Butoh

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Butoh (sometimes written butô) is the collective name for a diverse range of techniques and motivations for dance inspired by the Ankoku-Butoh movement. It typically involves playful and grotesque imagery performed in white-body makeup but there is no set style. Its origins have been attributed to Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno.

1 History
2 More on Ohno and Hijikata
3 Influence
4 International
5 External links

[edit] History

The first butoh piece was Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours), by Tatsumi Hijikata. Based on the novel of the same name by Yukio Mishima, the piece explored the taboo of homosexuality and ended with the smothering of a live chicken between the legs of Yoshito Ohno (Kazuo Ohno's son) and Hijikata chasing Yoshito off the stage in darkness. This piece outraged the audience, resulted in the banning of Hijikata from the festival where Kinjiki premiered and established him as an iconoclast.

In later work, Hijikata continued to subvert conventional notions of dance. Inspired by writers such as Yukio Mishima, Lautréamont, Artaud, Genet and de Sade, he delved into grotesquerie, darkness, and decay. Simultaneously, Hijikata explored the transmutation of the human body into other forms, such as smoke, dust, ghosts, and animals. He also developed a poetic and surreal choreographic language, butoh-fu (fu means "word" in Japanese), to help the dancer transform into other materials.

Starting in the early 1980s, Butoh experienced a renaissance as Butoh groups began performing outside Japan for the first time. The most famous of these groups is Sankai Juku.

Butoh's status at present is ambiguous. Accepted as a performance art overseas, it remains fairly unknown in Japan.

A Butoh performance choreographed by Yoshito Ohno appears at the beginning of the Tokyo section of Hal Hartley's 1996 film Flirt.

[edit] More on Ohno and Hijikata

Kazuo OHNO/ŌNO (or ŌNO Kazuo, to use the eastern name order) is a dancer associated with Butō, and considered by many to be one of the greatest performers of our time.

Born in 1906, in Hakodate, Hokkaido, he began formal study of dance in 1933, not long after seeing the dancer La Argentina in a performance that would forever alter the course of his destiny. After seeing her he decided himself to become a dancer. Roughly 50 years later, he paid homage to this muse with the solo performance, 'Admiring La Argentina'.

Now largely in a wheelchair, Ōno-san has been performing and teaching with his son Yoshito to the present time. The least that can be said of this man is that he performed and taught well into his 90's, a remarkable feat in and of itself.

Ōno has gone on to become a guru and inspirational figure to many, and is thought of his followers as the kind of performer capable of making a person weep with just the shift of an arm or focus, his very presence being an 'artistic fact'.

In 1960, Ōno began to work directly with HIJIKATA Tatsumi, widely considered the originator of Butō technique - although some would say that only insofar as there is a technique behind Butō, it is Hijikata who created it, in the form of his Butō-Fu. Butō-Fu are a collection of visualization cues, of a verbal/textual and visual nature, that are used to construct both form and quality of movement. An authoritative collection of Butō-Fu has been aggregated into a multi-media DVD-ROM by Yukio Waguri (a student of Hijikata and performer in his company for many years).

Ōno, on the other hand, was less of a technician and choreographer and more focused on being purely a solo performer. Together with Hijikata, they form the nucleus of what has come to be know as Butoh.

Students of these two great personae have been known to show up the differing orientations of their masters. While Hijikata was a fearsome technician of the nervous system influencing input strategies, Ōno is thought of as a more natural, individual and nurturing kind of figure.

[edit] Influence

Teachers influenced by more Hijikata style approaches tend to use highly elaborate visulizations that can be highly mimetic, theatrical and expressive. A good example of this teaching would be Koichi and Hiroko Tamano, founders of Harupin-Ha (who incidentally own a sushi restaurant in San Francisco).

Teachers who have spent time with Ohno seem to be much more eclectic and individual in approach, bearing the mark of their master, perhaps, in tendencies to indulge in wistful states of spiritualized semi-embodiment.

There have however been many unique groups and performance companies influenced by the movements created by Hijikata and Ohno, ranging from the highly minimalist of Sankai Juku, to very theatrically explosive and carnivalesque performance of groups like Dai Rakudakan.

[edit] International

Numerous Butoh companies exist outside of Japan in Europe, Asia, and North and South America. The multimedia, physical theater-oriented group called Ink Boat in San Francisco incorporates humour into their work.

Many Nikkei (or members of the Japanese diaspora), such as Japanese Canadians Jay Hirabayashi of Kokoro Dance and Denise Fujiwara, incorporate butoh in their dance or have launched butoh dance troupes.