Rose-coloured Dance: The Politics of Cross-dressing in Hijikata Tatsumi's Ankoku Butoh

Abstract

In Hijikata Tatsumi's Butoh dance, the materiality of the body was expressed in opposition to the textually based modern Japanese drama and idealist forms of contemporary dance. Hijikata's dance exposes the subversive aspects of sexuality and challenges the complacency of current mainstream performance. His early creative period from 1959 to 1968 was predominantly centred on the male dancer. Homoerotic themes proved a consistent feature of his stage practice as he invoked the diverse sexual practices and concepts of gender that had long existed through Japanese history. Androgynous bodies through which an indeterminate gender was expressed were increasingly incorporated into his dance. Hijikata parodied and disrupted the borders which marked conventional gender roles and fixed identities with crossdressing calling attention to the act of gender performance. In this article I problematise the repercussions of these elements, asking if they subverted the fixed principles of male and female or if they served to reinscribe their binary nature.