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BUTÕ

Contemporary Japanese dance comprises a wide variety o styles, from folk dances and traditional dance-drama genres such a nõ and kabuki to imported forms such as ballet, modern and postmodern dance, and performance-art forms that incorporate dance. Butõ, which began to develop in the 1950s, is a contemporary form that draws on both Western and indigenous Japanese sources. According to Dance Research Tokyou, fifty-five butõ choreographers and companies were active as of late 1994.

 

The term buto (from bu, “dance”, and butõ, “step” or “stomp”) was used during Japan’s Meiji era to mean the Western-style ballroom dancing then being introduced into the century. (The term was also used in ancient Japan to designate ritual dance.) By the mid-twentieth century, however, the word had fallen into disuse, until revived-and given a new meaning- by choreographer Hijikata Tatsumi.

 

Contemporary butõ has its origin in the new dance movements presented in the late 1950s, in the works of Hijikata, Õno Kazuo, and Kasai Akira – all of whom opposed contemporary Japanese modern dance’s strict adherence to western styles. The first butõ dance, Hijikata’s Kinijiki, was performed in 1959 and again soon afterward as part of Hijikata Tatsumi 650 Dance Experience no Kai (The title refers to the 650 seats on the theater in which the performance took place – and to Hijikata’s contention that the “experience” was participated in by all 650 spectators). This violent, improvisation-based performance, however, was very different from butõ as in later developed.

 


Butõ has gone through several stylistic phases. Hijikata’s first style, which he named ankoku butõ (or, originally, ankoku buyõ, “dance of darkness”), exhibited the influences of German Neuer Tanz and American “happenings”. The ankoku butõ fad came to an end in 1968, with Hijikata’s solo performance Hijikata Tatsumi to Nihon-jin Nikutai no Hanran (Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese Revolt of the Flesh).

 

In 1970, some ten years after he had begun butõ with Kinjiki, Hijikata inaugurated a new kind of butõ with his work Shiki no Tameno 27 Ban (27 Nights for Four Seasons), performed on twenty seven consecutive evenings in and old movie theater in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo. Elements of this work – the distorted, emaciated bodies and shaved heads of the dancers, their white plastered faces (to erase their humanness), and the costumes made from old kimonos – established the style known as Hijikata’s butõ, which continues to influence contemporary butõ, especially the work of Õno but also that of the Dai Rakudakan, Byakkosha (dissolved 1994), and Hakatobo companies.

 

While Hijikata investigated the “shape” of dance through bodily distortion, Kasai has used butõ to express the invisible, interior world of human thought as well as cosmology and the spiritual world. Kasai’s excellence as a performer is matched by his exceptional teaching ability; a number of noted butõ dancers, including Yamada Setsuko, received training at his studio, Tenshi-kan, In the late 1070, Kasai became interested in Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy and in the movement theory known as eurhythmics, which he traveled to Germany to study. He eventually returned to the butõ style, giving his first butõ performance in fifteen years in January 1994; Kasai’s later style incorporated elements from both his earlier, improvisation butõ and eurhythmics.

 

Butõ has been well received outside Japan. Among performers who have moved abroad are Ikeda Carlotta of Aradone no Kas, based in France; Murobushi Ko of Butoh-ha Sebi (formerly of Dai Rakudakan) and Furukawa Anzu of Dance Butter, both in Germany; Tamano Koichi, director of Haru-pin Ha in San Francisco.

 

Not yet four decades old, butõ has not developed a well defined style. Nudity, shaved heads, white-plaster make-up, and transvestism are often considered essential elements of butõ because they have so often been used by Hijikata and Ono Kazuo. Nevertheless, Hijikata, the creator of butõ, himself believed that the soul of butõ consisted in imposing a peculiarly Japanese quality climate of Asia and especially Japan. Therefore, elements like those listed to not necessarily define butõ style.

 

Besides the dancers already named, others belonging to the evolving butõ tradition include Nakajima Natsu of Muteki-sha, Ishii Mitsutaka, Takai Tomiko, and Kasukuri Yukio of Kozensha, all of whom studied with Hijikata; Kukuhara Tetsuro and Oomori Masahide, both of thow studied with Kasai; Amagatsu Ushio of Dai Rakudakan and Sankai Juki; Yoshimoto Daitsuke who studied butõ independently; and Goi Teru. Outside Tokyo, butõ performers include Katsura Kan in Kyoto and Mori Shigeya in Yamagata.

 

 

International Encyclopedia of Dance

 

Selma Jeanne Cohen, Editor

 

Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford 2004

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Durland, Steven. “Contemporary Art in Japan.” High Performance (Summer 1990): 22 – 23.

 

Garafola, Lynn. “Variations on a Theme of Butoh.” Dance Magazine (April 1989): 66 – 68.

 

Hamera, Judith. Derevo, Butoh, and Imagining the Real“. High Performance (Spring 1990): 36 – 39.

 

Halborn, Mark. Butoh, Dance of the Dark Soul. New York, 1987.

 

Klein, Susan B. Ankoku Butõ: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Darkness. Ithaca, N.Y., 1988.

 

Mikami Kayo. Utsuwa to shite no shintai: Jinikata Tatsumi ankoku butõ gihõ e no apurochi. Tokio, 1993.

 

Miyava Ichikawa. „Butoh: The Denial of the Body.” Ballet International 12 (September 1989): 14 – 19.

 

Paszkowska, Aleksandra. Butõ-Tanz: Ushio Amagatsu und die Sankai Juku Gruppe. Munich 1983.

 

Tanemura Suehiro et al. Hihikata Tatsumi butõ taiken. Tokyo, 1993.

 

Viala, Jean, and Nourit Masson-Seikine. Butoh: Shades of Darkness. Tokyo, 1988.

 

FILM

 

Michael Blackwood, Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis (1990)

 

Hasegawa Roku

 

BUTÕ


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