-Butoh

We normally use our individual body as a tool for attaining what we think we want or what society wants.
We normally ignore that society makes us want to hide our naked life, our true nature.
We normally forget that our bodies harbor their transformative nature inside.

 

 

Butoh's Origins: Butoh dance is born out of many insurgent, transgressive philosophies.
Butoh dance is born out of the need to free our identities from the prisons imposed by our societies.
Originally, Ankoku Butoh Dance (Dance of Utter Darkness) was born out of the contemporary crisis of nuclear war, of the total mass murder of nuclear war supplanting tooth and claw as the nature of war perfected. In earlier times, even in war, we had individual will ... even if we were uneducated and didn't know what we were fighting about ... our abilities gave us some control over our destinies. But in nuclear warfare, death is arbitrary ... it doesn't matter how fast or strong you are when faced with an atomic bomb ... nothing about you matters. You have no control. An atomic bomb erases your hand in your own destiny. It may not erase your identity but it makes everything about your identity irrelevant, useless. It erases your soul. When the Atomic bombs were dropped, much of the identity of Japan was erased -- never had so many ghosts been created so simultaneously. The question, not just for the Japanese, but for everyone became: What is the significance of my individual life when I, along with everyone I know and love can be obliterated in a moment? This question persists in every aspect of our lives, no matter how many screens we erect to disguise it.

So, Ankoku Butoh arose, not as an answer, but as a dialogue with that question, an art form developing as a way to live with our reality: wherein an arbitrary and omnipotent death endlessly shadows our lives. Always eye to eye with death in life, how do we continue? Always hand in hand.... Butoh is often (but not limited to being) an art of confrontation. (Butoh is not really limited by anything: its only limitations are the the standards and limitations of the dancer, and the dancer's standards, like those of death, tend to be arbitrary.) But in general, butoh performers have enough honor to dance outside (and up against) the walls of our societies -- we recognize that beneath the veneer of prosperity, everything is rotting. Through Butoh we try to gaze into the darkness and bring forth the hidden part of ourselves (our uselessness, our nonconsumptive voluptuousness); we brandish everything that Society and its Corporations (Church and State and Military and Property) would have us outlaw, or better, ignore.... Thus, Butoh is about facing truth, not hiding from it, not making excuses, not saying it would be unbearable to live if we looked at reality, and certainly not falling prey to that great stupidity, to confuse seeing reality with negativity. To truly embrace reality, we have to desire to apprehend all of the world, the warmth, the cold, the laughter and the screams. Butoh is about seeing and feeling Everything that exists ... not just what we want to see. Butoh is about being a living mirror ... not trying to impose our values on the rest of the population by manifesting what we think is right. As one grows and transforms, what one considers right also grows and transforms, so why bombard your audience with information that you won't believe in tomorrow? Instead of proselytizing, ask questions. What are the borders of my body? Where do I end; where do you begin? Where do we find our identity in this new world where the border between life and death has been breached? Like most meaningful creation, Ankoku Butoh looks like it was born out of atrocity because there is always atrocity. In fact, to make meaningful work any artist has to look at the darkest recesses of their surroundings, into the unknown and forbidden spaces. -- Some military engineers get to do this. It would be well for architects and designers to do the same. In any case, Butoh's original form was inexorably tied to its time and place, the flavor and smell and the birth defects of Japan's identity crises in the post-war period. The Identity Crises There are many reasons. Losing the war. Loss of the God/Emperor identity. The Bomb. But not just the Bomb. The abortion of reason that came with the Bomb. This is what we are taught: The Japanese were murdered by the atomic bomb to ensure that no one would ever again be murdered by the atomic bomb. To make certain that the atomic bomb would never be used to kill people, the Japanese were murdered twice. In these crosshairs the Japanese identity becomes a paradox of importance and utter worthlessness. They become the most evil, cruel people in the world, and people so unimportant that they can be obliterated en masse, to serve as an example to real people. That a need for an examination of all that was hidden and taboo inside the Japanese culture arose out of this atrocity is not surprising. That butoh arose -- fed by Artaud, Mishima, Genet, and other artists of madness, crises, revolt, transgression -- is as inevitable as it is beautiful. Just as inevitable was the reality of a society that largely rejected, or ignored this movement of self-exhumation (Japan refused to recognize Butoh's existence, and while they celebrate Mishima, they really try to keep the focus away from the homosexuality part like it is a fatal flaw in a great man and ... only ten people have actually read Artaud). Obscurity. Shadows. Struggling on the border of the law due to pure, fiscal hardship. This is the reality and the burden of self-awareness, of soul struggle -- it is anti-social, it is specific to the individual rather than the general; it is not streamlined to the mass production needs of the state and it will not be supported except in commodicized form. It has been this way with every transgressive movement. If you look at history from a distance, as if you are in an airplane and history is sprawling below you, you will begin to see these transgressive groups and individuals not as a series of art/social movements (not dadaist, not situationist, not existentialist), but as a lineage, a bloodline flowing through the corroded nerve system of history. In each generation there are a few individuals obsessed with truly seeing, with heightening awareness, with naked expression. These individuals are the only creators, even if they make nothing, and if they are artists, they are the only ones who are not simply walking commercials for the status quo. These individuals may or may not be aware of each other as peers, may or may not be aware of those who existed before them in time, but they are born with the same thirst, they are of the same bloodline. Ankoku Butoh, as it was first conceived, was a part of this bloodline, this searching, questioning lineage. And some but of course not all Butoh dancers have found their own way to express this lineage. Like any movement, some people make more meaningful art than others, some just make commercials, and some do both. Butoh can just as easily be usurped to make spectacular meaninglessness as anything else. But if you desire to look inside yourself, Butoh technique can also help you find access to this heightened awareness in all things, and can be a gateway to meaningful, evolving creation. Butoh provides physical and mental techniques that make the practitioners far more in tune with their transformative nature, more sensitive to the worlds in and around them. Butoh greatly heightens body awareness ... helps you understand the interrelation of your muscles, hones balance, and constantly creates new movement vocabularies. Similarly, butoh provides challenging exercises for the mind -- visualization/dance work which serves to break down rigid thought patterns, repetitive cycles, and old habits. For any artist, for anyone, Butoh work is invaluable for expressing and expanding one's inner world into everyday life.

 

 

BUTOH: The Dream of Existence Perfected. --To manifest existence rather than to listlessly, passively exist like an automaton, (a machine of flesh, soulless, numbed of sensation)... --To be free, fluid, ever-changing, protean, extravagant --To be soft/rigid, rapid/slow, tense/released, vivid/dull, moist/dry, organic/inorganic, new/old, male/female, alive/dead… This is why we turn to Butoh. Not thinking about succeeding. Just to try. To try to be. However, our own consciousness, our blood, our breath, the vital energy that should freely flow from without to within is repressed by the codes and customs of our societies.

Tatsumi Hijikata said he drops a ladder deep into his body and climbs down it every night. Since he presented 'Forbidden Colors', 50 years have passed, but his words remain in the present: we always need to look down in the body. Each one of us needs to try again and again to penetrate the darkness of our bodies in order to reach the true essence of our lives. Each one of us has a distinct nature. Each one of us has a way of existing, deep inside, that we cannot learn from anyone else. Not from our parents, not from our friends. Not from Society. But deep inside, we have our own dance. This is our butoh. Butoh teachers can give you techniques to open the mind and the body. But in the end you have to express your own nature. When you express your own spirit: this is your butoh. You can only find that for yourself. You have to be willing to look inside yourself, to really observe and accept who you are. Without judgement and without self-deception. We are all lightness and darkness.

We each contain the potential for all the kindness and all the cruelty in the world. It's not bad or good, it's simply nature. But to dance butoh you have to really look at these things. You have to be able to look inside yourself without lying. Once you recognize what you are, it is much easier to transform into anything. Today, we can easily be informed of everything from all corners of the world through multimedia. And we reveal our own daily life to unknown people. So we are exposed, but not known, vulnerable, but not felt ... our 'life' will never be truly revealed by multimedia, but it can succumb to it. What can we learn of other people through technology, it may be their body skin, clothing or what they possess... but not deeper. Like we cannot seize a foreign country without being soaked in the place, we may never live a life without entering inside of the bodies, base of the life. Each of our bodies has a human form. However, inside that form, each body contains many other bodies, of the living, of the dead, of the visible and the invisible. How can we find a connection with each life in the body? How can we reach the crossroads with another life? How can we live that life? This search will be our dance.

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