Butoh

From Free net encyclopedia

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 Ohno Kazuo.

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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.

Hijikata went on further to deliberately work against conventional notions of dance, and inspired by the works of writers such as Yukio Mishima, Lautréamont, Artaud, Genet and de Sade, delved into worlds of the grotesque, darkness, decay and the transformation of the body into other materials 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 from the early 80`s, Butoh experience a renaissance when Butoh groups started performing for the first time outside of Japan. 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. _____________________________________________________

More on Ohno and Hijikata

Kazuo Ohno (or Ohno Kazuo, if you like, since in Japanese, one's given name comes last,one's surname comes first) a dancer associated with Butoh, is one of the great performers of our time.

Born in 1906, in Hakodate, Hokkaido, 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, Mr. Ohno has been performing and teaching with his son Yoshito to the present time. The least that will be said is that this man performed and taught well into his 90's, a remarkable feat in and of itself.

Ohno is the kind of performer capable of making a person weep with just the shift of an arm or focus. He has become very much a guru and inspirational figure. It has been written of him that his very presence is an 'artistic fact'.

In 1960 Ohno began to work directly with Hijikata Tatsumi, who may be said to be the originator of Butoh technique. In the opinion of this writer, insofar as there is a technique behind Butoh, it is Hijikata who created it, in the form of his Butoh-Fu. Butoh-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 Butoh-Fu has been aggregated into a very fascinating multi-media DVD Rom by Yukio Waguri who was a student of and performer in, Hijikata's company for many years.

Ohno, on the other hand, was less a technician and choreographer and much more of a tremendous solo performer. He and Hijikata form the nucleus of what has come to be know as Butoh.

Students of these two great personae clearly show the differences in orientation of their masters. While Hijikata was a fearsome technician of nervous system influencing input strategies, Ohno is by nature a far more individual-spirit nurturing kind of figure.

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 the Koichi and Hiroko Tamano (who incidentally own a Sushi restaurant in San Francisco).

Teachers who have spent time with Ohno seem to be much more eclectic and indvidual in approach, bearing the mark of their master, perhaps, in tendencies to indulge in wistful states of spiritualized semi-embodiment. In this authors' experience, it is usually pretty easy to tell which current in Butoh has had more of an influence on a given performer.

There have however been many unique groups and performance companies influenced by the movements innaugorated by Hijikata and Ohno. Ranging from the highly minimalist and near otherworldy level of design perfection of Sankai Juku, to very theatrically explosive and dare I say carnivalesque performance of groups like Dai Rakuda Kan. There is a very interesting multi-media and physical theater oriented group in San Francisco called Ink Boat that is not afraid to make its audience laugh, something that has been less of a tendancy in what is typically a rather serious and other-worldy art from. (end Carlos Abler)

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