“He was in some ways a very traditional shaman,” says Natsu Nakajima, an original member of Tatsumi Hijikata’s first butoh company. “But why I was charmed by Hijikata and by butoh was the sympathy for the lowest people–drunk people, sick people, disabled people, weak people.”
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Largely a reaction to the massive Westernization of Japanese culture in the years following World War II, butoh developed in the 1960s as an underground movement under the leadership of Hijikata and his colleague Kazuo Ohno. They held that Japanese culture and society had lost vitality because of the ossification of traditional artistic forms such as No and Kabuki and because Western-style industrial capitalism had alienated the Japanese from themselves and from nature. Hijikata and Ohno drew inspiration from various early-20th-century forms of popular Japanese entertainment and from Kabuki before its 19th-century elevation to the status of “high art.” They were also influenced by such Western intellectual currents as Dada, German expressionism, and surrealism, which explored the Freudian unconscious. Particularly influential was Antonin Artaud–who had himself been inspired by traditional Asian disciplines to propose a “theater of cruelty” liberated from the tyranny of a written text.
Working in Tokyo, Hijikata formed a tight-knit company and developed an anarchic, explosively inventive style of dance theater, exploring the very regions of the unconscious that the modern industrialized world tends to prudishly avoid. The subject matter was often violent and sexual, and sometimes conventional dance technique was ignored. The dancers, often performing nearly naked and without musical accompaniment, enacted ritualistic, darkly lyrical scenarios; the goal was spiritual catharsis for performers and audience alike.
Butoh tends to avoid literal narrative and the deceptive conceptualizations of language. As Nakajima has written: “The gestures do not tell a story but evoke associations–to explain a movement is to undermine its meaning.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Charles Eshelman.
