Buto(s) (review)

Butô(s) is the latest collection of groundbreaking and erudite essays from the Laboratory for Representational Arts of France's National Research Center (the pure research branch of the state educational system). In character with the sixty plus volumes in the Laboratory's two series, Styles of Theatrical Creation and History and Society, this first book-length study of butoh in French offers a wealth of illustrations, charts, and bibliographical material, including photos of key performances, comparisons of styles of butoh and of butoh and classical dance, chronologies of major performers, genealogies of schools and trends, a dateline of significant and corresponding cultural and political events, and a film and video source list. The twenty essays include pieces by the editors on the place of Asian arts in France and on the two founding artists of the butoh movement, Tatsumi Hijikata (the violent) and Kazuo Ohno (the wondrous), as well as in-depth articles by Japanese specialists who place butoh squarely within the context of the Japanese avant-garde. Four personal accounts by participants of training sessions and workshops help readers grasp the extreme technical and psychological demands placed on butoh performers.

Most notable among the essays are those by George Banu, Kuniyoski Zazuko, and Odette Aslan, as well as the entire fourth section of the collection devoted to interpretations of the fifth and sixth segments of Hijikata's 1972 work Hôsôtan.Banu, in "Mythologie de la femme" (Mythology of Woman) scrutinizes the difference between the onnagata of kabuki theatre—an idealized and perfected representation of woman—and the ragged, imperfect masculine/feminine presence in butoh, seen as a form of nostalgia for the union of sexual opposites. Kazuko details in "Repenser la danse des ténèbres" (Rethinking the Dance of Utter Darkness) the artistic explosions of 1960s and 1970s Japan, where Hijikata and others incorporated into their movement work modern jazz, expressionist painting, and newly translated and scandalous writings of Genet, Artaud, and Bataille. Aslan's sketches of Carlotta Ikeda, Ushio Amagatsu, and especially of Tanaka Min, who finds and dances the soul of each nontraditional venue in which he performs, suggest the complex evolution of the dance form. We come to understand butoh as less a specialized form than an invitation to rethink what dance is.

In an excellent piece by Yvonne Tenenbaum, "Ikeda Carlotta, un art de la presence" (Carlotta Ikeda, An Art of Presence)—a piece which could serve as an enlightening first encounter with the achievements of butoh—Ikeda's technique is examined philosophically and analytically. Tenenbaum describes Ikeda's unusual presence as a foregrounding of the materiality of her body through the evacuation of narrative structure. Alix de Morant likewise emphasizes the unnerving and contradictory messages of the butoh performer. Approaching Hijikata's Hôsôtan from her long experience as dance critic in France, de Morant points to the choreographer's tremendous importance as a deconstructor of gestural codes. Kurihara Nanaka, however, reads in the same choreography the crucially surprising rapport which Hijikata established between music and dance; by privileging dance, Hijikata reversed traditional Japanese practice. Nanaka's essay coaxes a Western reader to apprehend what a Japanese public might take away from a performance. It simultaneously indicates how much a Western-schooled critic can miss in analyzing the importance of butoh in Japan.

Rather than simplifying or condensing our knowledge of butoh, this collection fragments our understanding by approaching butoh, from several different angles—as part of a global movement of 1960s experimentation inspired by thinkers of the body; as an opportunity to inscribe history and subjectivity on stage in place of universal and immemorial signs; as a response to the rapidly changing sociopolitical scene in Japan after World War II with its destruction of old authority figures; as a renewal of expressive forms and of life itself, and thus as a therapeutic attack on the nerve cells of the audience; and—paradoxically in light...