Butoh: Dancing to Death
Posted by Steven Bruhm on October 29, 2009 in Guest Blog, Prof Steven Bruhm tagged withWhile I was trained in literary studies and have spent most of my energies in the Gothic thinking about popular culture, I’ve been drawn recently to dance and to the ways in which dance so often embodies a "gothic" aesthetic. In particular, I have been fascinated by Butoh, the Japanese *Dance of Utter Darkness.*
First, a very little bit of background. Butoh was invented as a dance form by Japanese artists Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno as a post-modernist response to more conventional Japanese stage dance (Noh and Kabuki) as well as European modes of balletic grace and beauty. (In this sense, Butoh is part of European modernism’s attempt to re-write dance convention, to get to a more legitimately "human" expression as opposed to the falsifications of ballet.) Moreover, the first Butoh performance was performed on the day that Japan signed the Mutual Defense Treaty with the United States, 24 May 1959, prompting Japanese artists to rise in protest against what they saw as a selling out to the country that had bombed them a decade and a half earlier. In this sense, Butoh deploys modernity against modernity, forging a new kind of dance to resist both Japanese tradition and contemporary politics.
In terms of its founding principles, Butoh aligns itself very closely to what we think of as a western gothic aesthetic. According to Hijikata, in Butoh, "We shake hands with the dead, who send us encouragement from beyond our body; this is the unlimited power of Butoh. . . . Something is hiding in our subconscious, collected in our unconscious body, which will appear in each detail of our expression. Here, we can find Butoh in the same way we can touch our hidden reality. Something can be born, can appear, living and dying in a moment." (quoted in Ethan Hoffman, *Butoh: The Dance of the Dark Soul,* 121) Living, as well as dying—for in Butoh, physical death actively engenders choreographic life, not just in the communication with the afterlife but in the actual sinews of the dancer. As Hijikata has elsewhere put it, “Butoh is a corpse standing straight up in a desperate bid for life” (quoted in Jay Hirabayashi, Vancouver International Dance Festival 200 catalogue, 14).
So, what exactly does this dance look like? I’m posting below a few links to YouTube, where you can watch various pieces of Butoh choreography. As I’m sure you know, YouTube also gives you a list of related links so that you can watch Butoh until the dead come home. I’m fascinated to hear what kind of impressions people have and how you might want us to think about this very staid, controlled, and choreographed form as an expression of *gothic* physicality. In a more general sense, I’m interested to read how you want to *talk* about an art form that seems to exceed words.
Butoh on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8V-KMDWe_Q&feature=rec-HM-fresh+div
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxT-v9cxf7g&feature=related
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Steven Bruhm
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Hello Steven!
There is something, an imminent feeling of a disaster, a plead to the gods, or the dead through the butoh dancer’s movement and gaze. But it does exceeds words as you say. The black background contrasted to the corpse paint of the bodies is quite compelling as well as the use of corpsepaint (in black metal and some gothic bands, i have in mind Anna Varney of Sopor Aeternus and her asexual identity) to eliminate difference, the feeling that the butoh dancers are all parts of one collective idea/movement,their shadows on the black background, their appearance and disappearance on stage.By watching some other video clips, I found also very interesting the fact that butoh can take place outside a theatre, crossing the boundary of art and entering real life. The music is also quite repetitive, there is no climactic point in which the body will perform some revelatory movement or expression, which renders the performance a feeling of fear or as if the performers have control over the happening and the audience doesn’t, expecting something unknown to happen.
Thanks, Aspasia. Yes, getting rid of any notion of personal identity is crucial to the Butoh aesthetic, presumably because such individualism is so central to Western notions of capitalism and competition. This raises the question of Butoh’s conversation with a Western gothic. Is it the function of the gothic, I wonder, ultimately to reinscribe personal identity or to obliterate identity under a feeling of terror or the sublime? I’m thinking in particular of the link you make between Butoh and some Western gothic bands. Indeed, I’m not sure many Marilyn Manson videos would be possible with Butoh.
I’m finding this interesting, but a bit difficult to understand. Visually, I see the gothic here definitely, but in terms of what they are trying to do, I’m a bit lost. Looking forward to hearing more!
Thanks Jodi. I find the notion of “understanding dance” to be exactly the problem for Butoh, especially given that it is staging an encounter with the dead that isn’t necessarily limited to a single register. There are some Butoh dances that are extremely narrative in their structure: the first Butoh performance in 1959 was based on a scene from Mishima’s novel, *Forbidden Colours.* I’ve also seen a piece in which a woman dramatizes the death of her daughter in a river and moves through a narrative that suggests her reconciliation with that death. Other dances, though, are not nearly so coherent or narrative. The dancer might invite her body to become a thing (and I mean that literally) that we associate with fear, or power, or destruction–say, a tiger–and then immediately switch that identification into some other image of fear–say, falling into a pit or having one’s body consumed by insects. The purpose here is not to tell a story or to have the audience trace one, but to identify with death in a conglomerate of its many aspects. Often a dance will be a series of pinpointed and lucid death-meanings, but this series itself is by no means linear. I take this to be, among other things, the influence of German Expressionism on Butoh, where the aesthetic depends upon presenting (rather than representing) death as it figures the endpoint of the human’s capacity to present anything.
I hope this is helpful.
Thank you, yes, I think I’m getting it! Maybe my problem is partly my tendency to try and convert everything into narrative.
About the influence of German Expressionism – I had thought of Cabinet of Dr Caligari in looking at some of the youtubes.
Caligari is certainly an interesting comparison. Indeed, I think it would be interesting to think about the gothicism of German Expressionist film alongside the gothicisim of German Expressionist dance. How is extreme movement understood in both? How does each represent the body at the limits of its own capabilities?
Something you might take a look at on YouTube is Mary Wigman’s “witch’s dance,” or “Hexentanz.” This is one of the most famous performances of German Expressionism in dance, and as you’ll see, conveys a profound sense of bodily horror (not unmixed with humor, I suspect).
November is winding down, which means I’m about to move out of the position of guest blogger. Before I go, I want to direct any readers to one final website on Butoh. This site–a YouTube link, actually–is of a performance by Katsura Kan and represents his use of the Irish writer Samuel Beckett : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o650tVAdxQw.
I’m posting this for a number of reasons. First, I wanted to present you with some dance that incorporated the spoken word rather than music or percussion. Second, I wanted something that used more technology than some of the other things we’ve looked at. And third, I’m hoping your knowledge of Beckett may help you to think about–or to experience–what is going on in this piece. I’m especially intrigued by the way the words coming from the two projected mouths above the dancers seem to wash over the bodies on the stage, both caressing and destroying them. The single dancer in the centre is presumably the “Not I” of the title, and we are left to ask about how the combination of words and gesture render this Not-I-ness. Finally, please note the dancer on the right hand side of the screen near the end of the piece: he moves as if his entire body were dead, except the lower legs. This is some of the most disturbing and fascinating dance I’ve seen.
Very interesting and disturbing. It reminds me of the primitive energies found in Greek ancient tragedies. The masks (no facial expression) and the movement of the body (and also dramatic voice). The movement of bodies here is however really unique.