Ankoku Butoh Research Articles

Three Exercises derived from Ankoku Butoh Training Practices to Develop a ‘Martial Presence’

Three Exercises derived from Ankoku Butoh Training Practices to Develop a ‘Martial Presence’

SOL E LAMA

O trabalho que ficou conhecido como obra inaugural do Ankoku Butô de Tatsumi Hijikata foi nomeado Cores Proibidas, fazendo uma alusão direta ao título do romance escrito por Yukio Mishima. Deste ato proposital, surgiu uma amizade entre esses artistas que durou onze anos. Este artigo apresenta a partir do Cores Proibidas do escritor e do dançarino as distinções entre suas perspectivas acerca da morte, atrelada diretamente aos modos que investigaram seus próprios corpos. Propõe-se um embate entre o Corpo Saudável em Mishima – forjado pela doutrina severa do Sol e do Aço – e o Corpo Debilitado em Hijikata – aberto e poroso como condiz à sabedoria anunciada pela lama.

Dance as a Sign: Discovering the Relation Between Dance Movement and Culture

This article presents examples of the relationship between culture, dance, and the body in the fields of communication (with oneself, the community, God/deity), the social hierarchy, social values, relations between the individual and the group, and relations between genders, from the perspective of the sociology of the dance. The sociological perspective also indicates the various historical, ritual, control, and regulatory roles that traditional and modern dances play in the communities in which they arise and are performed. The second part of the text contains a case study of the Japanese ankoku butoh dance. The author presents the philosophical roots of the dance (e.g., Japanese mythology, Zen Buddhist philosophy) and the creator’s personal experiences (childhood trauma and post-war social situation) as factors that influenced the dance’s development. The example of ankoku butoh illustrates the interrelation between cultural meanings and dance movements.

書評 ケイトリン・コーカー著 『暗黒舞踏の身体経験――アフェクトと生成の人類学』

書評 ケイトリン・コーカー著 『暗黒舞踏の身体経験――アフェクトと生成の人類学』

A Study on Hijikata Tatsumi’s Ankoku Butoh (Dance of Darkness) by Analyzing Butoh Notation

A Study on Hijikata Tatsumi’s Ankoku Butoh (Dance of Darkness) by Analyzing Butoh Notation

Presença em Tatsumi Hijikata: Shintai-Nikutai

Neste trabalho transitaremos pelo conceito de presença que é o cerne da pesquisa denominada Por uma poética política: presença e ankoku butô. Tendo em vista alguns pilares que sustentam o entendimento de presença desenvolvido por Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, o interligaremos mais precisamente à presença cênica do dançarino japonês Tatsumi Hijikata. Para tanto, adentraremos mais profundamente no trabalho deste artista, desvendando em sua proposta de pesquisa corporal a chave para a presença. Não por acaso, permearemos as qualidades corpóreas do shintai e nikutai que são possibilidades distintas desse corpo que dança.

Woman as Plaything? Configurations of the Feminine in Japanese Butoh

In October 2013, the veteran Butoh1 1. Ankoku Butoh (Dance of Utter Darkness) is a term borrowed from the author Yutaka Haniya who likened Hijikata Tatsumi’s dance to, ‘an obscure image moving abou...

The Un-Seeing Eyes of the Foot

Departing from a brief evocation of the late Kazuo Ohno's dancing in Just Visiting this Planet (Peter Sempel's cult film from the early 90s), and taking a closer look at Ohno's “Workshop Words,” this essay offers a series of brief poetic meditations on the dancing body in butoh through the “un-seeing eyes” of the feet, as a tribute to the co-founder of Japanese modern dance who passed away last year. When Ohno admonished the dancers at the beginning of a workshop: “Don't look with your eyes, don't look!”, he was suggesting that we focus our awareness, and attention to the world, on the entirety of the core of body and soul as sensory receptor organs. This method, not unlike Antonin Artaud's struggle with the hierarchical organization (organism) of the theatre and the human body, deconstructs conventional perception and looking out. It shifts attention to the necessity of “looking” with the underside of the foot, transforming feet into eyes or into receptors which, like animal or insect reflexes, react to a boundless universe, the tactile senses replacing the need to see as we imagine the sky underneath the toes. It also suggests, as a metaphysical principle, a downward, dissolving direction. The meditations further explore the “Artaud Method” – recently introduced by dancers who trained with Ohno and Hironobu Oikawa, offering introspective insights into a perceptual, cosmological and metaphysical performance morphology – and Biyo Kikuchi's dance From Listening, adding cross-references to the beginnings of Hijikata's Ankoku Butoh and the paradoxes of “un-dancing” (trance performance, psychedelic vitalism and animalism, the foot stamping choreomania of marginalized folk traditions such as Salentine tarantism, Min Tanaka’ ascetic pedagogy and the demanding theatrical technique taught by Tadashi Suzuki whose interest lies in the articulations of animal energy with rigorous emphasis on feet and ground

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

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.

Recovering the Body and Expanding the Boundaries of Self in Japanese Butoh: Hijikata Tatsumi, Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud

Ankoku Butoh (the Dance of Utter Darkness),1 a revolutionary dance form created by Hijikata Tatsumi in the late 1950s, emerged in the new Tokyo that developed out of the dark, post-nuclear war year...

Body of questions, book of changes: Event-texts from the butoh performance work Ama-no-gawa

4 May 2010: Frauke (Caroline Lundblad), Swedish butoh choreographer and performer, and an exponent of Ankoku Butoh, has arrived to commence rehearsals for her collaboration with First Physical Theatre Company. She will be creating an original butoh work with these particular 8 African bodies. Although some of us have encountered the form theoretically, none have embarked on a butoh performance process. I am to observe rehearsal so that I can document and research the choreographic process. After a few days of watching, a quiet but persistent hunger begins to unsettle me: my body doesn-t want this distance .... my body wants to experience this 'butoh-tai', this butoh space-time.

Cutting the Surface of the Water: Butoh as Traumatic Awakening

In this paper, I examine Robert Jay Lifton's belief that 'imagery, symbolization, and meaning are in a life-death model or paradigm' and that traumatic experience, in particular as a death-equivalent, 'sever[s the mind] from its own psychic forms, [and] impair[s] the symbolization process itself'. Lifton believes that, for survivors of Hiroshima and for other survivors of trauma, this 'shattering of prior forms' leads to new insights and 'new dimension[s] of experience' that not only reconstitute and re-integrate the traumatized self but, more accurately, mirror the human condition. I examine this thesis within the context of a comparison and contrast between post-war Japanese poetry and the postmodern Japanese dance form called Butoh (originally Ankoku Butoh , meaning 'dark dance of the soul'). I argue that Butoh, in drawing upon traditional Japanese forms, and by displacing, extending, and exploding them, more successfully re-figures prior imagery and reintegrates the traumatized Japanese culture in ways that some post-war poetry, which relies on language and, especially, traditional Western models of language, cannot. I also consider the materiality of the body versus the materiality of language, and consider how dance, which emanates from the phenomenological body, has a materiality that escapes language and carries greater tropological power. Finally, I consider how Butoh, in troping on the Hiroshima disaster, displaces 'phallogocentric' semiotic structures and comes closer to realizing Julia Kristeva's notion of a pre-Oedipal symbolic order.

Cutting the Surface of the Water: Butoh as Traumatic Awakening

In this paper, I examine Robert Jay Lifton's belief that 'imagery, symbolization, and meaning are in a life-death model or paradigm' and that traumatic experience, in particular as a death-equivalent, 'sever[s the mind] from its own psychic forms, [and] impair[s] the symbolization process itself'. Lifton believes that, for survivors of Hiroshima and for other survivors of trauma, this 'shattering of prior forms' leads to new insights and 'new dimension[s] of experience' that not only reconstitute and re-integrate the traumatized self but, more accurately, mirror the human condition. I examine this thesis within the context of a comparison and contrast between post-war Japanese poetry and the postmodern Japanese dance form called Butoh (originally Ankoku Butoh , meaning 'dark dance of the soul'). I argue that Butoh, in drawing upon traditional Japanese forms, and by displacing, extending, and exploding them, more successfully re-figures prior imagery and reintegrates the traumatized Japanese culture in ways that some post-war poetry, which relies on language and, especially, traditional Western models of language, cannot. I also consider the materiality of the body versus the materiality of language, and consider how dance, which emanates from the phenomenological body, has a materiality that escapes language and carries greater tropological power. Finally, I consider how Butoh, in troping on the Hiroshima disaster, displaces 'phallogocentric' semiotic structures and comes closer to realizing Julia Kristeva's notion of a pre-Oedipal symbolic order.