Session 186: Butô(s): Past and Present, Center and Periphery

Organizer and Chair: Bruce Baird, University of Pennsylvania

Discussant: Kazuko Kuniyoshi, Waseda University

Observers (both Japanese and Western) have had a difficult time placing butô: there is the infamous Forbidden Eros of 1959 with its focus on homosexuality and sodomy, and also the later, and more widely recognized (because often published in photographic collections), butô with its contorted postures, grimacing faces, and white body paint. Unfortunately, there has been little in the way of scholarly analysis of the art form. We present a proposal for the first panel in America to look exclusively at butô. We seek to understand both the origins and later development of one of the most original and influential performance art forms of the latter half of the 20th century.

Both Kurt Wurmli and Bruce Baird have studied the art of the founder of butô, Hijikata Tatsumi. As a prelude to understanding the social and political place of butô in society, they seek to understand the precise mechanisms of his art. Wurmli takes up the relationship between Hijikata’s artistic notebooks and the performances, and focuses on the power of images to evoke movements. Baird then examines the presentation of pain in butô performances, and elucidates both the kind of power that attends presentations of pain, and also the social role these presentations play. Finally, Tamah Nakamura shows how butô was altered and transformed as the founder and members of one next-generation regional dance troupe, Seiryukai, twisted it for their own purposes.

As the advance guard of scholars scrutinizing an insufficiently studied avant-garde art form, we seek to understand butô’s place in Japanese society and cast light on the contributions made by butô to the worlds of art and philosophy.

The Power of Image (Reading Hijikata Tatsumi’s Butoh Fu)

Kurt Werner Wurmli, University of Hawaii, Manoa

Hijikata Tatsumi, acclaimed originator of the art form known as butoh or ankoku butoh (dance of darkness), ceased to perform onstage in 1974. He concentrated his later creativity on directing, choreographing and teaching butoh by using his own system of butoh fu, commonly translated into English as "dance notation(s)". However butoh fu should not be compared to the classic Western dance notations of Beauchamps, Feuillet or Laban, which are systems attempting to analyze and record movements. Butoh fu is meant as a visual source for inspiration to create dance. In sixteen volumes of scrapbooks, Hijikata collected nearly six-hundred reproductions of artworks from five continents, ranging from prehistoric cave paintings to twentieth century street graffiti. The images collected by Hijikata create a unique assemblage, drawing a topographic image of Hijikata’s search for a medium to explain, transmit, create, define, and reflect on butoh. Like one’s private library, the butoh fu mirrors Hijikata’s interests, orientations and tendencies, and therefore reveals a not-so-obvious Seelen-Verwandtschaft (soul-affinity) between his art and the collected artworks. Reading and understanding the images of the butoh fu offers deep insights into Hijikata’s artistic aims and orientations.

The major questions to be addressed in this presentation are:

A. What is the artistic nature (content and message) of the collected images in the butoh fu, individually and as an assemblage?

B. How are the images related to and reflected in Hijikata’s art?

The principle purposes of this research are:

1. To analyze and evaluate the images of the butoh fu.

2. To reveal the intimate artistic affinity between Hijikata Tatsumi’s dance and the collected artworks in the butoh fu.

3. To propose a more wide-ranging and international art history approach towards Hijikata Tatsumi’s art.

Parsing the Power of Pain in Butô

Bruce Baird, University of Pennsylvania

An early commentator on the avant-garde performance art form butô commented on butô’s "revision of technical competence." She was referring on butô’s move away from a focus on the ability to jump high or spin fast. However, a more important revision of competence lies in the stress placed upon the ability to endure pain. Suffering occupies a unique place in the development of butô. The initial avant-garde experiments of the founder of butô, Hijikata Tatsumi, emphasized presenting unmitigated suffering onstage as a way of engaging the audience, expressing reality, and driving social change. Later Hijikata began to place a premium on experiencing the pain of others manifest in the idea that the prerequisite to producing butô was an attitude of being jealous of a badly injured dog. Finally, Hijikata began to talk about the "emaciated body" by which he appears to have meant the aged and infirm body that has been shaped by prolonged interaction with an environment.

This presentation first traces the development of pain in the art of Hijikata and his co-founder Ôno Kazuo, and then goes on to examine the relationship between suffering and society. It seeks to understand why pain should have been such a pivotal concept in Japan in the 1960s by examining Japan’s place in the cold-war political climate, and international artistic and philosophical worlds of that time. I couple this exploration with an examination of some feminist implications of the widely prevalent idea that the Japanese (and in particular Japanese women) are particularly skilled at enduring pain.

Expression of Butoh beyond Tokyo

Tamah Nakamura, Kyushu University

During the 1960–70s, Butoh was a counterculture movement based in street theater and dance activities. Recently, the Butoh body in performance has been analyzed less as a site for opening up forms of social and political inquiry and is seen more as representative of an essential Japanese identity. However, a regional Butoh group in Fukuoka has transformed the original concept of the Butoh body as an experimental site into a site for their own personal and social transformation. The Butoh Seiryukai dance group exhibits in its workshops and group activities fewer prescribed: (1) images of a Butoh body; (2) patterns or techniques for practice; (3) concepts of Butoh performance; (4) standardized norms for Japanese group dynamics, and thus by implication; (5) fewer fixed assumptions about the nature of Japanese self and identity.

In this presentation I will report on my three-year inductive qualitative inquiry using ethnographic methods into the meaning of participating in Butoh Seiryukai dance group activities. Previous studies have not explored the meaning of doing Butoh beyond the performance arena, that is, they have failed to consider the connection of the participants’ experience of doing Butoh to society. Results show that the importance of Seiryukai’s Butoh practice and inclusive group interaction dynamics is the opportunity it offers its members to reexamine themselves in relation to others in the group and the larger society. Self-reflective identities participants experience include centered or grounded self, process-oriented or organic self, relational self, and ordinary self. Seiryukai’s Butoh body offers a site for self reflective knowledge generation oriented toward a positive resistance in what I call a "soft" counterculture movement.