Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings

The Power of Stripping Down to Nothingness—The Butoh Diaspora

120 | The Power of Stripping Down to Nothingness New York Times, Arts & Leisure, November 7, 1999 The growing presence of butoh in all its intensity and strangeness has enriched the international dance scene. Watching one of these performance was like being inside a dream that could turn into a nightmare at any moment. I decided to go on a search for what was “authentic” butoh and why its slow-motion imagery packed such a punch. I needed to hear an array of voices. This piece also asks questions that come up when any culturally specific dance form takes hold and spreads: Where did tap dance (or flamenco, or Contact Improvisation) come from, and who is entitled to do it? I was lucky with the timing because a spate of butoh performers was reaching New York just as I pitched this to the Times. When Sankai Juku first performed at City Center in 1984, audiences were transfixed by its brutal images, its haunting beauty. It grabbed something fearful and nightmarish from inside us and reflected it back with a new intensity . Four men, covered only with white powder, dangled upside down from high above, tied at the ankles like pieces of meat. They descended slowly, backs arching, arms coiling, flaunting their closeness to death. (The next year, one dancer did fall to his death during an outdoor performance, prompting a yearlong hiatus in their work.) Tony Micocci, former executive director of City Center, ranks the first time he saw Sankai Juku among the top five theatrical experiences of his life. “You’re being torn,” he said, “you feel like your soul is being looked at. Although the aesthetic is very elegant, you feel completely ripped open.” Since 1984, butoh-influenced groups have proliferated internationally, attaining some measure of familiarity and acceptance. Maybe they can’t shock us as they first did, but we go back to their performances again and again to learn about our bond with nature and our place in the universe. Butoh (shortened from “ankoko butoh,” meaning “dance of utter darkness ”) grew out of the American occupation of Japan as an effort to resist the Westernization of Japanese culture. It drew on the ancient forms of Kabuki and Noh, especially in their embrace of the grotesque. Tatsumi Hijikata , the primary originator of butoh, was known for his transgressions into vulgarities and violence, as well as his meticulous, riveting dancing. His spirit is refracted in three current butoh leaders, all of whom will appear in New York City in the coming weeks. Ushio Amagatsu brings Sankai Juku to the Brooklyn Academy of Music Wednesday through Sunday in Hiyomeki The Nineties | 121 (“Within a Gentle Vibration and Agitation”); Min Tanaka will do late-night performances at P.s. 122 on December 3 and 4, followed by a two-week stint at P.s. 1 in Queens; Kazuo Ohno, ninety-three, will dance a new solo at the Japan Society on December 9, 10, and 11. The challenge of butoh is to reveal the nakedness of the soul as well as the nakedness of the body. Last month Ohno led workshop students in Venice into an improvisation aimed at understanding the devastation of the bombing of Hiroshima. “The atomic bomb destroyed everything,” he told me through an interpreter. What he tried to elicit from the students, through dance, was “How we find the first life growing from that destroyed place.” We tend to think of butoh as exclusively Japanese, but there has always been a kinship with Western artists. Ohno’s teacher, Takaya Eguchi, had studied with Mary Wigman, Martha Graham’s counterpart and leader of expressionist dance in Germany. For musical accompaniment, Tanaka favors jazz; Ohno favors Chopin; other butoh artists have used Bach, flamenco or bagpipes. Sankai Juku’s dangling action has something in common with the gravity-defying feat of Trisha Brown’s Man Walking Down the Side of a Building of 1970. And Ohno, inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s reading of “Kaddish,” once danced for him at a party. Anna Halprin, the mother of American experimental dance, feels this Sankai Juku in Ushio Amagatsu’s Hibiki (“Resonance from Far Away”) at Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2002. (© Jack Vartoogian / FrontRowPhotos) 122 | Through the Eyes of a Dancer kinship, too. Last year, when reconstructing her seminal work Parades and Changes of 1965, she hired Oguri, a butoh group in Los Angeles, to perform it. One section requires...