November 28, 2000
This happens to be a dance of life and death. Without the measure of sorrow, there is no life. Without the measure of life there is no death. Within the dark, light shines even brighter. Butoh is striking. Anyone who has seen any type of the presentation of it would be able to tell you that. The first time I saw it I was intrigued. I had studied Japanese as a young child growing up and never had I seen the stark, confronting style of butoh, in anything that I was exposed to. I decided to discover more about Butoh. And this, after weeks of study is what I have seen; darkness amongst the joy, sorrow amongst the light.
Butoh is many different faces. From the pages of articles and books many angles of approach have been scripted in reaction to the scenes it has produced. The sight of a foreign thought come to life by foreign bodies, the scene of a familiar ritual distorted by the seemingly anguished faces of white, or even the disgustingly barbaric dance of silly, painted people. Butoh is all these things in the minds of the people of the world, all these things and more.
But here is where we wipe the board clean.
To say that I can understand a dance without dancing it is to claim that one not necessarily needs to breathe to know the feeling of air as it feeds your body. Therefore I cannot give a gift that isn't given. Butoh is rather a part of one's understanding of the spiritual and intellectual inspiration to those who brought it to the stage.
But here, objectivity is engaged. The search for the pure explanation of what made butoh what it is today is an impractical goal. However to sift through the many sources of information to try and bring to the surface an accountable construction is a feasible design. So we begin in Japan trying to reconstruct the environment that was the birthplace of the two known counterparts of the form. The first of the two, Kazuo Ohno, was born in 1906 in Hokkaido, Japan.
In 1926 Ohno made his way to Tokyo where he enrolled in the National School of Athletics. Shortly afterwards he encountered a performance of the Spanish dancer La Argentina, and began to dance. La Argentina inspired something in Ohno that never left him and became the impetus of his most famous performance Admiring La Argentina. Of La Argentina Kazuo said, "The dance of La Argentina invited people into a sea of excitement. She embodied dance, literature, music and art and furthermore she represented love and pain in real life." (qtd. in Holborn p. 38)
But let us back up a little. Before Ohno danced
anything resembling butoh he studied dance under various dancers
including the first important Modern dancer in Japan, Baku Ishii. Ishii
had been in the study of classical forms such as Ballet and also the
less classical form of Neue Tanz from Germany. These forms were the
basis for Ishii's developing concept of "Creation Dance". This dance in
turn influenced the works of both Ohno and his Butoh counterpart
Hijikata who found themselves intrigued by the creation concept that
was so freeing from the strict, more methodical dance types (Viala
& Masson-Sekine 1988 p.16)
Ohno's development of Butoh came along different lines than Hijikata's. Ohno was influenced by his newly embraced religion, Christianity. While Hijikata had a perceptibly expressive focus to his dancing, Ohno's work had the focus of a more spiritual nature. "If Tatsumi Hijikata invented the Dance of Darkness (Ankoku Butoh), his colleague Kazuo Ohno lays claim to the Dance of Light." (Siegel 1996.) During the five years of performance before he and Hijikata met, Ohno's work was notably inspired by the evocations of the spirit. Said Kazuo Ohno of his greatest inspiration, "I had read about the creation of the world in the Bible; I'd always accepted it as a legend, but in La Argentina's work I saw it realized in front of my eyes. If this is creation, I would like to lift one corner of it." (qtd. in Viala; Masson-Sekine.) Though he attempted to understand the methods of expression in his dance, his own conscious efforts did not solidify for him until he finally met Hijikata in 1954. (V;M-S p. 24)
Kazuo still dances today at the age of 93*. And even seems to evoke feeling in the audience despite his obvious lack of intensity. A critic, Jennifer Dunning, recently wrote of his work that " the flame-like intensity of his movement and presence, so hobbled and yet so serenely certain, made wondrous magic." (qtd. in Farmer 2000)
In contrast to Ohno's longevity, the creator of Ankoku Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata passed away in 1986 at the age of 57 just before his planned American debut (Daly.) He was born in 1928 in Akita, Northern Japan. For Hijikata the inspiration for butoh was hand in hand with the literature of his time. "...words were essential to Hijikata.... He was especially fond of verbal battles with artists, poets, and writers, which he initiated during drinking bouts and which he considered necessary process for his creations." (Nanako)
Hijikata used words to inspire themes of movement in butoh. The use of Japanese onomatopoeia was very significant because of the implied meaning of these "sounds". They are in the Japanese language used as adverbs to describe the action or event as well as mimic the sound. In this way the "Japanese onomatopoeic language is designed to capture a physical sense rather than merely imitate or refer to a concept by means of a sound." (Nanako)
Hijikata worked with not only these kinds of words but with the books of some of his favorite authors from whom he acquired a sense of the world in the context of his new dance form. Particularly a French writer of the times, Jean Genet, influenced Hijikata when it came to the themes of paradox in the world. Where the ugly became the beautiful, and the beautiful became ugly is where Hijikata found his butoh. (Nanako)
For Hijikata it seems that he was influenced perhaps a little more than Ohno by the bombing of WWII. His youth at the time of the war along with his early exposure to Modern dance and the effects of post world war Western rejection among the artists of Japan were clearly an influence on his earliest work. The environment was chaotic and full of energy. (Nanako) These things, however, did not directly cause the work of Hijikata, but were, thereby, elements within the environment where his form was encouraged to develop and in a literal sense grow within and without Hijikata.
The true sense of Hijikata's work as a dancer is not the sorrowful expression of a depressed and repressed man in the after throws of a war torn homeland, but it is a expression of the important elements of his lifetime. He is, therefore, not the product of an event as many critics seem to enjoy inferring, but the emergence of a man in the opportune environment of creative freedom.
Important to Hijikata's work is the element of memory. His childhood provides in this case a supreme example of the emergent quality of his work. As he spoke in a lecture entitled "Kaze Daruma" Hijikata described many parts of his childhood that he recalled as part of the development of his dance form. This is the core of our search.
I, at many points in the search for what it was that made up butoh, was making an attempt to incorporate each thing I read into the vast fabric of my brain. As I did this layers seemed to be forming under, above, and through the space and time of this dance experience. It is just this. As Hijikata began to dance he felt, as though there were no other sensation, that the feeling was the soul of the dance and that to dance this soul an emptiness of the body was necessary. This was encouraged to a deeper level by the spiritual awareness that Ohno brought to him through their years of collaboration.
In the section Notes By Kazuo Ohno, of the book Butoh: Shades of Darkness, Ohno speaks of the study of butoh and of the importance of awareness of daily behavior, as well as study of elementary movement. He also spoke of a "place" that must already exist, a place which words cannot describe, and that he cannot teach. This "place" for Hijikata was the vast memories he held of his childhood and which he used as part of the development of movement. In his lecture "Kaze Daruma", Hijikata spoke of his childhood memories "Sometimes in early spring I would fall down in the mud and my child's body, pitiful to its core, would gently float there. . . .It's as if my body, from its very core, returned to its starting point." As Hijikata speaks of this feeling of returning to the starting point of his child's body, one might see here explained much of the movement in this form. Slow, crouched, and seeming to constantly rediscover the use of limbs and torso. Like a child, dancers of butoh are empty of lifetimes of movement memory. From this point pure expression can issue forth. Kazuo Ohno made a statement reinforcing this "As long as the body maintains an existence marked by social experience, it cannot express the soul with purity." (Viala;Masson-Sekine p. 94)
By this it must be true that each Butoh dance is unique to the person who dances it. For no one can create the same dance feeling inside that any other dancer has already felt. The "magic" of this dance then is in the ability of the individual to push away all that is unnecessary to the expression of the feeling in the dance. Butoh was the effort of two men, the combination of their thoughts and feelings, their memories and their theories. To say that it was a product of a horrible event, or the environment of an ancient country might just miss the point. Butoh is about the human experience not the Japanese experience. And as long as we ignore this, we are missing out on our potential, which is exemplified by the purest form of this dance. Here, we find the ugly and the beautiful without any denial of the existence of either, amazing.
Sources
Daly, Ann. Darkness into Light, Village Voice, Nov. 19 1996 Vol. 41 issue 47 pg. 84-92
Farmer, Ann. The New Kid in Town Has Been Around, Dance Magazine, June 2000 Vol.74 issue 6 pg. 52-54
Holborn, Mark; Hoffman, Ethan. Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul. New York, N.Y.: Aperture, c1987
Nanako, Kurihara. Hijikata Tatsumi: The Words of Butoh, The Drama Review Spring 2000 Vol.44 issue 1 pg.12-28
Siegel, Marcia B.. The Anti-Dark, Village Voice Feb. 27, 1996 Vol. 41 issue 9 pg. 82-86
Tatsumi, Hijikata. Wind Daruma, The Drama Review Spring 2000 Vol. 44 issue 1 pg. 71-80
Viala, Jean; Masson-Sekine, Nourit. Butoh: Shades of Darkness. Tokyo:
Shufunotomo Co. Ltd. 1988
* In the years since this was written in 2000, advancing age has finally put an end not only to Kazuo's performances, but to the classes that he regularly taught. However, he sometimes makes an occasional appearance at the Butoh classes of his son, Yoshito, who was himself born in1938 and is now in his sixties - Webmaster)