The Big Bang of Bay Area Butoh Historical Highlights of Butoh What Bay Area Artists Have to Say About Butoh
	Guilty Verdict for Edmund Ko (in National News) Retired Asian American Judge to Fill Insurance Post (in Bay Area News) Streaming Media--Primetime and Online (in Business) Emil Amok: A Sudden Eraption (in Opinion)

A Historical Highlight on Butoh

Definitions

The definition of Butoh is controversial. Although Butoh, by its very nature, defies definition, a simple one can be found in The Dance Handbook (c1988): “Butoh is an “[a]vant-garde Japanese dance form that emerged after the World War II. Its central focus is emotional intensity rather than physical dexterity. Leading practioners inclue the Paris based Sankai Juku and New York based Kei Takei.”

In general, dance writers have called butoh “dance of the apocalypse” in association with the 1945 Hiroshima bombing, or ankoku butoh meaning dance of darkness, in reference to Hijikata’s early explorations. While partially true, such surface definitions, however formal, do not reveal what butoh actually is.

Stereotypes

These definitions feed stereotypcial pictures of butoh, such as images of dancers with shaven heads running naked and painted white, sticking out their tongues and rolling on the floor. When someone mentions Butoh in the United States, for example, the first image that often pops to mind is that of the New York-based “Eiko & Koma” taking ‘a million years’ to move across the stage, or that of Paris-based Sankai Juku’s all male company writhing upside down, twisting grotesquely with the whites of the eyes popping out.” These two companies have since move away from the original tenets of butoh.

Origins

The term “butoh” comes from two Japanese words: bu which means “step” and toh which means “dance”, or literally, “stamping dance.” The father of Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata(1926-1986), was to Japanese butoh what Martha Graham was to American modern dance.

In the wake of Hiroshima and post-war Japan in the 1950s, when annihilation became possible, butoh was launched by Tatsumi Hijikata in 1959 with the performance of Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors), a choreographic debut which raised a scandal in Japan and had him outlawed by the All Japan Modern Dance Association.

Thereafter Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno (1906-present) collaborated on the Ankoku Butoh group (1961-1966), beforing parting ways in 1968. Hijikata to focused extensively on company works, while Ohno pursue a more individual path of solo performances around the world.

Reversing Beauty

A revolt against the Japanese and Western standards of beauty and the body, butoh pulled the body down from its pedestal. “In this grotesque ugliness and corruption, however, there can be found an irreducible beauty and sweetness which are without equivalent elsewhere,” wrote Japanese dance critic Kazuko Kuniyoshi. “Clearly, butoh has accomplished a reversal in aesthetic consciousness.”

Harnessing Life

More importantly, butoh goes directly to the basic root of the life force as embodied in the body’s deepest physical regions and the mind’s deepest consciousnesses. Thus the emphasis on the imagination and images of the mind, and moving from a physical sensation of consciousness. Thus the focus on rural landscapes and nature imagery native to one’s origins as if trying to reach the body’soriginal state and consciousness. “It is the historically unprecedented discoveries it has made in the realm of physical consciousness, that is the originality of butoh,” Kuniyoshi said.

Hijikata’s critical spirit aimed at the most profound level of physical existence, using “ankoku butoh” as a force which works directly on the foundations of the body, where conservative elements, tastes, instincts and attitudes of Japanese culture bore deep roots, in the region between consciousness and unconscious, where life is not easily adaptable to urbanization of the West. This original consciousness was Hijikata’s greatest contribution to the history of 20th century dance.