Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy by Sondra Fraleigh, and: Butoh Ritual Mexicano / Alchemy is Dancing by Shakina Nayfack (review)

Both Sondra Fraleigh, in her book, Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy, and Shakina Nayfack, in Butoh Ritual Mexicano / Alchemy is Dancing, ascribe the international appeal of dance practices inspired by the work of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno to a universal hunger for change. Both dancer-scholars express a sense of urgency for individual, collective, and environmental healing and transformation, and consider butoh to be an effective tool for these tasks. Fraleigh uses the term “alchemy” because alchemists, she explains, “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” (1). She also uses this term to refer to the blending of Western and Japanese culture via this dance tradition (12). The “morphology of butoh,” she insists, results from global exchanges in 20th-century dance (33). Likewise, Nayfack analyzes his experiences working with his teacher Diego Piñón within the context of globalization. According to Nayfack, Piñón’s curative efforts integrate multiple realities in order to lead to the discovery of one’s soul and its connection to something larger, also in the ultimate interest of healing and transforming the world (86).

Both Fraleigh and Nayfack enter slippery territory in attempting to describe butoh, given its undefinable and uncontrollable nature. Fraleigh humbly acknowledges the “poverty of words” (7), and they both occasionally find poetry a more comfortable medium for representing their subject matter. Both authors remind us of Hijikata’s theory that butoh, though not a philosophy, “someday [...] might be” (Fraleigh 63; Nayfack vii). This proposition opens the door to their explorations of the intersections between the underlying motives of butoh and its execution in specific contexts.

Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy is Fraleigh’s most recent publication, and the third book she has authored specifically concerning dance inspired by the work of Hijikata and Ohno. She calls Dancing Into Darkness: Butoh, Zen, and Japan (1999) a “metaphysical diary” of her study of both butoh and Zen Buddhism. Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo (2006) is part of the Routledge Performance Practitioner Series designed for college students. In this latest book, more similar in style to Dancing Into Darkness, Fraleigh again “shifts between voices of exposition, analysis, poetry, and personal experience” (1999:7). The first section of Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy defines what she calls “the morphology of butoh, its meta morphic context, and its alchemy” (2). The second section offers documentation and impressions of a global sampling of butoh and butoh-inspired works created between 1973 and 2008. The third and final section revisits Hijikata’s 1968 performance of Kinjiki, and describes Kuu (2007), Yoshito Ohno’s dance on the occasion of his father, Kazuo’s 101st birthday. Fraleigh honors the lineage of her teachers more poetically and documents the global dissemination of butoh more fully here than in her previous books.

In her chapter, “Is Butoh a Philosophy?” Fraleigh offers a very clear documentation of the historical context and resulting philosophies that shaped the development of ballet and modern dance in America and Europe. She then uses this inventory as a base from which she attempts to explain how butoh converges with and diverges from these major traditions. This section feels most natural, as opposed to another section of the book in which she uncritically invokes the “shamanistic” foundation and tendencies of butoh, and deploys an assortment of disparate terms from her diverse areas of study: Carl Jung’s “active imagination”; yoga and its attendant “third-eye awareness”; and Zen concepts, such as “wabi-sabi” and “ma.” Fraleigh also uses the German term “ursprung,” or “origins” coming from Martin Heidegger, in order to explain that the “ursprung of butoh” is simultaneously...