"The dancer's costume is to wear the universe" - Kazuo Ohno

A few weeks ago I was in Japan, cruising from Wakayama to Kyoto to Tokyo and back down to Osaka, and Marceline asked me to write something vaguely interesting about what I did/saw/ate. I had a couple of mini adventures, got to the bottom of some intriguing liner notes in a Robbie Basho album, and descended Mt. Fuji at night with no torch ("ok, ok, there's the edge. ok? shit. shit. shit. THERE'S THE EDGE. shit. shit. BIG ROCK RIGHT THERE. shit. THERE'S ANOTHER EDGE" etc. etc. for 3 hours). But by far the most intense and affecting thing I did/saw was to attend a performance of Japanese Butoh theatre at a tiny Arts Cafe in the middle of a giant, practically deserted concrete complex in Osaka.

The Butoh I saw was supreme human expression. These dudes' bodies writhed, contorted, flowed, bent, agonised and slinked their way through a mesmerising performance...they were utterly possessed by their dance but at the same time more in control of their bodies and their inner selves than any human beings I've ever encountered. There were about 9 or 10 at first, all sitting cross legged on the floor of the theatre space, completely naked except for some dirty loincloths and all with shaved heads. As the lights slowly faded up, the expressions on their faces became clearer. They were human gargoyles, total demonic weirdos, immediately reflecting the audiences' (and their own) most depraved, terrified states. What followed over the next hour and a half was not so much a danceform but an attempt to find one's own body admist an infinite black space. It was tribal and terrifying. There was a kind of metaphorical narrative going on, parts of which were exceptionally funny, but to try and relate that would be pretty impossible without accompanying video footage.

Butoh was conceived as a new form of human expression by Tatsumi Hijikata in the 1950s.The first performance took place in 1959 and completely scandalized the Japanese art scene, resulting in Hijikata's being banned from the festival where the performance took place. Although by nature Butoh is a highly subjective and individual form of movement, reading Hijikata's own words about the dance is incredibly insightful, and really gives you an idea as to the radical nature of what he wanted to pursue with it:

"Western dance begins with its feet firmly planted on the ground whereas butoh begins with a dance wherein the dancer tries in vain to find his feet"

This idea of the inversion of the traditional concepts of dance as an art-form is essential to the nature of Butoh. Instead of the dancer embodying an objective concept through his/her movement, Butoh is pure creation - the dancer is created through his movements, and accompanying connotations completely flow from the performer rather than any outside instruction; it limits itself only inasmuch as the particular performer limits his emotional and physical expression. The piece I saw was obviously choreographed rather than improvised, but in such a way that each individual was able to bring his fully developed style to the whole.

A total army of tortured souls, each determined to bring to bear the full weight of their neuroses and fear.

"I'm convinced that a pre-made dance, a dance made to be shown is of no interest. The dance should be caressed and fondled; here I'm not talking about a humorous dance but rather an absurd dance. It must be absurd. It is a mirror which thaws fear. The dancer should dance in this spirit." - Hijikata

Such enormous rhetoric might seem absurd in itself were it not for the staggering emotional depth of what I saw. It was a kind of ancient, monolithic poem made with limbs and teeth. Fuck the half-hearted catharsis of 99% of the world's angst-ridden metal or rock bands, this is true exorcism. One of the first things you notice about the performers is their breathing - at times a violent hissing of escaping steam, at others utterly silent and only discernable from the swathes of muscle that rise and fall in time to their heartbeats. And then at times one of the dudes would let out a throat- rattling scream that sent the others scurrying into the corner. There's a great quote from Jerzy Grotowski on one of the many Butoh sites floating around who connects Butoh to the most basic and primitive human idea of ritual and ceremony, calling it "a very ancient form of art where ritual and artistic creation were seamless. Where poetry was song, song was incantation, movement was dance." Despite the fact that Butoh is chronologically very modern, watching the dance felt timeless, almost like the dancers were not only attempting to escape their superficial selves but escape the collective limbo that seemed to exist in that tiny dark room for 2 hours. These people essentially wrap their souls round their skin and contort until it splits. Having read a little about Noh theatre, I dediced to go see some of that in Kyoto before my friend had even told me about Butoh, and with hindsight it seemed like such a regimented, elitist and stylisitcally turgid mode of performance compared with the almost dangerously emancipated movements of the Butoh dudes. When they arch their backs as if the weight of the sun presses on their skull,you fear for their sanity and their lives.

Incidentally, the theatre group I saw are called Dairakudakan and were formed by Akaji Maro, a disciple of Hijikata's, in 1972. There's a bunch of Butoh pages lying around the internet, most which have s omething interesting to say and a few of which I've ransacked to get to grips with what I'd seen in Osaka. Google it up. Also, there's some clips on YouTube of the founding masters of Butoh, Hijikata and his friend and collaborator Kazuo Ohno.

More information:

Kobo Buta Archive - good introduction site with a big bibliography
Flesh & Blood Mystery Theater - dubiously named theatre company but with loads of quotations from Hijikata
Masaki Iwana - "White" Butoh as practised by Masaki Iwana (differing, but not necessarily opposed to the Ankoku Butoh, or Dark Butoh, conceived by Hijikata)

article by Joe Luna