Butoh Translations and the Suffering of Nature

Abstract

Butoh, a form of dance and theatre having its roots in midtwentieth-century Japan, continues to migrate across cultures through translations that are individually crafted and understood. It has never been a progressive art, sinking as it does toward mud and disappearance. It is not based on steps, but rather on images and atmospheric change, eliciting affects of bodily being. Most significantly for this essay, butoh brought marks of suffering into dance, sublimating the body while extending its liminal, intermediate states. Butoh seldom lands anywhere: it keeps morphing.

Notes

1 In brief, butoh is a dance of transformation. This is a thematic of my book, BUTOH: Metamorphic dance and global alchemy (2010), which takes a closer look at metamorphosis as a butoh signature and introduces a philosophy of the butoh body. Those inclined toward butoh in the present century don’t necessarily stage their work through this prototype. Rather they see butoh as a contributing strand that informs them.

2 The butoh way of translating pain and suffering is part of its aesthetic ethos, as I have written about before (Fraleigh 2010: 49–50). In brief, butoh does not push away pain, but allows it to be, to move and morph. ‘Every step is pain’, Ohno Yoshito sometimes says in his workshops, as dancers work though this movement image in their own way. I have learned how to relieve back pain through admitting it in dance improvisations, especially in butoh, developing migratory pathways in bodily responsivity instead of getting stuck in the pain. This matter of attuning to affect and experience is a way of paying attention in dance.

3 Kaze Daruma (Wind Daruma) is a speech that Hijikata gave the night before the 1985 Butoh Festival in Tokyo. A daruma is a doll weighted at the base, so it can’t be knocked over.

4 In their four-decade career, Eiko and Koma have performed many environmental works on themes of water, land, trees and wind.

5 Since then, his art has proliferated widely and internationally, as I write about in a fuller treatise (2010) that explores the history and metamorphic essence of butoh.

6 Germen modern dance of that time was called ‘poision dance’ in Japan.

7 Many students also came to Japan to study with Ohno, including this writer. One fellow student from Sweden told me that he came ‘to bask in Ohno’s aura’.

8 In their travels abroad, Japanese proponents of early modern dance studied German Expressionism and American modern dance. Eguchi Takaya studied with Mary Wigman, and became a very influential teacher in Japan. Wigman herself involved Asian influences. Ohno Kazuo, Hijikata’s closest dance associate, studied with Eguchi in 1936. Hijikata studied Western style modern dance as a young man in the school of Masumura Katsuko, also a student of Eguchi.

9 Consider Isadora Duncan’s rebellion against ballet and Victorian manners, and we know that Duncan also rebelled against the corset as binding the female body.

10 Ephia Gburek, whose workshops have been hosted at various locations in Europe and the United States, leads butoh- influenced dances in Valcivières, France. In preparation for moving in nature, her blindfold exercises permit dancers to be guided through ‘listening’. Walking meditations also invite play with internal transformation, as does experiment with dream symbols and poetic vision, so that: ‘A finger placed on the pulse of the earth touches the connection of the sub-conscious and the landscape, of memory and place’ (Gburek 2015).

11 Shigenori Nagatomo’s work introduces Ichikawa and Yuasa to English speakers (1992).

12 Nobuo Harada, the leader of this butoh group, was not a student of Hijikata, but rather of Kasai Akira.