A Masters Dissertation - A CORPSE DESPERATELY STANDING: The Literary Influences on Hijikata Tatsumi's Ankoku Buto is in the process of being edited and revised. This may become available in the future. For now, two short introductory pieces concerning the genre are posted.

SEETHING CAULDRON (An introduction to Butoh)

The seminal form of Butoh, Ankoku Butoh (The Dance of Utter Darkness) was birthed in the chaotic vacuum of post-war, post capitalist, American occupied Japan in the mid 50s by Hijikata Tatsumi (1928-1986).  Hijikata's revolutionary spirit and fiery creativity incinerated all that was stale, mediocre and fossilised by convention in the japanese dance world, and what he conjured from the ashes has, in the words of Maro Akaji "spread like a virus throughout the world".

The influences upon the formulation of Ankoku Butoh were a complex and eclectic mix.  Hijikata, in the spirit of a magpie, collected inspirations from many varied sources.  From the arenas of performance he drew from phlebian forms of entertainment: Mimosa, Yose, Carnival, from Karuga, folklore, and also from early Kabuki (before its sanitisation), as well as the contemporaneous Happenings and Action Art. He soaked himself in literature and poetry, particularly French Decadent authors (Lautremont, Baudelaire, Sade etc.), held Satre and Genet in high esteem and fed upon Artaud's ferocious demands for performance/theatre reforms. He had an intrinsic linkage with the visual arts, collaborating with many artists, particularly those from Yomiuri Independent and Hi Red Center,  and with filmakers and photographers. All these fragmented treasures,  and many more besides,  stirred together with his own experiential existence and childhood memories of a harsh rural Japan, Hijikata brewed in a cauldron of his own creativity.  What emerged was a potent, intoxicating and powerfully innovative/evocative concoction, beautiful and terrible...essentially shamanic in essence.

When Ankoku Butoh made its first inception onto the boards of the stage on May24, 1959 with KINJIKI, it caused a shudder of revulsion to vibrate through the dance world.  Its homoerotic subject shocked, but more than this...the body was exposed AS IT IS: false, dislocated, suffering.  The anarchic rejection of consensual ideas of beauty and the violent thrusting aside of all prior dance convention caused his expulsion from the mainstream dance as a 'dangerous rebel'. But as an unprecedated creative performer, Hijikata was embraced by those on the cutting edge of art, and though his performances  initially continued in small venues, on the streets, in fields or on beaches and his art and charismatic personality soon gathered many disciples and admirers.       

From Hijikata's initial Ankoku Butoh many variants have spawned, many other 'butohs'.  Whereas most do not share the same degree of violence and eroticism as evidenced in Hijikata's work, all retain an emphasis on the exteriorisation of the 'dream' and the gravitational pull of the earth.  Indeed, the earthbound state of the human body is one of the quintessential elements of Butoh, and as such, it has been seen as the antithesis of ballet.

Butoh disregards all notions of sophistication and symbolical referencing.  It does not seek idealised form or harmonically choreographed patterning, but embraces the spontaneous, the grotesque, the ungainly, the raw, non-aesthetically encoded body.  Butoh gropes beneath the overlay of socialisation and cultural authoritarianism for 'the body that has been robbed'...the 'fiery body', the wild inner flame in the heart of darkness.  In the very best of Butoh performances a deep communion between dancer and spectator emerges wherein both become participants in an ancient rite.  Both dismembers the social body, plunges into the darknes of Chaos, returns to bleeding nature, undergoes catharsis and rebirth.  Yet, Butoh is not a religion, not a form of healing, nor a response to nuclear bombing of Hiroshima (as some state), but a dance-theatre based on a distinct approach, a sort of non-dance, springing forth from the realms of the imaginal, from bones, sinew and nerve-endings.

Defying standardised 'good taste', commonly held aesthetics, convention, logocentricity, linearlity, compartmentalisation and so forth, Butoh aslo defies precise definition.  Any attempt to undertake definition in unequivocal intellectual terms must inevitably meet with failure, and would be as futile as trying to put a full stop on eternity. It is by very virtue of an absence of manifesto, dogmatism or coded structure, by its refusal to be adequately defined, that Butoh has flourished to become an international phenomena with a continuing and a growing influence.  Not only has it engendered some of the most powerful of dance/theatre performances but also some of the most stunning photographic images ever seen in relation to the perfoming arts.  It has cast its shadowy influence on computer graphis artists, fine artists, film makers and rock musicians.   It can seep into and use any from nature or culture....and is spreading like Artaud's plague.  Perhaps, because, in the words of Hijikata -"Butoh can never be finished".

    One beat out a rhythm upon a drum, another chanted, as we slowly, very slowly, coiled and come to standing. Little flames from many candles began to flicker and illuminate the dark enclosure as we paced spirally and entered gnosis (a state of consciousness akin to semitrance). The drumming got louder, faster, the chant became one of many voices and pacing became dancing, sometimes wild, erotic, sometimes hypnotic and slow. The dancing had no predetermined patterning; it was more given over to the visions experienced and the impulses of our being. The flesh of our bare feet ceased to feel the cold and the grove swirled with flames as we passed through a metaphorical membrane. Laughing, singing, joking, feasting, we made merry until the shining Sun Child was birthed and the light shafts of dawn pierced through the gaps in the branches.

Both sacred rites, The Japanese matsuri and the Celtic Sabbat, share the same structional  elements: intent, the preparation of special place, use of selected materials, sympathetic magic/ mimesis, offerings, sacrifice (which in more ancient times were invariably blood sacrifices), evocation, chants, trance and dance form the basis of their performance.

Similar pagan rituals may be evidenced as belonging to many indigenous cultures across the globe. As cultures were swallowed up by the industrialised, mechanised world, practices such as these were rendered extinct, or diluted, denigrated into folk custom and stripped of purpose, only to be monopolised by tourist boards. Only in the most isolated and rural areas, or through secret groups and covens made up of dedicated individuals, have such practices remained relatively intact; being passed on from generation to generation (not necessarily in a familial manner but by a careful selection of candidate). From the outside, such practices have, and are, looked upon with derision, ridiculed as the superstitions of unenlightened simpletons, or responded to with abhorrence, being considered the barbarous ceremonies of devil worshippers. From the inside, there is a firmly held belief that to attempt to run counter with nature is folly, attunement to it is essential, both to personal individual natures and the wider nature of which the individual is a part. Such rites, thus, serve a dual purpose. They are both seasonal observances reconciling participants to nature’s cyclical motions and vehicles for permanent psychophysical transformations.

For the majority of Japanese, the myth of Amaterasu O Mi Kami is the genesis of theatre, its roots lying in prehistory, in archaic shamanic practices which share prevailing features worldwide.  Many scholars have acknowledged the evolvement of theatre from these antediluvian beginnings (Victor Turner, Richard Schechner),  but over the course of history, theatre lost its sacred function and became a mirror to societal attitudes rather than nature, seeking to do nothing more than indoctrinates with a religion, politically persuade and/or simply entertain. The twentieth century, however, witnessed certain individuals within the avantgarde groping toward a theatre considered more efficacious, more communal, more ritualised; an attempt to bring theatre back into the margins of the sacred; sacred, that is, in terms of alignment to the natural, particularly the natural in the human sphere.

One of the quintessential rudiments of the avantgarde, across all its multifarious expressions, is ‘primitivism’.  Its first notable expression was evidenced in the works of painters after the World War 1, particularly the Surrealists, and most notably the renegade Surrealist automatists, Andre Masson, Roberto Matta and Max Ernst. Those who fell under their influence, placed emphasis upon spontaneity, process, and the unconscious aspects of creation whilst working in semi-trance states. Primitivism, in this sense, is defined not solely in terms of a neonostalgic hankering after a more simplistic and uncultured means of expression for artistic stylistic concerns, but by its serious explorations based upon the idea that there be a prelinguistic and mythopoeic level of the psyche that the artist can access in order to discover fundamental truths. In this respect, primitivism, as employed in the fields of art, bears correlation to shamanism and witchcraft (true witchcraft, the craft of the wise, being essentially rooted in shamanic practice: the term deriving from wicce, meaning wise and also to bend.  The shaman/witch contends that s/he makes journeys to separate realities, otherworlds, the lands of the faerie, realms of the dead, through means of ecstatic techniques, altered states of consciousness (ASC's}, to obtain wisdom, knowledge and guidance, to return to the source of their being.

Many avant garde artists have, and do, proclaim or aspire to do the same. In the context of theatre, if it is to be accorded with a sacred primality, the avantgarde director and/or performer must, therefore, take on a different role(s) other than normally assigned in more institutionally traditional forms: must become more akin to priestess, or 'master of ceremonies' (to coin Artaud' s phrase), to shaman, to witch. Moreover, aligned with the original purposes of sacred rite, such theatre must also cross the gulf which separates performer from spectator, seek to facilitate an attunement to the natural and a lasting alteration in performer and spectator (or more properly participant). Though the people of earth speak in many different tongues, such a position necessitates a fundamental belief that there be a twilight language all understand, even if not wholly consciously. A universal language that flickers in the flame of the spirit, roars in the wind of breath, surges on waves of blood, resounds in the clay of flesh and cracks in the bone, bespeaking of nature' s ways, archetypal journeys of the soul and existential experiences that are the same for all peoples, in all places, at all times. Theatre, not limitedly defined by specified building, may be seen as a liminal space, a betwixt and between the worlds space, that, in this instance, must aim to mollify, aid and support the creation/destruction spiralling motion of our being. Theatre, then, is sacred only in so far as it does this.

Theatre practitioners with varying degrees of success have undertaken experiments in producing theatre based on these concerns. Rather than being religious in the commonly understood sense, these experiments have appeared (paradoxically perhaps to many) somewhat sacrilegious when set against patriarchal formatted belief constructs and issues of faith dependent upon the notion of a montheistic god as supreme judgmental creator force. The urge toward such sacred theatre is essentially a primal, existential one, rooted in earth and body, unencumbered by dogma and unappropriated with moralistic scripture. Yet, in relation to the myth of Amaterasu O Mi Kami, the more popular traditional Japanese theatrical forms of Noh and Kabuki are not so much conjured for me as that of the more current avantgarde dance/theatre form of Butoh, with its dark archaic primality, its tortured, screaming physicality, derangement, metamorphosis, eroticism and sagacious humour. 

Stepping out of the Eurocentric constraints of perceiving cultural otherness (whilst still acknowledging the encoded, foreign, sociocultural elements), I couldn't fail to recognise the distillation of certain rudiments of the avowed aims of Western practitioners, not to mention core elements of the witchcraft I had encountered. My fascination is, therefore, selfexplanatory. Moreover, I am of the opinion that Butoh, originally formulated by the poet, dancer and choreographer, Tatsumi Hijikata, in its most genuine expression, more than any other attempt to do so, may have actually succeeded in bringing the sacred onto the boards of the stage; and, by the employment of certain techniques, achieved the transformation of performer into a sacrifice, a medium, and the spectator into participant ... returning theatre to participatory archaic rite.... mysterious ... cathartic.Butoh continues  to disrupt traditional ideas of what constitutes dance and theatre, and to challenge the compartmentalisation of dance, theatre and performance art. Both the approach to training techniques and performance is unconventional and challenging. Its tendrils have uncoiled  in many parts of the globe and an increasing number of Butoh and Butoh influenced  performers seem to spring forth each year, evolving a wide range of styles. For many, Butoh offers a more radical perspective and a more fulfilling expression  than most other performance methodologies and forms. The divergence of stylistic approach and standpoint entails a peeling off of cosmeticised layering in some cases, before being able to penetrate into its heart and to sift and analyse its fundamental principalities and practice. As a genre it appears to break down constrictions of time, space and culture.

Writers on  Butoh have had a tendency to portray it as isolated Japanese phenomena. Though it sprung from Japanese soil, a wider glance demonstartes it to have been birthed in tune with a particular global artistic climate prevalent at a certain historical time.  By crossreferencing the  principle tenets, aesthetics and concrete form of Butoh with the postwar work of relevant  avantgarde artists and theatre practitioners, the notion of Butoh as purely monocultural is  brought into question (indeed, it is only by such  analysis that any specifically inherent sociocultural Japanese elements can be isolated and discussed). Yet, although it can be historically traced as a genre, Butoh' s premodern and postmodern proclivities, along with its continuing evolvement, seem to confound any real attempt to tightly confine it within a  delineated time period. This, together with comparative analysis of more ancient magickal and shamanic rites from across the globe in relation to Butoh's methodology, tenents, practice and performance not only calls such a notion into dispute, but suggests it to be pretty shortsighted and blinkered. Rather than  trace the outline of Butoh as a lone branch, therefore, both the trunk from which  it springs and some of the other branches bending  with it as they struggle toward the  same light, albeit a light only contained within the darkness, should be woven into any investigative analysis.

When one of Japan's leading Butoh performers, Akai Maro, saw Aboriginal dances for the first time, he proclaimed that it wasButoh!!! And when I see witches dance at the sabbat I also could proclaim something very similar - for there is a recognisably archaic and universal substratum within shamanically rooted performance that, when experienced, is unmistakable. 

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