Butoh Totally Explained

Everything about Butoh totally explained

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 often performed in white-body makeup but there's no set style. Its origins have been attributed to Japanese dance legends Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno.

History

The first butoh piece was Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours), by Tatsumi Hijikata, which premiered in 1959. Based on the novel of the same name by Yukio Mishima, the piece explored the taboo of homosexuality and ended with a live chicken behind held between the legs of Yoshito Ohno (Kazuo Ohno's son) and Hijikata chasing Yoshito off the stage in darkness. Primarily as a result of the misconception that the chicken had died due to strangulation, this piece outraged the audience, and 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 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.

Butoh in popular culture

A Butoh performance choreographed by Yoshito Ohno appears at the beginning of the Tokyo section of Hal Hartley's 1996 film Flirt. Ron Fricke's experimental documentary film Baraka (1992) features scenes of butoh performance.
   The work developed beginning in 1960 by Kazuo Ohno with Tatsumi Hijikata was the beginning of what now is regarded as "Butoh." In Jean Viala's and Nourit Masson-Sekinea's book Shades of Darkness, Kazuo Ohno is regarded as "the soul of Butoh," while Tatsumi Hijikata is seen as "the architect of Butoh." Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno later developed their own styles of teaching separate from each other. Students of each style went on to create many different groups such as Sankai Juku, a Japanese dance group well-known to fans in North America.
   Students of these two great artists 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 and artists working in groups, Ohno is thought of as a more natural, individual, and nurturing figure who influenced solo artists.
   There is much discussion about who should receive the credit for creating Butoh. As artists worked to create new art in all disciplines after World War II, Japan artists and thinkers emerged out of economic and social challenges that produced an energy and renewal of artists, dancers, painters, musicians, writers, and all artists.

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.

International

Many Nikkei (or members of the Japanese diaspora), such as Japanese Canadians Jay Hirabayashi of Kokoro Dance, Denise Fujiwara, incorporate butoh in their dance or have launched butoh dance troupes.
Butoh is also created and performed by non-Japanese Canadians – Thomas Anfield and Kevin Bergsma formed BUTOH-a-GO-GO in 1999 billing it a "Second Generation Butoh/Performance Company." Anfield and Bergsma met in 1995 working with Kokoro Dance.
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 humor into their work. The Swedish SU-EN Butoh Company tours Europe extensively.

Further Information

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