my spirit and identity.
Raul turned to painting as a means of expression for him to not be trapped inside his
skin. For me, dance and theatre at the time, singing also, became these vehicles to express
myself in a way that got me out of my body . . . We did a collaboration together . . .
Diego was visiting at the time, it was just the three of us in Raul’s studio. We pulled out
canvases and paintings [that dealt] with Raul’s relationship to the aesthetics and beauty of
the physical form and the gay male body. We called it Revolution of the Flesh – inspired
by Revolt of the Flesh.
Exorcism
JS: There is a lot focus on form in public trans-discourse. People are curious about the body
and less about spirit or essence. You talk about negotiating your “transgender spirit” with
your body in the dance. What is it about butoh that lends itself to this kind of transcend-
ent experience?
SN: Spiritually, it has a lot to do with communicating with the dead . . . If you read the messages
of the early dancers, all the way to Ohno really, there’s a lot of talk about ancestry and spirits
and ghosts . . . In all the ensemble work exploring 9/11, we really felt we were accessing a
different plane and . . . communicating with the other side. That became really bolstered by
my work with Diego in Mexico, in a town that had suffered a tremendous catastrophe3 . . .
It was a haunted landscape we were dancing on. Communicating with the dead through
dance . . . has, for me, always been part of the reality of what a butoh practice is.
JS: Haunted landscapes – of place but also of the body – were foundational to how I came into
butoh as well and remain central to my dance as ghostly-practice.
SN: I was really inspired by Min Tanaka’s Hyperdance . . . “I don’t dance in the place, I dance
the place.”4 There was a time where I would stop whenever a site felt powerful to me, drop
everything and dance . . . It felt like some kind of exorcism, moving the spirit out of the
place and through my body into the world.
389
Figure 40.1 Revolution of the Flesh (2011), photograph and artwork by Raul Pizarro.
JS:Can you talk more about dancing the dead and experiences of self, particularly in the process
of transitioning? Is there integration that happens alongside release? What does the dead
become when you dance it?
SN: A lot of my dancing is releasing pain-my own and of the landscape of a place, or a spirit that
haunts that place. I’m thinking right now of experiences where I was improvising in water
. . . what happened to me at the point of submersion . . . the moment descending into the
water and fully submerging myself and feeling . . . how easy it could be in that moment to
let go . . . and to leave my body . . . or to almost let go of a piece of myself, a piece of me
being washed away, a little death to myself, a killing off.
390
JS: This spiritual imagery of baptism – it implies a rebirth.

SN: Yes! De la muerte viene la vida. From death comes life.
(. . .)
In the film [Death Drive (2014)]5 I do an improvised dance in Joshua Tree with a giant dried
Joshua Tree stump, rocks, a piece of fabric, and a staff. I take these earthen, phallic symbols
and try to . . . reflect the incongruence of self-formation that leads to a quest of destruction
. . . this terrible drive to annihilate oneself. I appear again a couple times in the film as a
dream guide. In the end [it] launches into this really aggressive gang-bang [with] sexual
partners as demons – butoh dancers inspired by Dairakudakan’s Sea-Dappled Horse. You see
this sort of butoh symbology in porn stars who I choreographed to have this breaking free,
this release – not a sexual release but a spiritual release . . . It was a really powerful use of
butoh, the truest butoh that I know how to do.
(. . .)
Death Drive is an investigation into the gay male impulse to self-destruct, which I identified
with . . . and was still processing as I leaned toward my transition. You could argue, in a
Freudian sense, the cutting off of my penis was the ultimate suicide of my gay maleness. We
filmed the same week I announced the crowd-funding for gender confirmation surgery. It
was my last act, my farewell to my maleness artistically.
(. . .)
All of my dances have had this sacrificial element . . . a sacrificial sense of the body in
which I am giving myself-my physical self-up, for the sake of whatever spiritual energy
I’m hoping to move through me. It’s very challenging and it’s why I don’t do it often, but
also why I feel called to do it at times. It’s a necessity to make that offering, to lay oneself
down and allow these complex energies of the universe to move through us in a way that’s
cleansing and purifying and liberating. Exorcism. Processing-out dark energy . . . using
your body, using the dance to free and expel that energy.
Figure 40.2 Death Drive (still from extended dance segment) (2014), photograph by L. E. Salas.
391
Figure 40.3 Death Drive (still from extended dance segment) (2014), photograph by L. E. Salas.
Dancing the spirit of a landscape

JS: Can you talk a little about how dancing the landscape and the spirit was a part of your piece
Arena y Sangre, Blood & Sand (2004)?6
SN: I collaborated with visual artist Rigo Maldonado and designer Miguel Barragan, and we
went to El Paso, Texas, for V-Day the year that The Vagina Monologues were going to be
done in Ciudad, Juarez, across the border, which is where, at the time, over 400 women
had gone missing, had been killed. There was a massive demonstration that started in El
Paso and went across the border to Mexico . . . We had with us a chain of fabric over
400 feet long, a panel for every woman that had been missing, tied together in this long
chain. We used it in the march. People carried it all along the procession . . . The next
morning we went to Lote Bravo, a place, a ditch, where the bodies of eight women had
been found brutally mutilated. We laid the fabric in the ditch and I danced in [it], col-
lecting the fabric as if I was collecting these souls . . . I was covered in mud and collecting
this fabric – It was very, very heavy, probably close to 80 pounds – and then danced with
all of that sort of on top of me. The mud we had put on my body was freezing on my
skin . . . [And] this place was so present with the heaviness of these women’s deaths . . .
Afterwards I was sobbing and Miguel was pouring water on me to try and thaw the mud
that had frozen to me.
JS: How did you experience your flesh in that dance, specifically? Your form . . .
SN: One of the things that’s so heavy for me and has been hard for me to acknowledge in reflect-
ing on this whole era of my life is that fundamentally I hated my body. And myself. Fun-
damentally. Because no matter what I tried to dance beyond or escape from or transcend, I
felt trapped because I was in a male body . . . I was committed for years to trying to use the
dance to free myself from the pressures of physical form. And I told myself that physical form
was fleeting, and that if I allowed form to dictate my gender then I wasn’t really transcending
the binary that I hoped to shatter. Through all of this, there’s this underlying current of a
transgender spirit, trapped in a male body.
392
Sacrifice and alchemy

JS: What is the relationship between sacrifice and alchemy?
SN: In the alchemical processes of butoh, as I have been trained beneath Diego, seemingly dis-
parate elements are brought together, integrated and refined to create gold. That gold is
your impeccable offering as a dance. The most true distilled and enlightened presentation
and offering that you can make as a dance. The process to refine that is demanding, and
demands, in part, a physical sacrifice. It’s very challenging to push your body to that extent,
to actually arrive at a place where you can be achieving that level of energetic integrity. It’s
also sacrificial emotionally . . . to encounter trauma, your own and others, in order to release
whatever it is that you’re attempting to unleash.
JS: Part of your book that really stood out to me was your reflection on your experience training
with Diego in 2006 during a workshop, which he themed the sacrifice of the feminine heart.
SN: What he was getting at was that independent of body, and a gendered system that ties gender
to body, we all have a feminine heart, or aspect of our heart that is feminine energy . . . The
sacrifice isn’t about giving that up – but it’s the fact that that aspect is accustomed to being
sacrificial – to putting others needs before [its] own – Oh my god – which is a gendered
concept, but it’s also been made true inasmuch that it has been enacted for centuries across
cultures.
JS: In talking about the exercises Diego asked you to do that summer, you said that there was a
sense in which they relied on the binary between the archetypal feminine and masculine
elements to encounter the impossibility of the binary. And also to dance beyond that impos-
sibility. It relied on the binary in order to get beyond it. This sounds similar to your using
the body to get beyond the body through the dance. What is it about butoh work that is
conducive to transcendence?
SN: I feel like I live my life in a way that’s rooted in philosophies of butoh and my choices as
an artist, as an activist, and as a human are rooted in those principles. There is nowhere
this is more evident for me than in my choice to travel to Thailand alone for gender con-
firmation surgery, which I really framed as a pilgrimage. The process before, during, and
after that surgery was for me kind of my ultimate sacrifice, the giving of my flesh in that
way . . . I don’t know if there’s a way that butoh can bring you to a permanent place of
transcendence, but for me the butoh path is punctuated with experiences of transcendence
that then make the path worth it . . . inspiring enough to continue on with. You have proof
. . . because you’ve lived it, felt it, seen it, experienced it in the dance-proof that there is a
world beyond the veil . . . moments of liberation that are just human enough to keep you
going on this planet.
JS: In your story of going to Thailand as pilgrimage, you spoke about living butoh principles in
life. In your book you reflect on “Real Butoh,” a term Diego used in describing someone’s
experience crossing the border. During your transition, you also committed to a kind of
crossing – a risky physical and emotional journey of pilgrimage. Is this your “Real Butoh?”
Do you view your pilgrimage itself as being a kind of dance?
SN: Oh, yeah! 100%. The whole trip was my butoh.
JS: Getting ready for it . . . the rituals of anticipation and preparation.
SN: My transition overall is like a butoh dance . . . the way that I’ve chosen to do it publically.
Every procedure and process medically is part of that accumulation and distillation and sac-
rifice to arrive at some sort of pristine offering, the being that I hope to create within myself
and express and offer through my art.
393
Figure 40.4 Arena y Sangre, Blood & Sand (2004), photograph by Rigo Maldonado.
JS: In your book you quote Diego as saying: “Opening is always painful and it always implies
sacrifice. That is the gift of butoh. It is a path to walk to open the sacrifice. When you can
open you can receive. It can happen on the stage if you deserve the energy of the collective.
And it can happen in life at any moment. That is the real power of butoh, and when you
have it, you realize it is not for you.” I’m thinking about this idea of the dance as an offering,
to bring it back to your transition, that your life itself, as your dance, is also an offering to
the collective experience. You are a trans-activist who has very vulnerably put your personal
story out in public – even brought your show on tour to share your experience. How do
394
you recognize your story as a dance, as a public offering? What is its relationship to you as
a trans-activist?
SN: Diego and I talk a lot, still, about what it means for me to be an actress and getting an increas-
ingly high profile in the media . . . what I must do with that platform to deserve it . . . to
make use of it in a noble way. Because it’s not for me. It’s not . . . The goal is to transmit
healing, as broadly and deeply as I can as an artist, and I feel that I’m capable of doing this
through the training in butoh – the ways I’m able to access my body, whether it’s on stage
or on camera. I hope that it’s powerful for people . . . that they can feel and receive it.
JS: In witnessing butoh, many people sense a kind of mimetic, affective transference that hap-
pens. There is a healing that occurs simply by witnessing someone going through a process.
I sense a parallel here in the way that you’re dancing your life’s dance publically, as a kind
of sacrificial offering too, creates that kind of mimetic transference for people witnessing
you – trans and otherwise.
SN: I think you’re right. People tell me that that’s what they receive from what I’m doing. And
I feel capable of doing it because of my training. I wouldn’t be able to be out there as
publically about my transition, my politics, my artwork, if I did not have the foundation in
cultivating and exchanging energy with consciousness that butoh provides.
Alterity and transgression

JS: What is the relationship between how you understand butoh, the border, and gender identity?
SN: In my book I talk about . . . trying to look through a transfeminist lens, which also implies
a transborder, transhistorical, and transgender lens . . . There’s something really valuable in
looking at how borders are crossed whether they are bodily, geopolitical, or rhetorical. I’m
passionate about challenging preconceived notions of boundary and alterity . . . the notion
of inside and outside . . . binaries that don’t serve our evolution as a species.
(. . .)
SN: We’re also at a crucial time in terms of the evolution of the planet and . . . of the species.
We’re looking toward the ascension of everyday spiritual warriors in our midst. Looking for
ways to strengthen our reserves and fortify our toolbox for not only our own healing and
strengthening and deepening of our communities, but also for spiritual warfare. There’s a
brilliant cross-pollination happening now because of what’s been afforded us through glo-
balization . . . opportunities to learn each others’ approaches to spiritual truth . . . There’s a
. . . universality in that, which is problematic if you’re only talking about politics and bodies
and borders, but it’s also essential to talking about spiritual evolution. You can’t separate
them – the complexities and intersections of spiritual truths from [those] of economics
[and] politics . . . butoh rides this thin line, but offers so much more in terms of the holistic,
the spiritual, and the contributions toward that kind of social evolution which is . . . always
going to be connected to political revolution and political evolution . . . butoh as a ritual
art form is always going to be politicized and butoh as a political protest is always going to
be ritualized.
JS: What of the ways border-crossing occurs in/though butoh along lines of gender?
SN: Hijikata changed his pronouns and only wore women’s kimonos in the last years of his life.
Kazuo Ohno only danced as a woman.7 There was this porous relationship to the veil of
gender, just as there was to any other veil that butoh tries to see through. As the dance found
its way across its different borders, encountering it personally through Mexico because of my
master’s connection to Japan, at a time when I was figuring out how to live with my gender
identity and body, the dance gave me tools to deal with the trauma of physical form and the
395
illusion of fixedness. That same trauma of physical form and illusion of fixedness is what
holds our geopolitical map together. There are divisive lines . . . drawn by man through
what was once a connected landscape. Through those divides [we’ve] separated people and
economies and created systems of exploitation and oppression, just like we’ve done with the
imaginary line of gender. Butoh offers us a way – experientially, in the doing of it and in
the propagation of the form – to move beyond those limitations.
(. . .)
SN: A rigorous exploration of one’s own . . . perceived limitations can reveal much greater poten-
tial, much deeper truths than you might ordinarily have access too. Rigorous exploration
offered by butoh can contribute to a lived understanding of a world beyond borders –
geopolitical, gendered, and otherwise . . . The more people have this lived experience of
transcending that which we take for granted as fixed, the more we can evolve as a species
because we understand the potential, the greater possibility of human connection.
JS: Is butoh a queer or trans art?
SN: There is queerness . . . in the foundation of the dance. Many practitioners flock to it because
it allows for playfulness beyond [gender] boundaries. But you could also re-inscribe hegem-
ony with butoh . . . even if you thought you were transcending it.
Spiritual warfare
JS: How has butoh come to bear on your daily life?
SN: Living in New York City as someone who has cultivated . . . higher levels of empathy is
challenging . . . And requires spiritual armor on a daily basis . . . butoh was my boot camp
. . . to be a spiritual warrior.
(. . .)
It’s a sacrificial task to move through society with a fully awakened spiritual awareness of
suffering, which I think butoh asks you to do . . . There’s a proposal that we are intended to
contribute to the evolution of the species by disrupting old habits, forms, and ways of recy-
cling energy that aren’t ultimately productive . . . To transform . . . you have to be willing
to detach . . . from a lot of societal expectations and pressures. That resulting isolation or
solitude is painful and a big part of the sacrifice.
JS: You talk about transformative work in butoh as a “magical process.” Could you expand on
that and talk about how you are using the term “magic?”
SN: One of the key elements of my doctoral work was tracing the “Political Economy of Magic,”
which gets to that question you were asking earlier about globalization, the spiritual and the
political.8 Magic is a very real thing . . . if you are believer in it. Magic is also a very . . .
commodified word and concept. One reason I wrote about it was because for those of us who
dance butoh, we feel an undeniable magic to the work. There is something really third about
it, really other, something beyond conventional understanding, beyond an easily graspable
form of language. Magic is one of those words that relates to the alchemical process. There are
supernatural forces at work in butoh, and words like “ritual” and “magic” and “alchemy” are
all found circling the dance because its practitioners know that we’re onto something sacred.
(. . .)
In order to get the most out of butoh work, you have to believe that magic is real. That
is the first leap of faith in engaging with ritual practice . . . I really believe that our
resistance to mysticism is a roadblock to our spiritual and emotional and intellectual and
physical evolution.
396
JS: There is a quote by Sondra Fraleigh that says “Butoh is form coming into being.”9
SN: You could also say that butoh is form revealing essence.
JS: What would it be to call butoh the practice of spirit coming into being? Is there a place where
spirit and form meet in the dance?
SN: Science fiction movies where you see demons being exorcised, or aliens embodying other
forms and being cast out of them, Jedi mind tricks and light-sabers and all that . . . I just feel
like if you live life as a butoh practitioner, that is not future-fantasy. That’s present-reality. It
got me in a lot of trouble in graduate school because academically, essence is problematic.
(. . .)
I had a really hard time in my graduate work trying to vouch for these things that I just
fundamentally believe . . . through experience. Things I’ve seen and gone through in my
spiritual journey, which parallels my gender journey, which parallels my dance journey.
There are just certain truths that, for me, are actual . . . and really high stakes. Spiritual
warfare . . . butoh was the dance of darkness, but then we learned that from that darkness
comes light. As a practice of spiritual warfare, living a life rooted in butoh means embracing
the darkness, venturing into the darkness, engaging with darkness, all in the hopes of trans-
forming it into light.
Notes
1 Shakina Nayfack, Butoh Ritual Mexicano / Alchemy Is Dancing (Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publish-
ing, 2010) (out of print). PDF download available at shakina.nyc/butoh.
2 Michael Blackwood (Producer), Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis, Documentary Film (New York, NY:
Michael Blackwood Productions, 1990), Video recording.
3 Tlalpujahua de Rayón was once a booming mining town and a central player in the international mining
industry in Mexico. It was wealthy, diversely populated, and employed over 5,000 workers to sustain the
mines and the wealth it generated. On May 27, 1939, the town was completely buried by a catastrophic
land-slide induced by heavy rains and the mass displacement of earth from the mines.
4 Tanaka has been known to say both “I dance the place” and “I dance the space,” either because he himself
worded the phrase differently in English, or his words have been translated differently into English. See, for
example, Tanaka Min, Bodyprint (Tokyo: Media Information, 1981) and Tess de Quincey and Stuart Lynch,
“Dancing the City,” Realtime 11 (February–March 1996) www.realtimearts.net/article/issue131/6033.
(E-mail to editors from Zack Fuller, May 31, 2017).
5 Death Drive, Dance Edit, directed by L. E. Salas, choreographed and performed by Shakina Nayfack
(2014).
6 Arena y Sangre/Blood and Sand, video excerpt, Performed by Shakina Nayfack, Video by Rigo Maldonado
(2004) Digital.
7 While Ohno Kazuo often dressed as a woman on stage, in costume which evoked feminine roles to
portray a range of female types, there are dances in which he dressed like a man and explored masculine
roles on stage as well. Ohno believed that everyone contains both feminine and masculine energies and
much of his play with gender on stage can be attributed to his interest in origin and true nature, “before
birth, neither man or woman” (as he explores in his piece Room, Tokyo 1966). See also “Femininity” and
“Masculinity” in Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno, Kazuo Ohno’s World: From Without and Within, translated
by John Barrett (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 76–85.
8 Shakina Nayfack, “The Political Economy of Magic,” in Butoh Ritual Mexicano / Alchemy is Dancing
(Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010), 65–75.
9 Sondra Horton Fraleigh, Dancing Into Darkness: Butoh, Zen, and Japan (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pitts-
burgh Press, 1999), 34. “Butoh shows form coming into being.”
Works cited
Arena y Sangre/ Blood and Sand. Video excerpt. Performed by Shakina Nayfack Video by Rigo Maldonado,
2004. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SyM_kIXgfw&t=4s
397
Blackwood, Michael (Producer). Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis. Documentary Film. New York: Michael
Blackwood Productions, 1990. Video recording.
Death Drive. Dance Edit, directed by L.E. Salas. Choreographed and performed by Shakina Nayfack, 2014.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iSBh6P7zrI&t=4s
Fraleigh, Sondra Horton. Dancing into Darkness: Butoh, Zen, and Japan. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pitts-
burgh Press, 1999.
Nayfack, Shakina. Butoh Ritual Mexicano/Alchemy is Dancing. 2010. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Pub-
lishing, (out of print). PDF download available at shakina.nyc/butoh
Ohno, Kazuo, and Yoshito Ohno. Kazuo Ohno’s World: From Without and Within. Translated by John Barrett.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.
398
41
CRITICAL BUTOH AND THE
COLONIAL MATRIX OF POWER
Miki Seifert
On April 17 and 18, 2009, He rawe tona kakahu (She wore a becoming dress) was presented at
the Film Archive in Wellington, New Zealand. When the audience entered the theater, the per-
formance was already underway and they immediately became part of the performance. When
seated, each audience member had their own unique perspective of not only the stage, the per-
formers and the videos, but of other audience members as well.
Distorted video projections of fashion shows raked on two walls of the theater were playing
to the repetitive, pulsating calls from the first minute of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Karn Evil
9: 1st Impression, Pt. 1”:
Come inside the show’s about to start

Guaranteed to blow your head apart
Rest assured you’ll get your money’s worth
The greatest show in Heaven, Hell, or Earth.
Dominating the space were two silent, motionless other-worldly creatures. Their bodies were
encased in golden-hued shell-like cloaks. Their white faces and red lips, emotionless.
Impressive and commanding through the strength of their presence, they beckoned the audi-
ence to “come inside,” bidding them to question what lies beneath the spectacle, beneath their
heavy cloaks – “guaranteed to blow your head apart.”
After 10 minutes of stillness, one alien creature began moving down the catwalk. She clearly
tried – despite the inappropriateness of her size and shape – to perform the signs of the female
human as they were projected on the walls. Meanwhile, the second alien began to crack through
her shell gradually and grotesquely emerging, relishing the exposure of her darkness. Despite
their similar outer appearance, their bearing and intentions were quite different. One embodied
the desire to conform to the external images, while the other determinedly remained alien,
embracing her darkness and otherness.
He rawe (Becoming dress) was created and performed by Anahera Gildea, a Māori writer and
performer, and me. It was built around the ideas of a fashion show and the matryoshka, or Rus-
sian nesting dolls. Anahera and I were both models going down the runway in different fashions
and characters acting out their drama on the stage. We began the performance wearing all the
fashions/costumes, one piled on top of the other. The removal of each layer was done in full
399
Miki Seifert
view of the audience and was not a seamless strip but rather a struggle and challenge to break
free. Our fashions/characters were:
Miki Anahera
Matryoshka Matryoshka
Miss Texas Mother
Black Widow Bride
Executive Dusky Maiden
French Maid Ballerina
Dressmaker’s Doll Dressmaker’s Doll
Costume-less Costume-less
He rawe (Becoming dress) delved into the complex relationship between women, fashion, con-
temporary ideals of beauty, and women’s self-image as played out on the real bodies of an Amer-
ican and a Māori woman. It was a public performance of decolonization.
Critical Butoh
While He rawe (Becoming dress) was created by Anahera and me, the methodology used to
create it was developed by me and William Franco, my long-time collaborator. This meth-
odology, Critical Butoh, grew out of our artistic practice of 30 years that crosses the borders
between visual, media, dance, and theater arts, as well as critical and indigenous theory, indig-
enous spirituality, and humanistic Buddhist philosophy and practice. William and I began our
collaboration in San Diego in the 1980s, exploring the relationship between art and decolo-
nization. This exploration was further expanded when we moved to Aotearoa, New Zealand,
to work with Māori artists.
A driver for us to use creative practice as the keystone of our decolonizing methodology was
the power of the aesthetic, as articulated by art historian and critic Grant Kester who sees the
aesthetic as a unique form of knowledge that can visualize and embody both what is and what
could be: “these aspects combine to provide the aesthetic with a unique ability to identify and
describe the operations of political, social, cultural, and economic power, while at the same time
allowing it to think beyond the horizons established by these forms of power” (Kester 1998, 8).
Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo used this power of the aesthetic in their movement inves-
tigations called butoh. They were responding to postwar conditions of Japan: the westernization
of Japan, the renewal of the security treaty between the United States and Japan, rural poverty,
rapid industrialization, societal conformity, the suppression of self, and the rise of a materialistic,
consumer-oriented culture.
What is remarkable about what Hijikata and Ohno did is the development of a process that
allows the performer to find the hidden levels in her/himself and her/his society – what Toshi-
haru Kasai calls “butoh’s body archaeology.” Diego Piñón, founder of Butoh Ritual Mexicano
(BRM), calls it “anthropological research on ourselves.” From William’s and my training with
Piñón – workshops in 2003, 2004, 2008, and 2012 – we came to understand butoh as awak-
ening the energy of rebellion and seeking to use this energy as the force to propel a creative,
transformative expression that breaks through the confines placed on one’s body by one’s self,
family, education, and society. For us, butoh seeks to liberate the mind from the way it habitually
thinks, the body from the way it habitually moves, and the self from how it habitually conceives
of itself and its world.
400
Critical Butoh
The world that we live in is shaped by colonization. The rise of modern Europe and its sub-
sequent colonization of the world brought into being what Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano
calls the colonial matrix of power. Philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez states that colonization
and its colonial matrix of power is not a historical period, but “a technology of power” and “not
modernity’s ‘past’ but its other face” (Castro-Gomez 2006, 218). Sociologist Ramón Grosfugel
conceives of the colonial matrix of power as “entangled global hierarchies” which permeate
every aspect of being human (Grosfugel 2009, 18). Through the hierarchies of knowledge and
language, it colonizes the mind. Through the hierarchies of race, sexuality, and gender, it colonizes
the body. Through the hierarchy of spirituality, it colonizes the spirit.
William and I saw butoh’s body archaeology as a key to helping individuals transform the
colonial matrix of power as it reproduces itself inside them. This is where we found the inter-
section of butoh and critical theory – hence, Critical Butoh. Critical theory is concerned with
an analysis of issues of power and justice and how I as an individual am part of those larger
power relations – a microcosmic expression of the macrocosm – and how I not only reflect
upon my imperatives and assumptions (Kincheloe and McLaren 2005) but also strive towards a
self-criticality to unseat the ways in which these larger relations are inscribed on my being and
being-in-the-world.
From this positioning we developed Critical Butoh, a performative research method that
uses the power of the aesthetic and butoh’s body archaeology to re-write the colonial matrix of
power as it manifests in us as individuals. It offers a physical practice and process to enact this
transformation in our bodies as well to communicate this transformation through performance.
He rawe (Becoming dress), the outcome of Anahera’s and my investigation into gender and
colonization, is an example of Critical Butoh in practice. Anahera’s and my starting point for
the creation of this work was butoh’s body archaeology. In our daily lives, Anahera and I had
absorbed the experiences of women we knew, the images and stories of women in the media,
and the social constructs of gender as conveyed by them. In creating He rawe (Becoming dress)
we strove to bring out and examine these “absorptions” that were hindering our ability to live
happy and fulfilling lives as a Māori woman and a white American woman. The characters of He
rawe (Becoming dress) were constructs through which we examined our own distress in response
to being women who are part of the colonial matrix of power.
The following discussion of key fashions/characters – the Matryoshka, the pairing of the Mother
and Miss Texas, Dressmaker’s Doll, and Costume-less – provides examples of this in practice.
Matryoshka
Drawing from both feminist and postcolonial theorists, as discussed above, the Matryoshkas’
alien-ness was that of being the Other (Said 1995). In her presentation of both recognizable and
unrecognizable human features, one possible reading of her encounter with the audience was that
of a re-creation of the colonial encounter. In relation to the Matryoshkas, the audience members
were the colonists arriving in this new territory. Having purchased their tickets, they arrived
with the expectation of ownership, of being able to claim a piece of the territory as their own.
However, the environment was unfamiliar and unknown. The usual signs of a concert dance or
theater performance were not present. There were no assigned seats nor ushers to show them the
way. Even to those who attended other events at the Film Archive, the space would have been
unfamiliar. Rows of seats had been unbolted and their orientation changed to accommodate the
raised transverse stage.
This “re-enactment” was not merely a historical reference but one of the key underpin-
nings of the whole performance: as citizens, we participate on a daily basis in the re-creation of
401
Miki Seifert
our nations and, therefore, we as performers, in both the private and public sense, are not only
responsible for its continuation but are empowered to change it. E. J. Westlake in her work on
a Nicaraguan women’s theatrical collective finds that national identity is based not only on a
shared culture that is transmitted through institutions, but also an imagined shared culture that is
transmitted through media, which “shapes the idea of the nation within the imagination of the
citizen” and “the drive is to create a seamless sense of one nation, but the performances are incon-
sistent and fragmentary, leaving openings for the formerly disenfranchised to enter the debate”
(Westlake 2005, 22). He rawe (Becoming dress) steps into this space and makes an offering about
women and the colonial matrix of power.
Because He rawe (Becoming dress) was performed in Aotearoa, New Zealand, by an American
woman and a Māori woman, we were able to adopt a transnational perspective to examine the
relationship between colonizer and colonized, settler and indigenous peoples, in former British
settler nations of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This transnationality,
i.e., not being from the same indigene-colonizer pairing, mitigated the possibility of potential
conflicts arising from a shared history and its emotional baggage. The distance provided by this
transnational approach benefited not only Anahera and I but possibly the audience as well. We
hoped that the American colonization I represented would provide a safe distance to allow the
Kiwi audience to engage with what we were saying about settler-indigenous relations in such
settler societies. For this reason, it was critical that they could immediately identify me as Amer-
ican, which led to the development of my Miss Texas character.
The other underpinning of the performance and the characters was drawn from the humanist
philosophy of Nichiren Buddhism, which Anahera and I (as well as William) practice. An exam-
ple of this is how we incorporated the Buddhist concept of Bodhisattvas of the Earth into the
performance. The Lotus Sutra portrays the emergence of the Bodhisattvas of the Earth from the
Earth as a momentous, ground-breaking, ground-shaking event. It describes their appearance as
impressive and awe-inspiring: “The bodies of these bodhisattvas were all golden in hue, with the
thirty-two features and an immeasurable brightness” (Watson 1993). Our imposing Matryoshkas
sought neither confrontation nor conquest with the audience but, grounded in their hidden
identities as Bodhisattvas of the Earth, they wished to embrace the audience with compassion
and together embark on a non-verbal dialogue of transformation. Drawing upon the writings of
Buddhist scholar Daisaku Ikeda, we conceived of the Matryoshkas as Bodhisattvas of the Earth
as representing a revolution in consciousness, connectedness, grounded-ness, empowerment, and
transformation. As modern-day Bodhisattvas of the Earth, our Matryoshkas willingly took on and
sought to transform the trials of their lives into order to encourage others “to seek out their own
inherent brilliance” (Ikeda et al. 2001). Through their behavior on stage, the stripping away of
layers of costumes, which can be read as delusions, our Matryoshkas revealed their true identities.
Miss Texas and the Mother

The larger than life, aging beauty queen Miss Texas triumphantly emerged from her Matryoshka
shell into the pulsating, competitive world of beauty and fashion. Dressed in a cowboy blue jean
jacket, a red, white and blue jean skirt that only partially covers the black crinoline beneath,
accessorized with white cowgirl gloves, she confidently strutted down the runway accepting
imaginary applause and kudos, oblivious to her grotesqueness and misshapen body, unperturbed
by her uneven gait caused by a missing white boot. She was the mistress of her world.
Meanwhile the Mother, dressed in a sheer plastic muumuu-housecoat with lacy cuffs, emerged
from her shell. Within the Other (the Matryoshka), there was now a new Other. The Mother
tentatively found her way out of her Matryoshka shell, carefully taking her first step into Miss
402
Critical Butoh
Figure 41.1 Miki Seifert as Miss Texas, photograph by Craig Thomson.
Texas’ world. Unsure of herself and her place in this world, she hung back, almost willing herself
to remain unseen. She hesitantly echoed the gestures made by Miss Texas, whose demeanor subtly
shifted from unassailable confidence to uncertain questioning. A foot dangling in mid-air asked
where it should be placed, and soon she found herself face down in a crumpled heap at the end
of the runway, the same foot raised behind, again questioning its place. Still, she steadfastly strove
to remain in control, walking on the very edge of the runaway like a tightrope performer, passing
the Mother, like a ship passing another ship at sea.
As the Mother moved into the limelight, a quiet air of domesticity blanketed the stage. Her
hands alternatively carried the imprint of mundane daily household chores, the loving touch of a
403
Miki Seifert
mother comforting her baby and the loss of something of great value. She moved with purpose
but tried not to draw attention to herself. After she had made her pass down the runway and
returned upstage, she turned as if she suddenly remembered she’s a woman being looked at, her
hand self-consciously reached to check to see if her hair was in order.
The Mother emerged into a world different than who she is. While some differences between
Miss Texas and the Mother were obvious, there was another level to this difference. The Mother
was Māori, though all of Anahera’s characters except for the Dusky Maiden foiled the typically
held racialized stereotypes of Māori. Her characters embodied a Māori perspective: the way they
see themselves in the world and the way they conceive of the world were constructed through
the connection with other women. As a Māori woman, Anahera is never alone: “I have ancestry.
It never leaves me. I’m never alone . . . When I die, I will be welcomed into the same spaces as
all my ancestors have gone” (Gildea, Anahera. 2009. Rehearsal with author, March 30). When
the Mother emerged, it was into the world of Miss Texas, a place of whiteness, individualism, and
competition, a place very different than her own which values whakapapa (genealogy), whanaun-
gatanga (focus on relationships), and manaakitanga (looking after people).
While the Matryoshka positioned herself as Other to the audience, the intention of the pairing
of Miss Texas and the Mother was to raise the notion that there can be Others within Others,
that the positionality of a white American woman is not the same as that of a Māori woman.
Dressmaker’s Doll
As Dressmaker’s Doll, I walked down the runway modeling my one-piece foundation garment – a
pair of unmatched breasts and half a butt sewn from a pink wool blanket – that gave my characters
their unnatural size. Anahera walked down and modeled the corset that reduced and constrained
her characters. We both stopped mid-way and began removing them: Anahera frantically; I slowly,
though both of us expressing sadness, uncertainty, and trepidation. We then were wearing our
Figure 41.2 Miki Seifert as Dressmaker’s Doll, photograph by Craig Thomson.
404
Critical Butoh
final layer: a one-piece, off-white, short-sleeve, and short-leg one piece jumpsuit, styled to suggest
the fabric that covers the mannequin on which dressmakers construct garments. We offered our
“distortion” to the other, accepted the offering with care and awe, and explored the “reality”
of our Other. I then placed Anahera’s corset on the stage in front of the center stage screen and
Anahera wrapped my garment in it. For the first time in the whole performance, we touched and
our bodies came together. We danced the Dressmaker’s Doll duet, becoming one, creating shapes
that passed away and formed anew until we separated to claim our spot side by side on the runway.
The Dressmaker’s Doll is when we truly see each other for the first time, when we recognize
our common humanity. It is the transformative moment that leads to re-connecting with our-
selves. It is through our connection with each other that we can start connecting to ourselves. For
the first time, both our characters are truly vulnerable, experiencing a vulnerability that comes
from a deep acceptance of self. Anahera’s characters find strength to be who they are, while mine
find strength to give up control.
Costume-less
Anahera and I, standing mid-way on the runway facing upstage, were shedding our last remaining
layer as if crawling out of an alien skin and being re-born. Naked, we walked in unison to the end
of the runway and back. By the time we reached the center stage screen, the videos had stopped.
There only remained the two of us, side by side.
This performance was a journey. Our goal was to transform our experience of being women
and of being woman on different sides of the colonizing relationship. Costume-less was not the
culmination of the stripping away of layers of distortions and delusions. Costume-less was finally
revealing the true hidden identities of the Matryoshkas as Bodhisattvas of the Earth, which was
present from the beginning – just as our common humanity was always present.
Conclusion
He rawe (Becoming dress) grew out of Anahera’s and my standpoints as a Māori woman and a white
American woman investigating the intersection of gender and colonization. Using Critical Butoh,
we interrogated our personal worldviews as they were shaped by the colonial matrix of power.
Though He rawe (Becoming dress) was personal and idiosyncratic, it was, through the power of the
aesthetic, suggestive of something larger. It was a public performance where we invited the audience
into a universe where questions were raised, ideas contested. It was a lived, shared experience of
transforming the experience of being women who are part of the colonial matrix of power.
Credits
Creators and performers: Anahera Gildea and Miki Seifert
Production Designer: William Franco
Costumier: Janet Dunn
Lighting Designer: Bex Weatherhead
Works cited
Castro-Gomez, Santiago. 2006. “The Social Sciences, Epistemic Violence, and the Problem of the ‘Invention
of the Other’.” In Unbecoming Modern: Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities, edited by Esha Beteille,
211–227. New Delhi: Social Science Press.
405
Miki Seifert
Grosfugel, Ramon. 2009. “A Decolonial Approach to Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Border Thinking

and Global Coloniality.” Kult 6 (Special Issue): 10–38.
Ikeda, Daisaku, Katsuji Saito, Takanori Endo and Haruo Suda. 2001. The Wisdom of the Lotus Sutra, iii. Santa
Monica, CA: World Tribune Press.
Kester, Grant H. 1998. “Ongoing Negotiations: Afterimage and the Analysis of Activist Art.” In Art, Activ-
ism, and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage, edited by Grant H. Kester, 1–19. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press Books.
Kincheloe, Joe L. and Peter McLaren. 2005. “Rethinking Critical Theory and Qualitative Research.” In The
Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonne S. Lincoln, 303–343.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Said, Edward. 1995. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin Books.
Watson, Burton. 1993. The Lotus Sutra. New York: Columbia University Press.
Westlake, E. J. 2005. “Theoretical Foundations and Intercultural Performance: (Re)writing Nations on the
Margins.” In Casting Gender: Women and Performance in Intercultural Contexts, edited by Laura B. Lengel
and John T. Warren, 19–34. New York: Peter Lang.
406
SECTION 5
Pedagogy and practice

42
THE DAILY PRACTICE
OF HIJIKATA TATSUMI’S
APPRENTICES FROM 1969 TO 1978
Caitlin Coker
When attending butoh workshops from 2006 to 2016, I often heard the following phrase: “butoh
cannot be taught.” To be more exact, Hijikata Tatsumi’s apprentices Kobayashi Saga and Waguri
Yukio both stated this clearly, saying that what they teach are the “seeds” (Kobayashi 2005) or the
“text” (Waguri) for butoh. Since butoh cannot be learned by imitating its movement, I wanted
to know more about how these butoh teachers developed butoh. This led me to research their
time spent with Hijikata.
This chapter claims that their daily lives spent as apprentices under Hijikata fostered the physical
philosophy of butoh. It will clarify their daily practice from 1969 to 1978,1 especially focusing on
their collective living and performances at cabarets and clubs, and then present how they under-
stand the connection between that practice and their physical consciousness and performance.
However, this chapter is not the first to note the daily lives of butoh artists around this period.
Mikami Kayo, a butoh artist and dance scholar, entered Hijikata’s studio Asbestos-kan2 in 1978,
when apprentices mainly danced as showgirls at bars. She writes that the first step to approaching
butoh was a daily stance; this was completely dropping out of society and devoting everything
to butoh, which she calls an “invisible technique” in itself (Mikami 1993, 79–82). Inata Naomi
likens this lifestyle to the master-apprentice relationship in traditional Japanese arts. She writes,
Hijikata drove (his apprentices) into a situation where they had to throw away their
intention for expression, their identity, and themselves with their lifestyle, his words, and
training. Regarding classical dance, such as Japanese performing arts, Noh, and tradi-
tional dance, perhaps this (Hijikata’s training style) is related to the method where the
apprentice enters the master’s home and, while eating meals together, trains repetitively
and extensively, to the point that the apprentice gives up “expression.”
Inata 2008, 452
A major part of their daily lives was performing at cabarets and clubs as show dancers.
However, this history is often ignored completely (Mikami 1993), thus disregarding its signifi-
cance. One exception is Shiga Nobuo’s essay which posits show dance’s “cabaret-ish orgiastic
atmosphere and entertainment” as one element of butoh (Shiga 2008, 45). In contrast with
past research, this chapter investigates the significance of their daily lives based on interviews
and workshops with butoh artists who experienced this period. Specifically, this research was
409
Caitlin Coker
conducted with six former apprentices (two women and four men) who stayed with Hijikata for
periods ranging from three to eight years.3
Apprentices gathering at Asbestos-kan

These artists entered when they were between 19 and 23 years old. At that time, the Tokyo
they knew was completely different from what it is today. Kobayashi Saga has often commented
on how Shinjuku was much dirtier and full of drifters huffing paint thinner. Murobushi Kō
remarked that in the late 1960s with the student demonstrations, classes were cancelled indefi-
nitely, and so he could not go to his university. Yamamoto Moe was commuting to an agricultural
college in the 1970s while he was dancing, and he reflected on how there seemed to be less anxi-
ety in those days, that they could get by on what is equivalent to a few hundred dollars a month.
Basically, at the same time that it was a turbulent era, it was also a time of economic growth and
stability. Many of them seemed to be drifting in the midst of this and wondering what to do with
their lives when they encountered and were mesmerized by Hijikata’s words and/or his presence
on stage or in photographs.
Some of these artists, like Kobayashi, had parents who were accepting of their decisions to live
and study at Asbestos-kan, but this was not always the case. Former apprentice Waguri Yukio
said that they got many phone calls from parents saying, “Give me back my daughter.” Hijikata
would counter this by questioning, “Don’t you trust your daughter?” Waguri said that his right-
wing father begrudgingly accepted his apprenticeship as “being taken by the military and sent
off to war,” which Hijikata deemed as “wonderful.” Perhaps most parents thought that by doing
Hijikata’s butoh these youth were throwing away what society recognizes as a normal life and
accepting the lowest social status as a performer.
When the artists decided to train under Hijikata, they almost all began living there imme-
diately. In Yamamoto’s case, he was commuting from his own apartment but decided to live in
Asbestos-kan to absorb butoh more quickly. Sakaino Hiromi was also commuting from her own
apartment, but the other apprentices moved her belongings to Asbestos-kan while she was away
on a show dance tour. She said that when she returned home to an empty apartment she merely
thought, “Oh, okay. Well, I did hear that everyone is living collectively.”
Daily life at Asbestos-kan

Bishop Yamada, who lived at Asbestos-kan from 1969 to 1971, explained daily life at that time
as having the following physically demanding schedule. They woke up at around 8:30 a.m.,
trained from 10 a.m., and got ready for working as a show dancer from the afternoon, went to
the cabaret or club at 5 p.m., performed two or three times between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., returned
to Asbestos-kan, trained from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m., and then slept from 6 a.m. Waguri admits that
it was tough, even masochistic, and Yamada writes that it was so busy that 1 year felt like 10
(Yamada 1992, 128).
Yamamoto remembers this daily life as practicing butoh until dawn, sleeping until morning or
noon, and then moving independently in the afternoon. He said that he slept during his college
classes. Sakaino said that she slept on the floor of the cabaret dressing room, and she remembers
all of her waking hours being training.
At the studio, the apprentices slept in two rooms on the second floor of the studio. Accord-
ing to Sakaino, about 10 apprentices slept in a 10 to 14 square meter room. “There were no
futons. We all slept like canned sardines on top of the floor. I cannot recall ever sleeping well.”
Kobayashi elaborated by saying that “there was absolutely no privacy. We were there all day. We
410
Hijikata Tatsumi’s apprentices
were always there, except for when we performed at the cabaret, and we were not allowed to go
out with friends.”
In addition to living and sleeping together, they also cooked and ate meals together. Kobayashi
said that the local grocer knew them as Hijikata’s students and often gave them vegetables. In
1969, she wrote in her journal that the rice porridge with leeks was delicious (Kobayashi 2005,
30). Yamamoto remembered eating pancakes with mayonnaise on top, and Sakaino said that she
cooked with bread crusts and the parts of vegetable that were normally discarded.
Finally, they cleaned and took care of the studio together. Kobayashi writes how they would
clean the studio floors with damp rags (see Figure 42.1). “We would get on all fours and run
Figure 42.1 Cleaning the floor at Asbestos-kan, photograph by Fujimori Hideo. Courtesy of the Hijikata
Tatsumi Archive.
411
Caitlin Coker
from one end of the studio to the other, making a sound like ‘soo soo’ with our rags against the
floor. Hijikata, Ashikawa, and I would altogether say ‘soo soo’ while going back and forth.” In
parentheses, she writes this very important statement: “As I write this, I cannot help but search
for butoh within that movement” (Kobayashi 2005, 31).
Abducted into butoh

Kobayashi spoke about butoh as being inseparable from that daily life. “When I was in Asbestos-
kan, I was immersed in butoh all day. The distinction between the usual and the unusual dis-
appeared, and everything completely mixed together. There was even butoh in eating a meal.”
Kobayashi stated that not eating fully was necessary for them to be able to feel their internal
organs. The state of having just enough food and barely enough sleep could be seen as the base
state for the passive body in butoh, which lends itself to transformation. We can ascertain that
having no privacy or freedom took away their sense of self and created an environment where they
could focus exclusively on butoh. This stance of becoming fully immersed in butoh was a circum-
stance that they willingly let themselves be thrown into, by entering the butoh world of the studio.
Yamamoto quoted Hijikata in saying that “the person who is kidnapped will become the most
skilled.” Yamamoto then likened this to supposed cases in the traditional Japanese performing
arts, where the apprentice is stolen or sold and then trained from a young age. Like these arts,
butoh was not something that can be taught or learned, but instead something that the appren-
tice attained unconsciously through daily life with the master and consciously through trying to
“steal” the art by observing that master (see Figure 42.2). Their recollection of this daily life and
its circumstances matches with how they reflect on the nature of the body as passive and thus
connected to its surroundings.
Figure 42.2 Chatting at Asbestos-kan: Left, Hijikata Tatsumi; right, apprentices, photograph by Yamaguchi
Haruhisa. Courtesy of the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive.
412
Yamada explained this passivity in the following way: “It’s not that you move, it’s not your will
or you ‘doing’ it. You are being carried onward by something, or being taken away by something.
You are moved.” Waguri called this one’s stance towards movement. He said, “Thinking to do
something means that it is already over . . . But I would try to ‘do’ anyways. Everyone thinks that
dancing is ‘doing,’ right? If I tried to do something, I would be told (by Hijikata), ‘Don’t do! It’s
finished.’ I often didn’t know what to do.” Even before moving, it was important for the appren-
tice to be placed in the space as if waiting to be moved by something else.
Kobayashi stated how a feeling of being abducted and moved was evident to her when she was
sent to perform at the cabaret. “Hijikata told me to go to the cabaret . . . I rode the train for a long
time and went to far-away places like Hokkaido and Kyushu. During that time, I would get the sen-
sation that my body was being taken away.” She reflected on this experience positively, as all of the
other interview subjects did, by saying, “I think it was a good thing that I had that sort of sensation.”
Yamada and Kobayashi both pointed out how the body itself continues living on despite the
individual’s will. Their accounts diverged after this. Yamada thought of this living and thus danc-
ing as a constant reception of the outside, whereas Kobayashi said that it springs from the aeon of
memory compressed into the material body. If both, then perhaps the encounter of the internal
(body) with the external (environment) generates movement along with life.
Show dance by Hijikata’s apprentices

All apprentices, both men and women, debuted as show dancers at the cabaret shortly after
entering Asbestos-kan (see Figure 42.3). Their performance salary went directly to Hijikata’s
wife Motofuji Akiko and was then used for the studio, performances, and their livelihoods. Out
of that salary, which ranged from about 10,000 to 20,000 yen (approximately $95 to $191), the
apprentices received 500 yen (about $4.80).
Figure 42.3 Rehearsal for the “avant-garde show.” Kobayashi Saga (back left), Ashikawa Yoko (front left),
Hijikata Tatsumi (front right), Tamano Kōichi (back right), photograph by Nakatani Tadao. Courtesy of
Nakatani Tadao and the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive, Keio University Art Center.
413
Caitlin Coker
While some did joke that they were being “exploited,” this paper’s research subjects did not
complain or reflect back on this fact negatively. First of all, Murobushi and Sakaino stated that
there is a long history of modern dancers and also actors dancing in cabarets to make a living and
fund their performances. Also, Waguri said that it was good, because they didn’t have to think
about money and could completely focus on butoh. At the same time, Kobayashi stated that one
reason that other apprentices did quit was because they didn’t like baring their bodies or shaking
their hips in front of people in the countryside.
These apprentices performed in a wide variety of acts and venues. The venues ranged from
small clubs to large theaters that could seat 500 to 600 people, with locations in Tokyo and far-
away rural areas. Some of these shows were marketed as avant-garde and had strong elements of
butoh, while others were standard shows or strip acts.
For example, after Kobayashi entered Asbestos-kan in 1969, she soon performed an “avant-
garde show” weekly at the upper-class members-only club Space Capsule for about one year (see
Figure 42.4). This show featured motifs from butoh. For example, there were dances where the
women were on all fours, wearing chastity belts and with their hair teased up. The men wore
phalluses, danced with large brass panels, and used costumes or movements inspired by Nijinsky
in “Afternoon of a Faun.” After this, Kobayashi and Ashikawa also starred in shows at a small
theater called Shinjuku Art Village in a shady part of Shinjuku. Yamada commented that “Hiji-
kata choreographed it, and they danced it just as they were told, so no one really thought whether
it was butoh or whether it was a show. For everyone those were the same thing.”
Waguri’s account of his debut in 1972 was a bit different. He said that 10 days after he entered
Asbestos-kan as an apprentice, he was sent as a show dancer to a strip club called France-za. Hiji-
kata taught him a few movements, but he was overall told to “think for himself.” France-za was
a well-known, prestigious strip club, but in the 1970s the number of audience members became
Figure 42.4 Kobayashi saga and props for the Space Capsule Show, photographer unknown. Courtesy of
the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive.
414
fewer and fewer. Overall, strip clubs and cabarets in the 1970s experienced a decline, with the
economic repercussions of the 1973 oil crisis and the advent of new entertainment like television
and color movies diverting the audience’s attention (Fukutomi 1994; Hashimoto 1995). Waguri
described what happened after this decline in the following way:
That era became more and more materialistic, more radical, erotic, perhaps even more
obscene, and no one cared about strip or dance anymore. Sometimes actually having sex
with the girl (on stage) . . . making the female (performer) completely nude from the
start. The era where they showed the art of the strip tease completely came to an end.
Training through show dance

It is undeniable that these butoh artists polished their physical and stage skills through show
dance, which then served to develop butoh. Regarding the physicality she gained through the
cabaret, Kobayashi said, “it really trained us, because we were dancing everyday.” Waguri went
further and stated, “The cabaret is what actually made me what I am today. I think it was proba-
bly what I experienced at that time.” Sakaino made a similar comment by saying that “the person
I am now is here because of (butoh) performances and (cabaret) shows.” Sakaino also said that she
is glad that she could experience the hardships of practice and the joys of the cabaret, and that she
feels sorry for young butoh artists who cannot live that lifestyle because of the cabaret’s demise.
On the other hand, some butoh artists like Yamamoto do not necessarily feel a connection
between the cabaret and butoh. However, many butoh dancers would disagree fervently if the
cabaret were framed as merely a place of fundraising.4
Communities in the studio and the cabaret

Butoh is often depicted as mainly focusing on the individual’s material body, but the dancing
communities of Asbestos-kan and the cabaret were also pivotal in its development. Waguri nostal-
gically referred to both as a “dance village,” their own comfortable space separated from society.
Along with providing them with a place to belong, having a community of apprentices allowed
them more opportunities to develop movement. In their workshops, Waguri, Kobayashi, and
Yamamoto all focus on what one can see and learn in watching others dancing. Hijikata’s appren-
tices took notes based not only on what he said but also on how others were dancing it. Waguri said,
When Hijikata was training us, there were about 30 people . . . And we were separated
(by gender). . . . While we took notes, we had to watch the others. If I took notes and
was not watching, he would get really angry. We’re in a divided state. So, we are writing
our own movements while watching another person’s dance.
He described this “divided state” in Hijikata as Hijikata being “in” the person dancing simulta-
neously as he is directing them (Workshop 2015/8/25).
Furthermore, although Yamamoto received a lot of choreography directly from Hijikata, he
also has taught the choreography that he saw Hijikata give to a fellow apprentice, Nakajima
Natsu (Workshop 2014/5/2). Also, in workshops teaching how to dance artist Hans Bellmer’s
dolls, Kobayashi praised the diversity in how each participant danced this doll, suggesting that
there is something new to learn from each dancing body (Workshop 2014/5/13).
These artists were also members of a dance community based in the cabaret dressing
room. Waguri and Sakaino reminisced about how the show dancers showed concern for
415
Caitlin Coker
them, asking if they could properly eat or sleep due to their demanding schedule. Kobayashi
reflected on this relationship further and stated that there was a connection based on a shared
social status.
Everyone puts on their makeup, goes out onstage naked, and then comes back (to the
dressing room) naked. Our relationships were straight and honest. I was taught some-
thing really big here. Things that I remembered with my body, a warm heart . . . Show
dancers are people in the lowest social status. When you go that far, there is nothing to
hide from each other.
Conclusion
This chapter clarified the daily practice of Hijikata’s apprentices and postulated that significance
based on the statements of the apprentices themselves. It seems that the movement that sprang
from their body was not solely Hijikata pulling at their puppet strings but was generated from
these daily experiences, based on communities in dance and social deviancy, as well as collectivity
in living and working. Through these experiences, they gained not only stage and dance skills but
also developed their philosophies about living as a human being and as a physical body.
Notes
1 Mikami references Goda Nario when she classifies Hijikata’s Butoh into three periods (Mikami 1993, 54).
What Mikami calls the “middle period,” from 1969 to 1978, was when Hijikata worked the most closely
with his apprentices creating numerous performances. This period is arguably when the movements of
“butoh” were developed the most through a series of performances.
2 Hijikata’s studio was named “Asbestos” because Motofuji’s father, who gave the studio to Motofuji Akiko
in 1952, worked in the Asbestos industry (Motofuji 1990; Keio University Art Center 2004, 191).
3 Research Subjects
Artist Year of Birth Gender Apprenticeship Period

Kobayashi Saga 1946 F 1969–1975
Bishop Yamada 1948 M 1969–1971
Murobushi Ko 1947 M 1969–1971
Waguri Yukio 1952 M 1972–1980
Sakaino Hiromi “It’s a secret” F 1974–1978
Yamamoto Moe 1953 M 1974–1977
4 Murobushi, in particular, critiqued an earlier Japanese version of this paper as shallow because it was lim-
ited to a generation of dancers (including Murobushi) who didn’t know the post-war cabaret as Hijikata
did. Below is an excerpt from an e-mail from Murobushi to the author.
What I am intrigued by the most is not the post-1968 Asbestos-kan of which she (the author)
writes, but instead a comparison and verification of the ‘Yami (darkness)’ during and before the
war with the darkness of before then (1969). I most want to read about what kind of ‘stage,’. . .
the Japanese cabaret offered. Then, we can start talking about Hijikata’s ‘Ankoku (darkness)’
‘Yami (darkness),’ ‘Yami no ichiba (black market) . . .’ and also about the American military base.
Correspondence on March 13, 2015.
This research is based on the actual physical experience and recollections of its subjects, and thus this
grounded approach cannot touch on the history that Murobushi indicated. Murobushi pointed to a
deeper connection between butoh and the cabaret that has yet to be written.
416
Works cited
Fukutomi, Taro. 1994. Showa Kyabaret Hishi. Bungeishunju.
Hashimoto, Yoshio. 1995. Nudosan-Sutorippu Ougon Jidai. Chikuma Shobo.
Inata, Naomi. 2008. Hijikata Tatsumi: Zetsugo no Shintai. NHK Publishing Company.
Keio University Art Center. 2004. Hijikata Tatsumi no Butoh-Nikutai no Surrealism/ Shintai no Ontology. Keio
University Publishing Company.
Kobayashi, Saga. 2005. Ume no Sunaguse-Butoh no Kotoba. Atorie Sado.
Mikami, Kayo. 1993. Utsuwa Toshite no Shintai-Hijikata Tatsumi, Ankoku Butoh he no apurouchi. Anz dou.
Motofuji, Akiko. 1990. Hijikata to Tomoni. Chikuma Shobou.
Shiga, Nobuo. 2008. “Hijikata Tatsumi-Butoh, Kyabare Ikkou” Corpus-Shintaihyougen Hihyou 4:41–45.
Yamada, Ippei. 1992. Dansa. Ota Shuppan.
417
43
BUTOH PEDAGOGY
IN HISTORICAL AND
CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE
Tanya Calamoneri
At first glance, “butoh pedagogy” may seem to be an amorphous concept, as there are nearly as
many teaching methods and aesthetic styles as there are practitioners in this increasingly global
community. Within the growing butoh diaspora, it can be difficult to trace a methodological
thread from the founders to now. Is there a central organizing principle among these varied
approaches? My quest as a student and researcher has been to understand the key tenets of the
form. There is an aesthetic core of embodying grotesque beauty and a philosophical orientation
toward transformation in an almost shamanic, certainly ego-transcendent sense. And of course
there is the characteristic glacial pace, which some teachers emphasize more than others. But
training methods vary widely from pure improvisation, to strict learning of choreographic forms,
to doing something outside of dance to learn about the body and human movement, such as the
farming practices of Tanaka Min and his Body Weather–trained practitioners.
The primary challenge to defining butoh pedagogy is that the founders never articulated
such a method. Unlike Martha Graham or Mary Wigman, singular voices in modern dance
who developed their own aesthetic preferences into replicable techniques, Hijikata Tatsumi and
Ohno Kazuo offered more of a philosophical approach to the body and dance, but not a codified
method per se. Hijikata in particular focused primarily on his performance work, and teaching in
the traditional sense during the early years of butoh was limited to ballet classes (which Hijikata
himself taught) and cabaret dance classes (which his dancers were required to attend at Tokyo
studios in order to choreograph the burlesque acts that funded Asbestos-kan). There were also
late night art talks that Hijikata and Ohno lead at the studio. According to Nakajima Natsu, the
two senior artists would discuss an assigned reading while the dancers mostly listened, and then
Ohno would conduct an improvisation class. Following this, Hijikata and his dancers would
continue drinking and talking about art until early in the morning (Nakajima, Natsu. Interview
by the author. Tokyo, January 11, 2010).
Artists such as Nakajima, Kasai Akira, Murobushi Kō, Waguri Yukio – dancers who were part
of Asbestos-kan and early butoh experiments in some way – developed their own workshop cur-
riculum primarily from rehearsals and these art talk experiences. They were not dance teachers
prior to working with Hijikata, and they developed their teaching out of the necessity of survival
as artists after they had either left the studio or after Hijikata died. And many dancers found a
new home base – for example, Murobushi with Carlotta Ikeda in France; Kasai in Germany for
a time studying Rudolph Steiner’s work – and they incorporated these different sensibilities into
418
Butoh pedagogy
their teaching and performance work. As a result, the transfer of butoh methodology from the
first-generation initiators to second-generation students-cum-teachers was more of a mutation
than it was a direct transmission of knowledge. This is not to say that Hijikata was not precise
in his choreographic direction; indeed he was. It is just to say that he did not offer his dancers a
clear sense of how to teach butoh, as this was not his concern.
Given this lack of a formalized butoh pedagogy, this chapter traces butoh pedagogy through
two paths. The first historical path traces pedagogical practices from Hijikata outwards (or to
be more precise, traces practices back to him). That is, I attempt to identify aspects of Hijikata’s
choreography and rehearsals that point to how Hijikata taught work to his dancers. The second
experiential path presents the pedagogical practices I have experienced through my teachers
including Murobushi, Waguri, Nakajima, Seki Minako, and Shinichi Iova-Koga, who are primar-
ily in the Hijikata lineage, though there is certainly a fluidity to their approaches as all of them
have worked with Ohno as well. Like many other contemporary butoh artists, I took countless
workshops with these artists and others including SU-EN, Ohno Yoshito, Iwana Masaki, Yoshi-
moto Daisuke, Tadashi Endo, Muramatsu Takuya, and Tamano Koichi and Hiroko. Across all
these experiences, I often found some familiar exercises and some overlap in their approaches,
but no clear methodology was apparent. This chapter attempts to map various pedagogical
approaches rooted in Hijikata’s founding ideology.
Historical traces of butoh pedagogy

It bears emphasis that what are taught today as “butoh methods” are the formulations of these
second-generation dancers. Hijikata’s work with his dancers was a process of grooming them to
perform as he needed them. Ohno Yoshito explains that training was “not actually practice, it is
rehearsal for the next show. Everything is for the performance with Hijikata” (Interview by the
author. Tokyo, November 8, 2010). There is a famous picture of Hijikata wearing an eye patch
standing arms up stretched next to Tamano Koichi, the student attempting to copy his mentor as
they rehearse Finback Whale, the piece Tamano would perform in San Francisco and Los Angeles
in 1976, bringing butoh to America.1 The image captures the transmission from Hijikata to his
dancers, whereby the choreographer gives precisely the movements in space, dynamics, and effort
quality. Nakajima recounts that Hijikata would show dancers the forms only once, and then she
would notate the choreography and work with Ashikawa Yoko to replicate it exactly as Hijikata
had given it to them. “Teaching” at this early stage of Hijikata’s butoh was out of choreographic
necessity and movement would always carry the imprimatur of the master artist.
Many dancers and commentators have spoken about Hijikata’s short temper and the often
times brutal conditions to which he subjected to the dancers. Says Kasai, Hijikata’s butoh was
“hanzai [crime] dance” (Interview by the author. Tokyo, October 29, 2010). He danced literally
and figuratively on a dangerous edge where anything could happen: “a perilous place called
butoh” (Mikami 1997, 89). His working process ensured that those who remained were able to
achieve the “edgy,” intense psychophysical state he demanded in performance; however, most
current teachers do not subject their students to such abusive working conditions.
One of the most tangible remnants of Hijikata’s work is his choreographic notes, or butoh-fu.
In 2015, dedicated Hijikata archivist Morishita Takashi introduced the study Hijikata Tatsumi’s
Notational Butoh: An Innovational Method for Butoh Creation, which makes it possible to investigate
Hijikata’s scrapbooks and butoh-fu beyond the walls of the Keio University Archive.2 As a student
of Waguri, Mikami Kayo, SU-EN, Tamano, and Koga, I was familiar with some of the images or
at least the format of creating dance inspired by various visual artists’ oeuvres (particularly that of
Francis Bacon) before I had the chance to visit the archive myself. Waguri relies on them heavily
419
Tanya Calamoneri
and brings photocopied packets of images to class and refers to them when giving choreography;
students eagerly huddle around and study the images. According to Morishita and dancers such
as Waguri and Yamamoto Moe who are invested in preserving Notational Butoh as a method,
Hijikata had very specific manifestations of each notation in mind and was working on systema-
tizing his dance vocabulary toward the end of his life (Morishita 2015, 28). Butoh-fu, however, is
still a far cry from a codified pedagogy system such as Graham technique, which teaches “con-
traction” as the primary organizing principle and incorporates incrementally complex exercises
to train the physical body for Graham’s choreography. It is impossible to say if Hijikata would
have eventually developed such a precise method if he had lived longer.
Today, Waguri3 is the only teacher I know of who carries on this tradition of teaching directly
from Hijikata’s butoh-fu notation.4 Other contemporary teachers, notably SU-EN, Katsura Kan,
and Frances Barbe, have devised their own butoh-fu. Their notations reference similar images as
Hijikata’s and follow the surrealistic, associative flow of images, which change dramatically in
mood, dimension, and focus. The few vestiges of choreographic form indicated in Hijikata’s
notes that appear in the classes of a wide variety of butoh artists are the Maya walks (a traveling
version of the dancing Shiva pose), bull (performed on the hind legs, feet in a forced arch, eyes
gazing out under a lowered brow) and beast (on all four limbs with fingers tucked to form paws,
similar lowered brow, and the mouth slightly open like an animal smelling), and the crouching
Nijinsky hands shuffling form (seen most often today in Sankai Juku performances but I have
also done them in workshops with SU-EN, Koga, Tamano, Waguri, and Kan). All of these forms
are seen clearly in Hijikata’s 1972 piece, 27 Nights for Four Seasons. Dancers included Waguri,
Tamano (with whom Koga trained extensively), and Ashikawa (Hijikata’s main muse in the latter
half of his career, with whom SU-EN trained extensively), so it is relatively easy to trace the initial
migrations of these choreographic forms.
Perhaps more interesting to this discussion on butoh pedagogy than the forms themselves is
the way those forms were approached. Waguri described his first experiences at Asbestos-kan,
working for three months only on Maya and bull choreography for five hours a day in rehearsal
for 27 Nights. At the end of the three grueling months,5 Waguri was the only one remaining of
the eight new dancers. He was at the point of giving up as well and Ashikawa begged him to
stay, to which he acquiesced. Waguri says he summoned his “fighting spirit” cultivated through
karate. Eventually Hijikata amassed a cast and completed the work, presumably with dancers who
had the tenacity to match his intensity.
A similar kind of ferocity exists in Noguchi taiso, which many butoh teachers use to prepare
students for dancing.6 Noguchi taiso was created by Noguchi Michizo, a high school gymnastics
teacher who fought in World War II and afterward returned to his practice with a newfound
appreciation of the body’s interaction with the forces of gravity and natural flows (Fraleigh and
Nakamura 2006, 123–124). Noguchi proposed that the body is a water bag, with the skin as a
sac which contains mostly fluid, and bones. His theory was that with proper alignment of this
water bag, it should be as easy to stand on one’s hands as it was to stand on one’s feet. Rather
than focusing on anatomical structure, his teaching employed poetic visual and aural imagery
to cue movement. His exercises, as I learned them from Seki, Koga, and Kaseki Yuko, resemble
extreme fitness moves, with Ashtanga yoga-like focus and rigor.7 The teacher gives an exercise
and the students practice them repeatedly for several minutes with the teacher giving corrections
while they practice. In one such routine, referred to as “stom-paa,” the dancer squats and curls all
limbs into a tiny little ball and then explodes into a three-dimensional “X” body, balancing on
the heels. As soon as one finds the apex of the movement, the subsequent collapse is joint-like
and complete, moving back into the balled-up figure. The extreme physicality and imagery based
language used in Noguchi taiso was a good match for butoh dancers, so much so that teachers
420
Butoh pedagogy
like Seki are sometimes unsure whether an exercise came from Noguchi taiso or was something
she adapted from working with Hijikata.
Experiential traces of butoh pedagogy

Most contemporary butoh students learn their craft from a host of itinerant teachers referred to
as “butoh masters” – generally second- and third-generation dancers who trace their roots to
Hijikata or Ohno, or both – and very few dancers dedicate themselves exclusively to one teacher.8
Most people also take workshops or train with other teachers when the opportunity arises.
Workshops are offered typically in weekend and weeklong, full-day “intensives.” Teachers
often have at least one meal with the students, while students often eat together, and participants
quickly form a communal sensibility. There are a handful of butoh teachers who have devel-
oped their own year-long study programs (i.e., apprenticeship with SU-EN Butoh Company or
Anita Saij’s Nordic School of Butoh) and a few artists working in higher education who develop
15-week curriculums in an academic context (notably, Frances Barbe at Edith Cowan University
and Marie Gabrielle-Roti at Goldsmiths, University of London). Dairakudakan, Kasai, Tanaka’s
Body Weather students, and others have developed their own clearly-structured systems that they
teach in short and long format, ranging from a weekend to several months.
As a result of being the servant of many masters, so to speak, many contemporary butoh
students develop an eclectic style and methodology that is confusing to comprehend. I was one
of these students. Having come to butoh quite by accident – I met Koga in a three-month Ruth
Zaporah Action Theater training in 2000 and subsequently joined his company inkBoat’s tour
to Germany with the production of Cockroach – I could hardly grasp a cohesive system for this
new form. When I asked Koga for overarching tenets (to which my Western-educated mind
was accustomed), he handed me what looked like an evolutionary timeline, only instead of the
progression of apes to humans, the sequence was something like small child, seashell, wooly
mammoth, worm, house, flower. I was bewildered, yet intrigued.
In preparation for the tour, I studied with Koga intensively and also took a weeklong work-
shop with SU-EN. Koga had us standing on active train tracks and SU-EN had us walking blind-
folded through a multi-tiered broken concrete park. I was instantly captivated by the immediacy
I felt from this work. Also, the patchwork self-designed workshop training system was familiar
from somatics and postmodern dance. Many students I encountered in the workshops were also
cross-overs from contemporary dance, who were also eager to explore new working methods
that cultivated internal experiences.
While in Berlin, I performed with Seki and Kaseki, and met Yoshioka Yumiko while inkBoat
was in residence at her art colony Schloss Broellin. I returned to Berlin annually for five years
to study with Seki. The training was often grueling and many times I questioned the goal of it;
however, I saw several brilliant solo performances that spurred me deeper into study. Highlights
include Kaseki’s Kudan, in which she transformed herself into a bull complete with eight teats
and horns and wagged her head endlessly to a cow bell sound, and Yoshioka’s i-Ki, in which
she inserted her body inside inflatable plastic furniture that continuously deflated and kept me
on edge wondering if she had enough oxygen. As with my initial introduction with Koga and
SU-EN, I sensed an immediacy and unflinching absorption in these performances that I wanted
to cultivate in myself.
Seki offered the most extensive training at the time, in daily practice for a month at a time. Her
workshops combined Noguchi taiso and improvisational scores such as transforming our bodies
into boiling water, steam, and geysers. She was also fond of durational scores, like 30 minutes of
suri-ashi that explores jo-ha-kyu rhythm, and 30 minutes of jumping with the image meditation
421
Tanya Calamoneri
of dangling from a string as if we are a tea bag being dipped into hot water. It took time to adjust
to the rigor of her training, and I often couldn’t walk upstairs after the first three days of each
session. We all wore our soreness like a badge of courage. Every day we began by cleaning the
floor with folded rags; each student lugged a bucket of steaming hot water from the kitchen to
the studio and then proceeded to dip the rag, wring it out, and then run across the floor folded in
half in a traveling downward dog with their hands pushing the rags in long lanes. Seki closed each
day’s practice with otsukaresamadeshita, loosely translated as “thank you for your blood, sweat, and
tears,” which indeed we had shed by the day’s end.
I participated in two 2003 Impulstanz Coaching-Series workshops with Murobushi and
Ikeda.9 They made lasting impressions on my approach to butoh through their performances and
teaching. I had one of the most transformative audience experiences of my life watching Ikeda
simply raise her arms,10 evoking in me a sensation of standing in the dry alley of the parted Red
Sea. She enveloped the space around me as well as herself and I felt the pressure of the walls of
water held at bay by her outstretched arms. Needless to say, I did whatever she asked in class, and
can still hear her yelling “plus bas [lower]!” and feel her kicking my heels so I wouldn’t lift them
off the floor as we walked what felt like endless rounds of suri-ashi in the hangar-sized studios.
Though I had attempted the “1,000 ants crawling all over you” (and basically eating you alive)
exercise previously, it was in Ikeda’s class that I had a breakthrough with this. Whether it was just
the accumulation of previous attempts, the slightly difficult life transition phase I was in, or Ikeda’s
severity that made me always feel like I could work harder, I cannot say. She also juxtaposed the
exercise with an ending image of lotus flowers floating on a pond and instructed us that a thin
spirit should rise from the ashes of the previous gruesome image, and that we should dance with
this wispy smoke. It was like having a pose and counter-pose in yoga, an action and recuperation.
The one image served to distinguish the next in relief (literally and figuratively). The result was
such that my post-bug-eaten body was drained, and I was no longer in charge of my limbs; a very
thin breath moved me. When Ikeda called an end to the improvisation, my conscious thought
moved through layers of cotton to reach her “thank you” cue to end.
I used to cherish and even seek to replicate these kinds of transcendental experiences while
dancing, until Waguri noted that Hijikata coached him that his desired position was “coolness”
(2010a), or that which Mikami calls “not drunk,” meaning not in an altered state (2010b). Hiji-
kata cautioned his students against being seduced by one’s own movement. He told Waguri, “if
butoh looks like [you have taken] a drug, and ahh, [I have a] good feeling, or possession . . . Such
kind of dancer cannot get it.” Instead, he suggested that a “drunk” dancer is lost in the personal
body’s sensation and is no longer tuning to, or resonating with, one’s ambiance (in the form of an
image or whatever the substance of study). Waguri suggests that in order to remain “cool” even
while consumed, “my eyes [must] watch myself ” (2010a). He likens this paradoxical experience
to sleep, saying “my every consciousness and sense reach out and, like an insect,” he can sense tiny
vibrations, and his “nerves are like the hair of a cat, and 360 degrees my senses catch everything.
But, very cool, not too excited. If I want to do more, such sense is gone” (2010a). Waguri explains
that although one does become fully engrossed in the experience, “being danced” by images is
not the same as being in a trance. The dancer must maintain consciousness in order to be able
to sense new information on a very minute level, and also sculpt the unfolding experience and
movements that arise into something performance-worthy. They must observe without attach-
ment, and without interfering too much.
The question of where to position one’s attention has been a consistent navigation throughout
my research. At that same 2003 festival in Vienna, Murobushi threw himself in and out of an
industrial sink in one of the stable-like buildings. He was sweating profusely in the August heat
and startled me by talking directly to the audience. “It’s hot, ne?” he asked. I have seen him do
422
Butoh pedagogy
this many times in performance since that moment and it always catches me off-guard, because
of his playfulness with presence. He appears entirely absorbed in another dimension, and then
makes a casual personal comment as if we are simply having a coffee.
His class11 was also a surprise to me, after having come from workshops that were based
around extended improvisational scores through which I found myself in altered states. Muro-
bushi would play a strange game of follow the leader, beginning with a light jog complete with
the towel around his neck (evoking one of his favorite athletes, Mohammed Ali) and then cawing
birds with wide flapping wings, and then Pinocchio-like wooden puppets operated by master
puppeteers and unruly toddlers, alternately. We followed him like small children and copied his
vocal sounds, which often made him laugh. He taught us to use breath and fill from the inside
in order to find our apex (with feet crossed one in front of the other, balanced on tip toes) from
which point we were to collapse as if our puppet strings had been cut. I can still hear him saying,
“top, stop . . . and . . . explode, POW!”
At first I had a difficult time with Murobushi’s instruction because I was too focused on
copying his many forms. Years later, after working with Waguri primarily on form and devel-
oping a larger lexicon of butoh-esque vocabulary, I could more quickly grasp the idea behind
Murobushi’s directions, and position myself in the mental state needed to dive into the experience
from the very first shape Murobushi offered in his follow-the-leader game. This was because
Waguri was so precise: he would have us turn into pollen in 20 steps, in 5 percent increments. We
students were expected to achieve complete transformation very quickly, to just simply let go of
any notion of personal form and reach, in Waguri’s words, “ecstasy.” This practice pushed me as a
dancer; I found I no longer needed to coax these states out through long improvisational explora-
tions, but rather I could “drop in” as if I had slipped into another room and the atmosphere was
suddenly different. Waguri also demanded precision in our expression. Dancer Ximena Garnica
told me that when working with Waguri on a duet, he chastised her, “I said 1 ant, this is 10!”
In my training with him, Murobushi continued to increase the complexity of the images. For
example, in later workshops, he expected us to fully inhabit consuming sensations like our bodies
burning to ash. He laughed at us (albeit kindly) at the conclusion of most exercises, saying “ok,
ok . . . it’s difficult . . .” before moving on to something equally challenging, like being plunged
into lava and cooling as a mummy, balancing on the knife edge side of the body without moving.
When most of us felt like we were going to pass out from holding our breath, he told us to use
“back-up breathing” or “hidden breath” to maintain the tension needed to keep the image alive
and engaged. When I interviewed Murobushi further about his own experiences, he told me that
Hijikata’s working methods were “dangerous” with real stakes, not dancers coming into the stu-
dio and participating in a group warm-up session like so many contemporary butoh workshops
that are taught in the post-modern dance class structure (2010). Hijikata directed him, “always
unbalance,” which Murobushi clearly took to heart in his own choreographic aesthetics and
attempted to replicate in the exercises he offers in classes. However, Murobushi was kind with us
and there were no consequences to our failures. He simply invited us to play in his playground,
and made little comments or corrections to our work. I speculate that his lack of critique was a
result of his own experience, in which the dancers of his generation were generally self-directed
as they developed their own work.
Nakajima helped make sense out of these two different approaches – improvisation and
choreographic form – showing me that they can in fact be two sides of the same coin. In her
own classes, she combined lessons from both of her teachers in order to develop her teach-
ing. She says, “Ohno Kazuo taught only improvisation, forget[ting] about how to show it,
and Hijikata taught us only how to show it. They taught us only one-way ticket, not double
ticket.” She says that what she teaches now depends on whom she is teaching. For professionals
423
Tanya Calamoneri
such as her own dancers, the form is paramount, and for novice students, learning how to find
the expression of the experience is the starting point. Further, she has to modulate what she
emphasizes within each of these groups: “If the teacher taught everything, the student will
collapse.” At Nakajima’s community classes in Tokyo, she begins with something called “kat-
sugen movement,” a regenerative movement technique developed by Noguchi Haruchika. She
instructs students to shake, gyrate, and exhale loudly in an effort to clear the nervous system of
its grooved-in pathways and create a system-wide vibratory experience for the body. Following
this, she crafts a series of dance scores for duets and trios based on movements that students have
developed during the katsugen warm up. Like a live director improvising her choreography,
she stages the students’ movements and guides them to deepen their explorations of particular
images that emerge.
Conclusion
Ohno Yoshito suggests that contemporary butoh dancers take it upon themselves to take respon-
sibility for their own learning. He says, “Study by yourself. Then make your own revolution.
This is butoh” (Interview by the author, Tokyo, November 8, 2010). For younger generations
that dive straight into butoh, Yoshito says, “they cannot make a revolution because they have no
foundation.” It doesn’t have to be dance technique per se, he advised, it could be that one studies
movement in daily life closely. I understand Yoshito’s advice as a caution to not simply copy form
without understanding context. Hijikata’s pedagogy is linked to the philosophy, so much so that
many young butoh students eagerly quote Hijikata’s “To Prison” (1961), “On Being Jealous
of a Dog’s Vein” (1969) and other essays, more so than any modern dancer I know referencing
Graham’s “I Am a Dancer” (1952). As described in his essays, Hijikata’s “derelict” body makes
a certain kind of sense when juxtaposed with then-emergent critiques of productivity and cap-
italism. Without that framework his dance would be grotesque as aesthetic only. Of course,
that macabre sensibility is a hallmark of Hijikata’s butoh, which is why butoh has been taken up
by film and theater practitioners to portray ghosts, demons, villains, etc., as I have commented
elsewhere (Calamoneri 2016). However, for founding dancers like Yoshito and Kasai, there was
an inherent social critique involved in Hijikata’s artistic work. Yoshito (Interview by the author,
Tokyo, November 8, 2010) notes that Hijikata first studied German Neue Tanz and ballet, and
then from that made his own form. These dances were of course also wrapped up in the social
and political movements of the time, and so Hijikata’s radical presentation of the body vibrated
against previous aesthetics and organizing principles. In other words, he had a base scaffolding to
break and make into something new.
Yoshito’s suggestion to study daily life today might get us to the same conclusions and rep-
resentation of body in society, since many of the same political realities from the 1950s remain;
however, the tenor is different so I conclude that Yoshito suggests butoh today should really look
differently if students do their own research and do not just copy historical form. If the contem-
porary generation of butoh students – and I include myself among them – is to heed this advice,
then it is incumbent on us to study the pathways butoh artists have traveled in order to know
where we will take our own artistry next.
Notes
1 See Kurihara, Nanako. 2000. “Hijikata Tatsumi: The Words of Butoh.” TDR. Vol. 44, Issue 1, p. 23.
2 Costume En Face, Yamamoto Moe’s transcription of Hijikata’s choreography for the dance piece of the
same name, was also published in 2015 by Ugly Duckling Press.
424
Butoh pedagogy
3 Waguri passed away on October 22, 2017, after the writing of this chapter.
4 I would surmise that Yamamoto’s workshops rely heavily on this method as well, but as I have never
studied with him personally I cannot confirm.
5 From personal experience, I can attest that Maya is quite painful to perform, with many awkward angles
held at uncomfortable heights and an attempt to make a three-dimensional human form into a two-
dimensional hieroglyph.
6 Seki says that Noguchi taiso was adopted by Dairakudakan (directed by Akaji Maro), which accounts for
the spread of the training through butoh teaching. Dairakudakan spawned four major butoh companies:
Sankai Juku, Dance Love Machine (in which Seki and Yoshioka performed), Byakko Sha (Temko Ima
carries this tradition on in Kyoto), and Ariadone (Murobushi and Ikeda).
7 I also experienced another approach to Noguchi’s work through Osanai Mari, and this strand reminded
me of Feldenkreis and Bartenieff work, with patient yet unwavering attention paid to the rotation of the
joints, moving in circles and figure-eights.
8 The exception to this would be the young (primarily Japanese) dancers who dance almost exclusively
for one choreographer and then branch off on their own. For example, former Waguri dancers formed
their own company, Shinonome. New butoh companies continue to emerge from established conduits
such as Dairakudakan and Sankai Juku (such as Semimaru’s Kokutoh-in, founded in 1990, or Matsuoka’s
recent Dessin La performance series). These branches of butoh are more similar to one particular sec-
ond-generation butoh artist than the typical eclectic mash-ups seen in other young butoh companies,
however the young artists show a wide variety of contemporary influences. Shinonome, for example,
incorporate popping and locking styles into their lexicon to great effect.
9 Murobushi passed away on June 18, 2015, in Mexico City; Ikeda passed away September 14, 2014, in
Bordeaux, France.
10 The performance was Haru no Saiten / Un Sacre Du Printemps, directed by Ikeda and Murobushi, pre-
sented at ImPulsTanz in 2003.
11 I continued to study with Murobushi when he was a frequent resident artist through CAVE in New
York, where I relocated in 2003. I also shadowed his collaboration with Koga on Crazy Cloud during
their residency at the Maggie Allese National Center for Choreography at Florida State University.
Works cited
Calamoneri, Tanya. 2016. “Dancing Hamlet in a World of Frogs.” Theatre, Dance and Performance Training.
Vol. 7, Issue 3, pp. 375–388.
Fraleigh, Sondra, and Tamah Nakamura. 2006. Routledge Performance Practitioners: Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno
Kazuo. New York: Routledge.
Graham, Martha. 1952. “I Am A Dancer.” Written for the radio program This I Believe, published in This
I Believe, Vol. 2.
Hijikata, Tatsumi. 2000 (1961). “To Prison.” Translated by Nanako Kurihara. The Drama Review. Vol. 44,
Issue 1, pp. 43–48. Originally published as “Keimusho e.” Mita Bungaku. (May 1961).
———. 2006 (1969). From Being Jealous of a Dog’s Vein. Translated by Elena Polzer. Berlin: Mori-Ōgai-
Gedenkstätte der Humbolt Universitat zu Berlin. Originally published as Inu no jomyaku ni shitto suru
koto kara (Bijutsu Techō, May 1969).
Mikami, Kayo. 1997. Tatsumi Hijikata: An Analysis of Butoh Techniques. Thesis (PhD). Ochanomizu Univer-
sity, Tokyo.
Morishita, Takashi. 2015. Hijikata Tatsumi’s Notational Butoh: An Innovational Method for Butoh Crea-
tion. Tokyo: Keio University Art Center.
Murobushi, Kō. 2010. Interview with the author. Tallahassee, May 10.
Waguri, Yukio. 2010a. Interview with the author. New York City, September 9.
———. 2010b. Interview with the author. Kyoto, November 7.
425
44
WAGURI YUKIO’S BUTOH KADEN
Taking stock of Hijikata’s butoh notation
Rosa van Hensbergen
I will also leave for a new journey.

( Waguri Yukio)
In 2004 Waguri Yukio released his Butoh Kaden: DVD-ROM (henceforth Butoh Kaden) presenting
the notational records of 88 butoh movements choreographed by Hijikata Tatsumi in the 1970s.1
These are organized in a “Butoh-fu Title Map” into seven thematic “worlds,” which can be
navigated either sequentially or horizontally as a “web” of interrelated items (Waguri 2017). This
cartography of Hijikata’s notational language is the retrospective work of a dancer “who made
his start . . . in chaos flooded in Hijikata’s words” (Waguri 2004, 16). The words Waguri wrote
down during this chaotic period were not systematically notated, just as they were not system-
atically delivered – Hijikata had been so “occupied with creation” that he “did not systematize
his choreographic words” (14). Nor were they fully representative, in that Hijikata varied these
words according to the period, the performer, and the performance.
The notational records produced by Hijikata’s dancers are necessarily heterogeneous. They
had to be organized after the fact, and without his guidance.2 As such, any systematic presentation
can only ever offer a “perspective” on Hijikata’s butoh (Waguri 2004, 3). This perspective none-
theless brings his method – of “‘physicaliz[ing] images through “words”’ – into view.” Without
this perspective, it is easy to “believe that there is no choreography” in Hijikata’s butoh, when in
fact it is highly structured (5). What lends this structure is, conversely, its flood of “words.” These
words even become, Waguri suggests, coterminous with butoh itself; as he writes: “it is now
widely recognized [as a result of Butoh Kaden] that Hijikata butoh is, in fact, butoh-fu.”
Butoh-fu or “butoh notation” asks for clarification – the Japanese fu designates something
strictly written, a “score” or “record.” Equating “Hijikata butoh” with butoh-fu, as Waguri does,
suggests its application is broader than the “notation” of a written score. Butoh is, after all, a live
performance art. The butoh artist SU-EN has suggested “body words” in place of “notation”
as a more faithful translation of their in-context use.3 And while “notation” as written record is
justifiably too narrow, it might have broader practical application here. Waguri certainly under-
stands butoh-fu in this broader sense: “butoh-fu (butoh notation) uses words to explain matters that
cannot easily be symbolized,” he writes. “A word is not a tool for recording, but is used as a kind
of medium to expand on a physical image with imagination” (2004, 11).
426
Waguri Yukio’s Butoh Kaden
With this medial sense of butoh-fu or “butoh notation” in mind, Butoh Kaden can be framed
as the virtual rendering of a live exchange that took place in the 1970s between Hijikata and
Waguri. But it can also be taken as a starting point for future creative work: “butoh has just
begun,” Waguri writes (2004, 3). Waguri’s own journey back through the chaos of that live
exchange was not only a matter of systematizing, but of rediscovering materials for new cho-
reography. It gave rise to the “7 illusionary stages” of Butoh Kaden productions for the DVD.
These “stages” are distinct from the notational “worlds” in that they represent Waguri’s own
choreographic engagement with Hijikata’s notational language. They propose a “journey to the
frontier of new Butoh” (16), but one that expects to be extended and modified by the work of
future choreographers. Opening the doors on the conversation involved in butoh’s making in the
1970s, Butoh Kaden also enlivens the vocabularies with which current exchanges can take place.
It returns to circulation words that were never intended as historical records, but as materials to
be shared between bodies in a space.
The words of Hijikata’s butoh

Listening to Waguri direct a choreographic sequence, his spoken stream hardly lets up.4 This sonic
landscape, shifting through densities of verbal imagery and onomatopoeia, builds the environs in
which a body is moved. What this world of words is to the body of butoh is various: running along-
side the body, language pressurizes movement’s onward flow; crystalizing minute detail, language lends
choreographic intricacy and precision; spinning imaginative worlds around the body, language builds
a virtual density in which movement takes place. Words are never at rest in the practice of butoh.
Within the space of several seconds, Waguri might direct a dancer with the following words:
A room is filled with pollen.

Show the density and drowsiness of the pollen.
The air itself is very sleepy.
The dance of the pollen is itself wrapped in pollen.
The air is dull and damp under and overcast sky,
like during the spring flower season.
The air is dizzy.
Waguri 2004, pt. 1 > Butoh-fu
Title Map > World of Flowers > Pollen5
Fixed as a written score, these lines entitled “Pollen” leave themselves open to a range of dis-
section procedures. But the words of butoh are both more and less vulnerable than those of
a printed text. The surface of their reading, or listening, is the flesh. Their materiality is not
written, but registers in the thickness of language spoken from choreographer to dancer’s body:
a body subject to the intonations, rhythms, and stopping points of the choreographic voice.
It is the choreographer’s job to manage the slow, or more often quick, release of these words
into the space around and through the dancer, and the dancer’s job to “sharpen [their] whole
body’s sensation as a receiver-body (jushin-tai), whilst simultaneously effecting an extreme
effort to become a signal-body (hasshin-tai)” (Waguri 2015, 1).6 This “receiver-body” is not
only passively receptive (the ju of jushin, literally “receiver,” also builds words like “passive,”
judō), but expected to affect an instantaneous physicalized response. This translation of lan-
guage into movement allows the words themselves to fall away – there is no spoken text in
Hijikata’s performance.7
This express conversion system is a highly trained one. Rather than restrict the body’s respon-
siveness, training urges movements into the unfamiliar, opens a space for improvisation beyond
427
Figure 44.1 Screenshot of Part 1: BUTOH-FU.
the limits of a personal repertoire.8 Words exert this choreographic pressure, as that which forces
out “things not understood”:
When things not understood are encircled by things that are, those things which are not
understood swiftly flee and are continually chased. That which is understood is language.
Everyone has the desire to escape from this endless and eternal movement. But what is
not understood, above all else (even God), is the self (jibun). It is impossible to flee from
the self, and so maybe every age needs dance (buyō) or butoh in order to forget the self.
Waguri 2015, 4
“Language” as “understood” might be clarified here – wakaru (判る) can mean grasping, compre-
hending, but it can also mean knowing, taking time to acquire a specific connaissance. Hijikata’s
language is hardly quick to grasp at first parsing (“The air itself is very sleepy”), but rehearsed its use
sharpens up into something physically legible. Only with this linguistic familiarity can the chasing
game begin. The body’s ability to “understand” Hijikata’s language is related to technical or physical
training, to an understanding that comes through the body first. As Kobayashi Saga recalls: “the
reason behind many things couldn’t be understood, but even without logical understanding, the
body could understand” (Kobayashi, in Keiō gijuku daigaku āto sentā 1998, 34). So “a room is filled
with pollen” might initially fail comprehension, but in time trigger a precise suspension in the solar
plexus caused by a catching of the breath as if about to sneeze; a narrowing and flickering of the
eyes, pollen dusting the lashes; a parting of the lips, drying out with the held breath.
This trained knowing does not equate to consolidated physical knowledge, to infinitely repro-
ducible form, because “understood” things continually unsettle themselves in the chase after the
“not understood.” This restless to-and-fro between understanding and not relates to the dynamics
of “becoming” in butoh. In Hijikata’s method, the dancer is expected to “become (naru)” the
“Pollen,” but this never “stagnates into the condition of trance,” never “fully becomes (nari kitte).”
Rather the condition of “trance,” as a total self-forgetting, runs alongside the “condition of man-
aging the self, awakening, self-consciousness” (Waguri 2015, 2). Without this ability to manage
the self, choreographic sequence grinds to a halt. The single image, fully become, threatens a
vertiginous totality, offering no way to keep moving.
A printed notational text more apparently risks this stasis. Sent to press, a single line on
“Thickness, density, drowsiness” can be entered into, amplified into a state of “trance.” Whereas
played through the choreographer’s voice, in an audible score that gives no pause, the same line
is continually disrupted by the emergence and dissolution of new imagery. “Pollen” (above)
establishes a base condition that folds into “Pollen” 1:
Your body is made of flower pollen.

Your fingertips are pinching threads as if you are yarning.
You are now changing into Rodin’s Hanako
who is wearing a hat and who has long hair.
Then Hanako has transformed into very dense pollen.
It slowly starts evaporating,
and you slowly retreat into the background
relying only on the sense of touch on your fingertips.
And through this slow “retreat” into “Pollen” 2:
There is a roomful of flower pollen.

When you take a closer look,
429
Rosa van Hensbergen
one thick portion looks like a rooster like in a painting by Itō Jakuchū.
But then, it is still a wall of pollen.
It looked as if the pollen started walking,
but then again it started looking like Jakuchū’s rooster.
But again, it only looked like a wall of pollen.
It retreats into the background.
Finally, it again becomes enveloped in a dense wall of pollen.
And finally, from this “dense” envelope into “Pollen” 3:
Out of the dense wall of pollen, a person made of pollen appears.

The person again becomes wrapped around in pollen and disappears.
(Example of the person here are: Drawings by Beardsley,
Goya’s family portrait, Francis Bacon’s man
with a letter in his hands, Turner’s boatman.)
Waguri 2004, pt. 1 > Butoh-Fu Title Map >
World of Flowers > Pollen
‘Notation’ in Hijikata’s butoh, then, is both the verbal score (live or recorded) and the experiential
knowing that surrounds its use – a language haunted by the cues and references of an embedded-
ness within exchange. Each of these choreographic phrases (as the English makes far clearer than
the original Japanese)9 is studded with visual references: Auguste Rodin’s sculpture of Hanako,
Itō Jakuchū’s paintings of a rooster or flowers, a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley, and suggestions of
drawings or paintings by Francisco de Goya, Francis Bacon, and William Turner. But even with
these allusions revealed, knowing how to move through them remains opaque without training.
Hijikata’s butoh places less stress on the forms themselves than on the transformation between
them. As Waguri suggests in a “hint” in Butoh Kaden: “A hundred movement changes can be no
match for one transformation” (Waguri 2004). This transformative work does not only dynamize
the interstices between images, but treats each image as itself already dynamic. This is illustrated
by the “Workshop” footage that accompanies “Pollen” 3, in which a dancer moves without pause
through the “dense wall” into “Madame Beardsley,” continually guided by the voice of Waguri.
Transforming through images without ever stagnating into a single one, the movement of butoh
works the tension between instant and sequence. Language is the mediator of this “continuous
transformation of the two-dimensional space of the visual image into the four-dimensional space of
butoh,” precisely because the spoken word as a live score can manage this tension in synchronicity with
the body’s movement (Waguri 2015, 1). Hijikata described this time-bound forward shudder in 1971:
If you create a condition in which the continuity (renzoku-sei) that threatens to confine
the body’s movement is subject to continual interruption (chūdan), then this itself can
transform into the movement of a moving subject.
Hijikata 1998, 241
The work of cutting continuity is continual because one interruption might otherwise extend
into a new spaced-out continuity. The single image, or interruption, if left time to stagnate,
would evaporate the complex interlocking that makes up a choreographic work: the total
weave of choreographic moments that form an hour or two long piece. It is worth bearing in
mind that Hijikata’s notation was always developed and taught in the service of a performance
(Waguri 2016). The visual image is always dynamized in sequence, for “if the human eye is
430
taken as a single camera shutter, then the entire landscape (fūkei) of reality becomes something
like a one-way series of single paintings (ippōtsūko no ichimai no e no renzoku)” (Waguri 2015, 1).
Notational language comes into play as the continuous mediator of this visual “shutter.”
As Hijikata developed his notational language in the 1970s, he was reading Gaston Bachelard
on the poetic imagination.10 Bachelard’s treatment of the poetic image in language was vulner-
able to the same risk of stagnation as Hijikata’s moving image. Underlining the following lines
in his Japanese translation of Le droit de rêver (The Right to Dream) in the late 1970s, Hijikata
must have heard his own consideration of “continuity” played back in synonymous terms: “It
is in order to build a complex instant, and load it with numerous simultaneities, that a poet
destroys (hakai) the simple continuity (renzoku) of enchained time (rensatekina jikan)” (Bachelard
1970a, 244, 1977, 260). Bachelard was shedding the chains of Bergsonian duration – his project
made exigent the “instant” as duration’s counter-structure, as “the domain of abrupt mutations,
where the creative act takes place at one stroke” (Bachelard 2013, 9). Bachelard’s answer to the
threat of stasis was the imagination, for the imagination did not operate in “fixed” images but
maintained its liveness as the imaginary: “As a result of the imaginary, the imagination remains
essentially open, evasive,” where a “fixed and achieved image cuts the wings of the imagination”
(Bachelard 1943, 7–8).
Hijikata may have sharpened his tools for the cutting of “continuity,” but he was not in the
business of clipping imagination’s wings. The image, always channeled through a live exchange
between choreographer and dancer, is not to be “fixed and achieved,” “fully [become].” Each
image is subject to continual transformation into the next, and even this transformational
sequence is open to choreographic reordering. The voice is the mediator of this constant
motion. Hijikata was fairly clear on the relationship between language and movement as
spoken rather than printed. In a late interview given for W-Notation magazine, he suggested:
When it comes to writing, I’m a bungler in the face of a blank sheet of paper. I think
when I’m speaking it’s pretty close to when I’m moving, but writing is a little differ-
ent. . . . When I’m speaking it really is close to when I’m dancing, and I do things like
speak whilst dancing. I speak because I don’t understand. I have the instinct that I won’t
say anything if I understand completely.
Hijikata 1985, 13–14
Even Hijikata’s non-notational writings present the casual verb-endings and unraveling clauses of the
spoken word.11 But his notational language is even more embedded in this context of “speaking” off
the page. The restlessness of this live text balances on a tight-rope between understanding and not:
“I speak [and dance] because I don’t understand.” Fixed understanding or stable knowledge mutes
speaking and stills movement. What is understood continually unsettles in the chase after what is not.
But when this liveness is transferred to the page as a notational record, how is its restlessness preserved?
Is the written text the dead past of the present participles of speaking and moving, the stasis of the
image, the clipping of imagination’s wings? And when this written record is mediated digitally, does
it undergo a second death, or find new life in the plural dimensions of a DVD-ROM?
The worlds of Waguri’s Butoh Kaden

Waguri’s Butoh Kaden: DVD-ROM organizes a collection of notational materials that were pro-
duced under a practical pressure to integrate vast quantities of choreographic information: “The
quantity of rehearsals was totally impossible to remember without taking notes . . . I would
furiously write things down” (Waguri, in Keiō gijuku daigaku āto sentā 1998, 29). Writing was also
431
Rosa van Hensbergen
integral to training in Hijikata’s studio. It trained the ability to exist in a “split” condition, Waguri
recalls: “whilst watching the dance of more experienced dancers, you had to simultaneously write
down what you had just been taught. So you were basically split (bunretsu). These notes also
became butoh notation” (29). Writing, then, was not only the trace of parole, it was also involved
in training the mind and body of the butoh dancer. Practically, it served as a “shared language”
for teaching choreographic sequences at high-speed (29). This meant that even “without really
understanding,” with “no time to think” in rehearsals, a dancer like Waguri could “get up
onstage” and perform Hijikata’s choreography (25).
The written score of butoh, then, exists within a very precisely trained usage that never
expected to live outside a conversation between choreographer and dancer, or teacher and stu-
dent. When Waguri “hint[s]” in Butoh Kaden to “take written matters as things actually hap-
pening to your body,” these “written matters” can only in fact be “take[n]” in the designated
choreographic sense once they have been trained technically through a verbal exchange (Waguri
2004). Outside the parameter of training, these notational remnants – whether those recorded
by dancers like Waguri, Kobayashi Saga, Yamamoto Moe, Mikami Kayo, or those kept in the
scrapbooks and loose sheets of paper retained at the Hijikata Archive – can become prompts
for limitless imaginative processes. They can be cut up, extracted, replayed, collaged into poems,
visual images, other texts, and performances.12 But they cannot be physically materialized as
Hijikata’s choreography.
Waguri’s Butoh Kaden speaks to the imagination in several ways: as a record for trained butoh
dancers embedded in a dialogue between the choreographic voice and listening body, and as a
creative prompt for limitless re-imaginings through other media and techniques. It can also, turn-
ing to this page, inflect writing on butoh from the edge of practice – reveal without explaining-away
the intricate grammar of butoh’s making, suggest without reducing the structures of inter-
relation between the various layers that subtend Hijikata’s choreographic work: his language
notation, visual imagery, and movement training. It can sketch without fixing the parameters of
performance, the procedures that precede and accompany creation. This necessarily changes the
way in which Hijikata’s (and Waguri’s) choreography appears. Movements appear highly struc-
tured where they might have seemed improvised.
William Forsythe’s technological innovations in Improvisation Technologies and Choreographic
Objects occupy a similar position in relation to choreography.13 Forsythe claims the former does
not present “method” or “[tell] you how to invent motion, but deals with the very important
point just before the invention of motion,” or parallel to it – it is “less about how to improvise
than about how to analyze when you’re improvising” (Forsythe 2012b, 16–17). The latter is
“not a substitute for the body,” he proposes, “but rather an alternative site for the understanding
of potential instigation and organization of action to reside” (Forsythe 2009). Neither claims to
replace or realize the creative work, nor to short-cut the labor of technical training. A trained
dancer will always inhabit this alternative site in a different relation of understanding (or not) to
the researcher entering into a first encounter. But “digital objects,” as Forsythe calls them, still
set a virtual scene for the actual stage of making – block out spaces in which performance has
or might take place. A record can only ever hope to work along this edge. As Waguri describes
the work of codification:
Codifying is sometimes about taking stock of that which cannot be codified. For, as
[Hijikata] has said: “in order to grasp things which cannot be understood, that which
can be understood must press inwards to make these incomprehensible things appear.”
Waguri in Keiō gijuku daigaku āto sentā 1998, 29
432
Figure 44.2 Screenshot of Part 2: References.
Rosa van Hensbergen
Waguri’s “codifying” of Hijikata’s butoh notation could only ever present the parameter of “that
which can be understood,” as the border-pressure forcing “incomprehensible things [to] appear”
in the live performance. In presenting a range of digital “worlds,” from notational texts to work-
shop and performance recordings, Waguri lays out the materials for butoh’s making without
reducing their interrelations to reproducible formulae.
Waguri’s choice of “worlds” as an organizational structure for presenting these notational
materials is fitting, not only as a term borrowed from Hijikata’s own vocabulary, but in the sug-
gestion of plural totalities (Waguri 2016). Unlike the total image in Bachelard, here one totality
folds continually into the next. A notational unit is integrated into a further thematic whole (say,
in “World of Birds and Beasts,” “World of Abyss,” “World of Wall”) or choreographic sequence
(a movement from “World of Abyss” might occur at the same time as, or in sequence with, one
from “World of Wall”). The dancer’s training enables them to receive and signal these plural
“worlds” at once, to transform imperceptibly through sequences of images that are each built of
further layers of enfolded referential materials (visual images and cultural allusions). This thick
spread is virtually hyperlinked through the multiple digital registers of Waguri’s Butoh Kaden
(image, word, video files). To take one example, diving through “World of Anatomy” into the
notational language of “Traces of Salvador Dalí,” a section of notation reads:
Following the passage of Dalí around King Solomon’s Palace.

Lion in the grotto. Faces of the forest.
Slugs. Francis Bacon’s faces (fists, scabs, three faces).
The pope wearing clothes made of steaming pus.
The executioner. Disappear into pus.
Slowdown.
Waguri 2004, pt. 1 > Butoh-fu Title Map >
World of Anatomy > Traces of Salvador Dalí
As with “Pollen,” the base condition for “Traces of Salvador Dalí” is legible in the notational
language alone: “pus” repeats itself as the ambient quality through which movements appear and
dissolve. But the precise body-reading that each notational reference asks for is a trained form
of physical literacy.
While physical training is required to convert this notation into Hijikata’s live movement
language, Butoh Kaden opens to view the process of that conversion. It makes clear the lines
between record, practice, and choreographic work without closing off the possibilities for crea-
tive response. In presenting seven “illusionary stages” as virtual performances, Waguri suggests a
future for Hijikata’s method that nonetheless derives its main energy from the materials passed
between choreographer and dancer. Hijikata’s notation was never finalized because it was respon-
sive to the demands of any given performer and any given performance.
What the Butoh Kaden: DVD-ROM offers, more than a ready guide to Hijikata’s (or Waguri’s)
choreographic work, is a sense of the extensive labor and commitment to a “shared language”
this work demands (Waguri, in Keiō gijuku daigaku āto sentā 1998, 29): both in terms of the cho-
reographer refining and sequencing notational language, and in terms of the dancer developing a
“receiver”-“signal” body to mediate this choreographic work. At the same time, it does not, and
would not want to, guard against the richness of creative interpretations that might spin out from
this language when not “shared” by a trained body. It is, as several of the essays featured in Butoh
Kaden suggest a “form of a journey,” a “trip” that welcomes the ready “traveler” (Waguri 2004,
pt. 2 > About Butoh > Essays on Butoh > Yukio Waguri & ‘Butoh Kazen’).
434
Notes
1 Butoh Kaden refers to Waguri’s own butoh company. For ease of reading, it is italicized to refer to the
DVD throughout, and non-italicized to refer to the company. The DVD-ROM (2004), in fact had a
previous life as a CD-ROM, and has since been turned into an iPhone app.
2 Mikami Kayo (1993, 2015, 2016a) published the first comprehensive overview of Hijikata’s method,
including an appendix of his butoh notation. Since then, Waguri (1998, 2004) has published the DVD
under discussion here; Kobayashi Saga (2005) has published a selection of Hijikata’s words framed within
an autobiographical account; and Yamamoto Moe (2015) has published a bilingual notational record of
his solo part in Hijikata’s choreography Shōmen no ishō (Costume in Front). Morishita Takashi (e.g., 2015)
has published accounts of the notation and worked with dancers to build a video bank of Hijikata’s
movement vocabulary at the Hijikata Archive. Bruce Baird (2007, 2012, chap. 6) has offered critical
accounts of the method in English and evaluated several of the Japanese sources mentioned above.
3 Butoh-fu has been standardized retrospectively. SU-EN suggested at a POHRC event (Cambridge,
June 28–July 1, 2016) that butoh-fu might be limited to the written text, where “body words” could
better describe the live text passed between choreographer and dancer. I am indebted to SU-EN in the
decision to frame this chapter in terms of the relation between liveness and record.
4 This is particularly apparent where he guides dancers in his own company – as in the “Work-
shop” examples contained in Butoh Kaden , or when I have seen him direct the movement of
Ishimoto Kae in workshops. This style of delivery, whilst distinctly Waguri’s own, is also learned
from Hijikata.
5 Citations are from the English version of Butoh Kaden; however, there are discrepancies between the
English and Japanese versions worth noting here. The Japanese text is more compact. A more literal
translation of “Pollen,” for example, reads:
A room is filled with pollen.
Thickness, density, drowsiness.
Enveloped. Heavy, leaden, overcast spring sky (hanagumori).
Becoming hazy.
6 My translation (revised in consultation with an unpublished translation by Caitlin Coker). Unless cited
in translation, all translations are my own, with input from Bruce Baird.
7 Hijikata’s notational language is never spoken by dancers in performance. The spoken word, however,
is not entirely absent from his performances. In Geisenjō no okugata (Lady on a Whale String, 1976), for
example, a German voice recording is played.
8 At the POHRC event mentioned, Waguri contested the division of butoh into two camps: one of chore-
ographic structure (after Hijikata Tatsumi) and one of improvisation (after Ohno Kazuo). He considered
the line between choreography and improvisation to be a matter of “degrees”: improvisation could
be termed a “minute-by-minute choreography,” and choreographic structure could open a space for
improvisation.
9 As I have already noted, the English translation varies significantly from the Japanese contained within
Butoh Kaden. Here, for example, the names of artists are not mentioned in the Japanese. In the context
of this discussion, it is possible to read the English translation as the reintegration of the context within
which this notational language is learned into the language itself – that is, cues and references that would
be given live in workshops are here rendered textually.
10 Hijikata’s extant library contains four books by Bachelard, translated into Japanese in the 1970s
(Bachelard 1970b, 1971, 1976, 1977), each containing substantial underlining and annotations in his
hand. I am indebted to Mikami Kayo for suggested secondary reading on Bachelard in Japanese (Mikami
2016b, 2017).
11 Hijikata often did dictate his written texts to a scribe, as Morishita Takashi (one of these scribes) has
mentioned in person on several occasions. I am indebted to Tōzumi Dai, with whom I discussed Hiji-
kata’s writing, for this stylistic noticing.
12 Whether through the collage works of Richard Hawkins, inspired by Hijikata’s notational scrapbooks,
or Big Dance Theater’s Resplendent Shimmering Topaz Waterfall (2016), inspired by Hijikata’s notation for
Shōmen no ishō (Costume in Front), Hijikata’s notation continues to generate creative responses that take
alternative forms to those presented in Waguri’s Butoh Kaden.
13 Bruce Baird (2012), citing Sakurai Keisuke, has suggested comparisons between Hijikata’s and Forsythe’s
approaches (168). Waguri himself suggested more differences than similarities at the William Forsythe X
435
Rosa van Hensbergen
Hijikata Tatsumi: Illustration of the Body Symposium (Goethe Institute Tokyo, November 11–13, 2011).
The comparison, here, is principally between Waguri’s and Forsythe’s use of digital media, rather than
Hijikata’s and Forsythe’s choreographic method.
Works cited
Bachelard, Gaston. 1943. L’air et les songes: essai sur l’imagination du mouvement. Paris: José Corti.
———. 1970a. Le droit de rêver. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
———. 1970b. Sora to yume – undō no sōzōryoku ni kansuru shiron [Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imag-
ination of Movement]. Translated by Eiji Usami. Hōsei daigaku shuppankyoku.
———. 1971. Mizu to yume – busshitsu no sōzōryoku ni tsuite no shiron [Water and Dreams: On the Imagina-
tion of Matter]. Translated by Shunro Kohama and Yasuyuki Sakuragi. Kokubunsha.
———. 1976. Rōsoku no honō [The Flame of a Candle]. Translated by Takasuke Shibusawa. Gendaishichō
shinsha.
———. 1977. Yume miru kenri [The Right to Dream]. Translated by Takasuke Shibusawa. Chikumashobō.
———. 2013. Intuition of the Instant. Translated by Eileen Rizo-Patron. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press.
Baird, Bruce. 2007. “Structureless in Structure: The Choreographic Tectonics of Hijikata Tatsumi’s Butō.”
In Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance, edited by David Jortner, Keiko I. McDonald, and Kevin J.
Wetmore. Plymouth: Lexington Books.
———. 2012. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Forsythe, William. 2009. “Choreographic Objects.” Accessed January 21, 2017. http://synchronousobjects.
osu.edu/assets/objects/conceptThreadsAnimation/WilliamForsythe-ChoreographicObjects.pdf.
———. 2012a. William Forsythe: Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye. Ostfildern:
Hatje Cantz Pub.
———. 2012b. “William Forsythe: Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye
(Introductory Booklet).” Hatje Cantz Pub.
Hijikata, Tatsumi. 1985. “Kyokutanna gōsha” [Extreme Luxury]. W-Notation 2: 2–27.
———. 1998. Hijikata Tatsumi zenshu: 1 [Hijikata Tatsumi Complete Works: 1]. Edited by Suehiro Tane-
mura, Yoshihisa Tsuruoka, and Akiko Motofuji. Kawade shobō shinsha.
Keiō Gijuku Daigaku Āto Sentā, ed. 1998. Shiki no tame no nijūnanaban: Hangidaitōkan [Twenty-Seven
Nights for Four Seasons: Hangidaitōkan]. Keiō gijuku daigaku āto sentā.
Kobayashi, Saga. 2005. Ume no sunakusa: butō no kotoba [Sand-Grass of Plum: The Words of Butoh].
Aterie-sādo.
Mikami, Kayo. 1993. Utsuwa toshite no shintai: Hijikata Tatsumi ankoku butō gihō e no apurōchi [The Body as a
Vessel: An Approach to the Hijikata Tatsumi Ankoku Butoh Technique]. ANZ-dō.
———. 2015. Utsuwa toshite no shintai: Hijikata Tatsumi ankoku butō gihō eno apurōchi [The Body as a Vessel:
An Approach to the Hijikata Tatsumi Ankoku Butoh Technique]. Revised. Yokohama: Shunpūsha.
———. 2016a. The Body as a Vessel. Edited by Ben Jones. Translated by Rosa van Hensbergen. Birchington:
Ozaru Books.
———. 2016b. “Private Correspondence.” September 28.
———. 2017. “Private Correspondence.” January 1.
Morishita, Takashi. 2015. Hijikata tatsumi butōfu no butō = Hijikata Tatsumi’s notational butoh: kigō no sōzō hōhō
no hakken [Hijikata Tatsumi’s Notational Butoh: An Innovational Method for Butoh Creation]. Keiō
gijuku daigaku āto sentā.
Waguri, Yukio. 2004. Butoh Kaden: DVD-ROM. Japanese and English. Tokushima: JustSystems.
———. 2015. ‘Butō-fu kōan’ [Thoughts on Butō Notation]. Essay. Received from Author.
———. 2016. Interview with Waguri Yukio in London.
Yamamoto, Moe, and Hijikata Tatsumi. 2015. Costume En Face: A Primer of Darkness for Young Boys and Girls.
Translated by Sawako Nakayasu. New York: Ugly Duckling Press.
436
45
A FLOWER OF BUTOH
My daily dance with Ohno Kazuo (1995–2012)
Budding
Meeting the vital embodied presence of Ohno Kazuo for the first time struck me like a bolt of light-
ning, and I had no choice but to surrender that November night in 1995. Our small butoh company
of four, led by Joan Laage, had just travelled from Seattle to Tokyo. I was sweaty and breathless as
we reached the doorway of Ohno Kazuo Dance Studio in Kamihoshikawa, Japan. Apart from the
airport immigration staff, the first Japanese person I met face to face was Ohno Kazuo, and it was
love at first sight. His workshop that night amazed me and later that week, when I attended his live
performance of “My Mother,” I wept in awe throughout, without knowing why.
After that initial meeting with Ohno Kazuo (also referred to as Sensei), everything about my
life and career path came into question. My heart and soul cried out, “You must stay to live and
study with this newfound beloved master,” while my logical mind replied, “What?!!” This was my
first ever trip overseas and I had a reservation to return in 3 weeks, zero experience with Japanese
language or culture, no financial resources, lodging, or job. Still, I ended up staying a year and a
half. The loneliness and self-absorption that I felt being foreign to the Japanese culture, language,
and landscape, along with the intense soul searching inherent in practicing butoh, became essential
material for my dance. Sensei lived and expounded the value of non-separation between one’s
dance and day-to-day life, as well as the need to extract beauty from the most dark and painful
aspects of body and soul. I was a complete outsider who longed to emulate his mastery and expe-
rience this profound process myself. Since the Ohnos’ family life was inseparable from their butoh
pedagogy, the only way to create and teach in the Ohno butoh lineage was to fully immerse in the
ordinary nichijo seikatsu 日常生活 (daily life activity) of this extra-ordinary family.1
Sensei’s classes were open to all irrespective of national origin, language, performance expe-
rience, or physical capacity. Even if people could not pay, everyone was welcome to join and
regularly invited to dine at the Ohno family dinner table.2 Sensei was an inventor who would
enter about 30 minutes before class with his leather bag packed full of loose papers covered with
magic marker scripts, notes, arrows, and lines that he’d been poring over that day in his bedroom.
I would also arrive early to clean the studio floor around him with rags as he’d shuffle through
the pile, gazing and contemplating. At 8 p.m. we’d circle around, transfixed as he transmitted a
30 to 60 minute non-stop cascade of verbal information, sometimes punctuated with his danc-
ing for us, about what was currently “up” in his soul process, his daily life, imagination, dreams,
437
and passions (Ohno 2004).3 Common images were nature-based, like flowers, salmon, and bears.
Family members, ghosts, or artwork also inspired him along with special places he had visited.
Sensei would ask his beloved manager Toshio Mizohata to play some music based on its ability to
inspire memory and emotion (often Western classical or popular music chosen from piles of well
worn CDs and cassettes), and call out to us, “Now dance freely!” or “Freestyle!”
Every day and season with Sensei brought fresh teachings as his intimately personal images
would ignite deeply moving explorations for us as well. These included a crazy old woman and
a willow tree in a storm (inspired by paintings of Edo-period artist Soga Shohaku); memories of
bears and salmon of Kamchatka; his mother dying like a flounder on the bottom of the sea; his
sister being killed by a train while his mother served him dinner on a tiny table; seeing his war
comrades buried at sea among the jellyfish; walking hand in hand with his father over a bridge,
and so on. He never asked us to dance like he did physically, instead he reminded us how useless
set techniques or thoughts are when dancing butoh. Ohno-sensei wrote,
It became clear to me once I started giving gymnastics instruction and rhythm gymnas-
tics at school, to which I added my own take on dance, that if I was to teach anything, it
was ultimately how to discover oneself. If dance is an art form, then art is not something
that can be taught.
Ohno 2010, 146–147
After witnessing a segment of our unstructured movement exploration, he’d reflect on what he
saw with poetic verbal or physical responses. It was profound wisdom we could apply to both
dance and life. These cycles of free movement and coaching would continue for a couple hours.
I usually left either in a state of ecstasy or deeply disturbed and feeling incapacitated to fulfill his
ambiguous and ephemeral promptings. There were often witnesses at Ohno-sensei’s classes not
physically participating, so each class resembled a mini-recital and would often close with him
dancing for us again at the end, followed by a collective bow and teatime.
I was intimidated by the lack of explicit direction in Sensei’s workshops. I’d attended many
years of both Western and Asian technique classes for dance and theater where I was taught to
perform with technical perfection. My mind would anxiously scroll through its automatic inse-
curities: What was I supposed to be doing? Was what I was doing good, bad, wrong, right? Was
I “getting it”? Why didn’t he give me any direct feedback? Sensei often said, “You must find
your own dance by yourself. In dance, the soul always moves first and your body follows.” New
students, impressed by his avant-garde presence, often mistakenly tried to imitate his physical
“style,” ending up as far as one could be from what he taught. In class, he would never dictate a
technique or choreograph a specific movement sequence, and this invitation to be freely creative
was not easy for us. A dance that is authentically one’s own must be discovered through tireless
searching of body and soul to discover each step, and can take a lifetime. In fact, his “method”
did closely resemble the creation of the universe, arising from a mysterious source and developing
spontaneously in accordance with nature.
Gradually over months of uncomfortable self-inquiry, spontaneous waves of catharsis began
to course through my body, mind, and emotions. In the safe space Sensei created for our intro-
spective nourishment, I had ample time to struggle with my inner and outer demons and shadow
aspects. The combination of daily synchronistic events, deep personal and transpersonal insights,
and the sheer delight I felt every time I attended class, began to quell my confusion and doubt.
Each time I witnessed one of Ohno-sensei’s performances, I’d still find myself in tears. I’d never
cried at any other dance performances and could never explain just why I was weeping. It is the
kind of mysterious experience one always hopes for, and yet so rarely has in the theater. Yoshito
438
A flower of butoh
regularly reminded us that it would take at least seven years of training before one began to “get
it,” so I committed myself to go for that. I was drawn into a dreamlike world of my body sensa-
tion and imagination as my prior identity began to dissolve into a liminal “space in between.” As
I contemplated what Sensei shared about his own voyages in between dichotomies of the inner
world of imagination and outer aspects of day-to-day life, private and public identities, female
and male aspects, cycles of life and death, my soul began to gradually reveal itself on a journey
through my flesh.
Blossoming
Sensei’s creative process had always featured cycles of overcoming suffering and deep sadness
alongside celebrating the spiritual blessings of enduring a human life. He loved the Christ story
and shared it often as it exemplified his own philosophy about how our worst pains can “force”
our bodies and souls to blossom into a brilliant dance of beauty, love, and light. While many
dance for reasons of aesthetic beauty, skillful execution, or physical fitness, Ohno-sensei has a
much loftier purpose. He danced mainly because he wanted to embody the creation of the uni-
verse. No simple task, or maybe it is very simple. Ohno-sensei believed that within the cells of
every human being lies the same material and information as in all of creation. Thus, dance is
his way to explore life’s mysteries. Where did we come from? What is love? What lies between
life and death? Who am I? In his dance, and life, he aspired to always be in a state of inquiry.
His preparation for performance was a detailed process of deciding on costume, setting, image,
music, lights, etc. Still, he insisted he never knew just what he would do each time he performed.
In this way his dance, although he often repeated the same themes and stories, was always fresh
and full of surprises.
All this freeform creativity and embodiment of universal creation could initially appear quite
insane. On one occasion, Sensei painted his full body white, teased his shoulder length hair into
an afro and wrapped himself in only an obie (the wide belt used to tie a kimono). With a huge
bow at his waist and his legs and chest bare, he appeared to be an over-sized, leather skinned babe
in golden diapers. In another piece, he donned a formal black suit and romped to his current
favorite Elvis Presley tune. Next, we’d see him in an exquisite vintage lace wedding gown with
a train that fanned across the entire stage. In his unique attempt to embody universal creation,
he also happened upon a way to synthesize some of the greatest paradoxes of art and life. His
presence was at once formal and irreverent, young and old, male and female, comical and tragic.
Sensei was a living example of how butoh artists can embrace and include the full spectrum of
our human condition while maintaining the integrity of an individual soul on a mysterious voy-
age through this embodied life. The exquisite journey of each soul was honored as a flower-like
gift worthy to offer to our greater human family through performances. And, Sensei and Yoshito
taught us to celebrate and reveal all three days of this flower’s journey: its bud full of possibility,
its lavish blossom, as well as its passing on into death.
Working with his hands was an essential part of Sensei’s creative process, especially with
“mundane” tasks, such as cleaning, maintenance, gardening, and cooking, usually in the service
of others. The kitchen was a favorite creative space for both Sensei and Yoshito, and they were as
talented there as on stage. Some of my most memorable experiences with the Ohnos took place
when I was invited to join them at their great family table. Ohno-sensei sat across from me, while
Yoshito danced graciously between stove, sink, and fridge, and Yoshito’s wife Etsuko presided
at the head of table. A worldly guest like a dancer from Pina Bausch company, or butoh artist
Ashikawa Yoko, or academic Sondra Fraleigh could be on one side of me, with a neighborhood
friend or grandchild on my other. The magic would ensue as a gift of some rare culinary delicacy
439
to sample with eyes, nose, mouth was delivered by hand or mail from Ohno’s many admirers
and friends. All senses expanded and my attention sharpened with this daily feast of novelty and
multi-cultural exchange. It was an enthralling performance and complex dance of serving both
Japanese and worldwide cuisine as I basked in the engaging company and lingered as long as
possible. As the wine and beer flowed freely, so did Yoshito’s engaging stories and Etsuko’s intense
and insightful critiques of recent rehearsals and performances she’d attended. I was in awe of the
generosity and inclusivity extended to me while I also felt entirely inadequate and ashamed about
my lack of skill (with Japanese language, housekeeping, cooking, etiquette, aesthetics, butoh
dance, etc.). I longed to participate and be of service. And since the cat begged to be fed, the
dishes to be washed, the garden to be weeded, the floor and toilets to be cleaned, I could usually
manage those tasks, even if my efforts were awkward or caused more interference than assistance.
After each workshop we would bring out tea, nibbles, and often more wine and beer. We’d
spend an hour chatting about workshop content and recent events or listen to more of Yoshito’s
compelling stories about Ohno-sensei, Hijikata, and other historic aspects of butoh. This was
such a valued part of butoh education for me that I’d often miss the last train. Thus began a
practice of sleeping over at various other student’s homes where I immersed in the real-life inti-
macy and ura (private face) of many Japanese six tatami mat apartments and tiny family homes.
During the eight years that I attended workshops, I had a wide range of living situations, from
home stays with Japanese families, to my own little house in the mountains, to an apartment just
down the road from the studio. For the first couple years of this regimen, I commuted 4 hours
round trip, not returning home until 1 a.m. at least 3 times-a-week. Then, I’d head out early
the next morning to teach English to my daily audience of 500 junior high students in the tiny
town near Mt Fuji called Yamakita. I was spending over $200 and 18 hours or more a week on
commuting and workshops.
I was the only non-Japanese person living in Yamakita, and apart from the remedial English
of a few Japanese teachers I worked with, my loneliness inspired me to learn the language as
quickly as I could. As my Japanese improved, so did my understanding of Sensei’s workshops. I
was invited to join local Japanese groups to practice such cultural traditions as tea ceremony, taiko
drumming, dance (nihon buyo), theater (noh, kabuki), and kimono wearing. I attended pilgrimage
walks with Buddhist monks and Shinto shamanic ceremonies with local mountain Yamabushi who
still honored nature-based spiritual rituals, all of which helped me become more familiar with
my beloved teacher and his Japanese art of butoh.
My happiest times in Japan with the Ohnos blossomed after years of commuting. At last, I
established a stable nichijo seikatsu that perfectly suited my needs. I lived within walking distance
of the Ohnos’ home and could participate in simple day-to-day activities without hours in transit.
An essential foundation of Sensei’s pedagogy was this: “Please begin each workshop by telling
yourself that dance isn’t something remote from your day-to-day lives; let that be your starting
point” (Ohno 2004, 298). A favorite typical day was waking up around 9 a.m. in my 12-tatami
mat apartment with reading and journal writing, changing my sleeping room into a living/din-
ing room and ritually cleaning the tatami mats and entire tiny house with a rag to remove every
speck of dust. This clearing meditation served to empty my mind and integrate lessons from the
prior night’s workshop. Then, a brunch of rice, egg, natto, and salad, a 30-minute walk to the
studio on a tiny back road, a couple hours of weeding and planting in the Ohnos’ garden, one to
two hours of personal butoh practice in the studio, an hour of English tutoring for Sensei’s great
grandson, and an hour of dinner with the family. Before living with the Ohnos, routine activ-
ities like these seemed menial or unimportant, now they were rich with mindfulness. The day
closed with our two-hour workshop and hour of post-workshop conversation, then a walk home
around midnight. I savored the precious simplicity and intimacy of this daily ritual, inspired by
440
A flower of butoh
the Ohnos’ own routines, and found it fulfilled my body, mind, and soul. With only a few essen-
tial possessions, appointments, and relationships to attend to, no internet connection, and such
a small space to care for, most of my moments were entirely focused on the embodied present.
Occasionally, a small group of regular students would spend a couple days with the Ohnos’
manager remodeling the studio into a venue and preparing refreshments for Sensei’s most inti-
mate live performances and family gatherings. After a special event, long low tables would fill the
studio and all would gather for a feast followed by a stream of spontaneous performances from
students, guests,Yoshito, Ohno-sensei . . . anyone who felt called to offer something. Some of the
most stunning butoh I ever saw was at intimate events like these. In 1997, when Sensei’s beloved
wife Chie passed, the entire studio was filled from end to end and floor to ceiling with flowers
surrounding her delicate body lying in repose. At one point, as guests filed through paying our
respects, Sensei spontaneously picked up some flowers and broke into an unforgettably vital dance
next to her as the entire room began tenderly sobbing.
The following year, we hosted Pina Bausch and her company as they were presenting a new
work in Tokyo. Pina and her dancers were in love with Ohno-sensei and Yoshito as much as we
were. So this became a pivotal time for many of us to exchange dance, philosophy, and passions,
as well as recognize the vast influence that our teachers had globally. Before that, it had been
an intimate and personal journey, and at this point I began to understand how this butoh path
could become a lifelong vocation and professional and global movement that could transform
the world’s ways of dancing and making performance forever.
That same year (1998), I began to accompany (and sometimes perform with) the Ohnos on
their tours in Japan, then overseas. As I’d observed Sensei’s performances, I saw revelations and
reflections of a day-to-day inquiry into the most meaningful aspects of life and death, imagina-
tion, relationships, personal and collective history, ancestry and soul. While I was participating
daily in the Ohnos’ life and community, many small performances would arise with very short
Figure 45.1 Maureen Momo Freehill with Ohno Kazuo on tour in Venice. Courtesy of the author.
441
notice. I would get a phone call in the morning inviting me to come over and get a costume or
figure out logistics. These performances were an extension of an ongoing daily practice of body
and soul searching and development of our butoh. Every few months, a major performance
would happen. The theme for a performance would become the theme of our classes during the
months leading up to an event, serving somewhat like rehearsals. Those of us who were deeply
involved in the Ohnos’ day-to-day life would be invited to join the event as staff or performers.
Since we usually never knew till opening day who would dance on stage, we practiced as if we
would perform. As much as I longed to be chosen, I had to trust Ohno-sensei’s teachings and
Yoshito’s directorial sense about who would be most appropriate for any given situation.
In October 1999, I joined the Ohnos on tour to the Venice Bienalle, and then to New York
City for Sensei’s overseas finale that December. Traveling with him had become quite challenging;
at 93 he still enthusiastically took to performing onstage, while offstage he needed continuous
care and support to dress, eat, and walk. Yoshito eventually assumed the bulk of teaching as Sensei
attended and looked on as a witness and sometimes offered his dance seated or lying on the floor.
I continued to immerse myself in the Japanese culture that strongly delineated between
outside (omote) and inside (ura). So, this type of ongoing adoption into the Ohnos’ Japanese ura
(private face) was a rare and challenging privilege. Sensei reveled in public exposure of his inner
face through his art. When photographers or interviewers would come, he would light up and
allow them full access to his soul. No subject or story seemed taboo, and he taught us to bare
our deepest “inside face” of the soul as well. I allowed my identity to become fluid, like an ever-
shifting alchemy of opposites for my dancing body to respond to. Focusing on my dream-like
inner world helped fuel my creative process. However, I was no master yet, and sometimes I lost
track of my personal boundaries and cultural foundation, literally forgetting I wasn’t Japanese.
Day-to-day existence became surreal. Upon returning to the United States for visits, people
would regularly ask if I was Japanese. I’d find myself confused about who I was or where I
belonged and was often overwhelmed when immersed in large groups of Americans. I was trying
to follow Sensei’s important lesson of “Not thinking, only soul,” yet sometimes it felt like I was
losing my mind. There was a need to re-establish my central axis and core stability. I needed to
learn to embrace the shadows of my body and soul, and trust in my own brilliance and mythos.
Yet this would take far longer to mature.
Passing on
As painful and difficult as the dying portion of a life-cycle may be, Sensei always insisted on
celebrating all three days of a flower, knowing that death was in fact a blessed part of nature and
a new beginning. However, when you are living it, it can be excruciating.
A most joyous highlight of my life with the Ohnos was my traditional Japanese wedding
and butoh dance reception. My new husband was a pivotal member of the Ohnos’ creative
team as assistant director and sound operator for performances. At our wedding in April 2000,
Ohno-sensei, Yoshito and his wife Etsuko, their children, my mother, and many of our beloved
butoh dancer friends gathered to celebrate and perform. This deepened our sense of family and
promised a life of butoh yet to come. It also ushered us into 10 years of profound pain and chal-
lenge when, in November 2000, Sensei had a serious fall that left him requiring round-the-clock
care. One month later, my husband left our marriage and soon broke communications with the
Ohno family for an extended period.
This loss and my grief about the palpable unravelling of all aspects of family identity we’d
grown to love, was so intense that I seriously contemplated suicide. My husband’s leaving put
particular stress on Yoshito, who’d depended upon him like a son. I was deeply torn: Should I stay?
442
A flower of butoh
Figure 45.2 Maureen Momo Freehill with Ohno Kazuo on her wedding day. Courtesy of the author.
How could I ground myself? Who was my family? With Toshio’s wife, my dear friend Mina, to
support me, I began to establish my boundaries and core stability again by standing firm that I
would remain in my Japanese home, close to my teachers and “family.” Sensei’s health and men-
tal condition continued to deteriorate further with Alzheimer’s. Months after my husband left,
I bent down to tie Sensei’s shoe since he could no longer reach his feet. He whispered to me in
plain English, “He took the flower and left.” This was the first time I’d ever heard him speak a
full English sentence to me. I silently broke into tears knowing how deeply we all were grieving
while at the same time realizing that we had no choice but to dance through this gateway of death.
The family garden had been Sensei’s realm for years, and when he was no longer able to tend
it, I volunteered as a way to contribute and re-establish connection after the divorce. Many ideas
for butoh pieces came while I worked there, including “The Garden Path: Weeding in Process”
(2001), the final of three original full-length butoh performances I presented at theaters in Tokyo.
The rich and intimate experiences I had on that narrow path between the Ohnos’ studio and
house taught me the value of balancing butoh dance philosophy and practice with simple task-
based physicality. The Ohno butoh process could be so ephemeral and dreamlike. So, this work
beyond the studio and stage provided me integrative self-contemplation that naturally comes
with being outdoors, close to the earth, and using my hands for a creative task. During this time
of grieving, the simple sense of accomplishment when seeing tangible results was healing and
grounding. When interpersonal issues brought anxiety or confusion, I’d settle into weeding the
garden path for discernment and integration.
In June 2001, I began to reorient my life back to my home country and family in the states.
I kept my Japanese apartment, with the intention that it would be available to me and others for
shorter visits. It was heartbreaking to leave, yet I trusted what Sensei had always told us, that death
came hand in hand with a new beginning.
A couple years later, I recognized that the soul/body fluidity and surreal connection between
daily life and butoh that I’d established so strongly in Japan was fading. In order to maintain my
butoh artistry in Sensei’s lineage, I knew I needed to re-commit to a daily practice. Yet I lacked the
context of day-to-day support I’d enjoyed with the Ohno studio family. I recalled a time when, in
his late fifties, Sensei became “lost” about his dance performances. He stopped performing for 10
443
years and began experimenting with film (Ohno 2004, 144). I sensed how film gave a performer
the opportunity to self-reflect and explore in ways that live contexts could not.
First, I arranged to travel solo across the country with a video camera, back to where I’d
grown up in Connecticut. I visited locations with strong body memories for me, especially the
most traumatic ones. This became a profoundly healing soul retrieval of sorts, wherein specific
landscapes would trigger me back in time and while the film was rolling, I would dance my way
home to the present and later witness the video to help integrate the process. Next, I returned
to Japan and made a short film called A Question of Family4 about the Ohnos’ intimacy between
dance and family life. It features footage of Toshio and Mina’s infant son juxtaposed with Sensei
performing in his wheelchair and a tender dance I shared with Sensei and his assistant Kato-san
while he was bedridden after his fall.
The years I spent working, living, and performing day to day with Sensei and his family
are undoubtedly the most treasured and influential of my life. Simply said, in Sensei’s presence,
I fell in love, I woke up, I transformed, I was moved. My work with Ohno Kazuo and Yoshito
now imbues all aspects of my teaching, performance, and daily life. In January 2009, to honor
the 50th anniversary of butoh and further establish the integration between my daily life and
butoh, I committed to make and film a butoh dance every day for a year. I devised a way to be
accountable by carrying the camera everywhere and posting these films online as evidence.5
Each day, I waited for a particularly moving moment; when it came, I’d “stop, drop and dance
butoh” right then and there: in a grocery store, my bedroom, a mountain stream, wherever. At
the time, I had no clear understanding for how I maintained my passion for this odd undertaking
that often took 5–8 hours each day. Now, I realize it was, in the lineage of Ohno-sensei, a way
of honoring my own nichijo seikatsu and revealing my private face to my greater human family
and, more importantly, to myself.
Sensei’s passing felt imminent, so I returned for final visits to Japan in both June and October
2009. I carried my camera as usual when I entered the Ohnos’ living room to see Sensei lying
there in a hospital bed on his 103rd birthday. The room felt as full of his stunningly inspiring
presence as it had been that first night I’d met him 14 years before. But this time his face and
body were skeleton-like, his breath was a labored moan through his toothless gaping mouth, as a
tube fed some creamy white liquid through his nostrils. Without a doubt, this was that day’s most
moving moment. A friend held the camera as I began to dance. I’d been taught by Sensei that
dying is a new beginning, that butoh is about day-to-day life wherein all aspects of our private
face and soul’s pain are revealed through dance. However, for Etsuko this face was too private to
be revealed, and when she heard what I’d done, she sent me out of the house. I felt so sorry for
upsetting her and yet deeply moved by that last dance I shared with Sensei, which I considered so
beautiful. I posted the video as usual that day, but unlike most other days, this one drew attention.
So, to honor her feelings, I removed it.
My final “Year of Butoh” Daily Dance happened the day Ohno Kazuo died. After completing
the first year of postings, the practice had become such a fulfilling and integral part of my life
that I’d decided to continue for a second “Year of Butoh” in 2010. This time, I included a daily
written blog to accompany each dance.6 On Memorial Day, I was invited by my local Veteran’s
Resource Center to offer a butoh piece as part of their annual presentation. The center’s direc-
tor had seen my butoh and was so taken by hearing of how Ohno Kazuo’s experience as a war
veteran had influenced his life and artistry, she wished to feature that in their program. Just as I
was completing my dance, I felt a sudden energetic “wind” from behind me. It hit me with such
a force that it blasted me to leap off the stage and race up the aisle of the large auditorium and
out of the building. Later that day, I learned that Sensei had just died in Japan and felt as if part
of his spirit had taken wings through my body.7
444
A flower of butoh
The last two times I met Yoshito and Etsuko Ohno were in spring of 2009 and 2012 when
they came to the Pacific Northwest to perform and teach at the Vancouver International Dance
Festival.8 Our connection remained strong, yet our interactions were strained and polite during
the 2009 visit. I was so relieved to see the honest warmth and happiness on their faces when
we met again in 2012. It had been two years since Sensei’s death and the intensely stressful years
when he needed home care 24/7. This time they invited me to support them in their master
class and dine with them that evening. For many years, it had been in my heart to make one
essential inquiry of my dear Yoshito-sensei. There are very few on earth who focus exclusively
on transmitting the essential stream of the Ohnos’ butoh pedagogy and philosophy. I had recently
completed my MFA thesis on this subject at the University of Hawaii and was dedicated to this
path for the rest of my life. I sensed this was the time to humbly request Yoshito’s blessing for
me to continue to perform and teach in the Ohnos’ lineage. To my delight he smiled widely and
replied with a bow, Yoroshiko onegaishimasu (Please, do me that favor.). With my heart budding
with fresh joy and possibility, I responded with a bow, Hai, wakarimashita (Yes, I understand).
This simple exchange provided the gateway and fertile ground to cultivate my primary vocation
of mentoring those who feel called to train, offer performances, and live in a way that fosters
the eternal flowering of the Ohnos’ exquisite lineage of butoh. My teaching has evolved into a
unique synthesis of Ohno Kazuo and Yoshito’s approaches, interwoven with my passion for dance
in the natural landscape. In 2011, with the help of family and friends, we built a large nature-
based movement arts studio in the forest lands adjacent to my home. So, thanks to the Ohnos, I
could open this sanctuary and my home to all to dance freely with us at Butopia9 on Whidbey
Island in Washington State, United States.
In closing, I offer this brief quote from Ohno-sensei’s vast wisdom:
The sufferings of others have, without our ever fully realizing it, been engraved in us
. . . We survived only because others died in our place. We owe our existence to the
sacrifices made on our behalf. Don’t rest on your laurels; it is utter nonsense to believe
that you are life’s be-all and end-all. Each and every one of us has gradually evolved
through the good grace of the dead: yes, each and every one of you, novelists, dancers,
whatever you are; you’re alive thanks to the sacrifices others made on your behalf.
Ohno 2004, 299
Yes, dear Ohno-sensei, thank you, I love you, I am.
Notes
1 It is often said butoh arose out of various horrors of post–World War II in Japan, but mostly I see the
Japanese emergence of butoh as a natural process of reconciling extreme opposites and integrating the
dichotomies of art and life. Specifically, the butoh lineage of Ohno Kazuo and his son Yoshito is about
an endless yin/yang dance between the dynamic opposites of omote and ura. For more about omote-
ura see: www.nakasendoway.com/omote-ura-public-and-private-faces/ and www.myokucenter.com/
myoku-training/concepts-in-martial-art/omote-ura
2 As I write this in 2016, workshops are still happening at the studio twice a week with Yoshito Ohno
instructing. www.kazuoohnodancestudio.com/english/lesson/index.html
I value him as a master and teacher equal to his father and always considered him to be the third
“founder” of butoh since he was center stage at just 21 years old, co-creating that first Kinjiki performance
in 1959 with Hijikata, before his father joined those early butoh collaborations.
3 Some excellent examples of these stream-of-consciousness lessons are in part 2 of Ohno Kazuo’s World
from Without and Within by Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno, published by Wesleyan University Press, translated
445
in 2004 by John Barrett. It was a great honor to help edit the early drafts for the English translation of
this book, first published in Japanese as Workshop Words.
4 Web link to A Question of Family video: https://youtu.be/x26eHSpC45w
5 Title of the project and YouTube channel with nearly 600 short butoh films is “YearOfButoh” www.
DailyDance.net
6 Web link to DailyDance and Life Art Mastery blog: www.lifeartmastery.com
7 Web link to Memorial Day 2010 performance video: https://youtu.be/nwQETuSnTbU
8 Web link to Vancouver International Dance Festival History: www.vidf.ca/history/
9 Web link to the Butopia website: www.butopia.net
Works cited
Ohno, Kazuo. 2004. Kazuo Ohno’s World: From Without and Within. Trans. John Barrett. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press.
———. 2010. “Uchu no bunrei toshite (A Spirit Conferred by the Universe).” Gendaishi Techo 53(9),
pp. 144–151.
446
46
ON AND THROUGH
THE BUTOH BODY
Katherine Adamenko
I am blindfolded on my hands and knees, picking up dried black-eyed peas one by one off of the studio
floor, all the while I am weeping and weeping for the lost souls of humanity.
Such is the world of butoh
I am walking in a straight line toward the other end of the room encased in saran wrap. I am desperately
trying to free myself, my soul, in anguish and more so in anger toward liberation.
Such is the world of butoh
Butoh training and performance has made a deep and lasting impact upon my artistic practice
and upon my soul. I am a better artist and a better human being because of it.
From ballerina to bodybuilder, from modern dancer to actress and performance artist, I come
from a body specially trained. It’s a theatrical body, ignited early on by the dance theatre of Pina
Bausch, Stanislavski’s method acting, dance educator Margaret H’Doubler, and the theatre theory
of Antonin Artaud and Michael Chekhov. It was a body ripe for butoh just as it was making its
way to the United States at the turn of 21st century.
What attracted me so strongly to butoh, both performing it for the first time and then in
subsequent workshops, was the process of experiential learning and freedom of exploration with
the body as its locus. I am excited to share my journey into butoh with you, realizing only now
that it is a historical journey at that.
Butoh by accident
I happened to be in the right place and the right time when an actress friend of mine, Delphine
Kini Mei, asked me to be in a butoh dance piece in 2000 while I was living in the San Francisco
area. I was intrigued as I knew very little about butoh and there was not much of it online (and
no YouTube for easy access).
It was a performance set to poetry choreographed by members of the Ancient Touch Butoh
Ensemble. The rehearsal process consisted of imaginative movement explorations grounded in
nature and dichotomies such a life/death, light/dark.
447
Katherine Adamenko
I am fortunate to have recorded this experience in my performance journal:
Put on Global Meditation CD and started to move. Getting inspired by a book from the
library Butoh–Dance of the Dark Soul – reading about its origins, what it’s made of – it is
pure physical theatre not based on a “technique” per se, but on this grand earth – the
relationship in a purist way it seems. Mind you, I know very little so far and have been
exposed even less, but so far it is as if a hole has opened only to expose my own passion
and desire to explore this new world. It feels so good on my body and my mind stays
free. I become free.
A new world opened up to me. After having battled dance injuries from the past, I had found a
satisfying way to move without pain. Butoh began to inform my performance art work.
Into the studio

By 2003, I had been back in New York City for a couple of years and decided it was time to
look for some butoh training. It’s as if the butoh gods conspired and like magic, the teachers
appeared.
The following are recollections of the early workshops that I attended during these first heady
and impressionable years of my training, some with master teachers such as Akira Kasai, Muro-
bushi Kō, Takuya Muramatsu, and Diego Piñon and down through impassioned students such as
Vangeline, now an esteemed teacher and choreographer in her own right.
I learned who came from the Ohno Kazuo or Hijikata Tatsumi lineages, often times they
were influenced by both. In these early workshops with the masters there was a consistent
thread: the breath. It all began with the breath. Each master gave me a new perspective. The
workshops also differed. Some were deep explorations of the imagination, some were deep
explorations of concepts such as space/time, while in others we danced the dance of physical
exhaustion.
My very first workshop was with Akira Kasai in February 2003 where we worked on the
breath for hours it seemed. The natural breath and the unnatural breath. Metaphorical death and
dying. Here are a few paraphrased notes from class:
Breathing is what you do before you die. The unnatural breath – dancing with death
in a cell. Natural is boring, unnatural is out of the cell, on the outside, you become the
cell (especially if you have a life sentence).
Dance as if you are dying. We don’t really die, we don’t want to lose body and soul,
we want to take the body with us. Dance that way here.
The following year in Murobushi Kō’s workshop, this time we focused on the breath in its vertical
form, emphasizing its highest point, dancing from its highest point to inform the movement.
In one unforgettable moment in class, Mr. Murobushi emulates a bird, reaching his arms high
above his head, dancing at the highest point, dancing, dancing, until the breath is released and
with a grace and speed that floored me, down to the ground he went only to rise again, higher
and higher, effortlessly moving in space.
Also in 2004, I attended a workshop with Takuya Muramatsu. This workshop in particular stayed
with me. He introduced to me the concept of the empty (neutral body). This resonated strongly
with me. My acting training had taught me to attain a neutral body, ridding oneself from distracting
bad habits on stage so to appear more truthful while in character. I was able to translate that in this
448
On and through the butoh body
workshop. I saw the parallel. One must start with the same neutral body. As Mr. Muramatsu put it
(and I paraphrase from notes), “we are the empty vessel – you can fill it with whatever you like.”
Later that year, I would experience something a little different with Vangeline, whose
teaching at that time was influenced by her extensive training with butoh master Diego
Piñon and his Butoh Ritual Mexicano. Her classes and workshop were electrifying and
emotionally charged, something that I had not experienced in previous workshops. I was also
experiencing a new level of intimacy and community, and something Vangeline is particu-
larly keen at creating. She seemed to effortlessly guide us to our inner depths and a shared
humanity. She put a fearlessness inside of me. We were asked to explore our soul and bear
witness to each other’s suffering or joy, happiness or disappointment. We pushed and pulled
each other and carried each other’s weight upon our backs. It was the perfect introduction
to Diego himself.
Diego Piñon – the Stanislavski of butoh

Cabbages, eggs, potatoes, flowers, dried beans, saran wrap, and rope. These are some of the exam-
ples of items that were woven into Diego’s workshops. The day began with four bellows from
a conch and a deep bow for each direction of the earth. We warmed up with rhythmic and
repetitive tribal-like moves in a circle for an hour at a time. As the workshop progressed, Diego
asked us to use objects to restrict the movement of the body, a cornerstone of his training. We
carried eggs in our mouths or kept a potato lodged against our perineum as we walked through
space. We unlocked the memories in our joints, hands gripping and releasing each other’s knees,
elbows, shoulders, feet, and ankles, while he shouted “liberation!”
What Diego provided was a safe space to deeply explore emotions. He utilized exercises
reminiscent of Constantin Stanislavski’s method acting training and emotional memory exer-
cises. Diego guided us on emotional memory journeys of our mothers, fathers, and lovers
whether fraught with pain and anguish or embellished with joy and abandon; no emotional
stone was left unturned. Sometimes we worked with partners, acting as a witness to each
other’s dance. Other times we would close our eyes and embed ourselves in our own universe,
into our own private dance. In the end, however, just like with Vangeline, a community was
built. A few hours together and a boundary had been lifted and a humanity was created with
fellow classmates.
I was able to explore myself in ways that were otherwise inaccessible in other workshops – it
was the physical satisfaction of dancing and sweating (with sore muscles and all) to emotional
exhaustion – it was a grand catharsis each and every time.
On the stage
By 2004, I had been performing physical theatre vignettes, movement installations, and what I
like to call ‘cabaret performance art’ for some time. Now I was ready to take my butoh training
from the studio to the stage (or gallery or lawn or alley). My work was most definitely feminist
and theatrical and I enjoyed creating female characters with a story to tell. With butoh, however,
there was a natural broadening of perspective toward female archetypes (still with a story to tell)
such as the madwoman (see Figure 46.1), the fallen woman, the beauty, and the diva. In terms
of performance, the biggest shift was in the way that these characters moved. There was a new
vibration, an intensity, a slowing down of time that I reveled in.
There is something primal about reaching down into the depths of my soul. Then, going even
farther into the depths of the collective soul (for that is the space that I believe butoh inhabits and
449
Katherine Adamenko
Figure 46.1 Choreographer/performer Katherine Adamenko. Water Cure (Galapagos Art Space, 2005),
photograph by Steve Zak.
a good explanation of its world-wide appeal), and bringing that back up on and through my butoh
body, past the fourth wall, and into the stomachs of the audience members.
I am moving wildly with my water bottle, my lover, whom I love and hate simultaneously – feeling
the deep penetration of heartbreak and ecstasy in just this one dance.
Such is the world of butoh.
450
47
MY DAIRAKUDAKAN
EXPERIENCE
Julia A. Vessey
My introduction to butoh was Mark of the Sun, choreographed and performed by Muramatsu
Takuya, a senior member of Dairakudakan, the Japanese butoh company founded by Maro Akaji.
The year was 2006 and I had finished my first year of graduate school at Arizona State University
(ASU) and interned that summer at the American Dance Festival (ADF) in Durham, North Car-
olina. Caught in a fishing net, grimacing and writhing on the floor, Muramatsu was surrounded
by male and female dancers painted white. I was struck by the hauntingly raw and expressive
movement. I spent the next two years of graduate school studying everything I could about butoh
and returned to ADF after graduating to intern once more, this time with Dairakudakan. After
this internship, I was invited to join the company in Japan for their summer intensive, held in
Nagano, Japan. That summer of 2008 was the beginning of my journey reevaluating and recon-
figuring my concepts as a dancer, artist, and teacher.
Dairakudakan’s summer intensive is open to interested dancers who train and perform along-
side company members. Maro lectures each evening, discussing his teaching philosophy, concepts
of choreography and movement, and creation of personal style. Different from my formal train-
ing and dance experience, I found his lectures bewildering, but I was intrigued and determined to
understand. Led by Muramatsu, each day at the summer intensive began with movement training
that gave dancers the opportunity to explore the evening lecture topics through dance. A perfor-
mance for the public with Dairakudakan members and students is held on the final evening of
the camp. At the end of the summer intensive, the night before I was to return home, I met with
Maro. He invited me to return to Japan the next year to study and perform with Dairakudakan.
I was the first westerner invited to do so. One year later I returned to Tokyo to do just that.
In July of 2009, I arrived in Tokyo with one suitcase ready to study, dance, rehearse, perform,
and live with members of Dairakudakan for the coming year. Work, classes, rehearsal, and per-
formance all take place at the Kochuten Theater in Kichijoji, Tokyo, the home of Dairakudakan.
Most days included rehearsals and classes of some kind, both mornings and afternoons. Maro
taught some and rehearsed his work, but Muramatsu, Mukai Kumotaro, and other senior mem-
bers also led classes and rehearsals.
At this point in my training as a choreographer and dancer, I was reasonably skillful at imitat-
ing the styles of teachers, choreographers, and dancers, having not yet developed my own teach-
ing, choreographic, and performing style. Therefore my early approach to butoh was to mimic
the movement of my Dairakudakan teachers. Additionally, I attempted to learn butoh through
451
Julia A. Vessey
the lens of modern and ballet techniques. I soon learned words like “alignment” and “rotation”
are not used in butoh training. I struggled to achieve the butoh aesthetic while maintaining
“proper” ballet and modern technique because I did not realize that these skills are foreign to the
execution of butoh. Of all the dancers who are currently in Dairakudakan, only two are trained
classical dancers, one in ballet and one in Korean dance. Dancers trained in western styles of
dance, including myself, have a difficult time learning butoh. For example, the corps de ballet in
companies incorporate dancers close to the same body size and type, with arms and legs creat-
ing the same lines at all times. This is not how butoh works. Dancers are to embody a feeling,
image, or idea and let that experience influence the way the body moves, as opposed to matching
the movement of others. My western approach to butoh began to fall away. I stopped trying to
mimic the other dancers and truly allowed my body to find its own way to move. As soon as I
began letting go of my dependence on habits of western training and stopped limiting my body
by keeping those rules, I began experiencing the exhilaration of this new, free form of dance.
The next step in my journey was to focus on the choreographic process of butoh. The way
that Maro and the Dairakudakan members created work was, again, breaking the rules of my pre-
vious training. The butoh pieces had scenes that collectively told a story. However, this story was
never given to the audience as in a classical ballet. The scenes were simply titled in the program
and that was all the information the audience was given. Maro values the experience of his audi-
ence and their willingness to allow the suspension of reality and exploration of the unexpected.
For one of his full-length performances, he might find inspiration in one simple idea creating a
world for the dancers to perform in. There may be a story with characters that he develops for
his dancers, but the story is only minimally conveyed to the audience by titles of the piece and
names of scenes. The bulk of the story is uniquely experienced by each audience member. For
the audience to completely understand every moment of the piece is not significant. What makes
the work come alive is the personal history of each audience member and his own life experi-
ences that attach significance to the scenes. This is Maro’s gift to the audience. The humanness
of butoh, the honesty of the movement, makes butoh an individually understood experience that
is not dependent on shared language or culture.
For the choreographer and dancers, however, the story was essential to the development of
movement. The movement we learned during butoh training classes was not necessarily what
was performed onstage. In ballet and modern, we practice in class what will be performed
onstage. In butoh, these class exercises are designed to develop the mind and body connection.
Interestingly, the Dairakudakan members do not take daily butoh classes. They learn by going
through the choreographic process and by performing. Division of sexes and seniority are prev-
alent in the choreographic process and performance. The more senior dancers are the “leaders”
of their groups, meaning they are responsible for remembering all the choreography, counts, and
corrections, and making the vocalizations that are used to inform dancers of a choreographic
change. Dairakudakan does not use music to inform tempo or duration of movement. The
counts are given and set and practiced without music. The music is usually added a week or two
before the performance.
Toward the end of my time in Japan I was invited to choreograph for Dairakudakan’s Kochuten
Series. The Kochuten Series provides an opportunity for emerging Dairakudakan members to
choreograph and perform under the guidance of Maro in order to further develop their own
butoh style. Started in 2001 and named after the small Tokyo basement that Dairakudakan uses
as office, workshop, rehearsal, and training space, as well as a performance venue, the Kochuten
Series has seen numerous unique performances choreographed and performed by Dairakudakan
members. The first piece presented in this series was the iconic Paradise in a Jar Odyssey 2001,
choreographed by Dairakudakan’s senior member Mukai Kumotaro. Maro describes the butoh
452
My Dairakudakan experience
that is happening in this series as “post-post-post-butoh dance.” This is the place where Maro’s
butoh is evolving.
For my Kochuten Series performance, I was joined by Dairakudakan dancers Takakuwa Akiko
and Yang Jongye in my piece that I called With Weight. With its presentation I became the first
western performer and choreographer to be a part of this series. The preparation, choreograph-
ing, and training for my performance constituted a grueling two-month schedule filled with
rehearsals that often lasted all day, as well as set and costume construction. Maro periodically
attended my rehearsals along with the rest of the company to provide feedback. However, Takuya
was the senior member who worked with me daily. Under Maro’s guidance, the choreographer of
butoh must have an image and a reason behind all movement in the piece. The storyline must be
clearly thought through and translated into the most appropriate and honest movement. Honesty
of movement is considered vitally important. Maro then pushes these ideas even further, delight-
ing in pushing to what seems like a ridiculous place, an odd or unexpected result. He then pushes
for extreme movement and powerful physical imagery to convey this ridiculous place. The pace
of choreographing, intensity of rehearsal, and endurance of the constant pressure of pushing the
boundaries is emotionally and physically exhausting. However, the final product under Maro is
always breathtaking, fresh, and vibrant.
Maro created a word for describing his concept of butoh, temputenshiki, which he translates as
“being born in the world is a great talent itself.” This concept has profoundly influenced me as
an educator and a choreographer. I am currently an adjunct faculty member at James Madison
University (JMU), where I teach ballet, modern, dance improvisation, and butoh. Students often
seek to replicate the western vision of dancing and this now seems to me to be limiting. Strongly
influenced by my butoh experience, I see expressive beauty in the less trained and more unusual
movers, and encourage everyone to approach ballet and modern techniques in their own unique
way. The second invented word is miburi-teburi, which refers to the daily, elemental movement
(e.g., pouring tea into a cup) that Maro prefers to use as the foundation of his work.
In addition to temputenshiki and miburi-teburi, Maro has developed three specific concepts
which are the basic building blocks of his philosophy, teaching, and choreography. The first is
ma, the second is igata, and the third is chūtai. These concepts also fully inform my pedagogical
and choreographic approaches. The concept of space, or ma, is important in Maro’s butoh. It
encompasses not only the body’s space but the space which surrounds the body. This can include
such things as the space between body parts, such as between fingers, or between the arm and
torso. Ma can also refer to the space between dancers on stage, the space between the dancers
and the audience, the space between dancers and the people in the city, country, the world, the
universe. Ma has also been described by Maro as the breath between sentences, or between words,
or the space between conversations. Every word, every movement must honor the vastness of ma.
There is an endless use of ma, and we are connected at all times to everyone and to everything
in the universe.
Igata is called mold body and is used to explore fundamental movement derived from con-
scious and unconscious thought. Maro describes igata as a moment of time in the mind and body,
and, perhaps more richly, as the sum of all. Like a spinning top, the body looks still and quiet but is
dense with movement. There is a Buddhist saying that Maro quotes: shikisokuzeku kuzesokushiki,
which is translated as “everything is empty, empty is everything.” Butoh exists because of me, I
exist because of butoh. To find and explore igata, the dancer begins with a situation occurring
in daily life, such as walking down the street or sipping a cup of tea. Then an incident occurs, a
jiken. This incident is not clearly defined and can be something as simple as tripping or having
your mouth burned by the tea. The significance of the incident is not the incident itself, but the
response that interrupts the flow of daily activity. Normal activity is interrupted and a different
453
Julia A. Vessey
movement is called for. This is the moment when the dancer enters the butoh experience, the
moment of connection between the conscious self and the jiken.
Chu tai is space body, the idea that the body is manipulated or affected by something or some-
one. First the dancer is asked to imagine the body as a bag made of skin, full of water, and this
water is moved by something from either inside or outside the bag. The skin is your brain and
you must think with your skin. This exercise is designed to stimulate fresh and interesting move-
ment. Movement is developed from exploratory play. It is important to remember this exercise
is not mime. There are five tools that Maro uses to develop the exploration of chu tai. They can
be used individually or in any combination. The first tool is time. The dancer is encouraged to
study the effects of time. For example, he might study the transformation of a baby into an old
woman, a tree blossoming in spring and losing its leaves in the fall, or rust spreading across a fence.
The evidence of the passage of time influences the shapes and movement of the dancer conveying
these changes. The second tool is the environment. Imagining frigid cold, stifling heat, fierce
wind, or gentle breezes exerts influence over movement. Just as the passage of time alters shapes
and movement in butoh, so do imagined environmental influences. The third tool is occupation.
A Japanese rice farmer might display a chronic hunched back from working the rice paddies; a
sumo wrestler would be large, aggressive, and powerful; a Japanese businessman might be small,
intense, and anxious. Occupation affects body shapes and actions, thereby influencing how a
dance might reflect that reality. The fourth tool is emotion, as the dancer’s emotional state affects
the shape of the body. The fifth tool is an awareness and acknowledgment of physical differences
in people, such as a handicapping condition like palsy or the loss of a limb. The idea of the chu
tai being affected by something can perhaps be related to Maro’s idea of “flavored ma,” meaning
there is an emotion, a situation, an animal, anything imaginable that can influence the space of
your mind and your body, your ma.
When I first learned these three basic aspects of Maro’s butoh philosophy, I did not see their
connection with my previous training. As I spent more time immersed in butoh, however, my
understanding of these concepts deepened and I began to internalize them into my own per-
forming, teaching, and choreographic styles. Additionally, I realized that I was now intuitively
using these ideas on a regular basis in my own classroom experiences. Where these concepts seem
most useful is when I am teaching performance quality, the qualitative execution of movement.
Performance quality is that je ne sais quoi of a dancer, the light that radiates from within someone
that makes the audience want to watch them. The dancer must connect with other dancers and
with the audience and must radiate the intention of the piece, defined by the choreographer. The
butoh dancer is always living within the intention of the movement while being connected to
all those around him. Students of western schools of dance are taught the physical and technical
locations of the body, but intention may be an afterthought. In my early experiences as a student
and as a teacher, I focused on this physicality and left out intention. I then realized that I was
moving differently onstage during the performance experience because I was incorporating per-
formance quality. When I saw my students perform, I made the same observation. The classroom
dancer was completely different than the performing dancer. This was not how we practiced
and performed in Dairakudakan. I started to adjust how I took class and also how I taught based
on these butoh principles. Instead of focusing entirely on proper movement of the body, I began
focusing on the equally important space around the body. Imagining the studio as a performance
venue, feeling the energy of the imaginary audience, applying an image to inform the overall feel-
ing of the phrase, and responding to that image all became important butoh inspired ingredients
in my classes. Imagery is not an unfamiliar aspect in my training, but my comprehension of chu
tai helped me to more fully understand the application of imagery to movement. This made my
use of imagery as a teacher and choreographer more specific and effective. The ability to feel the
454
My Dairakudakan experience
image in every cell of the body makes the movement become more authentic. The dancers do
not act out or mimic the image, but allow the image to resonate throughout their bodies. Effect-
ing stillness, sustaining movement and suspension are aspects of dance that can be challenging to
execute. Often when a dancer attempts to execute the very slow, sustaining movement often seen
in butoh, he will experience painful tightening of his muscles, leaving him off balance and unsta-
ble. Utilizing the concept of igata, sometimes described by Maro as the “spinning top density of
stillness,” will help the dancer to find grace and smoothness in sustained stillness. Thinking of the
body in constant motion changes the dancer’s perception and therefore the execution of stillness.
It is impossible to move well with muscles tense and clenched. Using the concept of igata allows
the dancer to find the fluidity inside of stillness.
Maro sees butoh and unique talent in all dancers. He calls it ichinin-ippa, which means “one
dancer, one school.” This idea is that each individual should be able to create and express his
or her own movement vocabulary, and each dancer has the talent to do that. The applauding
of individuality and uniqueness in dancers, the connectivity of all humans, the embodiment of
imagery have been the most influential aspects of my experience with Dairakudakan. Maro’s
butoh is about seeing the world with fresh eyes and studying the world with honesty. Everyday
is an opportunity to study and deepen one’s understanding of dance. Remembering temputenshiki,
we are already talented dancers because we were born.
My time studying and performing with Maro and Dairakudakan has affected who I am as a
teacher, choreographer, and performer. In particular, as a teacher and performer, my use of imagery
has become essential to how I communicate performance qualities and technical execution. I
believe the imaginative mind has great influence over the body, so I encourage imagination in the
students to aid in their physical understanding of dance technique. Maro’s temputenshiki philosophy
has expanded my acceptance and recognition of specialness in all students. It has also become more
important in my choreographic approach. When I am commissioned to create work on a new set
of dancers, I do not force my specific choreography onto them. Before I begin choreographing,
I first watch to see how each dancer moves, looking for some special thing about each of them.
Then I set a piece on the dancers that incorporates their uniqueness. My work has become more
about discovery of individuality in movement and celebration of that individuality. Maro, through
his butoh teaching, has taught me to see butoh in every aspect of life and in every person, and
to constantly study the world around me for expressive butoh moments. He has, in other words,
opened my eyes to see more clearly the unique and expressive beauty that is always all around us.
455
48
BUTOH AS AN APPROACH TO
PERFORMANCE IN SOUTH
AFRICA
jackï job
I am a female solo dancer, teacher, and researcher currently based at the University of Cape Town.
My formative dance years were in release-based contemporary dance,1 contact improvisation,
and mpantsula2 in Cape Town. To that I later added eight years of study of butoh in Japan with
Ohno Yoshito. In my work, I embrace my background in multiple dance and cultural forms that
include but are not exclusive to Africa.
When I took my first journey out of South Africa in 1994 as an independent artist,3 I travelled
to London and created a work with the intention of responding to reductive, binary stereotypes
that put South African people in White or Black race boxes. Singular stylistic expectations of
dancers are usually based on these racial descriptions. I wanted to introduce myself in dance, but
not as a Black body that does traditional African dance and moves to the beat of a drum with foot
stamps, syncopated rhythms, and a fluid, undulating torso. I wanted to deliver a more nuanced
description of my identity, stemming from my upbringing in apartheid South Africa and an
involuntary absorption of the meticulous attention paid to officially dividing people into four
racial categories. White (defined as of European descent) was placed at the top end of the eco-
nomic spectrum. Much further down the scale of socio-political advantage were those classified
Indian (of Indian descent). They were followed closely by the Coloured category (described as
neither White nor Black), and at the bottom of the scale, positioned with the most disadvantages
in terms of education, economics, job opportunities and living opportunities, were those classified
as Black (of African descent). For me, growing up as Coloured in a community of people who
largely believed themselves to be neither White or Black, but someplace in between, became
a lens for me to create a solo work called Daai za Lady, a colloquial expression in English for
“That’s a Lady.” The main intention was to create a dance language that like my identity could
not be described in unitary terms. Daai za Lady is a self-constructed, imaginary hybrid figure that
explores the physical, psychological, and emotional aspects of a woman imbued with the spirit of
a horse. From 1994 to 2004, several installations of the character Daai za Lady emerged and her
hybrid parts, including male, female, horse, and flower parts, explored.
Upon my arrival in Japan in 2003, I thus brought with me an established body of work that
focused on expressing a dance identity that provokes a more nuanced and complex perception of
identity through the leitmotif of Daai za Lady. This repertoire aims to find a holistic way of being
that is not contained within the structures of race and gender, as well as its associated stereotypes.
It is a liminal state that subverts structure, roles, and relationships encumbered by categorizations
456
Butoh in South Africa
of self (Turner, 2017). When I worked with Ohno Yoshito in Japan, he often asked a question that
I understood on quite a personal level, “What is your butoh?” (Ohno, 2004–2011). I do not repli-
cate the methodologies of butoh as I received them in Japan. However, I purposefully draw specific
principles from butoh philosophies and its notions of the body to deepen my solo practice and focus
on hybrid identity. These principles have led to my developing a methodology of teaching and
understanding of performance that I call “my butoh.” Through Daai za Lady I use the idiosyncrasies
of my body, upbringing, and everyday experiences to find meaning in who I am, on my own terms
and not subsumed by Western aesthetics of performance. These intentions connect with the found-
ers of butoh, Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo, and their desire to find a unique body language.
Whilst I was living in Tokyo from 2003 to 2011, butoh became a viable tool for deepening my solo
performance and visceral conviction that we are not just our bodies but entail bodies of wisdom from
multiple sources within and around us. This sensation and conviction has intensified since my return
to South Africa, a country still fraught with racial conflict and economic disparities.
This chapter begins with contextualizing my investigation of butoh as a form, methodology,
and pedagogic tool within Dance, Theatre, and Performance Studies in South Africa. It briefly
discusses my research with professional ballet dancers from Cape Town City Ballet, my artistic
role as choreographer and director of African Angels with the Cape Town Opera Company, and
my role as teacher of drama students of the University of Cape Town. Finally, I theorize some of
the philosophies that underpin my research and teaching that is applied to a range of performers
seeking creative ways of engaging with multiple issues concerning identity and socio-political
transformation in South Africa, in order to problematize notions of the Body and Performance.
Re-imagining “South African”

Making sense of the complexities of identity in South Africa requires imagination, or as South
African sociologist Zimitri Erasmus says, “a re-imagination of our identities” (Erasmus, 2001,
21). In addition, I believe a willingness to engage with the unfamiliar is of fundamental impor-
tance. In terms of dance in South Africa, ballet, contemporary, and African dance are entangled
in processes, methodologies, and performance aesthetics that are best described by South African
theatre-maker Jay Pather as “shaped by a colonial hangover that we have not shaken off ” (Pather,
2007, 11). Pather claims that we need to develop a set of aesthetics that are informed by a life lived
within and of our communities in this time and in this place. Personally, butoh has provided me
with the tools to ameliorate self-styled aesthetics, and from both theoretical and practical posi-
tions I have been able to interrogate ways of applying it to performance processes in South Africa.
Theoretically, I use indigenous research methodologies in combination with philosophies
in phenomenology as a means to make sense of butoh in a South African context. Indige-
nous research methodologies, as expounded by Linda Tuhiwai-Smith (1999), suggest the cen-
tering of our own concerns and experiences as a way to understand theories and research from
our own perspective. Examining these experiences with a phenomenological methodology
suggests an analysis of imagination and the perception of the world beyond simple descrip-
tions of what they are. Drawing from Gallagher and Zahavi (2008), phenomenology reflects
on how things appear and expands an understanding of how that description correlates to and
informs our experience. Therefore, it helps us pay attention to the way in which we experience
reality and as a consequence, how combinations of different actions affect the world in which
we live. These notions of indigenous research methodologies and phenomenology connect
to butoh, especially when we consider how the insertion of personalized characters give per-
formances of butoh various manifestations of form and content. Butoh artists are described
as understated and nude, antiheroic, wild, spiritual, mystical, existentially dark and void, and
457
jackï job
uplifting; sometimes a single artist can portray all of this. Fundamentally, I believe performances
framed within phenomenology’s introspection and butoh philosophy have the possibility to
move one beyond the “categorical formations [that] we inherit” (Sokolowski, 2000, 167).
In practical terms, I draw on principles from butoh that relate to broadening notions of the
body and performance, and assimilate these philosophies into my performance and teaching.
There is the principle of restraint, which I interpret as a restraint from oneself, achieved by
repressing the urge to respond to stimuli in ways that one usually would. Another is a conscious
physical and psychological focus on oppositional forces, such as the idea of the beauty in the
monster, or the continuum of life in death in life. The principle of perception, physically experi-
enced by imagining eyes under the feet, on the back, hands, as well as the surrounding environ-
ment, is useful in developing multiple perspectives of the processes of creation. The inversion of
body weight and body parts also serves to re-imagine the body and psychically will a different
expression, presence, and understanding of narratives. The idea of learning from both animate
and inanimate elements, such as embodying the density of stones, or delicateness of a tissue, shift
the quality and dynamics of movement in the body. Combinations of butoh principles enable a
specific body language and conscious choice in how movements, narratives, and characters are
articulated.
This process is extremely physical and requires a particular understanding and awareness of
the body. To this end, I have developed a style of movement, called Movement Dynamics™, often
taught in the warm-up phase of my teaching sessions. It comprises a series of physical, cardio-vascular,
and muscle toning exercises and movements, to bring awareness, release, and a different percep-
tion to what may be considered as smaller or even hidden parts of the body. For example, realizing
the middle fingers as alternative spines, releasing the neck by tapping the bone behind the ear,
utilizing the armpit and shoulder to initiate arm movements, finding balance by focusing on the
heart, or consciously inhaling to elevate and expand the body, or exhaling to deflate and release
certitudes and perceived limitations of the body. Movement Dynamics also brings a consciousness
to the surrounding environment and prepares the body to find meta-physical meaning in the
exploration of various butoh principles.
In my teaching, metaphors inform many of the butoh exercises following the warm-up and
are helpful in challenging stereotypes. For example, psycho-physically imagining and embodying
the vastness of the sky, or slow-moving heat of the summer sun can problematize the stereotypical
representation of Black people as energetic, colorful, or loud. In addition, imagining eyes under
the feet and on the fingertips enables a sensitive movement quality and forces a close up look
at where, what, why, and how we touch and tread as go through our daily lives. Butoh classes
taught by Ohno Yoshito in Japan end with the drinking of tea. The end of my class draws from
this custom. No actual tea is drunk; however, a “cup of tea” is the phrase that marks a moment
of consolidation and coherence, whereby the performers can decompress and assimilate the work
into their practice by sharing their experiences. I have drawn several comments from the final
cup-of-tea phase of the class, which reaffirm my conviction that butoh has relevance and is a
viable tool in approaching performance making practices in South Africa.
Butoh approaches to ballet, opera, and theater-making

The fact that we are all encased in bodies that signify meaning extends my work beyond dancers
who generally use their limbs in a conscious way to deliver meaning. It includes actors and opera
singers, who may be less aware of the potential of their bodies and how it could add meaning
to their performance. My aim is not to get them to move in a butoh-esque fashion. Rather,
I find that butoh puts the body in research and interrogates its potential and significance in
458
performance. Therefore, the performer’s skill is intensified as they become capable of demonstrat-
ing different depths and nuances to their narratives and more adept at creating a sense of magic
that all performers yearn for.
According to Cape Town City Ballet dancers (job, 2014), butoh heightened their imagination
and embodiment of characters. One dancer mentioned that following her butoh experience,
when next playing a character in a classical ballet, such as Giselle, she would first look with the
eyes on her back before moving. For her, realizing this sensation and awareness of the body makes
a huge difference to the more conventional, controlled rendering of the back in classical ballet.
This active and different engagement of the body changes the interpretation of the music and
provokes a different emotion within the dancer. If done consistently, this can infuse classical ballet
with new meaning and alternative ways of expressing aesthetics. This ideology fits into Spivak’s
notion of aesthetic education and how it requires going beyond agendas set by established centers
of learning. It creates the sense of shifting the sacred from its pedestal by proposing alternative
ways of performance. For me, butoh has become a provocative tool in nurturing “an epistemo-
logical performance through a rearrangement of desires” (Spivak, 2012, 125) and shifts the con-
ventionally undisputed authority of what we hold as ideal. I apply butoh in an aesthetic training
that engages the imagination to not only see what is there, but also what is not, by rendering the
invisible, visible, and in the process, destabilizing power structures.
Shifting notions of what is held as sacred and thus formulaic in theater-making processes into
a more indigenous and contested place, is demonstrated in the production African Angels, per-
formed by Cape Town Opera. This opera concert is performed by 18 singers and moves through
classical repertoire, gospel, traditional African tunes, as well as jazz. During the time of my associ-
ation with the production from 2013 to 2016 it was performed in the biggest opera houses and
concert halls in Germany and Holland. The prestige of venues associated with what is perceived
as sacred in the way classical opera repertoires are delivered, increased the performers’ anxiety
and sense of responsibility to live up to the ideal. My directing processes, however, lean toward
the notions of Antoine Vitez, who claims that performance work has to be “both the preserver
of ancient forms of expression and the adversary of traditions” (Vitez in Pavis, 1996, 127). In the
rehearsal processes with African Angels, I considered how to ignite what has been submerged and
internalized, in order for the performers as well as the audiences to listen, recognize the familiar
in the unfamiliar, and at subliminal and visceral levels, establish a different connection to their
traditions and their skill. Would it be possible for their bodies to sing and, thereby, provoke audi-
ences to listen differently? I found a way to experiment with this idea in the transition between
a medley of songs from the musical Showboat (1936) and a rendering of a Nina Simone tune,
“Strange Fruit” (Simone, 1965).4
In this scene, we first considered the unspoken racial prejudice and stereotypes in the narrative
of Showboat, as well as Nina Simone’s graphically explicit outcry against racism with the meta-
phor of strange fruit portraying Black bodies hanging from trees, and connected that to Black
lives in South Africa. The invisible was made visible by reflecting on how human injustices asso-
ciated with perceptions of race are still experienced in South Africa but remain silenced. Instead,
positive images and romantic notions of transformation and multiculturalism are perpetuated in
South African productions on international stages. Around the time of rehearsing African Angels
in 2016, an incident occurred in South Africa where two White men, Willem Oosthuizen and
Theo Martins Jackson, threatened to kill a Black man, Victor Mlotshwa, for trespassing on their
farm. They put him in a coffin, threatened to douse him with petrol and bury him, all the while
filming their sport. Fortunately, they did not follow through on their threats, but seemingly una-
ware of the gravity of their crime, posted this sickening incident on social media three months
later. The video (Newsdesk, 2016) went viral and lead to their arrest. In the wake of this, the cast
459
jackï job
of African Angels felt obliged to say something about the ongoing racial disparities and hatred that
continue to govern our actions in the country. It was important to generate a response within
their performance of African Angels, and the song “Strange Fruit” became the perfect conduit
for their emotions.
In staging the scene, I employed a butoh-esque aesthetic that might be considered disturbing
in conventional opera. Instead of employing the center, the lead singer was placed far back on the
left-side of the stage, and the rest of the cast positioned across the lip of the stage, where they silently
stood, covering either their eyes, mouths, or ears. This staging could have forced the audience to
employ their imagination in interpreting the scene, negotiate meaning between themselves and the
silent, up close bodies, and then connect that to what they heard from a distance. Unfortunately, the
scene was perceived by management as being racially provocative in its protest of violence and injus-
tices toward Black bodies, and two days before the opening performance, management removed the
scene from the December 2016 rendition of African Angels. However, the rehearsal processes and
butoh experiences of the singers could not be censored and are noted hereafter.
I believe that just as the cast were required to sing differently and use their bodies, the scene
could have provoked the audience to listen differently, and become conscious of bodies – both
theirs and the performers. I like to think this scene could have led to an “affirmative sabotage”
in Spivakian terms (Spivak, 2012). The inclusion of indigeneity, something derived and produced
naturally, or born from the region, enabled the singers to shift what they held as sacred with
imagination. In addition, the singers’ embodiment of butoh principles transmitted a performative
energy from their silent bodies. In shaping the scene, they imagined eyes under their feet, back,
and hands, and accessed an endarkened aesthetic that was not determined by Western rationale,
but informed by inhabiting a metaphysical, phenomenological sense of themselves and their
environment. When referring to the rehearsal process one singer claimed that the experience
of placing eyes on her feet made her feel more careful as she moved through the space. This
sensitivity forced a different connection to the body and the space. She poetically claims, “to
wear the song [. . .in order to] truth-sing and deliver the message of what is hidden within my
body” (Pam, 2017).5
In African Angels, butoh was a legitimate tool for placing the singers’ bodies in research and
specific exercises triggered their desire to look into darkness. I believe the scene potentially
demonstrates one way for performers and the audience to re-establish visceral connections with
traditions, as well as re-imagine their assumptions of knowledge. According to Molefi Kete
Asante, if language possesses an instrumentality, it provides a way for persons to understand and
transform their reality. In other words, “It must be able to do something toward transforming
particular ways of knowing and producing knowledge” (Asante in Denzin et al, 2008, 279).
Whether this knowledge is demonstrated in the mode of dancing, singing, or acting, I believe
the process of creation should “shift the boundaries of the familiar, of what we assume that we
know” (Ahmed, 2000, 7) and broaden the thinking around transforming bodies in South Africa
from the perspectives of both participants and the observers.
At the University of Cape Town, my third year drama students created practical work that
required a phenomenological engagement with their performance space. Here, the notion of
possessing multiple eyes extends to the space and its way of looking, thus creating a partnership
and dialogue with the environment, including the walls, floors, trees, and sand. The process of
artistically examining what might otherwise be taken for granted or represented mimetically,
enables the actors to find lateral ways of engaging with site specific work and link it to their
personal narratives. The actors’ historical research of various sites on campus identified one toilet
building to be a place where slaves had been killed. An actor whose work focused on the shame
experienced with an abnormal menstrual cycle chose to use the toilets as her performance site
460
and draw from its abhorrent history as a place of bloodshed. Approaching the work with the pre-
viously referenced butoh principles enabled an embodiment of the phenomenological narrative
of the site together with the crafting of a particular movement language, texture, and dynamic of
the body, thus rendering a re-imagining of the body and its environment.
When I asked the students about their experiences with the butoh principles, several actors
related how the physical processes specific to their engagement with butoh built strength and a
sense of having multiple foundations in the body. This was especially heightened with one stu-
dent, an above-knee amputee, who claimed the combination of Movement Dynamics and butoh
principles facilitated an exploration of different ways to balance and stand. The actors also spoke
about how the processes in butoh relating to ways of seeing can be applied to how they view
their performance scripts. For example, they relate it to looking at the material peripherally and
finding meaning hidden in and in between the lines. They found the introspection of butoh to
enable a stripping of their bodies as well as the text, allowing them to portray their vulnerabilities
from a truly corporeal perspective. One Coloured actor claimed to have found ways to validate
her story, including her fears and ambiguous support experienced in the politics of everyday
social life, even if they do not easily fit into the popular narrative of a non-racialized South Africa.
Another actor mentioned how inhabiting a different perception of the body, discovered when,
for example, initiating movement with the wings on the back, seemed to trigger memories of
another being, perhaps an animal being, rendering the self unfamiliar and curious.
Ideas of transformation and feelings that several performers describe as love seem to be the
most frequently expressed views from those with whom I work. In terms of transformation,
after engaging with butoh principles in their performance-making processes, they do not claim
to be butoh artists. They are aware, however, of how this Japanese mode has been made specific
to a South African context and, in the process, precipitated a transformation of themselves and
the space, in turn creating a third or in-between space. Rustom Bharucha states this in-between
space is “found when we open ourselves up to other spheres and find overlapping in blurred
spaces that bring us together” (Bharucha, 2000, 122). For me, it is also found in the interrogation
of love, which, similar to bell hooks (2000), I understand to be an action rather than a feeling. As
an action, we can interrogate the complexities and ambiguities of love, as well as be accountable
and responsible for what we do. Ohno Yoshito claims that love is the primary intention behind
all of his father’s work (Ohno, 2004). This is echoed by the actors, dancers, and opera singers
who engaged with butoh processes in their performance making. After trying to express love
with a sense of a disabled body, an actor claims “to find beauty and love within his ugliness”
(Charles, 2017). One ballet dancer, initially embarrassed to do an exercise that forced broken
and incomplete lines, claims to feel “so in love” (Cindy, 2013) at the end of the session. Finally, I
will risk being esoteric and recall one opera singer who mentions how, “it is our job to change
the energy in the room and realize that we are all brothers and sisters. Respect me, and I will
respect you” (Pam, 2017).
Epilogue
Daai za Lady is always there, as evidenced in Love Is . . . ( job, 2012, 2017). This leitmotif remains
a palimpsest in my journey with butoh and ultimately my exploration of love.
To find the feeling of being born again,

have a sense of not knowing
as we go through
this world.
461
jackï job
To know that when I fall,

I will find
invisible strands of support
on which to hang,
and move
through.
Always curious
to find what it means to be a person
through what may be
deemed as different,
difficult
and strange.
Notes
1 Between 1988 and 1993, I was associated with the Jazzart Dance Theatre, established in 1973 in Cape
Town, South Africa. In the 1980s and 1990s, a time when oppressive apartheid separatist systems were
rife, Jazzart Dance Theatre was known for its anti-establishment choreographic works that incorporated
people of different age, gender, sexuality, and race descriptions.
2 Mpantsula is a form of South African street dance that requires multiple, fast footwork syncopated to the
off-beat rhythms of Township Jive, a genre of popular music in South Africa.
3 I was a professional dance member of Jazzart Dance Theatre from 1990 to 1993. In 1994 I co-founded
an independently funded dance company called Jagged Dance Theatre, and embarked on making solo
performances. Jagged officially disbanded in 1998 and since then I continue to perform, choreograph,
produce, and direct inter-disciplinary works in my capacity as a solo artist.
4 The song is based on a poem written by written by Abel Meeropol in 1937, and later set to music by
Meeropol. The song was first recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939.
5 Note: pseudonyms have been used to provide anonymity for all persons interviewed and whose comments
are reflected in this chapter. First names are specifically used as opposed to the convention of surnames,
in order to signal the value of personhood and individuality.
Works cited
Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. New York: Routledge.
Bharucha, Rustom. 2000. The Politics of Cultural Practice. London: The Athlone Press.
Caesar, Cindy. 2013. Interview with author, Butoh-Ballet.
Charles. 2017. Interview with author, Butoh as an Approach to Performance in South Africa. September 2.
Denzin, Norman K., Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith eds. 2008. Handbook of Critical and Indig-
enous Methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Erasmus, Zimitri ed. 2001. Coloured by History Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape
Town. Cape Town: Kwela Books.
Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and
Cognitive Science. New York: Routledge.
hooks, bell. 2000. All about Love. New York: HarperCollins.
job, jackï. 2012. “Love Is . . .” YouTube video. Uploaded by cedoriko. Published Nov. 14, 2012, 1:35.
Accessed on September 7, 2013, https://youtu.be/abaT15rPUsY
———. 2014. “Butoh-Ballet.” Master’s thesis, University of Capte Town School of Dance.
———. 2017. “Daai za Lady 2017 Showreel.” YouTube video. Uploaded by jackï job. Published Oct. 29,
2017, 9:01, https://youtu.be/icUaqiC-Ycw
Ohno, Yoshito. 2004–2011. Interview with author, Butoh Workshops.
Pam. 2017. Interview with author, African Angels. July 9.
Pather, Jay. 2007. “A response: African contemporary dance? Questioning issues of a performance aesthetic
for a developing continent.” Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies 20(2): 9–15.
Pavis, Patrice ed. 1996. The Intercultural Performance Reader. London, New York: Routledge.
462
Simone, Nina. 1965. “Nina Simone: Strange Fruit.” YouTube video. Uploaded by Aaron Overfield. Published
Feb 26, 2013, 3:30. Accessed on June 5, 2017, https://youtu.be/P8Lq_yasEgo
Sokolowski, Robert. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spivak, Gayatri C. 2012. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Tuhiwai-Smith, Linda. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York: Zed
Books.
Turner, Victor. 2017. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Routledge.
“White Men Force Black Man Into Coffin.” 2016. YouTube video. Uploaded by AllAfrica Newsdesk. Pub-
lished Nov. 16 2016, 0:20, https://youtu.be/V9KeMzEgXgc
463
49
WRECKING BUTOH
Dancing poetic shores
Bronwyn Preece
i dance butoh. i write poetry. butoh dances me and my pen across page, through
performance stage(s): a mnemonic limb of the unfurling process: embodying the making, the
creating, the understanding . . .
the scribing of [a] deepening access
For two weeks, in June/July 2016, I participated in Kokoro Dance Theatre’s1 21st Annual
Wreck Beach Butoh intensive in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The yearly event – a
celebrated Canadian butoh dance institution – spearheaded by choreographic dance pioneers
Jay Hirabayashi and Barbara Bourget, gathers together a panoply of participants through an
open call. The assembled group works together for nine days in-studio, five hours a day, then
transfers the learned choreography to the tidal shores and waters of the Pacific west coast:
Wreck Beach, for three one-hour long outdoor performances. The transition from floorboards
to sands, windows to waves, air conditioning to the temporal temperaments of the conditions,
and conditioning of white-painted body in/with the outdoor air is marked and molded by a
motley crew of performers (human and other-than-human). This year’s grouping of thirteen –
including Hirabayashi and Bourget – engaged first-time to near-professional dancers. Relocat-
ing to Vancouver for the two-week period, leaving my off-grid remote island home, I fit into
this assemblage – my third year consecutive year of participating – as a PhD student, a modern
homesteader, improvisational performance artist, author, mother, and someone who moves
through life with Wilson’s Disease.
The language of my moving body, my body moving with others, within choreography, with
and as site, evokes a raw, humbled, and sensuous poetic. Tufnell and Crickmay suggest that,
“Writing in the wake of moving (or watching another move) brings the living, sensuous world
of the body into our language” (2004, 63). I agree, translating and transcribing kinesthetic, synes-
thetic feeling into inked marks on paper: an invocation of a personalized butoh-fu – a calligraphy
of symbols and synthesis, of interpretation, distillation, crystallization, metaphoric compound, and
alchemized articulations in a non-linear (personal) pastiche of a contextual present. Immediately
following each day of rehearsal and performance, I penned a poem.2 References are specific and
simultaneously open. The universal may be hidden in the local. The public within the individual.
464
Wrecking butoh
The particulars may offer opportunities for wide-ranging interpretations, appropriations, and
exegeses of meaning: equally inviting or distancing potential relevance for a reader. Their mean-
ing is relative. How do we calculate phonetic and semantic linguistic cartography? The distance between
context? Where and who do we measure from? The poetic details corresponded to choreographic
elements, moments of struggle, snippets of instructions, geographic features, epiphanies, and the
charting of a cultural/social/ecological landscape that met through dance the delicacies and rel-
evance of dancing butoh on unceded Indigenous Traditional Territories, the Brexit vote, Full
Moon and Summer Solstice, and the transitions from inner-city studio to vistaed panoramas.
The poems are utterances of the seen and unseen, the sensed and the displayed, simultaneity
and predicament. They are a form of “practiced vulnerability: a purposeful movement into
liminality – the betwixt and between-ness – of the critical creative process” (Spry 2011, 167).
The poems dwell in the liveness of the questions that butoh engages with, allows one to grapple
with, through the practice. They are a form of critical inquiry.3 They are performances (unto)
themselves. They exist as a palimpsest of the ephemeral: fixed. The are owned by none; written
by one. The experience of one woman’s interpretations – in ensemble – inextricably linked to a
larger whole, is embraced by the paradox of my pen trying to capture the moment(s) . . . always
passing, already passed: the present of (shared) presence . . . dancing butoh poetics.
Brady remarks that poetry is tied to “the context of the immediate and the immanent, to the
processes of ‘being there’ and sensual saturation, and to the art of the possible and not necessarily
Figure 49.1 butoh-as-i-as-butoh. Courtesy of the author.
465
Bronwyn Preece
the actual” (2005, 991). He continues, by suggesting that this might happen “in or out of what
might seem to be an obvious historical or mythological context” (991). What I share with you
here are the twelve poems penned immediately following each day. They mythologize the [un]ob-
vious: her storizing context. They exist as raw testimonies, nascent coalescences, processual markers.
They unknow the knowing concurrently knowledging the knowings of butoh. The first nine
poems chart the in-studio sessions; the final three, the outdoor events. The weather, the temper-
ature, and the climate always changing: these poems and accompanying photograph capture the
spirit of the dance: without title, they linguistically dance butoh as a site-sensitive elucidation, an
open offering . . .
dance like
you’re at
war:
[my neuro-pathways
weave knots into
smooth-grained
floorboards]
fly
like a
butterfly, sting
like a bee –
(forget the choreography
non-linear pieces:
lyricism later)
less is more:
this is the
butoh way:
with lifted
(thinking)
hearts –
even in this brick-

lined studio:
three stories above
a downtown conglomerate
of XXX peep shows, panhandling
poverty, boarded storefronts
and consumer gentrification:
the theme is
always the same . . .
466
Wrecking butoh
a mullioned window
frames
The Vogue’s marquee:
RuPaul’s Drag Show . . .
stretching time
and space, i
integrate the flashing
red as a (subliminal)
cross-dressing
nod to ohno:
his 103-year-old
spirit joining us
on this full moon,
on the solstice,
as we
gather fallen seeds,
lunge into
cumulous clouds
bump-and-
grind nutmeg,
whilst
see-
sawing off our
axis [ pl. axes |ˈaksēz|]
(both our own and today’s earthly-lunar diad:
inseparable)
13 teeter-totter(er)s . . .
2
i am
a thread
of raw
silk carrying
the weight
of the
buddha (world)
in the palm
of my hand:
smiling
this the
sensual dance
467
Bronwyn Preece
of resistance:
the flow
contained in
the point of
no dimensions
dragging bone-
less body
across ground:
total silence in
the dark it
was:
hiding
amongst
shrouded arms:
slowly is
always more
interesting . . .
So Mooove. . . . .!!!
dancing over
and off
the edge:
this is our now
[if you believe it]:
barreled together
in a constant river
without accent –
we blow flowers from
can(n)ons, tackle
animal husbandry,
suck the inner tube
dry of the Mother
of time that
breathes without
air
and meet for
the first time
in a single
fingertip mudra
Potential Infinity . . .
now jump . . .
468
Wrecking butoh
3
i am dancing
socrates’
lament:
losing what was/
is never used:
mind in body:
the underbelly
of the present:
reaching forward
arching back
a palimpsestic
ode scoured in
two sheets of
cardboard:
a prologue
for/of past fragments
traipsed through Time
in the
weeble-wobble
movements of
a shifting pivot
point:
carrying our [heavy]
cargo like pack-
rat-in-drainpipe,
we
cannot fly this coop . . .
but can re-
plant seeds in trees,
[a climatic change (of )
action]:
growing temporal chroniclers
because
at some point we
have to have
faith . . . in ourselves . . .
myself
i look in, i look up . . .
469
Bronwyn Preece
4
i am
the buddha-
as-pedestrian:
breathing
orchid
oxygen (02) into
the pieces of
shit on the
wheel of samsara:
focusing this lens
of engagement, the
ordinary blurs:
an arboreal
aperture grows
trees on my shoulders:
extending roots deep
in the fields of my calves:
i become
an f-stop for feeling,
a shutter speed for
surrender, poised
as peripheral
polaroid, a wide-
angle for
(a darkroom’s)
water: revealing
reflection and
absorption of self as
other (precariously
balanced/carried):
rolling in
the womb of and as
(non-sexed)
saline mother:
this is me:
close to the earth:
bruised and
skinned alive,
caressing the ground
this is me:
we are this suffering
the process of
(a) body in shared relation
470
Wrecking butoh
this is we:
perched with (almost) articulated passion:
exhausted, devoted . . .
in process.
5
i am
(an) Atlas:
arms widening
to carry the
currency of
rolling, shifting
lines:
borders:
the poundage (£)

of economies of
choice:
my belly sinks
this is the language

of éshappé
my ego exfoliated
i spiral up
escaping
like smoke
(a signal):
bend my wings
at the elbow
and . . .
get tangled:
as if
suspended from
a clothesline:
i hang
in the humbled
mix of [our]
dirty laundry:
[i am
not wearing the
emperor’s (read:
queen’s) new clothes:
my nakedness will
471
Bronwyn Preece
hold an
awareness of the
double-edged
inclusive/exclusive
power of white]
and so together (our

core strength! ),
we (an ethnic-mix)
maneuver through
imagery, symbolism and
metaphor:
(each
dancing our ‘own’) . . .
sweating, with messy hair . . .
6
‘start
from the
place of
your handicap’4
yoko ashikawa’s
words make my
shaky hands
sign in with a
freudian slip
of the pen:
WD instead of WB
(Wilson’s Disease/
Wreck Beach):
unable to write
my body’s
choreography in
a language of
linear Times New
Roman script:
at this time,
in these Times
i am
the ma between
vulnerability and
472
Wrecking butoh
security, tears and

a hug, isolation and
ensemble: in and
out of phase,
delicate
like baby’s
breath, i am
newborn
with beginner’s
mind: filled
body trembling
eyes open
my textures,
dynamics
distinctive:
gaze up
this is not
about
achievement:
it is dancing
my commitment
to the moment:
transparent.
real.
honest.
impermanent.
7
i am
moving zazen:
performing
[performance:
an elevation of
experience]
i am [the]
topography of
transformation:
a beautiful struggle
(where is the joy?)
i am
the stick of
473
Bronwyn Preece
the master:
[it’s not about
my experience,
it’s about tout
le monde]
awakening
(global) inertia:
it’s not you,

and it’s not
not you
it’s not me,

and it’s not
not me . . .
[butoh].
8
i am
the wheel
inside
the wheel
dancing with
my heart
on my sleeve
and my body
on red alert:
[revved,
anxious]
turning on
myself:
evolutionary
circles:
spiraling
through a
menagerie of
animals i
once was,
still
am:
wiping the
fish scales of
474
Wrecking butoh
my body, with
the familiarity
of skin:
a discipline
of remembrance
a responsibility
of (intra-)relationship:
through
[the waking moment
of the senses]
kinesthetic
synesthesia:
the choreography of
Be Here Now!
. . . again . . .
. . . and again . . .
. . . and again . . .
. . . and again . . .
9
i am
a flower:
trying to
open a new
chapter
[as my body
closes around
the effects of
my medical
categorization:
(privately)
gripped in
panic –
struggling . . .
how perfectly butoh]
i breathe
through:
pushing past
my limitations
475
Bronwyn Preece
to
pure kokoro
[heart, soul, spirit]:
this is
the corkscrew
the coil
the spring . . .
the open book
of my dance:
ambitious.
exhilarating.
potent:
even
within this
(shared)
soundless
soundtrack
of dis-ease:
there is music.
10. / 1
i am
a guest
on this
land:
unceded
Traditional
Coast Salish
Territory:
asking
permission of
the waves,
winds, rain,
sand, stones
and skies
before entering:
to honour, to
embrace and
be embraced,
in elemental
476
Wrecking butoh
reciprocity
[on this,
canada
day –
a sad
marker of
colonialism,
conquest and
genocide . . .
‘celebrated’ in
red and . . .
white]:
in waters
equally
tidally tied
with japan,
i dance
locally/globally
holding (and
as) the Earth
Ball:
part atomic
bomb, part
seal, heron,
seaweed, part
sailing spinnaker,
cityscape, mountain
of forest, part
war, part cloud
shroud, trans-
pacific freighter,
part litter, part
peace –
this is the shore

of my present
awareness:
humbling:
collectively
moving in and
477
Bronwyn Preece
out of
trembling:
touching
and touched
by the
grittiness
of our
different
experiences
of
this
beached
reality . . .
11. / 2
eagle
calls out
heralding
our arrival:
patterners
of impermanence:
makers and
destroyers of
sand mandalas
whose swallowed
footsteps soon
become tidal
markers: puddled
metronomes for
changing orientations,
warming weather,
falling trees on
eroding cliffs, resting
spot for feathered
migratory routes –
we are
this expression of
Time
becoming
mirrors of the
stratus clouds
stretched across
478
Wrecking butoh
the brilliant
azure:
our white now

stretched (naked)
from the
abrasion of
our dance . . .
12. / 3
we are
the primal
weather-
vanes of
the north-
west white-
capped
wind:
honouring
the edges of
pounding surf
and howling
sky,
our skin
registers this/
[our] ebbing
changing
flow:
curving
and
carving
the
cartography
of shore:
. . . we trace ‘the’ ephemeral . . .
© 2016 bronwyn preece
Notes
1 For more information on Kokoro Dance Theatre Society, visit www.kokoro.ca
2 The poems I have written from the previous two years of engaging in the Wreck Beach Butoh intensive can
be read here: “Butoh 1.2.3 . . . (Wrecked Beach)” 2015 Choreographic Practices, Vol. 6, No. 2, 245–250; and
“White-Bodied Poetry: Beaching the Beached” 2015 Dance, Movement & Spiritualities, Vol. 2, No. 2, 159–179.
479
Bronwyn Preece
3 For more about Poetic Inquiry as a Critical Methodology read Monica Prendergast, Carl Leggo, and Paul-
ine Sameshima. 2009. Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant Voices in the Social Sciences. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers; and
Monica Prendergast and Kathleen Galvin, 2015. Poetic Inquiry II: Seeing, Caring, Understanding. Rotterdam:
Sense Publishers.
4 Yoko Ashikawa quoted in Sondra Fraleigh, 2004 Dancing Identity: Metaphysics in Motion (Pittsburgh: Uni-
versity of Pittsburgh Press), 181.
Works cited
Brady, Ivan. 2005. “Poetics for a Planet: Discourse on Some Problems of Being-in-Place.” In The Sage Ency-
clopedia of Qualitative Research, 3rd edition, Eds: Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 979–1026.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Spry, Tami. 2011. Body, Paper, Stage: Writing and Performing Autoethnography. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
Tufnell, Miranda and Chris Crickmay. 2004. A Widening Field: Journeys in Body and Imagination. Plymouth:
Latimer Trend and Company.
480
SECTION 6
Beyond butoh
50
TANAKA MIN
The dance of life
Zack Fuller
Tanaka Min is an innovator in international contemporary dance who has extended the legacy of
the radical experiments of the avant-garde dance movements of the 1960s into an experimental
practice unlike that of any other major dancer/choreographer. He has performed thousands of
improvised outdoor solo dances. His training methods have been disseminated around the world,
including such places as Denmark, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, New Zealand,
and the United States. His version of The Rite of Spring (Haru no saiten) was featured in the film
Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis, his collaboration with avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor and his
solo performances in Indonesia have been the subject of feature-length documentaries, and he is
an award-winner film actor. In the Czech Republic he retains the status of an avant-garde hero,
having risked imprisonment to perform secretly in communist Prague. The French Ministry of
Culture awarded him the title of Chevalier des arts et lettres in 1990. He has collaborated with writ-
ers such as Felix Guattari and Susan Sontag, and visual artists such as Giulio Turcatto, Murakami
Takashi, and Noriyuki Haraguchi. The musicians and composers he has worked with represent a
wide variety of different styles of twentieth century music, and include the free-jazz percussion-
ist Milford Graves, the multi-instrumentalist noise musician Haino Keiji, Velvet Underground
founder John Cale, and the composer Iannis Xenakis. He is a unique figure in the dance world
in that each aspect of his dance practice (improvised dance, training, and choreographic meth-
odology) is informed by his daily life as an organic vegetable farmer. While it is impossible to
do justice to such an incredibly prolific and mercurial artist in an essay of this length, I will here
clarify certain aspects of his praxis, with an overview of his career highlighting some of his major
contributions to dance in the twentieth and twenty first centuries.
Tanaka’s work is characterized by periodic renewal and experimentation rather than the
development and mastery of formalized structures. He once stated that his conceptualization of
dance does not include the dance “piece,” because for him dance is never finished (Tanaka 2011).
His dances are series of explorations rather than fixed works. Those where he is the sole dancer
are entirely improvised, with titles such as Subject: Heurystic Ecdysis (1999) or Locus Focus (Ba
odori 2006–2016) that provide a pretext for open experimentation rather than a defined subject.
Dances entirely different in structure and movement vocabulary are presented under the same
title. While his group work is generally much more precisely composed and rehearsed, with a
relatively defined subject, dances such as Rite of Spring (Haru no saiten) (1990), the Goya dances
(2000–2002), and Kidnapping (Hitosarai) (2000) were restructured, often radically, each time they
483
Zack Fuller
were performed in a different place. The training exercises that Tanaka proposed in his work-
shops (often termed Body Weather training) were likewise very open, with clear methodological
principles but no fixed or ideal form (Fuller 2014).
While Tanaka’s improvised dance, training practices, and choreographic methodology are
characterized by a resistance to formalization, he began his life as a dancer with a strong training
in dance technique. Like the first generation of butoh dancers, Ohno Kazuo, Hijikata Tatsumi,
and Kasai Akira, Tanaka was trained in Western style modern dance before developing his own
radically experimental practice. He began training in modern dance and ballet in 1963 in Tokyo
with Hiraoka Shiga, a prominent dance teacher and choreographer strongly influenced by the
work of Martha Graham (Marshall 2006). Graham’s technique was the dominant style of mod-
ern dance training in Japan at the time (Kusaka 2002). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Tanaka
performed with Hiraoka’s dance company and became established as a modern dancer in Tokyo
(Harada 2004). In 1974 he abandoned this career to concentrate on developing improvised,
site-specific, minimalist dance. He shaved his head and body hair, dancing wearing nothing but
an Ace bandage covering his genitals, using primarily bisoku (extremely slow) movement, in a
widely differing array of spaces including public areas such as streets, parks, and subway stations,
as well as art galleries and private homes. For approximately seven years he danced in this manner,
lowering himself, in full contact with the ground where countless people had walked, spit, and
deposited their refuse. In December of 1977 he danced on Yume-no-shima (Dream Island), a small
island in Tokyo Bay that was used as a garbage dump, in what was essentially a field of garbage,
exposing his body to broken glass, metal, and filth, at times covered by countless flies (Uno et al.
2007). During this period he was frequently arrested, though his use of the elastic bandage and
lack of pubic hair prevented him from being charged with an actual crime. He called this dance
practice by different names: Subject, Butai (Dance State), Dance Doings, Hyperdance, or Drive, and
would often dance three or four times a day. Many of these performances were done in collab-
oration with Noguchi Minoru, a musician and composer working in the musique concrète mode
(Fuller 2012).
Harada Hiromi, in her Butō Taizen (Butō Encyclopedia), writes that during this period Tanaka
was bringing postmodern dance to Japan, comparing this early work to that of Anna Halprin
and Judson Dance Theatre. She foregrounds his interest in breaking away from the conventional
relationship between audience and performer, challenging audiences to see themselves and their
environment in new ways (Harada 2004). While Tanaka’s “naked” dances arose out of a similar
questioning or search for new possibilities in dance, what he was doing was something quite
different from the American postmodern dance of the 1960s and 1970s. The originality of his
project consisted in part in of unprecedented layering of a multiplicity of experimental tactics
employed by both the U.S. and Japanese avant-gardes.1 While in the 1960s, dance artists exper-
imented with minimalism, nudity, pedestrian movement, endurance, the use of non-traditional
performance space, site specificity, improvisation as performance, playing with the relationship
between audience and performer, and blurring the boundaries between art and daily life, no one
combined all of these into a practice of dance and sustained that practice for so long. Tanaka has
acknowledged his admiration for Anna Halprin, yet whatever inspiration he may have had from
Halprin or accounts of the postmodern dance scene in the United States, what he was doing was
quite unlike the work of Halprin, Judson Dance Theater, or the much more figurative work that
Hijikata and others associated with butoh were doing.
It was during this “naked” period, in 1977, that Tanaka began collaborating with the cul-
tural critic Matsuoka Seigo, then the editor of YU (Play) magazine. Tanaka’s discussions with
Matsuoka formed the conceptual basis for the work of Body Weather Laboratories, a collective
they formed in 1978 whose investigations into language, music, and the body under Tanaka’s
484
Tanaka Min
leadership marked the start of his ongoing experiments with group work in his workshops and
choreography (Kobata 2011). While the term Body Weather (Shintai kisho) later came to be
associated primarily with the workshop exercises developed by Body Weather Laboratories and
by Tanaka after that group was no longer in existence, Tanaka maintains that Body Weather is not
a type of performer training but an ideology or personal philosophy of life informing all of his
activities, including his farming work, dance, and training methodology. Body Weather considers
the body as omni-centric and, like weather, in a state of continual flux. Body Weather values
personal autonomy, collaboration, and constant variation as means of resisting the stratification
of habituated form (Fuller 2014).
Due to Matsuoka’s influence, Tanaka was invited to perform in the Espace Temps-MA exhibi-
tion, an exhibition of Japanese art, cinema, and performance at the Festival D’Automne in Paris
in 1978 (Kobata 2011). This was the first time he had performed outside of Japan. At the festival,
the French press categorized him as a butoh dancer, along with the other Japanese dancers who
had been invited to perform there (Aslan and Picon-Vallin 2002). While the image of a naked
dancer with a shaved head carries associations with butoh for many, what Tanaka was doing was
starker and much more minimalist than the butoh of Hijikata and those directly influenced by
him. After the festival Tanaka continued to travel, performing in Europe and in New York City
at the Clocktower Gallery under the Auspices of PS1 Contemporary Art Center. In subsequent
appearances in New York City and events such as the Avignon and Nancy Festivals in France and
the Reykjavik Festival in Iceland, he met the artists Karel Appel and Richard Serra, both of whom
he would collaborate with in later years.2 In the same period he began collaborating with the
percussionist Milford Graves (Uno et. al 2007), a major innovator in what is often termed “free
jazz,” or what Valerie Wilmer in 1977 termed “the New Black Music” (Wilmer 1977). Tanaka’s
collaboration with Graves is particularly significant in that Graves was the first musician Tanaka
encountered whose playing technique mirrored the use of the body that he had been developing
in Hyperdance, what might be termed an ametrical polyrhythmic independence. When in my
interviews with him I suggested to Tanaka that his relation with music might correspond to
counterpoint, Tanaka referred to the term polyrhythm, which he learned from Graves: “Maybe
I have a kind of polyrhythm in my body” (Tanaka 2011).
In 1981 Tanaka formed the dance group Maijuku (Dance School), which was initially com-
posed of dancers who had participated in his Body Weather Laboratory (Kobata 2011). Maijuku
was composed of performers from Japan, Spain, The Netherlands, France, and New Zealand.
Over the next sixteen years the group would create dances such as Moon at Noon (Hiru no tsuki,
1985), Can We Dance a Landscape? (Wareware wa fukei o odoreru ka, 1987), and Ancient Women
(Kodai fujin, 1994). Generally speaking, Tanaka’s approach to choreographing group work is col-
laborative. He does not choreograph in the traditional sense of teaching his own dance to those
he works with, but proposes images, actions, and qualities to the dancers, who develop their own
individual movements, which Tanaka then develops through verbal feedback.
After years of training in modern dance followed by years of rigorous experimentation,
Tanaka encountered Hijikata Tatsumi. This meeting complicated both Tanaka’s relationship to
butoh and the categorization of butoh itself. In 1983 the Tokyo Mainichi Shinbun (Daily News-
paper) published a report that Hijikata appreciated the minimalist outdoor performances Tanaka
was engaged in at the time (Misaki 2000). In response to this, Tanaka wrote a homage to Hijikata
that was published in YU, titled “I Am the Avant-garde Who Crawls on the Earth” (Watashi wa chi
wo hau zen’ei de aru) in which he declared himself the legitimate son of Hijikata Tatsumi (1986).
This exchange of mutual admiration eventually led to Tanaka helping Hijikata, who had been
relatively inactive for about five years, to produce a series of performances at Plan B, a small the-
atre space in Tokyo run by Tanaka and his associates. These included a retrospective of Hijikata’s
485
Zack Fuller
dance through film and slide projections, and a series of live performances: Hook-off 88: One Ton
of Hairdo for the Scenery (Huku ofu 88: Keshiki e no ittan no kamigata). Tanaka performed in one
of these: Bromide That Can Be Inhaled Incredibly Quickly (Hijō ni kyūsoku na kyukisei bromaido),3
a duet for Tanaka and Ashikawa Yoko, and in the following year Hijikata directed him in the solo
dance Performance for the Foundation of the Love-Dance School (Ren’ai butō-ha teiso koen). Accord-
ing to Tanaka, this collaboration was a great surprise to many in the butoh world, as he was seen
by many as being, in his own words, “against butoh” (Tanaka 2011).
Harada Hiromi classifies Tanaka as a dancer who challenged butoh from the outside (Harada
2004), and since his encounters with Hijikata, he has continued to challenge received notions of
butoh, primarily the notion that the most significant result of the experiments of Hijikata Tat-
sumi was the development of a form of dance entirely distinct from contemporary dance outside
of Japan.4 He has frequently refused invitations to perform at butoh festivals in the United States
and Europe, and in a statement on his official website announcing his 2009 summer workshop, he
wrote, “My workshop is by no means intended to teach butoh; I’d rather like to smash down the
tendency to believe as though there exists a genre of dance called butoh” (Tanaka 2010). He has
made similar statements over the years, and these do not simply indicate resistance to the butoh
label or a desire to place himself outside of butoh, but a critique of the very notion of butoh as
a genre, style, or category of dance. Despite his objections Tanaka has been seen through much
of his career as a major figure in the butoh movement, referred to as a “butoh master” by those
promoting his work in the West (MOMA PS1 2007), a designation that erroneously suggests
he has studied and achieved mastery of a culturally specific dance form. Tanaka is opposed on
principle to categorization and formalization of method, which he sees as restricting both the
freedom of both the human body and the human spirit. His improvised “solo” dances, training
methods, and group projects are all strongly influenced by (but rarely imitative of ) Hijikata and
in turn true to his understanding of the original spirit of experimentation embodied by Hijikata.
His contention that to live as a farmer is the best training for dance parallels the importance
Hijikata placed on the sensations he experienced growing up in rural Tohoku on the develop-
ment of his own dance.5
Tanaka’s encounter with Hijikata took place at a time when he was initiating a major shift in
his dance. Prior to meeting Hijikata, Tanaka had begun a series titled Emotion (Kanjo). Emotion
was strikingly different from Hyperdance/Drive and the MMD performances (collaborations with
Milford Graves and Derek Bailey) that preceded it. Hyperdance, Drive, and MMD were exercises
in pure movement; they avoided emotional, figurative, or narrative expression (see Figure 50.1).
Emotion by contrast was characterized by intense emotional expression, physical actions, and the
incorporation of elements of daily life (Viala and Masson-Sekine 1988) (see Figure 50.2).
The importance of the relation between daily life and dance in Tanaka’s work is fundamental
in contextualizing his choice to leave Tokyo and become a farmer. In 1985 Tanaka opened Body
Weather Farm in Hakushu (now Hakuto City), a small village about four hours west of Tokyo.
He and the members of Maijuku lived there with other collaborators, learning farming methods
from local villagers (Van de Ven 2007). Over the next eleven years they lived as farmers while
continuously training and rehearsing, performing in Europe, Japan, and the United States. Tana-
ka’s ongoing commitment to agricultural labor as a lifestyle constitutes his most radical exper-
iment with the intersection between dance and daily life. After moving to Hakushu, farming
came to inform every aspect of his dance practice. On the most mundane level farming provided
a means of subsistence income (and food) for the people that lived, worked, and danced with him,
alleviating the need to rely entirely on outside funding sources. The farming lifestyle also pro-
vided access to a wealth of materials to be used in set construction and spaces in which to dance.
More importantly, farming a wide variety of small crops exposed the body to a multiplicity of
486
Figure 50.1 Drive (Performance Space 122, New York City, 1980), photograph by Charlie Steiner.
Figure 50.2 Emotion (Kanjo) (La Mama E.T.C., New York City, 1983), photograph by Charlie Steiner.
Zack Fuller
stimuli and physical actions, functioning as dance training not bound up with a specific cultural
context. The practice of farming as dance training constituted a decommodification of dance
practice, involving a use of space overturning conventional hierarchical relations between places
for dance training and the dancers who engage with them (Fuller 2014). It relates directly to
a fundamental aspect of Tanaka’s personal philosophy: daily life should be as experimental and
physically rigorous as dance itself.
Tanaka disbanded Maijuku in 1996. Some of the Japanese members (Tamai Yasunari, Natsui
Hidekazu, and Suzuki Keishi) continued to live at and maintain Body Weather Farm, with the
help of various volunteers who stayed there for periods of time. After the dissolution of Maijuku,
Tanaka directed several group dances including El Conquista, an adaptation of Antonin Artaud’s
The Conquest of Mexico (1996) featuring Brazilian performers; The Poe Project: Stormy Membrane
(1997), developed from a libretto by Susan Sontag based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe, with
a cast of U.S. based performers; and Romance: Love in Fluxus (1999) with an international cast.
In 2000 Tanaka formed a new group, Tokason (Plum Arcadia), and founded Honmura, a
farm that became his new home base, at a largely abandoned collection of small farmhouses
in Shikishimacho (now Kai City), a mountainous area about one hour south of Body Weather
Farm.6 The members of Tokason worked and lived at either Body Weather Farm, which was by
that point a self-sustaining agricultural enterprise, or at Honmura. While Body Weather Farm
produced a wide variety of crops, at Honmura, Tanaka initially focused on cultivating tea, along
with other crops such as buckwheat (soba), and activities as such making charcoal using a tradi-
tional clay oven.
While there is no fixed method to Tanaka’s approach to choreography, there were some essen-
tial differences between his approach to creating group dances in the work of Maijuku and that
of Tokason. While with each group, dancers developed their own movements based on Tana-
ka’s proposals, which he then altered in regards to movement quality, timing, and nuance, with
Tokason there was in general more of an emphasis on the individual performers developing their
own images as well as their own movement, rather than working from images supplied verbally
by Tanaka or by Hijikata. There was less of a direct relation with the training exercises known as
Body Weather, and outside of annual summer workshops, Tokason members did not collectively
participate in training other than farming work itself. There was also a focus on the development
of a series of complex individual physical characters that was not present in Maijuku’s work,
where dances tended to be constructed from image work, physical actions, animal studies, and
studies of generalized human types (such as children or pre-modern human beings).
In the first decade of the twenty-first century Tanaka began working as an actor in feature
films and initiated new agricultural projects. In 2002 he appeared in The Twilight Samurai (Tasu-
gare Seibei), for which he won the Japan Academy prizes for both best supporting actor and best
newcomer. Since that time he has worked fairly extensively as a film actor. There was a shift in
the focus of his solo dance in 2003 when he began dancing in remote villages in Indonesia and
India, for audiences who had never been exposed to types of performance other than their own
traditional ones (Yutani 2007). This led to his initiation of a forest preservation project in Kali-
mantam Island, Indonesia, in 2004.7 In 2006 Tokason stopped performing in large theatres and
gradually suspended their activities altogether. Body Weather Farm dissolved sometime around
2011. As of this writing, Tanaka has stopped leading summer workshops and accepting requests
from those who wish to live and train with him. He no longer maintains a group of dancer/
farmers, focusing on his own improvised practice of dance, often under the title Locus Focus (Ba
odori), as well as directing solo performances for his disciple, Ishihara Rin.
A major innovator in international contemporary dance, Tanaka Min’s experimental practice
encompasses the interrelated fields of improvised performance, choreographic method, training,
488
Tanaka Min
and daily life. Leaving a successful career as a modern dancer to explore minimalist site-specific
dance, he then moved beyond this to develop a practice of improvised dance not based in any
specific technique, but on an accumulation of physical experiences acquired through collabo-
ration with different spaces and bodies, exhibiting an expansive range of movement quality and
physical vocabulary (a practice that he, at the age of 72, continues today). His body training
and choreographic methods are likewise based in a collaborative methodology where bodies
received numerous stimuli from other spaces and bodies. Tanaka is an avant-garde artist deeply
concerned with the interaction between dance and daily life, and his devotion to agricultural
labor altered his own body and the bodies of those who worked with him for long periods of
time. Since declaring himself the legitimate son of Hijikata Tatsumi in 1983 he has maintained
an ambivalent relationship to butoh, developing a practice of dance extremely different from
Hijikata Tatsumi’s in many ways, while remaining deeply inspired by him.
Notes
1 I employ Certeau’s concept of tactics as an “anti-discipline” in positioning Tanaka’s dance as a spatial
practice that contests the boundaries between dance and everyday life in a struggle for personal agency
(Certeau 1984).
2 On Can We Dance a Landscape and Rite of Spring respectively.
3 I have used Susan Blakely Klein’s translation for this obscure title. See Susan Blakely Klein, Ankoku Butoh:
The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Darkness, Cornell East Asia Series 49 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University East Asia Program, 1988), 81.
4 In my interviews with him Tanaka stated his opinion that the butoh-fu constitutes “1 percent” of Hijikata,
and that Hijikata was not only important for butoh, he was important “for dance.”
5 While Hijikata’s accounts of his childhood in Tohoku are fictionalized to some degree, they are filled with
examples of his body being stimulated by natural elements.
6 I performed in several of these dances during the interim between Maijuku and Tokason, and participated
in a small portion of the work restoring the houses at Honmura Village.
7 Tanaka suspended the Forest Preservation Project in 2015 because of demands for bribes by corrupt
government officials.
Works cited
Aslan, Odette, and Béatrice Picon-Vallin, ed. 2002. Butō(s). Arts Du Spectacle. Paris: CNRS editions.
Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Fuller, Zack. 2012. “Hyperdance in Tokyo: Urban Space as Subject in Tanaka Min’s Solo Dance Prac-
tice; 1975–1977.” SDHS 2012 Proceedings. Society of Dance History Scholars. https://sdhs.org/
proceedings-2012.
———. 2014. “Seeds of an Anti-hierarchic Ideal: Summer Training at Body Weather Farm.” Theatre, Dance
and Performance Training, Vol. 5, No. 2, 197–203.
Harada Hiromi. 2004. Butoh Taizen. Tokyo: Gendai Shokan.
Klein, Susan Blakely. 1988. Ankoku Butoh: The Premodern and Postmodernism Influences on the Dance of Utter
Darkness. Cornell East Asia Series 49. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program.
Kobata Kazue. 2011. Interview with Zack Fuller. Off Soho Suites, New York City, October 15.
Uno Kuniichi, Kobata Kazue, and Matsuoka Seigo. 2007. Min Tanaka: Between Mountain and Sea: Photographs
by Masato Okada. Tokyo: Kousakusha.
Kurihara Nanoko. 2000. “Hijikata Tatsumi Chronology.” The Drama Review, Vol. 44, No. 1.
Kusaka Shiro. 2002. The Development of Contemporary Dance in Japan: 3 (division 3) New Tide, directed by
Shiro Kusaka (Tokyo, Japan: Contemporary Dance Association of Japan Tokyo: Video Corp), VHS.
Marshall, Jonathan W. 2006. “Dancing the Elemental Body: Butoh and Body Weather: Interviews with
Tanaka Min and Yumi Umiumare.” Performance Paradigm, Vol. 2. www.performanceparadigm.net/
category/journal/issue-2/.
Misaki Eri. 2000. “Min Tanaka: What is Dance?” New York Dance Fax, 6–9.
489
Zack Fuller
MoMA PS1 Studio Visit. 2007. “Min Tanaka: Photos by Masato Okada 1975–2005,” MoMA PS1, Accessed
April 20, 2010. http://ps1.org/exhibitions/view/159
Tanaka Min. 1986. “From ‘I am the Avant-Garde Who Crawls on the Earth: Homage to Tatsumi Hijikata.’”
The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 30, No. 2, 153–155.
———. 2011. Interviews by Zack Fuller. Dance Resources on Earth, Honmura, Yamanishi-ken, Japan,
August 8, 9, 12.
———. “Min Tanaka Official Website.” Accessed April 20, 2010. www.min-tanaka.com/
Van de Ven, Frank. 2007. Interview by Zack Fuller, Itxassou, Pays Basque, July 19.
Viala, Jean, and Nourit Masson-Sekine. 1988. Butoh: Shades of Darkness. Tokyo: Shufunotomo.
Wilmer, Valerie. 1977 (1992). As Serious as Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz, 2nd ed. London: Serpents
Tail.
Yutani Katsumi, ed. 2007. Umihiko Yamahiko Maihiko: Min Tanaka’s Dance Road in Indonesia. Tokyo: Designing
GYM.
490
51
BODY WEATHER
LABORATORY LOS ANGELES
An interview with Roxanne Steinberg and Oguri
Joyce Lu
Body Weather Los Angeles was, by definition, its own version of Body Weather Laboratory.
All Body Weather Laboratories around the world, despite their subjugation to similar, almost
identical training regiments, are distinct and unique . . . pointing to the potency of these prac-
tices; their potential to take the body to layers more sublime and rare.
Boaz Barkan, personal communication
Roots
Summer in Los Angeles, 1992: I see a flyer on a telephone pole advertising an “open opportu-
nity” for “determined physical expression” – something I found lacking in my undergraduate
theater education; something that I was looking for. The address leads me to Roxanne Steinberg,
Oguri, and Melinda Ring, who are leading workshops in an old church sanctuary in South LA.
We begin by crawling, jumping, reaching, and more: everything across the floor. The movements
they propose challenge my strength, flexibility, and coordination. They demand that I bypass my
cognitive brain and move spontaneously with my whole being. Blindfolded, we explore the area
around the church outside; we carry each other and compose human sculptures with the archi-
tecture of the environment. I try to introduce several friends to the training, but they all say it’s
too hard and refuse to return after one try. I don’t understand, because I personally need to exert
and express myself in this way. I feel like I’ve found something essential that has been missing
in my life. At the end of the summer, however, I take a job in the Bay Area. Before leaving LA,
Ring gives me information about Min Tanaka’s Body Weather farm in Hakushu which I carry
with me for seven years until I finally make it there for a month in 1999. Serendipitously, I also
keep encountering other people who trained on the farm, like Naoko Maeshiba and Sherwood
Chen. I do the training on my own as much as it is possible to do that . . . and when another
job finally returns me to LA fifteen years later in 2007, I re-find Oguri and Roxanne who are
now based at the Electric Lodge1 in Venice. Eventually, they invite me to perform with them and
offer me the opportunity to construct solo dances in their Flower of the Season2 series. Along
with other workshop participants, we hike in the San Gabriel Mountains, dig sand on the beach,
push and pull sculptures by Hirokazu Kosaka in the moonlight in Little Tokyo, Downtown LA,
and the Getty Museum. We become, in this way, part of the landscape of Los Angeles in the
491
Joyce Lu
Figure 51.1 Flyer for Body Weather Laboratory workshops at La Boca, photograph by Gary Matteson.
larger landscape of time and the universe. International Body Weather dancer friends also come
through town from time to time, like Boaz Barkan, Christine Quoiraud, Frank van de Ven,
Yasunari Tamai, and Andrés Corchero. They lead workshops, create performances with us, and
also perform their own work, sometimes solo and sometimes with Oguri. In other words, the
492
Body Weather Laboratory Los Angeles
space remains an open opportunity just as it first advertised itself to be. And this opportunity spills
from the studio, down the street, to the Oguri-Steinberg residence, where these two are always
ready to shelter and feed wayward artists. So I find myself again in their kitchen over tea and beer
and snacks trying to explain to them this book project about butoh although I have heard them
say so many times that their work is not that:
OGURI: So this book is for . . .?

JOYCE: Dance scholars, dancers, students –
ROXANNE: And the section we are in is –
O: “Beyond Butoh,”
R: Beyond Butoh
J: Or “Besides Butoh” or . . . I mean, we don’t have to worry about it really . . .
O: I’m not worried. I think what is important for me to tell is this: I performed [in the] 80s
start[ing] with Min Tanaka. I wasn’t particularly thinking about butoh –
R: I first heard the term butoh in Paris in 1982. I had already worked with Min and butoh was
a big thing in Paris. There were butoh companies that came there and performed and it all
sounded really obscure to me because I related to Min. He was an improvisational dancer; I
totally related to where he was coming from, and I felt like I wanted to learn from his prac-
tice. Soon after, I began working with the musician Yas Kaz who composed music for many
butoh dancers. In 1987, he invited me to Koyasan, Japan, to choreograph a mandala and
spinning dance for Buddhist acolytes and the model/dancer Sayoko Yamaguchi – an event
to increase tourism by displaying new robes created by designer Emi Wada. That summer,
at a butoh Festival at the Saison Theater in Ginza, Tokyo, I began to see and understand
Hijikata’s legacy. What I saw was – in many of the dancers – not a form, and not a style
either, but a spirit, an empowerment . . . that went in many different directions. They each
had their own approach.
O: Yeah, I took a workshop with Hijikata around 1984 . . . He was already a legend. He wasn’t
dancing on stage anymore. My dear friend took me to his workshop demonstration. It was
really unnamable; something almost like ugly, but I cannot stop watching; just so strange.
And he was so beautiful . . . In his workshop, I had to bring some imagination from outside
myself . . . it was not simple imagination. That was a very special strength that he gave to
people – Hijikata. He was maybe 54 or 55, but he looked like an old man; a very wise man
. . . And his voice was . . . not beautiful, but the rhythm and connection to the body . . .
like a coffee or caramel or something coming into my inside . . . coffee is like a bitter taste,
like you can’t forget that taste . . . You feel like you know this person before and he knows
me, or . . . that was amazing.
R: He knew you. Those kind of people they know everything . . . He already knew Oguri was
coming.
O: It was a free and very unique time before Hijikata died . . . Nobody wanted to capture or
trademark . . . That’s why the best idea is to –
R: Just let the label of butoh go.
O: Yeah let go.
R: Just say it died.
O: Died . . . I don’t think died –
R: Not died.
O: I chose that word before: “昇華”
R: “Sublimated”?
J: There’s other ways to translate it.
493
Joyce Lu
R: “Evaporated”?
O: Yeah . . . kind of.
J: Evaporated in a state of perfection? In Chinese that term means to raise to a higher level; the
level of the sublime.
sub·lime [səˈblīm]adjective
1. of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe.
– used to denote the extreme or unparalleled nature of a person’s attitude or behavior.
verb
2. Chemistry (of a solid substance) change directly into vapor when heated, typically
forming a solid deposit again on cooling.
– cause (a substance) to do this.
3. archaic elevate to a high degree of moral or spiritual purity or excellence.
Google 2017
O: This kanji, this hanna is like something very central comes up. Sho is like going up, as in like
after Jesus died, three days later . . .
R: Ascending.
O: I also had seen Min. I didn’t label Min Tanaka’s work butoh, and at that time I was not
interested in dance. Min’s work and Mai-Juku3 work was kind of like a black sheep in the
butoh community, you know? But he was collecting 40 male performers to make work in
the 1984 Butoh Festival, so I was one of those 40 men. I wasn’t in Mai-Juku yet. Our per-
formance was pretty amazing. We brought gigantic trees on the stage inside the theater.
We went to the mountain and cut them down and brought them by truck. . . . That
work with Mai-Juku was very minimal, but at the same time the size was unlimited. . . .
There was the influence of the Mono-ha art movement in Japan at that time, like [Koji]
Enokura, or [Noboru] Takayama . . . something very similar to like what Richard Serra
was working with too. Normally an art movement has some strong leadership who is
in charge, but Mono-ha was very open, using a lot of plain material . . . and Min had a
lot of sculptor –
R: – and architect –
O: – friends – same age and very cutting edge . . . so there were many collaborations that
happened at that time at Plan-B. . . . And I started taking training – I didn’t say I was a
dancer – I said “train.” You know that time, in ’84, ’85, we called performances: “Oguri
solo performance.” That was what we put on flyers and such, and then like two or three
years later someone said: “Hey you guys, maybe you can write ‘dance performance’ or ‘solo
dance’ now,” or something like that. We didn’t say “dance” before. It very much started
from performance . . . And some people shifted to become visual artists with Takayama
and Enokura.
R: Your first solo performance you shared the evening with Simone [Forti] at Plan-B.
O: Yes, Min produced a week-long program featuring the sculpture of one artist. Everyday a dif-
ferent dancer would dance in the space with that artist’s sculpture. Simone was, of course, a
highlight. When I was just in my first year participating in Mai-juku, Min asked me: “Oguri
are you interested? Can you do that?” That was my first time dancing solo on a public stage
. . . Simone was like my age now. I think she was 51 or 2 at that time.
J: What is your memory of that performance?
494
O: I was naked and I moved a lot; like some movement I learned from a Hijikata workshop and
some martial arts movement and just continued moving, I just kept going, ne? I was about
22 years old.
R: I first saw Oguri dance in 1988. I was struck by a shocking simplicity, a purity. Oguri was
doing things that forced me to challenge myself, to simplify and strip away.
Figure 51.2 Oguri at Plan-B, Tokyo (1986), photograph by Christine Quoiraud. Courtesy of Médiathèque
du Centre National de la Danse, Paris.
Figure 51.3 From L to R: Simone Forti and Oguri, Flower of the Season (2016), photograph by Sally Stein.
Postcard Art + Design by Kio Griffith.
495
Joyce Lu
Who is this sacred fool Pure as water from a mountain spring Imagination tumbling
through sensation.
Simone Forti, personal communication
Spirit
J: Oguri, a lot of people use this word “pure” to describe your dance: Roxanne, Simone, Judith
Hamera, various other dance critics. How do you feel about that word? Do you know what
they mean? Do you know what they’re referring to from your perspective?
O: “Pure” has a really beautiful sound, yeah? But pure is at the same time like “Puritan.” It can
also mean like very stiff too. To be pure in collaborating is like to accept from the outside.
But “pure” is a very positive word, no?
R & J: Yeah.
O: Then actually I don’t want to lose that.
J: Does it have something to do with “essence” or “spirit”?
R: I was thinking about the spiritual piece before in the way that some of the musicians that we
work with have a strong Buddhist practice or something like that. For me, I think of spirit
as the thing that’s moving me . . . So like when I use the word “inspiration,” it means that
something’s giving me impetus to move whether that’s, you know, inspiration to read a
book, or inspiration to cook a meal. I think dancing also brings me face to face with the fact
that I’m moving and that sometimes it’s hard for me to move. Sometimes there’s not much
inspiration there, but there is a kind of a desolate fact that I’m moving so that becomes a
point of questioning and I think of a spiritual practice as that point of: “okay, I don’t believe
in anything, but the fact is I’m here and I’m moving and I have to move, and I continue to
move, so, you know, recognizing that place of desolation or that place of inspiration and also
the ability to reflect and to be present.”
J: Were you raised with any particular religion or spirituality?
R: I think from Judaism the most interesting thing to me was the sense of the unknown
and an understanding that there are no answers, and I can’t hold on to anything, and
that it’s about all that I’m questioning, and if there’s darkness to be able to search for
the questions.
J: I think you more so, Oguri, because you’re Japanese in the United States, people project some
kind of exotic spirituality on you.
O: Maybe so. But my sense of spirituality is about responsibility rather than sitting on some
mountain cultivating “wisdom” or trying to feel “peaceful” or anything like that . . . It’s
about embracing all aspects of life, including the bad moods, the fighting . . . It’s about
ethics and purpose in dance, a committed ability to participate, respond, and be fully
present.
J: Do you think it’s significant that you both come from two cultures that suffered these atroc-
ities: the Holocaust and the atomic bombing during World War II? A lot of people mark
avant-garde dance, or the spontaneous gesture, as a necessary response to reckoning with the
aftermath of that war.
R: Yeah, that’s all present, but to identify that as a purpose is unfortunate. I think having to
identify with other kinds of meanings, whether it’s a meaning of a Holocaust or Hiro-
shima, or an apocalypse, or pain denies us the possibility to be present . . . and that notion
496
of being present and able to respond in a resourceful way, however limited those resources
might be; that’s dance. That’s how I’ve always responded to the calling to be a dancer . . .
I just love the risk of improvisation . . . It’s a risk each time of “can I do what I came
with or not?” And it’s really important for me to honor the element of change that’s
always there. It’s lovely when you have a fixed thing. And of course, you know, a fixed
set of choreography – it’s always going to change when you perform it: timing, rhythm,
temperature, people, all of that, but with improvisation it’s a higher platform to fall off
of . . . For me, a dance needs a certain balance between things that are magical that are
unplanned and things I have in place as a structure and when the two things can come
together with the right timing at the right moment then a third thing happens. That’s
for me when it works . . .
J: So this last performance you did at the Electric Lodge in February, Person’s Body, what was the
inspiration for this work?
R: Oguri got really obsessed with [Gustav] Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, the third movement. It
has many starts – as in a round – and folk song themes, and also some very heavy parts that
sound like a dirge – very interesting as a structure. Dynamically, this piece was interesting
to work with as a dance study. We read the score and tried to understand the patterns and
layers. We worked to embody the composition, then turned the music off. The dance came
to us partly from the inventiveness of the music. It served as a vehicle for personal and shared
stories, and an exploration of emotional stimulus and cultural cues
O: Yes, for example, for a long time I didn’t know I wasn’t part of my mother’s body. Then, when
I was very little, in an instant as she was washing her hair in the sink I realized that I was
separate. Last summer, I spent time with her during her death and the traditional process for
her departure and cremation; her body becoming thin, transforming and finally evaporating
in ashes and smoke. These are the thoughts that filled me as I was making this dance. I was
thinking: Can we be in another person’s body? Can we feel through this other person’s
senses?
R: The concept of social observing was also inspiring us. The year before this, in June of 2016,
also at the Electric Lodge, Oguri and I did a duet and used almost the same title: person’s
body . . . flower. Oguri was inspired by a museum that took the initiative to share its exhibits
with visually impaired people by having docents describe paintings verbally. He thought,
“How could I dance for someone who can’t see with their eyes?” We were curious about
how the process of verbalizing work changes the experience of perceiving it. So we asked
the audience to pair up and discuss with each other: (1) what they saw – is dance visible or
not, (2) what they embellished or how their own thoughts may have amplified or changed
what and how they saw, and (3) what discussing these things with another person did to
their viewing experience.
O: Yes, how is it different to see, not as individuals, but in the company of another? We wanted
the audience to witness aloud, to experience the transparency of their impressions and/or
interpretations with another person. Through this social observing, I felt that the dance
could be revealed instead of imposed.
Oguri did a solo Performance at LACE in 1992. That was one of the last per-
formances at LACE downtown. Fucking blew my mind. I could not move for a
while; I was locked between tears of disgust, lust, and grief. I had just left the army,
was put through the mental health system and managed to escape to LA, and here
497
Joyce Lu
Figure 51.4 L to R: Steinberg and Oguri, Person’s Body (Electric Lodge, 2017), photograph by Moses
Hacmon facesofwater.com.
I was being sucked into a Japanese body as the first glimpse of redemption and
rebirth into something I felt was mine . . . Joined the workshop and stuck to it
like religion . . . Abandoned the BFA program I was in, turning to the BWL path.
Boaz Barkan, personal communication
Training
It takes a certain kind of person to be attracted to this work. Like most things, it is not for every-
body. Like Barkan, I feel it leads me to feeling a sense of “mine” – not in a selfish way – but
in an empowered way, like what Steinberg reports witnessing when she first saw contemporary
498
Japanese dancers in the 1980s who were influenced by Hijikata. This empowerment comes from
my ancestors, my life experience, and also from connecting these things to the environment and
other forces beyond my body. This practice feels best to me when I can touch a complete relin-
quishing or offering of the body to show what needs to be shown. It is a means to experience
total freedom if only for a second or a millisecond. I train with the wish to be able to touch and
share this sensation with more frequency.
Steinberg and Melinda Ring began Body Weather Laboratory Los Angeles in 1988, after train-
ing with Min Tanaka in Japan for some time. Following his established structure of MB, followed
by improvisation and sensory exercises, and sometimes manipulations,4 they led workshops three
times a week at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Oguri came from Japan to
join them in 1990, and then they moved BWL to the Sunshine Mission, Casa de Rosas, the city’s
oldest shelter for homeless women, where I found them in 1992. Choreographer and director
Sarah Elgart was given the space in 1990 when she received funds from the City of Los Angeles
to do a performance piece with transitional homeless women. Elgart named the space La Boca,
or “the mouth,” because the surrounding community was primarily Spanish-speaking Latinx,
and because she felt the mouth was a symbol of how the space would speak to the community.
Elgart founded a performance group there called Mothers and Daughters Reaching Empowered
States (MADRES) and also opened the space as a common ground for people to experience the
performing arts regardless of their socio-economic backgrounds.
R: We were part of an early wave of a downtown Los Angeles arts scene.

O: We did a lot of performances at La Boca.
J: Could you talk about the training praxis: how MB and the improvisation and sensory work we
do in workshop relates to performing?
Figure 51.5 From L to R: Oguri, Melinda Ring, Roxanne Steinberg, Galvanic Murmur (La Boca, 1992),
photograph by Gary Matteson.
499
Joyce Lu
Figure 51.6 Roxanne Steinberg, photographer unknown.
O: Dance is about instinct and the first thing we have for dance is the body. We train to connect
back to what we were, or who we are before language.
R: We train together so we become very connected and to know each other’s tendencies and
energy. We challenge our limits, and by doing over and over we are ready to be open to the
space and ideas as they arise. All of the sensitivity work and putting ourselves in vulnerable
situations readies us for the risks necessary to take to create an interesting performance.
J: Part of what really appeals to me, and maybe again relates to this sense of “mine” that Barkan
talks about, is that the movements we do don’t have to look a certain way as in ballet or
other dance forms; they just have to find a home in my body in the present moment. This
helps me to improve my capacity for honest expression. Even if it looks like we are doing
the same movement week after week, it is never exactly the same.
500
R: One thing I really appreciated when I first started doing Body Weather training was that it
wasn’t about demonstrate and then you do that. You couldn’t ask lots of questions. You
couldn’t say, “Oh should I do it like this or that?” It wasn’t about learning by mouth. It’s
what you can watch and learn, and really watching the others. . . . But as soon as I started
leading Body Weather workshops here, people would ask me, “So how do I become a butoh
dancer and how does this relate to butoh?” I feel like to learn any kind of serious approach
to theater or dance it takes years and years of doing without asking questions, because you
can’t even know what questions to ask until you’ve practiced a long time. And if you ask
the wrong questions you’re set off in a totally weird direction. How can you even know
what to ask? So what I really liked was that you do and do and do and finally some honest
questions come up and you learn to solve them through the practice. So when people think
they’re coming to “butoh class” I feel “what do you think I can teach you? Nothing!” You
know? I think learning involves a lot of breaking down. Learning, at least for me, it’s always
involved destroying what I know. . . . And the techniques I’ve encountered, or the – let’s say
exercises – that I’ve worked with, with other dancers that perhaps identify as butoh dancers
are similar to acting practices or Anna Halprin’s Movement Rituals or other creative dance
work. They’re physical practices and they’re infinite. So I find it surprising when people say,
“Oh, this is the butoh dancer, the master,” or however people want to identify either Oguri
or me. Isn’t it enough just to be a dancer?
O: Some [people] want me to give them some movement or technique or something, but it
doesn’t start from there. What is happening in the body? What is gravity doing? Where is
stillness? What is a quiet body? Let’s start from that point . . . just making a big voice; you
don’t need to make any “movement” but, it’s still very much about the body.
J: So, what about how you’ve observed each other’s dance change over the years?
O: Well, definitely changing, yeah?
R: So, what about me?
O: Yeah, change, ne . . . Roxanne [is] now getting more free to be dance. Maybe before it was
more like there was always some idea that you might get stuck in, but now it feels much
more free. Maybe this is something I’m reflecting about myself too.
R: I would say the same thing about you: I think your improvisation has grown so much.
J: And what about your relationship now to this term: “Body Weather”?
R: It wasn’t my invention. I find it a very beautiful term, but I didn’t come up with it myself. I
feel it can honestly identify the way I think about the body and dance, you know; it’s always
changing and Body Weather seemed to aptly define that kind of relationship. Dance is
change. But Body Weather also seems to be the hook connected to some kind of notion of
butoh. So, I might sometimes feel disingenuous to use the term “Body Weather.” Honestly
I love it, but it’s not mine. It’s everybody’s.
O: When I came here, to the United States, it gave me some strength. And in my heart, I appre-
ciate this work, but I don’t need to name it that. Like she said, it’s not mine. I’m with it. I’m
totally with. I’m still very interested in it, but I cannot stay there. . . . So many great artists
have been dying. The persons I always followed, who inspired me, many are gone. We have
a lot of responsibility, you know, to go on.
Continue
Exactly 25 years after meeting Oguri and Steinberg near downtown LA, I am excited and hon-
ored to work with them this summer on their next piece, a collaboration with composer Paul
Chavez, and French video and performing artist Lola Gonzales. The Distance Is Beautiful: La
501
Joyce Lu
Distance la Plus Courte Entre Deus Points n’est pas Une Ligne Droite is meant to question ideas of col-
laboration and community in the context of urbanization and gentrification, and will take place
in several downtown LA sites, leading ultimately to Grand Park. Someone asked me recently,
“So this dancing thing, doesn’t it have an expiration date?” If anything, I hope this conversation
helps people to understand that if you maintain a relationship with roots and spirit, and if you
continue training your body and mind, if you use these things and let them use you, then your
dance, your evolution is forever without limit. That is how we can always become, as Oguri says,
“more free to be dance.”
Notes
1 The Electric Lodge was established in 1996 by Dr. Joel Shapiro, who bought an old Masonic Lodge in
Venice and transformed it into one of the first solar-powered theater and community spaces in the coun-
try. It is the founding venue of Arts: Earth Partnership and meets the highest standards of environmental
excellence, striving for a zero carbon footprint. Oguri and Steinberg have been artists in residence at The
Lodge since its inception, and Dr. Shapiro also trains and performs with them on occasion.
2 Oguri and Steinberg started the Flower of the Season dance series in 2004 as a platform for the develop-
ment of new and important dance explorations by a variety of local and international artists. See: http://
lightningshadow.com/Flower.html
3 Mai-Juku was a performing arts group begun by Min Tanaka in the early 1980s. See Bonnie Sue Stein,
“Farmer/Dancer or Dancer/Farmer: An Interview,” The Drama Review: TDR 30 (Summer, 1986), p. 148.
4 MB is series of movement proposals that the workshop leader offers and that workshop participants
follow, usually moving across the floor. MB can stand simultaneously for many things, such as “Muscle
and Bone,” “Mind and Body,” whatever you can think of. Manipulations are a series of hands-on studies
done in pairs to move and stretch the body in ways that one could not accomplish alone. This sequence
of seven partner manipulations were originally formulated by Min Tanaka based on his study of various
somatic practices.
Work cited
Google. 2017. “Sublime definition.” Accessed on August 14. www.google.com/search?q=sublime+defi
nition&oq=sublime+definition&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0l4.206250.209025.0.209185.18.16.0.0.0.0.146.1708
.7j9.16.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..2.16.1698...0i131k1j0i131i67k1j0i67k1.yzerFnvIagA
502
52
THE CINEMATIC FORMS
OF BUTOH FILMS
Aaron Kerner
Introduction: cinema and butoh

Butoh performers have had a long productive interaction with the cinematic form – from
documented butoh performances to the spasmodic butoh-inspired performances in E. Elias
Merhige’s 1990 film Begotten. This chapter will chart the terrain of various types of butoh films
and survey the ways these two art forms – butoh and cinema – mutually seduced one another,
how the cinematic medium has been used to record butoh performances, and what remains yet
to be discovered.
The interactions between butoh and film predate even the advent of butoh proper. Before
Hijikata Tatsumi’s Forbidden Colors (Kinjiki, 1959), there are accounts of Hijikata adopting the
persona of movie actors and characters (e.g., the gangster Matsunaga in Kurosawa’s 1948 film
Drunken Angel, and James Dean) (Holborn 1987, 11; Barber 2010, 19; Fraleigh and Nakamura
2006, 22), as well as making an appearance in Birthday Girl Jazz (Sunohara Masahisa, 1957) as
a backup dancer in a large dance number. The ideas that stimulated Hijikata’s imagination and
fueled the development of butoh emerged from a fecund mélange of cultural sources including
the cinema.
We might roughly place films that incorporate butoh into three categories: narrative fiction
films that incorporate butoh elements into their story-world; documentary films that intend
to record a butoh performance (I am grouping filmed documentation under this category as
well); and dance-films where dance is as much a product of the editing as it is the performance
(Rosenberg 2012, 2).
Documentary butoh films usually adhere to certain conventions: a preference for long takes,
long shots where the camera is usually placed on a tripod and at a distance from the performance
in an effort to capture most (if not all) the body/action; camera movement is typically limited
to pans (moving along the horizontal axis) in an effort to keep the action centrally framed. The
camera is situated outside the performance space, positioned as an “objective” observer of an
event.
As an example of a documentary butoh film, consider Arai Misao’s 2003 film Natsu no arashi
(Summer Storm), which documents a 1973 Hijikata performance at Kyoto University. Arai’s foot-
age remained untouched for 30 years before he assembled it. Aside from contemporary footage
cut into interstitial moments and as bookends, he largely restrains himself from interfering with,
503
Aaron Kerner
as Sondra Fraleigh and Tamah Nakamura recount, “the integrity of the dance by editing it”
(Fraleigh and Nakamura 2006, 89). There are, nonetheless, certain instances where Arai offers
“forensic” close-ups, for instance, of hand gestures, to offer some specific details, but by and large
the film conforms to the above conventions. There are also examples of expository documen-
taries that survey the history of butoh – for instance, Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis (Michael
Blackwood, 1990), and Butoh: Piercing the Mask (Richard Moore, 1991) – and instructional films
as well; all of which might be placed under the umbrella of documentary butoh films (for more
on instructional films, see Morishita 2015b, 23).
Butoh has been incorporated into a number of narrative films, such as Ishii Teruo’s 1969
film Horrors of Malformed Men. Ishii, interested in the ero-guro genre (which combined erotic
and grotesque elements together) and frequently adapting material from Edogawa Rampo sto-
ries, likely cast Hijikata because of his screen-appeal without much regard for anything else. “I
approached Tatsumi Hijikata for the role because without him, I could not have made the film
the way I wanted,” Ishii recounts. “Without him, it would have been just another normal film”
(Ishii cited in Barber 2010, 64). Ishii was a B-film filmmaker and had no pretensions otherwise –
he emphasized cinematic spectacles over narrative coherence (for more see Barber 2010, 61–64).
In addition to working with Ishii, Hijikata also appears in Shinoda Masahiro’s 1974 film Himiko.
Like the narrative found in Hosoe Eikoh’s experimental short film Navel and A-Bomb (1960,
discussed further below), Shinoda’s film revisits the Japanese creation narrative. Hijikata, and
members of his troupe, play the role of mountain spirits. These filmmakers who incorporated
butoh into their narrative films seemed drawn to butoh for how it could visually embellish the
screen, capitalizing on Hijikata’s charisma and striking images.
Where a documentary film records a performance, or offers some exposition, dance, how-
ever, is itself the subject in a dance-film. The dance-film as a form predates butoh; perhaps the
Figure 52.1 Screenshots from Horrors of Malformed Men.
504
The cinematic forms of butoh films
Figure 52.2 Screenshots from Himiko.
best-known dance-film is Maya Deren’s 1946 film A Study in Choreography for Camera. What sets
a dance-film apart from the other categories discussed here is that the editing of the dance-film
and composition of shots serve the dance-film narrative beyond what any documented perfor-
mance in itself typically can convey. For instance, the cinematic convention of shot/reverse shot
might register what a performer is thinking, seeing, or reacting to. The use of match on action
(or something approaching this convention) allows for fluid cuts between shots. Where docu-
mentary films fetishize the long take and its supposed fidelity to “objective reality,” dance-films
on the other hand rely less on “real time” and “real spaces” and instead imply temporal and
spatial continuity from shot to shot through editing conventions – Gilles Deleuze commenting
on Fred Astaire song-and-dance numbers notes that the cinematic “action dance” allows for a
spatial slippage that might take “place in any-location-whatever” (Deleuze 2009, 7). Think, for
instance, of Deren’s film where movement carried from one shot to the next (in a near match
on action cut) shifts from an exterior to an interior space. The movement carried across the cut
entwines what in reality is incongruous, but the syntax of cinema invites us to understand this
as “any-location-whatever.”
It might come as something of a surprise, but an American made the first butoh dance-film–
Donald Richie’s 1959 film Gisei (Sacrifice). Gisei, insofar as its narrative is concerned, is fairly typ-
ical of the period: a story of non-conformity, and the social repercussions for falling out of line,
which is effectively what one of the dancers does. The film opens with a procession, appearing
to enact a folk festival dance such as matsuri – but the figures march and dance in an exagger-
ated fashion, and wear clownishly embellished summer festival clothing. The nonconforming
member of the group is a topless male figure wearing flaring pants; he stands apart from those
wearing cartoon versions of traditional festival attire. The carnivalesque band of revelers takes
turns ridiculing the nonconformist – urinating, defecating, and vomiting on him before finally
castrating him. Particularly in the early part of the film – composed largely of long, medium long,
and medium shots – we see Hijikata and his group dance in a circular procession. This distant
505
Aaron Kerner
framing resembles the documentary aesthetic – the camera largely observing from the outside,
recording events from afar. Richie, though, includes a number of close-up shots to detail the car-
nivalesque punishment meted out by Hijikata’s merry band of sadistic participants and to register
their emotions. Richie also uses tighter shots – close-ups and medium close-ups – to convincingly
create the conceit of the sadistic acts visited upon the nonconformist.
Avant-garde poet, playwright, and filmmaker Terayama Shuji formed along with Tomatsu
Shomei and Eikoh Hosoe the Jazz Film Laboratory (Jazzu-eiga jikken shitsu) – an artist collective
interested in pairing jazz with other art forms. Hosoe’s contribution to this project was Heso to
genbaku (Navel and A-Bomb, 1960); Hijikata performs in the film and choreographed it. Broadly
speaking Hosoe’s film finds certain affinities with Richie’s, though Navel and A-Bomb is less “cin-
ematic” than Richie’s. That is, Navel and A-Bomb relies less on the conventions of cinematic syntax
and emphasizes instead photographic formalism; indeed some of the shots are exact replicas of
photographs in Hosoe’s photobook Otoko to Onna (Man and Woman, 1960).
The generally static nature of Hosoe’s camera is made all that more palpable when set in
contrast to Iimura Takahiko’s dance-films – his 1963 film Anma (The Masseurs), and Rose-Colored
Dance (1965). To begin with there is no narrative as such in either of Iimura’s films; that said,
Iimura was ostensibly documenting performances that were absent of any coherent narrative to
speak of. In fact, Iimura’s small 8-mm wind-up camera only allowed for shots lasting 15 seconds,
before having to wind the camera again. Such limitations would make it impossible to capture
any significant continuous sequence of an on-going performance. Unburdened by the obligation
to record the performance, Iimura used the limitation of the technology to his advantage: creating
Dada-like cut ups, assembling a series of shots together based according to rhythmic choices, or
perhaps simply chance (Iimura 2013, 717).
Obviously, these categories of butoh films overlap. Documentary and documentation films are
laden with narrative – even an instructional film, for instance, is an exposition on choreography,
and thus a narrative. Ishii’s feature films might share certain affinities with avant-garde filmmak-
ing practices – namely the dance-film. And clearly, dance-films such as Gisei and Heso to genbaku
are also imbued with narratives. What finally sets these categories apart though are the ways in
which butoh is contextualized. Ishii’s use of butoh, for example, is set within a larger narrative
feature film – the use of butoh merely embellishes the story with stunning spectacles. Dance-
films, on the other hand, are stand-alone pieces where butoh is choreographed not only into the
performance but also into the editing of the film. The ontology of butoh films is complex and
entwined.
The “butoh film”

While butoh has been the subject of films, or used for cinematic storytelling, it may be possible
to conceive of a further combination of butoh and film, a “butoh film.” Iimura has perhaps come
the closest to making such a hypothetical genre of film. The recent turn to affect, and the cinema
of sensations in film theory offer a tantalizing sketch of what a “butoh film” might actually look
like. While film theory historically has been concerned with narrative construction and character
motivations, from the early to mid-1990s theorists such as Vivian Sobchack turned our attention
to the experience of viewing film and the ways in which the cinema might elicit feelings from
the viewing body (see, for example, Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film
Experience). Contemporary film theory tends to place a premium on affect, rather than emotion.
The latter is invested in narrative outcomes (e.g., “happy endings”) and meaning, and thus deeply
concerned with character motivations and story structure; the former, on the other hand, relates
to the visceral experience of the spectator. At stake in contemporary film theory are cinematic
506
moments that elicit feeling; narrative meaning is less of a concern, perhaps even inconsequential.
Many theorists, often drawing from Sobchack or Deleuze, emphasize the synesthetic possibili-
ties of the cinema, where, for instance, the audio/visual experience might elicit the sensation of
touch (see, for example, Laura Marks’s The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and
the Senses and Jennifer Barker’s The Tactile Eye). Still others have drawn our attention to particular
aesthetic cinematic strategies that might elicit sensations in the viewer (see, for example, Martine
Beugenet’s Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression, and Aaron Kerner and
Jonathan Knapp’s Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media).
What might a “butoh film” be then? A “butoh film” would be less concerned with represent-
ing a butoh dancer or performance, and more concerned with eliciting sensations in the specta-
tor. Hijikata demanded that his dancers repress their inclination to be expressive and to abandon
“the images that the dancers held”; the founder of butoh wanted his dancers to arrive “at move-
ments which worked on nerves and sensations” (Hijikata Tatsumi Notational Butoh 2015a). If then
we are to have a “butoh film,” then we must be prepared to relinquish all of our preconceptions
of what a “butoh film” might look like, and begin to think about how it might work on (the
viewing body’s) nerves and sensations.
Presumably Hijikata intended the spectator not only to recognize the “representation” of
these bodily conditions in his dancers, but also to “communicate” these feelings to the spectator.
Butoh might be thought of as an effort to apprehend the pre-linguistic, to work outside of coded
systems – a “language” of the body. In butoh the body is compelled to “express without expres-
sion” (Morishita 2015b, 7). A “butoh film” then should be less concerned with representing a
performance, and more concerned with conveying the sensations that the performance purports
to engage with.
Iimura refers to his work featuring Hijikata as “cine-dance,” precisely because he was not
concerned with documenting a butoh performance so much as he considered himself a part of
the group – he is not recording a dance per se, he is dancing (Iimura 2013, 712). The cinema, even
avant-garde practice to some extent, is supposedly obligated to adhere to “narrative exposition
and tends to be constructed according to a strict optical organization; to watch a film is to dis-
tinguish objects and human forms (characters) at the level of representation, already distinct and
encoded” (Beugnet 2007, 67). A “butoh film,” however, would need not “represent,” and Iimura
achieves this to a certain degree – particularly when his embodied camera signifies movement,
rather than documenting movement. The cinema of sensations, Beugnet insists, blurs or overloads
“photographic precision, extreme close-ups, superimpositions, under-exposure or over-exposure,
variations in sound pitch and intensities.” She continues:
When cinema becomes a cinema of the senses it starts to generate worlds of mutating
sounds and images that often ebb and flow between the figurative and the abstract, and
where the human form, at least as a unified entity, easily loses its function as the main
point of reference. One way or another, the cinema of sensation is always drawn towards
the formless (‘l’informe’ [drawn from Bataille]): where background and foreground
merge and the subjective body appears to melt into matter.
Beugnet 2007, 65
These are the instances that are pregnant with the potential for affect, which appeals to the body
of the spectator. In sum, affect is typically located in (cinematic) form not content (Kerner and
Knapp 2016, 4).
What I am proposing here – as to what might constitute a “butoh film” – could be set adja-
cent to Eckersall’s appropriation of remediation: an embodied camera movement that kinetically
507
Aaron Kerner
expresses an event and invites the spectator to share in the experience (Bolter and Grusin 1999,
11). Eckersall rightly observes that, “cine dance was a breakthrough in film aesthetics in rela-
tion to the body, making the experience of film more corporeal” (2013, 42). He concludes that
Iimura’s kinetic camera and its radical fragmentation communicates “the sensory disorientation
of putting the viewer in the same space as the objects viewed; he thus makes the point that the
remediated body extends from framing the performer to also include the spectator in the making
of the film” (2013, 50).
Some dance historians or archivists may recoil at the prospect of a “non-representational”
“butoh film,” especially if their concern is straightforward documentation of a live performance;
indeed, some have voiced frustration with Iimura’s films precisely because they do not conform
to the conventions of documentary filmmaking, that the dance (ironically) is obscured by the
filmmaking. In the end, what I have tried to do here is to press for the consideration that while
film can be about butoh, it might also be possible that butoh can also be in cinematic form. A
“butoh film” does not represent a butoh performance, or interact with one; rather it is butoh.
Where Eckersall views butoh in the remediation “where the body is transformed into media”
(2013, 35), I see it in the aesthetic strategies that the cinematic has at its disposal, and finally what
it potentially elicits from the viewing body. Remediation in Eckersall’s estimation, and Iimura’s
conception of cine dance, necessitates “the quality of liveness” (Eckersall 2013, 55) – performa-
tivity. Performativity as it is generally understood here enacts the thing that it is representing and
thus remains servile to an exterior event.
Implicit in this conception is a reliance on an outside (performing) object even if that is only
the kinetic motion of the camera-operator; however, performativity (or remediation) is not nec-
essarily prone to eliciting an affective response in the spectator. “It is always ‘re,’” Eckersall notes
of remediation and cine dance, because the kinetic event is a representation, it is an “imprint of
movement retrieved by the performer in a process of concentrated re-imagination” (Eckersall
2013, 59).
The objective, as Eckersall argues, is that remediation intends to break down the border
between the spectator and butoh, to fuse the body and cinema (Eckersall 2013, 60); this is pre-
cisely what I envision for the “butoh film.” What in the end sets a “butoh film” apart from a
cine-dance film, or a remediated performance, is its emphasis on reception. Where narrative
films, dance-films, and documentaries that include butoh are about the performance conducted
in front of a camera, a “butoh film” is located elsewhere – in the viewing body.
So what is being argued here? Documentaries, narrative films that feature butoh perfor-
mances, and dance-films all have their own individual functions and merits, but a “butoh film”
should be “melting candy,” as Hijikata might say.
Works cited
Barber, Stephen. 2010. Hijikata: Revolt of the Body. Washington, DC: Solar Books.
Barker, Jennifer M. 2009. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press.
Beugnet, Martine. 2007. Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Cabondale: Southern
Illinois University Press.
Blackwood, Michael. 1990. Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis. Film, 89 min.
Bolter, J. David and Grusin, Richard. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2009. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habber-
jam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Eckersall, Peter. 2013. Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fraleigh, Sondra Horton and Nakamura, Tamah. 2006. Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. New York:
Routledge.
508
Holborn, Mark, et al. 1987. Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul. New York: Aperture.
Hosoe, Eikoh. 1960. Heso to genbaku (Navel and A-Bomb). Film, 15 min.
Kerner, Aaron and Knapp, Jonathan. 2016. Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media. Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Marks, Laura. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Shinoda Masahiro. 1974. Himiko. Film, 100 min.
Moore, Richard. 1991. Butoh: Piercing the Mask. Film, 49 min.
Morishita, Takashi. 2015a. Hijikata Tatsumi Notational Butoh. Film.
———. 2015b. Hijikata Tatsumi’s Notational Butoh: An Innovational Method for Butoh Creation. Tokyo: Keio
University Art Center.
Richie, Donald. 1959. Gisei (Sacrifice). Film, 10 min.
———. 1962. Wargames. Film, 22 min.
Rosenberg, Douglas. 2012. Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sobchack, Vivian. 1992. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Sunohara Masahisa. 1957. Birthday Girl Jazz. Film, 78 min.
Iimura Takahiko. 1963. Anma (The Masseurs). Film, 20 min.
———. 1965. Rose-Colored Dance. Film, 13 min.
———. 2013. Interviewed by Aaron Kerner. “Takahiko Iimura’s Butoh Films: Cine-Dance in Anma (The
Masseurs) and Rose Color Dance.” Positions: East Asia Ccultures Critique vol. 21, no. 3 (Summer): 703–723.
Ishii Teruo. 1969a. Kyofu kikei ningen: Edogawa Rampo zenshu (Horrors of Malformed Men). Film, 99 min.
———. 1969b. Meiji-Taisho-Showa: Ryoki onna hanzai-shi (Love and Crime). Film, 92 min.
———. 1969c. Zankoku ijo gyakutai monogatari: Genroku onna keizu (Orgies of Edo). Film, 89 min.
———. 1970. Kaidan nobori ryu (The Tattooed Swordswoman aka Blind Woman’s Curse). Film, 85 min.
Tsukamoto Shinya. 1989. Tetsuo: Iron Man (Tetsuo: Iron Man). Film, 67 min.
———. 1999. Soseiji (Gemini). Film, 84 min.
Yamada, Yoji. 2002. Tasogare Seibei (The Twilight Samurai). Film, 129 min.
509
53
LOCUS SOLUS – LOCUS FRACTA
Butoh dance as protocol for
visual self-representation
Lucile Druet
Introduction
This chapter discusses the impact of butoh performances, imagery, and writings on my practice as
a visual artist and performer as an example of the impact of butoh on artists outside of Japan. My
practice as a photographer and videographer developed both in France and Japan, creating and
editing series of pictures alternating with video projects, interrogating the theme of self-portrait
using dance, performance, makeup, kimono, ukiyo-e, black and white, superposition of lines and
surfaces, framing, blurs, fades, and montage.1
At the core of the corpus is Japan: Japan as a motif, Japan as a manifesto, an akogare 憧れ to
tend to, to long for, a motto or in Japanese zayū 座右2 that I reached for with my hands, eyes,
and camera, nurtured by my studies, practices, and experiences. My choice of going to Japan
was not as a caprice or a quest for unification or identity, rather it is an exploration of what
appeared to me as a heterotopia (Foucault 1967), a space where the words, shapes, and forms of
others would work as a beckoning, inviting way for developing and articulating my imagery in
an assumed fractured modality. A way where the answer is not in the why but in the how. An
approach that is both emotional and intellectual, navigating between intuition and language,
aware of its limits and qualities of being between East and West. A navigation that uses distance
and collage between all these intuitions and languages as a valid method for creating pictures. A
posture deeply rooted to the idea of creativity and visuality working on a deep interconnected
relationship, as Antonin Artaud argues:
In the Oriental theater of metaphysical tendencies, as opposed to the Occidental theater

of psychological tendencies, this whole complex of gestures, signs, postures, and sonor-
ities which constitute the language of stage performance, this language which develops
all its physical and poetic effects on every level of consciousness and in all senses, nec-
essarily induces thought to adopt profound attitudes.
Artaud 1938, 44
Butoh came to me wrapped up in the middle of this intricate relationship with Japan, not only
as a concrete organic process, but also as a training that became an effective way to involve simul-
taneously dance, posture, visuality, presence, and deconstruction, a protocol that helps articulate
510
Locus solus – locus fracta
my practice between performance, photography, and video. In other words, butoh represents for
me a code with which I could start playing during my performances (video and photo), tying
together ideas of haptic and atavistic choreography with physical and spiritual presence, not to
“make” something Japanese in an outdated Japonisme way but in a multilayered, total take on the
understanding of Japanese culture, arts, and languages.
With time, a constellation of references and imageries to work with visually and metaphorically
started to form, and it worked for me as a set of stances and stages to go back and forth, traveling
between obscurities and epiphanies, a process of growing thick, stripped, cut, flayed, mangled, and
more mature at the same time. As Shu Kuge phrases it, it is for me a dynamic process that: “Trans-
lates erlebnis (lived experience) or taiken (bodily experience) into erfahrung (structured experience)
or keiken (ordered experience or wisdom)” (Kuge 2003, 3). A process that starts to exist because
of the potential space it starts opening between brutality and elegance. A procedure cultivating a
“silent threshold between language and body. This threshold or gap can be constituted by a brief
spatiality, an instance in which the temporal flow of the discursive becomes idle” (Kuge 2003, 71),
and in which a sense of butoh as the very place I want to be becomes pivotal, forming the axis I
chose to build not only the modalities of my visual appearance and corpus but also shaping the way
my body dances. Here, too, Shu Kuge puts the equation in interesting and inspiring terms: “Why
is the place so important? For there is no body that does not belong to a space; the presence of
the body also means that of space. Without place, there will be no ‘experience’” (Kuge 2003, 78).
Ambivalence and attitudes

I am left standing by the wall among the flowers. . . . I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the
stalk. My roots go down to the depths of the world, . . . through veins of lead and silver.
I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs. Up
here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing. . . . I am rooted to the middle of the earth. My
body is a stalk. I press the stalk. A drop oozes from the hole at the mouth and slowly, thickly,
grows larger and larger. . . . She has found me. I am struck on the nape of the neck. She
has kissed me. All is shattered.
Woolf 1931
At first, butoh helped channel the dance in me. In other words, butoh was appealing to the dancer
in me as it appeared as a phenomenal kind of dance, playing with a stage presence that deals with
its own difficulties of being post-modern, resisting, underground, stubborn. A dance that would
not celebrate a spectacular unified body with a specific role, nor a virtuoso belonging to an elite,
but a bricolage body in full interaction with skin, costumes, and darkness, a possible embodiment
for a tabula rasa, a display case for something emerging and disappearing at the same time, a dance
assuming its fractures and uncertainties, being away from definition and linear language. Ohno
Kazuo and Hijikata Tatsumi but also Roland Barthes, their writing inspired in me a certain way of
thinking the post-modern dancing body, as they articulate something about this moment of loss
and contrast, solitude and fracture that happens when one dances: quite accurately Ohno writes,
You there, you flower in bloom. . . . but it vanished as unexpectedly as it appeared. . . .

I can still feel its presence. . . . Dance has got to be crazy. . . . yet the moment you
deliberately set out to talk with it, it suddenly vanishes. In any event, let your dance be
crazy. Don’t figure your movements out in your head. Dance free style.
Ohno 2004, 202
511
Lucile Druet
And Hijikata adds:
Once onstage you create a new role from what you have perfectly remembered. It too
is creating a role of forgetting. This method of forgetting in the midst of forgetting is a
mechanism that means you don’t want to touch what you have once forgotten.
Hijikata quoted in Akihiko 2000, 66
Finally, Barthes says:
My language is a skin: I rub my language against someone else. It is as if I had words

instead of fingers, or fingers at the tips of my words . . . I wrap the other in my words,
I caress it, I graze it, I maintain this light touch, I exhaust myself at maintaining the
commentary under which I submit the relationship.
Barthes 1977, 114
When elaborating the dance for my series of photos and videos, the numinous, sometimes extrava-
gant performances of Sankai Juku, Dairakudakan and most importantly Carlotta Ikeda (Ariadone)
who was always questioning theatricality and presence, were especially pivotal to me. Away from
the arabesques of established dance, Ikeda’s involvement, throughout her butoh career, with the
volcano, the princess, the thorn, circus, mythology, and burlesque figures, at the same time ghost,
witch, statue, stripper, flower, sphinx, and koma-inu showed to me that butoh is a form whose
corporeality developed by moving back and forth between nihilism and arousal, stubborn stillness
and movement. Going a little further, I think that Ikeda in her work was always forming a way to
erase and shift the conventional feminine body and nuance her visceral, imperious desire to express
emotions through dance with skin and femininity seen then as a haptic and ethereal interface.
Her performances, like a synecdoche, helped me adjust my relationship with my body and
dance, playing with the photogenic and metaphorical aspects of alpha-female desires, smiles and
tears, both young and old, sexual and asexual, lonely and social, displaying in an articulated fash-
ion costumes, makeup, and scenography to bluntly and yet gracefully show the cracks, the bends,
the folds that a woman can assume and celebrate. A presence in movement, a she, a resolute she:
She breathes in darkness on the verge of emptiness.

She needs air, her body shrivels and then stretches.
She is in search of her own centre, deep down
She cannot see, her head out of water
Her tight forms scream silence
She sweats her stories
[. . .]
Her strength puts her to sleep
and her peace wakes her up
She floats
and disappears
She is still there
Vérité 2005, 163
Exploring butoh performances prompted different ideas about how to build a body of my
own, visual and butoh-esque. Both well-anchored and helter-skelter, the body I started to create
512
thanks to and through the skin of butoh resulted in a figure, a dancing and acting form always
in transition between vibration and stiffness. Adorned and dusty, the butoh body came to me as
an ambivalent yet solid locus employing the skin as a binary system always in dispute between
integrity and legitimacy versus doubt and hesitation. As Ikeda puts it, a body, through the staging
of the skin, becomes something between humanity and animality, poise and absurdity: “My dance
lies somewhere in between the role of the character on stage, the animal and me” (Ikeda 1997).
She continues,
When I dance, there are two persons in me, living together: one in trance, that does not
control itself any longer, and the other observing the first one with lucidity. Sometimes,
these two “I” coincide and give birth to a sort of white madness, close to ecstasy. That
is how the butoh dancer must try to feel. It is for that privileged moment that I dance.
Ariadone Dance Company 2017
In exploring this ambivalent dimension of the body in butoh, I’m starting to envision the body as a
performing figure transformed by the bodies of others, animals and cosmos, crying the tears of another
face, trembling the fears of another skin. Sharing a locus with death, with otherness, as Hijikata declares,
We shake hands with the dead, who send us encouragement from beyond our body; this
is the unlimited power of Butoh . . . We can find Butoh in the same way we can touch
our hidden reality. Something can be born, can appear, living and dying in a moment.
This cast-off skin is our land and home.
Hijikata quoted in Hoffman and Holborn 1987, 121
On the same note, when Ima Tenko3 says, “there is a dance for each human body” (Tenko 2014),
she might not only be pointing at humans and dancers but also at what is lying on the other
side, the negative, the invisible beings a human can channel, a threshold of many possibilities, of
many memories. A transgendered shape shifter with an idée fixe, either dealing with the animal
or otherness, never alone and yet lonely.
Following the same train of thought, I can’t help but think that butoh signals a presence that
tenuously connects with romantic ballet dancing and poetry: in both stances one can see how
the feminine figure dancing is like a white sign, a white swan whose torso, breathing slips, raises,
shrinks, bends, breaks, a flint going to sleep here, a spark coming of age there. As the author and
poet Stephane Mallarmé puts it in his Crayonné au Théātre:
The female dancer is not a woman who dances, as for these juxtaposed motifs that she is not a
woman, but a metaphor resuming one out of several aspects of our elementary form, sword, cup,
flower etc. . . . and that she is not dancing, suggesting, by the prodigy of leaps and momentums,
with a corporeal writing what would take paragraphs . . . poem free from any writer’s pen.4
Mallarmé 1897, 173
Performative visualities
But here I am nobody. I have no face. . . . We are all callous, unfriended. I will seek out
a face, a composed, a monumental face, and will endow it with omniscience, and wear it
under my dress like a talisman and then (I promise this) I will find some dingle in a wood
where I can display my assortment of curious treasures.
Woolf 1931
513
Lucile Druet
On another level, butoh appealed to the visual artist in me. Butoh helped shape the role
self-representation was having in my photo and video projects. In terms of imagery, viewing
butoh initiated my understanding of the power and modalities of self-presence one can shape,
individually and collectively. Looking at performances and photo books, one can see how butoh
dancers forget the ballerina and pursue the freakish yet simultaneously signal back at convention
and the almost-necessary categorization of things and beings, and in doing so, they can create a
strong, visually powerful set of performances.
On this very point, I yet again see a duality, nurturing a je-ne-sais-quoi, at the same time frail
and adamant, something working against what it is and what it is not, against dissemination
and finitude. Such dualities can be found in Ohno’s creation Breathing the Spirit of Soga Shōhaku
(1997)5 or the ukiyo-e projections of the Asbestos Dance studio (2002),6 both playing with
projections of ink paintings and woodblock prints on their bodies. I wanted to deal with that
characteristic in my work as it adds yet another interface, something tailored that I can slip into,
covering and revealing at the same time something slow, borrowed, old, new, found, confident,
and lost. This concept led to creating a series of photos7 and a corpus of videos8 dealing with
these kinds of questions: Is it a self-portrait if no one can recognize the author? Can one be
sincere, be even present when wearing so many folds, wrappings, and masks? What kind of
self-portrait is it when one can see so many different layers, masks, and blurs? A dissemination,
a figure, a body, whose body? It doesn’t matter. In retrospect, what matters is to show how it
is to work on and with one’s own body as it is the closest within reach, with double folded
posture and appearance: choreographer and dancer. To show a visual way to inhabit one’s sil-
houette, hands, hips, shoulders, feet, tights but also nudity and femininity, through tulle, kimono,
make-up, framing, and montage.
Concretely speaking, I built my series on two stances: the first one being the time of the
dance, time when body, costumes, improvisation, and bricolage come up and play together. The
second one being the time of the video/photo editing, when montage, cuts, music synchroni-
zation, breaking, and layering occurs. In terms of material and techniques, I like to play with all
the above mentioned (body, butoh, make-up, kimono, montage) and mix them with ideas such
as imitation and mimicry, and I let the magic of improvisation happen. As a result, I get a mass
of material, more or less ready-made I can knit, knead, and mold with my cut, copy and paste
editing technique.
The two pictures inserted in this text particularly show how I like to put my body in
an utopian mode9 where I not only play with my presence but also the familiarity with
shadows, lines of carefully chosen woodblock prints, framing, black-and-white balance,
and exposure.
The first one, from the Koma/The Chapter series (2014) (Figure 53.1), plays with a work by
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi titled Catching Fireflies (1888). With timer set on the camera, I join hands,
bite on the uchiwa fan, shift to be in a similar position to the woman in the print, and wait. I
reiterate until I have enough pictures to work with. I then do the rest with Photoshop, using layer
blending modes and transparency to obscure or reveal enough of my silhouette. Tweak an angle
here, remove of mole there. Done. I like when it is instantaneous like this, almost as if I were
illustrating the Zen principle: Ichi-go ichi-e 一期一会 (One time, one meeting).
The second one (Figure 53.2), from the Mononoke Hime series (2015), plays with several uki-
yo-e prints, all based on ghost stories. The setting is very simple: a small room with just enough
light coming from outside the door, no windows, camera on tripod and timer mode. I pose, I
shift, I turn, I twist. The body with the shadows, the white, the grey, and the black. After the
session, I work with the computer and start the montage, creating time and space where things
are here and yet ambivalent, like when you squint.
514
Figure 53.1 Lucile Druet, Koma/The Chapter, 2014 (digital photograph). Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 53.2 Lucile Druet, Mononoke hime, 2015 (digital photograph). Courtesy of the artist.
Lucile Druet
Ultimately, what I visually build in my works is a sense of bodily montage, a hybrid, inhab-
iting a space (stream, bedroom) where tension and repose circulate freely. Here I share the view
developed by Amagatsu Ushio:
We consider tension as the main element and relaxing as a subordinate. However, I

would like here to take a reverse position from this general opinion we have on dance.
Tension is the one element that should be set back compared to relaxing. If we observe
things from that angle, we can then see that a child lying down, abandoning his body
to Earth gravity is therefore dancing.
Amagatsu and Delahaye 1994, 102–103
Out of public sight, the dance/the pose is created in-situ, impromptu. It is here to work as
a visuality, playing with non-dance: part of the process being not incorporating repertoire
dance movements but rather everyday movements yet moving as if impelled by someone else,
a puppet master of some sort. Butoh in that sense represents an active way that teaches me
how to be passive, how to deal with my techniques and reveries, control and craziness, on
stage and backstage qualities and limits. Fragmented, organic, the body I want to expose and
explore in my series of works included butoh most naturally as if incorporating a new vocab-
ulary. Not a Japanese one but a butoh one, expressing metaphorically qualities of the mineral,
vegetal, human, or aquatic through an organic framework with many layers, branches, limbs,
and fins, building a possibility for personal mythology. This idea of navigating in a fictional
universe is once again branching out from my observation of different butoh performers and
companies, especially when they are using a totem or a psychopomp as an agent for dance: a
weasel (Kamaitachi, Hijikata), a dancer from the other side of the planet (La Argentina, Ohno),
a water spirit (Hisoku, Ima Tenko), mythological tutelar figures (Ariadne, Medea, Zarathoustra,
Ikeda). All of them have been potent symbols not only for the dancer but for the performance
itself, as it is what remains in the end: the metaphor, the imagery, the visual. Superficially
chaotic, it is nonetheless organized around strong aesthetic choices: the contrast between black
and white or the absence of it, the framing, the composition, the one/long shots, all those
visual elements carefully chosen just like the poetic and engaging aspects of butoh. Exploring
how they connect gave me a reflexive and more synoptic view of not only dance but visual
creation.
Conclusion
My interaction with butoh is a space for dance and visual performance that I want to cultivate
and grow old with. I want it as a long-term experiment, an ongoing creative process that inspires
and establishes a long-lasting referential system, pivotal to my works, past and future. A project
where butoh teaches me something about Japan, about myself, about dance, the backstage, the
obscene, and vice-versa, always the same, always different, inexhaustible past that never seems to
vanish.
Between Ghost in the Shell, In Praise of Shadows, The Empire of Signs, and Madame Chry-
santhème,10 I see my work as a compound, a fold of naïveté and maturity, regulated by a
multiplicity of choices, timings, quotes, lines and contours, parallels and geodesic. What is
ultimately expressed on the screen is not a result but an “in progress” body, a kimono-butoh-
gray-black-and-white like presence both decisive and vague, massive and refined, dancing
produced through the magic of the editing (fades, cuts, post-produced synchronization with
516
music). A presence attained through the accumulation of words, filiations, exegetical expla-
nations, and poetical interpretation of its attitude and visuality that cannot be reduced to a
simple equation, a body oozing with energy both dark and light, sincere and fake. A thing
to see although the only thing it seems to perform is pointing at a grey zone where almost
nothing happens but a duration. A butoh body replete with folds, nooks and corners, frames
and captions; not easy to decipher but something else, aside and outcast saying, “this is a crisis
yes but it is my own.”
In conclusion, butoh works for me as a chosen and necessary restraint for a body who doesn’t
necessarily need to go anywhere (especially in the videos): a room (Elephantine, Somosomo), a
stream (The Nine Sisters, Dead Space-Eurydice), a lover’s embrace (Palladium Apparel-Shinayakana
kemono), a garden (Yumi), something magnetic, both compass and North Pole, finding a dwelling
in this ambivalent attitude, performative visuality. And by doing so, leaving things procrastinated,
tucked up in this bittersweet feeling of things that are hurting and yet giving bliss, cherished and
unresolved ellipsis.
This side, never fixed, never attached, sleeping in us,

from where tomorrow the multiple will spring.
Conquered nature, inside in bloom, outside devastated.
Earth where I fall asleep, space where I wake up, who will come
when you’ll not be there anymore?
What I will become is to me of an infinite warmth.
Char 1952, 74–8011
Notes
1 Videos are accessible at: https://vimeo.com/somosomo and the photos at: https://somosomo.co/
artworks-2/
2 Zayū no mei 座右の銘 (Desk Motto) meaning literally a word, an inscription you keep close to your
right hand, the right side of your body.
3 Ima Tenko (今貂子), butoh dancer and choreographer based in Kyoto. Founder of the all-female butoh
dance company Kiraza 綺羅座, she performs every Thursday since July 2016 her solo Hisoku at the
Kyoto Butoh-kan (www.butohkan.jp).
4 Another English translation is available: see the part titled “Scribbled at the Theater: Ballets” in Barbara
Johnson, Divagations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
5 Photos by Eikoh Hosoe, published in The Butterfly’s Dream (Kyoto: Seigensha, 2006).
6 Photos by Eikoh Hosoe, published in A World of Eikoh Hosoe, Spherical Dualism of Photography (Kyoto:
Seigensha, 2006).
7 Titles: Nemureru Bijo / Sleeping Beauty – 2009, Yumi / The bow – 2011, Koma / The Chapter – 2014,
Mononoke Hime / Princess Monster-2015.
8 Titles: The Nine Sisters – 2006, Elephantine – 2008, Dead Space / Eurydice – 2009, Palladium Apparel /
Shinayakana Kemono – 2010, Yumi – 2011, Somosomo – 2014.
9 Here, I think about this other text by Michel Foucault, Utopian Body or Le Corps Utopique (1966) (Paris:
Éditions Lignes, 2009). Note that there is an English version available in Caroline A. Jones (ed.), Sen-
sorium: Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art (Cambridge/London: MIT Press, 2006):
229–234.
10 For reference:
Ghost in the Shell, Mamoru Oshii (1995)
In Praise of Shadows (陰翳礼讃, In’ei raisan), Junichiro Tanizaki (1933)
The Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes (1970)
Madame Chrysanthème, Pierre Loti (1888)
11 Note that another English version is available in James R. Lawler, René Char: The Myth and the Poem
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).
517
Lucile Druet
Works cited
Akihiko, Senda. 2000. “Fragments of Glass: A Conversation between Hijikata Tatsumi and Suzuki Tadashi.”
TDR/The Drama Review 44, No. 1: 62–70.
Amagatsu, Ushio, and Guy Delahaye. 1994 (2013). Sankai juku. Arles: Actes sud.
Ariadone Dance Company. 2017. “Choreographer: Carlotta Ikeda.” Accessed April 30, 2017. http://
ariadone.fr/eng/ikeda/
Artaud, Antonin. 1938 (1958). “The Metaphysics and the Mise en scene.” The Theater and Its Double 44.
New York: Grove Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1977. Fragments d’un discours amoureux. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Char, René. 1952. “Transir.” In La paroi et la prairie (Translation by the author). Paris: G.L.M.
Char, René, and David Paul. 1958. “La Paroi et la Prairie/The Wall and the Prairie.” The Hudson Review
11, No. 1: 64–71.
Foucault, Michel. 1967 (1984). “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias.” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5.
Accessed July 8, 2017. https://foucault.info/doc/documents/heterotopia/foucault-heterotopia-en-html
Hoffman, Ethan, and Mark Holborn. 1987. Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul. New York: Aperture Foundation.
Ikeda, Carlotta. 1997. Programme de Stage AFDAS (Translated by the author).
Kuge, Shu. 2003. “The Body, Rhythm and Space: Interactions between Writing, Arts and Technologies in
Three Modern Japanese Authors.” PhD diss., Stanford University.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. 1897. Crayonné au théātre, Ballets. Paris: Œuvres complètes.
Ohno, Kazuo. 2004. Kazuo Ohno’s World: From Without and Within. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press.
Tenko, Ima. 2014. “Ima Tenko Butoh Studio.” Facebook page, published January 14. Accessed June 10,
2017. www.facebook.com/imatenkobutohstudio/posts/486683321451316
Vérité, Stéphane. 2005. Carlotta Ikeda, Butoh dance and Beyond. Lausanne: Favre Editions. 163.
Woolf, Virginia. 1931 (2015). The Waves. University of Adelaide. Accessed June 10, 2017. https://ebooks.
adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91w/
518
54
OHNO KAZUO’S LESSONS FOR A
FRENCH CHOREOGRAPHER
Ô Senseï by Catherine Diverrès
Miyagawa Mariko
Catherine Diverrès, a French choreographer and dancer, studied under Ohno Kazuo (1906–2010)
in the early 1980s. Although she does not insist on the direct influence of Ohno on her recent
work, she choreographed a piece entitled Ô Senseï in 2012 to pay homage to Ohno after his
death in 2010. “Sensei” means master or professor in Japanese, and “Ô” suggests the first initial
of Ohno’s name. Diverrès studied with him in the 1980s, and this experience impacted all of
her subsequent choreography. But how did Ohno’s lessons change Diverrès’ way of creating her
dances? How was Ohno seen by this French choreographer? What of his influence may be seen
in her choreography today?
French dancers in Yokohama in the 1980s

According to Sylviane Pagès, the French dance researcher, there were two different paths that
young French choreographers took for their studies in the 1980s. Some of them went to the
United States to study postmodern dance with Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) or Trisha
Brown (1936–2017), and others visited Japan to study butoh.1 Diverrès is one of the earliest
dancers who went to Japan to study butoh under Ohno. Before leaving for Japan in 1982, she
had studied classical dance and was trained at Maurice Béjart’s (1927–2007) L’Ecole Mudra,
before joining Dominique Bagouet (1951–1992) at the Centre chorégraphique national de
Montpellier, where she met Bernardo Montet (1957–). She and Montet received a fellowship
to study in Japan and stayed in Yokohama at the Ohno Kazuo Dance Studio for half a year
(1982–1983). The experience with Ohno changed everything about dance for her. She later
shared her impressions:
I experienced no part of Japan without the presence of Ohno. And it was a profound,
radical revolution of all of my being. I swept away all the choreographic language and
vocabulary accumulated during my years of training. Having arrived as a dancer in
Japan, I became a choreographer there.
Diverrès 2012a2
Diverrès and Montet created their first piece at the end of their stay in Japan. Entitled Instance,
the duet premiered in Nakano, Tokyo at Terpsichore. It was subsequently presented in Europe
519
Miyagawa Mariko
and won the Premier prix au concours International de Chorégraphie de Nyon (Switzerland)
and the Prix de la ville de Vernier in 1983. It could be said, then, that the piece opened the door
to becoming a choreographer for Diverrès. Then Diverrès and Montet created the company
Studio DM and became one of the main companies in the French contemporary dance scene.
In 1994, she was elected the director of the Centre Chorégraphique national de Rennes et de
Bretagne.
Diverrès had the following impressions about Ohno’s lessons:
Ohno is a master who teaches nothing that you would be looking for such as function,
attribute, technique, method, knowledge, system, secret, or philosophy. He is.
Diverrès 2006 3
For Diverrès, Ohno seemed to not have taught what she expected. And also, she and Montet were
encouraged to improvise and to find out what the dance is by themselves. She says:
Ohno might wait 10 years before saying a single thing to anyone. It is up to each person
to ask themselves questions. Ohno urges [us] to improvise and says to dance without
arms and legs. The dance is reset to zero.
Diverrès 1993b, 40
She also shares her impression of the first day with Ohno:
When we arrived at his house, he offered us a meal that his wife had prepared and
immediately, he told us about The Dead Class by Tadeusz Kantor . . . Then, he spoke
about the flatfish that stays at the bottom of the ocean for a long time, enduring the
pressure of the water, before rising. And in a two meters square area of his living room,
he began to dance. Our first “class” started like this. . . . Questions that he posed to us
non-stop like indecipherable riddles turned us around and upside down, feet in the air.
The more we looked for meaning, the more we ran into obstacles. When finally we
released everything, something profound began to move. To dance while being immo-
bile. This absolute reversal, for the Western dancer, of the concept of dance, which for
us is associated with movements expanding into space in an organic way, with the idea
of physical energetic exercise and so on.
Diverrès 2010, 74
By reading Diverrès’s observations, it can be seen that the words of Ohno seemed like riddles to
her and that it was difficult to understand his thoughts in the usual (western) way. But over a long
period of time, Diverrès felt something profound began to change. The call to “dance without
moving” seemed to shift the notion of movement that she had accumulated during her training
in classical ballet and contemporary dance.
Not only her notion about bodily movement itself, but also her notions about space were
transformed. Diverrès recalls that Ohno said in an interview: “Don’t break the atoms in the
space.” She then observes the space is not empty, but filled with atoms that we cannot see (Diver-
rès 2012b). This leads to the kind of movement that gently touches space. Pagès points out
characteristics of the connection with steps and space.
The steps for Catherine Diverrès, Sidonie Rochon or for Ohno Kazuo are based on a
non-expansionist conception of space: there is no projection, nor conquest of territory
520
Ohno Kazuo’s lessons
in these movements, but rather a space to be created, to transform, through the meta-
morphosis of one’s own corporeality.
Pagès 2015, 210
Thus, according to Pagès, Diverrès’s dance movement calls for a change to the dancer’s own body,
and from this transformed body a new space will be created. The space then becomes a kind of
partner to dance with.
To know how Ohno taught in the studio, the comments of Bernardo Montet are also benefi-
cial. He wrote that he was told to dance only with his arms. Ohno took Montet’s hand and said,
“Be conscious of the space between your fingers, the space under your hand, the space above
your hand, the temperature of your hand, and that of the air, sense your hands, be conscious of
your bones” (Montet 2002, 332).
“Are you free?” and “Is it new?” these were the words of Ohno. . . . There was no
training, no warm-up. We had to improvise for two, three, four hours, it was horribly
long, we didn’t know what to do anymore, we were tired of ourselves, and we had to
continue searching, continue endlessly. . . . He told us to dance without psychology,
thoughts, desires, or memory; to hold back the moment of movement. After a tremen-
dous wait, the accumulation, it led us, we didn’t know by what, to dance almost without
the willpower to dance.
Montet 2002, 332
These comments suggest that Ohno’s lessons were really surprising for the dancers who were
used to western dance training and warming up as part of a class. Ohno’s lessons, in contrast,
required his students to improvise through a deep inner searching prompted by Ohno’s words.
They were confused by being asked to dance without moving anything but the arms, or to be
conscious of their bones or the space between their fingers, etc., because these elements were, at
the time, outside of their notion of dance. It is also important that Montet noted Ohno told them
to dance without psychology or thoughts. It seems contradictory because Ohno often referred to
his mother or La Argentina, and his feelings towards and affection for these women are usually
thought as a motivation for his pieces. Diverrès understood Ohno’s comments to mean that what
exists without thought and feeling is the soul (Diverrès 2012b). It seems that she received from
Ohno philosophical instructions rather than physical ones. According to accounts by Diverrès
and Montet, Ohno taught students neither his characteristic bodily stances, nor his method for
moving his body, nor how to create a piece; rather he made them improvise and observe their
own bodies in minute detail.
Ô Senseï
So what then did Diverrès take away from Ohno’s lessons? I would like to investigate this ques-
tion through an analysis of her piece Ô Senseï.4 In the dance she cites some characteristic Ohno
gestures. Here I focus on her usage of eyes and the position of the rib cage to argue that these
citations reveal traces of Ohno’s corporeality in Diverrès’s Ô Senseï.
This piece is separated into three parts. In the beginning of the performance, there is only a
white screen on the stage, barely taller than a human. One dancer, Katja Fleig appears in front
of the screen wearing a man’s suit.5 This image evokes images of Ohno wearing a black suit, for
example, in his piece, My Mother (1981). She moves her arms in a manner reminiscent of Ohno,
only stronger and faster. After her solo dance without music, Fleig exits into the wings and
521
Miyagawa Mariko
Diverrès appears on stage wearing the same kind of suit. She takes off her jacket and the music
starts; she walks like a somnambulist. The second short section, beginning with Diverrès’s exit, is
mainly a projection on the screen. The silhouette of Diverrès there recalls Expressionist dancers.
Her long robe brings to mind those of Mary Wigman (1886–1973), as well as the image of Ohno
in a kimono. In the last section, Diverrès reappears on the stage wearing a bright red dress. She
dances to “Ave Maria,” Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” and Bach’s “Prelude and
Fugue,” which was also used in Admiring La Argentina (1977).
Viewers who know Ohno’s work will recognize some characteristic gestures of his being used
in Ô Senseï. In the first part, Fleig moves her hands like a butterfly, shaping them in the form of
flowers, moving them fluently in front of her body. She also dances with crossed bent legs, tap-
ping the floor by jumping with bowlegs that suggest the section of My Mother in which Ohno
wears a black suit. Other particularities, like the control of the tension of movements and the
sudden change of steps or levels of the body are common in both Ohno and Fleig. In the dance
by Diverrès, one can also notice references to Ohno, for example, the somnambulant walk, the
gaze toward the sky or, on the contrary, toward her interior, the soft movements of bending arms,
and the incline of the head, etc.
It could be suggested that these gestures are simple imitations, but as Diverrès says, it is
impossible for her to completely imitate Ohno’s gestures because his movement is quite singular.
She knows the utilization of body and the structure of movement in Ohno’s dance are different
from hers. To the contrary, Diverrès interrogates the methodology that Ohno used to create his
homage to La Argentina. As he shared in interviews, Ohno himself did not perfectly imitate his
idol. Instead he used his memory and emotion (even if this is a contradiction of Ohno’s direction
to Montet to dance without emotion). The method he used in that dance has no relation to the
actual technique of Spanish dance or Argentine tango, but rather reflects his own imagination of
an Argentine tango. His dance instead begins from his memory of La Argentina; the usage of his
body in the piece is completely original. Similarly, Diverrès calls to mind Ohno’s gestures in her
dance based on her memory, with no aim to perfectly reproduce Ohno’s movement. Diverrès
remains grounded in her way of dancing that includes the techniques of classical and postmodern
dance.
Diverrès interprets the philosophy of Ohno’s butoh as a connection between the dead and the
living. Being influenced by this thought, she elaborated the concept of the other in her dance.
To dance, to choreograph, it is to situate the other, whether it is absent or present. The

other is the condition of all movements, of all desires, of all knowledge. This conscious-
ness of otherness, joined with memory, gives to the human path its value, it’s right
balance. The dance is this thread that circulates upon this path surrounded by the dead.
Diverrès 1993a, 29
When Ohno dances with the dead, he utilized an unseeing gaze. The usage of the eyes is also
significant in Diverrès’s piece. In the last section, she wears a red dress and dances as if she is at
a ball, only she has no partner. Her eyes, however, seem to see someone who is not there. In an
unpublished archival recording of a 1990 lesson, Ohno said that the gaze is significant for meeting
the dead on the stage, for experiencing the encounter by crossing the border of the living and the
dead (Ohno 1990). Ohno insisted that students be able to create such a gaze in which the eyes
are open yet unseeing. In other words, the eyes see one’s inner world.
This usage of eyes observed in Ohno’s lesson above is also seen in some scenes where Diverrès
shifts her gaze to an internal one. For example, when she does her somnambulant walk, she moves
delicately, arms outstretched as if holding something, her head slightly inclined, eyes vacant. These
522
Ohno Kazuo’s lessons
postures give an impression of delicateness or fragileness. When she dances with such eyes, it also
evokes the presence of someone who is absent.
In Ô Senseï, Diverrès also utilizes her characteristic retracted sternum, which Pagès attributes
to Ohno.
In the solos of Catherine Diverrès, . . . the posture of the dancers gives the impression
of humility or weakness. The most notable element of this posture appears in the
absence of projection and openness of the rib cage, a retraction of the sternum that con-
nects to Ohno’s work, when he evokes, in his lessons to Catherine Diverrès, removing
the ego and the [solar] plexus.
Pagès 2015, 206
It is interesting that Diverrès interprets this posture in her work as a humbleness or removing
human ego. She insists that she inherits its philosophical aspect and not the technical one.
If Diverrès thinks of the words of Ohno as a kind of spiritual or philosophical inspiration,
she also, I argue, inherits his corporeality in her solos. Ohno did not specifically teach his way of
dancing, nor was it easy for Diverrès and Montet as foreigners to understand his words; never-
theless, in Diverrès’s solo I can see traces of Ohno’s postures and philosophies. This corporeality
is the heritage of butoh, and it forms a foundation of Diverrès’s dance. The characteristics of her
works are not necessarily imitations of Ohno, but sometimes the corporeality of Ohno comes
into being like a specter in her body.
Notes
1 For example, Pierre Doussaint, Isabelle Dubouloz, and Sidonie Rochon in 1988, and this stream contin-
ued into the 1990s. Cf. Sylviane Pagès. 2015. Le Butō en France: malentendus et fascination. Pantin: Centre
national de la danse.
2 All translations from French by the author.
3 There are only a few documents that tell what it was like in Ohno’s studio during that era. These include
notes made by workshop participants, and also books and videos that recorded his lessons. Although I
focus on the impressions that Diverrès and Montet recorded, these other sources have been useful points
of reference. Of course, there were problems of language for foreigners who visited his studio. Some
Japanese students or Ohno himself tried to speak in English or convey what he said. But for Diverrès and
Montet, the interpretation of his words was always necessary.
4 Diverrès clarifies that this piece is different from her current style.
5 It must be noted that in the premier presentation in Avignon, Diverrès herself danced this role and the
piece was a solo performance. This chapter is based on the performance in 2012 at Théātre national
Chaillot and the video of that performance.
Works cited
Diverrès, Catherine. 1993a. Ellipses-Regards sur 10 chorégraphes contemporains et témoignages sur une décennie de
danse. Edited by Antoine Choplin, and Patricia Kuypers. Lille: Danse à Lille.
———. 1993b. “Croisade contre l’inconscience.” Les Saison de la danse 243: 40–41.
———. 2006. “Kazuo Ohno a 100 ans!” Lettre d’infos du Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de
Bretagne, October 27.
———. 2010. “Un jour avec Kazuo Ohno.” In Catherine Diverrès mémoires passante, ed. Irène Filiberti. Paris:
L’œil d’or, 74–75.
———. 2012a. “Ô Senseï . . .” Program of Ô Senseï, Théātre national de Chaillot, November.
———. 2012b. Ô Senseï. “scènes/ d’écran.” Interview directed by Luc Riolon, 24 images-gie grand ouest
télévision.
———. 2012c. Ô Senseï. Paris: Performance at Théātre national de Chaillot, November 10.
523
Miyagawa Mariko
Montet, Bernardo. 2002. “Témoignages.” Butō(s): 332–333. Edited by Odette Aslan, and Béatrice Picon-Vallin.
Paris: CNRS Editions.
Ohno, Kazuo Dance Studio. 1990. The lessons by Ohno Kazuo in July 1990, video recording.
Ô Senseï, 2012. “scènes/ d’écran.” directed by Luc Riolon, 24 images-gie grand oust television. Accessed
August 8, 2016. www.numeridanse.tv/fr/video/2090_o-sensei-stance-ii
Pagès, Sylviane. 2015. Le Butō en France: malentendus et fascination. Pantin: Centre national de la danse.
524
55
MICHAEL SAKAMOTO
AND THE BREAKS
Revolt of the head (MuNK remix)
Michael Sakamoto
A monk asked Joshu, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” Joshu replied, “Mu.”1
– Zen koan
Not knowing is most intimate.

– From the Zen koan collection, The Book of Equanimity 2
Revolution
Play.
I’m facing an opponent, about to battle.
As the bell rings, an overhead circle of light appears. We step into the cypher.3 The music swells as the beats
pump. Each body sways . . . and attacks.
Rennie Harris and I – a hip-hop artist and butoh artist respectively – are onstage, mimicking a
street dance battle for a paying, contemporary performance audience. In a real cypher, however, this
would be the moment alliances form, lines are drawn, rules disappear. These are the breaks,4 and if the
stars align, and the DJ is hot, and the dancers have nothing to lose, then nothing will go as planned.
Rewind.
In the decades following World War II, nothing went as planned in the daily lives of a handful of
artists who developed the corporeal artistic practices that eventually coalesced into and became
labeled as butoh and hip-hop dance. One the one hand, Japan experienced massive upheavals,
swinging wildly from the anarchic consequences of wartime devastation to become a globally
dominant, socio-economic oligarchy, Western in orientation and American in style (Dower 2000).
Avant-garde artists in all media in the postwar era reflected these rapid changes, including modern
dancer and butoh founder, Hijikata Tatsumi, who infused the Tokyo arts scene with a ruralist
aesthetic from his native Tohoku, the marginalized northeastern area of Japan. Butoh artist Muro-
bushi Kō, who worked with Hijikata in the late 1960s, explains, “I always say after the Second
525
Michael Sakamoto
World War . . . our ground became zero. And Hijikata had to start, to stand, with this condition,
because he began to think about the crisis of existence, the crisis of standing” (Murobushi 2012).
In the 1960s and 1970s, the northeastern margins of New York City were also transformed by
American-ness, but of a more archetypally insular and hermetic expansion: namely, postwar sub-
urbia. Urban planner Robert Moses’ Cross-Bronx Expressway both provided an efficient avenue
for the worker bees residing in those upwardly mobile vistas, yet it also effectively isolated thou-
sands of immigrant families in the gang-infested and actual inferno of the South Bronx. Benjy
Melendez, founder of the Ghetto Brothers, one of the largest gangs of the period, compared it to
World War II’s aftermath: “We lived in a very dangerous time. The buildings were burning – it
was like Germany after the war” (Sullivan 2012).
In such threatening, chaotic environments, there was the necessity and desire to devise
solutions for daily survival. Butoh and hip-hop practitioners learned to make it up as they
went along, quickly and stealthily. As Hijikata characterized his performers, “Butoh danc-
ers have got to position their bodies so that no one is able to guess their next movement”
(Hijikata 2000c, 50).
Rennie Harris speaks of the confluence between hip-hop and butoh in terms of dancers from
marginalized populations expressly engaging with an urban body in crisis:
The idea of it [hip-hop] is always being in crisis, and that’s why it’s important to propel
forward and always be progressive and think out of the box, cuz we’re always in this
sort of situation that we need to move out of, so I get that in regards to the connector
between butoh and, so to speak, neo-Japanese culture.
Harris 2012
Butoh and hip-hop dance both attach to and make a friend of an ambivalent corporeality
between pleasure and pain, joy and despair. They are each a consequence of disfigured landscapes,
tracing psyches afflicted with chaos and contradiction (George 2002; Barber 2005). And in prac-
tice together, aesthetically and philosophically, they may operate as twin suns in metaphorical
orbit around each other.
And they have both defined my life as an artist.
Play.
I’m watching Star Trek circa 1969. Intimidated by the multi-hued close-ups, the camera intimate with
characters’ faces, their psyches, I gaze anxiously, imagining a camera inside the screen staring back. In the
center of our Philco entertainment console, the TV and turntable sit in the same box, a single sound and
vision device for capturing and expressing music and the mediated body. Decades later, every time I dance, I
still feel both the expectant, electric tension from flipping an LP and the thought, “Is someone watching me?”
Rewind.
Even one glance, it’s something. Revolution can start.

– Nakajima Natsu, butoh artist (2011)
With this album, we dedicate ourselves, our futures and our energies to the people of
the revolution . . .
– Chicago II album liner notes (1970)
I’m waiting for the break of day . . .

My earliest music memories are the 8-track cartridges in our 1970 Dodge Charger. I would sing
along with Three Dog Night’s Joy to the World, maybe cuz I was more Jeremiah than Kermit,
526
Michael Sakamoto and the breaks
more about who we could be than who we were. And I’ve always remembered another tape by
a group of funky white rockers with horns.
“What?” Rennie blurts at his university dance students as he cues up “25 or 6 to 4.” “You guys don’t
know Chicago? Y’all got to get with Chicago. That’s where it’s at. What do you think we danced to?”
In the 1960s to 1970s, the diverse foundational dances of what later coalesced under the
“hip-hop” tag developed at parties, in backyards, and on street corners to any appropriate tune;
whatever had a groove for the crowd and a solid break-beat for the street dancers, and a positive
message didn’t hurt. Afrika Bambaataa, one of the original holy trinity of foundational hip-hop
DJs (along with DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash), co-founder of the hip-hop cultural
organization, the Universal Zulu Nation, and designator of the original four elements of hip-hop
culture (graffiti, MC-ing [rapping], b-boying [dancing], and DJ-ing), was especially eclectic in
his turntable tastes, broadening hip-hop’s subsequent global genetics.
“Bam would be playing the break-beats and then would jump off and start playing some
calypso, or playing some reggae, or playing some rock,” remembers promoter Van Silk. “I
was like, ‘What is Bam doin’?’ But Bambaataa’s mindset is that hip-hop was an open field of
music” (Fricke & Ahearn 2002, 49). On the deepest level, Bambaataa as DJ was responding
to the economically devastated and violence-ridden landscape of hip-hop’s birthplace of the
South Bronx and neighboring hoods. He juxtaposed musical genres and forms, attempting
to demonstrate music’s potential to integrate ideologies and thereby move the gangs to lay
down arms.
Outlaw bodies
Butoh, if necessary, it’s resistance. Of course, it’s political dialectic action. It’s impossible.
– Murobushi Kō (2012)
Oftentimes in the midst of large-scale social transitions, there is a tipping point, when suddenly
everything seems possible, though a harsh, even cruel, edge may be considered necessary to pull
it off. Hijikata Tatsumi perceived as much after the 1950s. With Japan emerging from years of
American occupation, deteriorated social strata, and rapid Westernization and commercialization
of all major socio-economic aspects of daily life, Hijikata identified with artists who rejected
complicity with the new privileges of late capitalism: “This big Tokyo is rotten with bodies.
There is a lethargic generation arrogant with fat and I vomit on its lotioned and powdered pale
effeminate skin” (Hijikata 2000c, 40). Hijikata’s mode was oppositional, externally needing to
fight against an authority to which he could only provide a poetically Sisyphian revolution, but
also internally, crafting his socialized body in crisis within a subculture electrified by subjectivity,
flesh, and despair.
Similar conditions existed in the Bronx and beyond a few years later, where hip-hop culture
evolved in the midst of a wholesale breakdown of civil order. As Nelson George describes, “The
sound-system battles in city parks and school yards would have been impossible in a city that
strictly enforced ‘quality of life’ crimes against loud music and after-dark use of public space”
(George 2002, ix). Concomitantly, B-Boy Alien Ness speaks of the resulting long-term effect
on hip-hop dancers: “You could take the b-boys back to the outlaw gangs of the late ’60s, ’70s.
They were the original b-boys, and it was part of their war dance. That’s why the competitive
level is always going to be there with the b-boy” (Fricke & Ahearn 2002, 9).
This aggressive atmosphere drove the four elements into a mode of direct assault. The graff writ-
er’s dream was for their subway tags to go “all-city,” witnessed by thousands. The DJ was expected
to move hearts, minds, and behinds, flipping the switch on whole neighborhoods. The MC’s very
527
Michael Sakamoto
raison d’etre was to get the crowd to raise the roof. And in the cypher, the b-boy was a down-low
centerpiece onto which partiers could focus their spirits, a collective trophy of psycho-physical
transcendence bringing what Bambaataa later identified as hip-hop’s fifth element – knowledge –
from the funk.5
Butoh, however, despite its transgressive tendencies, was not there to get any party started,
let alone be the life of it. Hijikata and butoh co-founder Ohno Kazuo cultivated a rather
insular universe: hidden, menacing, perhaps awe-inspiring at times, but never taking you out.
While hip-hop dance, like funk music before it, rocked the house in order to transform your
inner world, butoh awoke within that insular zone, shaking the walls of body and mind. If
hip-hop is the club, then butoh is the back room that only a self-selected few know about and
are dying to enter.
Like b-boys being largely defined via the criminality of gang culture, Hijikata imagined such
marginalization as likewise requisite for authentically non-commodified behavior in his dancers.
In his essay “To Prison” (1961), written halfway around the planet from New York just before
the completion of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Hijikata asserts:
Human remodeling is accomplished only in connection with young people who

unceasingly experience the natural movements that kick the matrix of today’s good
sense. I dream of such a criminal dance. There will no longer be any hesitation over
torching theatres.
2000b, 45
In such environments, both Hijikata and Bambaataa, the progenitors of their respective sub-
cultures and future transnational creative movements, each fixed their mental lens on wanting to
be starting something with a faction of abject, like-minded bodies. Amidst a plethora of black
racist stereotypes permeating mid-20th century mass media, Bambaataa had been inspired as a
teenager by the big-budget war movie Zulu (1964). While reifying the heroism of British impe-
rial soldiers in 19th century South Africa, the film also depicted the Zulus as a well-organized,
powerful social force:
We was busy watching Heckyl and Jeckyl, Tarzan – a white guy who is king of the
jungle. Then I see this movie come out showing Africans fighting for a land that was
theirs. . . . I said when I get older I’m gonna have me a group called the Zulu Nation.
Chang 2005, 94
At the same time, Hijikata set himself to recruit dancers whom he could mold into shape: “I
am dumbfounded by the bodies of young creatures who, bereft of any ethical echo, overrun the
streets. . . . I believe . . . that they can be perfected as my naked soldiers” (2000b, 48).
From 1959 through the early 1970s, Hijikata accumulated his artistic militia through exper-
imental group performances in defiance of any normative conception of the Japanese dancing
body. In 1972, he presented “27 Nights for Four Seasons,” a month-long performance series by
his new company, Ankoku butoh-ha (Darkness Dance Group). That same year, the house band
of the Ghetto Brothers gang,6 whose rockin’ but sweet tunes had been cooling barrio heads
for years, recorded a socially-progressive party album, Power-Fuerza (1972), and Bambaataa was
DJing and amassing his pan-cultural vinyl stock. Such progressions within and away from the
Bronx gang culture set the stage for a new youth generation of not simply the disaffected and
poor, but those “obsessed with flash, style, sabor. For them, the block party – not the political
party – was the space of possibility” (Chang 2005, 65).
528
Those who grow up where the party’s in the street, however, also know that the street never
leaves the party.
Inner images/images
Play.
I don’t know what’s happening. It’s a moonless, pitch black night in 1972. I’m a five year-old, only child
awakened by the distant whirr of blades approaching, circling my family home in El Sereno, a working class,
high-crime borough in northeast Los Angeles. As it has since my earliest memories, ghettobird 7 moonlight
bright as day suddenly shoots down from the skies, flooding my room. My knees buckle as I try to stand.
I’m suspended between rise and fall. Is this how my uncles felt in Vietnam, dropped on a dusty road or in
a rice paddy to fend for themselves? Are they looking for me . . . ?
Play.
I’m 17, working the door at a high school dance. I stop a kid trying to sneak in. He gives me that stone
cold glance that says, “Man, you know I’m in the Wah-Chings, and I can fuck you up any time.”8 As he
disappears into the night, I slip back into the darkness to dance away my fear. I find my footing, the steps,
the stomp, with The Brothers Johnson, Zapp, the Bar-Kays, and chase the colors with Tears for Fears,
Eurythmics, David Bowie. And one man-child from Minneapolis brings it all the way in for me, tellin’ me
if I feel alright, I should scream . . . “Yeeaahh, yeah!”
But I’m not really there yet. No matter how many times I let the words to “DMSR” or
“Lady Cab Driver” pump my brain while I practice waving, tutting, ticking, and puppet9 in my
bedroom mirror, I won’t know what Prince is really gettin’ on about until years later as a grown
man. Meantime, this Saturday night, I can’t stop jumping, turning, flirting between the grooves
and the lights. I laugh, I smile, I Smurf, but I’m not satisfied. I want to hear – to be – every song,
and all at the same time. I want to be something impossible. I need my whole mixtape to play
at once, cuz that’s the only thing that makes sense to me, that’s all that, cuz each of us is all that.
And it’ll take at least two turntables, a few microphones, and a lot of life experience to help those
tunes converse, to find their middle path. And after a certain point, someone not black, brown,
or even yellow is going to find a way to bottle and sell it all straight back to the five boroughs
and beyond . . .
Why’s a pity that we’re so dirty?

’Thout dancing we can’t be pretty?
Pretty enough to make ’em loco? (as if . . .)
Skin too pretty to blush like so . . .
I record Malcolm McClaren’s “Buffalo Gals” video from TV on our home Betamax and
copy Rock Steady Crew popping moves revealed between the models and Malcolm’s obnoxious
duck-walk. I mostly keep things to myself, though, only going out in a cypher at a church party
and a Sadie Hawkins dance. There’s something deeper, heavier, weighing me down, that refuses
to reveal itself for another decade.
Cue.
A Monday night in Spring 1994, at Espace DbD, the studio theater of performance artist Rachel
Rosenthal, six months after she took me to see Ohno Kazuo in “Admiring La Argentina.” Wit-
nessing an 87 year-old man dance butoh for over an hour infected me with the urge to perform,
to move my body through a hidden reality. I’ve accepted Rachel’s barter of me producing her
529
Michael Sakamoto
promo video in exchange for taking her classes. I don’t know why. I’m just a wannabe media
artist who hasn’t danced in public for a decade. But here I am preparing for my first-ever improv-
isation on the first night of class.
I ask for a single overhead circle of light. No music.
I step tenuously on the edge between light and dark . . . as I let myself stumble into the center, I glance
up into the fresnel, blinded, suddenly releasing my ankoku . . . eyes surrounding, peering into me from the
shadows . . . I gradually climb to standing with dense, methodical pops, ticks, waves . . . finding my perform-
ative body in solitude . . . battling my own reflection . . .
Body is the weapon

Play.
December 2014, exactly 20 years after my first stage performance with Rachel, and an hour
before Rennie and I perform the Philadelphia premiere of our butoh/hip-hop dance theater
duet, Flash. Rennie hasn’t performed here for a decade. I’ve never performed in Philly, and my
teenage voice tells me I better bring it for his sake. I think about Dr. J and Andrew Toney being
the only ones in the NBA who could be counted on to shred the Lakers defense. TSOP is on
the box, but Prince’s beats are in my DNA, so I switch to his latest joint for confidence’s sake.
Rennie notices and livens up, and so do I. Most butoh practices have no required soundtrack,
but mine does.
I really wanna find the answer to this cancer so I must rewind . . .
Bruce Baird argues that Hijikata’s early dances employed interpersonal struggle as a mode
of growth, that they “were structured as competitions for artists to write themselves into each
other’s psyches. In the best-case scenario, there was also a concomitant willingness to see one’s
self or one’s own art transgressed by others” (Baird 2012, 12). Joseph G. Schloss explains this
approach is also in the nature of the b-boy cypher: “Ultimately, battling teaches its disciples how
to use style to reconcile opposing forces, a skill that may well be at the heart of hip-hop itself ”
(Schloss 2006, 27).
Would I run to you if somebody hurt me, even if that somebody was you?
As my warm-up builds to a frenetic pace, I’m still second-guessing myself, but it’s become a
reflective practice. With every beat, snap, and pop, each joint moves independently yet balances
every other. By the last scene, Rennie and I are unmoored, navigating with elbows, knees, fingers,
spine, neck, eyes, lips, and tongue. Demonic passion lies beneath my ambivalence, with catharsis
hidden in the map of Rennie’s psychic battle scars. When we fade to black, the audience is silent,
questioning, or processing, before applause and the talkback, during which we have no definite
answers; only experiences and further questions.
No more pretending I’m blind / A ritual of affliction brought on by a dancer’s curse . . .10
Who am I?
Back in the day, you always had a meaning for your name.
– Anthony Colon, b-boy and graff writer (Schloss 2009, 75)
Who . . . are . . . you?

– Tamano Hiroko, butoh artist, on the definition of butoh (Tamano 2010)
530
Every time I dance, in my mind, I enter the cypher, a space as virtual as it is physical, similar
in nature to what Jeff Chang describes in hip-hop music: “In the loop, there is the alpha, the
omega and the turning points in between. The seam disappears, slips into endless motion and
reveals a new logic – the circumference of a worldview” (Chang 2005, 85). Likewise, when I
reach my hands and face toward the audience through the space between, I am grasping for my
self-identity – a singularity defined by a tenuous balance between knowing and unknowing, light
and dark, life and death.
Such perennial irresolution lies at the roots of butoh’s fraternal twins, the inseparable oppo-
sites of Hijikata and Ohno. To this day, some artists debate their meaning, conjecturing around
the nihilism of the former or the devout religiosity of the latter. For me, however, they are equal:
yin and yang. Hijikata’s hedonistic anarchy in awe of Ohno’s eternal God light. Ohno’s flame,
choreographed by Hijikata for decades, a bare whisper in the dark night of his soul, after sur-
viving island warfare, POW camps, and postwar austerity. Late in life, playing to sold-out main
stages, the modest prayer Ohno danced did not so much fill a cathedral as the very private altar
of his heart. One of Hijikata’s earliest inspirations was, as he called it, the “deadly poison” of
Ohno’s dance (Hijikata 2000a, 36), while Hijikata’s dying vision, according to first-generation
butoh dancer, Ohno Yoshito, was the opposite of ankoku: “In my last moments, God’s light . . .”
(Ohno & Ohno 2004, 137).
Or maybe, as I stomp into my own future butoh, I just want it all to be true. Maybe the ghet-
tobird moonlight that filled my childhood bedroom was a visitation by my own internal yin and
yang, as angelic as Ohno’s deathbed hands11 and as devilish as Hijikata’s red satin dress,12 now
remixed later in life by my hip-hop head as one and the same. Regardless, my body has always
wanted to taste them both – to taste everything – and then dance it like it is.
Like the novice monk asking zen master Joshu, I keep wanting to ask Rennie if a street dancer
has butoh nature, but he’ll probably just say what he usually does when I ask too many questions:
“I don’t know. Can we just dance?”
And then . . . I got nothin’.

Mu. Not Knowing. The Funk.
MuNK.
I guess that’s my name.
Play.
Notes
1 “Nothingness” in Japanese. For analysis of this koan’s complex circulation and mythology, see Steven
Heine, “Four Myths about Zen Buddhism’s ‘Mu Koan’,” 2012, Oxford University Press Blog, http://
blog.oup.com/2012/04/four-myths-about-zen-buddhisms-mu-koan/.
2 For analysis of the non-dualistic nature of this koan, see Zenkei Blanche Hartman, “Beginner’s Mind,”
2001, www.chzc.org/hartman4.htm.
3 The cypher is the hip-hop iteration of a circular formation commonly found in Africanist ritual con-
texts. Rennie Harris states, “We call it a battle as if we’re going to war, but this is all just language and
jargon used from the gang period before hip-hop. So really, we’re actually pushing each other to the
next level in the cypher. Which protects everyone, right? Because as long as you’re in the circle, you’re
protected” (Harris 2012).
4 Originally referring to the instrumental breaks in songs with which early hip-hop DJs and dancers
performed, “the breaks” as a term in hip-hop culture generally are a nexus of physicality, time, space,
spirituality, and style (Schloss 2009: 19).
5 For a broader exploration, see Travis L. Gosa, 2015, “The Fifth Element: Knowledge” in The Cambridge
Companion to Hip-Hop, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 56–70.
531
Michael Sakamoto
6 The murder of Black Benjy, Peace Counselor of the Ghetto Brothers, was the catalyst for a consequent
all-gang meeting that began the end of a five-year internecine war.
7 “Ghettobird” is common American urban street lingo for police helicopter.
8 The Wah-Chings are a powerful Asian street gang from California.
9 Various street dance techniques often grouped under the general category of “popping.”
10 Victor Turner defined a ritual of affliction, in which “there is a strong element of reflexivity, for through
confession, invocation, symbolic reenactment and other means, the group bends back upon itself . . . not
merely cognitively, but with the ardor of its whole being, in order not simply to remember but also to
remember its basic relationships and moral imperatives, which have become dismembered by internal
conflicts” (1985: 233).
11 In his book, Butterfly Dreams (2010), Japanese photographer Hosoe Eikoh published a photo series of
Ohno in bed in the last years of his life.
12 Hijikata infamously danced in this dress in his seminal 1968 solo performance, Hijikata Tatsumi to Nihon-
jin: Nikutai no Hanran (Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese: Revolt of the Flesh).
Works cited
Barber,Stephen. 2005. “Revolt of the Body.”Vertigo,Spring–Summer. Accessed January 1,2017. www.closeup-
filmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/volume-2-issue-8-spring-summer-2005/revolt-of-the-body/.
Chang, Jeff. 2005. Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. New York: St. Martin’s Press/
Picador.
Dower, John W. 2000. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W. W. Norton &
Co./The New Press.
Fricke, Jim, and Charlie Ahearn. 2002. yes yes y’all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop’s
First Decade. Cambridge: Da Capo Press.
George, Nelson. 2002. Introduction to yes yes y’all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First
Decade, Jim Fricke and Charlie Ahearn, eds., vii–x. Cambridge: Da Capo Press.
Harris, Rennie. Conversation with the author, April 2012.
Hijikata, Tatsumi. 2000a. “Inner Material/Material.” The Drama Review 44.1: 36–42.
———. 2000b. “To Prison.” The Drama Review 44.1: 43–48.
———. 2000c. “Plucking off the Darkness of the Flesh: An Interview by Shibusawa Tatsuhiko.” The Drama
Review 44.1: 49–55.
Murobushi, Kō. 2012. Interview with the author, Los Angeles, CA, April 28.
Nakajima, Natsu. 2011. Interview with the author, Tokyo, Japan, October 10.
Ohno, Kazuo, and Yoshito Ohno. 2004. Kazuo Ohno’s World from Without and Within. Middletown: Wesleyan
University Press.
Schloss, Joe. 2006. “The Art of Battling: An Interview with Zulu King Alien Ness.” In Total Chaos: The
Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, Jeff Chang, ed., 27–32. New York: BasicCivitas/Perseus Books Group.
———. 2009. Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Sullivan, James. 2012. “The Ghetto Brothers, Pioneers of Hip-Hop Culture, Get Album Reissue.” Rolling
Stone, November 20. Accessed June 21, 2016. www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-ghetto-brothers-
pioneers-of-hip-hop-culture-get-album-reissue-20121120.
Tamano, Hiroko. 2010. Interview with the author, San Francisco, CA, June 20.
Turner, Victor W. 1985. On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience. Edith L.B. Turner, ed. Tuscon:
University of Arizona Press.
532
56
BURN BUTOH,
START AGAIN
Shinichi Iova-Koga
Butoh dance opened my senses to an unseen, mysterious, buried, and fragile world, disrupt-
ing my assumptions and expectations of order. In 1999, I and thirteen other choreographers
(from Japan, Europe and the Americas) participated in the German-based international Butoh
dance-exchange and performance festival known as eX . . . it!’99. Our discussions led us to this
agreement: “Butoh is life, life is Butoh.” We agreed on nothing else, arguing incessantly about the
form, intent, spirit, and validity of any one particular dancer’s definition of butoh.
Though I only recently become acquainted with the Japanese concept of shu-ha-ri, (shu: form,
ha: break form, ri: re-create form), I look back on my training and notice my relation to butoh
through that filter. My formal training began with Judo, my father’s practice, at age eight. The
discipline of Judo provided a path to follow and a clear form (shu) to work within. However,
after nine years of Judo, I left the martial arts in favor of theater arts. Both Judo and theater were
practiced at night and I needed to choose between the two. In university, I studied photography
and filmmaking while performing in Shakespearean works and founding my own theater com-
pany, performing original or “devised” work. I jumped into this creative process with very little
theatrical training, going straight for the experimental tinkering, the ha and the ri of breaking and
re-creating (though I had little idea of what, exactly, I was breaking). Recognizing the limitations of
operating without formal foundations, I began studying Tadashi Suzuki’s Method of Training for
Actors, incorporating elements of noh theater, kabuki, kagura, flamenco, ballet, and balinese dance.
In Suzuki’s method, the spirit must struggle with and meet the demands of discipline. The train-
ing requires precise expression from the practitioner within deliberate constraints: it demands the
impossible. As Leon Ingulsrud of SITI company says, “In Suzuki’s method, you never get it right.”1
It was during this period of personal ferment that Yuko Yuki’s Suzuran-toh company appeared
at Noh-space, San Francisco, in 1991. They performed Ezo-men, choreographed by Bishop Yam-
ada. In this work, linear logic vanished; there was no plot, though plenty of mood. My attention
remained riveted to the smallest motion. Energy and gesture were brutally economized. Playing
this first experience back in my memory, I recall these images:
A man under a thick kakefuton (blanket/comforter) seems to sleep as he slowly drifts

on a thin mist carrying him centimeters above the ground, across the stage. A woman
slowly ascends . . . a small eternity passes as she rises from a squatting position to
standing, as loud, driving music vibrates the walls. Two women perform mock sumo
wrestling. Stomping feet. Shouts. Comic effect.
533
Shinichi Iova-Koga
Figure 56.1 Father, Yuzo Koga, pictured on right, provides early influence on Shinichi Iova-Koga’s physical
discipline. Courtesy of the author.
This jived with the dark, shadowy aesthetic I entertained in my photography of dead, decayed,
rotting rats; my films of lonely people gathered in dank cellars, cutting onions and crying; my
early stage productions where tortured recluses walked slanted stages, arguing with themselves via
video projections, surrounded by shadowy beings whose slow, circular steps formed a living cage.
I wanted to connect with the butoh dancers from the cold, remote countryside of Hokkaido and
taste their mysterious world, so resonant to my sensibility.
I didn’t have long to wait. Soon afterwards, dancer Ashikawa Akeno from Hakutobo (a com-
pany founded by Ashikawa Yoko, Hijikata Tatsumi’s principal dancer) conducted a workshop.
She used words to feed us images – cockroaches crawling inside our bodies, feet sliding on razor
534
Burn butoh, start again
sharp rails, lightning striking the body, prompting us to convulse and burn up, leaving behind an
empty shell. The imagery connected with me and I quickly adopted its code. I accessed a visceral
feeling state, leaving behind actor motivations and plot analysis. Through crystalline images, I
transformed my body from the inside out: words made flesh.
Unlike Suzuki, Hijikata was not interested in synthesizing a form to be repeated and perfected
(shu). Instead, he sought to escape the trap of form and break (ha) his own previous developments.
Hijikata, in a sequence of ha’s, changed his dance every 4 years (Ishide 2013).
Hiroko Tamano, formerly of Hijikata’s company, also used evocative images to elicit bodily
response and shape. I began training with her in late 1991 and joined Harupin-ha in 1993, led
by her husband Koichi Tamano. She required me to dance paintings one by one, create zigzags in
my body, to transform into a bull/cow/monster and hoof it in the noon-day sun, barefoot on a
Figure 56.2 Shinichi Iova-Koga, influenced by butoh even when not explicitly performing butoh.
Photograph by Pak Han.
535
Shinichi Iova-Koga
blistering black platform. Hiroko asked me to erase myself so that I could dance. Words yanked
the “me” out of me. My everyday relationship to objects, people, and place acquired an off-balance
balance. My grandmother and her grandmother and her grandmother stepped as I stepped. The
universe expanded infinitely and simultaneously compressed itself into the sub-atomic.
I abandoned scripts and storyboards to immerse myself in this ever-shifting and unreasonable
dance. When Hiroko would show me a piece of choreography, she never demonstrated it the
same way twice. “The feeling is more important,” she would say. She once took a pencil to paper
and drew a long, nearly un-trackable and un-broken squiggle and stated “this is the dancers’ life,”
then singled out minute elements on the long path and stated: “this is the dancers’ time on stage.”
Hiroko consistently pushed the boundaries between the quotidian and the mystical/imaginal. If a
pair of tabi (fitted Japanese footwear) did not fit me, she would demand “make your feet smaller.”
This was no joke. She meant for me to try. She once insisted that I should levitate, not jump.
Reason proved a liability. And yet we worked in highly structured ways, from how we washed
the floors to the Qigong-influenced exercises that were part of our regular dance preparation.
Butoh dancer Yumiko Yoshioka entered my sphere in 1996. She commented that I danced like
“a little Tamano.” My relationship to butoh was imitative, like a child, grappling with the shu. I
soon joined her company TEN PEN CHii in Germany. We lived, ate, practiced, and prepared
performances together in the countryside outside of Berlin. Yoshioka’s practice was informed by
Dairakudakan and as a company member of Ariadone with Kō Murobushi and Carlotta Ikeda.
As well, Noguchi Taiso, a training method focused on the motion of waves as manifested through
images of water or a whip, was integral to our dance, six hours a day, every day. By the time I left
the company in 2002, Yoshioka’s influence had clearly marked my practice.
During this time of defining myself as a butoh dancer, I simultaneously desired to break (ha)
myself of butoh’s physical signatures. In 2000, I sought out Ruth Zaporah, a teacher of improv-
isation, creator of Action Theater. With her, the body provides the cues for movement, sound,
text, and feeling. Action Theater performers embrace the flickers of recognition and momentary
reactions as performative material. Where butoh places emphasis on memories and the influence
of the image on the body, Action Theater demands that the body, in experiencing the moment,
create the image. Images can alter the physical/energetic state and encourage the body to adopt
new material, movement, information. And so I found another way to break and re-create.
For some time, I purposefully walked away from butoh. And then walked right back: a four-
year collaboration with Kō Murobushi from 2008 to 2012. This could be thought of as a kind of
ri in my personal performance history. Though, rather than re-creating, I re-experienced butoh
with a new lens. Murobushi helped me strip away the tendency to add more and more. He knew
how to cultivate a simple moment. Our final iteration of Crazy Cloud (co-directed by Muro-
bushi and myself ) in 2012 included four bodies simply shaking for an extended time, the only
respite being the intrusion of “I Want a Little Sugar in my Bowl,” by Nina Simone. Murobushi
asked me to dance as a mummified skeleton, laying on the ground, alternately contracting and
releasing to the earth. Now that he is dead, these instructions remind me: dance is fragile.
Ralph Lemon, describing his work 4Walls, said: “It’s dancing that’s beyond shape or style –
dancing that’s beyond dance, as I know it. There’s something infinite and primal about it. It’s a
metaphor for life itself – things break down, collapse and die, and yet life goes on” (Weinstein
2012).
Lemon’s comment touches on my experience, that the creative process is not a linear one. Life
does not just rise and rise. It gets sick and frail, falls down, rises, falls down again, then appears
elsewhere in a new form. The form supports a spirit that cannot exist without some container.
Form and spirit change each other. In my current practice, I rely on structures (shu) to contain
the liquidity of feeling and spirit. I also abandon (ha) such structures to let life flow. From the
536
Burn butoh, start again
Figure 56.3 “Crazy Cloud,” co-directed by Murobushi Kō and Shinichi Iova-Koga. Photograph by Pak Han.
flow comes the re-forming (ri), which regularly returns me to the basics, to being a beginner,
clarifying shape (shu, again) and refining the energy within. I enter a discussion between the solid
and liquid, the rock and the water within the contractions and seeming oppositions between my
practices: Action Theater, Noh Theater, Qi Gong, Shakuhachi, Aikido, Tadashi Suzuki Method,
and Noguchi Taiso. Body mobility and circulation, awareness of weight, breath, and physical
mechanics connect to the feeling state, the mood, the space around. When I work within the
basic components, close my eyes and step away from the particulars, they all meet. Butoh informs
the way I give attention to the play between the hidden, imaginative body and the visible dance.
537
Shinichi Iova-Koga
If, after my death, someone dissects my body, they might be surprised to find that some essence
of butoh has weaved itself into my fascia, integral, yet hidden, and holding together the many parts.
Note
1 From a Suzuki Method workshop with Leon Ingulsrud, March 10, 2015.
Works cited
Ishide, Takuya. 2013. pers. comm., July 9.
Weinstein, Tresca. 2012. “Ralph Lemon pushes dancers to extremes in ‘4Walls’.” Times Union, November 14.
www.timesunion.com/entertainment/article/Ralph-Lemon-pushes-dancers-to-extremes-in-
4Walls-4037326.php
538
INDEX
Page numbers in italic indicate a figure and page numbers in bold indicate a table on the corresponding page
About Ohno Kazuo: Kawaguchi Takao Solo Dance aesthetics 126; of Amagatsu 239; of ankoku butoh
Performance (2013) 11 99; of “anti-art” 151; Corpus Delicti Butoh
“Absolute Dance” 27, 280 Performance Lab 384; “elective affinity”
Abstract Expressionism 63 159–160, 160; of eurythmics 197; of Hijikata
abstraction 10, 26, 31–32, 41, 89, 143, 154, 156, 108; of Kasai 193; of Kreutzberg 131; reception
256, 381, 386, 507; ability to process abstract of butoh’s choreographic practices in France
information 384; abstract images 347; abstract 256; of Sankai Juku 238, 257–258; shaved
painting seen by Ohno 116; of body 330; heads in butoh 130–131; of Wege zu Kraft und
butoh as compared with American abstract Schönheit 135
modern dance 256, 258; of locale through “Affective Athleticism” (Artaud) 139, 147n2
displacement 278, 281; Ohno’s dancing African Angels 459–461
becoming more abstract 118; Sankai Juku Afro-diaspora 37–41, 45, 48, 439; Afro-Asian 45;
as becoming abstract 238 Afro-Caribbean 41, 45; Hijikata as “Afro-like”
action/actions (akushon) 52, 93, 94, 95, 100, 123, Christ 48; influence on Hijikata 37–40, 48n2
133, 134, 138, 143, 150–158, 166, 183, 186, Afternoon of a Faun (Nijinsky dance, 1912) 5, 6,
196–197, 226, 266–267, 292, 271, 299–300, 307, 414; see also Nijinsky, Vaslav
352, 361–363, 375, 377, 379n15, 382–384, 385, Agatsuma Emiko 191n13
421–422, 432, 454, 457, 460–461, 469, 486, 488, Agitprop 383
503, 505, 527, 536; “action dance” of Deleuze Ailing Dancer 145; see also Ailing Terpsichore
505; action language 197; action painting 290; Ailing Terpsichore (Yamaeru maihime, Hijikata 1983)
akushon 151; “butoh action” (wuta xingdong) 16, 145, 171–176; the body in 172–175; ecology
as conceived by Hata 371–374, 377; direct of language 176; surrealism in 172
action 150; gender action 363, 368; and gestures Ainu 62
according to Maro 186–187; guerilla action 382; Akasegawa, Genpei 3, 93; “model 1000-yen bill”
for Kasai 196–197; physical actions of Tanaka project 93–94, 199
Min as opposed to minute movements 486, 488; akushon 151; see also action
pseudo-action 186 All Japan Art Dance Society 31
activist/activism xix, xx, xxiii, xxiv, 18, 96, 152, Amagatsu Ushio 8–9, 13, 17, 182–184, 183,
155–156, 221, 226, 234, 288, 378, 388, 393–395; 217, 219, 227, 237–242, 254, 262, 307, 516;
potential of butoh 382 Amagatsu-shō (1977) 238; choreography
Adamenko, Katherine 18 238–239; definition of word amagatsu 237,
Admiring La Argentina (La Aruhenchina shō 1977) image-based choreography 13; mainstream
9–12, 116–118, 124n8, 128, 162, 262–263, success of 9, 239; Sankai Juku 8–9, 237–238;
276, 282n2, 282n10, 294, 369, 516, 522, 529; theory of “oscillating time” 239–242; Unetsu:
abstraction over time 118; premiere of 117 The Egg Stands Out of Curiosity 239–240
539
Index
ambiguity 381, 384; between universals and use by Kasai 269; use by Murobushi 147, 226;
particulars in butoh 222, of gender/sexuality use by Tanaka Min 146–147, 488
in butoh 153, 299; of identity in Hijikata 95; of Artaud System (of Oikawa Hironobu) 140, 143
“indigeneity” in butoh 57; of Murobushi 228, “Artaud’s slipper” (Hijikata 1971) 140, 145–146
230 Arugeria ni ikitai (1960) 50n16
ambivalence 95, 335, 381, 514, 517, 526, 530; Asbestos-kan 204, 208, 212n3, 314–315, 409–412,
dimension of the body in butoh 511–513, 526; 414, 416n2, 420; as funded by burlesque shows
of gender/sexuality in butoh 95; of Tanaka 418; daily life 410–412, 411, 412; dancing
Min’s relationship to butoh 489, of urbanity and communities 415–416; gathering of Hijikata’s
rurality in butoh 223 apprentices 410; post-1968 life different from
Andō Mitsuko 2, 30, 38, 43, 62; Andō Mitsuko pre-1968 life 416n4
Dance Company 9; Andō Mitsuko Dancing Heels Ashikawa Yoko 4, 5, 8, 10, 12, 17, 35, 49n8, 101,
Special Performance (1954) 30 144, 159, 203–212, 206, 207, 219–220, 250, 254,
ankoku (darkness) 3, 40, 48n1, 49n7, 56, 79n1, 166, 259n2, 263, 292n2, 361, 366–367, 370, 412–414,
212, 293n16, 416n4, 530–531; see also darkness; 413, 419–420, 439, 472, 534; ankoku butoh
blackness 204–205; as performing female and girl-likeness
ankoku butoh (ankoku butō) 3, 25, 34, 37, 56, 71, 366–367; as teacher of SU-EN 285–288; body
81–83, 85, 96, 99, 101, 111, 114–115, 118, 156, of 207–208, 207; choreography 208–209; duet
161, 173, 181, 203–205, 208, 292, 307, 327, with Tanaka Min 486; in Geisenjo no Okugata
347, 528; definition by critics and other dancers 205–206, 206; Getsurin (Moon Wheel, 1988)
3, 56, 79, 109, 212n2, 238, 347; definition by 209; in Hifu Uchu no Magudara (Magdalene of
Hijikata 104; Ohno as the end of 118 the Skin-Cosmos) 211–212; in Hosoe Eikoh’s
ankoku buyō 3, 79 photography 159, 164; Nichirin (Sun Wheel,
ANPO (Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and 1988) 209; Nyushoku no onna (Milky Woman,
Security between the United States and Japan) 1988) 209; other dancers taking her family
94, 152–153, 226, 400 name 212n7, 534; Shumu (String Universal
“anti-art” (han geijutsu) 63, 69n8, 97n4, 102, 155; Dream, 1988) 209; teaching of 210, 286–288,
aesthetics of 151; and butoh 150–152 290; technique 205–208, 206, 207
anti-nationalism, influence on Japanese cultural Astrorama Midori Kan 155
transformation 132–136; of Murobushi “Atnarat” (Murobushi 2007) 232–233
226, 234 atomic bombings: association of butoh with 13,
anti-war street protests 18, 382–385, 386n6 230, 257, 260n16, 316, 348, 477, 496; in Heso
apprentices of Hijikata: “abduction” into butoh to Genbaku (Navel and A-Bomb, Hosoe Eikō
412–413; daily life at Asbestos-kan 410–412; 1960) 94; San Francisco Butoh Festival coincides
debut as show dancers 413–415, 413, 414; with 50th anniversary of 316; similarity between
“exploitation” of 414; gathering at Murobushi’s body and atomic bomb victims
Asbestos-kan 410 230; in Tōmatsu Shomei’s photography 160
Ariadne, usage by Ikeda 516; usage by Murobushi ausdruckstanz 114, 129, 132; see also German
230–232 expressionist dance; German modern dance;
Ariadone Dance Company (Carlotta Ikeda) 8, neuer Tanz
183–184, 227, 229–230, 255, 281, 512, 536; Australia: locating practice in 344–345; origins of
composition of 234n3; use of Noguchi taiso Deluge project 345–346
425n6 authorship: claims to The Baldheaded 342n2, claims
Arimitsu Michio 15 to Murobushi and Ikeda’s dances 234n6
Artaud, Antonin 16, 40, 111n20, 137–140, 168, avant-garde: 1, 13, 15, 38, 56–57, 65–68, 72, 79,
174–176, 190n3, 246, 260n17, 296, 302n2, 111n16, 126, 143, 151, 155, 159, 203, 221, 226,
510; as basis for Mexican reception of butoh 245–246, 283, 339–341, 372, 377, 379n14,
307, 309; as filiation for Hijikata 144–147; as 384, 438, 496, 506–507; Artaud’s influence on
foundation for Hijikata 143–144; Heliogabalus: postwar Japanese avant-garde 142; Australia
Or, the Crowned Anarchist (Artaud, 1934) 143–144; 344; centrality of concept of nikutai to 234n2;
influence on Adamenko 447; influence on Eiko & Koma 247, 252n3; in Forbidden Colors
Oikawa 137–140; influence on Taha 337–338; 52–53; French attitudes to avant-gardes in
similarity between Artaud’s daughters and relationship to butoh 255–259; Hijikata’s
Hijikata’s sister 145, 148n8; The Theater and its burlesque cabaret presented as 414; Kasai Akira
Double (Artaud, 1938) 142–143; To Have Done 194–195; in performance and poster for Rose-
with the Judgment of God (Artaud 1947) 144, colored Dance 65; proliferation of “blackness”
146; union of metaphysics and matter 145–146; in Japanese postwar avant-garde 45; Ohno
540
Index
Kazuo as not originally avant-garde 34–35, 114; 42, 43, 44; of early butoh 37; as ethnicity in
relationship with things 54–55; Tanaka Min South Africa 456–459; and Genet 49n6; of
483–485; various forms of in postwar Japan 63; Hijikata 37–45; kuronuri (black face and body
see also Forbidden Colors paint) 234n8; “Modern Dance on Negro
“Avant-Garde and Scandal” (Shibusawa 1960) 72 Document ’61” 45; proliferation of in post-
WWII Japanese avant-garde circles 45–48;
Baiocchi, Maura 296 Tanaka Min’s use of “new black music” 485;
Baird, Bruce 22n1, 47, 49n6, 50n16, 72, 166, 200, see also darkness; ankoku
222, 247, 530 Blakey, Art 45
The Baldheaded 337–342, 338; authorship claims to “bodily state” concept 266–267, 271, 273–274,
342n2 301, 376
ballet 2, 3, 30, 41, 45, 54, 57, 59, 90, 131, 222, 273, the body: in Ailing Terpsichore 172–175; ambivalent
294, 307, 309, 319, 452–453, 500, 520; Ballet dimension of in butoh 511–513; of Ashikawa
Plus Mime (Oikawa 1961) 139; butoh approach 207–208, 207; Butoh Body 208; as empty
to 237, 256, 457–459, 461, 513; classical ballet vessel 375; eurythmics 130; intermingling with
54–55, Creative Ballet Movement 138; Elektra writing 145; as media 163–165; Murobushi Kō
Ballet and Murobushi 232; ethnic dance and 232–233; as objet 75; problematics of 94–95;
socialist realism in 61–63, 69n7; Hijikata’s “Taiwanese body,” exploration through butoh
difference from 102–104, 108; studied by butoh 373; as weapon 530; see also Butoh Body;
dancers 7, 8, 10, 25, 56, 60, 61, 111n15, 124, movement
127, 137–138, 189, 194, 418, 424, 484, 533 Body-genesis or Time-catastrophe – About Min Tanaka,
Banpaku see Osaka Expo 70 Tatsumi Hijikata and Antonin Artaud (Uno
Banzai Woman (Hijikata 1959) 2 Kuniichi 2002) 147
Barber, Stephen 140, 153, 155, 364 Body Materials (SU-EN) 251, 287–289, 292, 336
Barrault, Jean-Louis 128, 137; Barrault’s triangles Body Weather (Shintai kisho) 10, 418, 421, 484–485,
139, 140n1; Oikawa’s interpretation of 139–140 488, 500–501; Body Weather Farm 11, 295, 486,
Bataille, Georges 3, 40, 73, 111n20, 143, 161, 227; 488, 491; Body Weather Laboratory 484–485,
l’informe (formless) 109, 256, 507 491–492
Batta-ou (King of the Grasshoppers, Bishop Yamada Body Weather Los Angeles 491–493, 499
1975) 218 “body without organs” 174–176
becoming 94, 156, 192, 200n6, 241, 291, 309, Body-Vessel of the Priestess (Zhugao zhiqi,
384, 389, 390, 429, 435n5, 478; Becoming Series Hata Kanoko 2011) 371–372, 375–376;
(Leimay) 335 definition of title 378n9
“Begone With the Ethics of Productivity” Bolter, Jay David 154
(Shibusawa Tatsuhiko 1961) 73–74 Bournier, Luis Otavio 298
Bel Congo 45–46 Brazil: arrival of Ohara Akiko 294–295; Bournier,
Bellmer, Hans 74, 75, 291, 297, 367, 415 Luis Otavio 298; choreographers 296–298;
Benabdelkrim, Yasmina 11 Coreoversações 298–299; Dzi Croquettes group
bishōnen (beautiful boy) 364–365 299; João Butoh 302n9; Kinjikinstruction 299;
Bishop Yamada (Yamada Ippei) 182–183, 214, 218, Kusuno, Takao 295–296; Lume group 296–298;
226–227, 410, 416n3, 533; Batta-ou (King of Yokohama, Brazilian dancers in 296–298
the Grasshoppers, 1975) 218; in Dairakudakan Broinowski, Adam 156–157
216–217; Gekka no une (Ridges in a Field Under Buddhism: avidya 82; Hijikata identifying Murobushi
the Moon, 1982) 221; in the Hijikata studio with remains of the Buddha 229; kaiin 190n10;
216–217; Hoppo Butoh-ha in Tsuruoka 218; Maitreya (future Buddha to come) as character in
Shiokubi (Salted Heads) 218–221, 219 The Last Eden 230; “white nuns” 83
Black Point (Wakamatsu 1959) 52–53 bugaku 1, 69n7, 364
blackface 45, 49n90, 228, 234n8; see also Buto, la nuova danza giapponese (D’Orazi 1997) 267
blackness; race butoh: abstraction through displacement 281;
blackness 3, 9, 50n15, 81, 166, 168, 184, 340; activist potential of 382; and “anti-art” 150–152;
American black culture and butoh 528–529; as approach to ballet 237, 256, 457–459, 461, 513;
compared with “darkness” and ankoku 49n7; arrival in Germany 277; Artaud, legacy of 147;
black bodies as opposed to culturally unmarked and the assumption of Japanese identity 95–96;
or universal “white space” 340–341; black categorizing performers 12–13; and cinema
greasepaint as costume in Forbidden Colors 503–506; and counterculture 152–153; critical
38–39, 45; in costumes 118, 195–196, 262; reception of 246; cruelty in 147n3; cutting
Dunham’s vodou-inspired performances 41–45, continuity 430–431; “dead body” of 382;
541
Index
diasporas outside of Japan 248–249; dual nature Tanz influences on 128, 258; Noguchi taiso 130,
of 222–224; earliest mandate of artists 361; 188, 279, 334, 420–421, 425n6, 425n7, 536–537;
eroticism of 94–95; essentialist interpretation of Ohno Kazuo 263–264, 437–440, 520–521;
of 10, 56–57, 69n3, 95–96, 105, 256–257, show dance (burlesque) as training 415; of SU-EN
377n2; France’s reception of 8–9, 117, 124n11, 285, 288–289; of Tanaka Min 486, 488; of Waguri
254–255; gendering process of artists 362–363; Yukio 422–424; see also workshops; training
and German expressionism 132–136; Germany, butoh pilgrimages 250–252, 251
first performance in 277–278; “indigeneity” Butô-ha Sebi (Murobushi Kō) 8, 183–184, 227,
57; as inspiration for contemporary artistic 229, 234n4
work 310; institutional study of in Mexico 310; buyō 2–3, 76n6, 104, 106, 129, 131, 197; see also
international roots of 246–247; “Japaneseness” hōbu
of 245–246; Korean perspectives on 347–348; Byakkosha (Osuka Isamu) 8, 183, 377, 379n13
lineage model 247–248; locality/rurality of
222–223; “ma” 282n6; male artists of the 1960s cabaret 56, 101, 105, 111n15, 182, 184, 190n4, 204,
and 1970s 361; in Mexico 303–308; non-linear 216, 218, 227, 277, 363, 367, 378n11, 409–15,
genealogy of 193–194; Ohno’s dance before 416n4, 418, 449; Lotus Cabaret 229–230
25–28; and Oikawa 139–140; origins of 92; Cage, John 101
periods of Hijikata’s butoh 416n1; philosophy in “The Caged Eros” (Shibusawa 1961) 73
222; and photography 159–163, 160, 161, 162; Calamoneri, Tanya 18, 19, 200
pilgrimages 250–252, 251; political nature of Callas, Maria 9
381–383; and the problematics of representation Candelario, Rosemary 17, 201, 249, 385n12
93–95; remediation into image 154; second Caracalla 72, 78
generation of dancers 100–101; shaved heads, categorizing butoh performers 12–13, 22n8
aesthetics of 130–132, 219, 257, 263, 484–485; CAVE 325, 327–331, 334, 336
and social change 199–200; stereotypes 12, 257, Centonze, Katje 17, 159, 161, 282
300, 313, 316, 339, 377n2; stolen body of 96–97; Chiba, Akinori 7
subjectivity in 158–159; teaching 409, 418–425; chickens 183, 290, 367, 386; in Hijikata’s
transcultural analysis of 48; vectors and tensions performances 2, 41, 43, 48, 49n13
of butoh practices and discourse 12–14; Western choreography 7; of Amagatsu 238–239; of
reception of 247; widespread impact of 255; Ashikawa 208–209; in Dairakudakan’s butoh
see also butoh pedagogy; history of butoh 189; in Forbidden Colors 38–45; gestures of
Butoh America (Kasai 2009) 193 temporalization 100, 106–108; Hifu Uchu no
Butoh Body (SU-EN) 203, 208, 211, 212, 289; Magudara (Magdalene of the Skin-Cosmos)
transmission of 209–210 211–212; Hijikata’s experiments with 3–4;
Butoh City: Blind Thief Version (Ishii Mitsutaka image-based 13; of Kasai 196–197; metaphoric
1969) 7 approach to 351–352; of Murobushi 227; nanba
the “butoh film” 506–508 90; in Tohoku Kabuki Project 102–105; in Twenty-
butoh-fu (butoh notation) 144, 147n6, 192, 197, Seven Nights for the Four Seasons 100–102; words,
204, 209–211, 212n4, 222, 247, 249, 288, 301n2, choreography of Hijikata’s relationship to 204;
419–420, 426–427, 428, 430, 434, 435n3; see also dances; performances
“Body Words” as more suitable name for 426, The Chronicle of the Phallic God (Maro Akaji 1973)
435n3; screenshot of butoh-fu 428 183
Butoh Kaden (Waguri, 2004) 247, 250, 426–436; chūtai (also igata) 186–188, 453
discrepancies between English and Japanese cine-dance (also cine dance) 154, 156, 164–165,
versions 435n5; English translation 435n9; 361, 507–508
screenshot of butoh-fu 428; words of Hijikata’s cinema, and butoh 13, 155, 164, 485, 503–508,
butoh 427–431, 428; worlds of 431–434, 433 504, 505
“butoh of the outside” 227–228 Coker, Caitlin 18, 435
butoh pedagogy 418–425; of Ashikawa 210; collaboration 281, 282n6, 343–353, 372, 382, 389,
butoh-fu 144, 147n6, 192, 197, 204, 209–211, 400; across different media 100, 154, 164, 278,
212n4, 222, 247, 249, 288, 301n2, 419–420, 338, 343; in Ashikawa’s dance 209; at CAVE
426–427, 428, 430, 434, 435n3; daily training of 328, 331, 334; with Hata Kanoko 373; with
Hijikata’s dancers 111n15, 409–410, experiential Hijikata 9, 15, 63–64, 100, 104–105, 108, 147,
traces 421–424; historical traces of 419–421; of 154, 164, 223, 224n1, 307; with Hosoe 45, 146,
Iwana 265–266; of Kasai 196–198, 269; links to 159, 161–163, 224n1; with Iwana 266; with
premodern Japanese movement traditions in Kasai 195–196, 259; with Maro 14, 159, 184;
Nakajima Natsu 197; of Maro 451–452, neuer with Murobushi 232, 254, 334, 425n11, 536;
542
Index
with SU-EN 287; with Tanaka 11, 483–486, 184–186, 185; Kochuten 189, 452–454;
489, 494; with war effort in WWII 147; with methodology of 186, 425n6; “molded phase”
Yoshioka 265, 283n13 (igata, also chūtai) 186–188, 453; Murobushi Kō
colonization/colonialism 48, 49n6, 215, 298, 300, in 227; “One person, one troupe” (ichinin-ippa)
308, 355n1, 364–366, 372–372, 377, 400–402, 8, 14, 183, 248, 455; Paradise 188; as “phallic
405, 457, 477; see also Critical Butoh company” 183; qualities of 190; “space body”
companies: Andō Mitsuko Dance Company 9; (uchūtai) 188–189, 348, 453–454; Sumera
Ariadone Dance Company 227, 512; Butō-ha daikogan (The Great Imperial Scrotum, Maro
Sebi 8; Byakkosha 8; Dairakudakan 8–9, 181, 1974) 190n7; summer retreat 190, 258, 451–454;
248; Dance Love Machine 8; Hangidaitōkan tenputenshiki 181–182, 190, 452
100–101; Iraqi Bodies 337; Living Theater 142; “Dance Experience” 3; Dance Experience Gathering
Maijuki 485; Sankai Juku 8, 237–238; Suzuran- (Dance Experience no kai, also translated as
toh (Yuki) 533–534; Tenshikan 7; Yellow Dance Experience Meeting) 34, 45, 72, 74, 110n8,
Butterfly Flying to the South 371–372; see also 125n5, 160
Dairakudakan Dance Love Machine (Tamura and Furukawa) 8, 183,
composition 60, 154, 208, 219, 271, 335, 341, 497, 278–279, 281, 283n14, 425n6
516; Ohno’s method of as a modern dancer dances 26; Admiring La Argentina 9–10; Afternoon of
28–29; see also choreography a Faun (1912) 5, 6; ankoku buyō 3; Banzai Woman
Coreoversações 298–299 2; Body-Vessel of the Priestess (2011) 371–372,
corporeality 20, 130, 147, 152, 164, 232; butoh’s 375–376; Butoh City: Blind Thief Version 7;
as different from Western 256, and film 508; buyō 3; “cine-dance” works 164–165; Dark
and memory 101, 109 110n11, 147; and Body (1960) 3; Exusiai 196; Performance for the
photography 162–164, 168; and writing 147, Establishment of the Pure Love Butoh School 10–11;
513; see also the body The Fire of Prometheus (1950) 29; Forbidden Colors
Corpus Delicti Butoh Performance Lab 382; 2, 34; Forbidden Colors (Kinjiki) 15; Foundation of
aesthetics 384; anti-war street protests 382–385 the Dance of Love 146–147; Gibasan (1972) 4, 5;
cosmology 16, 22n6, 114–119, 121, 237; Ohno’s Hanchikik 62; Headless (2001) 289–290; Hijikata
consolidation of 118–119; Ohno’s development Tatsumi and Japanese People: Rebellion of the Body
of 116 (1968) 3; Human Buddha (1953) 29; Japanese
costume design 118, 195–196, 262; of Ashikawa Drum (1951) 60; Last Eden – Gate to the Beyond
209; black greasepaint Forbidden Colors 38–40 8; Masseur: A Story of a Theater that Sustains
Costume en Face (Hijikata 1976) 11 Passion (1963) 3; Mid-afternoon Secret Ceremony of
counterculture 104, 152–153, 234 a Hermaphrodite (1962) 3, 40; Niguro to Kawa 45;
“creation of space” 27, 84–85 The Old Man and the Sea 31–32; Operating Table
Cristiani, Alessandra 270–271 26; Poinciana: Beginning of the Summer that Will
Critical Butoh (Seifert and Franco) 400–401 Freeze and Wane in the Non-Melodic Metropolis
critical reception of butoh 246; in France 254–255 45; Praise of Jacob 28; Tango 28; Quiet House
cross-dressing 56, 257, 467; girl-likeness of male (1973) 5; Random Thoughts 30–31; The Return
artists 363–365 of La Argentina (2014) 12; Rose-colored Dance:
cruelty, in kabuki 68, 83; in butoh 68, 147n3, 176, To M. Shibusawa’s House (1965) 3; Seed (1960)
in relation to Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty” 3; site-related 13; Subject: Dead 10; Sugar Candy
143, 176, 307 54–55; Three Phases of Leda (1962) 3; tourist
Crying Light (Hegarty 2009) 11 performances (omiyage butoh) 104; Twelve Phases
Cunningham, Merce 79, 256, 294, 519 of the Terpsichore of Darkness: Fourteen Nights
for the Louvre Palace 8; Used, Abused and Hung
Daai za Lady (“That’s a Lady” 1994–2004) out to Dry (2013) 12; Work No. 1 26; see also
456–457 performances
Dairakudakan 8–9, 181, 185, 219, 227, 238, 245, danmari (in kabuki, silent pantomime or silent fight
246, 248, 255, 257, 281, 344, 367, 388, 412, in the dark) 83
451–455, 512, 536; Bishop Yamada in 216–217; Danniku monogatari (The Tale of Male-Meat, Maro
butoh groups derived from 183–184, 183; 1974) 190
Danniku monogatari (The Tale of Male-Meat, La Danseuse Malade 223; see also Ailing Terpsichore
Maro 1974) 190; departure of its founding Dark Body (Hijikata 1960) 3
members 184, 281, 367, 283n14, 425n6; Flesh darkness 3, 173, 176; and ankoku butoh (darkness
Song (Agatsuma Emiko, 2014) 189; founding dance) 8–9, 56, 99, 161, 212n2, 221–222, 250,
members of 182, 221, 227; gestures (miburi, 257, 313, 315, 384, 397, 528; black market (yami
teburi) 186–187, 349, 352, 453; Kaiin no uma no ichiba) 416n4; Ohno as becoming less 118;
543
Index
as related to racial “blackness” 37–38, 40, 4–49; Druet, Lucile 19

as related to yami (darkness) 205, 259, 416n4; duality 274; in Kasai 194, nature of butoh
as thematic interest 65, 67–68, 72, 78, 81–83, 222–224
103–104, 133, 166, 173, 176, 211–212, 220, 223, Duchamp, Marcel 65, 93, 108, 110n6
229, 239, 241, 295, 339, 351, 376, 384, 399, 460, Dunham, Katherine 15, 31, 38, 40–45, 42, 43, 44;
496, 511–512, 529; see also ankoku; ankoku butoh; Bel Congo 45–46, 46; influence on Hijikata’s
blackness; yami (darkness) early works 41–45
“dead body” of butoh 56, 300, 378n9, 378n11, 382 Dzi Croquettes group 299
death 13, 133, 196, 211, 447–448, 458; accounts
of Hijikata’s 252, 531; in Ailing Terpsichore early butoh, blackness of 37
174–176; in and for Amagatsu 238–240, 315; early life: of Maro 181–182; of Ohno 113–114; of
for Anmar 339, in and for Hata 375–376; in Shibusawa 71–72
and for Hijikata 43, 49, 67, 102, 104, 105, 109, Eckersall, Peter 16
140, 146–147, 204, 208, 224, 301; in and for Edge (Murobushi 2000) 231
Murobushi 226–229; for Nayfack 390–392; in ecology 171, of language in Ailing Terpsichore 176;
and for Ohno 34, 114, 118–122, 263, 369, 439, see also environment: pollution
441–443, 445, 531; photography’s link with Eguchi Hiroshi 28, 29
158–159, 164, 168 Eguchi Takaya 2, 9, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32; All Japan
death rituals 375–376 Art Dance Society 31; “deer dance” 60–61;
debut performance: of Hijikata’s apprentices as Japanese Drum (1951) 60; Method of Dance
show dancers 413–415; of SU-EN 212n9 Creation (Eguchi, 1961) 27; on movements
decolonization 48, 400; see also Critical Butoh 27–28
Décoret, Anne 260n23 “elective affinity” 159–160, 168
Decroux, Etienne 137–138, 140, 143, 344, 349 Elswit, Kate 16, 126
“deer dance” 60–61 embodiment 26, 61, 93, 114, 130, 157, 341, 382,
DeFrantz, Thomas 340 461
delegation in Ohno’s work 123, 125n16 emotion 13, 26–27, 142, 153, 188, 216, 231, 264,
Dellecave, J 17 280, 383, 399, 449, 497, 512; in film 506; for job
Deluge (Neideck 2014) 343–356, 345, 354; 456, 459–460; for Maro 453–454; in Neideck’s
developing vocabulary 348–349; image-based Korean performances 346, 353–355; in Ohno
approach to the voice 349–350; “I-You-We” 29–30, 114–115, 119–122, 378n9, 438, 522; for
350–351; “keeping one eye open” 351; Nayfack 393, 396
measuring impact of on audiences 354–355; Emotion (Kanjo, Tanaka Min 1983) 486, 487
metaphoric approach to choreography 351–352, Emotion in Metaphysics (Keijijogaku) 163–164, 194
352; origins of project 345–346, 345 emotional memory 449
demonstrations 102, 152, 355, 362, 392; against empty vessel 375, 385, 449
ANPO 226; Corpus Delicti street protests Endo, Tadashi 10, 12, 17, 264, 274n2, 276–278,
382–385, 383; as gishiki (ritual) 102; as “hanran” 280–281, 282n6, 283n16, 298, 419; and German
111n21; Losheng’s protest movement 373–374, expressionism 276–277
378n5; by Murobushi 234n1; Neo Dada environment 17, 57, 104, 145, 188, 210, 227,
Organizers 151; student protests 109, 152–153, 328, 335, 343, 350, 374, 454, 502n1; in Kasai’s
410; see also activist/activism thought 192, 199; pollution in 1960s and 1970s
Dernier Eden: Porte de l’au-dela, Le (The Last Eden: Japan 214–215; Ohno’s relationship to 115,
Gate to the Beyond) 8, 229–230, 254–256, 119–120, 122; for SU-EN 251, 286; see also
260n5, 277 indigeneity (dozoku)
Desnos, Robert 73 eroticism 40, 143, 152, 504; in butoh 3, 34, 94–95;
diasporas of butoh outside of Japan 248–249 of Dairakudakan 183, 186, 190; of Hijikata’s dance
direct action 154; see also action 65, 68, 73–76, 104–105, 155–156, 307, 347, 415;
Discover Japan 5 of kabuki 83; of Murobushi and Ikeda 229, 256;
Diverrès, Catherine 19–20, 258, 519–523 in photographic butoh 153, 158, 167–168, 167;
DORODORO QUARKS (Kaseki and Seki 2011) in the Tohoku Kabuki Project 104–105
368 essentialist interpretation of butoh 10, 56–57, 69n3,
dozoku 57–58; see also indigeneity 95–96, 105, 256–257, 377n2
draconian aspects of Hijikata’s butoh 71–75, 75; ethnic dance in socialist realist ballet 62–63
see also Shibusawa Tatsuhiko Europe 376; as colonial power 341, 401; enthusiastic
dramaturgy 155; of Shimizu 156–157 reception of butoh 8–9, 117, 124n11, 254–255;
Dressmaker’s Doll (Seifert) 404–405, 404 ethnicity of “Whiteness” 456; first butoh
544
Index
performances in 7, 8, 184, 229–230, 262–263, 331–333; San Francisco Butoh Festival 314–323;
277, 283n11; location of Ohno archive 273; see also Festival Cuerpos en Revuelta; Festival
misinterpretations of butoh 13, 247, 256–257, d’Automne; Festival d’Avignon; Nancy
263, 267, 280; renewed interest in butoh 259; as International Theatre Festival
site for prewar dance study 26, 35n2, 126, 130, Fichte, Hubert 49n6
133, 246; as source of philosophical and artistic filiation 14, 136, 517; definition of 143; of Artaud’s
ideas 40, 63, 66, 101, 132, 152, 164, 194, 200n8; technique 144–147
as touring locale or base camp for current film 45, 62–63, 65, 94–95, 101, 133, 156, 165, 168,
performers 278, 281, 283n12, 286, 313, 323, 337, 255, 290, 367, 377n2, 444, 459, 498, 503–508,
342, 485–486, 519, 533; ways Europe changed 533; the “butoh film” 506–508; of butoh
butoh 11, 118, 254, 257–258 performances 155; documentary 152–153, 503;
eurythmy 7–8, 11, 128, 130, 147, 197, 200n9; of Freehill, Maureen 444, 446n5; of Hosoe
aesthetics of 197; Kasai’s 195, 197–199; Tenshi- Eikoh 506; of Iimura Takahiko 506–507; of Ishii
kan 195; see also Steiner, Rudolf Teruo 216–217, 227, 504; of Ohno Kazuo 9,
Evelin, Marcelo 299 35, 114–117, 119, 369, 444; remediation 154; of
existence 28, 56, 83–84, 120, 193, 200, 205, 208, Richie, Donald 505–506; of Tanaka Min 260n4,
211, 224, 289, 293n14, 445, 526 483, 488; Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit 135
eX...it! Festival 278–279, 283n12, 533 The Fire of Prometheus (Ishii Baku 1950) 29
Experimental Body (Murobushi 2004) 231 first European butoh performance 7, 8, 184,
experimentation 92–94, 115, 129, 151, 154, 163, 229–230, 262–263, 277, 283n11
182, 190n2, 193–194, 245, 258, 270, 299, 307, flamenco 3, 59, 251, 276–277, 281, 533; of Hijikata
327, 344, 516; action (akushon) 151; of Bishop 4, 361, 365; of Ohno 9, 262
Yamada 221, 223; films of Ohno Kazuo 9, Flesh Song (Agatsuma Emiko, Dairakudakan,
115, 444; of Hijikata 3–4, 52, 100, 102, 104, 2014) 189
106, 194, 204, 216, 248; of Kasai 7, 194–195; Flournoy, Brechin 17
with language 200n8; and modernism 163; of Flower Festival (hanamatsuri) 58
Murobushi 226–228, 231, 233; of Neideck 349, folk 57–60, 62–63, 66, 68, 83, 85–86, 102, 105,
353; of Oikawa 131, 137–140; of SU-EN 286; 138, 221, 346, 375–376, 379n14, 497, 505; as
of Tanaka 10–11, 146, 483–486, 488; see also related to socialist realism 63; as similar to Pop
avant-garde Art 64; definition of 57; “folk guerrillas” 153;
“exploitation” of Hijikata’s apprentices 414 Hijikata’s butoh as neither folk nor ethnic 59,
Expo 70 155–156 104; Murobushi’s use of 227; see also minzoku;
expression, Ohno’s minimization of 122 dozoku; shugendo
expressionism: German 276–277; post-WWII folk dance 5; afro-cuban 42, cited in modern dance
influence of German expressionism 132–136; 60–63, 68; “deer dance” 60–61; folk ballet 62;
related to butoh’s impact on dance in France 258 Hijikata attacks as tourist performances (omiyage
“Extravagantly Tragic Comedy: Photo Theater buyō) 104; Spanish folk dancer Antonia Mercé
Starring a Japan Butoh Dancer, Genius 9, 124n3
(Hijikata Tatsumi), An” (Hosoe Eikō, Forbidden Colors (1959) 2, 9, 15, 34, 38, 39, 40,
photography exhibition, 1968) 69n1, 103, 41, 45, 49n10, 52–53, 95, 97n2, 128, 138, 159,
110n7, 165; see also Kamaitachi 246, 295; Afro-diasporic influence 38–40,
Exusiai (Kasai 1998) 193, 196 39; costume design 40; expanded and revised
version 9, 40; as first butoh performance 38–40,
Falquez, Camila 11 38, 39, 97n3; reviews 41–43; studio performance
farming: influence on Hijikata 56; influence 39, 163; see also Black Point
on Tanaka’s dance practice 418, 486–488; forgiveness, as theme in Ohno’s work 118–119
“inserting one’s hip” 88–90 form 26, 131, 133, 139, 172–176, 194, 200n9, 237,
feminization, girl-likeness of male artists 363–365 256, 271, 288, 388–389, 397, 397n9, 425n5,
Festival d’Automne (Autumn Festival) 8, 205, 510; butoh understood as set form 246–247;
254–255, 259n1, 259n3, 485 connection to expression 114; demonstrating
Festival d’Avignon (Avignon Festival) 184, 186, 196, 204; everyday 87; for Hijikata 116, 122,
307, 485, 523n5 163, 172–176, 197; Hijikata and Ashikawa only
Festival Cuerpos en Revuelta 303 show once 419; for Kasai 195–196, 199–200;
festivals: eX...it! Festival 278–279; Flower “nationalist form, socialist content” (Stalin)
Festival (Hanamatsuri) 58; Gion Festival 62; for Ohno 114–120, 122, 276; resisting or
62–63; ImPulsTanz festival 280–281; MAMU transcending forms 116–120, 172–173, 200,
Festival 281; New York Butoh Festival 325, 208, 281, 389, 424, 429, 483–486, 492, 500; set
545
Index
or fixed forms 53, 56, 67, 68, 74, 116, 122, 264, German Arts and Culture in Butoh (festival) 319
420, 423, 425; shu-ha-ri (form-break-separate/ German expressionist dance 276–277; relationship
recreate) 533–537; SU-EN Body Materials to butoh 102, 132–136, 276, 280, 283n3, 323
288; tradition or folk forms 56, 61, 131; German modern dance 1–2, 8–9, 11, 126–136, 246,
transformation between forms 168, 195, 430 258, 282n3, 295
Fortnight for the Louvre Palace: Twelve Phases German neue Tanz see neuer Tanz
of the Dancing Princess of Darkness see Yami Germany: arrival of butoh in 277; eX...it!
no maihime jūnitai: Ruburukyu no tame no Festival 278–279; first butoh performance
jūyonban in 277–278
Foster, Susan 340 gestures 12, 27, 65, 101, 133, 296, 298, 367, 510;
France: aesthetic shock of butoh’s choreographic and actions 186; in Dairakudakan’s butoh
practices 256, 262–263, 277; association of (miburi, teburi) 186–187, 349, 352, 453; in Kasai
butoh with A-bomb 13, 230, 257, 260n16, 316, 195–197; Ohno, neuer Tanz influence on
348, 477, 496; butoh’s impact on dance in 258; 128, 132; in Ohno’s work 117, 119, 123–124,
favored aesthetics of Sankai Juku 257–258; 263, 368–369, 521–522; see also gestures of
initial reception of butoh 8–9, 117, 124n11, temporalization
254–255; journals receptive to modern dance gestures of temporalization 100, 106–108; in
260n13; legitimization of butoh in 255–256; Tohoku Kabuki Project 102–103; in Twenty-
reinvention of butoh 11, 118, 254, 257–258; Seven Nights for the Four Seasons 102, 105
renewed interest in butoh 259; written discourse geta 5
on butoh 256–257 Getsurin (Moon Wheel, Ashikawa 1988) 209
Franco, William (partner with Seifert Miki) 400, The Ghost of Montpellier Meets the Samurai (Harrell
405; see also Critical Butoh 2015) 12
Freehill, Maureen Momo 18, 437–447; initial Giacometti, Alberto 32
meeting with Ohno Kazuo 437–438 Gibasan (1972) 5, 6, 110n4
Fujii Kunio 45 Gilroy, Paul 45
Fukuda Tsuneari 31 Gion Festival 62–63
Fuller, Zack 19, 20, 397 girl/girlness/girl-likeness 4, 364: of butoh women
furigoto-geki (Japanese theatrical dance) 59 361–362, 365–367; of Hijikata 4, 166, 362, 365;
Furukawa Anzu 8, 14, 183, 227, 277–280, 283n14, of male artists 189, 363–365; of Ohno 117, 365,
298, 318–329, 321, 366–368 368–370
gishiki (ritual) 101–102, 151
Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters 64 global 1, 9, 14, 37, 85–86, 121, 127, 156, 238, 245–252,
gagaku 69n7 276, 306, 319, 339–341, 382, 395–396, 401
Gana, Maddalena 271, 272 Goda Nario 38–40, 96, 117–118, 282n9, 378n12,
Garnica, Ximena 17, 326 416n1
gei boy (gay boy) 363–365 Goi, Teru 10
Geisenjo no Okugata (Hijikata 1976) 205–206, 207 Goldfinger 48n5
Gekidan Kaitaisha (Theater of Deconstruction goza no mai (rush mat dance) 83
Shimizu Shinjin) 156–157 Graham, Martha 31, 127, 196, 227, 294, 307, 418,
Gekka no une (Ridges in a Field Under the Moon, 420, 424, 484
Bishop Yamada 1982) 221 Granato, Thiago 298–299
gender 4, 7, 14, 49n8, 192, 361–370, 378, 388–397, Greenberg, Clement 163
401, 405, 415, 456, 513; DORODORO QUARKS The Green Table (Jooss 1932) 1
368; gender ambiguity or transgression 94–96, Grusin, Richard 154
153, 195, 22–228, 232, 256, 361, 389–392; gender Gunji Masakatsu 5, 15, 58, 68, 81, 105–106, 109,
confirmation surgery 391; gendering process 220, 223, 224n3, 247, 282
of butoh artists 362–363; girl-gendered butoh
366–368; girl-likeness of male artists 363–365; Hakutōbō 183, 205, 208, 210–211, 212n7, 219,
“likeness” (rashii) 363; in Hijikata Tatsumi and 250, 286, 534
Japanese People: Rebellion of the Body 365; male Halifu, Osumare 41
butoh artists of the 1960s and 1970s 361; Maro Halprin, Anna 10, 11
as midwife 181, 190n1; proximity to gender han 346
stereotypes 363; Ohno’s female-like gendering han geijutsu (anti-art) 152; performances 150–151
117, 262–263, 368–369, 397n7; onnagata 364; hanamatsuri (Flower Festival) 58
Three Bellmers 367–368; see also transgender Hanaoka, Mizelle (stage name of Yumiko Yoshioka)
Genet, Jean 9, 34, 40, 49n6 227, 277; see also Yoshioka Yumiko
546
Index
Hanchikik (1958) 62 Afro-diasporic influence 37–40, 39, 48n2;

Hangidaitōkan 100–101; 110n8, “metamorphosis” Ailing Terpsichore (Ailing Dancer) 145, 171–176;
method 115 ambiguity of identity in 95; ankoku definition
Haniya Yutaka 43, 45 by Hijikata 104; apprentices, “abduction”
hanran (rebellion, revolt) 109, 111n21 and “exploitation” of 412–414; Artaud as
happenings 3, 65, 93–94, 100, 111n21, 151–152, foundation for 143, 143–144, 148n8; “Artaud’s
158, 226, 277–278; Kamaitachi as 162–163 slipper” (1971) 140, 145–146; Asbestos-kan
Harootunian, Harry 95, 97 204, 409–412, 414–416; ballet 2, 3, 102–104,
Harrell, Trajal 12, 110n9; “In One Step Are a 108, 111n15; “blackness” of 37–45, 49n9;
Thousand Animals” 12, The Ghost of Montpellier burlesque cabaret shows 48n5, 378n11, 414, 418;
Meets the Samurai (2015) 12 chickens in performances 2, 41, 43, 48, 49n13;
Harris, Rennie 526–527 choreographic notes 144–145; choreography 3–4,
Hata Kanoko 372–373, 376–377 13; collaboration with 9, 15, 63–64, 100, 104–105,
Hawkins, Richard 11, 435n2 108, 147, 154, 164, 223, 224n1, 307; cutting
He rawe tona kakahu (She wore a becoming dress, continuity 430–431; daily training of Hijikata’s
2009) 399–400; Critical Butoh 400–401; dancers 111n15, 409–410; darkness 416n4;
Dressmaker’s Doll 404–405, 404; Matryoshka Dunham, influence on early works 41–45;
401–402; Others 402–404, 403 farming, influence on 56; female-likeness of 362;
Headless (SU-EN 2001) 289–290 first meeting with Ohno 30; Forbidden Colors 34;
Hearn, Lafcadio 113, 122 form, attitude towards 116, 122, 163, 172–176,
Hegarty, Antony (Anohni) 11 197; gender experimentation 4, 49n8, 166, 362,
Heliogabalus: Or, the Crowned Anarchist (Artaud, 365; gestures of temporalization 106–108;
1934) 143–144, 146–147, 148n13, 269, 274n12; Hitogata 205–206; Hōsōtan 105; indigeneity in
as source for Dairakudakan’s Yōbutsu shintan 65–67; Maro, influence on 182–183; Marxist
(Chronicle of the Phallic God, 1973) 183; as tone of writing 153; “metamorphosis” 115, 120;
source for Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: movement vocabulary 105, 119–120; nanba 88–89;
Rebellion of the Body (1968) 143, 146, 147n4, 168 Nippon no chibusa (Breasts of Japan, 1983) 205;
Hemingway, Ernest 31, 33; see also The Old Man at Osaka Expo 70 155–156; performances,
and the Sea Ohno’s appearances in 34–35; periods of 416n1;
Heso to genbaku (Navel and A-Bomb, Hosoe 1960) personal metamorphosis for Twenty-Seven Nights
94–95, 377n2, 506 premiere 109; “To Prison” 381–383; response
heterotopia 510 to Japan’s urban rural divide 216; “return to
Hi Red Center (Akasegawa Genpei, Nakanishi Japan” 95, 105–106; return to Tohoku 101;
Natsuyuki, Takamatsu Jirō) 93; Street Cleaning Rose-colored Dance 66; sequences of movements
Event (1964) 151–152 5; Shibusawa’s comparison to Sade 72; “Sugar
Hifu ni naru Inu Doke (Skin Clock for Those Candy” 54–55; surrealism 4, 49n6, 172, 197,
Wishing to Become a Dog, Ashikawa 1987) 249, 420; Tohoku Kabuki Project 102–105; Twenty-
208–209 Seven Nights for the Four Seasons, innovative
Hifu Uchu no Magudara (Magdalene of the Skin- choreography in 100–102; see also apprentices of
Cosmos) 211–212 Hijikata; butoh-fu; death
Hijikata Method see butoh pedagogy; image/ “Hijikata Tatsumi: Burnt Offering Dancer”
imagery/imagination-based choreography (Shibusawa 1961) 72–73, 78
Hijikata Tatsumi 1–18, 22, 25, 29–31, 34–41, 43, Hijikata Tatsumi Dance Experience Gathering
45–50, 52, 54, 55–68, 70–76, 78–79, 85–90, 92, (Hijikata Tatsumi Dance Experience no kai, also
95–96, 99–111, 114–124; 126–128, 130, 132–133, translated as Dance Experience Meeting) 34, 45, 72,
135, 137–140, 142–148, 153–156, 158–168, 74, 110n8, 125n5, 160
171–176, 181–184, 188, 190, 192–194, 195, Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: Rebellion of the
197–200, 203–212, 216–217, 219, 220–224, Body (variously translated as Hijikata Tatsumi
226–229, 234, 237–239, 241, 245–252, 257, and the Japanese: The Revolt of the Flesh,
259–261, 269, 271, 273–274, 277–278, 282–283, Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: The
288, 292–295, 298–301, 303–304, 306–307, Revolt of the Body, 1968) 3, 47–48, 95, 101,
309, 311, 315–316, 319, 327, 337–341, 347, 143, 168; gender in 365, 532n12
361–368, 370, 372, 376–378, 381–382, 386, 395, Hinagata (Murobushi 1977–1982) 229–230
400, 409–416, 418–424, 426–427, 429–432, Hino Hiruko 156; see also Gekidan Kaitaisha
434–436, 440, 445, 448, 457, 484–486, 488, hip-hop culture 3, 527–528, 531
489, 493, 495, 498, 503–508, 511–513, 516, Hiraiwa, Yasuhiro 29
525–528, 530–532, 534–535; aesthetics of 109; Histoire de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du vice (Sade) 72
547
Index
historical traces of butoh pedagogy 419–421 of butoh 96–97; trans-identity 388–397, 390,
history of butoh 2–12, 14, 246–247, 248; Admiring 391, 392, 394
La Argentina 9–10, 116–118, 124n8, 128, igata (also chūtai) 186–188, 453
262–263, 282n10; Amagatsu Ushio 8–9, 13, Ikeda Sanae (Carlotta Ikeda) 8, 14, 183–184, 227,
17, 182–184, 237–242; Buto, la nuova danza 229–230, 234n3, 234n6, 247, 254, 256, 260n11,
giapponese (D’Orazi 1997) 267; first European 260n18, 263, 274n2, 277, 295, 366, 418, 422,
performance 7, 8, 184, 229–230, 262–263, 425n6, 425n9, 425n10, 512–513, 516, 536;
277, 283n11; Forbidden Colors as first butoh see also Ariadone Dance Company
performance 38–40, 38, 39; Harrell Trajal 11–12; Ikemiya Nobuo 30–31, 45
Hijikata Tatsumi 3; Hijikata and Ohno’s first image/imagery/imagination-based choreography
meeting 30; Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: 12 94, 108, 143, 147, 193, 197, 200n6, 200n7,
Rebellion of the Body (1968) 3, 47–48, 95, 101, 201n10, 266, 271 347, 349–351, 384, 452, 454–455,
143, 168; Ishii Mitsutaka 7; in Italy 262–263; 485, 488, 534; “Body Words” as alternate name
Kasai Akira 7; Kawaguchi Takao 11; Maro Akaji for 426, 435n3; by Hijikata 4–5, 8, 13, 22n2,
8; Ohno Kazuo 3, 8–9, 25–28; Tanaka Min 10; 101, 105, 108, 119, 122, 144–145, 271, 301n2,
see also Hijikata Tatsumi 367, 419–424, 426–435, 435n3, 535–536; by
Hitogata (Human Shape, 1976) 205–206 Ohno 10, 114, 116, 119–122, 263–264, 271,
hōbu (Japanese dance) 59–60; see also buyō; Japanese 280, 438; by Oikawa 143; see also butoh-fu
dance history images: butoh’s remediation into 154; of dislocation
Hokkaido, Hijikata’s cabaret dancers in 413; Hoppo in Hijikata’s movement vocabulary 108; inner
Butoh-ha in 221–222; Ohno Kazuo in 113, images 33, 196, 529–530; in Kamaitachi 165–167,
115–116; Hata Kanoko in 372–373 167; in Keijijogaku 163–164; Ohno’s use of
Holiday, Billie 46 120–121; printmaking 135; scrapbooks made of
Hokke-ko (Study of Atka Mackeral, Yuki 1978) 221 164; see also photography
homosexuality 56, 113, 143, 299; girl-likeness of improvisation 7, 13, 52–53, 196, 204, 233, 259,
male artists 363–365; see also gei boi 267, 271, 281, 288, 384, 418, 421–423, 427, 432,
Hook Off 88: One Ton of Hairstyles for the Scenery 435n8, 453, 496–497; in Ohno 10, 115, 117–122,
10–11, 486 124, 262–263, 418, 423, 435n8; in Tanaka 11,
Hoppo Butoh-ha 214; in Hokkaido 221–222; in 484, 493
Tsuruoka 217–218 ImPulsTanz festival 280–281
Horiuchi Kan 2, 138 In the Mood for Frankie (Harrell 2016) 12
Hosoe, Eikoh 16, 45, 57, 66, 94–95, 153, 155, “In One Step Are a Thousand Animals” (Harrell) 12
159, 164–165, 168; “An Extravagantly Tragic Inata, Naomi 2, 41, 48, 48n2
Comedy: Photo Theater Starring a Japan indigeneity: 57–59, 63–69, 460; Ainu 62; in butoh,
Butoh Dancer, Genius (Hijikata Tatsumi)” ambiguity of 57; defining 57–59; ethnic dance
(photo shoot that was to become Kamaitachi, and socialist realism in ballet 62–63; of Hijikata’s
1969) 69n1, 101, 103, 110n7, 146, 154, 162, dance 65–67; and pop art in Rose-colored Dance
165–167, 224n1, 250, 532n12; Navel and 63–65; of Taisho democracy 58; see also dozoku
A-Bomb (Heso to genbaku 1960) 94, 377n2, innovation: of Hijikata’s choreography 100; in
504, 506; Otoko to Onna (Man and Woman Tohoku Kabuki Project 102–105; in Twenty-Seven
1960) 506; VIVO 159, 163 Nights for Four Seasons’ choreography 100–102
Hōsōtan (Story of Smallpox, 1972) 101–103, 105, “inserting one’s hip” 88–90
108, 110n4, 216–217, 222, 260n26, 283n16, inter-Asian transnationalism 372, 376–377
365–366, 378n12; smallpox as metaphor for intermediality 163–165
leprosy 216, 224n2 international roots of butoh 246–247
Hoyer, Dore 127 interviews, with Oguri and Roxanne Steinberg
Hughes, Langston 45, 47; “The Negro Speaks of 491–512; with Shakina Nayfack 388–394
Rivers” 45; “Tungsten M. Hughes” 47 Iova-Koga, Shinichi 19, 535–537
human body: eurythmics 130; as objet 73–75, 75; Iraqi Bodies 337; mission statement 340
problematics of 94–95 Ishii, Baku 7, 26
Human Buddha (Ishii Baku 1953) 29 Ishii, Mitsutaka 2, 7, 8, 9, 21n4; All Japan Art
Dance Society 31; Butoh City: Blind Thief Version
ichinin-ippa (“One person, one troupe,” Maro) 8, 7; MU-dance 7; structured improvisations 7
14, 183, 248, 455 Italy 265; “bodily state” concept 273–274; Buto,
identity: American-ness 526; the assumption of la nuova danza giapponese (D’Orazi 1997) 267;
in butoh 95–96; “Japaneseness” 95; “return to Cristiani, Alessandra 270–271; first butoh
Japan” 95; in South Africa 457–458; stolen body performance in 263; Gana, Maddalena 271;
548
Index
history of butoh in 262–263; Kasai’s arrival 258–259, 262; gender ambiguity 361–362; in
in 267–269, 267, 268, 269; Liòs Company Italy 262, 265, 267–269, 267, 268, 269, 271,
267; order of dancers’ arrival in 274n2; Pintus, 273–274, 274n10; My Own Apocalypse (1994)
Alessandro 271 193; Nobody’s Money (2011) 199–200; Pollen
Ivy, Marilyn 106 Revolution 192–193, 195–196; study in Germany
Iwaki, Kyoko 17 194–195, 418; Tenshi-kan 194–195, 194;
Iwana, Masaki 10, 264–265; workshops 264–266 training exercises 8; in the USA 315–319; 323,
“I-You-We” 350–351 328–329, 331, 333–334; vibrational voice power
IZZIEs, recognition of butoh 321 196–199; workshops 448
Kaseki Yuko 277–278, 281, 304, 331, 332, 334,
Jansen, Sara 15 368, 420–421
Japan: death rituals 375–376; ethnic identity katsugen movement 424; see also Nakajima Natsu;
in butoh 7; Hokkaido, Hoppo Butoh-ha in Noguchi Haruchika
221–222; Orientalism 12, 90; post-WWII Katsura, Kan 14, 249
proliferation of “blackness” in avant-garde Kawaguchi, Takao 11, 369
circle 45–48; printmaking in 135; segregation Keijijogaku (Emotion in Metaphysics) 163–164, 194
policy 378n4; social normativity of 361–362; keiken (experience) 511
underground theater scene 182; see also rural keiren (twitching, seizures) 233
Japan; urban Japan Kelley, Robin D. G. 49n6
Japanese dance history 1; citing folk dance in Kerner, Aaron 19
modern dance 60–62; goza no mai 83; hōbu 59–60; Kikan shōnen (Amagatsu 1978) 239
Nihon buyō 1; Western dance in Japan 59; Kinjiki see Forbidden Colors
yōbu 59 Kinjikinstruction (Evelin) 299
Japanese Drum (Eguchi 1951) 60 Klein, William 155, 159, 249–250
“Japaneseness” 95; of butoh 245–246 Kobayashi, Saga 4, 101, 159, 319, 366–367, 409–416
João Butoh 302n9 413, 414, 429, 432, 435n2
job, jackï 18 Kochuten 189, 248, 451–453; see also Dairakudakan;
Jokyo Gekijo (Kara Jūrō) 181–182 Maro, Akaji
Jooss, Kurt 2 Koi no kakehiki (The Bargain of Love, Sade) 71
Komuso (Murobushi 1976) 228–229; definition of
kabuki 2, 59; danmari 83; Hijikata’s relationship as “mendicant Zen monk” 229
with nanba 89; late Edo 83; nanba 90; Tohoku Korean perspectives on butoh 347–348
Kabuki Project 102–105; wakashū kabuki 364 Korean shamanism 348–353, 356n4, 356n5
Kafun kakumei (Pollen Revolution, 2001–2004) koshi o ireru (inserting the hip/tucking the pelvis)
192–193 61, 91n1
kagura 1, 66, 83, 533 koshi o otosu (lowering the hip/lowering the pelvis)
Kaiin no uma (Sea Dappled Horse, Maro 1980) 91n1
184–186; definition of the word kaiin 190n10 Kosuge Hayato 17
Kaitaisha 156–157 Kreutzberg, Harald 9, 26, 114, 130–131; aesthetics
Kamaitachi (Hosoe 1969) 57, 69n1, 103, 110n7, of 131; “sublime technique” 282n5
146, 154, 159, 162–163, 165–168, 167, 224n1, Krypt (Murobushi 2012) 231
250, 516; see also “An Extravagantly Tragic Kudō Tetsumi 150
Comedy: Photo Theater Starring a Japan Butoh Kuni Masami 26
Dancer” Kuniyoshi Kazuko 15, 208–209, 247, 282n4, 366
Kanamori Kaoru 46; see also Strange Fruit (1959) Kurihara, Nanako 7, 377n2
kankotsu dattai (exchange bones and steal the kuronuri (black face and body paint) 234n8
uterus) 124n9 Kusuno Takao 295–296
Kano Masanao 58 kut (Korean shamanism) 348, 351–352, 354, 356n5
Kara Jūrō 152–153, 190n2 Kyofu kikei ningen (Horrors of Malformed Men,
Kara・Mi – Two Flows (Amagatsu 2010) 240 Ishii Teruo 169) 216–217, 227
“Karn Evil 9: 1st Impression, Pt. 1” (Emerson, Lake &
Palmer) 399 La Argentina (stage name of Antonia Mercé y
Kasai Akira 2, 7, 8, 11, 13, 14, 117, 138, 140, Luque) 9, 26, 113–114, 124n3, 117–118, 121,
147, 148n13, 182, 192–201, 418, 484; Butoh 124n3, 127, 246, 280, 282n5, 368, 521–522,
America (2009) 193; debate about categorization influence on Ohno 116–118, 368–369; The
as butoh 193, 200n1, 222, 317; eurythmy Return of La Argentina (Harrell 2014) 12; see also
197–198, 198; Exusiai 196; in France 254–255, Admiring La Argentina
549
Index
language: in Ailing Terpsichore 176; butoh-fu 197, Marshall, Jonathan W. 16

212n4, 426–427; Hijikata 199, 204, 427–431, Marxism, in Hijikata’s writings 153
428 masculinity 40, 49n8, 139, 183, 363–364, 393,
The Last Eden: Gate to the Beyond (Le Dernier Eden: 397n7, in Iraqi Bodies’ The Baldheaded 337, 339,
Port de l’au-dela, 1978) 8, 229–230, 254, 256, 341–342; male butoh artists of the 1960s and
260n5, 277 1970s rebelling against 361
Lautréamont, Comte de (pen name of Isadore Masseur: A Story of a Theater that Sustains Passion
Ducasse) 3, 4, 40, 49n6, 269 (Anma 1963) 3, 38, 65, 194; Iimura Takahiko’s
Leda Association 3, 46, 79 film The Masseurs 154, 506
LEIMAY 325; understanding of butoh 326–331, Masson-Sékiné, Nourit 161
326, 327, 329 Matryoshka 401–402
LEIMAY LUDUS 325, 335 media: intermediality 163–165; remediation 154;
“likeness” (rashisa) 363; girl-likeness 363–365; see also film
see also girl/girlness/girl-likeness Meiji era 90
Liòs Company 267 Meiji Restoration 59
Living Theater 142 Melo, Carla 18
locality/rurality of butoh 222–223, new local Mercé y Luque, Antonia 9–10, 26, 124n3, 246, 276,
butohs 250–252, 251 296; see also La Argentina
Losheng Sanatorium 371; legacy of 373–374; Mesukazan (Female Volcano) dance name,
protest movement 378n5 Murobushi/Ikeda (1975–1977) 227, 234;
Lott, Eric 49n9 group name 229
Lotus Cabaret (Murobushi project) 229–230 metamorphosis 14, 104, 109, 144, 163, 256, 301,
“lowering the hip” (koshi o otosu) 88–90 376; Ohno as opposed to Hijikata 115, 117,
Lu, Joyce 19 120, 521
LUDUS 335 metaphysics: Emotion in Metaphysics 194; union
Lume group 296–298 with matter in Artaud 145–146
methods: Artaud as foundation for Hijikata 143,
ma (space/time/interval) 276–277, 281, 472, 143–144; “metamorphosis” 115; SU-EN Butoh
definition of 282n6, 349; for Maro 453, 454; Method 288–289; transfer to second-generation
“flavored ma” 454 students 419; see also butoh pedagogy
MA: Space-Time of Japan exhibition 8, 10, 205, Mexico: arrival of Sankai Juku 307–308; butoh in
254, 485 303–308, 304, 305, 307; contemporary artistic
maiginu (dance robe) 81 work, butoh as inspiration for 310; Festival
Maijuku (Tanaka Min) 10, 485–486, 488, 489n6, Cuerpos en Revuelta 303; institutional study of
494, 502n3 butoh in 309–310; Raíces profundas de la danza 305
Mailer, Norman 50n15 Mezur, Katherine 18
Maison d’Artaud 140 miburi 186, 349, 352, 452; see also gestures; teburi
Maki, Isaka 15 Mid-afternoon Secret Ceremony of a Hermaphrodite
makimono 65 (1962) 3, 40
MAMU (Endo) 280; MAMU Festival 281 migrant transnationalism 376–377; Critical Butoh
The Mandala of Mr. O (Nagano Chiaki 1971) 115 400–401
marebito 82 miira (mummy) 228–230, 232, 234n8; Komuso
Marenzi, Samantha 16 228–229
Maro, Akaji 8, 12, 14, 16, 20, 159, 181–190, 217, mime 2, 7, 13, 25–26, 31, 128, 270, 283n17; Japan
234, 238, 260n18, 367, 451–455; aspects of his Mime Research Lab 138; Mime Series Recitals
philosophy 348–349, 453–454; early life 181–182; 139; Mime Studio 138; Oikawa, Hironobu
“flavored ma” 454; gestures (miburi, teburi) 138–140, 143; see also danmari; Decroux, Etienne
186–187, 349, 352, 453; Hijikata’s influence on Mime Series Recitals 139; see also Oikawa Hironobu
182–183; ichinin-ippa (“one person, one troupe” Mimo Sapiens (series of performances by Oikawa
philosophy) 8, 14, 183, 248, 455; Kaiin no uma through 1960s) 139
184–186, 185; Kochuten 189, 452–454; ma 453, minzoku (folk, ethnicity) 57, 86; minzokugaku
454; meeting with Hijikata 182; methodology (ethnology) 96; see also dozoku
of 186, 425n6, 451; “molded phase” (igata, also misemono 82
chūtai) 186–188, 453; Paradise 188; “space body” Mishima Yukio 41, 43, 52, 54, 56, 72–73, 76n3, 87,
(uchūtai) 188–189, 348, 453–454; tenputenshiki 95, 102; 110n8, 159, 163, 238, 246, 255, 364;
181–182, 190, 452; see also Dairakudakan ritual suicide of 49n8, 110n8, 177n1
Marotti, William 15, 69n3, 151, 247, 306 Miya Misako 2, 9, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32
550
Index
Miyagawa Mariko 16, 19; on gestures 133; on neuer nagaginu (long robe) 81
Tanz 128 Nagano Chiaki 9, 115–116
Mobile Suit Gundam 11 Nagase Kiyoko 29
“model 1000-yen bill” project 93–94 Nagata Tatsuo 28, 45
modern art, Hijikata’s use of 108 Nakajima Natsu 2, 4, 14, 182, 197, 245, 252n1,
modern dance: citing folk dance in 60–62; French 274n17, 298, 304, 308–310, 367, 418, 423–424,
journals receptive to 260n13 526
“Modern Dance on Negro Document ’61” 45 Nakanishi Natsuyuki 3, 64–67, 73, 151, 214, 226,
modernism 163 239; inspiring Ohno with abstract painting 116;
modernization 58; for national entertainment 59–60 Study of Pink and Green (1964) 64
“molded phase” (igata, also chūtai) 186–188, 453 nakedness/nudity 79, 111n21, 151, 154–155, 163,
Monroe, Marilyn 64 184–185, 216, 228, 231, 256, 258, 361, 367, 416,
Montet, Bernardo 19, 258, 519–523 528; Tanaka Min 10, 263, 484–485
Moriya, Shige 325, 334 nanba 87–91; of Hijikata 88–89; “inserting the hip”
Motofuji Akiko 2, 37, 43, 45–46, 48n5, 159, 315, 88–90
319, 413, 416n2 Nancy International Theatre Festival (Festival
movement 5; actions 186–187; “anti-art” 150–152; Mondial de Théâtre de Nancy) 9, 184, 245,
Butoh Kaden 426–427; Eguchi on 27–28; 254–255, 485; Ohno at 117–118, 121, 262–263
emotion as initiator of 120–121; expression, “national poetics” 95
Ohno’s minimization of 122; of Hijikata nationalism: influence on Japanese cultural
105; images of dislocation in Hijikata 108; transformation 132–136; inter-Asian
“inserting one’s hip” 88–90; “lowering one’s transnationalism 372, 376–377
hip” 88–90; “metamorphosis” 120; “molded Nayfack, Shakina 18; interview with 388–397, 390,
phase” 187–188; Ohno’s basic motor patterns 391, 392, 394
123–124; Ohno’s minimization of 119; “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (Langston Hughes) 45
“passive” movement 189, 191n15, 412, 427, Neo Dada artists 3, 40, 63, 68, 93, 150–152
516; of Wigman 26–27; see also “anti-art”; Network of Stoppages (Duchamp, 1914) 108
improvisation neuer Tanz (new dance) 2, 31, 113, 126–131;
Movement Dynamics™ 458 eurythmics 130; Kreutzberg, Harald 131–132,
movies see cinema, and butoh; film incorrectly conjugated in Japan as “neue
Mr. O’s Book of the Dead (Nagano Chiaki 1973–1976) Tanz” 129
115 New Music Drama Theory (Shingaku gekiron,
MU-dance (Ishii Mitsutaka) 7 Tsubouchi Shōyō 1940) 59
Murano Shiro 29 New York Butoh Festival 325, 331–333, 332, 333;
Murobushi Kō 8, 14, 17, 147, 226–235, 247, NYBK 333–336, 333, 334; origins of 326–330,
280, 309, 310, 329, 331, 334, 525, 527, 536; 326, 327, 329
as apprentice to Hijikata 410, 414, 416n3–4; Nicely, Megan V. 16
Atnarat (2007) 232–233; “butoh of the outside” Nichirin (Sun Wheel, Ashikawa 1988) 209
227–228; in Dairakudakan 182–184, 227; Edge Niguro to Kawa (Negro and River, name of dance
(2000) 231; Experimental Body (2004) 231; program 1961, and Japanese translation of Weary
Hinagata (1977–1982) 229–230; “Hinagata” Blues, Langston Hughes, 1926) 45, 46, 47
manifesto (1977) 229; keiren (seizures) 233; Nihon buyō 2, 197, 440; see also hōbu; yōbu
Komuso 228–229; Krypt (2012) 231; The Last Nijinsky, Vaslav 127; connection to neuer Tanz
Eden (11978) 8, 229–230, 254, 256, 260n5, 277; 128–129; considered as butoh by Kasai 200,
Lotus Cabaret 229–230; Mesukazan (Female 269; Tamano compared to 315; use of hand
Volcano, Murobushi/Ikeda 1975–1977) 227; positions in butoh 5, 6, 101–102, 196, 230,
miira (mummy) 224, 228–230, 232, 234n8; 414, 420
pedagogy 418, 422–423, 425n6, 448; quick silver nikutai 97n5
(2005) 231–233, 231, 232, 329; sokushinbutsu Nippon no chibusa (Breasts of Japan, Hijikata 1983)
(self-mummification) 227–228; taoreru (falling) 205
233; theatrum chemicum 232; Zarathustra 230–231 Nobody’s Money (Kasai 2011) 199–200
Muronoi Yoko 274n7 Noguchi Haruchika 424; see also katsugen
music in butoh 130 movement
musikdrama 59 Noguchi Michizo 181, 188, 190n6, 279, 420
My Mother (Watashi no okāsan, Ohno 1981) Noguchi Minoru 10, 484
118–119, 294, 378n9, 437, 521–522 Noguchi taiso 130, 188, 279, 334, 420–421, 425n6,
My Own Apocalypse (Kasai 1994) 193 425n7, 536–537
551
Index
noh 2, 59, 61, 81, 86, 88–89, 297, 301, 364, 409, La Argentina’s influence on 116–118, 368–369;
440, 533, 537; butoh compared with 252, 409; metamorphosis in, as opposed to Hijikata
Kasai’s use of 195–197 115, 117, 120, 521; method of composition
“nomadic” performances 384–385 as a modern dancer 28–29; minimization of
non-human theater 231–233 movement 119; My Mother (Watashi no okāsan,
“notation” in Hijikata’s butoh 430; development 1981) 118–119, 294, 378n9, 437, 521–522; neuer
of 431; limitations of word “butoh-fu” 435n3; Tanz influence on 128, 132; The Old Man and the
overview of scholarship about 435n2; see also Sea (1959) 31–32; pauses, use of 123; pedagogy
butoh-fu of 263–264, 437–440, 520–521; perception of
notebooks, of Hijikata 4, 5, 12, 101, 200, 212n9; of global interconnection of life 121; Praise of Jacob
Artaud 144, 146, 147n6, 147n5; see also butoh-fu; (1949) 28; Random Thoughts 30–31; rejection of
“notation” in Hijikata’s butoh; scrapbooks, of technique 115; reviews of 28, 29, 33–34, 117,
Hijikata 119; second dance recital 29; second period of
Nouveau, Jean (variously romanized as Jan Nubo, silence 115; spatial organization of hands and
Jean Niveau, stage name of Ōta Junzō) 7, 138 feet 123–124; stylistic influences on 114–115;
NYBK (New York Butoh Kan Training Initiative) and surrealism 32; Tango 28 (1949); themes of
333–336, 333, 334 death in 118; touring 441–442; use of images
120–121; workshops 438; see also Admiring La
Ô Senseï (Diverrès, 2012) 521–523 Argentina
objet 67, 71, 93–95, 97; human body as 73–76 Ohno Kazuo Dance Studio 28–29
Oguri, interview with Roxanne Steinberg 492–501, Ohno Yoshito 2, 30, 34, 38, 41
495, 498, 499, 500 Oikawa Hironobu 2, 16; Artaud System 140;
Ohara, Akiko, arrival in Brazil 294–295 connection to butoh 140; education 137–138;
Ōhashi, Kakuya 13 interpretation of Barrault’s triangles 139–140;
Ohno Kazuo 1–3, 7, 9–22, 25–35, 50, 81, 95, 97, Mime Series Recitals 139
113–128, 130, 132–133, 135–140, 143, 158–162, The Old Man and the Sea (Ohno, 1959) 31–32;
164–165, 184, 190n9, 194, 245–247, 250–252, reviews 33–34
254, 257–259, 262–265, 269, 271, 273–274, omigoromo (mourning robe) 81
267–278, 280–283, 294–298, 301–302, 304, “On Hijikata Tatsumi” (Shibusawa 1968) 73
307–308, 313, 361–370, 378n9, 389, 395, 397n7, “one person, one troupe” see ichinin-ippa
400, 418–419, 421, 423, 435n8, 437–445, 448, onnagata 364, 368
457, 461, 467, 484, 511, 514, 516, 519–523, Ono, Robert 15
528–529, 531–532; appearances in Hijikata’s opera, butoh approach to 459–461
performances 34–35; archive in Italy 275, basic Operating Table (Eguchi and Miya) 26
motor patterns 123–124; characteristics of dance oral tradition, butoh-fu 197
before joining with Hijikata 25–28, 34–35, 114; D’Orazi, Maria Pia 10, 17
consolidation of “cosmology” 10n6, 118–119; Orientalism 10, 12, 90, 99, 102, 315, 344
coordination 123, 125n16; “cosmology” 121; origins: of ankoku butoh 99; of butoh 92; of Deluge
creative process 439–440; dances become more project 345–346, 345; of New York Butoh
abstract 118; death of 442–444, 443; delegation Festival 326–331, 326, 327, 329
123, 125n16; development of “cosmology” Osaka Expo 70 155–156
116; development of gestures from neuer Tanz “oscillating time” 239–242
128; deviation from modern dance 29–31; early Ōshima Nagisa 152–153
life of 113–114; emotion in 29–30, 114–115, o-shira saimon 83
119–122, 378n9, 438, 522; as end of ankoku butō Osuka Isamu 8; Byakkosha 8
118; expression, minimization of 122; female- Ōta Junzō see Nouveau, Jean
like gendering 368–369, 370; films of 9, 35, Otake, Eiko 16, 126; Eiko & Koma 8, 22n4,
114–117, 119, 369, 444; first dance recital 28; 191n11, 245–247, 252n3, 254–255
first meeting with Hijikata 30; first period of Otoko to onna (Man and Woman, Hosoe 1960) 45,
silence 29–30; forgiveness, as theme in 118–119; 159, 161, 506
form for 114–120, 122, 276; ghost motif Our Lady of the Flowers (Genet 1943) 9, 34, 46
121–122; girl-likeness of 117, 365, 368–370; o-zen (little table) used by Ohno in performance
in Hokkaido in 113, 115–116; images, use of 119, 125n15
120–121; improvisation in 10, 115, 117–122,
124, 262–263, 418, 423, 435n8; initial meeting Page, Ruth 26, 131
with Maureen Momo Freehill 437–438; Italian Pagès, Sylviane 17, 132–133, 140, 282n10,
reception of 262–264, 273; kankotsu dattai 124n9; 519–521, 523
552
Index
p’ansori (Korean epic narrative expressed through Hōsōtan 101; I Love Butoh! Kamiyama Teijiro
song and verse) 343–344, 346, 349–350, Photographic Collection 362; intermediality
352–353, 356n2 163–165; Kamaitachi 165–167, 167; link with
Panta Rhei (Murobushi, 1986) 227 death 164; post-war Japanese 158–159; “staged”
pantomime 7, 25, 31, 83, 128, 131, 138; see also 162–163; “subjective documentaries” 163;
mime; Mime Series Recitals; Nouveau, Jean; surrealism 161
Oikawa Hironobu physical theater companies, Iraqi Bodies 337
Paradise (Dairakudakan 2016) 185, 188 physicality of being 289–290
Paradise in a Jar Odyssey (Mukai 2001) 452 pilgrimages; see butoh pilgrimages 250–252, 251
Park Younghee 343–356, 354; Korean perspectives Piñon, Diego 251–252, 308, 318–319, 321, 388–389,
on butoh 347–348 393–395, 400, 448–449
passive movement 189, 191n15, 412–413, 427, 516 Pintus, Alessandro 271
pauses, in Maro 187; Ohno’s use of 123 poetry 464–465; of Artaud 145, 174–175; of
Pavlova, Anna 26 Bronwyn Preece 466–479; Hijikata’s use of
Péladan, Joséphin 72, 78 144–145; “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” 45
Performance for the Establishment of the Pure Love Poinciana: Beginning of the Summer that Will Freeze
Butoh School (Hijikata 1984, also translated as and Wane in the Non-Melodic Metropolis (Nagata
Performance for the Foundation of the Love-Dance Noriko 1959) 45
School) 10–11, 146, 485 political resistance 102, 300; see also gishiki
performances: The Baldheaded 337–342, 338; politics 14, 49n6, 49n8, 100, 102, 104, 106, 108–10,
blackface 49n9; “blackness” of Hijikata’s 37–45, 142–144, 150–154, 156–157, 181, 192, 194, 216,
38, 39, 42, 43, 44; Body-Vessel of the Priestess 221–222, 226, 228–231, 233–234, 246–248,
371–372; The Chronicle of the Phallic God (1973) 282n6, 288, 290, 295, 299–301, 306, 308, 310,
183; Le Dernier Eden: Porte de l’au-dela (The 323, 330, 341–342, 362–367, 370, 372–373,
Last Eden: Gate to the Beyond) 254–255; of 375–378, 381,-382, 384–386, 389, 395–396,
Dunham in Hijikata’s early works 41–45, 42, 400, 424, 457, 461, 527–528; Amagatsu as
43, 44; Exusiai 196; Forbidden Colors 38–40, 38, apolitical 241, The Baldheaded 337–342, 338;
39, 246; Performance for the Establishment of the counterculture 152–153; Dzi Croquettes group
Pure Love Butoh School 146–147; Geisenjo no 299; reenactment 300–301; of shintai 156–157
Okugata 205–206, 206; goza no mai 83; Hifu ni pollen, as metaphor for butoh’s non-linear
naru Inu Doke (Skin Clock for Those Wishing genealogy 193–194
to Become a Dog) 208–209; Hifu Uchu no Pollen Revolution (Kasai 2001–2004), 192–193,
Magudara (Magdalene of the Skin-Cosmos) 195–196, 199; definition of 192
211–212; Hitogata 205–206, 206; Kaiin no uma pop art: in Japan 69n8; in Rose-colored Dance 63–65
184–186, 185; Komuso 228–229; of Kreutzberg popularizing butoh in the United States 323
131–132; Paradise 188; Pollen Revolution 195–196; The Portrait of Mr. O (Nagano Chiaki 1969) 115
quick silver 231–233, 329; Revolt of the Body 96; posture, “space body” 188–189, 348, 453–454
rituals 151; Shiokubi (Salted Heads) 214, 218–221, Prager, Wilhelm 135
219; tourist performances 104; Twenty-Seven Praise of Jacob (Ohno 1949) 28
Nights for Four Seasons 100–102; Unetsu: The Egg praxis, Hijikata’s choreography as 100
Stands Out of Curiosity 239–240; Von Hinter der Preece, Bronwyn 18; poems of 466–479
Mauer (From Behind the Wall [1988]) 278–280; pre-modern Japanese art 106
see also choreography; dances printmaking 135
performative visualities 513–516 problematics of representation in butoh 93–95
performers, categorizing 12–13 protest movement: and butoh 153; Losheng
periods of Hijikata’s butoh 416n1 Sanatorium 373–374, 378n5; see also
philosophy: in butoh 222, 300–301; “dead body” demonstrations
of butoh 382; of Maro’s butoh 453–454
photo exhibitions, “An Extravagantly Tragic quick silver (Murobushi 2005) 231–233, 329
Comedy: Photo Theater Starring a Japan Butoh Quiet House (1973) 5
Dancer, Genius (Hijikata Tatsumi)” 69n1, 101,
103, 110n7, 146, 154, 162, 165–167, 224n1, 250, race: early butoh, “blackness” of 37; Hijikata’s
532n12 “blackness” 37–45; “Modern Dance on Negro
“photographic theatre” 163–165 Document ’61” 45; “national poetics” 95;
photography: butoh’s circulation through 249–250; proliferation of “blackness” in post-WWII
butoh’s remediation into images 154; “elective Japan’s avant-garde circles 45–48; see also
affinity” 159–160, 160; Hosoe, Eikoh 159; indigeneity; dozoku; minzoku; folk
553
Index
“radical juxtaposition” 111n12 307; Kara-Mi – Two Flows (2010) 240; Kikan
Rancière, Jacques 110 shōnen (1978) 239; mainstream success of 8–9,
Random Thoughts (Ohno 1953) 30–31 239; in Mexico 307–308; as representing all of
reenactment 300–301, definition of 300 butoh 12; Shijima: The Darkness Calms Down in
remediation 154, 507–508 Space (1988) 241; theory of “oscillating time”
reportage painting 63 239–242; Tobari: As if in an Inexhaustible Flux
Resplendent Shimmering Topaz Waterfall (Big Dance (Amagatsu 2008) 239; Toki: A Moment in the
Theater 2015) 11 Weave of Time (Amagatsu 2005) 239; Umusuna:
The Return of La Argentina (Harrell, 2014) 12 Memories Before History (Amagatsu 2012) 241;
“return to Japan” 5, 96, 105–106 Unetsu: The Egg Stands Out of Curiosity (1986)
“return to Tohoku” 106 239–240; using Noguchi taiso 425n6; see also
reviews: of Forbidden Colors 41–43, 42; of Kaiin no Amagatsu Ushio
uma 184–186, 185; of Ohno’s dance recitals 28, Sas, Miryam 48, 48n6, 102, 145
29, 117, 119; of The Old Man and the Sea 33–34; Schmidt, Johann 134
of Shiokubi (Salted Heads) 219; of Twenty-Seven Schneider, Rebecca 158
Nights for Four Seasons 106; see also Shibusawa Schwellinger, Lucia 16, 21n6
Tatsuhiko SCOT (Suzuki Company of Toga) 1
ritual 351; death rituals 375–376; Korean scrapbooks, of Hijikata 5, 11, 12, 101, 108, 111n15,
shamanism 356n4; kut 348; in performance 164, 419, 432, 435n12; see also butoh-fu; notation;
practices 151; in Twenty-Seven Nights for Four notebooks
Seasons 102; see also gishiki second dance recital of Ohno 29
Robertson, Jennifer 363 second generation of butoh dancers 100–101
Rodez psychiatric hospital 144 security treaty see ANPO
Rodman, Tara 16 Seed (1960) 3
Rosales, Gustavo Emilio 17 Seetoo, Chiayi 18
Rose-colored Dance: To M. Shibusawa’s House (1965) Segal, George 3
3, 40, 66, 68, 71, 194; female-likeness of men segregation 373–374; in Japan 378n4
in 365; Iimura Takahiko’s filmic recording 506; Seifert, Miki 18
indigeneity in 63–65, 68; photography in 164; Seki, Minako 14, 17, 277–281, 282n8, 283n14, 368,
poster design of 69n9, 73; stage art of 64–65 420–422, 425n6
rural Japan 5, 246, 375; Hijikata’s attitude towards sequences (of dance movements in Hijikata’s
103–104, 109, 216, 220, 224n6; in the 1970s butoh) 5
214–216; “locality” 224n8; tension with urban Séraphîta: My Girl with the Mirror Genitalia (Kasai
Japan 214–215 1994) 7, 267
Rynd, Roger 343–344 sexuality 56, 94, 143, 153, 163–164, 299, 361–366,
401, 462n1; Dunham exploring black female 38,
Saarinen, Tero 11 40; girl-likeness of male artists 363–365;
Sade, Marquis de 3, 40, 52, 71–73, 143, 163, 269; sex-gender system (in Japan) 364; see also
Histoire de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du vice 72 gender; homosexuality; transgender
Sakamoto, Michael 19 shamanism 105, 155, 247, 308, 348–353, 356n4,
Sakana no nioi no suru ojo (Princess that Smells like 356n5, 418, 440
Fish, Yuki 1977) 221 Shannon, Jacquelyn Marie 18
Sakharoff, Alexander 26 shaved heads in butoh 130–132, 219, 257, 263,
Sakurai Daizo 377, 379n14 484–485
San Francisco Butoh Festival 313–324, 318, 320, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko 15, 56, 65, 71–80, 75, 96,
322; end of 324; evolution of 319; inaugural 124n7, 143, 146, 220, 238; “Avant-Garde
festival 316–317; Kasai at 193–194; themes and and Scandal” 72; “Begone With the Ethics
trends 316–323 of Productivity” 73–74; “The Caged Eros”
Sankai Juku 8–9, 14, 17, 117–118, 183, 184, 73; comparison of Hijikata to Sade 72; “The
196, 237–242, 245–247; aesthetics of 238, Danger Within the Body” 75; early life of
242n2, 257–258, 313, 315, 324, 340, 420, 71–72; heterodoxy of 75–76; “On Hijikata
512; Amagatsu-shō (Homage to Ancient Tatsumi” 73; human body as objet 73–75;
Dolls, 1977) 238; as adjusting their dance to “She Fears a Negative Response” 74; see also
cater to Europeans 118; Bakki (1981) 307; Rose-colored Dance: To M. Shibusawa’s House
choreography 13, 238–239; in France 254–255, Shige, Moriya 17, 325–327, 329–331, 334
257, 260n10, 262–263; Hibiki (1998) 307; Shijima: The Darkness Calms Down in Space
Kagemi: Beyond The Metaphors of Mirrors (2000) (Amagatsu 1988) 241
554
Index
<Shimchong> Daughter Overboard! (Neideck 2016) Story of Smallpox (Hijikata 1972) see Hōsōtan
353 Strange Fruit (1959) 46; see also Yura Kazuo;
shintai 97n5, 156–157, 267, 306; see also Body Kanamori Kaoru
Weather (Shintai kisho) Street Cleaning Event (Hi Red Center 1964)
Shinto 1, 5, 66, 440 151–152
Shiokubi (Salted Heads, Bishop Yamada 1975) 214, student demonstrations 109, 111n21, 152–153, 410
218–221, 219 Study of Pink and Green (Nakanishi 1964) 64
shironuri (white face and body paint) 3, 37–40, Sturges, John 35n5
81, 83, 108, 115, 161, 166, 181–185, 195, 230, Subject: Dead (Tanaka Min 1974) 10
234n8, 237, 251, 256–257, 263, 361–362, 364, “subjective documentaries” 163
367, 369, 371, 376, 382, 385, 399, 439, 451, subjectivity in butoh 158–159
464, 472; Amagatsu’s interpretation of 237; “sublime technique” 282n5
Iraqi Bodies’ use of 338–342; origin of 3; as SU-EN 17, 201n10, 212n9, 250–252, 285–292, 287,
stereotype of butoh 12, 257, 300, 313, 316, 339 291, 317, 321, 344, 386n4, 419–421, 426, 435n3;
show dance: debut performance of Hijikata’s Body Materials 251, 287–289, 292, 336; Butoh
apprentices 413–415, 413, 414; training through Body 203, 208, 211, 212, 289; debut performance
415; see also cabaret of 212n9; transmission of 209–210
shugendō (mountain asceticism) 227–228, 232 SU-EN Butoh Company 285–292; Kaze no
shu-ha-ri (form-break-separate or recreate) 533–537 cho (Butterfly of the Wind, 1992) 285–286;
Shumu (String Universal Dream, Ashikawa 1988) performances 290–291
209 SU-EN Butoh Method 288–289
Sirca, Joe 41 suffering 222–223, 230, 337 339–340, 396, 439,
site-specific performances 13; of Bishop Yamada 445, 449, 470; image of in butoh as reason for
223–224; Corpus Delicti street protests 385–386 connecting it to a-bomb 230, 260n16
Situation Theater (Jōkyō gekijo Kara Jūrō) 8, Sugar Candy 172; name of performance Mishima
181–182, 217, 377, 379n13 alludes to 54–55; lickable program for Rose-
social change 192, 199–200 colored Dance 64
social dances 1 Sumera daikōgan (The Great Imperial Scrotum,
social normativity in Japan 361–362 Maro 1974) 190n7
socialist realism, in ballet 62–63; “nationalist form, Summer Storm (Natsu no arashi, Hijikata 1973)
socialist content” (Stalin) 62 367–368, 503
sokushinbutsu (self-mummification) 227–228; surrealism 1, 3–4, 12, 63, 68, 71, 101–102, 143, 222,
see also Murobushi Kō 384–385; in Ailing Terpsichore 172; as anti-racist,
Sontag, Susan 111n12 anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist 48n6; Bellmer,
Soseki, Natsume 97 Hans 74; in butoh 3–4, 12, 40, 145, 364, 381;
South Africa, identity in 457–458 in butoh-fu 197, 249, 420; Giacometti, Alberto
“space body” (uchūtai, Maro) 188–189, 348, 32; human body as objet 73–75, 75; and Ohno
453–454 10, 32, 115; and photography 161–164, 166;
spatial organization: Butoh Body in time and Takiguchi Shūzō 48n6
space 289; goza no mai 83; of hand and foot Suzuki Shiroyasu 106
movements in Ohno 123–124 Suzuki Tadashi 1, 91, 105, 209, 296, 533, 535, 537,
“spirituality of Zen” 90–91 538n1
“staged photography” 162–163 Suzuki Yukio 231, 234n9, 304
Stanislavski method 447, 449, 62 Suzuran-toh (Yuki) 221, 533–534; Hokke-ko (Study
Steinberg, Roxanne 19; interview with Oguri of Atka Mackerel, 1978) 221; Sakana no nioi
492–501, 495, 498, 499, 500 no suru ojo (Princess that Smells like Fish, Yuki
Steiner, Rudolf 7, 147, 197, 200n9, 269, 418 1977) 221
stereotypes 362, 377n2, 404, 528; of butoh as Swan Lake (Muku Naomi, Dairakudakan, 2010) 189
connected to A-bomb 230, 257, 260n16; butoh
employing and contesting gender stereotypes Taha, Anmar 337–342, 338; The Baldheaded 337–342,
363–366; categorizing butoh performers 12–13; 338
contesting South African stereotypes 456, 458, taiken (experience) 511
459; of Iraqis 337; look of butoh performers Taisho Era (1912–1926) 58, 64, 92; Taisho
with white body paint, shaved heads and slow Democracy movement, indigeneity of 58
movements 257, 298, 300 Taiwan 139, 371–379; death rituals 375–376;
Stewart, Ellen 12 Losheng Sanatorium 373–374; migrant
stolen body of butoh 96–97 transnationalism 376–377
555
Index
“Taiwanese body,” exploration through butoh 373 Tobari: As if in an Inexhaustible Flux (Amagatsu
Tak Hoyoung, 343–356, 345; Korean perspectives 2008) 239
on butoh 347–348 To Have Done with the Judgment of God (Artaud
Takai Tomiko 2 1947) 144, 146
Takami Jun 29 “To Prison” (Kemusho e, Hijikata 1961) 58, 153,
Takechi Tetsuji 7, 12, 15, 88–91, 247; dialogue with 381–383, 424, 528
Tomioka Taeko 85–88 Tohoku Kabuki Project (Tohoku kabuki keikaku) 35,
Takenouchi Atsushi 264–265, 274n2, 304, 325 101–105, 109, 155; gestures 103
Takiguchi Shūzō 3, 48n6, 74, 161–162, 166, 239 Toki: A Moment in the Weave of Time (Amagatsu
Tamura Ryuichi 29 2005) 239
Tamura Tetsuro 8, 182, 183, 217, 219, 227, Tomioka Taeko 12, 15, 88, 90; dialogue with
278–280, 283n14; Dance Love Machine 8, 183, Takechi Tetsuji 85–88
278–279, 281, 283n14, 425n6 Tomoe Shizune 209–212, 250, 285–286, 288, 292
Tanaka Ikko 64, 66–67 Tomoe Shizune & Hakutobo 203, 208, 212n1,
Tanaka Min 10–14, 19, 146–147, 155, 245, 251, 212n7, 285–286, 292
254–255, 257, 259, 259n2, 260n4, 262–263, 271, tourist performances (omiyage butoh), Hijikata
274n2, 282n9, 295–296, 300, 308, 313, 316, 389, criticizes folk performances as 104
397n4, 418, 421, 483–489, 488, 491, 493–494, traditional performing arts 41, 212; Hijikata’s
499, 502n3, 502n4; experimentation 10, repudiation of connection to butoh 104;
483–484; farming, influence on dance practice hypothesized connection with butoh 58–60, 66,
486–488, 487; meeting with Hijikata 485–486; 68, 83, 85–88, 99, 102–105, 197, 247, 252n3,
“naked” period 484–485; see also Body Weather 308, 347, 364, 376, 409, 412; transformed for
(Shintai kisho); Maijuku modern tastes 59–60, 63; use of African forms
Tango (Ohno 1949) 9, 28 by job 456–460; use by Kasai 193, 194, 195, 222;
tango, as danced by Ohno 9, 117, 262, 369, 522 use of Korean forms by Neideck 343, 349–353;
taoreru (falling) 233 use by Murobushi 232
teburi (gesture) 349, 352, 453; see also Dairakudakan; training 91, 138, 143, 152, 246, 248, 250–251,
Maro; miburi 257, 259, 271, 301, 323, 344, 347, 352, 418,
technique 126; Artaud as filiation for 143, 144–147; 447, 449, 459; Ashikawa 203, 209–211, 290;
of Ashikawa 205–208, 206, 207; “inserting one’s burlesque show dance as training 415; through
hip” 88–90; knowledge of in discourse 13–14; Butoh Kaden 427–432, 434; CAVE/New York
nanba 90; Ohno’s rejection of 115; in “return to Butoh Kan 325–326, 330–331, 333–335;
Tohoku” 106; “sublime technique” 282n5 German modern dance 132, 134, 227, 246, 257,
Tenshikan (Kasai) 7, 194–195, 333 295, 420; Hijikata 4, 18, 79, 111n15, 145, 156,
tent 183; of Hata Kanoko 371, 377; of Kara 204–205, 271, 367, 409–410, 415, 419–420,
379n13; of Sakurai 379n14 427–432, 434; Hijikata’s choreography not
tenputenshiki (“just being born is this world is a taken to need 105–106, 257; Eguchi 27;
great talent itself ” Maro) 181–182, 190, 452 Furukawa 278; Iova-Koga 421; Iwana 262,
Terayama Shuji 1, 66, 110, 364, 506 265–267; Kasai 7–8, 194–195, 197–199, 447;
texts 111n18; butoh-fu 419–420; “Hinagata” Kusuno 295, 296, 301n3; Maro (Dairakudakan)
manifesto 229; notational records of Hijikata’s 18, 283n14, 348, 451–454; Murobushi 227,
dancers 426–427 229, 423, 447; Noguchi taiso 279, 425n6,
theater: butoh approach to 459–461; cabarets 536; Ohno’s methods 18, 409–410, 438–439,
190n4; furigoto-geki 59; Living Theater 142; 520–521: Ohno’s pre-butoh dancers lack 28;
non-human 231–233, 231, 232; “photographic that Ohno received 27, 31, 113–114, 122, 128,
theatre” 163–165; Situation Theater of 246, 263; performers without butoh training
Kara Jūrō 8, 379n13; Tent Theater 379n14; 10, 12–13, 294, 302n9, 339; Piñon 393, 395,
underground theater 152–153, 181–182 400, 447, 449; Seki 421–422, 425n6; similarity
Theater of Cruelty: Artaud’s conception 143, 146, to somatics and postmodern dance 421;
butoh as realization of 143, 307 socialization 54–55; SU-EN 285, 287–289,
The Theater and its Double (Artaud, 1938) 142–143 292, 421; Tamano 535; Tanaka/Body Weather
theatrum chemicum 232 10, 11, 271, 418, 483–486, 488–489, 491, 494,
Thomas, Colette 145 498–499, 502; traditional Japanese performing
‘Three Bellmers’ (scene from Summer Storm, arts 90, 301, 412; traveling to Japan for (butoh
Hijikata 1973) 367–368 pilgrimage) 248, 250, 258; with more than
Three Phases of Leda (1962) 3, 46, 79 one teacher 421; Yoshioka 279; see also butoh
Tisci, Riccardo 11 pedagogy; Butoh Kaden; workshops
556
Index
trans-activism 388, 394–395; interview with Van Gogh, Vincent 146

Shakina Nayfack 388–397 van Hensbergen, Rosa 10, 17, 18
transformation 26–27, 84, 94, 96, 97n5, 100, vectors and tensions of butoh practices and
110, 139, 163, 249, 263, 281, 282n8, 307, 311 discourse 12–14
381, 388, 396, 405, 418, 421, 473, 513, 535; Vessey, Julia A. 18
Agamben 107–108; Amagatsu (Sankai Juku) Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste 74–75
239; Artaud 143–145; Ashikawa 208, 210–211, Visitations (Cima, 2005) 260n26
285; CAVE/LEIMAY 326–331, 335–336; VIVO (photography collective) 159, 163
Critical Butoh 400–401, 405; Hijikata 4, 74, vocal transformation 345–346
101, 10–105, 109, 145, 172, 274n11, 405, voice 144, 146–147, 148n11, 173, 175–176, 193,
430–431, 434, 535; gender 364; Kasai 192, 197–199, 233, 335, 435n7, 493, 501; image-
195–199; Maro (Dairakudakan) 188–189, based approach to 349–350, 352; as opposed to
454; Murobushi 227, 230, 232; Neideck notation 427, 429–433; vocal transformation
345–346, 348, 351; Ohno 120, 264, 280, 345–346; see also p’ansori; voice power
521–522; in photography 163–166; as postwar voice power 196–199
preoccupation 94, 96, 97n5, 150–152, 155–156, Von Hinter der Mauer (From Behind the Wall,
418, 508; SU-EN 317; Waguri 423, 429; see also Tamura 1988) 278–280
shamanism
transgender 299, 363–364, 388–389, 392, 395, 513; Waguri Yukio 18, 110, 197, 200n6, 247, 250,
transsexual 299; see also gender 271, 331, 333, 334, 425n8, 426, 426–435; as
transmission 199–200; of the Butoh Body 209–210 apprentice to Hijikata 409–410, 413–415; butoh
Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security pedagogy 419–423; see also Butoh Kaden
between the United States and Japan (ANPO) Wakamatsu Miki 15, 38, 40, 43, 52
94, 152–153, 226, 400 wakashū kabuki 364
Tsubouchi Shōyō 59–61, 63, 68, 83, 84n3 war, Corpus Delicti street protests 382–385
Tsuda Nobutoshi 2, 26, 52 Warhol, Andy 64, 69n9
“Tungsten M. Hughes” 47 Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (Prager 1925) 135
Twelve Phases of the Terpsichore of Darkness: Fourteen Western dance see ballet; flamenco; hip-hop
Nights for the Louvre Palace see Yami no maihime culture; neuer Tanz; tango; yōbu
jūnitai: Ruburukyu no tame no jūyonban “white,” on butoh becoming 37–45, 48, 341;
Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church ethnicity of “Whiteness” 404, 456; symbolism
(Harrell 2009) 12 of in premodern Japan 81; “whiteface” 37
Twenty-Seven Nights for Four Seasons (Shiki no white face and body paint see shironuri
tame no nijūnanaban 1972) 68, 100–106, 108, Wigman, Mary 1, 2, 102, 116, 124n8, 126–130,
110n2, 110n7, 216, 420, 528; Hijikata’s personal 133–134, 258, 282n6, 283n15, 309, 522;
metamorphosis for premiere of 109; innovative “Absolute Dance” 27, 280; as teacher of Ishii,
choreography in 100–102 Eguchi and Miya 9, 26–27, 59, 126–130
women: girl-likeness of Butoh women 361–362,
Umusuna: Memories Before History (Amagatsu 2012) 365–367; girl-likeness of male artists 363–365;
241 see also gender
Underground (Neideck 2012) 354, 356n3 “The Women’s Kingdom” (Shibusawa 1965) 74
underground theater 101, 104, 132, 152–153, 155, words: choreography of Hijikata’s relationship to
160, 181–182, 190n2, 209, 255, 278, 295, 306, 204; of Hijikata’s butoh 427–431, 428
313, 315, 511; Maro, Akaji 181–182 Work No. 1 (Eguchi and Miya) 26
Unetsu: The Egg Stands Out of Curiosity (1986) workshops 7–8, 246, 251, 294, 296, 304, 339–340,
239–240 373, 385, 400, 415, 448–449, 491; Butoh Kaden
Unique Dance Group, renamed Unique Ballet 430, 434, 435n4, 435n9; in butoh pedagogy
Group in 1957 (Horiuchi Kan) 30, 138 418–425; CAVE/NYBK 325, 331, 333–334;
United States: American-ness 526; blackface as circulation of butoh ideas and techniques
in 49n9; butoh in San Francisco 313–314; 246, 249–250, 281, 372; Dairakudakan 186,
hip-hop culture 3, 527–528, 531; New York 188, 190, 191n13, 451–454; Endo 281; Hijikata
Butoh Festival 325, 331–336; pop art 63–65; 493; first Italian butoh workshop 263–264, 264;
popularizing butoh in 323; San Francisco Butoh Iwana Masaki 264–267, 274n3; Kasai 197, 269,
Festival 315–316 274n12; Murobushi 234; Muronoi Yōko 274n7;
urban Japan: “locality” 224n8; tension with rural Ohno Kazuo 10, 14, 115, 117, 263–264, 280,
Japan 214–215 296, 369–370, 437–438, 440; San Francisco
Used, Abused and Hung out to Dry (Harrall 2013) 12 Butoh Festival 313–314; as source of income for
557
Index
performers 13, 340; SU-EN 289; Tanaka Min Yoneyama Mamako 2, 62, 138
484–486, 488, 502 Yoshida Yukihiko 16
writing, intermingling with body 145 Yoshikuni Igarashi 153
Wuzazu 82 Yoshimura Masunobu 40, 151
Yoshioka Minoru 214
Yagawa Sumiko 72 Yoshioka Yumiko (stage name, Mizelle Hanaoka)
yamabushi 227–228 8, 14, 17, 227, 234n3, 265, 276–282, 283n13,
Yamada, Bishop (Yamada Ippei) see Bishop 304, 315, 314, 318–319, 331, 344, 366–367, 421,
Yamada 425n6, 536; part of first butoh performance in
yami (darkness) 205, 259, 416n4; yami no ichiba Europe 229, 230, 247, 277
(black market) 416n4 Yuki Yuko 220–222, 227, 362, 367, 370; Hokke-ko
Yami no maihime jūnitai: Ruburukyu no tame no (Study of Atka Mackerel, 1978) 221; only
jūyonban (variously translated as Twelve Phases female founding member of Dairakudakan
of the Terpsichore of Darkness: Fourteen Nights for 221, 227; Sakana no nioi no suru ojo (Princess
the Louvre Palace; Fortnight for the Louvre Palace: that Smells like Fish, 1977) 221; Suzuran-toh
Twelve Phases of the Dancing Princess of Darkness, (company name) 221, 533–534
1978) 8, 205, 259n2 Yura Kazuo 46; see also Strange Fruit (1959)
Yanaihara Isaku 32
Yasuda Shugo 31 Z-A 1980 Zarathustra (Murobushi 1980) 230
Yellow Butterfly Flying to the South (Hata Zaitsu, Gyohei 259
Kanoko’s company) 371–378; Body-Vessel of the Zarathustra 229–231; as character from Nietzsche
Priestess (2011) 371–372, 375–376 used by Murobushi 229–230; as title of
yōbu (western dance) 59, 60 restaging of dance Zarathustra (Murobushi 2005)
Yōbutsu shintan (Chronicle of the Phallic God, 231; see also Z-A 1980 Zarathustra
1973) 183 Zen 86, 140, 229, 252n3, 255, 514, 525, 531; butoh
Yokohama: Brazilian dancers in 296–298; French being stereotyped as 377n2; “spirituality of ”
dancers in 519–520 90–91; use of by John Cage 102; see also
Yokoo Tadanori 3, 64, 69n9, 73, 154; see also Rose- Komuso (mendicant Zen monk); o-zen
colored Dance, poster design of (little table)
Yomiuri Indépendant-ten 93, 150 “Zhugao zhiqi” 378n9; see also Body-Vessel of the
Yoneyama Kunio 2, 49n13; see also Hijikata Tatsumi Priestess (2011)
558

Bruce Baird - Rosemary Candelario - The Routledge Companion To Butoh Performance-Routledge (2018)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Bruce Baird - Rosemary Candelario - The Routledge Companion To Butoh Performance-Routledge (2018)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO

The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance provides a comprehensive introduction to and

Rosemary Candelario is Associate Professor of Dance at Texas Woman’s University, USA.

The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/handbooks/

Edited by Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario

For Jeanne, Beckett and Axel

List of ﬁgures xiii

Introduction: dance experience, dance of darkness, global butoh:

1 On the eve of the birth of ankoku butoh: postwar Japanese

2 From vodou to butoh: Hijikata Tatsumi, Katherine Dunham,

3 Contemporary nightmare: an avant-garde dance group dances

4 The relationship between avant-garde dance and things 54

5 Rethinking the “indigeneity” of Hijikata Tatsumi in the 1960s

6 À la maison de Shibusawa: the draconian aspects of Hijikata’s butoh 71

7 Hijikata Tatsumi: burnt offering dancer 78

8 A certain kind of energy: dancing modern anxiety 79

9 Butoh and taboo 81

10 “Inserting the hip/s” and “lowering the hip/s” excerpt from

11 The problematics of butoh and the essentialist trap 92

12 Returns and repetitions: Hijikata Tatsumi’s choreographic practice as a

13 Ohno Kazuo: biography and methods of movement creation 113

14 What we know and what we want to know: a roundtable on butoh and

15 Oikawa Hironobu: bringing Decroux and Artaud into Japanese

16 Foundations and ﬁliations: the legacy of Artaud in Hijikata Tatsumi 142

17 Butoh’s remediation and the anarchic transforming politics of

18 Bodies at the threshold of the visible: photographic butoh 158

19 The book of butoh; the book of the dead 171

20 “Open butoh”: Dairakudakan and Maro Akaji 181

21 Growing new life: Kasai Akira’s butoh 192

23 The expanding universe of butoh: the challenge of Bishop Yamada

24 Murobushi Kō and his challenge to butoh 226

25 Oscillation and regeneration: the temporal aesthetics of Sankai Juku 237

26 “Now we have a passport”: global and local butoh 245

27 A history of French fascination with butoh 254

30 SU-EN Butoh Company – body, nature, and the world 285

31 Butoh in Brazil: historical context and political reenactment 294

32 A sun more alive: butoh in Mexico 303

33 Global butoh as experienced in San Francisco 313

34 LEIMAY, CAVE, and the New York Butoh Festival 325

35 Iraqi Bodies’ The Baldheaded: “butoh”-inspired Iraqi contemporary

36 “We need to keep one eye open . . . ”: approaching butoh at sites of

37 Butoh’s genders: men in dresses and girl-like women 361

40 Butoh beyond the body: an interview with Shakina Nayfack on transition,

41 Critical Butoh and the colonial matrix of power 399

43 Butoh pedagogy in historical and contemporary practice 418

45 A ﬂower of butoh: my daily dance with Ohno Kazuo (1995–2012) 437

46 On and through the butoh body 447

47 My Dairakudakan experience 451

48 Butoh as an approach to performance in South Africa 456

49 Wrecking butoh: dancing poetic shores 464

50 Tanaka Min: the dance of life 483

51 Body Weather Laboratory Los Angeles: an interview with Roxanne

52 The cinematic forms of butoh ﬁlms 503

53 Locus solus – locus fracta: butoh dance as protocol for visual

54 Ohno Kazuo’s lessons for a French choreographer: Ô Senseï

56 Burn butoh, start again 533

2.8 Cover illustration of Niguro to Kawa (Tokyo: Kokubunsha, 1958)

46.1 Choreographer/performer Katherine Adamenko. Water Cure

Scholars, Association of Theatre in Higher Education, and Performance Studies International.

Christine Greiner is Professor in the Department of Body Languages, Graduate Program of

Iwaki Kyoko is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at Waseda University specializing in Japa-

Jonathan W. Marshall is an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in history. His mono-