Butoh

Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy

Sondra Fraleigh

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780252090134
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Both a refraction of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a protest against Western values, butoh is a form of Japanese dance theater that emerged in the aftermath of World War II. Sondra Fraleigh chronicles the growth of this provocative art form from its mid-century founding under a sign of darkness to its assimilation in the twenty-first century as a poignant performance medium with philosophical and political implications. Through highly descriptive, thoughtful, and emotional prose, Fraleigh traces the transformative alchemy of this metaphoric dance form by studying the international movement inspired by its aesthetic mixtures. While butoh has retained a special identity related to its Japanese background, it also has blossomed into a borderless art with a tolerant and inclusive morphology gaining prominence in a borderless century. Employing intellectual and aesthetic perspectives to reveal the origins, major figures, and international development of the dance, Fraleigh documents the range and variety of butoh artists around the world with first-hand knowledge of butoh performances from 1973 to 2008. Her definitions of butoh's morphology, alchemy, and philosophy set a theoretical framework for poetic and engaging articulations of twenty butoh performances in Japan, Europe, India, and the West. With a blend of scholarly research and direct experience, she also signifies the unfinished nature of butoh and emphasizes its capacity to effect spiritual transformation and bridge cultural differences.

Part One

Alchemy and Morphology

FIGURE 1. Butoh founders Ohno Kazuo and Hijikata Tatsumi rehearse The Dead Sea for the 1985 Butoh Festival in Tokyo, the first of its kind. As choreographer, Hijikata whispers instructions to Ohno, who is costumed ambiguously, bridging genders, the human word, and other life forms. Miniature flags of several nations adorn Ohno’s hair. Nourit Masson Sekine, a witness to the beginnings of butoh as a photographer and author, calls the work “a fusion of polarities” through the opposing yet complementary talents of Hijikata and Ohno. Photograph by Nourit Masson Sekine, © 1985. Used by permission of Nourit Masson Sekine.

Chapter One

Butoh Alchemy

There is an orientalism in the most restless pioneer, and the farthest west is but the farthest east.

— Henry David Thoreau,
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Butoh is a form of dance theater born in Japan out of the turmoil of the post–World War II era, partly as a refraction of America’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and more generally in protest of Western materialism: “I don’t want a bad check called democracy,” is how butoh founder Hijikata Tatsumi sometimes put it. I first saw butoh at the Festival of New Dance in Montreal in 1985 with Nakajima Natsu’s dance Niwa (The Garden). I wrote about Niwa and sent Nakajima the article. She invited me to Japan and took me to a butoh class with her teacher, Ohno Kazuo, who cofounded butoh with Hijikata. Ohno was eighty when I met him in his studio in 1986 and as of this writing is a centenarian. I have been a butoh addict ever since.

I understood this form of dance immediately, because it is not filtered through classical or folk forms, but its basic material is the body itself in its changing conditions. It is furthermore a hybrid form of dance, linking physical and spiritual cultures from around the world, also accounting for aging bodies as well as the buoyant qualities of youth. I have studied many dance forms, including ballet and modern dance with its postmodern offshoots. Butoh fascinates me most because of its shape-shifting potentials and its somatic shamanistic basis, not marking race so much as metamorphic change. The manner in which metamorphosis is achieved becomes part of the aesthetic of the dance and is individual, as the essays in part 2 explore. Metamorphosis and alchemy are linked as the very words suggest; they both point toward transformative change and connectivity, even when the change seems to come magically from nowhere.

Butoh has several translations as well as differing meanings in Japanese. Most basically, it means “dance step,” but Hijikata evoked an older meaning, that of “ancient dance.” It also refers to Western social dances imported to Japan, and some say it refers to Western dance in general, but this would not be its central meaning.¹ Butoh now identifies a genre of dance, and as a term in use internationally, it accrues meaning.

This chapter introduces butoh as alchemy, how its various Eastern and Western elements come together, fuse, and transform into something new. The values and means of metamorphosis arise in this context, and we see how butoh morphology rests on globalizing elements in dance throughout the twentieth century.

Shape-shifting

The therapeutic potentials of butoh are founded in shamanic alchemy, and by this I’m not suggesting the paranormal or supernatural but rather the very real ability of the body to manifest healing through dance and movement. Dance as therapy (also called “dance movement therapy” and “dance therapy” in America) is widely practiced by professionals in America, Japan, Europe, and elsewhere. Dance therapists wouldn’t call themselves “shamans,” because they don’t consider themselves mediums between this world and another; rather they employ dance and movement toward healing as shamans often do. Shamans—also known as shape-shifters—are healers first and foremost; dance and repetitive movement (such as shaking, stamping, leaping, and whirling) are part of their seemingly miraculous means toward healing. As shamanist, butoh uses movement to pass between conscious and unconscious life, finally distilling this in various forms of dance and theater. This might be said of other kinds of dance as well, but butoh methods cultivate this passage in-between in unique ways, one of which is called ma in Japanese, as we mentioned in the introduction and explore throughout the text.

At the New York Butoh Festival in 2007, Tatsuro Ishii spoke about the shamanistic basis of butoh as a dance form.² He further outlined how butoh moves out internationally because of this. Shamanism is deeply embedded in Asian sensibilities, as he showed on film. I also recognize shamanism in butoh, a kind not based in religious or ritual practices. Butoh is based in creative arts and draws upon the shamanic aspect of metamorphosis; it involves several core shamanic practices that transcend cultural boundaries, as we will see.

If butoh has a shamanist basis, that doesn’t mean that butoh dancers are taught how to be shamans or that they have this as a goal. They will, however, encounter core values of shamanism, whether explicitly stated as such, or not. Shamans exist in all cultures and many religions, from Judeo-Christian to Hindu, and many are independent of any specific faith. Shamans aim to heal at the soul level. They work with their own awareness in relation to nature, dancing with plants, rocks, and trees, paying attention to the weather and the land, the seas and the mountains. Consciousness through movement and sound is their primary tool in healing, and thus they are often dancers and musicians.

Shamans respect death and the ancestors: This is also a key element of butoh. Like Hijikata and Ohno, butoh-ka (butoh dancers) are often aware of the spirits of their ancestors. Hijikata said that his dead sister danced inside him, and Ohno said that the dead spoke to him, as we will see further in part 2. In one of my early butoh experiences, I saw my mother’s face. Subsequently, I wrote about what this experience meant to me and how seeing my deceased mother connected me to feminine divinity and ancestry.³ Ohno teaches that there is a thin separation between the living and the dead, and he encourages states of consciousness that dance into the gap. He himself danced about embryonic life as also the life/death/life cycle.

For the shaman, everything is alive: As for Ohno, stones speak. He likes to dance with stones, and a popular exploration in his workshops is “be a stone.” Everything carries information for the shaman. In butoh we might call this spirit, energy, movement, or consciousness. Shamans shift through states of awareness in order to connect with the spirit or energy of the thing with which they seek resonance. This can be done through meditative movement, wild and uncontrolled movement, concentrated movement in natural environments, and embodiment of surreal imagery that stirs the unconscious, as was Hijikata’s primary means. The performative issue is how one embodies the image: pictorial, poetic, natural, metaphysical, or surreal—transforming through consciousness— morphing (changing) from image to image. Metamorphosis is the metaphysical method of butoh, its alchemical aspect, and its shamanist basis.

Soul Retrieval

The shamanist basis of butoh is seldom pointed out in workshops, and it may be implicit rather than explicit in performance. It takes some acquaintance with the practices of shamanism to gain a perspective on alchemy in butoh. The shaman’s work is soul work. And, as we will explore further in the text, soul work also motivates butoh. We notice, however, that shamanist healing principles appear in many movement forms and are not exclusive to butoh. Soul retrieval is practiced in meditative forms of yoga and in some forms of Qi gong. In my practice of Taoist Light Qi gong, I invite the return of my soul, one of the explicit practices in the form. This presupposes that my soul is lost, and sometimes it is—through a sense of dissociation, lack of wholeness, or “sorrow” for something missing. The shifting state of awareness that allows the return of the soul is essential in shamanism, as it is in some meditative movement forms and butoh.

In addition to healing people, shamans have traditionally performed rituals to heal the earth, using the power of consciousness to that end. One of the most interesting tangents of butoh has been precisely this. From Ohno Kazuo who traveled to heal rivers, seas, and prison camps with his dance, to Takenouchi Atsushi who dances in deep caves and on the killing grounds of war around the globe, butoh has developed the special mission of healing the earth.

We know that shamans are responsible for discovering the healing properties of plants, especially in South America where their explorations later form the basis for specific medicines, and that they also communicate with the spirits of animals, shifting their states of awareness to include nonhuman life. It is significant in this regard that Hijikata slept with a chicken to remind himself of his hunger, he said, and that chickens (also the ritual sacrifice of chickens) entered into his dance. His student and chronicler of his butoh-fu (dance notation collages), Waguri Yukio, is especially gifted in dancing animal essence. I took a workshop with Waguri in Tokyo that revolved around the instruction: “Be a chicken.” As absurd as it may sound, I found it fascinating and far more difficult and nuanced than one might suppose. In keeping with Hijikata’s concern for dancing into the margins and paying attention to the dispossessed, his identification with chickens and their commodification is apt. SU-EN’s butoh also takes chickens seriously. Her Chicken Project in Sweden is covered in the seventh essay of part 2.

In most cultures, even in current times, a particular shaman will be gifted in working with one or another shamanic activity. Butoh-ka practice the shamanist art of transformation, which, we have said, requires the ability to cross over from image to image, shifting shapes and bodily forms, while relating to others and the outer world. The purpose of this shape-shifting, as I study it, is to release and heal the subconscious mind. The practice of butoh is inspired through hidden messages from the subconscious; not relying on the linear mind, butoh works with nonlinear processes, giving less attention to controlling the body than to cultivating a listening-body. Questions that suppose surprise flow though such processes: “What is waiting to emerge,” the dancer asks her body without forcing an answer. “How might it speak? Does it have a color or a sound, a shape or a smell? Can I let my dance find its own way out?”

The trust that is asked of the dancer is how she can stay with the emergent image, let it be, let it move and morph, and not fix it. Then she can be surprised by her dance. And if she is performing, perhaps she can also surprise her audience by awakening something in them of their own hidden truth. In these affective connections, butoh holds healing potentials, as many dancers have experienced, not only committed butoh-ka, but also those who take butoh classes and workshops for personal growth. Healing and celebration are basic purposes in all forms of creative arts—though seldom stated as such. In butoh they appear oddly and unexpectedly, often as interactive aspects of world community, through personal intuitive insight, and in theater performances.

Sand and Footprints in Water

Now that we can see images of our planet from space, we understand how all life is connected. We are related—sharing a small home spinning in the vastness of space. As a hybrid art that expands this sense of kinship, butoh as it developed through the second half of the twentieth century continues to move across cultural boundaries. If its shamanist basis promotes a healing ethos, its aesthetic tendencies further a Buddhist psychology of nonviolence and compassionate interdependence. The individual, as such, is not as important as the whole in butoh, even as individuality is represented and respected. The particular features of the dancers are often indistinguishable in the butoh company Sanki Juki, for instance, as white faces and powdered bodies blend and sand drops from the ceiling in sprays across them.

The use of sand that occurs a lot in butoh is profoundly mesmerizing. It prompts the mind to spread out and dissolve and the ego to give up its attachments to limited individuality. The shifting qualities of sand point directly toward shape-shifting and the transcendence of individual ego. On the cover of this book, we see Yoshioka Yumiko drenching her head with sand in Before the Dawn, her work premiered at the Daiwa International Butoh Festival in London in 2005. In an earlier work, It’s All Moonshine (1997), she is buried completely in a large pile of sand. We see only the mound in the beginning, as we wait through a long period of emptiness and silence. Then she comes plowing out, dancing. Finally she spits sand, ritualistically, propelling us into its grit. Yoshioka loses herself to the dancing and the sand, shaking, shedding her skin like a snake, and morphing through several states of being.

Likewise, I have seen Ohno Kazuo bite into paper in dance class, using illogical behavior to prompt laughter and release ego, then through poetry motivate dancing with a barrage of images: a moth’s wing, the fetus in its mother, the ocean, orchids, racing sperm, the dead, and more. He projects students past the solidity of ego and imbues empathy in a global sense. His more linear lectures assert care and gratitude for those whose lives we share, the living and the dead.

Butoh comes rolling through the wind with its bones on fire, in the shape-shifting imagery of Hijikata Tatsumi. The first performance of butoh, Kinjiki (Forbidden Color), was in Tokyo in 1959. Seeded by Hijikata, Ohno Kazuo, Ohno Yoshito (Kazuo’s son), and Kasai Akira, butoh redefines beauty in dance. In its beginnings, several women were also important, including Ashikawa Yoko, Nakajima Natsu, and Motofuji Akiko (Hijikata’s wife). Its heart-searching images pose new imperatives for contemporary life. Butoh can also be irritating, as any alchemical form would. It rubs through in bravura performances, even as it covers its tracks, erasing pride.

Whether amateur or professional, butoh performers challenge inner enemies, mourn the living and the dead, carry ancestors, resonate with fear and faith, and, in the unlikely manner of alchemy, leave evanescent impressions like footprints in water. Unlike ornamental European ballet, the democratic designs of American modern dance, or the improvisational games of the postmodern, butoh masquerades human weakness. It exposes the watery subtle body ready to dissolve and go under. Not moving outward in decorative lines or aspiring upward, butohka around the globe effect a metamorphic signature through inward dances of spiritual transformation. They show how our global survival depends on empathy with others—not control. This is, moreover, not a conceptual empathy, but one that is lived through the vulnerable body we all share.

Sheer strength is not the quality that leads to feelings of gratitude and love. Rather, compassion for others and ourselves deepens through the experience of vulnerability, especially as we contemplate the impermanence of everything on the globe—mono no aware (evanescence)—and transform the earth we share. As in meditation, butoh offers a slow contemplative space within consciousness, somatically transforming: one pace, one synapse, and one cell at a time. This space of passage is known as ma. We have no Western term for ma. It is a middle, a hyphen in-between in any case. Sometimes I visualize this metaphysically as the space between the top of white and the bottom of black or more physically as a wide yawn where I lose myself in the middle, not the top of the wide inhalation or the bottom of the release moving down. Ma comes to me similarly as I form my own Zen question: What is the middle of gray? The essays in part 2 explore the Japanese concept of ma in several different butoh contexts.

Broken Path, Global Scattering

In several ways butoh is an arresting mixture of East and West, beginning with Japan. First, Japonisme strongly influenced the dev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Biographies of Dancers
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index