Butoh Dancing (舞踏): Discovering Emptiness, Embodiment & Environment in an Archeology of Body

Minako Seki © Esther Suave.

Identifying The Self & Depoliticizing The Body

An Explorative Identity

With the body vacant of design and the full spectrum of emotions accessible by the moment’s instinct, Butoh dancers are met with the challenge of identity. The experience of identity within Butoh is astonishingly elastic. Stories of evolution especially find apt expression in Butoh, as their metaphysics fit perfectly with the continuous discovery of the dancer’s self through body. Nowhere else is this self-recognition more exceptionally reflected than in the volume of Sayoko Onishi’s remembering of animal body memory in Animal Science, or in Imre Thormann’s glorious evolution at the Hiyoshi Taisha Shrine.

Kazuo Ohno was one of the core founders of Butoh in the 1960s, with Tatsumi Hijikata. To watch many of Ohno’s performances is to witness a man discovering his most repressed qualities: those of innocence and naïveté, of grace and romanticism, timidity and gentleness. Ohno often channeled this energy into his dance by “becoming” a woman through his use of props and costume, rather than simply imitating her. His legacy is kept alive today by his son Yoshito Ohno, who is also a choreographer, and the many Butoh dancers who have learned directly from him or been inspired by his spirit.

Even if a character is predetermined, the Butoh dancer will often experience several cathartic encounters of self through their experience of body — almost infantile, as though this self is entirely unfamiliar. It is through the deep connection with the body’s physicality and range of movements that accidental gesture creates character. It is unwritten character from chaos. Within this ecstatic madness, the relinquishment of control does not always mean the surrender of particular identity. The embodiment of a concrete identity can be enabled through conscious use of costume and props, the potential of which may surprise audiences accustomed to seeing only the naked Butoh dancer. The objects’ symbolism must come from a dancer’s deeply personal connection to their presence: with minimalism as the most expressive aesthetic, everything must serve a purpose.

Simon Orinska © J. Deinats.

Nakedness & Body Politics

We have been violently purged from our bodies–displaced by socially constructed egos or else exaggerated as capital. The further our bodies are from our selves, the poorer are our lived expressions through them. We forget what it truly means to dance in every moment of our lives, the significance of which was so celebrated by Kazuo Ohno. However apolitical Butoh may appear to be, it is unavoidably a language of deeply ingrained personal politics. By enabling the reclamation of body and, in the process, repossession of identity, Butoh creates immense opportunity to engage dance as an active form of liberation from social ritual and body governance.

No matter what sophisticated costume may command our attention, it is inevitably the naked Butoh dancer whom we never forget. At any time, nakedness can either enable invisibility or become a vessel of purpose, its visceral power confronting socially-accepted confines of the body — and not just within dance. Butoh can communicate the law of body which has been deemed pornographic: sexuality, eroticism and repressed desire. Let us never forget the core of Butoh’s origins as a form of rebellion, and the legacy of Tatsumi Hijikata’s provocative performance — a physicality that respected the wild expression of the body without any repressive cast of form.

It is only natural, then, for Butoh to also express the transcendence of gender, or enable dancers to explore the delineations of genders within their own bodies and definitions. For a Butoh dancer, the symbolic weight of a transgender costume is not of theatrical impersonation, but of an authentic embodiment. In Butoh, a man may wear a dress so that he becomes more conscious of his movements, while a woman will perform naked to desexualize her body. That is not to say that Butoh is a kind of utopia manifest in the form of dance. To assume so would be to underestimate the power of social prejudices that lie beneath our individual understandings of body and the significance we place upon particular forms of its expression. U.K.-based Butoh dancer Marie-Gabrielle Rotie rightfully points out that even Butoh maintains a certain ideal– the ideal of a white and slender body. Whether as audiences or as dancers, we must always be willing to question our reasons and our interpretations, as well as those of the dancer.

Florencia Guerberof (on left) and Marie-Gabrielle Rotie (on right).

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