ESSENTIAL of BUTOH

Tatsumi Hijikata was born as Yoneyama Kunio on March 9, 1928, during the early reign of Emperor Showa, in Akita Prefecture, the cold Northern part of Japan. He died in 1986, just two years before the collapse of the Emperor. So, he is known as a ‘child of Showa’. The Showa Period saw the progression from modernism and postmodernism. Hijikata encountered the same challenges as other artists, in music, visual art, and literature, during this period. The 1960s, a turning point for Hijikata, was a moment when world values shifted. In the postwar, Japan entered a period of rapid economic development and high growth, which coincided with internal tensions over national security. Hijikata’s work responded to a world that was looking for new values, and a moment in the performing arts where people were looking for alternatives to Western rationalism. It was in this context that he proposed a ‘return to the physical body’ or a ‘return to the physical body of the Japanese’.

Much Japanese art following the Meiji Period was produced through an encounter between Japanese traditional art and western art. Hijikata was no exception. As with many Japanese artists following the Meiji Period, he pushed past the influence of western art to produce something original. As part of this, he also turned back towards his origins in Akita. Descriptions of butoh tend to conjure the image of a snow-covered country, figures with “short limbs”, that are “bow-legged” from working in the rice fields of Tohoku (the Northern region). Butoh challenges the priorities of ballet through remaining low to the ground, as in “muddy rice fields”. Hijikata saw this, however, as about establishing something more universal; as he put it: “there’s a Tohoku even in England”

Hijikata never travelled abroad, despite invitations in the early 1970s to travel to the US, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, and to France, to present work at a major Festival. Butoh, originally an underground artform, achieved recognition abroad, which led to it being reimported by companies like SANKAIJUKU and DAIRAKUDAKAN into Japan. Hijikata confessed to the Producer of Terayama Shuji’s theatre company, Kujo Kyoko, that the reason he didn’t accept the invitation was: "I can't dance on the hardened Western ground. My stage must be on muddy earth."

According to Tamano Koichi, one of the first-generation of butoh dancers who now lives in California, Hijikata had an opportunity to perform at the Paris Opera. Apparently, his vision was to create a performance in which he was carried in a casket from Orly Airport to the Theatre, and which began when he stood up out of the casket. This performance was, of course, never realized.

Most of Hijikata's disciples were amateurs with absolutely no foundation in dance. How shall we make them dance? The training of butoh artists was an urgent task. Hijikata choreographed with words.  Each of these dances has strict conditions for its formation, which can only be understood by the students present. The famous dance critic Ichikawa Masa described it as "an area that we outsiders cannot enter.

Conditions for the dance sequence: “Nerves: Wols – thousands of branches”・perceiving thousands of branches ・the branch at the temple breaks (snap) ・nose becomes an ear　・a thousand birds fly out from the back of the head　・an insect crawls by the foot　・crushing the insect whilst walking　・a twitch in the cheek　・the little finger (prick)　・Adam’s apple contracts in three stages　・the sound of a spoon falling behind (clank)　・the leaves inside the skull (rustle rustle)　・about to walk (click) there’s a locked room inside　・tooth pain (suuu suuu)·       the slug sliding up the left neck-tendon　・the grass-hopper jumping by the feet　・whiskers in space　・the horse’s neck　・strange smile·       flee like that (bye bye) There are innumerable examples of butoh notation, or butoh-fu, from notation of just a few lines to whole scenes that read like prose poems, like ‘Flemish’ or ‘City’, or ‘Canal’. All of these notational examples are interconnected.