Duet for Dancer and Photographer

Butoh, the Japanese dance form, has been widely photographed since its inception in 1959, when the first performance emerged from the collaboration between Kazuo Ohno (1907–2010) and Tatsumi Hijikata (1928–1986). It has attracted photographers with its strong visual aesthetics and the physical appearance of dancers’ well-trained bodies. The dancers welcomed the collaboration with photographers, which resulted in the creation of many Butoh photograph albums. There is an interesting statement reappearing in many Butoh photographers’ testimonies noting that the act of taking pictures places them closer to the dance. They often claim that they are themselves part of the Butoh dance. The photographers’ creative involvement has been recognized and appreciated by Kazuo Ohno for many years, and he often collaborated with the French photographer Nourit Masson-Sékiné. He would invite her to take photographs during the rehearsals in his studio, allowing the clicking sound of the camera to become his guide on whether the inner focus in his dance was sustained.

However, this creative duet between a Butoh dancer and a photographer has not received much attention in view of the artists’ immediate collaboration, and the dance and photographs have been mostly discussed as separate artworks. Here I am offering a closer look at the dancer-photographer relationship by describing my act of photographing several Butoh performers and sketching reflections on this process. This will help present the duet in a new light, where a photographer does not only offer a technical skill and a visual interpretation of a dance (according to his style, art-history knowledge, and so on) but first and foremost takes part in creating a new event and is an active participant rather than just an observer.

I first came across Butoh in Australia in 2000. Having previously studied mainly “classical” theatre, Butoh seemed fresh, new, and challenging, with dancers’ grotesque bodies treating taboo subjects such as sex, death, and homosexuality. Following the advice of a writer and theatre director Lee Chee Keng, who said that “Butoh is an art that is understood primarily through practice,”¹ I took Butoh workshops, mainly with Daisuke Yoshimoto, in order to experience the dance myself. I was disappointed to discover that I felt uncomfortable dancing Butoh, which led me to conclude that the body was not my medium of expression. However, just watching Butoh dancers was not enough, and I had a strong urge to “do something” with the form. Photography became my choice and, as the Butoh photographer Laurencine Lot described her need for photographing the dance, I too became hungry to capture images of Butoh dancers.² I started by photographing performances and then moved on to independent photography projects, in which I would choose a location and ask dancers to improvise for the camera. This kind of practice was more than just being in the audience at a theatre and resulted in my engagement in the performance in a different way from when I danced or just observed dance.

As a Butoh researcher and a photographer, I have explored the photographic act as a site-specific performance, prompted by Butoh dancer Min Tanaka’s claim about the embodied relationship between a performer and surrounding environment; he said: “I don’t dance in the place, but I am the place.”³ The projects presented here were conducted in London in 2007 and 2008: the first one in the Westminster underground station with Yuko Kawamoto and Tadashi Endo, the second in Abney Park Cemetery with the same dancers, and the third in the National Gallery with Katsura Kan and Gabriella Daris. The projects set out to explore photographically the environmental influences on the collaborative act between a photographer and a performer. They aimed at exploring both contrasting qualities and a thematic unity of Butoh and the surroundings. Dancers were placed in a public space where live performances are not usually seen. The emphasis was placed equally on creating stills as final products as well as on the process of photographing the experience.

The Westminster Project

The Westminster Project was a collaboration between myself and Butoh dancers Tadashi Endo and Yuko Kawamoto. Tadashi Endo...