Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy

Introduction

Introduction Dance should be intoxicating. —Ohno Kazuo Alchemy is an early unscientific form of chemistry exploring the power of enchantment and transformation. Alchemists sought the conversion of base metals into gold and a universal cure for disease, just as butoh-ka (butoh dancers) attend to metamorphosis and healing through the body. In butoh, as in alchemy, the darkness of material needs to be undergone before transformation and integration can occur. Hijikata Tatsumi, the principle founder of butoh and an outspoken agnostic, created his dance under the sign of darkness, but it morphed throughout his lifetime. In his final workshop, he encouraged students to disperse into nothingness—quite a Buddhist turn—and at his death, he uttered: “In my last moment, God’s light.”1 Butoh, a metamorphic form of dance that had its origin in Japan, is fast becoming a borderless art for a borderless century. In this book, I trace its transformative alchemy and study the international movement inspired by its aesthetic mixtures, moving forward from the founding of butoh in 1959 to its international assimilation in the twenty-first century. I describe the work of a wide range of contemporary butoh artists, weaving an aesthetic tapestry with philosophical and political threads. Not least is my visit in June 2006 with Ohno Kazuo in his hundredth year, twenty years after my first class with him. In part 2, I write of this visit and my improvised dance with his son and dance partner, Ohno Yoshito, at their studio in Yokohama. (Last names come first in Japan, and I follow this convention throughout the book.) Through their association with 2 Introduction Hijikata, Ohno Kazuo and Yoshito also became important in the founding of butoh. Tamah Nakamura and I completed a book on butoh founders in 2006, Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo,2 to document their work and words and the origination of butoh. Part 1 of this work consists of three chapters that define the morphology of butoh, its metamorphic context, and its alchemy. Chapter 1 is historical and explains butoh elements and global fusions. Chapter 2 is analytical as pertains to conceptualization of the body and lived experience, and chapter 3 is philosophical . Part 1 sets the theoretical framework for the essays of part 2, which describe a wide variety of butoh and related performances spanning 1973 to 2008 and further develop themes introduced in part 1. These essays vary in length but are consistent in their descriptive thrust, and they take advantage of the creativity of the essay form in its interpretive function. The essays begin with Hijikata’s 1973 rescue of Japanese identity in his antiwar dance Summer Storm. Part 3 returns to the ursprung (original leap) of butoh and signifies its unfinished nature, pointing toward emptiness in the description of Kuu (2007), Ohno Yoshito’s dance of nonattachment. This work, discussed in the final essay of the book, furthers a fifty-eight-year history of butoh and spiritual metamorphosis through its inclusion of Yoshito’s father, Ohno Kazuo, on film. At the root of butoh, Yoshito performed Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors, 1959) with Hijikata and figured prominently in the subsequent development of this original dance genre. The text as a whole shifts between voices of exposition, analysis, poetry, and personal experience. I include my own experience in phenomenological descriptions and set apart longer ones. The essays show that butoh has retained a special identity related to its Japanese background, while creating at the same time a tolerant and inclusive morphology. Butoh had its source in the limited political surrealism of Hijikata and his identification with Japanese nativism, but its ability to adapt to new ethnicities and circumstances provides it wider appeal and staying power. Compassion, the patient mind of Buddhism, which is able to endure difficulty calmly, is the subtext of much butoh. Erasing outlines of the confining self, butoh revives this Eastern ethos in an unexpected alchemy: through a transformational form of theater dance bridging cultural differences. I explain butoh’s genesis and how the butoh aesthetic eventually extended beyond the borders of Japan, first through the extensive dance tours of Ohno Kazuo and Yoshito. I studied with Ohno and became fascinated with his life—as a dancer, soldier, and finally an unassuming spiritual guru. Ohno is a very sensitive Japanese man who converted early in his life to Christianity, even as he retained Buddhist teachings and beliefs. A pacifist, he was nevertheless conscripted for service before and during World War II, where he served as...