Essay by Alice Gebura
Contemporary Dance for Japan
Butoh began in the 1950s as a reaction to traditional Japanese theater and western culture as it was being imposed on Japan during the post-war occupation. The founders, Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata, wanted a contemporary art form that was distinctly Japanese. The following performance is by Kazuo Ohno.
On the river bank we see struggle and frustration as Ohno pushes against and tries to climb an impenetrable wall. Is the wall a metaphor for power structures? social structures? The flower and ribbon band in his hair are the ornaments of a little girl. Indeed he expresses a child’s wonderment at times as well as spatial disorientation. The movement though is frail and jerky, not youthful, also not stereotypically feminine—the many contradictions within the frame resist categorization. The bent and hesitant movements become markers of psychic condition, not of a particular story or person. The ruffles tied on the back of the shirt are feminine, yet also suggest a strait jacket. While the white face and body paint are characteristic of Kabuki theater, butoh reassess its meaning in its allusion to beings covered in nuclear ash. Trauma is visibly evident and on a par with gender in this mining of the archive within the body. The movements invoke emotions that surely all have experienced across any gender, social class, or culture.
This is from the 1980 Experimental Theater Festival in Nancy, France. The music is “O mio babbino caro” from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, sung by Maria Callas. Ohno said that Callas and Puccini were “close to the Japanese.” Ohno used music and images to trigger his improvisatory movement. He said of his somatic performances that he found within himself both a little girl and a dying woman, often his mother.
“A Corpse Standing in Desperation”
Butoh emerged at the intersections of collective trauma, expressionist dance performance and East/West identity conflicts within 20th century Japan. In butoh’s somatic performances, whether intended or not, political statements emerge as personal and collective sufferings archived within the body are revealed.
Ohno says:
“Alive, in each and every one of us, are countless individuals whose lifetime experiences, joys, sorrows, angers, doubts, and so forth have been successively passed down from one generation to the next. The physical form I assume now is but the fruit of what I’ve inherited from those who have existed before me. What, you might ask, has become of our ancestors’ ideas and emotions? Where do you suppose our creativity springs from? There’s no way that it springs forth from our finite and limited knowledge of life.”
Butoh, War, and Gender
Turn of the century Japan (Meiji restoration) was an imperialist, colonizing power, invading and occupying Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan, and northern China by the 1930s. Such militarism exacted draconian and gendered expectations of its citizens. All males were conscripted into military service. Although not punished, those who were unable to pass the physical requirements were often socially ostracized. The female role was clear: marry and produce more soldiers. Poor females were sold to brothels where they were sex workers (Karayuki-san) at military outposts. “The young women were told that their bodies belonged to the state and that they constituted a form of female army.”1 This structuring of gender according to the needs of a nation is not unusual in human history. In Japan, however, loyalty and sacrifice for the state were particularly significant. Although individual rights were under discussion at the time, these were clearly subordinate to the goals of the patriarchal and warring state. While collective trauma due to war is not unique to Japan, it was experienced there most profoundly when atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima instantly killed 80,000 people. Another 80,000 died later from radiation injuries. The intensity burned shadows of objects and people into the cityscape, the Hiroshima shadows. Photo: Public Domain
Male homosexuality had “a socially and culturally distinctive form well before the modern period.”2 Gendered, state-prescribed roles changed after World War II. The new constitution written during the occupation, heavily influenced by the American occupiers, “defined marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman.”3 In post-war Japan the Japanese male was now an Americanized heterosexual. For example, a man was not eligible for promotion at work until he was married and had children. The female was now a consumer yet still relegated to marriage and family. Political trauma continued with the ANPO treaty between Japan and the United States with its militaristic right-wing dictates and the establishment of US military bases in Japan.
The Anpo protests, the largest in Japanese history (including a brutal police response), occurred when the US-Japan security treaty was being renewed, 1959-1960. The song by Kyu Sakamoto is about the loss he felt after the protests failed. It was an international hit, selling millions of records.
Mining the Body Archive
Butoh emerged in mid-century Japan as a somatic practice. The underlying mechanism in butoh is to unearth the self. “Movements are discovered rather than imposed.”4 One result of butoh as a self-revelatory practice is that gender is fluid and destabilized. “The concepts of otherness and ambiguity, particularly with respect to gender identity and sexuality, permeate its narratives. Drag, androgyny and fluidity are staple elements.”5 Yet in viewing early butoh performers, gender can only be fully grasped by understanding the body as an archive of collective traumas: the traumas of “national body,” nuclear war, and political struggles.
Tatsumi Hijikata Photo: Public Domain
A male presenting as female challenges gendered roles as experienced during Japan’s Meiji restoration and post-war society. Ohno lived through both. His embodied femaleness is not a mature woman, not a mother, neither wise nor particularly functional, and not sexual—resisting the female roles of mother/sex-worker/functioning consumer. The deformed hand gestures, death-mask face, and tremulous shaking also reveal the trauma of wars and nuclear disaster, exposing psychic damage and “dark truths behind the Japanese social mask.”6 Ohno’s performance in the video from Nancy, France is a complex response to the warring state and social mores regarding gendered roles.
Since its early practice butoh has spread globally and been adapted in numerous ways. Decades later what holds true throughout all of its different forms are:
- The rejection of technique and the concept of a style or school
Movement is somatic. “Ohno believed that movement that was too big or too fast endangered his ideal of body-soul-unity, which requires that movements be directed by the soul.”7 - Primal exploration of the dark side of the human experience
“Its hunched crawls, seizure-like convulsions, and silent screams aim to uncover ugly or uncomfortable truths.”8
More Performances
“Words do their job in most circumstances, but movement can probably say a lot more.” – Kazuo Ohno
More Links
A Child of All Time: Butoh Dancer Ohno Kazuo at 98
Notes
- Warren, James F. “Review: Sandakan Brothel No. 8: An Episode in the History of Lower-Class Japanese Women”. Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context. Issue 4, September 2000.
- Tamagawa, Masami. “Same-Sex Marriage in Japan”. Journal of GLBT Family Studies. 12 (2): 160-187.
- Makoto, Furukawa, and Angus Lockyer. “The Changing Nature of Sexuality: The Three Codes Framing Homosexuality in Modern Japan.” S.-Japan Women’s Journal. English Supplement, no. 7, 1994, pp. 98–127.
- George, Cassidy. “Queer Butoh: Finding Belonging in the Dance of Darkness”. The New York Times. June 21, 2020.
- Ibid.
- Masakatsu, Gunji. “Butoh and Taboo”. The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (1st ed.). Routledge (2018).
- Schwellinger, Lucia. “Ohno Kazuo, Biography and methods of movement creation”. The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (1st ed.). Routledge (2018).
- George, Cassidy. “Queer Butoh: Finding Belonging in the Dance of Darkness”. The New York Times. June 21, 2020.
Bibliography
Hiroshima Mon Amour. Screenplay by Margueritte Duras. Dir. Alain Resnais. Prod. Anatole Dauman. Perf. Emanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada. Argos Films, 1959. Film.
Gadu. https://doushinbutoh.com/about
George, Cassidy. “Queer Butoh: Finding Belonging in the Dance of Darkness”. The New York Times. June 21, 2020.
Jones, Colin. “After the Uprising, The Anpo treaty protests and the unmaking of Japan’s postwar left.” The Nation. March 3, 2020.
Kazuko, Kuniyoshi. “On the Eve of the Birth of Ankoku Butoh, Postwar Japanese modern dance and Ohno Kazuo”. The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (1st ed.). Routledge (2018).
Makoto, Furukawa, and Angus Lockyer. “The Changing Nature of Sexuality: The Three Codes Framing Homosexuality in Modern Japan.” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal. English Supplement, no. 7, 1994, pp. 98–127.
Masakatsu, Gunji. “Butoh and Taboo”. The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (1st ed.). Routledge (2018).
Mezur, Katherine. “Butoh’s Genders, Men in dresses and girl-like women”. The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (1st ed.). Routledge (2018).
Michio, Armitsu. “From Vodou to Butoh, Hijikarta Tatsumi, Katherine Dunham, and the trans-Pacific remaking of blackness”. The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (1st ed.). Routledge (2018).
Ohno, Kazuo and Ohno, Yoshito. Kazuo Ohno’s World, from without & within. Weslyan University Press (2004).
Schwellinger, Lucia. “Ohno Kazuo, Biography and methods of movement creation”. The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (1st ed.). Routledge (2018).
Stein, Bonnie Sue. “Butoh: ‘Twenty Years Ago We Were Crazy, Dirty, and Mad.’” The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 30, no. 2, 1986, pp. 107–126.
Tamagawa, Masami. “Same-Sex Marriage in Japan”. Journal of GLBT Family Studies. 12 (2): 160-187.
Warren, James F. “Review: Sandakan Brothel No. 8: An Episode in the History of Lower-Class Japanese Women”. Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context. Issue 4, September 2000.
Molony, Barbara. “Women’s Rights, Feminism, and Suffragism in Japan, 1870-1925. Pacific Historical Review, vol. 69, no. 4, 2000, pp. 639–661.