Butoh
““My art is an art of improvisation. It is dangerous. To succeed, one must first reach the very depths of the human soul, and then, express it ...” ”
Butoh is a hybrid dance-theatre style originating in the tumultuous time of 1960’s post-WWII Japan. It is not so much a performance style with an agreed upon list of defining conventions as it is a movement, or tradition that has a common philosophical underpinning interpreted by each artist and evolving dependent on the socio-historical context they exist within. It is not only a provocative and beautiful performance style, but also has gained global popularity as an actor training methodology.
The History
Ankoku-Butoh first appeared in post World War Two Japan, a country relatively isolated for centuries before the 20th, in which the country’s entire culture and traditions were violently challenged. After their defeat, many traditional ideals were seen as unstable and ineffective constructs and were challenged along with those elements of culture which represented them. This was further exacerbated by the influx of Western culture which overwhelmed traditional perspectives on art and left society with an abundance of choice, but little in the way of the depth of meaning and identity seen in the values, beliefs and aesthetics of pre-war Japan.
Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno were searching for something uniquely Japanese, contemporary and unhindered by the strict and unchanging forms of traditional performance. They wanted to refer to culturally significant aesthetics and forms, but not be bound to them, allowing for evolution, development and, most importantly, cross-cultural communication.
In 1959, Hijikata and Ohno’s performance entitled Kinjiki, based on Yukio Mishma’s novel Forbidden Colours, scandalised the conservative All Japan Modern Dance Association due to indefinable form, it’s confronting aesthetic and its homosexual themes. With the confronting, abstract symbolism exemplified by the image of a young man strangling a chicken between his thighs to represent sexual awakening, Hijikata was banned by the association from further performance.
Initially Hijikata first coined the phrase Ankoku Butoh (Ankoku: Utter darkness, Bu: step or stomp, Toh: dance), roughly translated as Dance of Darkness, to describe a performance style that rejected both traditional Japanese and Western dance and that reveled in everything the Japanese post-war culture rejected or repressed. Butoh is often described as shocking, surreal, provocative, primal, visceral, spiritual, erotic, grotesque, violent, meditative, cosmic, nihilistic, cathartic, mysterious and animalistic. It is a dance of the senses, which aims to reveal the unconscious, inner world of the performer, stripped of their social mask. At times fiercely primitive, and at others serenely meditative, Butoh has a history of cultivating courageous performers and enabling them to develop a rich inner life, deep focus, and the ability to express emotions honestly and openly through the entire body.
Traditional images of the Butoh performer are of a near-naked, white painted figure in a g-string, head shaved, face and body contorted, eyes rolled up into the head; the anti-individual, the grotesque distorted features, the uncontrollable convulsions juxtaposed with incredible specificity of isolation throughout the entire body and the sublime stillness.
Butoh Throughout the World
Since the 70’s Butoh has been studied and performed all around the world with as many interpretations of the style as there are companies. The poignancy, stillness and exactitude of the meditative movements attributed to Sankai Juku (‘the studio/school between the mountain and the sea’), differ entirely from the primal, convulsive, extraordinarily contortive movements associated with DaiRakudaKan (roughly translated as Great Camel Battleship). Through these intercultural influences Butoh has become a more universal exploration of what it means to be human, rather than remaining an exclusively Japanese art-form. There are now resident Butoh companies on every continent excluding Antarctica, each with their own interpretation and use of the style according to their needs and aesthetic.
Today, while companies may follow the tradition of including an animal in their name and sounding as much like a Zen koan as possible, the traditional image of Butoh has been constantly broadened. The parameters of the style and what it includes have been stretched to incorporate more than other movement style. Performances now include, gold, red or black body paint, a range of music from the use of discordant ethnic instruments to the new-age droning of Enya to silence, nudity to extreme, gaudy costume, irreverence as much as profundity. Where once Hijikata danced his childhood self, playing in mud as the essence of abandonment, his widow, Akiko Motofuji dances a tango with a live turtle. There are no prescribed physical techniques or forms for Butoh, no common terminology, no pre-requisite skill, no ideal body type or shape. There are as many different styles of Butoh as there are dancers, which is what makes it incredibly difficult to define. Today it is referred to as a movement as much as it is a form or style.
So why should we study it in our classrooms?
Butoh is growing in popularity throughout the world and, as a result, is becoming a truly multi-cultural, world art form.
Butoh is the essence of adaptability, of intercontextuality. Its performance finds appeal in any country and culture, its training methodologies complement and resonate through a variety of other actor training and performance styles. I believe it does so by stripping back all of the cultural and social conventions, the language barrier, the literal perspective and the dominant logical/rational paradigm that we decipher the world through. It leaves us with the common human denominator of our own body expressing an honest response to experience and emotion. The honest response is the transcendent, uninhibited, unconscious, transformation that has been at the core of the greatest performances since “…..ritual and artistic creation were seamless. Where poetry was song, song was incantation, movement was dance." ( Jerzy Grotowski ) (2.)
To answer the question of why we should include Butoh in our course of study, let us examine the following three things :
The Body
Expressing an Honest Response
Transformation
The Body
"In other forms of dance, such as flamenco or classical dance, the movements are derived from a fixed technique; they are imposed from the outside and are conventional in form. In my case, it's the contrary, my dance is far removed from conventions and techniques ... it is the unveiling of the inner life."
Tatsumi Hijikata ( 1.)
Because of its improvisational nature and the fact that a lot of the training attempts to elicit an intensely personal response to the given stimulus, Butoh frees students from expectations of a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way of performing. As the great director and performance theorist Tadashi Suzuki says in The Sum of Internal Angles“There is no good acting or bad acting. Acting should be judged by the degree of how profound a reason the actor has to stand on stage.” (2.) Butoh requires no previous dance or movement training, no particular body type, no social constraints and no form or ‘steps’ which must be mimicked to prove understanding. Butoh’s co-founder Kazuo Ohno, who still dances in his wheelchair aged 100, refuses to teach Butoh as a codified form at all, and asserts Butoh is not a particular dance style but simply the expression of the dance that resides in each individual.
Think of this in terms of the literal translation of the word Butoh – ‘stomping dance’. A prime example from Hijikata’s may be a small child stomping in a mud puddle with complete abandonment, both to the unrehearsed action and the emotion that compels it and results from it. A whole mind-body ( psycho-somatic ) connection in the moment – how could this action have a specified form and be qualified as wrong ? The quality of connection and the expression of it may be judged, but never can it be ‘wrong’.
The object in this philosophy is to further distance the conscious reaction as Butoh is interested more in the physical, visceral, impulsive and intuitive response; the focus on feeling more than intellect. Because of this one of the first and most difficult skills a Butoh performer learns and constantly revisits is establishing a calm, open and aware state of mind, or what some performers call ‘no mind’. This state can be found in a number of ways from breath control to image work to meditative, repetitive movement. The goal however is to find a state from which the performer is free to respond with their own physicality in the moment with no censorship from the right brain. This freedom usually results in a connection to something far more honest and personal – what wants to be danced from inside rather than what wants to be seen from outside.
“ By this it must be true that each Butoh dance is unique to the person who dances it. For no one can create the same dance feeling inside that any other dancer has already felt. The "magic" of this dance then is in the ability of the individual to push away all that is unnecessary to the expression of the feeling in the dance.”
Emily Burke (3.)
This also reinforces the concept that there is no perfect Butoh body type. Because the emphasis in Butoh is on an honest expression through the body the performer has now, Butoh is less concerned with whether they have the body of an athlete or ballerina. This is not to say that flexibility, strength and co-ordination aren’t important, but they are not necessarily the focus and can be developed through working on the expressiveness of the entire body.
The perception of the body is also an important point when discussing the traditional use of semi-nudity in Butoh with students. Talking with high school students after Zen Zen Zo’s Butoh inspired performances a recurring comment is “ After a couple of minutes I forget they were only wearing g-strings.” The use of semi-nudity is more about stripping away a façade than an attempt at eroticism. It is a way of focussing on the incredible ability of the entire body to express meaning. It shifts the perception that the most expressive features of the human body are the face and hands and forces performers, and through them the audience, to become aware of the expressive quality of their backs or their feet.
Traditional Butoh performance aesthetic also promotes the anti-individual image – the uniform colouring of performers in white body paint, the shaved heads, the eyes rolled up obscuring the pupils, the wide open mouths that still manage to conceal the teeth. By taking away all of the aspects that show the performer as an individual, the focus becomes ‘a body’ on stage rather than ‘the body’ of a particular performer.
This particular focus on exploration through the body rather than the ‘right’ product is not only more conducive to creating an effective learning environment, it is also vital in establishing an atmosphere where students will feel safe to abandon and become vulnerable. It is only by taking the risk to let go of these conditioned intellectual responses that a performer may connect and express their inner selves honestly in more abstract ways.
Expressing an Honest Response
"The passion of the Butoh dancer is an inner one. What you see on the outside is always infinitely subtle. You see a trace of the emotion, never the emotion itself. In the west we have a tendency to throw ourselves against walls as a way to indicate passion. The Japanese just show traces, not unlike their prints, their art of leaving traces on paper. They disclose only just enough to allow you to imagine an inner poetic landscape. This is much more interesting" Robert LePage
“…strictly speaking, the gestures of great actors are all butoh. They are brought into consciousness in a state where the actors seem to forget that they are speaking” (Tatsumi Hijikata quoted in Kurihara 2000, 69).
Butoh, like many forms of method acting, concentrates on exposing the unconscious connection of mind and body, of emotion and its expression through action, by peeling away the socially constructed and contrived responses. It uses a variety of methods to do so – from developing what Kazuo Ohno calls ‘the dead body’ ( an energised state of readiness without expectation or thought ), to concentrating on the physical and psychological responses to unconscious, extraordinary or involuntary movements ( convulsions, tics, jerks, extremely contorted bodily positions and facial expressions, isolation of body parts or the juxtaposition of different movement dynamics in one body ). The purpose of these exercises is to free the performer to respond honestly, to express the feeling of the dance rather than trying to contrive an appearance according to what is expected by the audience. Anything else is extraneous and confuses the meaning. Honest and organic, the physical movement stems unconsciously from, and is charged by the emotional/psychological connection.
This concept of stripping away all conscious response, all ego in order to discover a pure expressive state is not unique to the Butoh dancer. Grotowski almost defined Ohno’s concept of the dead body in his interview with Eugenio Barba stating
"If the actor is conscious of his body, he cannot penetrate and reveal himself. The body must be freed from all resistance. It must virtually cease to exist.”
An exercise that I believe is derived from Grotowski or perhaps even Stanislavski’s later work on the psycho-physical, illustrates not only the similarities in the underlying philosophy of the seemingly unrelated styles, but also demonstrates the core principle of using physicality as a means to derive an honest expression.
The participant is told to continually recite a section of Seneca’s Oedipus - where the main character is lamenting his misfortune at being spared while his beloved city and people are suffering - no matter what, not focussing on the words but on expressing ‘the experience’ through them. The ‘experience’ is that while they do this, a dozen people drag, push, carry, roll, pull, lift and throw their unresisting body throughout the space. After the words seem torn out of them, the frustration, discomfort and pain naturally filling their voices by their simple refusal to resist it, the teacher asks the participant to perform the speech standing still with the memory of the experience informing their words. The teaching/ directing point is made when they are asked how it felt to be at the whim of the gods.
In a second example participants in a Butoh class were asked us to simply lie on the floor. Without the benefit of words to express their feelings, they were to feel the impulse to rise, to come to standing and then reach above them as if toward a goal. When the extent of their reach was exhausted, they were asked to acknowledge the moment when they realised that by reaching so far they would fall, and then to allow their bodies to fall to the floor without resistance. While on the floor they were to acknowledge the opposite feeling to the desire to reach toward the goal – the heaviness of gravity holding them back – in order to find the moment when the equilibrium changed again and the desire to rise once again took over. The process of constantly rising and falling was repeated again and again with the only two further instructions. The first was to have the desire to stand and reach constantly outweigh the desire to remain lifeless on the floor. The second was for both the moment of rising and the moment of stillness and gravity on the floor to gradually increase in tempo until a rise and fall could take place within two seconds. After rising and falling at speed for some time they are asked to fall one last time, then from the floor, to begin dancing the experience – one aspect of it or in its entirety.
Both exercises were aimed at providing an external stimulus in order to inspire the internal life of the actor. In this way the actor is manifesting and then expressing an emotion from a real, lived experience rather than their intellect. The major difference of course is the means of expression – through the voice and Seneca’s beautiful text for one and the body used in any way for the other. In participating and observing in both of these exercises it is interesting to note that often in the first exercise, while a strong emotional connection can be heard in the voice, the words are often a restriction for the participant’s expression. As the emotion generated by the experience grew and became overwhelming, the limited confines of the prescribed meaning and sound of the text were usually abandoned in favour of silence or emotional expression through open vowel sounds or stuttering strings of consonants. Strangely the strangled silence, grunting and howling seemed to express the character in the situation much more honestly and effectively than the beautifully constructed words. Perhaps it’s just my favour of abstract expression over the literal.
The other curious observation of the first exercise is that while the strength of the emotional quality can have a visceral effect on an audience member, the actor usually seemed pre-occupied with the voice, emotion and mind and barely moved at all. The language we speak seems to subvert our movement and control us by making us think more than we move. It takes control of our concentration and makes us separate movement and voice.
In the second exercise the participant finds themselves free to allow movement to happen as a result of concentrating on the feeling the exercise gives them, their body knowing inherently what it needs to do. The more abandoned, abstract and unconventional the movement, the more they find they can explore the feeling unconsciously, the more they ‘try’ to do something the less the connection to the wellspring of emotion the experience had generated.
It was also in this exercise that I have witnessed a strong personal connection when participants recognise the feeling they generate through the exercise as one they possibly felt before in regards to striving and failing again and again to reach a goal. If this personal connection occurred, their performance became deeper, their personal feelings resonating with the physical experience of the exercise and the expression after it in the dance. Often it is a feeling they had repressed as too painful or too esoteric to clearly relate to anyone, but by exploring the abstract concept/ feeling through abstract movement they manage to express it adequately enough to feel some cathartic change.
Art is...a process where the darkness within us is gradually brought into the light. (Jerzy Grotowski Towards a Poor Theatre). (4.)
Because Butoh strips away even our self-imposed social conditioning, the confronting element of performance often becomes discovering some repressed memory, feeling or response to various stimuli within the performer themselves. These aspects of the self, either good or bad, can be used as a means of exploring and reinterpreting patterns of behaviour and response within the individual, aid in their development as aware human beings, which in turn can only further inform their artistic practice.
Toshiharu Kasai, a Butoh dancer and psychologist who focuses on the mind-body relationship, believes there are 3 phases of a Butoh dance method that explore the connection of the inner life of the performer to the honest physical expression of it. (5.) They are :
Playfulness – a way of initiating the spontaneous physical response in a positive atmosphere where only a simple form is to be adhered to. The focus then becomes the physical rather than the intellectual, spontaneous rather than consciously considered. When we play we strip away social restriction and associate the concept with childlike abandonment and lack of responsibility.
Relaxation – in this phase relaxation acts as a vehicle for accessing the unconscious. “ The exercises may include the experience of "amae", a soft mutual dependency with the other people, and the experience of being accepted and allowed to be as you are. Another set of exercises for enhancing the bodily perception and proprioceptive perception are introduced at this phase only when the participant reaches the level of enjoying the minute movements, a couple of millimeter ones.” (5.).
Confrontation – unconscious movement can often link the participant with repressed unconscious memories, feelings and responses. Images and physical situations may resonate with the lived experience of participants – in this instance, the response is the focus.
Kasai goes on to say that these three phases may exist in this sequence or that they may all exist within the one exercise. Depending on their level of awareness, participants may reach the third phase through a relatively simple exercise or one that was designed to explore one of the first two. While some exercises tend to push the barrier of the confrontation phase, Kasai suggests students explore the first two phases until the third occurs naturally.
This work is risky and can, like many other techniques, threaten the participant to reveal aspects of their personality and life that they normally wouldn’t. The argument of course is when did one of the hallmarks of great acting become ‘doing what people normally would’ ? This concept of an honest revelation exists in many training forms, the only difference being how to get there and how to express it.
This is the essence of the confrontation phase – confronting yourself and your honest response to the stimulus. What then is the result of this confrontation ?
Transformation
Paul Roquet in his thesis Towards the Bowels of the Earth (6.) writes :
In Butoh, one must become what is danced. Instead of applying an image onto the body from the outside, Butoh works from the inside out. When dancing a flower it is of no consequence if the dancer looks like a flower to the spectator, rather the dancer must feel like a flower, and let this lead the movement. Every gesture is drawn from a body consumed with the flower’s perspective. To allow this to happen the dancer begins with an empty form, a body free from likes, dislikes and habitual movements.. Ohno Kazuo writes :
If you wish to dance a flower you can mime it and it will be everyone’s flower, banal and uninteresting; but if you place the beauty of that flower and the emotions which are evoked by it into your dead body, then the flower you will create will be true and unique and the audience will be moved. ( quoted in Viala and Masson-Sekine, 22 )
The important thing is not the transformation into the flower but the transformation itself; the fact that you change. This is what makes the impact on the audience – why people can watch Butoh, not necessarily understand what is happening or where it came from, yet still be moved to an emotional response. Like witnessing a life condensed, they see the human body stripped of all artifice, honestly expressing the inexpressible, and being transformed by it. This in turn brings about change in the audience themselves.
The difficulty in defining Butoh is in explaining the lived feeling in words, both as audience and performer. Students respond openly and honestly when they feel they can become expert performers of their own interpretation of their own personal dance. To be able to provide this in a kinaesthetic learning style, as much as the it appeals to the others, Butoh is one that promotes the perfect body the students inhabit. Butoh, while confronting, allows all performers, especially young people, to explore themselves and the full scope of human existence through the beauty of the human body’s expression. It asks them to examine and express both the most sublime and the utterly dark, the beautiful and the grotesque and then challenges them to find the difference.
References
Unreferenced quote found at http://home.earthlink.net/~bdenatale/AboutButoh.html web-site of Flesh and Blood Mystery Theatre
Osinski, Zbigniew. "Grotowski blazes the trails : from objective drama to ritual arts"The Drama Review 35 (1991) 1 Spring, 95-112
as referenced in Butoh – Dance of Darkness adaptive version of an article originally published in DANS 12 (1994) nr. 6 (september), p. 22-23
Emily Burke (2000) “The Darkness Amongst the Joy.” Published with permission at http://www.butoh.net/DATJ.html
Grotowski J 1968 Towards a Poor Theatre Simon and Schuster, New York
Kasai T , 2001 Mind Body learning by Butoh Dance Methodfor 36th Annual Conference of American Dance Therapy Association in Raleigh
Roquet, P, 2003 Towards the Bowels of the Earth http://www.saigonsc.com/TowardstheBowelsoftheEarth.pdf
