Butoh, as Heard by a Dancer (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies) [1 ed.] 0367631199, 9780367631192

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Butoh, as Heard by a Dancer

This book explores the origins of Butoh in post-war Japan through orality and transmission, in conjunction with an embodied research approach. The book is a gathering of seminal artistic voices – Yoshito Ohno, Natsu Nakajima, Yukio Waguri, Moe Yamamoto, Masaki Iwana, Ko Murobushi, Yukio Suzuki, Takao Kawaguchi, Yuko Kaseki, and the philosopher, Kuniichi Uno. These conversations happened during an extended research trip I made to Japan to understand the context and circumstances that engendered Butoh. Alongside these exchanges are my reflections on Butoh’s complex history. These are primarily informed by my pedagogical and performance encounters with the artists I met during this time, rather than a theoretical analysis. Through the words of these dancers, I investigate Butoh’s tendency to evade categorization. Butoh’s artistic legacy of bodily rebellion, plurality of authorship, and fluidity of form seems prescient and feels more relevant in contemporary times than ever before. This book is intended as a practitioner’s guide for dancers, artists, students, and scholars with an interest in non-Western dance and dance history, postmodern performance, and Japanese arts and culture. Dominique Savitri Bonarjee is a dancer and an artist, currently completing her doctoral research in the Department of Art, Goldsmiths University of London, UK.

Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering theatre and performance alongside topics such as religion, politics, gender, race, ecology, and the avant-garde, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics. Performance, Trauma and Puerto Rico in Musical Theatre Colleen Rua Performance The Ethics and the Politics of Care, Volume I Hanna B. Hölling, Julia Pelta Feldman, Emilie Magnin Boundaries of Violence in Early Modern England Samantha Dressel and Matthew Carter Bourdieu in the Studio Decolonising and Decentering Actor Training through Ludic Activism Evi Stamatiou Ethical Agility in Dance Rethinking Technique in British Contemporary Dance Noyale Colin, Catherine Seago, Kathryn Stamp At the Threshold Contemporary Theatre, Art, and Music of Iran Rana Esfandiary Gut Knowledges Culinary Performance and Activism in the Post-Truth Era Kristin Hunt For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/RoutledgeAdvances-in-Theatre--Performance-Studies/book-series/RATPS

Butoh, as Heard by a Dancer

Dominique Savitri Bonarjee

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Dominique Savitri Bonarjee The right of Dominique Savitri Bonarjee to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bonarjee, Dominique Savitri, author. Title: Butoh, as heard by a dancer / Dominique Savitri Bonarjee. Description: New York : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge advances in theatre & performance studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023023318 (print) | LCCN 2023023319 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367631192 (hbk) | ISBN 9780367631215 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003112211 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Butō—Japan. | Butō—History—20th century. Classification: LCC GV1783.2.B87 B66 2023 (print) | LCC GV1783.2.B87(ebook) | DDC 792.80973—dc23/eng/20230711 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023023318 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023023319 ISBN: 9780367631192 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367631215 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003112211 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003112211 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

À Lucette, une petite lumière qui danse

Contents

List of figures Preface Acknowledgements

Introduction: Dust Is Time’s Body

ix xi xv 1

A Note on the Structure 6

1

Emergence: The First Collaborators

8

Ankoku Butoh Emerges 9 “Return to zero”: A Visit to the Ohno Studio 14 “Butoh Is Linked to Revolution”: Yoshito Ohno 19 A Code and a Compass 31 “Forget Butoh”: Natsu Nakajima 36

2

Structure: The Students

48

Masters and Students: Thoughts on Butoh-fu Choreography 49 You Are Being Watched from All Angles 58 Time and Space Is Body: Yukio Waguri 61 A Butoh-fu Workshop with Kanazawa Butoh-Kan 81 Face Things with Immediacy: Moe Yamamoto 88 A Life of Dance: A Butoh Day Camp with Hiroko and Koichi Tamano 95 Half a Century of Butoh: Koichi Tamano Speaks to Nobuo Shiga 99

3

Dispersion: The Mavericks Expanding Butoh: Dispersion, Diffusion, Migration 106 “You have to sacrifice yourself”: Masaki Iwana 110

105

viii Contents Spinning Threads of Nothingness 115 Masaki Iwana as Heard by His Students 121 From the Writings of Ko Murobushi 137 The Origins of Aloneness: Three Days in Yamagata 145 “What is my name?”: Ko Murobushi 150 Butoh Utopia: An Imaginary Ship 174 Notes from a Workshop with Akira Kasai 178

4

Complexity: A Contemporary Generation

185

What Is Contemporary? 186 “Keep doubting and asking, what is dance?”: Yukio Suzuki (2012) 193 “Stay in the now”: Yukio Suzuki (2020) 198 Dragging in the Past: Matters of Grace 205 A Contemporary Homage: Takao Kawaguchi 212 Butoh Bizarre: Yuko Kaseki 229 Kubikukuri Takuzou the Hanging Artist 251

5

Exhaustion: The Future of Butoh

256

Duet with Stone: The Riddle of Bones 257 The Exhausted Body: Kuniichi Uno 263

Index

275

Figures

P.1 I.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 2.2

2.3

2.4 2.5

“Headless: Seeing through the Heart”, linocut print, 150 × 197 mm, Dominique Savitri Bonarjee (2016) Tatsumi Hijikata crossing the street with a watermelon (cc.1970). Photo: Masahisa Fukase. Copyright Masahisa Fukase Archives “Liquidity Score: January 15, 2019”, pigment ink on paper, 150 × 150 mm, Dominique S. Bonarjee (2019) From above: rehearsals at Asbestos-Kan Studio (cc.1964). Photo: Unknown. Courtesy of Keio University Art Center and Butoh Laboratory, Japan Yoshito Ohno in rehearsal (2012). Photo: Dominique S. Bonarjee Natsu Nakajima in Sayoudearunaraba Sayounara (2021). Photo: Tomoko Kosugi “Liquidity Score, August 28, 2018”, pigment ink on paper, 150 × 150 mm, Dominique S. Bonarjee (2018) Rehearsals at Asbestos-Kan studio for Paragon of sacrificing great dance, performance to commemorate the second unity of the school of dance of utter darkness: Twenty-Seven Nights for Four Seasons (1972). Photo: unknown. Courtesy of Keio University Art Center and Butoh Laboratory, Japan Paragon of sacrificing great dance: the fourth Kyoto performance, “Bakke” (1975), Yukio Waguri. Photo: Makoto Onozuka. Courtesy of Keio University Art Center and Butoh Laboratory, Japan Bird drawings in Moe Yamamoto’s dance notebook. Photo: Dominique S. Bonarjee Performance 2, performance series celebrating the twentieth anniversary of formation of school of dance of utter darkness and the opening of Kanazawa Butoh House by Yamamoto Moe: Asbestos hall performance in October: Paragon of sacrificing great dance, Moe Yamamoto dancing in Shomen no Issho, “Costume In Front: A Model of Darkness for Boys and Girls”, (1976). Courtesy of Keio University Art Center and Butoh Laboratory, Japan

xi 1 8 12 19 35 48

51

61 81

87

x Figures 3.1

“Liquidity Score, August 16, 2018”, pigment ink on paper, 150 x 150 mm, Dominique S. Bonarjee (2018) 105 3.2 Masaki Iwana at Kid-Ailack Hall (2012). Photo: Dominique S. Bonarjee 110 3.3 “Masaki Iwana: The Last Season”: based on a photo Masaki Iwana took of himself in the mirror of his hospital room in the very last days of his life. Pencil drawing on paper, dimensions unknown, Tudi Deligne (2020) 120 3.4 Ko Murobushi (1979). Photo: Takeshi Sakai 137 3.5 Ko Murobushi dancing Faux Pas (2014). Photo: Laurent Ziegler (unstill.net) 144 3.6 Eclipse flag hanging in Ko Murobushi’s apartment, print on linen, exact dimensions unknown, Ko Murobushi. Photo: Dominique S. Bonarjee 150 3.7 “The five elements in the body, showing vowel locations according to Akira Kasai’s Ephesus Method”, Dominique S. Bonarjee 180 3.8 “Diagram of ego development” based on Akira Kasai workshop notes, Dominique S. Bonarjee 181 4.1 “Liquidity Score, October 11, 2018”, pigment ink on paper, 150 × 150 mm, Dominique S. Bonarjee (2018) 185 4.2 The Right of Spring, Yukio Suzuki Projects (2015). Photo: Bozzo 192 4.3 Homage to Kazuo Ohno at BankART1929, Yokohama, Takao Kawaguchi (2014). Photo: Teijiro Kamiyama 204 4.4 “SHOOT JEEZ MY GOSH” at Dock 11, Berlin, Yuko Kaseki (2015). Photo: Sigel Leicht 229 4.5 “Anarkhos: Kubikukuri”, pigment ink and collage on paper, 420 × 600 mm, from a series, Dominique S. Bonarjee (2016) 250



Preface

Figure P.1 “Headless: Seeing through the Heart”, linocut print, 150 × 197 mm, Dominique Savitri Bonarjee (2016).

xii Preface On a stingingly cold winter day, I arrived in Japan from London on a Lisa Ullmann Traveling Scholarship. It was February 2012. Almost a year after the savage earthquake of March 2011, the country was still reeling from the shock, and many expats and foreign residents had left. I was a solitary figure on the train from Narita. I didn’t expect I’d even last three months. One thing led to another… as it does. By the time the three months were up, I had already made plans to extend my visit. In the interim, I’d met the dancer Yoshito Ohno, who graciously facilitated my desire to stay by helping me to obtain a visa as his “assistant”. Those three months turned into many years, and during this time, I developed artistic and personal relationships which I nurture to this day. Going on this quest felt urgent. My experience of Butoh till then (mainly in Europe) seemed overly focused on propagating a performance form, often orientally “exoticized” for added attraction. I was convinced there was more to it, and something about Butoh’s visceral origins in the decimated landscape of post-war Japan felt strikingly relevant to contemporary times and the crises the world was heading towards – ecological collapse, widespread species extinction, protracted economic instability, social injustice, and political crises that undermine the very notion of democracy; all these are glaringly obvious as I now write in the year 2023. This is a record of this research journey to Japan that spanned the period 2012–2017. During this time, I interviewed ten artists with a connection to Butoh dance: they ranged from first-generation dancers to contemporary performance artists. The final interview is with a philosopher. As this book goes to publication, four of my interlocutors, including Yoshito Ohno, have left this world. It may seem rather delayed to publish now, but this deeply personal adventure into Butoh’s oral legacies – because they are manifold – was never intended as a book. These conversations originated in my profound and ongoing curiosity about Butoh, its past, its present, its future, and all the metamorphoses it has been through since its first appearance in 1959. I wanted to know many things, so I went seeking for answers from those who knew and might tell me, teach me, guide me, and enlighten me about the obscurity that still surrounds Butoh. As an artist and dancer myself, I didn’t set out to theorize Butoh. Perhaps I sensed that if I did, it would only further obfuscate my inquiry; after all, Butoh founder, Tatsumi Hijikata himself perpetually evaded explaining things, wanting to safeguard the mystique of his dance.1 Why would I, another practitioner, want to (or at least attempt to) expose it? No. From the start, these conversations have been part of an ecology of practices2 within a hybrid approach I consider embodied research, which I was mostly inventing on the job. Embodied research as a methodology has become more popular in recent years,3 in tandem with the growth of research-by-practice degrees in academia. At the time, because I hadn’t come across the term, I believed I’d come up with it. The core components of my embodied research project in Japan included attending Butoh dance workshops and classes with a great diversity of teachers, reflecting on my learning through writings, drawings, and dance improvisations, and starting in June 2012, the interview element became part of this “methodology”.

Preface  xiii My main reason for this particular mode was a means to make my “body material” – a term favoured by Hijikata – the very interface for my research: I needed to stay immersed, as opposed to taking the distance of an observer. The embodied researcher listens, participates, and imbibes knowledge, hence the title of the book. This tactic permeated my social life as well. Although in both realms, my immersion was hindered, not only by the hurdle of language but also by more opaque behavioural codes – seniority, gender, insider, and outsider status (uchi/soto) – still largely observed in Japanese society. Their traces linger as the somewhat covert punctuation of this research account: they are the possible omissions in the translations that were offered to me, be it in studio sessions, social gatherings, or in these transcribed conversations. But the constraints of this unspoken (and seemingly impenetrable to me) register also contributed to my embodied research methodology. It incited me to finesse my somatic attunement: my body as the interface for my learning had to become attentive to subtleties of ambience, tone, and gesture. This immersed form of embodied research is well suited to Japan, where the religious and cultural heritage of Buddhism is deeply imbricated within social structures:4 Buddhism addresses the split position, assumed by the (scientific) observer, as the “illusion” of duality. And at the very grassroots level of everyday reality, I also learned of a practice named kuki wo yomu – “reading the air”. In Japan, being adept at reading the air of different situations is a sign of a young person’s coming to maturity.5 Continuously listening, that is, by sensing with the whole body, is a way to read moods, energies, and the intricate social tapestry of spaces in order to become imperceptibly immersed in them. It later dawned on me that conversely, such fine-tuned awareness might also serve an espionage mission by helping to locate the fissures within the (apparently) homogenous fabric. When Hijikata challenged his artistic peers of the 1960s to “drop a ladder inside and eat of the darkness of their own bodies”,6 was he not also inviting them to do this by facing their own complicity in the social codes that surrounded them and shored up their own sense of identity? His one and only solo work was entitled Hijikata Tatsumi to nihonjin – nikutai no hanran, “Tatsumi Hijikata and the Japanese people – Rebellion of the Flesh” (1968). Butoh actively cultivated embodied revolt by honing the body’s capacity to prise open the cracks to then wholly immerse itself in the darkness of societal taboos. After my return from Japan, I began my doctoral research at Goldsmiths College, London, in 2017. I was determined to locate dance within a more hybrid art practice – in a Space of the Nameless, which is the title of my research. Crucially, my experimentation across mediums would be grounded in an embodied methodology guided by my own fleshy, visceral, body material. One of my “inventive methods”7 is Liquidity, a poetic movement practice I contracted myself to do for 18 months (though I still dance it). Liquidity means allowing my body to be moved, by forces both within and without, in a molecular form of (psychic and somatic) listening, for dance cues in my bloodstream, my breath, gravity, wind, light, sounds, weather, and

xiv Preface even in my fear. What emerges looks something like a “wind daruma”, being “whirled in the wind”.8 After each session, I notate the dance through dynamic and nonconscious (automatic) drawing. Scores from my notational method of recording these “liquid” states are included in this book, an acknowledgement that Butoh’s charge continues to fuel my creative inquiry. Because it is only now, at the end of both this book and of my doctorate that I realize that something was planted long ago when I initially plunged into Butoh. This seed has kept growing. It’s what continues to nurture wonder in my art practice, to the point that I began to imagine all matter could dance (Butoh). It’s what I call a “listening protest”. Doesn’t this sound like another (maverick) permutation from the reverberations of Butoh’s “rebellion of the body” that can still be heard? This book is a practitioner’s guide, recounting an embodied journey in search of the kind of attunement that leads to hearing the tides of “inner politics”.9 I hope the conversations and my reflections will invite other dancers, artists, makers, activists, and the curious, to bring a keener awareness of their own bodies, not just into their creative process but also into their everyday life, to question it and themselves, to grasp the body as a portal into the unknown, that can unleash the imagination that is needed to face our times, and as they do so, to be inspired by Butoh’s distinctive path into the dark enigma of existence. Notes

4 Rein Raud, ‘“Place’ and “Being-Time”: Spatiotemporal Concepts in the Thought of Nishida Kitarō and Dōgen Kigen’, Philosophy East & West 54, no. 1 (1 January 2004): 29. 5 The drawbacks of this practice have been pointed out by many friends who were forced into adhering to it. Even “sensory attunement” when codified and then strictly policed loses its appeal. For a detailed study of relational codes in Japan, see Jane M. Bachnik and Charles J. Quinn, Jr., eds., Situated Meaning: Inside and Outside in Japanese Self, Society, and Language (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994). 6 Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, ‘Hijikata Tatsumi: Plucking off the Darkness of the Flesh’, TDR/The Drama Review 44, no. 1 (March 2000): 51–52, https://doi. org/10.1162/10542040051058852. 7 Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford, Inventive Methods : The Happening of the Social, Culture, Economy and the Social (London: Routledge, 2012).

Acknowledgements

At heart, this book is a cluster of ten voices: the voices of Yoshito Ohno, Natsu Nakajima, Moe Yamamoto, Yukio Waguri, Ko Murobushi, Masaki Iwana, Takao Kawaguchi, Yukio Suzuki, Yuko Kaseki, and Kuniichi Uno. Each one offered me their time and their thoughts through these exchanges, and each needs to be personally thanked for their generous and vital contributions – some in absentia as four have now departed this world. As well as those whose voices can be heard, there are also the people who don’t appear in the text but enabled these conversations to take place. I also wish to thank them for supporting me in this project. They are the Ohno family who always extended a welcome to me in their home and in the studio, namely Etsuko Ohno, Keiko Ohno, and Yukito Ohno. Also, Takashi Morishita, former director of the Tatsumi Hijikata Archive at the Art Centre, Keio University; Kimiko Watanabe, director of the Ko Murobushi Archive; Teruko Suzuki, manager of Kanazawa Butoh-Kan; Toshio Mizohata for giving me access the Ohno Archives and Dance Archive Network; Hiroko and Koichi Tamano, and Hisaki Yasuda for helping me to find my feet in Japan. There are also contributors to this work whose input should be noted: Nobuo Shiga, Yu Homma, Kae Ishimoto, and Moe Tomoeda. Also, I wish to thank Stephen Barber who first suggested I compile these conversations into a book and then encouraged me in the initial stages of writing. I appreciate the sense of community and support I received from some of Masaki Iwana’s students who rose to the occasion by helping answer a second interview after our teacher’s sudden passing. I must also mention many photographers and archives that generously gave permission for the use of their images. There are many others who I encountered and who no doubt helped in ways that are less perceptible. This journey to Japan was made possible by a grant from the Lisa Ullmann Scholarship Fund. I am deeply grateful to the trustees, especially Anna Carlisle who thoroughly supported my decision to remain in Japan beyond the award period. Without forgetting to thank Marie-Gabrielle

xvi Acknowledgements Rotie, who introduced me to Butoh and recommended me for the Lisa Ullmann award. Finally, I want to thank The Study Society and Colet House London who have been providing me with a space in which to continue to nurture and transmit the legacy of Butoh dance through my teaching and performances.

Figure I.1 Tatsumi Hijikata crossing the street with a watermelon (cc.1970). Photo: Masahisa Fukase. Copyright Masahisa Fukase Archives.

Introduction

Dust Is Time’s Body

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112211-1

2  Introduction: Dust Is Time’s Body In the pitch darkness, a tiny bright light appears. It begins to swish rapidly with a whipping sound. And then, just as suddenly, before my retina has had time to adjust, it goes out again leaving only a hallucinatory halo of photons. In the dark interstice, I hear the sound of breathing bodies. A collective inhalation awakens the flitting light again. It ebbs, tilts, and turns, and in its wake, long shadows are highlighted in the recesses of the tenebrous basement. I make out the shadow of a hand, a sign of a human presence in the vicinity, but the creature to which this hand is attached remains a formless mass. The light diffuses bringing a smokey visibility. The roving hand I glimpsed in the shadows has materialized and sets off on a discovery of the mass that clings to it, feeling its way about feverishly. Buried in the folds of this body are two reflective spheres. My selfconscious discomfort scratches away at me; the confrontation begins. The grey light reveals a thing, becoming biped but only for a brief instant, before it crumples over onto its back, and convulses, stiffly, ungracefully, with the desperate automatism of a beetle reacting to the terror of temporary loss of control. But the creature quickly finds its feet and rises again. The hand continues to fester about the body with a “turbid erotic” compulsion.1 I discern a mournful quality in this ecstasy, somewhere between a child secretly discovering its own sexuality and the human shame of those who despise their cravings for tenderness. That insistent hand grasping again and again, as if wanting to give birth to itself by discovering the secrets of its innate genitality.2 Finally, it arrives at the place of its gendered matter. And then, splaying its legs open, it breathes life into a weightless dance that flickers like that tiny bright light that leapt at first in the darkness. On seeing Sacred Things by Temmetsu, Tokyo (2012) ~ Suspended between the light, the shadows, and the bodies, another element clings to Butoh – the dust. Dust might immediately evoke the radioactive particles released by the atomic bombs of 1945, whose fine dust sedimented over an entire nation, obliterating so many of its people. There is that dust, and it continues to haunt Butoh dance.3 But there is another dust that cloaks Butoh in a perpetual opacity: like a squid disappearing into an inky black cloud, Butoh is forever vanishing into the haze. The dust is Butoh’s refusal to be pinned down, which also affords it escape velocity and generates its ongoing energetic charge. This dust makes me wonder, what is Butoh? Dust forms when you stamp the bare earth with your feet. This is the meaning of the pictogram kanji for Butoh. With a forceful step on the ground, dust goes flying, it seeps into the mechanisms and structures, where it interferes with the smooth running of things, it glitches the habitual rhythms, and then, it might even invoke apparitions. When I saw Temmetsu’s performance of Sacred Things in 2012, I was reminded of this dust. The dust first engulfed me in 2008. The Butoh troupe, Sankai Juku, led by Ushio Amagatsu, was performing at Sadler’s Wells. Their opulent stage

Introduction: Dust Is Time’s Body  3 design is renowned for its visual appeal: the painted white bodies –“not of this earth” – the regal colour palette and the sumptuous costumes. But beyond the predictable exotic aesthetic, there was something else – the dust. My physiological rhythms, entrained as they were to London’s pace, had accompanied me into the performance: I had entered the auditorium still buzzing with those speeds. Now, the shift from uninterrupted activity to spectatorial expectation was underway. I was ready to consume the beauty of it all, and yes, it compelled me to watch. But at some point, I began to feel drowsy; I wasn’t “watching” anymore, I was dreaming. Some inertial force was pulling at the tightness of my physiological, psychosomatic, rhythmic habits, teasing them apart, syncopating them. I felt a monumental bout of fatigue. This hypnagogic effect is Butoh’s dust; that evening at Sadler’s Wells, I could make out many people sleeping in the stalls below. Sinking like a dead weight into my seat, I too felt the heaviness that precedes sleep. I sat bathed in a languid sensation, observing it; my curiosity about this state allowed me to ward off the inertia as I explored my body with my inner attention. In the oneiric zone, my mind now groggy, my body’s physical density was becoming unbearably foregrounded. The fluid movements taking place on the distant stage were doing something to my somatic landscape, awakening my exhaustion. This haunted me far more than the images playing out over there. That night, I encountered the spectre of the fast-paced urban environment, its speeds that moved in me felt invasive, contaminating almost; its rhythms appeared to cleave time from my body’s materiality. Now, as my matters became perceptible, I heard a question being asked: what is the tempo of my body? By holding this inquiry from then onwards, I began to notice jarring gestures and jittery movements, unconsciously attuned to an anxious, relentless measure – the metronome of daily life. It made me wonder, is the City (of London), the financial centre of the capital, setting the pace of its bodies? That question which formed after Sankai Juku’s performance surely echoes Tatsumi Hijikata’s own investigations. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he would roam the streets of Tokyo, looking for movement clues in the underbelly of the city, just as it was shifting into its “economic miracle” phase after its post-war Westernization by America. It was the manual workers crouching in workshops and garages, the homeless, the “left behinds”, that inspired Hijikata’s early dance research. In those dusty back alleys, he found the possibility of rebelling against what he called “a bad check called democracy”.4 Some may identify what I’m calling “dust” with Butoh’s slower register. But “slow” isn’t the adjective I wish to use here. This same question of tempo was something Ko Murobushi thought about very much. But as he states in our conversations, the word “slow” belongs to the “linear” (measurable) register of human social time. Butoh is not slow motion. Instead, because it delves into matter’s visceral charge, it transmits the (unpredictable) dynamics of materiality, and by doing so, it subverts (human) notions of “normal” in terms of speed, pace, and, I might add, audience expectations. I’m convinced

4  Introduction: Dust Is Time’s Body that this temporal volatility is one of the reasons why Butoh is hard to wedge into a single category. Is it dance, is it theatre, is it art; is it therapy, a remedy, a philosophy, an ideology, or an ontology, of/through the body; is it traditional, mystical, magical, or shamanic; what is this thing called “Butoh”? In brief, Butoh appeared in 1950s post-war Japan; it began to take shape in the 1960s; in the 1970s, some notion of form “that could be passed on”5 became apparent. By then, it had already morphed many times, from happening, to performance art, to dance, to theatrical event. Throughout its development, it cross-pollinated artistic fields and allowed, even encouraged, a variety of approaches from its practitioners. Emerging out of the avant-garde spirit of collaboration, it later found devotees (student “disciples”), while also grafting itself into the practice of artists, who had limited contact with Butoh’s core founders but succumbed to the promise of its radical viscerality. What is perhaps most enigmatic and particular about Butoh was its original openness. As Yoshito Ohno recounts, Tatsumi Hijikata, ostensibly the inventor of Butoh, allowed other dancers to use the name “Butoh”, even after they left his milieu and were creating very different dances from him.6 Such a lack of authorial restriction is unusual considering the strict discipline, codified aesthetics, and pedagogical formats entrenched within other Japanese performance forms, such as Noh theatre or Kabuki. Despite being slippery from the start, Butoh was not fleeting. Perhaps its plasticity, its malleability, which is of course also Butoh’s (unresolvable) riddle, is what continues to make Butoh so alluring over 60 years after its initial appearance. That “thing” called Butoh can’t be contained; like a rapacious weed, it continues to send feelers in all directions, establishing itself in France, Germany, the United States, South America, Spain, Italy, Greece, Russia, Iran, South Africa, Sweden, and many more. In the United Kingdom, Butoh’s propagation has been more timid. Despite an early uptake in the late 1990s and 2000s, it’s still relatively rare to see Butoh programmed into dance or art offerings. And usually, I’m faced with a blank expression at the mention of it: though this certainly isn’t the case on the continent. I often wonder if it’s Butoh’s dust, meaning the problem of “taxonomizing” it – because no one has yet established if it belongs to dance or theatre or performance art, so it becomes a problem of terminology and naming – and identifying and categorizing are major cultural drivers in the UK. Butoh’s loose boundaries also invite a host of other problems of course: how to practice, to understand, to communicate, to pass on its legacy, and to evaluate Butoh performances? Personally, I revel in Butoh’s generative dust. When art output is increasingly linked to declaring one’s identity in order to clarify one’s allegiances, Butoh reminds me of what Edouard Glissant calls “opacity” and the right to it: something I hold dear and wish to safeguard.7 And I believe that this unanswered problem of “what it is” is what makes Butoh so contemporarily relevant and resonant. It draws attention to betweenness and hybridity, what can’t be named and predicted, and what is beyond measure. As I inhabit the murky zones between (races, cultures, and more), I chose Butoh as the field

Introduction: Dust Is Time’s Body  5 in which to plant my questions on these matters. But these are not questions about my identity and how to express it – because as Takashi Morishita so clearly elucidates Butoh is not about self-expression.8 Hijikata himself alluded to this very early on, in his typically cryptic manner, saying that it was “his dead sister who lived inside his body” who would whisper to him: “what you are able to express emerges somehow by not expressing it, don’t you think?”9 As a practitioner I whole-heartedly agree, Butoh is not a means for me to express any sort of ideation of an authentic identity. Dancing Butoh is to grasp that I too am dust – “a corpse desperately struggling to stand upright”. And this realization might help me to embody a respect for all of life – not just for humans and their particular identities. So, I won’t begin with the question “what is Butoh?” and finally arrive at an answer that offers a new theory. My conversations with each of the dancers I heard are grouped according to particular phases that I have identified in Butoh, and which unravel chronologically in time – first the 1960s, then the 1970s, up till contemporary practitioners. These conversations feed into my reflections as I move between interlocutors. My own journey, however, has not been linear at all. Rather, I sought out one artist after another guided by questions that unravelled in tandem with my dance practice research, which is why I consider each exchange to be a form of “direct transmission”, urging me on in my perpetual quest. In other words, I wasn’t pursuing my interlocutors just as an interviewer. I was there as a seeker of knowledge, and their words were part of my learning. Direct transmission is an intimate mode of pedagogy. It requires physical presence, listening, and trust to develop between a teacher and a student. These transmissions I sought out occurred rather haphazardly. Consequently, my reflections on this learning process shift to and fro in time – a bit like dust particles – without ever conjoining into a solid definitive final form that aims to conclusively (re)define Butoh. Instead, I approach Butoh as a living organism bound to change all the time, which is why I borrow the language of dynamic systems theory to distinguish between the phases in a way that is non-hierarchical, but rather that speaks to the energies of life: emergence, structure, dispersion, complexity, and exhaustion.10 This book is divided into five sections bearing these titles. In Emergence, two of the first collaborators to Butoh’s germination – Yoshito Ohno and Natsu Nakajima – share their early experiences and personal stories about Butoh’s somewhat wild beginnings. Structure comes about with the choreographic phase of Butoh-fu. Here, two of Hijikata’s principal students of that period – Moe Yamamoto and Yukio Waguri – go into depth about the use of language and notation in creating the Butoh works of the 1970s. This part includes an interview with Koichi Tamano by Nobuo Shiga, which I helped to translate. Dispersion is the moment when Butoh begins to expand beyond Japan through the practices of the “maverick dancers”, Masaki Iwana and Ko Murobushi, who go on to take Butoh in new directions both creatively and geographically. In this section, I have included reflections on my experiences of the work of Akira Kasai, a dancer who was close to Butoh from

6  Introduction: Dust Is Time’s Body the beginning but also grew his own branch early on. Butoh’s later phase of Complexity unravels through the work of contemporary dancers and performance artists, Yukio Suzuki, Takao Kawaguchi, and Yuko Kaseki, including an encounter with the singular activity of performance artist Kubikukuri Takuzou whose exposure to Butoh lingered with him every day of his life. The last part, Exhaustion, is a form of conclusion. In it, I consider the alternative materials through (and with) which to dance Butoh. The final word belongs to the philosopher Kuniichi Uno whose fascination with Butoh has not abated since his first encounter with it. His vision of Butoh’s contemporary relevance is as a state of generative “exhaustion”. A fitting way to end, back at the beginning, when exhaustion is a sign that dust is latent. ~ A Note on the Structure The dancers included in the first three sections of this book (Emergence, Structure, and Dispersion) are those with whom I studied over the longest period, particularly Yoshito Ohno, Natsu Nakajima, and Masaki Iwana. Although I attended a few of Ko Murobushi’s workshops, my encounter with him developed over time as we spoke on many occasions as well as going on a research “field trip” together to Yamagata Prefecture: his last journey there as he passed away the following year, 2015. I studied with both Yukio Waguri and Moe Yamamoto attending their lessons and workshops over a three-year period, including an intensive Butoh-fu research workshop especially offered to me by Moe Yamamoto and the Kanazawa Butoh-Kan in response to my questions. In the fourth part of the book, my presence is a little sparse, as I have had less practice-based engagement with these artists’ creative approaches. I consider my own work to fit into this zone, and throughout these exchanges, I am ruminating on Butoh’s place in my artistic practice. The final section, Exhaustion, is the bridge that leads out to my future research orientation with the text “Duet with Stone”, bringing together the material practice of stone carving and the lessons I learned from Butoh dance. It may seem that in this “oral account” of Butoh, some important dancers and artists have been left out. This may be the case: I wish I could have spoken to more female Butoh dancers for example. But as already stated, this journey wasn’t intended as a book at the outset, so I didn’t explicitly go looking for people to interview. I spoke to those I encountered through my seeking, and some voices I wish I had heard are unfortunately absent. Instead of the usual Japanese format, names here are written as first name followed by surname. When recounting certain anecdotes, I sometimes refer to a dancer by their first name. This indicates a degree of familiarity. When I revert to speaking about them or about their work objectively, I will use their surname.

Introduction: Dust Is Time’s Body  7 Notes

2 Antonin Artaud used the expression “un génital inné” to speak of the necessary “self-genesis” of being. See Antonin Artaud, Antonin Artaud: Oeuvres, ed. Évelyne Grossman (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2007). 3 See, for example, Stephen Barber, Hijikata: Revolt of the Body (Washington, DC: Solar Books, 2010). 5 According to Takashi Morishita, Hijikata Tatsumi’s Notational Butoh. An Innovational Method for Butoh Creation (Tokyo: Keio University Art Center, 2015). 6 However, this generosity had changed by the 1970s. According to a later student, Seisaku, Hijikata’s claim to creative authorship may well have been a driving force in establishing Butoh-fu, from fear that the “form of Butoh developed by me alone might be stolen”, cited in Morishita, 59. 9 Hijikata Tatsumi, ‘Wind Daruma’, TDR: Drama Review 44, no. 1 (2000): 77.

1

Emergence The First Collaborators

Figure 1.1

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112211-2

Emergence: The First Collaborators  9 Ankoku Butoh Emerges “I am a body shop; my profession is the business of human rehabilitation, which goes today by the name of dancer”. Tatsumi Hijikata1 ~ It began in the dark to whispers of “je t’aime”. Two men faced each other; one stalking, the other standing immobilized, his legs constricted around a live chicken wedged between them. This was the first movement, Kinjiki, Forbidden Colours, performed in 1959. The only thing I know of this work is from the few photographs and the many rumours that persist about this mythical memory that constitutes Butoh’s genesis; the chicken’s fate continues to be spoken about, though Yoshito Ohno who danced in this work opposite Tatsumi Hijikata, always assured me that no harm came to it. Hijikata did the stalking, Yoshito,2 exposed and vulnerable, wearing only a pair of white underpants was the “young accomplice” providing a soundtrack of groans that only served to amplify the overt homosexual themes of the piece. The work was based on a short story by the controversial novelist of the era, Yukio Mishima, who was already known for his penchant for delving into society’s hidden taboos. To accentuate the occultness of the themes, the apparently dance-less dance was presented on a mostly unlit stage. All of this contributed to the outrage the work caused at the All Japan Art Dance Festival of 1959. Hijikata was immediately expelled from the organization. What a beginning for Butoh! Hijikata’s act of subversion must have been strategic because the result was what he needed to begin the process of worlding Butoh. The aberration caused by Kinjiki created the seism that threw him into the margins of what must have already seemed to him a stagnant dance scene. Now he found himself propelled into a far more provocative milieu, where he officially took on the status of outsider – the kind of “outsiderness” that readily yields creative space for experimentation. Hijikata had landed amongst the most provocative group of avant-garde artists of the times, led by the author Yukio Mishima who was its enfant terrible, and included the French scholar, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, translator of the works of Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade. The two became Hijikata’s mentors during the first incubatory phase of Butoh. Their education would guide his thinking and ideas through literature and art, especially the work of Jean Genet and Le Comte de Lautréamont, whose writings made a strong impression on Hijikata as he began to shape his still vague ideas of dance. This way he would be fasttracked into the avant-garde as both Mishima and Shibusawa were already well connected in the art world and respected within literary circles. And so, Hijikata drew energy from this fertile cocooning at the centre of the period’s most radical thinkers, poets, visual artists, and performers. Butoh’s embryonic period from 1959 into the 1960s was its state of emergence, still formless, nameless – it wasn’t yet called “Butoh” at the time  – anarchic, and wild, a malleable entity ready to ooze into unknown shapes

10  Emergence: The First Collaborators and forms. It was its two principal collaborators, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, who together would do this first smelting. ~ Japan’s defeat in the war was followed by an aftermath of subdued and grave introspection. The mass annihilation of life marked by the unimaginable horror of the instantaneous atomization of hundreds of thousands of people, caused by the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, was a catastrophic event branded into the national psyche. It led to a deep inner soul searching. Japan’s traditional society had, till then, been dominated by the emperor system. With the abdication of the Showà Emperor (Hirohito), following the defeat by America, the national and political power of the imperial system was dismantled. But its psychic traces still haunted the Emperor’s former subjects. The fleshy materiality of bodies, ripped out from the safe enclosure of national identity suddenly stood out as an almost incomprehensible phenomenon. The nikutai – literally “meat body” – became a recurring theme.3 These physical and spiritual questions fanned creative embers, prompting an ontological preoccupation with spirit and matter among the artists of the turbulent post-war era of the 1950s. While American art of the 1950s was dominated by Abstract Expressionism and its focus on “uncontrollable” forces driving the (painting) body to create swathes of leaks and drips, in Japan, another kind of action art was also happening. Here the focus was far more on the body than on the outcome. The (early)4 performance-oriented experiments of the Gutai movement (1954) led by Jiro Yoshihara are a testament to this. One of the seminal Gutai performances was Kazuo Shiraga’s Challenging Mud (1955), in which he “wrestled” with a pile of mud outside the exhibition space. In other works, he painted with his feet to create art that was directly related to what he described as “the unified condition of the spirit and the body”.5 This fascination with the spiritualization of flesh was reiterated in the Gutai Manifesto (1956), where founder Yoshihara stated that Gutai Art was concerned with “spirit and matter [that] shake hands with each other while keeping their distance. Matter never compromises itself with the spirit; the spirit never dominates matter”.6 ~ The artistic period of the 1950s was the backdrop from which Butoh emerged in 1959. And Butoh would take on the pervasive theme of wanting to unravel the mysteries of spirit and flesh; this unravelling would happen through the generative polarity of hardness and fragility embodied by its two founders, Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, respectively. Tatsumi Hijikata felt overwhelmed by a sense of utter weakness: “I was completely impotent”.7 This feeling of emasculation was widespread in Japan, following the Westernization that ensued from the United States takeover.8 Wanting to overcome his “impotence” led the 18-year-old Hijikata to attend dance classes in his native Akita in 1946. He was seeking “hardness” believing that he could resist through his flesh. It was in these early dance experiences

Emergence: The First Collaborators  11 in Akita that the seed of Butoh was planted. Soon though he would need another body in which to gestate his idea of Butoh, Kazuo Ohno’s body. Their first encounter was in Tokyo in 1949, when Hijikata saw Kazuo Ohno dance. Kazuo was a generation older than Hijikata, already an established modern dancer, and one of the men who had actually experienced the horror of war first-hand, having fought in it. Kazuo had spent nine years in service and had been the only survivor in a POW camp where 200 others died. When he returned to Japan at the age of 44, it was through his dancing that he chose to process, the unspeakably traumatic experiences he had lived through and witnessed. As his son Yoshito remembers, Kazuo returned completely alienated from the living; it was as if he had already died and continued to live as a ghost. His body bore the traces of Japan’s defeat, the same sense of impotence that marked the post-war (male) generation. But in Kazuo, this impotence did not pursue its opposite – hardness – but became a way for him to surrender to the fragility of life. He chose to embody the absolute polarity of what was deemed “masculine” in his dancing. Kazuo embraced softness so intensely that it bewitched Hijikata. Through Kazuo’s dance, Hijikata came face to face with raw materiality, describing it in terms of a craftsman’s sorcery: “he had the dimensions of a cabinetmaker measuring a dense territory with a ruler hidden in his breast”.9 In Kazuo, Hijikata recognized the “deadly poison”10 he needed to birth his sentiment of Butoh into Butoh dance. ~ When Hijikata moved to Tokyo, he initially studied Western dance forms including ballet and jazz. He earned a living from occasional appearances as a dancer in TV shows and cabarets, sometimes even resorting to shoplifting, partly spurred by his attraction to the author Jean Genet’s life of petty crime. So, he would roam the backstreets of Tokyo, looking for inspiration. Hijikata chose the grime, the darkness, and the back alleys, the underbelly of the city where the manual workers, mechanics, the homeless, and all the other left-behinds of Japan’s burgeoning “economic miracle” roamed. Here he could peer underneath the shiny new cult of the capitalist economy which had replaced the emperor system, with a new army of “salary men”.11 It was in the shadows of this rapidly modernizing society that Butoh’s earliest gestation took place. When Hijikata established the Asbestos-Kan12 studio, taking over from the dancer Nobutoshi Tsuda in 1962, he turned it into a meeting place for artists to congregate over late-night gatherings and drinking sessions. It became the headquarters of an “artistic resistance movement” made up of a diverse array of creative collaborators which included visual artists Yokoo Tadanori, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, and Genpei Akasegawa, from the performance actions group Hi-Red Centre, and Tatsuhiko and Mishima as the literary intellectuals of the group. Hijikata became the self-styled provocateur at the epicentre of this group. Having a space at his disposal and supported by a rich artistic network, he began to present his dance activities. ~

12  Emergence: The First Collaborators

Figure 1.2 From above: rehearsals at Asbestos-Kan Studio (cc.1964). Photo: Unknown. Courtesy of Keio University Art Center and Butoh Laboratory, Japan.

Yoshito Ohno and Natsu Nakajima were amongst the dancers who participated in Butoh’s first emergence. Yoshito danced in Kinjiki, and Nakajima attended sessions both at Kazuo Ohno’s studio and (eventually when women were accepted as she explains in our conversation) at the Asbestos-Kan with Hijikata. Both continued beyond the early experimental phase of the 1960s and went on to pursue their own artistic vision. With time though, their Butoh evolved independently from what they had learned with Hijikata during this early phase. But the thread of continuity from this period is still woven into their dance techniques and philosophy, even if their output has evolved quite differently from Hijikata or Kazuo’s works. In the interviews that follow I invited these first collaborators to share the timeline of their artistic journey into and through Butoh. In these conversations, both dancers consider how these formative years have endlessly nurtured their continued engagement with Butoh. How was it possible for them to follow and trust the chaotic impulse of those early days? I attended workshops with both Yoshito Ohno and Natsu Nakajima over a period of three years from 2012 to 2015. Their approach was markedly different, but the trace of the “spirit and matter” inquiry that had preoccupied the 50s generation of artists held a central position in both their methods. Yoshito’s teaching was always “world-conscious”. He often mentioned global events and issues at the start of a workshop, asking his students to physically and spiritually ruminate on them through their dance during the

Emergence: The First Collaborators  13 session. By mentioning events that often make an individual feel powerless or impotent, Yoshito believed that dancing could actively generate hope and (planetary) care. This approach was closely aligned with that of his father Kazuo in this sense. Dancing in the Ohno studio was always a means of coming into visceral contact with the global body, through dance as communion and prayer. Nakajima wrote that “if Ankoku Butoh was just a dance, I believe I would have given up on it long ago”.13 Butoh has endured in her life as a personal spiritual journey taken through the body. Her workshop sessions are also framed by practices of care. Drawing on the therapeutic method of Noguchi Seitai, each class begins with participants massaging each other’s hands, arms, backs, and necks. At the end of the class, our care turns to the studio floor; cleaning the studio is a communal task, and all of us get down on our hands and knees to scrub together.

14  Emergence: The First Collaborators “Return to zero”: A Visit to the Ohno Studio Kami-Hoshikawa, March 2, 2012 Hijikata once wrote that he “adored” ribcages.14 Mine had been dancing since morning, guarding a growing anticipation. What should I bring?  – because gift giving is expected here. And what will we talk about? What will I say? Will he understand? Yoshito Ohno’s daughter, Keiko, had invited me to come to the family residence to meet her father for the first time. Due to illness, he had suspended his classes: one of the main reasons I’d initially come to Japan was to meet him. This was a precious invitation, though a little unnerving as it wasn’t for a group lesson. The Ohno family home is located in Kami-Hoshikawa, a suburb of Yokohama. Because punctuality is important here, I set off early, in the heaviest downpour. When I got to the main station, I still had two hours to go before the appointment. After ambling into the giant Sogo department store to pass the time, and absent-mindedly following the crowds into the Nissan headquarters’ gallery, where gleaming vehicles were on display, framed by sleek female uniformed attendants, I came to the disappointing realization that Yokohama was not the quaint port city I’d imagined. But what had I been expecting to find here? ~ The steps that lead to the house are very steep. It was still raining. Towards the highest point of the path, on the right, under some dripping trees, I noticed a white sign with hand-painted black lettering peeking out: Kazuo Ohno Studio. In the background, there it was: the corrugated iron and wood of the white building, familiar to me only because I’d seen it in various pictures, mostly from the inside. Yoshito Ohno’s shape was suddenly reflected in the light of a yellow puddle at the door of the main house. And I was in. He was walking ahead in the narrow corridor. Smaller, slighter than I’d thought he’d be, his body orientated by his welcoming smile, which made it seem as if he was moving in diagonals, and never turning his back to me. His brother, Yukito, was waiting for us in the kitchen. Nobody spoke after the brief introductions, just a thick silence and the sound of the two brothers shuffling around the room in measured steps, gathering papers, boiling a kettle. Yukito put a few loose sheets of paper on the table: programmes and articles about Yoshito’s upcoming performance in Vancouver. Yoshito just hung back in the water-streaked shadows of the room carefully making green tea; setting out some strawberries; keeping himself busy, still swerving about along careful curves that allowed him to maintain a loose eye contact, sometimes pausing longer as if to check if I was still sitting there. At those moments, when our eyes crossed, his reassuring smile would return, accompanied by a friendly nod. Finally, he spoke, he was telling me he’d been ill and was not teaching

Emergence: The First Collaborators  15 because of this, but he also said he might be getting better. We got up now and he led me out into the wet garden. ~ When we entered the studio, warm dry air was already blowing hard from a yellowed aircon unit hanging from the central beam of the white space. The space was enveloped in white light, surrounded by white walls, and held by a dark polished wooden floor. The change in temperature and light made my skin react, shrinking back and tightening. I would learn about it later, in Yoshito’s lesson – the ritual of arrival that he called “meeting the space”, when all your senses tune towards the angles, the shadows, the sounds, and the ancestral presences. Because I would learn from him that “the difference between (any other) dance and Butoh, is that dance is change in space, and Butoh is transformation of space”. I followed Yoshito at a distance. Each foot dangling with a weight that made my presence feel too glaring for this environment. I realized that I could quickly learn Yoshito’s method of swirling along open curves, and this tactic would dampen the shuddering of my body and of my anxious thoughts. Mutely we both tracked the emptiness and the fine dust that our movement unsettled. Our furtive, respectful, eye contact would sometimes pierce through our circling, returning us to the dimension of harder things, where we couldn’t evade the cold floor sucking at our feet, the damp darkness whose muddy fingers were reaching for contact with the sole. Past dances were leeching through the carpentry. I was lost in the warm studio because it felt so familiar. These many dancers, I’d “met” them all somewhere before, but now they were here, surging out from shelves, walls, floor, photos, mementos, artefacts, and plastic flowers, meeting my meandering curiosity. And there she was. Noticing the familiar poster of her, La Argentina, loom into view at the far end, propped up next to the glossy black rectangle of the upright piano, made everything decelerate. The ruffles of her costume and her tight mollusc of a smile must have by now burned into eternity from being admired by Kazuo Ohno for so many years. And next to the enormous poster, more gaudy plastic flowers were laid out reflecting the flickering of the fluorescent tube bulbs. In the class, Yoshito would hand us these plastic flowers and say “if the flower is aware of me, then this makes my body move”. At this moment, he hovered past me with a flower. He reached out with the other sinewy hand searching the empty space for something, while at the same time, something else, something imperceptible, was pulling back at his opposite flank. These two forces kept him rooted in place, bristling with a tension that smothered his heart and chest, while the crown of his head was free to observe the darkness beneath the rafters. His feet were locked in place. He looked like he was praying, his body trembling under the gaze of invisible spectators,

16  Emergence: The First Collaborators ­ “The volume of kukan above the crown point of the head is just as dense as the layers of history that we stir up with our tail bone”: he would remind us, his students, of this all the time. I would come to understand it. His weightless presence occupied the periphery, nudging me towards the absolute centre of the room. Held in this place, I was unconsciously drawn to, or pulling on, all the other entities of the room. I recognize this was the exercise he called “the patience of not starting”. At the start of a lesson, Yoshito often asked his students to stand still, like this, encouraging us to nurture watchfulness and alertness. We would allow ourselves to be watched, by objects, emptiness, and ancestors. From this patience, an unknown dance arises, eventually. On that first visit, held by the centre, being patient, I noticed the black vertical slits of the cupboards, opening slightly, as if breathing with every silent footstep of his approach. Then, by applying just the right pressure, with a stiff tap of the palm, the double doors popped open. Packed tightly inside were the sumptuous folds of Kazuo’s abandoned skins – sequins, feathers, and silks, tumbling all the way down to the ground. I could sense their desire to feel the warmth of flesh and the heat of the spotlights once again. Yoshito crossed the studio space causing another gentle undulation in the floorboards. Another built-in recess on the opposite side, his own wardrobe, was a minimalist arrangement of geometric lines, in contrast to Kazuo’s costume box. The starched linen of three identical shirts in blue, yellow, and green, which he explained to me as the hues of darkness, light, and nature, respectively. I recall something he said once: If you learn how to see things you will learn how not to see things, what things don’t need to be looked at. In the space where you dance, look at it and imagine how the audience will feel when they experience your dance. And the corners are very important. The corners, the empty spaces around his simple arrangement of costumes, are where Yoshito’s sense of care hides, a care that abides. He often danced to support his father, Kazuo’s more flamboyant performances; he was the hidden earthy presence, the light and darkness, that allowed Kazuo’s flower to bloom. Yoshito knew the corners. And then I noticed it: the small low chair, its chipped pale grey paint, and the flattened indigo cushion. It faced the image of La Argentina along a direct perspectival line upon which I was treading at that moment. The invisible tight rope stretched along the length of the studio’s rectangular shape, from her teeth to the empty space, just above the backrest, where Kazuo’s

Emergence: The First Collaborators  17 face would have been. In the distance, Yoshito was observing me through an empty picture frame. When he talked about the zero point in dance, I wonder if he was thinking of that empty frame. Look for the zero point in dance: it’s important to start from there and to go back to it. Find moments of stop, and in those moments return to zero. Then your dance is unpredictable: go back to zero in your dance.  Keep going back to zero: Kazuo used walking to get back to ‘zero’. Adding, “the space between zero and one is very important: this is where dance happens. If you get to one and keep dancing it becomes ‘normal’ dance. If you keep going back to zero, it’s Butoh”. His face, pale in the cold light had the countenance of the paper tissue he was about to bring to life. Floating it from one hand to the other delicately, he wanted to talk of kamihitoe – the “space of delicacy” – a zone within the body where the external volume of space penetrates the body’s inner landscapes, where inside and outside, breath and air, intertwine in an intimate connection that invokes the softer emotions. Did I know that Kazuo Ohno “grew his hands through his dance”? Yoshito asked. As that tentative dance came to an end on that first evening, Yoshito began to play one of his favourite pieces of music: Mihalia Jackson singing Amazing Grace. Her gospel voice filled the studio, and my body, and would do so on almost every subsequent visit. Yoshito taught that “starting and finishing is very important: the snow, the full moon and the cherry blossoms know about how to appear, and then without warning, they disappear”. Knowing the secret of beginnings and endings is to understand the source of the deep longing, which is all that remains after the dance has ended. ~ Yoshito Ohno is the son of Kazuo Ohno. He danced opposite Tatsumi Hijikata in Kinjiki Forbidden Colours in 1959, considered to be the first manifestation of Butoh. Yoshito’s close association with Hijikata continued throughout the development of Butoh up until Hijikata’s death in 1986. After a hiatus from the stage, Yoshito returned to become his father’s artistic collaborator, dancing with him, assisting him, and helping to direct his performances. Yoshito taught regular classes at the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio on Tuesday nights and Sunday afternoon sessions. His approach was subtle, relying on duration and repetition to allow something to emerge from patient contemplation. Dance, according to Yoshito, begins with “the patience of not starting”: before the urge to “dance”, we should encounter the silence that generates movement.

18  Emergence: The First Collaborators Like his father, he encouraged free improvisation in the sessions, holding space by becoming a storyteller, providing an atmosphere for us, the participants, to “think” through our bodies. He was deeply concerned about the current state of the world; he wanted each dancer to discover a sense of response-ability towards it and he was convinced that through our bodies, “we can resist, we can revolt, we can heal and we can pray”. He repeated these words regularly. I began to attend Yoshito’s regular workshops in March 2012. From this point on, I gradually developed a close association and friendship with the Ohno family over the next three years, performing alongside Yoshito on some occasions, and was fortunate enough to be given the space to develop my own work in that well-loved studio, built by Kazuo Ohno, surrounded by him, Hijikata, and the ancestors. I am sure, they still dance there today. Yoshito Ohno passed away on January 8, 2020 – the last of the original triad of Butoh, together with his father Kazuo and Tatsumi Hijikata. During his final years of performing, Yoshito gradually left the three stiff shirts in their dark corner, often wearing loose swishing white bellbottom pants and pink rabbit ears. Perhaps with this freer, and more flamboyant look, he wanted to evolve from the steady gliding presence with which he’d respectfully shadowed his father, wanting now to lift off, take height, and hop, then bound and leap. He would often repeat a question posed by the theatre critic, Watanabe Tamotsu, “how can we create our own body?” Yoshito answered with a quote from Nietzsche: “If you want to learn to fly one day, first you must learn to walk, and then run and climb and dance; you cannot fly into flying”. I feel very fortunate to have spent these three plus years learning from Yoshito Ohno. It was he who helped me to stay in Japan. He and his family always welcomed me. I was even invited to take the role of Maria-san, the Virgin Mary, formerly played by Kazuo Ohno (in his old age), in the nativity play at the nearby primary school, alongside Yoshito and Yukito dressed in Santa Claus outfits. Thanks to the remarkable generosity of the Ohno family, I was able to present a solo work there, Black Box, in September 2012. It was also at the Kazuo Ohno studio that I found the space to develop my own dance work in response to this Butoh research project between 2012 and 2018.

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Figure 1.3 Yoshito Ohno in rehearsal (2012). Photo: Dominique S. Bonarjee.

“Butoh Is Linked to Revolution”: Yoshito Ohno Kami-Hoshikawa, July 10 and 17, 2012 Interpretation (Japanese to English): Moe Tomoeda

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Yoshito Ohno:

Before  Kinjiki, Tatsumi Hijikata was a top dancer in the ballet group of Ando Mitsuko’s Unique Ballet Theatre. I liked the style of the group and wanted to be a part of it. People from the group asked Kazuo Ohno and myself to join. Hijikata already had that mysterious air about him, in his face and eyes. We started talking and Hijikata began to visit our house. He struck up a friendship with us. At the time, Kazuo Ohno was developing The Old Man and the Sea. I was playing

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the part of the boy and my brother was the tuna fish (he laughs). Hijikata would visit to give advice for the piece. The style of the piece was modern dance – Neue Tanz was the basic style of dance. The first (style of) dance Hijikata had studied in Akita was Neue Tanz. How did this dance lead to Butoh? After The Old Man and the Sea, there was a competition for new dancers, run by the Modern Dance Society. Everyone (participating) was to perform a 15-minute piece. Hijikata was planning to present Kinjiki as his piece, and for the first time, I worked with him. He told me to make my body tough and hard for Kinjiki: the movement was not really dance, it was jerky and not smooth at all. I was very surprised to see this movement as it wasn’t like the modern dance I’d learned before. I thought: “Is this really dance?” Kinjiki was performed again for Yukio Mishima at the Asbestos-Kan in a private performance. Mishima really liked it. I was very pleased when Hijikata told me this. I didn’t feel my dance was very good but I felt I had a certain presence on stage: I was playing football at the time and my body was different from dancers, and maybe Mishima enjoyed this presence I had with my body. That was the beginning. In autumn of 1959, we made another performance, which was inspired by Jean Genet’s Notre Dame des Fleurs (1943) and the character of Divine. It had the same homosexual theme as Kinjiki. It was called Divine Show. Kazuo (Ohno) was Divine. So would you say that was the beginning of Butoh? The dance style wasn’t called “Butoh” at the time, but because of its homosexual theme, the Modern Dance Society rejected us. Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno decided to leave the society after that. I can’t confirm it, but as far as I remember, Akira Kasai started calling it “Butoh”. Hijikata didn’t call it Butoh, and Butoh became known by this name from the 1980s when it started to become popular. Hijikata’s dance was different from other styles because he put darkness into it and that was the main feature. From 1959, after Kinjiki, Hijikata called it Ankoku Buyo15 (Dark Dance) not Butoh.16 Can you define what Butoh means for you? It’s hard to tell; if there are a 100 people, a 100 styles of Butoh exist. Dairakudakan’s (artistic director) Akaji Maro was an actor, and he has no dance background.

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Akira Kasai learned modern dance and Neue Tanz from Kazuo Ohno, and later, he went to Germany to learn Eurhythmy: his own style is very unique. I went to see Kasai’s piece Utrobne a few weeks ago. It’s very different isn’t it? I was the only one who was with Hijikata from the very beginning until the end. Akira Kasai and Ishii Mitsutaka joined for some time, but then Tatsumi Hijikata told them to practice on their own to develop their own style. Hijikata said they could call their dance style anything they wanted: Kasai called it Butoh. While I practised with Hijikata, I felt there was something missing. Hijikata had many experiences of dance styles, and as I didn’t know any, I decided to learn ballet dance, pantomime in the Etienne Decroux style and Noh Theatre. So I  gained many other styles of dance for my own Butoh, and I also played music and bongo drums. Tatsumi Hijikata and Akiko Motofuji, his wife, started a show and I joined. I was asked to fill the interval when they had to change costumes. I would play drums and mime floating the drum off the stage (he laughs). After that, Hijikata would return to the stage. The group developed with more people and was called “Dancing Gogi”. It became very popular. We travelled to the countryside with it. We earned money from this to create Butoh performances. At night, we had an entertainment show, but in the daytime, we practised Butoh: that was the time for our art which was totally the opposite of the showy night time performance. After that many people started to join the Asbestos-Kan. Dancing Gogi went on for seven years. It was Motofujisan who came up with the name Dancing Gogi. Can you talk about the kinds of audiences that attended Butoh performances? Yukio Mishima was the first to be really impressed and touched by Butoh, and as he was a very influential person, he brought many important writers and people to the Asbestos-Kan and to performances, including Tatsuhiko Shibusawa17 and Kazuko Shiraishi18  – I’m performing with Kazuko in September this year. Mishima also brought painters and many people from the art world, publishing, and photographers. All the main people from the art world came to see Hijikata’s performances, and he was written about in magazines. It started in this way, but then Hijikata performed his solo as a “Japanese man”: he did the very powerful and

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shocking performance, Hijikata Tatsumi to Nihonjin: Nikutai no Hanran in 1968 (Tatsumi Hijikata and the Japanese: Rebellion of the Body). For seven years, he was doing all the organizing of the shows but he hadn’t performed really by himself. It was as if everything burst into Nikutai no Hanran. It had been nine years since performing Kinjiki and seven years after starting Dancing Gogi. Hijikata decided to end Dancing Gogi at this point and went back to Akita Prefecture.19 It was on his return that he did Nikutai no Hanran. I did my first solo in 1969, Hijikata wasn’t involved in the choreography or direction or anything, but he came to a rehearsal on the day of the performance, and he complimented me and said it was good, although I was doing improvisation. His comment really affected me and I found it difficult to perform after that: I found it hard to move at all. It was after that experience that I decided to leave dance performance and began to run a drugstore instead: I felt I had lost a certain sense of reality. After seeing the rehearsal, Hijikata called someone at Asbestos-Kan and asked them to bring a Japanese over-garment for me to wear. This clothing was a big, white, heavy garment, and once on stage, I panicked and I couldn’t dance, also because of the comments Hijikata had made. I couldn’t move at all (he laughs). The music of the piece was Obladi Oblada by the Beatles, and the audience began to move, while I was on the stage unable to move. The critics really liked it though and I got good reviews saying that my dance was “very pure” … that my dance was “very truthful!”. But I can never do that “pure” a dance again… This experience made me realize how weak improvisation can be, so I wanted to create forms: improvisation can be very weak. I stopped dancing. I didn’t dance for 17 years after that experience. But I did get job offers to choreograph opera and theatre. In this way, I was able to create real changes in the performances of groups such as Bungakuza and Gekidan Mingei, two very famous ensembles: I  would see a change in the actors’ approach, and I learned from this. I got invited to perform with young groups who had learned Etienne Decroux pantomime,20 and I performed as Edgar Allen Poe: I wore a moustache and I really looked like Poe! Did you dance Butoh in these performances? It’s hard to tell. Suehiro Tanemura, a professor at Gakugei University, said: “Any dance that can be a

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flashpoint of revolution can be described as Butoh”. The Russian Revolution is the body of Nijinsky for example. Kinjiki happened in 1959 and the United States-Japan Security Treaty was signed in 1960, and this caused a great deal of upheaval in Japan. The university students demonstrated. A girl was killed in the riots. Butoh is linked to revolution. This weekend is the anniversary of the French Revolution. If Butoh is linked to revolution, what do you think are the possibilities for Butoh in the 21st century, what do you hope the future generation can achieve? There have been revolutions in this present age. After Kazuo Ohno passed away, I realized I was now 70 years old – though I still feel like I’m 20 years old. Kazuo Ohno has gone, and Tatsumi Hijikata has gone as well. I am the only one left, the youngest of the trio. Tatsumi Hijikata stopped seeing people as he got older, he became reclusive, but if I wanted to go to see him, I would never tell him I was coming so I always managed to see him in the end. The year before Hijikata Tatsumi passed away, I visited him to talk about Kazuo Ohno’s new piece and Hijikata recommended that he call the piece My Mother. He said: “If he wants to dance about his mother, he can simply call the piece My Mother”. Hijikata once asked me what I thought of Kazuo’s dance. I replied “I think his dance is mod-eeee-rn dance” (he draws out the “e”) with emphasis on the term. In a sense to say that Kazuo Ohno had revolutionized “modern dance” in the same manner as Butoh. Hijikata seemed very pleased with this response. By implying that Kazuo Ohno had changed modern dance, did you mean that it wasn’t actually Butoh he was dancing, but that he had done something like Butoh to modern dance? It was easier for people to understand his dance if it was called Butoh instead of “modern dance”. After 17 years of absence from the stage, I came back to dance in The Dead Sea with Kazuo Ohno. Kazuo had been invited to Israel, and he was very happy to be there where Jesus Christ had been. After we returned, I suggested to him that he develop a piece related to his religious beliefs, and he replied that if I would dance with him, he would do it. He told me “You are always the one who makes people dance, you should dance with me now”.

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Can you talk about the experience of dancing with your father Kazuo Ohno, how did your relationship of father and son change on stage? Because of my experience of panicking on stage from getting compliments, I am very careful and I prefer to point out what isn’t working in a performance: the audience will let you know with their clapping. I would do the same with Kazuo Ohno. There was a very close, reliable relationship between us: Kazuo relied on my advice.

While I was away from dance, I was running a pharmacy and I experienced many things outside of dance. I also got to know Osaragi Jirō, an author who wrote Paris Revolution and many other books. Jirō really liked me, we became good friends and I worked for him as an assistant. Jirō was living in Kamakura but he and his wife needed to come to Tokyo to see publishers. They would come to see the Kabuki, and because he was so well known, he would meet the actors too. I saw many things during my time away from dance: this life experience would give depth to the advice I gave Kazuo later on. Osaragi Jirō would advise me to see the best performances because he knew I was involved in this dance called Butoh, and he also knew I didn’t have money. So he would take me when good groups would come to Japan, for example, to the Bolshoi Ballet, the Leningrad Ballet, and the Kirov. I could see the difference between each company. I also got to meet Kabuki actors off-stage in their daily life and see the differences between the role they played on the stage and their personal life. Kabuki actors “play” female roles (onnagata), but the audience knows they are men. Nakamura Utaemon is a famous Kabuki actor. He had a way of smiling with his eyes in a feminine way. But Nakamura Shikan, another famous male Kabuki actor, was very manly in his daily life. I could notice all those differences. At the Berlin Conference21 recently, Professor Tamotsu Watanabe, a famous Kabuki critic, was speaking after me. His talk was themed “Flowers Blooming in the time of Aging”. Utaemon, Shikan, and Kazuo Ohno all become female on stage, but Kazuo Ohno never tried to be female, he aimed for delicacy, and as a consequence of that he developed femininity, for this reason he wore dresses as his costume. In the case of Utaemon and Shikan, however, on the Kabuki stage, when they performed as female, the audience knew that they were male. There are three personas: Utaemon and Shikan male, Utaemon and Shikan male trying to be female, and then Utaemon and Shikan becoming female. The audiences know the three differences, but the basic persona is male. One of the enjoyments of Kabuki is to see the transformation between these personas, to see the men become female. Tatsumi Hijikata was always wearing women’s underwear on stage. He did it in order to “grow femininity in his body” and in contrast to his daily

Emergence: The First Collaborators  25 life; he did it to grow softness. He would sometimes show up in ladies’ panties in front of me and other dancers (he laughs). Nakamura Utaemon never had children so he could stay in his female character off stage too – in his daily life. Nakamura Jakuemon, another famous Kabuki actor, had fought in the war, and he had a masculine style, he wore jeans and rode a big bike, and he had children, so he would take on a masculine or male role off-stage: the contrast though made him even more feminine on-stage. These actors’ daily lives had a strong relation to their performance in Kabuki. It is the same in Butoh. I was really fortunate to be able to see the difference between the daily life and stage life of Kabuki actors thanks to Osaragi Jirô. I would visit them at their house, they lived in traditional-style Japanese houses, and this had an effect on their performance. Nowadays Kabuki actors don’t live in traditional houses, and I’m afraid their performance is very different because of these differences in their daily lives. All this gave me the experience to help Kazuo Ohno with his performances as female. When Tatsumi Hijikata came back from Akita, his dance had completely changed and was (now) about the extreme cold of that region. He didn’t need muscles anymore so he began to put white powder on to erase his muscles, his body. Kazuo Ohno was himself trying to be a dead person. There is a tradition in Japan of putting white powder on dead people. It wasn’t that he was trying to be like a dead person; he felt he was already half dead. Kazuo Ohno had been so close to death and seen so many people die around him; he felt his life had already ended somewhere. His experiences were very painful, and even I and the family didn’t ask him about his experiences in the war. Kazuo would sometimes talk about his experiences of coming back on a ship from the prisoner-of-war camp. Many people actually died on that ship from malnutrition. Dead people were thrown overboard and Kazuo made a jellyfish performance based on this. Kazuo was a leader of a military group in New Guinea; he had to decide where his group would go, so he was very responsible for people’s lives: if the leader made a wrong choice, everyone dies. Only one decision could change everyone’s life, so he knew the importance of life and decision. He would sometimes talk about these experiences.

Yoshito Ohno:

The title of my workshop at the Berlin Symposium recently was “A Portrait of Life”: from birth and as you get older you amass experiences. For example in the art of Sōtatsu22 of 500 years ago, he drew the life of flowers. He draws the first day of the flower [Yoshito produces a copy of a print by Sōtatsu showing a wilting

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flower]: I am like this now, but it’s still a flower. So as long as you’re alive, any shape any angle is you, and it is beautiful. As long as you’re alive, you’re dancing. Softness and hardness are both present in the body, and it depends on how you use them. The new director of the Wuppertal Theatre, Dominique Mercy, talked about the dancers Pina Bausch, Kazuo Ohno, and Merce Cunningham, who passed away recently. He remembers seeing Merce Cunningham when he was hardly able to move at all, dancing in old age with his limited movement, and it made such a deep impression on people. He had a strong sense of existence on the stage. When he saw Kazuo Ohno dance on stage, he said that he felt he saw him jump, although he didn’t actually jump at all: what is important is life and spirit on stage. Mark Franko from New York had a similar theme in his workshop at the Berlin event. His theme was “Why does the aging body see hands as the last resort?” He showed a video of Merce Cunningham dancing, and his hands were very active. What do you think of the idea of “transcendence” in Butoh? Some people compare Hijikata and Kazuo to shamans, what do you think of this? I am a realist. I was always the one thinking about Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata’s background life, their practical life, and financial situation. There is a picture of two monks in the studio: one is gazing up at the sky, and the other is sweeping. I am the one sweeping the ground: I care about reality. You need money to live in this society and to take care of things. The real life around me is the basis of my dance: my life is a solid base from which to jump higher. Hijikata once said “accumulation of sanity is insanity”; in other words, you have to be really sane to be insane. He also said, “accumulation of light creates darkness”. I had a complex about being a realist and not an artist; I should be thinking of space, the universe: but I wasn’t like that. I thought I wasn’t an artist type but I felt encouraged by Hijikata’s words. Reality is really important for artists as well. At one stage, I was even Hijikata’s guarantor and I became responsible for his financial affairs. I had trouble from that at times. In fact, I was quite often responsible for finances and paying Hijikata’s bills. Now thinking back, I learned a lot from these experiences. I took care of “reality” for Kazuo Ohno and

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Tatsumi Hijikata. When Kazuo Ohno was making the film Portrait of Mr O, I was running a drugstore and providing a great deal of money to help him with his day-to-day living because I knew he wasn’t in a great financial position. I was sending quite a bit of money. When I wasn’t in a great financial position and I asked if I could get some money back, my mother told me it was all gone. All the money had gone… into the film (he smiles). Do you think they were really in a “transcendent” space? The era they were living in affected the way they lived. Their backgrounds in Akita Prefecture were a part of this: Kazuo was born in Hokkaido but he went to live in Akita with his uncle and aunt when he was 13 and so he was away from his mother. Akita had a great deal of Western cultural influence, especially in the arts: Foujita Tsuguharu was a Western-style painter who became very famous at the time. Kazuo’s uncle and aunt were Christian and that also affected him. Akita was a very special place. When you returned to dance in The Dead Sea, you wore a white costume with very wide trousers and a puffed shirt. It is a very distinctive costume and your character creates a strong contrast to Kazuo Ohno in this piece. It has now become your trademark costume. Why did you choose this costume? Going to the disco was fashionable at the time and my wife would wear white bell-bottom pantaloons to go to the disco. I thought they were funny and chose this look as my costume because it reflected the times: the “time winds”. At the time, the film Amadeus was out, and when I saw it, I liked Mozart’s blouse and I told Hijikata. He approved of this look so I had the blouse made by a tailor. I found really old silk and used that. So that look is real postmodern bricolage! Now it’s your signature costume. This seems very symbolic. The costume became symbolical as a result of this miracle meeting of it and me. However in Berlin recently, I wanted to wear the same costume but after seeing the Berlin Wall, I changed my mind and decided to wear an Issey Miyake suit instead. I was going to go on stage from behind a screen but decided to come from the door in the auditorium. I wanted to show the reality. After feeling the energy of the history of the Wall, I decided to adopt a more realistic look on stage.

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I saw “The Dead Sea” and really enjoyed your performance; there was such a strong feeling of density within your dance. Thank you! It was choreographed by Hijikata. So, you said Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata couldn’t agree on how to create a Butoh piece. What do you think of improvisation versus choreographic structure? Which do you use in your work? Tatsumi Hijikata did well because Kazuo Ohno was his opposite: that really made Hijikata’s dance style stand out. Yukio Mishima really liked Butoh, so he brought the novelist, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, who was also his own opposite, to see Butoh. Shibusawa really liked structure, but Mishima wanted reality, he wanted to “smell death” in the performance. When you have someone so different, usually one of them leaves. But they kept coming together. For both pairs, having this strong opposite energy made both sides stronger: cooperation through opposition. Hijikata was good at finding people’s talent and using it well in his performances. For every performance, he found the right person to work in the right way, including writers, poets, and photographers. It would make both parties’ work stronger. He was very good at collaborating. For example, Yokoo Tadanori, an artist, was not so famous at the time, but Hijikata found him and got him involved. He asked him to paint some pictures for the programme. Yukio Mishima really liked them so then he did paintings for Mishima’s book. Yes, Tadanori’s posters appeared in the “Postmodernism” exhibition at the V&A Museum in London (2011). Eikoh Hosoe also became famous because of Hijikata. Hijikata was close to some very influential people like Mishima and Shibusawa. If Hijikata recommended someone, they in turn used their influence to help that person to become famous. These days there aren’t such influential people. At the V&A exhibition, they showed footage of Kazuo Ohno’s “La Argentina” and Tadanori’s posters, but they didn’t have any work by Hijikata from what I remember. It’s as if he made everyone else famous except himself. I told Morishita-sensei (the director) of Keio University Hijikata Archive that Hijikata is not so famous in

Emergence: The First Collaborators  29

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Europe the way Kazuo Ohno is. I told him that he should organize a big exhibition to make him better known. I still think that. Yoko Ashikawa23 doesn’t dance anymore and she doesn’t approve of the Hijikata Archive at Keio University. It’s difficult to talk about it. When I collaborated with Yoko Ashikawa and her group, Hakutobo, it worked well. But then Ashikawa left Hakutobo. Tomoe Shizune, a musician, is now the leader of Hakutobo, and Ashikawa doesn’t dance now. She says that she taught everything to Sanae Kagaya, a dancer from Hakutobo, so she doesn’t dance anymore but Hakutobo continues. They work very hard. Torifune Butoh-Sha is the group of Kayo Mikami, the last student of Hijikata. The ex-students know each other but they work separately. It’s difficult for those who were dancing as part of a group under a master like Hijikata to then continue to make work. Would you say that Ashikawa saw Hijikata’s work as dance notation that could be passed on? What do you think? I was with Hijikata since 1959 and I was with him throughout the 60s. There were only three of us who were there in a permanent way at the beginning of Butoh. Some people came and left after a few performances. And there were some people who were just “objects” on Hijikata’s stage. Akira Kasai was learning from Kazuo Ohno as well so he was involved. Hijikata was good at finding and using the essence of a person and letting them show the best part of their talent. He would use this for a few performances for example with Ishii Mitsutaka and Kasai. But if that person keeps performing, the weaknesses will come out if the person doesn’t have colourful talent. If he felt he couldn’t use their talent anymore, Hijikata would say, “you should experience more things, why don’t you go and travel”. That’s why Mitsutaka went to travel in Europe and made his own “colour” by himself. That’s good though? Butoh is about more than “form”. There is a thing called “essential,” and it can be applied to anything, it is like the foundation of a house. If you can learn how to make the base of the house, you can make any house on top. You can do anything after you learn about the base. I am trying to teach how to make the foundation in my

30  Emergence: The First Collaborators

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workshop. I am the only person who knows about the “essential” of Hijikata. The essential things I learned from Kazuo Ohno and Hijikata is what I pass on. Nietzsche said “one who wants to fly, must first learn to stand, walk, run, twist, jump…and dance”. Butoh is a meditation inside of the body. Kazuo Ohno said his dance was like dancing in the mother’s womb: Kazuo’s Butoh is a “continuity of discontinuity”. It is not about permanence. Another thing is that Butoh got a good reputation through a very famous Kabuki critic, Masakatsu Gunji. To continue about improvisation and structure: do you think there are any movements or forms that are specific to Butoh? Kurt Jooss, Pina Bausch’s teacher, did the dance “The Green Table”, which was about international relations and war. Pina learned from this that dance is a drama. Neue Tanz and traditional Japanese arts influenced us, and it became this fusion that led to Butoh. Butoh was born from the history of dance. Dance history though is at a corner-point and is going to change.

I was taking care of Kazuo Ohno for the last 12 years, and I haven’t been looking at new dancers’ live performances, so I can’t comment on contemporary Butoh. From my own travels and tours last year, I’ve been asked to return to all the places I visited, so I feel my own work still has contemporary appeal and I can trust that. When I had a performance with Antony and the Johnsons, we had a very good critique in the papers. The performance we had at Ryogoku’s Theater X (entitled) Time Winds also got a very good critique. I treasure each chance, and for every performance, I think really seriously and carefully “things have to be done now”, and “why does this dance have to be performed?”

Emergence: The First Collaborators  31 A Code and a Compass Upgrading has become common parlance in the age of mobile phones, themselves “upgraded” to smartphones.24 Every year your service provider, or more often peer-pressure, urges you to acquire the latest model because of its additional functions, capabilities, and memory space. With all these new features, it’s going to be faster, and so will you be, right? I stopped upgrading a few months before I went to live in Japan, and during the time I lived there I didn’t own a phone. I definitely didn’t need the chatting function, but I did need navigational assistance. Without the convenience of this computational device, I had to retrain my embodied global positioning technology. The thing is that in Japan there are no addresses, or rather the logic of placement is not presented in the format I was familiar with – a number on a road in a named district. Instead, you must discover a place according to a series of numbers arranged in a three-part code for example “2–15–45”. These numbers indicate various degrees of parcelling of space, where the largest parcel – the first number in the sequence – is related to the district area, which normally has the suffix ku meaning city, and within which the rest of the dividing cells are given a seemingly random numerical logic: the numbers are by no means arranged in a sequential order along anything resembling a grid system. Consequently, when arranging a meeting place with someone, you are often given directions from the station. The station becomes the zero point: “you are here”. Then, you will likely be guided through the surroundings according to descriptions of the situated relations of landmarks that lead to the destination: for example, two blocks from the bank, behind the post office, next to the school, and opposite the petrol station (called “gasoline stand”). Each point exists, in its place, but none has a clear and unique address. Everything in the city is officially connected through the numbers and unofficially through relations of placement and distance – next to, below, behind, after, and opposite. My physiological GPS had to become well calibrated to learn the “dance” of the city’s topography. Although this cryptic spatial code might appear to have no logic, there does exist a category of gatekeeper. They disclose their presence with a bright red light, and on maps their location is marked with an “X” symbol. “X” indicates the Koban, the police box, which houses a street-level archive, where large well-thumbed volumes containing complex and intricate maps, charts, and data hold the rubric to the organization of external space. By leafing through them, a uniformed policeman will speedily assist you to your destination. In this case, X is the spot where drifting around in circles gives way to a more directional choreography as urban disorientation turns to insider knowledge.

32  Emergence: The First Collaborators It was according to such a code of relations that I arrived at Natsu Nakajima’s dance workshop for the first time in May 2012. Her classes were held in a small community art gallery in Yotsuya Sanchome in the central part of Tokyo. She conveyed the instructions for getting there in an email. The orientation points were the Fire Museum, the large crossroads, and a yellow and red-painted Chinese restaurant. At this juncture, I should turn right, and from then on, I entered a hushed side street leading into a hidden patch of urban suburbia nestled on the fringe of the busy shopping zones of Shinjuku. I followed the trail through the thickening twilight towards an empty playground, greying in the fading light which foregrounded the billowing silhouettes of kendo practitioners brandishing long sticks in a brightly lit hall. A staircase led me down towards the basement, directly into a white room. Now I was gliding over the slippery wooden floor at the centre of which stood a wide-girthed pillar. Behind it sat Natsu Nakajima, smiling warmly and welcoming me with her outstretched hand. I would return to that basement again and again for the next three years. Natsu exudes charm and vivacity. She was one of the first women to apply to join the Asbestos-Kan during the early phase of Butoh. And despite being rejected at first – because as she recounts, Hijikata refused entry to women, under the pretence of being homosexual – she was determined to practice Butoh. She persevered and eventually was invited to join the inner circle of the studio. She studied under the direct guidance of the two founders, Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata, during the earliest part of the 1960s phase of Butoh. Upon a brief return to the Asbestos-Kan in the 1970s, she discovered Hijikata’s choreographic phase of Butoh-fu had become his new method of instruction. After this, she went on to become an independent dance artist, and her own works continue to be inspired by these formative encounters. In our conversation that follows, Natsu shares the breadth of her experience across a vast timeline that spans the 1960s and the 1970s, that is, two very different phases of Butoh. What is remarkable about Natsu’s practice is her ability to step back and reflect on her engagement at each stage: she is a practitioner, but she also takes a distance, she doesn’t get swept up as a student, she always seems aware of her own vision of dance, and Butoh becomes a means for her to nurture, shape, and reshape that particular vision over time. What I am most grateful to Natsu Nakajima for is her “tough love”: she not only encourages but also demands thinking through the body, developing sensitivity and intuition – what she calls the “intellectuality of the body” is paramount. Natsu’s method is marked by an important juncture in her Butoh experience which she returns to again and again – the distinction between improvisation and choreographic structure. As she recounts, when she returned to Hijikata’s studio in the 1970s, and witnessed Butoh-fu method being used to create performances, she realized that Hijikata no longer allowed improvisation. This was a shock to her, and she quickly sensed that this was to be a profound turning point for Butoh because “there [was] no freedom within the code” she tells me. This realization in turn seems to have

Emergence: The First Collaborators  33 prompted her own audacious creative impulse. This code that Hijikata programmed into his students’ bodies admittedly was a significant development in the history of Butoh – “upgrading it” some might say. And the 1970s was evidently a very fruitful era in terms of the volume of works produced (between 1972 and 1976). We will see in the next section, through the experiences of some of Hijikata’s students from this phase, that Butoh-fu as an innovative language-driven system for communicating dance would become a key element for perpetuating and assuring Butoh’s future legacy. As she reveals in our conversation, Natsu is in the special position of having bridged both phases of Butoh, the 1960s and the 1970s. Her epochal exposure to both Hijikata’s and Kazuo Ohno’s development of Butoh means that she has been able to combine improvisation and choreographic structure in her creation to invent a unique style. From studying with Natsu, I came to understand that her dance is a personal and spiritual vocation. She speaks of being “bewitched” by her embodied path of exploration, undertaken through the flesh rather than with language. The emphasis Natsu places on the spiritual is not of the realm of transcendence, but rather grounded in a relation to nature, and this also permeates Natsu’s particular choreographic mode of transmission. She does not prioritize the production of fixed dance forms, instead, to dance is to invite an ongoing spiritual inquiry; her method truly resonated for me. Bewitchment is central to her dance. It also describes a particular attitude to nature that she investigates by researching shamanism. The shaman traditionally acts as an intermediary between non-human entities and the human realm and nurtures the unity with nature as a form of healing. In the classes I attended with Natsu, she uses the same term as Hijikata “drug dance”25 to describe the dancer’s entry into a particular state of surrender.26 The “drug-dance” is “a certain special passivity”27 that enables the dancer to become a channel for the flow of dance; in a similar way the shaman’s body acts as a medium for healing relations between human society and non-human and ambient entities of the earth and cosmos. Natsu’s method, rather than a code – which is how she defines the choreographic logic of Butoh-fu – is a compass. Form or image is secondary and arises after the body has been equipped with “sense-ability”: the way I understand it is that this special passive state transforms the body into a divining rod. This rod, as compass, divines the flow of dance. But first it must be calibrated through very sensitive work. The practice of Noguchi Seitai is an important element of Natsu’s training. Noguchi Seitai is a release technique combined with a movement and health practice developed by Haruchika Noguchi (1911–1976). Katsugen undo is a fundamental aspect of seitai movement practice, which encourages involuntary movements and the development of physical spontaneity; and this underpins Natsu’s method of bodily attunement, or “at-one-ment” (what Natsu terms “total body”) with nature, the cosmos, and deep time. Natsu says that Western students don’t know “how to vanish humanity”. What she means is that unity beyond the self can be a challenge because of the

34  Emergence: The First Collaborators philosophical and religious traditions of Western thought that divide mind from body. In Japan, the social order is profoundly influenced by Buddhism and the sense of self is created in relation to the other or to the particular context, or place. Self is situated,28 meaning that it is affected by different situations. The self is constantly morphing by sensing the changing relations between people, things, and space in a process Jane Bachnik compares to reading a map: The process is similar to reading the spatial coordinates of a map, using the little red dot which says ‘You are here’. Without this dot one is unable to read a map: while without locating or ‘reading’ the social distance between self and other, one is unable to perform adequately in social life.29 The Shinto animist religion is the other facet of Japan’s religious traditions. Stones, mountains, and weather (even smartphones) are spaces in which kami spirits reside. Like the compass, itself moved by Earth’s magnetism, “vanishing humanity” means tapping into a more than human field of spirits, and spirituality, and allowing it to move you. At least that’s how I understand my lessons with Natsu. Her training definitely assisted me in navigating spaces and encountering other entities, not just in the studio but also when I often, even intentionally, lost myself in the Tokyo sprawl. Sure, smartphones and artificial intelligence technologies might offer us “humans” ever more compellingly convenient and multi-functional devices that prevent users from getting lost, but perhaps a relevant question to pose is, what does it mean to “vanish humanity” once human intellectuality of the body has vanished altogether?

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Figure 1.4 Natsu Nakajima in Sayoudearunaraba Sayounara (2021). Photo: Tomoko Kosugi.

36  Emergence: The First Collaborators “Forget Butoh”: Natsu Nakajima Yotsuya Sanchome, December 7, 2012 On the evening of the interview, I met Natsu Nakajima just after 5 pm in front of the Hotel Wing International Premium along the main boulevard at Yotsuya Sanchome, one block away from the red and yellow Chinese restaurant. We crossed the road to head to the nearest café, on the opposite side of the main street. Within five seconds of us sitting down, just as I switched on my sound recorder, an earthquake struck. Natsu’s eyes immediately darted towards the staircase – we were upstairs – could we still get down? She insisted we go to ground level as quickly as possible. We rushed downstairs, leaving our drinks untouched. The building shook for about a minute. The quake was later revealed to be a major tremor caused by an earthquake of magnitude 7.3 just off the coast of Japan. One of the many ongoing aftershocks from the Great Earthquake of 11 March 2011. I believe this beginning was relevant to the conversation that ensued.

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Natsu Nakajima:

At first, after high school, I was a part of a group who did copies of Hijikata’s and Shuji Terayama’s work. Many young people gathered together, it was a political time and our high school, among others, was at the centre of this climate. One of the members of our group was Akira Kasai. We met soon after high school and worked together. Macoto Sato was also a part of it; now he is a well-known director based at the theatre in Koenji and also at Black Tent.

I had been dancing at the Masami Kuni Dance Institute since my high school days. Masami Kuni was an important dancer who was instrumental in bringing expressionism to Japan. He had been a student of Mary Wigman, and he was a big power in dance education. Kasai though was dancing with Eguchi Takaya. Then around that period, Hijikata did Kinjiki. Macoto Sato went to see it, but Kasai and I didn’t see it, but we knew about it immediately. After that, it wasn’t interesting for me to study at Masami Kuni’s anymore: I wanted to find somewhere else. So, I and two other members of Masami Kuni’s institute decided to knock on Hijikata’s door first. But Hijikata pretended he was homosexual. He accepted Kasai Akira and two male classmates from my

Emergence: The First Collaborators  37 high school but not the females. So we three girls went to Kazuo Ohno’s to learn instead. We knew Hijikata wasn’t homosexual and he would open his classes to women soon. The first year the women went to Kazuo Ohno, but Kasai went to both Hijikata and Ohno. DSB: NN:

You knew about Hijikata through Kinjiki, so what attracted you to Kazuo Ohno’s dance? At this time, Hijikata did many experimental performances at his studio: feminine avant-garde presentations and his wife danced. We saw Ohno’s dance there too. During that period, Ohno taught us improvisation dance – actually Hijikata didn’t teach much at the time. One year later though, we did go to Hijikata’s. He did many avant-garde pieces and Kinjiki was one of the important ones, but technically he was still doing ballet and modern dance. At the time he was teaching barre work and classical ballet. But we talked, talked, talked with Hijikata. We did a lot of talking!

He supported himself with show business so we also learnt show dance. We had some very important classes at one point – but it didn’t continue for a long time. These were Saturday and Sunday exercises. Ohno would come to Hijikata’s studio on Saturday evening. Hijikata guided us advising us on books and paintings of interest and then Kazuo Ohno would teach dance. And Hijikata would participate as one of the students. This was a really important education for me. While I was at Hijikata’s place, I didn’t learn much in terms of technical meaning. But after two or three years, we had to “go out”, we had to be “graduated”. There were many reasons as to why we had to be graduated. For the graduation season, Hijikata did the choreography for the performances. Hijikata directed my first important performance. Through this preparation, I had to learn very strong techniques. His choreography was a big education for me. It was quite a strict choreography, but not like his later choreography. Other members who graduated were Tamano Koichi, Tomiko Takai, and Ishii Mitsutaka. And Hijikata did everybody’s choreography. I wonder why he pushed us so much… I suppose this is a secret story… Hijikata and his wife organized show business cabarets and once there was a very big accident and a dancer who was dancing in a fire act, died. So he had to change his system. Initially, we were all dancing in show business; he kept 10%, and we got the rest of the money. After graduation, he decided that [we] all should live together at the centre, Asbestos-Kan studio, though some were living in the nearby area; he set up a commune-style group. This was around the beginning of 1970. Yoko Ashikawa appeared just before the graduation and she also performed in it. Yoko, Hijikata, and I worked together. The “graduation performance” was at the end of the 1960s.

38  Emergence: The First Collaborators Kasai, Akaji Maro, and I were all born in the same year. I was the one who brought Maro to Hijikata’s place. Akaji Maro was an actor with the Red Tent theatre group together with Kara Jurô. In Hijikata’s show business, we aimed to work and dance, but the theatre people came just to make money in the cabaret. One of them was Maro, and also Kara Juro. DSB: NN:

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So you mean they had both come to work in the cabaret but not with Hijikata? Yes. But also after the shows we would mingle and talk and sometimes go to the studio and drink until morning. So when Kara Juro did the Red Tent opening performance, I was invited as a guest actress. When I performed, Maro-san, Kara-san, and four boys were guest performers. So, there was a great deal of exchange. And this was at Asbestos-Kan? No, my first performance was at the Gas Hall in Ginza: the choreography was Hijikata’s. After the “graduation performance”, the system changed completely. Yoko Ashikawa, Saga Kobayashi, and Momoko Nimura came to live at the Asbestos-Kan. In the dance we saw yesterday by Kobayashi,30 the last scene was based on Hijikata’s piece Three Bellmers which the three of them [had] danced.

Actually, for these new girls, they didn’t get any money from their performances in the cabarets, just a small allowance equivalent to about 500 yen per day, about enough for cigarettes and a coffee. When I was there, I think he [Hijikata] tried to hide things. We went to this boy’s funeral [who died in the fire act] as his colleagues, but actually it was a big secret, and Hijikata and his wife had to go to court over the payment. They had to pay money to the parents for the death of this boy. After that, [Hijikata] appeared in all kinds of strange erotic and grotesque films. I didn’t understand why he did this, but he needed money. It was at this time that Ohno and Hijikata separated. Ohno was a school teacher, and he didn’t want to be involved in this scandal. It was the beginning of the 1970s. DSB:

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Yukio Waguri developed Butoh Kaden as a form of dance notation for the Butoh that he learned from Hijikata when he was a disciple at Asbestos-Kan. When did Hijikata start to develop this method and did you learn any such forms from Hijikata? It was after I left that Hijikata started developing his method with Kobayashi, Ashikawa, and Nimura. They are very important dancers: he gave the choreography to them. One of the most important pieces in Hijikata’s career was Twenty Seven Nights for Four Seasons in 1972, where he used this new method. So when you were there he didn’t work with Butoh-fu imagery at all?

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No, he completely changed his style after that. Before that, he did his solo Nikutai no Hanran (Rebellion of the Body, 1968): it had a Spanish style to it. I was still there though when he did, and I helped out with it. At that time, I was still studying with him. It was after this solo that we had to leave. Then, Hijikata began to develop his style more and more. One day he invited me and Tamano (Koichi) as guest dancers. When I got to know this new system, it was amazing! So you were invited as guest dancers and he taught you the Butoh-fu system? Yes, we learnt his method for one month. I had to learn so much. Starting with Twenty Seven Nights for Four Seasons, a completely different dance appeared, something totally different, so I wanted to know it. You participated as a guest dancer after Twenty Seven Nights for Four Seasons? Yes, but I watched that performance. After Twenty Seven Nights for Four Seasons, they went to Kyoto University to do Summer Storm. I helped out as a lighting person. But by then I was independent and doing my own work as well as attending Kazuo Ohno sometimes. Strangely enough, I was independent from Hijikata, but he liked me. So, you were doing your own dances, solos at this stage? Yes, yes. I had a stronger influence from Kazuo Ohno in my dance. People misunderstand me, because I am closer to Hijikata than Kazuo Ohno, so people think I belong to Hijikata’s method but I only learned the new system for one month. Of course, I admire this system, and I use it in my own creation, but I’m not learning like [Yukio] Waguri-san. And also, I don’t like to copy it. But when I do creation, this system is great. I was invited as a guest dancer when Hijikata started the Asbestos Series at Asbestos-Kan. It was when Yoko Ashikawa was dancing: the Hakutobo period. I see. During Hijikata’s intense period of creativity from 1972 to 1976, Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata couldn’t agree on how to create a Butoh piece. You said that you learned a lot from that one month [of Butoh-fu instructions], but you also learned a great deal of improvisation from Kazuo Ohno. So, how do you use structure or choreography versus improvisation in your workshops? Since Hijikata started the new system, he forbade the students from doing improvisation. The students had to learn say a figure, a count, or a rhythm but there was no improvisation. Kazuo Ohno was the opposite: from the beginning till the end, it was always improvisation. As a creator, improvisation work is very important when we dance to create something. Each one’s – Hijikata and Ohno – education is a one-way, not a two-way, ticket. Artists

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need both. For example when we build a house, we need a roof and pillars: so Kazuo Ohno taught us how to make that, but with no floor. But Hijikata taught floor and pillars, but no roof. So in a way, Hijikata taught some foundations through the forms? He produced some great dancers. For dancers, it was a great method. But these dancers can’t do creation. That’s a problem. What Hijikata did was a code rather than a choreography: it was not totally techniques. With this code, we can combine this and that, change, etc. For example, “how to cook”, the taste is different for each person. In the same way, we can use this code. But if the person cooking is not a good cook, it’s not interesting at all. They’re just using the ingredients. Yesterday, I felt like this in the performance [at Kid Ailack Hall]. She is a good dancer, but there is no creative direction. If a dancer has a brilliant creative side, they can use this code in a good way. But without this creative direction, it’s boring, already the dance is bad. And within this code, is there any freedom? No, there is no freedom within the code. For example, I was surprised, when I worked with Waguri for five years after Hijikata’s death. We did a tour and this was my production, so overall I did the choreography, but for his own parts, he also did his own choreography. I felt he should be more free. But there was no freedom in his code or his forms. Recently, I heard that at the Kazuo Ohno Festival, his dance was good. But before, I can’t agree: he’s a very good dancer, but as a creator, I felt otherwise. For example, Maro didn’t learn anything from Hijikata. Akira Kasai also in the very early period learned from Ohno but not from Hijikata. So, they had to push themselves to create their own path and direction. Now they know what their own style is. The creative element is very important in Butoh. I feel that Butoh can really present a creative challenge to a dancer. Hijikata’s method is great within history but it is not eternal. It has already become historical I think. Also, another dimension to it is that Butoh also affected a revolution in Japanese culture. Butoh influenced other forms of art. After Butoh, the “contemporary” appeared… they already knew of this influence through Butoh. Some of the forms in Butoh are based on a “pre-modern” body, as you said in your article.31 And many of these pre-modern bodies are based on a Japanese body, for example, the rice farmers in Akita. How do you think these are relevant to an international audience? The most difficult thing to teach abroad is how to be, how to vanish humanity, social humanity. In Western dance, the dancers are already human beings. In Noh theatre and in our traditional

Emergence: The First Collaborators  41

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Japanese dance, it is important to “be unconsciousness”, or the material body, the neutral body. We need this. This is the most difficult part to teach: “how to vanish humanity”. The Butoh walk, is this a form that comes from Hijikata’s observation of people in Tohoku? No, not Tohoku. The walk isn’t based on farmers’ bodies but rather on the centre of gravity. All Japanese traditional dance has this. It is about gravity: gravity is the most important. Also, one very important thing that Hijikata investigated was that Western dance is the history of body and music, but Hijikata’s is the relation of the body and language, because our traditional music is completely different from Western music. The centre of music is song, and song came from Buddhist chanting. For example, if you use traditional music, we can’t go up, we need gravity. Also, in Western dance because of the music and body (relation), music is very much about movement, and so dance also [just] became movement, without stopping, a constant movement, as a response to music. But Butoh and Japanese dance, because they follow song and text, the language then follows the action. This is my opinion. When I think of why Butoh is popular in the Western world, it is the source of creation that is different. In the West, they can’t run away from music and classical ballet. Even Pina Bausch, in contemporary dance, she can’t run away from classical ballet, it always seems to be the reference. Whereas Butoh comes from a different source of creation. On the theme of spirituality in dance, you said in your article: “I have borrowed the ‘field of the body’ to go on a spiritual journey”.32 Can you talk about this idea of “embodied spirituality” with reference to Butoh and other forms of dance? You also said “Occidental dualism does not allow us to explore spirituality in the field of the body”.33 What do you think is the difference in your experience between Butoh and Western dances from this point of view, thinking of ideas of religion, faith, and spirituality? For example, you said “We hold the belief of the total body, and the view of ‘body as the scene of a full life’”. This is a topic that really interests me. Many different groups are working under the name of Butoh but I don’t think everyone treats spirituality as important, but for me, spirituality is very important. For example, I love Dairakudakan, and I like Kasai Akira, but I don’t think their work is spiritual. Kazuo Ohno is very spiritual. Also Hijikata’s work while he was alive was very spiritual. For me just physical work is not enough, I need the spirituality of it. I agree with you and this is important to me in my own work, I believe it’s possible to dance, while holding questions in your body, and to answer them through the dance. You don’t have to

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say: “this is a spiritual dance”. Now you also know other forms of dance, how do you think they are different from Butoh, why is there more possibility to explore a spiritual dimension through the body in Butoh, more than in contemporary dance, or ballet…? Contemporary dance is always visible and always moving, just moving. Spirituality is linked to something invisible. Do you think this spirituality in Butoh has something to do with the concept of “belief” in Japan or Eastern cultures? You might say that Eastern spirituality is more embodied, than Western spirituality: in India, for example, religious belief is a part of life. Dance is a primitive art. To the Mexican Indians, religion, art, medicine, and healing are the same area. I believe Butoh includes all these things, not only dancing. When I dance, I sometimes get some religious feeling, not all productions, not all the time, but in some important productions, I’ve had this feeling. In the Western World, spirituality belongs to the head. In the East, spirituality is a part of the body. For me, as I’m getting older, Butoh is more than technique or a modern art form or theatre form, for example, sometimes I feel like a shaman… (she laughs) What for you is the definition of a shaman? I want to talk about ideas of “transcendence” and “transformation” in Butoh. You refer to Hijikata as a “kind of shaman”. What do you think are the aspects of shamanism? Do you think “the dancer as shaman” is possible to achieve in our contemporary world and more particularly in Butoh? I researched and learned from an important shaman in Korea in the 1970s. Shamanism is the origin of art and its many forms. A  teacher who I learned a Korean shaman dance from told me that in the village, the status of the shamans is of very low-class people. Shamans had to do fortune telling, or contact dead people, they had this ability, but they also had to learn different arts in order to survive, such as dance, circus, etc. and each one has a different speciality. My teacher was a specialist of dance. I went there in the 70s, and it was a very great time because the most important shaman and traditional folklore art were about to die out. Then some scholar started to research them and one of the shamans became a national treasure. My teacher was a very important shaman; she taught me that dance for prayer is at the origin of dance. There is one repertory which is thought of as “women’s special dance”. People think this is traditional, but my teacher knew older styles. And suddenly a primitive style appeared. The newer dance had developed from the older shaman dances, so these dances are the source of modern contemporary theatre art, but also music, circus. It’s the story before theatre was established.

Emergence: The First Collaborators  43

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There is the Namsadam group, a homosexual male dance group. Traditionally in Korea homosexuals are outcasts, but they had to survive, so if one is good at dance or song, they became travelling artists. At one point, Namsadam had ceased performing, but people did research into it and it has started again. Namsadam is the name of the Korean group, the kanji spelling means “Male Temple Group”. How do you think shamanism relates to Butoh? In the article you gave me, you mention transformation and Hijikata being “a kind of shaman”. What aspects of shamanism are there in Butoh? We can explain it [through] his later method – though my understanding might be different from others – but when I learned it, it seemed so difficult. But for example, if this is (Hans) Bellmer or this is Picasso34… So I thought Hijikata’s [own] technique was to fill the body with images and then the unconscious would appear; it created a kind of trance situation. Also, maybe I have this quality. Without touching this dimension – this deeper side – dance means nothing for me. So, it was through this method of filling the body with images that there was a sort of transformation? Yes. For example, now that I’m getting older, it’s a serious problem for me. Last night after watching the performance, I couldn’t sleep very well. I was telling myself, there’s no need to follow Hijikata, no need for shape, no need for technique, but I need dance, so I need to find my own solution, even with my body getting old. It’s a big challenge for me. On this point, I feel one of the strengths of Kazuo Ohno was that his dance became so much about essence, as his body gradually disappeared, something about his body had changed quality and you could see something else rather than looking at the body. I never saw his dance, but I could sense this in the documentation of his performances. There is something that has this corpse quality that Hijikata spoke of, and from this corpse emerges the spirit that seems much stronger than the ailing body… Corpse, yes but also like wind, no shape… He [Kazuo] resembles a puppet, and it seems that something else, maybe spirit, is wanting to dance this puppet. What I think is interesting is that as you age, you can keep this embodiment of dance, and Butoh becomes with the body, the dance is what the body becomes: your body is the dance and as you age the dance changes with you. I would like to teach my mother Butoh to understand her body because she’s French and she danced ballet. My father is Indian though and a lifelong yoga practitioner and teacher. I feel suspended between these two, the Western and Eastern way of approaching the body.

44  Emergence: The First Collaborators

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Coming back to this idea of shamanism, transformation, and transcendence, these are things that perhaps hold less importance and therefore “faith” in Western countries, for example, there are artists who call themselves shamans and appear to be “performing” the part of the shaman, whereas shamanism explores a dimension beyond performance: there is a difference between what’s called “suspension of disbelief” in theatrical arts, and faith. Recently I’ve been thinking I don’t want to explain Butoh so much, so I’m just telling people that Butoh is an “intellectuality of the body”. Allowing the body to think, perhaps what we also call intuition? I don’t like to teach more and more techniques. Young people are just on their computers, so what people need now is more physical power and exposure and my generation has an obligation to teach this. Not Butoh technique, not dance technique, forget about it. My way of teaching is always changing: I like to teach more like Kazuo Ohno, not technique. Because my understanding of Butoh is more connected with my religion, or how to survive. With globalization, it is more just surface, and humanity is missing – it’s not on the surface for me – but this is because of the age we live in with computer-based living. Yes that’s true. I’m interested in the idea of what contemporary Butoh might be as relevant to our times. What do you think is the possibility of Butoh in the 21st century, how can it develop or become for people? For example, Hijikata actually stated that technology had a destructive effect on the body. But we live in an era when people, especially in Japan, are constantly on their phones and electronic devices. I wanted to briefly talk about Maro and Kasai’s joint performance this past weekend.35 You’ve said “Butoh loves irony, humor, nonsense and ‘the trickster’”. In the show, there was a great deal of irony and nonsense, but it was lacking in silence I felt… The country is moving on and changing. While Hijikata was living and maybe until last year, Hijikata’s method was brilliant and worked well. But since last year in Japan,36 people are really suffering. Something has changed since the earthquake. Japan has changed. For example Maro-san and the dance of Dairakudakan always adopts a low position, and people were not sure about Kasai’s dance. But I thought there was a great meeting of time in their performance. Maro-san is teaching the younger generation to use energy in a big way. Kasai-san is teaching to use body, body, body: forget about good or bad, just use the body. Recently the dance world has been missing this power: of course, contemporary dance uses the body, but it is as a dancing technique. The meeting of the two, Maro and Kasai, was great and much stronger

Emergence: The First Collaborators  45

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than the effect of just one of them. Now our times again request this power, not technique, this means we need to change the conception of dance, forget Butoh!… we need to break dance down we need more physicality. For example, Saga (Kobayashi) has good techniques, but she can’t change her mind, her way of perceiving dance, so her technique looks very old. My impression was different, I felt very irritated by it, the music never stopped. I wanted a moment when I could find my way in, respond to something internally, but there wasn’t this. Maybe that was also the point of it. Each culture has a different “time season”: this dance wouldn’t work in Mexico but in Tokyo, now, it does. This kind of work is quite popular in Europe, joking and irony, constant movement and sarcasm: I was reminded of this. They were constantly throwing the same message out at the audience: to me it felt like being force-fed, like being lectured rather than a communication where I have the opportunity to actively participate, inwardly I mean. The irony seemed a little too obvious, and they kept referring to ballet. Perhaps this style has now come to Japan. In Tokyo, irony is important, a sense of humour. We should forget about seriousness, because our life is too serious nowadays, too dark. We need irony, brightness. In the UK, we live in a world full of irony, it’s everywhere: advertising, fashion, etc. Can we change the tone of it? In Butoh, there is a huge scope for irony and humour, but it’s finding the balance that allows it to resonate. When it does, there is a profound sense of recognition, the body “knows” immediately. I feel that this can awaken the “intellectuality of the body” even in the viewer. Sometimes I feel like Kasai’s work is attempting to do this, I think of it as a form of “Butoh stand-up comedy”. I get the impression that one of Kazuo Ohno’s strengths was his sense of comedy, he was funny, he didn’t take himself so seriously, and he did it in a subtle, delicate way. Sometimes I think people are trying too hard to “show” that they are not taking themselves seriously. I think this is why Kazuo Ohno, sometimes awed and at other times confused people: it was the subtlety and range of his “tragi-comedy” rather than irony. Yes, I think if Kasai did this alone, it wouldn’t be successful, same thing if Maro-san did it alone. The greatness is the meeting of those two. Of course we need to have a sense of why they are doing this performance. But the level of performance at the moment is too low. And life is also too heavy. Do you think that the idea of contemporary Butoh is actually to change the notion of what dance is?

46  Emergence: The First Collaborators NN:

Forget Butoh! It’s not only dance, I think all arts should be changed not just dance. Already in Japan, painting has been destroyed from the old style. Art needs to be physical. My friend from France loves to see Tokyo fashion, but she says in France, it’s an adult culture, but here it is a child’s culture. Fashion is so free and childish here. Physical art and even sports change in more advanced cultures. I mean when capitalism became too much, for example, in New York, people are so busy getting money, there is no time or energy for art. Of course, there are great artists there, but there is no middle ground; it’s very individual, private art. Tokyo also became like that. Comparing with our seasons and time, I prepared for one whole year when I showed my own production, but the artists now can’t do that; they don’t have time to do this. All artists are wavering. We not only can’t stay in old values but also we don’t know how to go forward. ~

Notes 3 See, for example, the presence of the nikutai in “literature of the flesh”, Douglas Slaymaker, The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction (London: Routledge, 2004). 4 It’s worth noting that the Gutai group became far less experimental after the French curator Michel Tapié “discovered” them. Influenced by the exposure and success they received, in the later 1950s, they moved towards more “sellable” artworks and away from performance. See Paul Schimmel, Kristine Stiles, and Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (Calif.), Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object. 1949–1979. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998). 5 Schimmel, Stiles, and Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (Calif.), 146. 6 Jiro Yoshihara, ‘Gutai Art Manifesto’, Guggenheim.org, December 1956, http:// web.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/gutai/data/manifesto.html. 7 Hijikata, ‘Inner Material/Material’, 39. 8 This sense of impotence was shared by the ‘Flesh-Writers’ whose writing addressed “their anxiety over emasculation during the crisis of male identity accompanying defeat and occupation.” Slaymaker, The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction, 14. 9 Hijikata, ‘Inner Material/Material’, 36. 10 Hijikata, 36.



Emergence: The First Collaborators  47 15 Buyo is the name given to traditional forms of Japanese dance. 16 Butoh means “dance step” and other styles of dance can also be called “butoh” but they normally qualify this word with the style of the dance; Hijikata qualified his butoh with the word ankoku which means ‘darkness’. 32 Nakajima. 33 Nakajima.

2

Structure The Students

Figure 2.1

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112211-3

Structure: The Students  49 Masters and Students: Thoughts on Butoh-fu Choreography A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille1 Moe Yamamoto read us this long excerpt from Georges Bataille’s Critical Dictionary, originally published in the Documents review, on the first night of the Kanazawa Butoh-Kan workshop in 2014. The group of participants was gathered around him on the tatami floor of a small dimly lit room, drinking beer and snacking on an endless supply of nuts, rice crackers, and dried squid. We’d been dancing all day, then getting into groups to cook, eating together, cleaning up, and now it was late, but the workshop went on. Instead of just giving into our growing inebriation, Yamamoto was inciting us to think about what Bataille meant by formlessness, spit, and spiders. He was asking us to relate this to our Butoh dance practice of the day. By confronting us with this late-night discussion, Yamamoto was doing a very good job of transmitting the intensity of the teachings he himself had previously experienced at the Asbestos-Kan in the 1970s. The Last Rebellion of the 1960s

The three dancers featured in this section are Yukio Waguri, Moe Yamamoto, and Koichi Tamano. All three were among Hijikata’s principal students during the choreographic phase of Butoh that began in 1972.2 The 1970s signalled Butoh’s “second coming” after the curtain had come down on the 1960s period, when in 1968, Hijikata took to the stage with Nikutai no Hanran: Hijikata Tatsumi to Nihonjin (Rebellion of the Body: Tatsumi Hijikata and the Japanese People). This was to be Hijikata’s only solo work, and with it, the first chapter of Butoh ended just as it had begun, with another canon-blast shooting through the Tokyo art world. Nikutai no Hanran was inspired by Antonin Artaud’s book Heliogabalus: or the Crowned Anarchist (1934), the novelized biography of the scandalous Roman Emperor Heliogabalus. In the grainy film footage, I saw at the Keio University Archive, you see Hijikata enter the stage, carried aloft on a palanquin by a group of men. He floats above the audience, wrapped in a white sheath, grimacing wildly. He then dances in a variety of mostly

50  Structure: The Students unrecognizable dance styles, at the same time shifting through a number of incongruous costumes – a flamenco skirt, a sports dress and long socks, and by far the most memorable, an oversized golden strap-on penis. Devoid of any apparent cohesion, the atmosphere of the piece feels nervy and chaotic, made even more so by the choppy analogue film technology. The image that stays is of Hijikata’s naked, darkened, and emaciated body, hips thrusting repeatedly, while the fake phallus he’s wearing judders in a wobbly motion; a sequence that echoes Kinjiki’s taboos – the stalking and the white chicken. Now the cycle seems completed through this provocative gesture. In the final moment, we see Hijikata’s body being hoisted up with ropes, hovering momentarily above the audience’s heads in a mock crucifixion, before disappearing into the darkness. That night, when Hijikata flew off the stage, he would not reappear until the following decade. This bombastic exit would be the final curtain on the anarchic 1960s phase of Butoh’s emergence. What was this his solo all about? It’s hard to tell because throughout all this furious activity, there are no words, no hint of a reason. Hijikata’s mouth contorts endlessly, he even gags himself by biting into the stiff body of a dead fish in the final scene, but he says nothing. What flashes through the haphazard elements of pantomime and pastiche in this collage of a dance is Hijikata’s manic body joyriding across cultural categories with uncompromising irreverence. Perhaps, Hijikata's very intention was to “make formless” – (Western) dance, Japanese identity, gender, the performance space – by splintering away every social and cultural framing with each tremor of his frenzied hips. The solo was only performed once, but its aftershocks still roam in the memory of those who witnessed the event. And although the archival documentation is hard to interpret being patchy and overlaid with a cacophonous soundtrack, this too preserves the work’s enigmatic illegibility. It continues to confound over half a decade later. ~ After this, Hijikata went quiet for four long years. His disappearance between the years 1968 and 1972 would be a period of reflection. When he returned in 1972, Hijikata’s Butoh had undergone a phase transition.3 No longer anarchic, he was now pursuing structure. Butoh was about to transform into something far more concretized through the innovative choreographic method of Butoh-fu. To prepare for this transformation, Hijikata had to transform as well. In his case, the transition would be to claim his authorial position as the leader, the master. Only this new organizational structure would allow [Hijikata’s] Butoh to congeal into a dance form.4 And so, Hijikata’s Butoh distanced itself from performance art to reinvent itself as performing art. Staking his position as “master” in combination with the method of Butoh-fu were fundamental strategies that induced the phase transition.

Structure: The Students  51 Butoh-fu means “the words of Butoh”. It developed as an orally transmitted semantic system of sensorial imagery, invented by Hijikata to communicate instructions to his students. Instead of using symbols or images though, as other dance notation systems tend to, for instance, Laban notation, Hijikata’s system made use of words. Fu – word – the new suffix for Butoh came to usurp the 1960s prefix ankoku (darkness). Just this syntactical replacement underlines the radical transformations afoot. The “perlocutionary effect”5 of the uttered words – because Butoh-fu was an orally uttered form of choreographic language – was reserved for Hijikata, its creator, and singular orator. The 1970s phase of Butoh is defined by this formal structuring which, according to the archivists and researchers, was necessary for securing Butoh’s legacy. Formlessness into Form

The shift towards the theatrical arts was evidenced in Hijikata’s productions now adopting the existing scenographic vocabulary of stage arts. Perhaps, the most obvious example was the adoption of all-over white body paint, called shironuri, widely used in Japan’s traditional theatrical arts of Kabuki and nihon buyo (Japanese traditional dance). Alongside this, Hijikata incorporated

Figure 2.2 Rehearsals at Asbestos-Kan studio for Paragon of sacrificing great dance, performance to commemorate the second unity of the school of dance of utter darkness: Twenty-Seven Nights for Four Seasons (1972). Photo: unknown. Courtesy of Keio University Art Center and Butoh Laboratory, Japan.

52  Structure: The Students more traditional costumes such as wooden geta clogs, and kimonos. For some, Butoh’s new face (or was it “omote”, a mask?)6 had substituted the darkness for “a cozy stage framed by lights, sound, set, and props”.7 ~ When I first discovered this transition point in Butoh, I was disappointed. Butoh had begun as such a (truly)8 radical and visceral artistic force, placing the absolute alterity of the carnal meat-flesh-body – the nikutai – at its core. But then, in the 1970s, it became tame: the nikutai had become socialized, taken on a form, a name, wanting to gain entry to the theatrical enclosure. Without doubt, my reticence about this period has a personal dimension – my distrust of attempts to pin things down by naming them – but there is also something quite fascinating on a systemic level in this move from chaos towards a higher form of organization. It can be said, and Takashi Morishita alludes to this, that the 1960s phase was formless and anarchic. Anarchy derived from the ancient Greek anarkhos means “without head” and is represented by Acéphale, the figure Bataille chose as the symbol for his secret society.9 To return now to that night at Kanazawa Butoh-Kan and Moe Yamamoto’s late-night lesson on formlessness and spit, I’m reminded that Bataille stated that his “Dictionary” was not intended to give the meaning of words, but instead their task. The task of the word formless is to “bring things down in the world” he says. How do things come up again to (re)enter the world of forms? At first, Butoh wholeheartedly took on the task of bringing things down, disrupting the dance establishment to afford itself the anarchic energy needed for revolt. But now, the movement of Butoh began to gravitate around Hijikata as the central figure. The new pattern in this system’s organization was a “body politic” structured by the hierarchy that separates the master from the students. ~ “…one becomes a student after becoming aware of complete defeat. ’Mystery’ has something to do with this. One becomes a student out of a desire to pursue the mystery cast by the mentor”.10 During the 1970s phase, two interconnected aspects need consideration: the hierarchy that was established between Hijikata and his students, and then, how this relationship was instrumental in shaping the choreography of this period. Apart from the obvious syntax – ankoku to fu, from darkness to words  – the other distinction that occurs between the 1960s and 1970s, as Natsu Nakajima has already alerted us to in the previous section, is the move away from improvisation towards fixed choreographic structuring: from formlessness to form. In his research project as (former) director of the Hijikata Archive, Morishita identified six Butoh phases between 1959 and 1976.11 He deems the last three phases (1972–1976), radically different from the first three, saying that the 1960s performances displayed no definitive or lasting

Structure: The Students  53 forms of dance that might constitute a vocabulary let alone be taught and passed on as a legacy.12 Butoh-fu is the defining juncture. Morishita’s principal research contribution has been to establish Hijikata’s Butoh legacy by creating a database of movements of this period under the title Resources of Butoh Body Movements, alongside a supporting publication, Hijikata Tatsumi’s Notational Butoh: Sign and Method for Creation (2015). The project of digitizing Butoh-fu as Notational Butoh has relied heavily on the choreographic (written) records of Yukio Waguri and Moe Yamamoto. These records comprised both dancers’ notebooks and their body-memory of Hijikata’s choreography. Waguri was Hijikata’s lead male dancer during the development of Butoh-fu. He originally compiled a personal archive of the choreographies he’d learnt during the 1970s period in a project called Butoh Kaden.13 First published in 1998 as a book with an accompanying CD-rom, it has now been converted into a website, generously accessible to anyone interested.14 The texts are the documentary record of Waguri’s studio notes and are intended to be consulted alongside the specific movement forms which are physically demonstrated in the accompanying videos. Moe Yamamoto’s handwritten notebooks, where he recorded the Butoh-fu he was given by Hijikata in preparation for his main role in Shomen no Issho (Costume en Face, 1976), are also accompanied by the embodied component he carries inside his body. The Kanazawa Butoh-Kan method of teaching is Yamamoto’s way of transmitting this personal archive. The Hijikata Archive’s Notational Butoh project is based on a comparative analysis of both dancers’ studio notes and their manifestation as dance forms. What Morishita’s analysis brings to light is that although the choreographic instructions might elicit similar atmospheric textures, the way they are recorded by both dancers is markedly different. Out of over a 1,000 names of movements in Waguri’s archive and over 300 in Yamamoto’s, there are only very few (about a dozen) areas of crossover.15 Waguri’s Butoh-Kaden classifies Butoh-fu under Seven Worlds: World of Abyss; World of Anatomy; World of the Neurology Ward; World of Flower; World of Bird and Beast; World of Wall; and World of Burnt Bridges. Each world is made up of sensorial descriptive imagery. In these dance texts, people, ghosts, flora, fauna, and weather constantly morph into each other with a surrealist dream logic. Yamamoto’s notes also mention “worlds”, but they bear different names from Waguri’s, and instead of describing the imagery, he simply lists the word that represents a particular movement within a scene. If these worlds and words constitute a “code”,16 as Natsu calls it and Morishita confirms, then it is one programmed exclusively for a single dancer – Yamamoto or Waguri as the case may be here – because each set of Butoh-fu instruction relates to a particular work and a specific “body material”. It would seem then that the code isn’t intended to be passed between bodies. This now makes this choreographic system even more opaque than expected. Because the forms vary according to who is being addressed by the Butoh-fu utterance, this notation

54  Structure: The Students is not a classic “semiotic system” (and not really systematic at all) because it isn’t built upon an underlying abstract system of significance agreed upon by all users of the language. Yamamoto’s code is not directly accessible to Waguri, and vice versa. Hijikata himself did not keep a record of his choreographic words and images or the dance forms associated with them. His method was based in orality. He spoke the Butoh-fu to each student and they were expected to notate these instructions themselves. In the case of Butoh-fu, perhaps, a better word than choreography is choreoratory. Instead of being motivated by a desire to establish notation, which by implication would make the forms repeatable by any other competent dancer, Hijikata’s “command”17 was a trigger intended to set in motion a specific body: and more important than the words themselves was the relation between the master and the student, which would allow the former to know what words would set off the intended motion. Orality is a feature of the relation between master and student known as “direct transmission”. This mode of learning is derived from the ancient “guru-shishya” relation of spiritual practices that originated in India18 and is still widespread in Japan, notably in Zen, but also in many artistic and cultural traditions. In this model, learning is gleaned through devotion, proximity, and codes of obeisance, rather than texts and books.19 This model doesn’t provide an instruction manual but is founded on setting the student practical tasks: “What a student learns from his mentor, then, is not finite interpretations or knowledge, but how to learn”.20 This master-student relationship mode of learning was well-suited to the 1970s phase of Butoh and became profoundly important in the transmission of Butoh-fu.21 Students wishing to learn, would enter the Asbestos-Kan to live there as part of a close community, under the tutelage of Hijikata. This facilitated a way of life fully committed to learning through the intimate proximity of direct transmission. Not only did aspiring students follow Hijikata’s Butoh-fu instructions, they also adhered to the daily occupations he dictated, which meant working in cabarets at night to earn money to pay for the running costs of the studio, daytime dance training in Butoh-fu, and according to the students, very little time to rest. But this “merging with the master” went beyond just the dancing – a point that again seems to refute the notion that Butoh is a dance of “self-expression”22 – instead, dancers suppressed their own sense of agency, to become “empty vessels” to more fully embody Hijikata’s expression; this contradiction, according to Morishita, constitutes the “essence of Tatsumi Hijikata’s Butoh”.23 It’s interesting to compare the steep hierarchy of relations that developed between Hijikata and his students during this phase, to the system that had existed in Japanese society before the war and still lingers in the socio-cultural codifications that make distinctions between age groups, experience, or gender, so as to establish the gestures, behaviours, and linguistic forms (honorifics and male or female language) appropriate to any encounter. Researcher,

Structure: The Students  55 Nanako Kurihara, writes about the hierarchy of the Butoh-fu period rather scathingly.24 She notes that at the group level, such behaviour is linked to the most important hierarchy in Japan, the Emperor system. Butoh’s development in the post-war period had happened in the aftermath of the symbolic demise of this imperial hierarchy, and the collapse of Japanese society’s traditional order, which in turn led to a mass appearance of cults. What I earlier called (1970s) Butoh’s “body politic” inadvertently replicated Japan’s ingrained (and arguably abusive) power structures, and this was seemingly emblematic of the context and the times and rather widespread. Kurihara paints a sombre picture of the Asbestos-Kan’s authoritarian relations, claiming that Hijikata’s “disciples were completely under his spell and would tolerate whatever treatment he might dish out, no matter how irrational or severe”.25 ~ What if, like Bataille’s Dictionary, the task of Butoh-fu is more important than the meaning? The nature of Butoh-fu language is a type of sensorial image poetry. The intention, Waguri tells me, is “to physicalize images through words”. He also gives an idea of its delivery and function: “Hijikata verbally threw words of Butoh-fu to dancers, and the dancers, triggered by those words danced to them”.26 Waguri understood Butoh-fu as an attempt to disturb the signifiersignified relation in language, through the introduction of the materiality of the body: “a word is not a tool for recording, but is used as a kind of medium to expand on a physical image with imagination”.27 Dance is created through the words, rather than the words indicating a movement to be made, and ultimately any “meaning” depends on the dancer’s embodied understanding and reaction to the word’s charge, making it a spell, whose “magic” power is to extrude a material gesture that chimes with the choreographer’s intention. If Butoh-fu communicates a task, it isn’t a task for the mind to interpret but for the body-material to de-code through a visceral response to the words. Yamamoto and Waguri’s notebooks and each dancer’s embodied choreographic archive are evidence that Butoh-fu “notation” did not rely on any underlying semiotic conventions of meaning. In fact, the words’ power was to bring a world into existence, through poetic morphogenesis, that up till the point of utterance had only lived in Hijikata’s imagination in potentia.28 The “absolute obedience”29 demanded of Hijikata’s students allowed them to become “passive” in order to allow the mentor’s words to animate their bodies: as Natsu puts it in our earlier conversation, “becoming unconsciousness”, so that animation – dance – is triggered by the oral power of language, its “felt significance carried by the tone, rhythm, and resonance of spoken expressions”:30 in other words, more than a code, a spell. A task implies action, a spell suggests magic: Hijikata’s Butoh-fu contains both. What came into being on the stage was not just Hijikata’s own imaginary landscape, but a co-worlding derived from the sensorial encounter between

56  Structure: The Students mentor and student in the imaginal dimension of poetry and dance. Hijikata had already hinted at his ambition to invent such a space as early as 1968, at the very cusp of his four year disappearance: “…everyone has a body, and I prod them about it… I start off in a roundabout way, then get more and more to the point. By deftly touching them, I hope to share common elements with them”.31 Hijikata’s keen sense as a “choreorator” allowed him to constantly knead and work his method in accordance with the body-material of any particular student he was working with: he was obviously highly attuned to the imperceptible interpersonal realms of human relations. His approach resembles that of an artist-crafter, bringing the understanding, sensitivity, and care of the material, so as to intuit the form, and to then almost alchemically, breathe life into it – animating it by conjuring Butoh-fu. ~ I think I now know how to respond to Yamamoto’s question about Bataille’s words. Bataille’s informe describes a paradox that typifies the 1970s phase of Hijikata’s Butoh. Although it would seem that Butoh-fu was about establishing a notational system based on recognizable forms, I would say that it was actually entering a more molecular state of formlessness. This may sound surprising, especially as this section is entitled “Structure”. But clearly, both the imagery and the words of Butoh-fu are devoid of an abstract meaning; in other words, the language was not intended to be interpreted but rather ingested and reacted to with immediacy. The task of Butoh-fu was not aimed at the mind – the head – rather, through the headlessness that comes from becoming unconsciousness at the molecular level. This scalar shift towards a more microscopic level of body-material is what allowed Butoh to retain some of that vital energy of chaos, of the formless state of its first emergence. Might creating a level of structure at the human/social scale (the masterstudent relation) allow for freedom at the cellular level? Hijikata would be the spider, “spinning”32 a universe from within his students’ bodies. Even if this is the case, the problem that arises is how to transmit and continue to evolve Butoh-fu outside the relationship with the “master”, Hijikata. One obvious issue is that the type of intimate pedagogical relationship established at the Asbestos-Kan is uncommon in contemporary Western modes of learning. This is compounded by societal factors. The “self” in Japanese society, as already stated, is a “relational self”, adapting and shifting according to relations with others and externality, and influenced by its milieu. The Western model of self is very different, with the individual being associated with notions of agency, free-will, and intention.33 Saying that, this pedagogical model might well be outdated, even in Japan, and in the end it’s difficult to think of the “dynamic system” of Hijikata’s Butoh-fu outside of the controlled conditions of its initial transmission within the AsbestosKan. The Butoh Kaden project, though commendable, is confusing: are the forms shown in the videos meant to be emulated or interpreted – read – in consultation with the associated words? It’s easy to look at these documents through a (pseudo) scientific logic of cause and effect that leads to literalism:

Structure: The Students  57 “the movement snippets are the physical representation of the poetic verses”. Similarly, the Notational Butoh project compiled by the Hijikata Archive, in striving for rigor and clarity, displays the choreographic language and the gestures elicited by Hijikata’s poetic utterances, in a tabular grid format34 where movement and verbal meaning seem to correlate. Was this really Hijikata’s intention with Butoh-fu, or has the present era’s obsession with “numerical rhetoric” led to a category error?35 Such archival documents and scholarship can be misleading if taken out of Butoh’s much vaster trajectory, and without considering the specificity of the Japanese context of the times. The sense of the spectral master lurking in a database – “the ghost in the machine” – ensuring compliance to his foundational hierarchy is not so farfetched. This very scenario has already been turned into a speculative fiction by artist Choy Ka Fai who created an audio-visual performance entitled UnBearable Darkness (2018) in which an omnipotent Hijikata features as the “revenant” inside the mathematical grid of an all-enveloping digital universe. But without the ghost, how could this choreoratory be transmitted today? Butoh-fu can inspire the basis (without the abuse noted by Kurihara) for profoundly creative and generative mentor-student relationships, enabling the appearance of inventive (Butoh) dance forms to evolve – though they may not resemble Hijikata’s Butoh forms. Imagine such a relationship: a choreographer creates a score, based on a sensorial inquiry that might be linked to original Butoh-fu word-images (but also need not be). Without trying to interpret Hijikata’s initial intentions, or attempting to emulate the movements that Waguri or Yamamoto or any of the other students “physicalized” in response to the earlier Butoh-fu, the student/dancer responds to these words with present immediacy, by engendering a response through their own body; and then, if this physicalized reaction triggers the choreographer’s imagination, the latter continues to feed this form with more image-words – sculpting the dance by inventing sensorial language on the spot. If the purpose of the choreographic model is to deploy language in ways that address our present context, era, and challenges, then Hijikata’s method is a way of worlding the imaginal through improvised poetry in order to (continue to) invent dance. The embodied interpretation by his students would then only provide a historical reference (a very valuable one); the notation archive, the notebooks, and the movements are not to be copied mimetically, but instead they provide a template for innovative forms of collaborative creation from within hierarchical creative relationships. This would have consequences for the evaluation of a performance generated by such an interpretation of the Butoh-fu method. The criteria would have to be the sensitivity, attunement, understanding, trust, care, and magic that underpin the spell between the choreographer and the dancer, therefore not favouring one or the other in the creative process, but the relationship itself.

58  Structure: The Students You Are Being Watched from All Angles There is a person walking. He is aware that he is slowly disintegrating because he is being watched from all angles. At first he is aware of something that is staring at him from the back. Then he is aware of something that stares at him from the front. Then from the right and front. Then from the front and left. Then the something stares up at him from his feet. Then the something stares at him from above. The process is repeated again and again until the body is disintegrated. Finally there are only particles. Butoh Kaden, ‘World of Abyss’36 ~ Yukio Waguri (1952–2017) was one of Hijikata’s principal students and a lead dancer during the Butoh-fu period. When he joined the Asbestos-Kan studio in 1972, he had absolutely no formal dance training. There, he began to learn with Hijikata in a close master-student relationship. He stayed at the Asbestos-Kan throughout the choreographic phase of Butoh-fu, until 1978 that is. He then stopped dancing and became a kimono dyer, only returning to the stage to join Hijikata’s production of Tohoku Kabuki (1985). After Hijikata’s death, he felt compelled to return to dance practice as a means to pass on what he had learned from Hijikata. These teachings, gathered in his studio notebooks, were compiled and released as Butoh Kaden in 1998. When I arrived in Tokyo in 2012, Waguri was offering sporadic workshops to a small group of students in a community hall in Kunitachi, a suburb on the north-western side of Tokyo. Our first meeting was on the evening of March 7, 2012. We had a rendezvous arranged at the station exit, and from there, Waguri walked with me to the venue, chatting with warmth and ease. His other students, Hikaru and Macoto Inagawa, who make up the performance unit 4Rude now based in Berlin, were waiting at the hall.

~ The class begins. Waguri pulls out a small drum and begins to tap a simple repetitive beat. Addressing me directly, he explains that he’s adopted this method of accompaniment from Hijikata: the rhythm is intended to introduce another tempo to the space, taking the dancer away from everyday concerns and inducing a more primal, intuitive sensibility, close to a trance state. The shallow urgent beat feels jarring at first, interrupting my attempts to immerse myself in physical intensity. But then I wonder, perhaps shifting from the personal to a more impersonal state of pure materiality actually requires interruption so that the habitual groove of the self gives in to a unifying pulse. I notice that this beat fills me with a rhythmic expectation, awaiting a perceived climax, an end point, not inside me, but creeping in from an

Structure: The Students  59 unknown horizon, bringing with it both thrill and threat. It’s not possible to get too lost though – even “entranced” – in this situation because we are constantly called out of it. Waguri invites each of us in turn to step out of the dance so as to observe the others. This is active watching as a means of learning, the way trainee surgeons might observe proceedings at an operating table. Doing so means that we, the dancers, have to be nimble, continually shifting positions from the immersed “I” to the observing “eye”. When Waguri asks that we describe our impressions of each other’s performance, he is also encouraging us to develop a critical eye capable of going beyond personal taste and judgements like good or bad. His method keeps us aware of the space and of each other and prevents us from slipping too deeply into introspection and the pursuit of self-expression. ~ The first image: You are a doll made of glass, you are walking, you are in danger of shattering at any moment. Macoto and I are standing at the far end of the room, facing Waguri. Hikaru is also sitting out and watching. The drumbeat thumps across the room, reverberating through my body. Their serious gaze intensifies each sound wave. ~ Hairline cracks slice through glass, racing towards one another to form a tapestry of broken nerve-threads. The glass sweats with the memory of sand, the beads fill an aquarium for displaying matter. The glass doll was once a sea anemone, held by an inner pillar of particles swaying and swirling to the rhythm of the deep ocean currents. A person is toppling back and forth in the benthic darkness as water leaks through the broken glass. This is how I danced the dance of the glass doll. ~ The drumming stops. My nerve-frequencies have amplified to an explosive range. The bright lighting is burrowing into me causing minuscule electric shocks. So is Waguri’s gaze. “Keep the strangeness of the body for as long as possible, make the body unrecognizable at first, and then, let the dance itself gradually make the body appear.” This is what he advises me.

60  Structure: The Students He brings out some notes and images, photocopies of Francis Bacon paintings – the main one is Study for Three Heads (1962).37 He invites us to sit in a tight circle, shoulder to shoulder, knees touching. We are almost face to face “being watched from all angles” at such close quarters – no escape. One by one, we contort our faces following the visual reference of the paintings he just showed us. We must pay attention to where the movement begins in the cheek, and unfolds, swallowing and deforming our features: the others watch. All eyes fall on me, it’s now my turn to melt my identity, by succumbing to the dissolution of my face. I’m aware of an immense, unwieldy obstacle that I must surmount to do this. It’s located in the region of my neck, steely and hard, it blocks my vocal cords: a stone, a meteorite? Nausea is rising from my throat, my skin still prickling in the hot light, I can sense liquefaction about to occur. My mouth is drooling, chewing my cheeks, distending the sockets of my eyes, the room starts to spin. I must pull myself back from the abyss: the fear of losing my face. I cannot let go, not yet. “If you attempt to control your nerves, you will enter the realm of the uncontrollable. Realize that you are a gigantic kingdom of nerves” (Butoh Kaden, “World of the Neurological Ward”). ~ I continued to attend Yukio Waguri’s classes during those years in Japan. It was only in 2014 that I eventually got the opportunity to ask him all the burning questions that had grown from these lessons. I am profoundly grateful for the support I received from Takashi Morishita and Yu Homma of the Hijikata Archive in arranging this exchange. Homma was the interpreter and was present throughout the conversation. It was a steaming August day and our discussion went on for over three hours, interrupted only by an icecream break, courtesy of the Archive. Waguri’s delightful storytelling and absolute generosity as he shares these intimate memories are evident from the start. Almost exactly three years later, in late October 2017, I learned of Waguri’s passing from pancreatic cancer. I could never have guessed that his lithe body harboured any illness. Thankfully, his experiences with Hijikata’s Butoh, described in the long transmission that follows, can help propagate the life and world of an earnest student, a remarkable dancer, and an artist with a singularly unusual trajectory; I am honoured that we crossed paths.

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Figure 2.3 Paragon of sacrificing great dance: the fourth Kyoto performance, “Bakke” (1975), Yukio Waguri. Photo: Makoto Onozuka. Courtesy of Keio University Art Center and Butoh Laboratory, Japan.

Time and Space Is Body: Yukio Waguri Hijikata Archive, Art Centre, Keio University, August 7, 2014 Interpreter and translation assistance: Yu Homma ~ Dominique Savitri Bonarjee:

Yukio Waguri:

You were one of the seminal dancers working with Hijikata from the beginning of his choreographic phase in the 1970s. How did you come to know about his dance and studio and what attracted you to it in the first place and made you follow this path? My story: I was first interested in theatre. My favourite theatre company was not accepting new members right then. I left my family home in Tokyo and I was wandering in Shinjuku at that time. I happened to see the very large poster for Hijikata’s dance at Art Village in Shinjuku. And Hijikata was the teacher of the leader of my favourite theatre company: I already knew who Hijikata was. There were only three guests in that performance: there was Yoko Ashikawa and two other dancers. I asked the staff at the Art Village Theatre if I

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could meet Hijikata and the staff brought me directly to Asbestos-Kan in Meguro. Hijikata was preparing for a performance in Ikebukuro Fountain Hall and the performance was planned to happen in the next ten days. There was a kind of bar in the Asbestos studio, and Hijikata put a white kimono on the bar and the pupils were painting it. It was gradated from the bottom in pink. It was a costume for the “goldfish”. Hijikata asked me: “Can you help them?” I said: “Hai (yes)!” After three days, Ashikawa told me that Hijikata wanted me to appear on the stage. I refused saying, “I can’t do anything on stage”. Hijikata’s choreography was done at night. In the day, all the pupils were working and then at night they would go to Asbestos-Kan and start the practice. There was a kind of exclusive lesson time for me for two days, with only Hijikata, Ashikawa, and myself. And during the night, because I wasn’t living with Hijikata, I would go home, and other pupils would then come to practice. My first lesson was “Ghost Walk”. Hijikata said, “you are a ghost, just walking”. It is difficult because Hijikata said you are a ghost and you must walk, but what is a “ghost-walk”? He said, “straighten your back and don’t shake your body”. This kind of minor guidance would come from Hijikata but there is no essential description for what Ghost Walk is, so I didn’t know if that was dance or not. The practice was finished and the performance started. There was an accident on stage on the very first day. My role was the “Scissor-man” with a razor. There were four men walking at the back of the stage with razors in their hands. We had a barber’s bib and wore only underpants. I was practicing karate at the time and had a very good body, so it was embarrassing, and I was in the centre of the group. In the front, Ashikawa was dancing. Also in the front stage, there were nails so we had to put the bib onto the nails and spit on the bib and then cover the bib with the razors as if sharpening the razors with the bib. That was my first role. Just when I was trying to sharpen the razor, suddenly I felt someone put their hand on my shoulder. There was Hijikata’s face! He whispered: “You made a mistake, go back to the dressing room”. Hijikata had stepped up onto the stage. It was just 15 minutes into the performance and he yelled, “Stop, stop!

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Mic!” The audience was there and nobody knew what was happening because Hijikata was wearing normal clothes. He shouted that all performers must go back and he was also calling for a microphone. But the audience and even the staff couldn’t understand if it was a part of the performance or not, so nobody brought one. Finally, a member of staff brought a microphone. Hijikata announced: “There was a mistake, could we please start the performance from the beginning again in five minutes. If that’s ok, please clap your hands”. But the audience was confused so they hesitated, so Hijikata repeated slowly “Clap – your – hands –if – it’s – ok!” and Hijikata kept saying it. In the end, Hijikata restarted the performance. It was only ten days after my first visit to the studio and only one week after I had started lessons with Hijikata, and I felt that I couldn’t continue working with Hijikata and I resigned from the Asbestos-Kan after this performance. I was riding on the train after the performance, and I had removed the face make-up but not the white body paint. The body powder smelled very good, but nobody on the train would know my body was painted white and powdered, so I felt I had a small secret: that was a strong feeling. In my times, the 1960s and 1970s, everyone thought that they wanted to do something different to others. It was a characteristic of the times: they didn’t want to do the same as others. What I liked about AsbestosKan and Hijikata and his group was the secret aspect of the group, outside of society, and normal culture. Hijikata’s development of Butoh spanned what Takashi Morishita has described as six periods, from the more experimental phase started in 1959 and spanning the 60s, to the structured Butoh-fu choreography of the 70s. Can you talk about your experience of the development of the phase of Butoh-fu based choreography in the period from 1972 onwards? And your experience of this when you entered the Asbestos-Kan and joined this “secret society”? I don’t know the movement from the 50s and 60s and only came to Asbestos-Kan in 1972. The first generation of Butoh had quite a clear attitude: it was to destroy the existing Modern Dance. At the beginning it was called Ankoku Buyo. The important part was “ankoku” (darkness). They wanted to be different

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from the American Modern Dance concept which was about “health and beauty is power…this is dance”. At first, it was Ankoku Buyo then Ankoku Buyo and now we don’t often mention ankoku we just use the term “Butoh”. Maybe it has changed. The first generation of Butoh were actually dancers with experience in other dances, so to do Butoh was to destroy their experience and style. For the second generation, my own, there was nothing to destroy because we were amateurs when we started: most of us didn’t have a dance background. But some participants were from a literature background so there were even poets or writers, the kind of people who couldn’t endure Hijikata’s hard lessons: they were clever but couldn’t do the physical side. I was physically strong, only men like me could [follow]. Most of the students didn’t understand what Hijikata was talking about, what he meant, but gradually and slowly we started to understand Hijikata’s words. He asked you to be a ghost for example and then he gave you little tips, such as “pull your back up, don’t move so much”? He also gave you the Butoh-fu which are made up of “feeding words” – they feed the body so as to initiate a physical reaction – and then there are “fixing words” which create an image, like “the Aubrey Beardsley woman”. If he was talking about the spine, perhaps he was feeding something and the ghost was the fixing word; so how did he actually talk to you? What words did he use? There was no clear visual. It is about your self you are feeling your self as a vague image. While you are moving there is not a clear vision but you are imagining something, it’s a sort of shadow. You are following the shadow of your movement, your body moving, your body dancing: you are resolutely following the shadow of your dancing body. The present dance includes the future dance already. Usually, people recognize an image as a special image or as an image [existing] in a certain space. If the image disappears too quickly, they can’t recognize that image properly. It’s a kind of training, how long we can keep that image: whether we can keep it strongly and for a long time. If you consider, there is a “dancing body” and a “normal body”, if the image disappears in a minute, it means you can’t maintain the dancing body: the dancing body disappears with the image.

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Hijikata can keep stopping his  body for 20 minutes and he uses these images to “stop” his body. What do you mean by “stop”? Is it that the body is still but alive at the same time? If he stands on the stage and even if he doesn’t move, he has some image that keeps his body on stage for 20 minutes. So in a way the images create the body for those 20 minutes? What do these images relate to? Of course the still body is not dead, it is filled with these images… The images are eaten by time, so time is image: a boring dance can only last three minutes, that’s because the dancer only has three minutes of images. The images cover and enrich our bodies, but when the image disappears, there is just the body left. So the images are used to create another body then. Yes you understand, so if you lose the strong concentration of how to keep the images… In the state of the still body, there is a balance of images around the body, they are strong rich images which are keeping the body in equilibrium: for example, I want to go forward, but another energy is pulling me backwards. This balance crashes and some movement comes from it. Dancers’ images are not outside of the creative space, it is what increments, changes the body directly, it is not a weak skin on the body, it must be very strong. In the word “flower”, there is also the world inside that word: this is Hijikata’s way. The word is not an explanation tool for dance. Also images are the same: what is an image after all? The image must make your body change. If you’re standing in the forest, my body changes to a tree, each branch changes to nerve branches, and my branches connect to other branches and all my nerves make a forest of trees, so if I turn, this whole forest turns – this huge space is moving. Like that, images from inside go outside and outside goes inside: it’s a medium. So the images that Hijikata was creating were images that he could feel in an environment or a space, and what he was doing was trying to stimulate (and simulate) this by describing it through these images… I wonder if he used these images himself or if it was just a way to make dancers respond the way he wanted in a space? It is difficult to understand Hijikata’s writing, his handwriting is difficult to read. There’s image A and B and they are different. From A to B and B to A looks the same, but the process is quite different. And additionally

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there is C between A and B and this part is quite difficult to understand. I had my own C. He can describe A and B but C differs according to each dancer. So C can change with time, in the same dancer, for me in the first year of Butoh I had my own C, but now it has changed. So A and B is a kind of structure? I could describe A and B as this…but C has rich information, which can include my experience and attitude. It is strongly linked to creation. A and B is material, not creation. When I first went to Asbestos-Kan, Hijikata’s choreography was simple. It was only six months [I was there], so he gave me simple things. But looking at Hosotan (Story of Smallpox, 1972) there is a power in this simplicity. Story of Smallpox is still a simple choreography? My choreography was simple but Hijikata’s part was quite complex. Yes Hijikata’s contrasts quite strongly to the rest of the movement. At the time Ashikawa was already an expert dancer, but other male dancers couldn’t follow Hijikata’s movement. So in Story of Smallpox was Hijikata just doing C? Yes. Hijikata did very tiny delicate subtle movement in Hosotan and he gave this choreography to some of the male dancers the following year. The delicate movement is very difficult and needs strong physicality to maintain that low stance and keep this body position for 20 minutes: young dancers can’t do this because of muscle mass. At the time Hijikata only weighed 48 kilograms and was 1.70 m tall. He practiced hardest for Hosotan. You said you performed in five of the pieces in 27 Nights for 4 Seasons (1972)? From the second day we started rehearsals for the second piece called Susame Dama. There were only two days between each performance piece in that series. One work was performed for five days, then there was a two-day break, but the rehearsals for the next piece had to be started during the performance period. We continued this pattern for the “27 nights”. Hijikata came late at night and would start the choreography, and dancers would have to try to remember this. Was Hijikata working 24 hours a day?! Yes. Finally, Hijikata got ill so he didn’t appear on the stage for the fourth performance. Only students performed. But the whole audience were expecting

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Hijikata, and there was no announcement that he wouldn’t appear: there was “booing” because of this. How many pieces were there in total? There were five pieces, comprising of ten scenes each, so Hijikata made fifty scenes or so. So for students we were confused all the time. I would go to the studio to rehearse the next piece, but then in the performance, the current rehearsal practice would come to me, and I’d quickly think: no, it’s for the next piece. In Butoh Kaden you write that “the most significant purpose of Butoh-fu is to physicalize images through words”. Kayo Mikami says that Hijikata related everything to language.38 Can you talk about how the words of Butoh-fu relate to the images and thereby to the creation of dance forms: for example how did Hijikata use language in the rehearsal process for 27 Nights for 4 Seasons? It changed from time to time. At the beginning the choreography process was very simple, and words were like a code, for example “flower”, “cupid”, “bull”, “horse”. It’s like a stamp. So these words were the ones to fix the image in some sense? While practicing each code – for example bull code – a great deal of information was given in the lesson around it: “why does the bull have these kinds of horns?, “how many kilos does the bull weigh”, “how big is the bull”; so Hijikata could add a lot of images. For example, when we do the bull code lesson, to check what it’s like to be “bull”, we add a lot of adjectives to the noun bull, for instance “the eyes are very big and bloody”. Hijikata continuously added many words and the students remembered all the words. Hijikata added so many adjectives, but the dancer can’t follow all the adjectives given during the performances: the dancer must concentrate and put all the words given by Hijikata in layers, over a limited time. Going through the lesson, it is maybe the images, but in the performance they can remember all the words given by Hijikata at the same time, it’s not like a timeline or a sequential recognition, even though in the lesson they learn words one at a time. If you remember the words one by one according to time, it is a description not a dance. When you set your “ghost”, you are not trying to represent the ghost, you are the ghost. This layering of words creates the ghost.

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You can’t be a ghost by just understanding what is a ghost, there is another step for Hijikata. For example to make vision like a “string”: if you pull the sides, the eyes and sight will divide in two. Also to spread the spider web from the chest, or from the back: if the body is pulled to the extreme, the body will become thin and transparent. And, there is also recognizing a nerve that goes up towards space, to the universe. From the very high space, someone/one is moving your nerve, so your body is moving: do not walk with your legs, don’t put your weight down to the earth… At the same time we learn how not to walk with legs, we have to use abdominal muscles. The image and the actual physical body match. Contemporary dance uses a lot of images but in contemporary dance, they describe or explain the image. In that kind of dance, the body is a simple tool. But in Hijikata’s dance, the body itself becomes image. Hijikata often used the word transformation, in Japanese, we use the word naruなる which means “to become”. Maybe it is a kind of self-suggestion. In the rehearsals he used a lot of words, but did Hijikata ever demonstrate what he was looking for? A little bit. He showed a little, just the essence. For your role for example, would he give you a certain word and then you would show him something you had developed? My first rehearsal – to be “ghost” – Hijikata showed very simple suggestions, then I continued on my own. Then Hijikata called me and just said: “Continue!” Then he called me again: “Waguri-kun!”; so I came and he said again: “Continue!” Then the third time, “Waguri”, and then Hijikata came, and whispered in my ear: “Don’t stop!!” It was a sort of concentration test. Through this I could understand, and he also used a drum with the choreography. Hijikata could control time with the drum, or by himself. Then the dancer could find the space because time was controlled by Hijikata. I very quickly learned the space, and the images in this way. But also, when I left Hijikata and the studio, and started doing Butoh notation by myself, I wondered how to control time? Time is very important to this process? This was very hard work for me: how to control time. Of course I knew my choreography and how to connect

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and how to join, but time and speed… Dancers work is to know how to manage time but most dancers think that the dancer’s work is how to control space, and that time is based on music. No, no, no, time is set by dancers. Space and atmosphere, by music. This is a very big message from Hijikata’s Butoh. For other dances, music often has the title role. There is a Western hierarchy where the music is at the top, and body expression is at the bottom. There is a similar thing in Japan in the Japanese traditional dance: there are very few performances that have only music, almost always there are some words as well. If there are no words in Noh theatre, then it is not Noh! Almost all nihon buyo (Japanese traditional dance) has some words, the only exception is the Sanja Matsuri, a kind of comical dance. In Japanese traditional culture, the language is quite important; it is a very sacred thing. We have a word kotodama, written in kanji: “koto” is language or words, and “dama” is soul, spirit. Words come first, second is music, and dance and body expression follow. Maybe in Western society, it is a very human-centred world, but in Asia, the human is not central, instead it is kotodama, in other words some spiritual world exists, and instruments come next and the performer is one medium, but not of human expression: how to kill “humanity” is a technique for a performer. The body is a medium for the spiritual aspect of kotodama? If our usual ordinary body is full of individuality, the kotodama can’t enter it. So we need to empty our body to accept kotodama. To empty our body we need a lot of experience, and to practice for a long time. In Japanese traditional arts the artists are over 70 years of age when they become professional, their real career starts then. Artists around 40 or 50 are just children. Artists around 20 or 30 years are just at “baby level”. Would you say Hijikata was creating this concept of kotodama through language? Hijikata didn’t say directly that he had some image of kotodama, Hijikata was really careful about stepping inside the spiritual world. There was writing by Hijikata and it is not translated into English yet but the title is “Rhetoric of Play”. He wrote that when we empty our body, something comes inside our body and

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our body will be filled by something, and explodes in small explosions. The nikutai (flesh) body runs away, but after the body has run away, then the body is now empty and will again be filled. This is the process or rhythm of Butoh. In Hosotan, Story of Smallpox (part of 27 Nights for Four Seasons, 1972), you danced a duet with Yoko Ashikawa, which seems like a parody of a ballet pas de deux. Can you talk about the choreography and development of this duet and perhaps if it relates to Hijikata’s attitude towards Butoh and Western dance? Yes I think it does, but we were [also] doing “show dances” at the cabaret so it was quite normal to do this kind of duet. Many audience members accepted the duet as a parody of ballet because we were wearing Japanese traditional clothes. I didn’t know the dance in the 1960s but some poet described this pas de deux as dépaysement a term from Surrealism: here it is to replace A with B. So there is something, and that something should not be there. The person who said this was a poet and he also said Butoh was “the Surrealism of the body”. The duet was not a parody, but more an experiment in dépaysement. With Ashikawa we were dancing a Viennese Waltz in Japanese clothes but gradually so many Butoh dancers have done this strange combination thus the effect of it has weakened over time. It became rather typical, a “Butoh style” and people copied it. Gradually the dancers became reliant on music and lighting and design as the performances became weaker. I keep my memories and small images inside, like small stones, each independent but small, every time it is the same size. We don’t know what direction Hijikata was trying to go for the development of Butoh: when I was at the studio, it was a time of construction for Hijikata. The first generation of Butoh, when Hijikata was working with [Kazuo] Ohno and Kasai, was an age of ­destruction – of the existing art and morality. After destroying something, they also destroyed their own “Ankoku Butoh”, their own group. They all became independent, for example the Ohno Studio or Kasai’s Studio. And they both went towards improvisation, and Hijikata went towards choreography instead. Why? Maybe it’s his character. One thing, it’s his mission: Hijikata’s sense of responsibility or mission. He

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thought only he could do that kind of thing. For example Hijikata used the word “material” and applied it to the body. The informel movement in France after World War Two, which includes [Jean] Dubuffet, understood the body as material. For example with the atomic bomb, they experienced that the human body can be destroyed to that extreme. To think of the body as material is a very westernized thought for Hijikata. “The body is empty and a ghost”: this is the Japanese way of thinking, the “body as material” is Western. If the material changes, to describe our own images or expression with body, the world will change too, but Hijikata was representing himself as a space, and in this context “material” means time and space is body. There is a drastic change of object and subject on the stage: normally, the performer is someone who transfers information with their own body, but Hijikata was just exposing his body as a space. Hijikata was space and material on the stage before the audience. Hijikata’s body is a space; and the reason material is related to time, because material has a lifetime, for example, if the material is wood, wood is destroyed within a certain time frame but if the material is iron, it needs longer to be destroyed in the course of time. Hijikata on the stage is a space and the audience can enter that space freely, and so the audience’s image that enters the space of Hijikata’s body is the desire of the audience. Image = Desire. Hijikata used the word “poison”. In Anma (Masseur), why did he name the work “Masseur”? He said their dance is a kind of “massage” to the audience to take the poison out of the audience’s body. Hijikata said to me that recently dancers “gave the poison” out of their body to the audience and that is not the dance Hijikata wanted to create. That kind of way of thinking is very eastern. I tend to relate this to shamanism. Natsu Nakajima said of the Butoh-fu system: “what Hijikata did was a code rather than a choreography”. Do you think this is a code, like a language, that can be passed on, and how can it be used? Do you still use it in the way Hijikata intended it to be used? I don’t know. Do you agree that it’s a code? It is just words: it is not important to distinguish code from choreography.

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What I am alluding to is that choreography normally relates to notation of dance and movement, but Hijikata didn’t really show you movement, but he gave you words. What is important is perhaps how much creativity we can put in the process, when we transform the word to movement or dance. If there is choreography but the dance is not very good, it means nothing. I can’t agree with Natsu-san about it being a code. The human can’t be separated from the word, it is quite difficult or almost impossible to create or produce without words. If it’s a traditional art or dance, we can just say “watch me and copy the movement” but when we try to create new art, we have to understand each other with words. It is quite easy to say “dance is something beyond words” but it’s not that easy. I always say in my workshops, “let’s watch each other”, we get some notion from each other. For example, when the teacher says “walk straight”, but the people I watch are shaking a little bit, in the lesson I have to think “why is he shaking” and how can he stop. We can understand several reasons technically: “how” and “why” are a technical thing. There is also another layer and that is “what”: “what makes him shake”? This relates to mentality, perhaps he is embarrassed, or he wants to appear cool, what are his mental movements? Words used in the notation book by me, are different from the words used in the lesson by Hijikata to adjust movement: for example, to stop shaking, or the words used to stimulate, correct, or stabilize the movement. In the notation, the written and spoken words are different. When I use the notation, I fix the time, and, for example, when I say, “create some movement from (Henri) Michaux’s painting or drawing,” the movement created by students differs a lot according to their imagination. According to Hijikata, there are three techniques: one is to remember, for example the one word “ghost” which contains 100 pieces of information inside that need to be remembered. Second is to forget: dance is not a trace or a description, or explanation. The third is the most difficult and even I am still trying to understand it: “to touch the energy that makes us live”. The last technique appears when we touch the energy that makes us live. Miyabi Ichikawa, a critic, wrote about my Butoh Kaden DVD that perhaps in the final stage Hijikata wouldn’t need this kind of notation anymore, and Hijikata didn’t live long enough to get to the final stage. There is another

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problem though, that there must also be a dancer who can accept that method without Butoh-fu. But at that stage, Hijikata would have needed a professional dancer, not a ballet or modern dancer but a “professional Butoh dancer”. Maybe only Ashikawasan could do this. Do you still use Hijikata’s words? Yes I do. Have you added your own words as well? Yes, many. So you use them together? You said each form is made up of hundreds of words, have you made up new forms? Yes. Are these in Butoh Kaden? Butoh Kaden only includes movement up till 1993. Many Butoh dancers have their own Butoh-fu, for example Tamano (Koichi)-san, and Ashikawa-san of course has one. But this is the notation I compiled. I didn’t compile the book according to the performances, and it is the same as the DVD. So all these forms in Butoh Kaden are Hijikata’s, or are there some you created. Almost all Hijikata’s. It was only after 1990 I started to develop my own. To talk about improvisation within Butoh-fu: did you use both of these in the latest piece you choreographed in Kuala Lumpur. You talked of A, B and C and perhaps C is the place of creation, how did you combine these? It was a mix. Last time in Malaysia39 I asked professional dancers to make their own piece by themselves: there was a ballet dancer, an Indian dancer, a Chinese dancer, so I checked and changed it a little bit and so I included each traditional dance in my piece. Recently I used improvisation because I trust them, I know them, I know their level, so that I can ask them to improvise. This kind of relationship is important. If there is no relationship, and no trust, then I won’t ask them to dance. You said you used professional dancers, they were professional Butoh dancers? No not Butoh dancers but they are dancers with an ability to understand: a good dancer can overcome the category of the dance, they just love dancing. A real dancer can accept any kind of dance, so they learn Butoh rapidly, same with other dancers. They are confident and they also love to make their own “body dance”. Their

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attitude is not as if they are joining a Butoh company or learning Japanese Butoh dance, they are just dancing. It isn’t just about Butoh for them? It’s not about dancing Butoh per se, it’s just about “dance”? Actually they say “Butoh performance”, but I am not trying to categorize the dance. It sounds irresponsible but if the dance is good, I don’t care what the dance is called. Coming back to the question of improvisation then, did Hijikata allow you to do improvisation? No, not me, never. According to Hijikata, the dancer must do the improvisation within the structure of the choreography, so that we can’t separate improvisation and choreography. But you allow improvisation? I don’t allow improvisation, because when I choreograph with the notation, it is improvisation at the same time. Even when the dancers are doing the improvisation, I am doing the choreography. You mean basing the choreography on the improvisation of the Butoh-fu? About 80% is choreography. Inside the choreography, if the dancer exceeds my expectation, then I won’t stop them and I will keep that. With choreography, dancers are set free of the anxiety of what to do next. Dancers are afraid of the situation where they are responsible for the error or mistake in a piece. The dancers think they can’t be responsible for what is unknown: I am responsible for all the movement, all the performance, so dancers can do their movement freely. Do you mean the choreographer is taking responsibility? If the performance is good, it’s the ownership of the dancers, and if it’s bad it is the responsibility of the choreographer. Some choreographers do it the other way around. Hijikata developed many of these forms based on issues that were relevant to the socio-political climate of postwar Japan: you talked about the bodies that disappeared after the atomic bombs, a body could change very suddenly. He also created the stiff hard body, which can be seen to be in opposition to the impotence of a weakened, defeated country after the war, being nannied by the United States. It comes across in Hijikata’s words; “You have to pull your stomach up high in order to turn your solar plexus into a terrorist”40 and his distrust of the capitalist system being imposed by this onset of Westernization. He famously wrote

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that his “dance…flaunts its aimlessness in the face of a production-oriented society”.41 This was relevant to the times but what about the current situation in Japan and the world? You say for you it’s not important to call dance Butoh or not. But Butoh in its beginnings had a strong reaction to the times. Today many people say “what is Butoh?” or “Butoh  doesn’t exist anymore”: how important is it for Butoh to exist today, thinking of the societies and the kind of world we live in? In the 1960s and 70s the word “Butoh” only existed in Japan. In the 1980s, Nakajima Natsu and Sankai Juku spread the word to the world. Maybe now there are more Butoh dancers abroad than in Japan, but maybe we have to think of the question of the original versus the copy. Maybe in Japan we don’t have the original anymore because Ohno passed away and Hijikata is also dead. Perhaps we have to ask if Hijikata was also a copy of someone. The word Butoh was not created by Hijikata: the word is a very old word in Japan. A kind of adherence to Butoh’s originality actually exists: I am a copy of my ancestors after all, at the same time I am a copy of Hijikata. Often foreign friends ask me if I am the “direct descendent” of Hijikata. Friends in Brazil say that recently in Brazil, “fake Butoh” is very popular and so what do I think about it. Well I don’t know “fake Butoh dancers” very well. Yes the idea of the original and the copy, the true and the fake. There are many discussions about this all the time. What is the most essential thing in Butoh that dancers, or people involved in Butoh, should be addressing? For Hijikata at the time, it was the body in society, within a changing social space but now the space in Japan doesn’t seem to be changing so much, or is it? As you know in the 60s to the 70s, the Japanese social situation was called the “political season”. Even I went to demonstrations and fought with the authorities. In Japan currently and in the world, every situation is severe: the social situation, the situation around humanity, there are many religious problems, it is a difficult and severe world. In the 60s–70s, performing arts, and fine arts, arts in general was the way to pursue the question “what is the self?” The great existential question. To pursue that kind of existential question is connected with the healing of the mind or spirit. In a sense in the 60s and 70s, art was in some way connected to the healing of the soul. But now the social situation is

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far more severe compared to then, so art doesn’t have enough power to heal the social situation of the world. In the 60s and 70s there were people who found a healing function in aggressive Butoh but recently, people use Butoh as a hiding place or an escape from the real world. The healing nature of the arts in general has changed since those times. Do you mean people are using Butoh to withdraw from society? There is a strong desire for Butoh. People are thinking Butoh is strong, because Butoh fought with American culture and didn’t surrender, so they want to know how to do this too, so they invite me but I just speak, but not about fighting. In Asia – and of course there is a big difference between Asian countries – there is a special characteristic to the Japanese body, because it can be easily emptied but the body of people from other Asian countries like  Korea or China, perhaps their bodies can’t be emptied so easily. Why not? “Possession”: the characteristic of the Japanese body generally speaking, is that it can easily be “possessed” or “influenced”. Do you think it has to do with individuality? We have no example in the classroom or in childhood, we are not taught individuality, but rather to keep the community as far as possible. It is not that we don’t have individuality, but in education or everyday life we don’t put a strong emphasis on it. Of course we are clearly different from European people who are taught individuality since childhood, and to take responsibility for what you do. But they are not told that they have responsibility for the community: they take responsibility for themselves but not for the whole community. In Western cultures, freedom is strongly connected to responsibility but we (Japanese) are afraid to do anything, because we have to take responsibility, this is the very basic notion. But after WW2, Japanese people took one part from the Western education system: they taught their children about freedom, but not about responsibility, now there is a very unbalanced society. It can be related to the Fukushima problem, no one will take the responsibility for it, anywhere. Kayo Mikami has written about how Hijikaata's students had to give up their social identity and even their humanity so that they could be completely devoted to Butoh. So this seems to be a call to renounce your

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individuality. And dance author, Andre Lepecki warns that choreography establishes “a system of command”, thus creating a hierarchy. According to his perspective, there is, and I quote, a “responsibility involved in having oneself surrender to the demands or commands of a voice, of another’s desire, of another’s whims to whom we carefully and responsibly listen to, and whose wishes we fulfil, unselfishly, un-egotistically”.42 Can you talk about your experience of surrendering to Hijikata’s system of command in relation to the Japanese body and its ability for possession. Choreography as a system of command suggests that there is a leader, who tells people what to do. Lepecki talks about the responsibility that if somebody tells you to do something, the person taking the orders has to consciously think of why they are taking the commands of a particular teacher. This seems important today, in Butoh. The commands within a system are created for a reason. This is political of course: what Hijikata did in the 70s, was to create some kind of system of command through the words of his Butoh-fu. Why did you want to submit to his command, if you consider it in this way? People who can’t accept Hijikata’s choreography or his orders left the studio. Hijikata had a policy that he would accept everyone who came to his studio, but he didn’t chase after them if they decided to leave the studio. During eight years I stayed at the studio, more than 500 students came and left. It was a kind of family, Hijikata was like the “father”, and the father’s orders were the strongest. Hijikata as a father encouraged the students, or his “sons and daughters”, to be independent. He encouraged me to leave the studio and have my own company. I personally liked Hijikata, more than I liked dance or art, so when I was told that I must leave Asbestos-Kan, I felt I had to quit dancing. I thought that many students became independent from Hijikata, but they are small mountains compared to Hijikata. I wanted to be a part of the big mountain. I did quit dancing, and then I wanted to go back to Hijikata, but he died soon after my return. After Hijikata’s death, my real independence began. During the days I worked with Hijikata, it was a training period. It is very strange because Hijikata was a very strong father but at the same time, he had a motherly aspect too, a nurturing quality. Many people left Hijikata because they couldn’t learn from him, they couldn’t remember the choreography. Hijikata said

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that personality or individuality is like a small house, everyone has their own small house, and they call their small house their uniqueness. But Hijikata said, it is not that kind of thing, he said it is not something they obtained by themselves, it’s just the small house that each person has as a human. That kind of small house is destroyed by the tsunami. Individuality or uniqueness is not that kind of small house but some kind of building they created themselves. We have to destroy the building by ourselves, and destroying the building is Butoh. Let me see if I understand: we have this small house, some aspect that we are born with of ourselves, but we have to create who we are ourselves and we have to destroy it ourselves as well? And then create it again… and destroy it again? When Hijikata says “we should be born again and again, one birth is not enough”: is this what he means? Butoh notation is a brick. But finally you have to break it by yourself. You are referred to as a disciple of Hijikata. Morishitasan in his analysis of Butoh has described the “TeacherStudent” relationship as an essential element of the Butoh-fu development process? This hierarchy is important to it: that he is the father and you must listen to him and follow his instructions? Already we talked about how the Japanese body might be more pliable to this instruction, but Western people might have a different education as we discussed, so how can Western dancers approach the relationship of “Master and Disciple (deshi)” which is important for receiving the instructions of Hijikata? I’d also add that outside of Japan, especially in the West, there might not be so many teachers who work in this way … The basic thing is to share the problem or issue between the teacher and student, so if the teacher knows the problem but the student doesn’t know it, that kind of structure doesn’t work. People tend to forget what is taught by others, so students can only remember what they obtain by themselves. The teacher’s work is not to force students to learn something, but to encourage the student to get something by themselves. Maybe as you said Westerners have a different upbringing and notion of individuality, so it is quite difficult to form the Japanese-style “teacher-student” relationship in Western countries. How can Western people teach Butoh in a

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Japanese manner? Teachers have to stop teaching, they have to pursue something with the student: not orders but sharing. But it is not that teachers have to quit teaching, because students want to be taught something. The teacher has to go deeply inside the student to understand what the desire of the student is. For me, the actual performance is quite important, so I prepare the performance for the student to take a step to the next stage. I don’t usually do a workshop, only teaching, I almost always include a performance in the pedagogic programme. If there is a performance, I will give something to the students related to the performance, and the students wouldn’t be able to go to the next stage without the performance. The performance will help the students to go to the next stage? Performance is a kind of homework for the students. In the opening page of the Butoh Kaden booklet you write “Butoh has just begun”. What do you think of what Butoh is today and the idea of a “contemporary Butoh”. Can you talk about this and define what Butoh means for you or what the next steps are? In the conference in Malaysia recently, I realized that I am thought to be a kind of classic or “traditional” Butoh dancer. For example in America, Yukio Suzuki was introduced as a “contemporary Butoh dancer”. In that kind of situation, I always answer that I don’t think of myself as a traditional Butoh dancer, because Butoh itself is a contemporary dance. Butoh can’t become “classic”. Butoh actually has Japanese classical dance within it, a shadow of it anyway… Butoh and Japanese traditional dance (buyo) can be connected through the keyword “death”, and the question of death and life is a very global question. Every time I go abroad to perform, I do a collaboration with local artists and every time I create new works and every time I challenge myself in my work. I sometimes work with traditional artists or dancers and we want to do something new, but traditional artists can’t really go beyond the framework of the tradition. When I work with this kind of artist I ask myself “what is my role in this collaboration”? and I feel my role is to be a “break-through” for the traditional artists who can’t go through it without this. The important tool of the Butoh dancer is flexibility and responsibility. Do you mean towards the others in the collaboration?

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Yes, joint work is quite severe and difficult. It’s tough. But Butoh dancers are wanted in that kind of collaborative field. In some places Butoh dancers are invited into this kind of tough work, the most difficult work in that field because their weapon is flexibility and responsibility, and perhaps having the power to break the ice. If the Butoh dancer throws this away and makes their world small, the collaboration will fail: it is just working together in that case, but not collaboration. Butoh dancers tend to be responsible for the very creative point of the collaboration. The Butoh dancer is offering an opportunity for the traditional dancer, for example in Noh or Kabuki, to go beyond the classical framework, but paradoxically it is quite difficult to go beyond it by themselves. If they (the Noh and Kabuki performers) do, it is just going outside of the form: they have to stay inside, but at the same time, go beyond the framework. Butoh dancers make such an impossible situation possible. Would you say that Butoh is always contemporary? Yes, that’s my feeling. These are the words from Masakatsu Gunji, a researcher: he says the oldest type of possession dance in Japanese history is related to god, and Miko-san is a female shaman, possessed by the god. This idea remains in Korea, and China. It is related to play, and pleasure and madness. Also possession remains in Noh theatre. We have another word that means crazy or madness, it is kichigai: it is a rather new word that started to be used in the Edo period. In ancient times, you lost your mind, and then god comes and then there is delight and pleasure, then the soul is gone and the dance is finished, the god is gone. In modern times, kichigai is used more and more: ki means energy of the human; chigai is “not fitting”– cannot talk, no relationships. In ancient times, it was humans and gods that met, but in the Edo period, madness becomes something that exists within human relations. Hijikata’s performance has been criticized as being just madness or shamanic dance. But what is shamanism and dance, what is the connection? Hijikata didn’t mention shamanism, officially. But I am interested so I studied about shamanism in Korea, in Siberia, in Japan. Of course, Hijikata wasn’t a shaman, but something about his purpose touched people: “Why do I dance? Why do I have to show this dance to others?”

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Figure 2.4 Bird drawings in Moe Yamamoto’s dance notebook. Photo: Dominique S. Bonarjee.

A Butoh-fu Workshop with Kanazawa Butoh-Kan Although it was still early morning and already mid-September, the summer stickiness immediately clung to us as we exited the pink Willer Express coach at JR Kanazawa station. Our little group was here for the Kanazawa ButohKan Autumn workshop. Kanazawa Butoh-Kan is led by Tatsumi Hijikata’s student, Moe Yamamoto and his partner Kei Shirasaka. Very soon, we were driving up into the mountains with Teruko Suzuki, the company’s manager and producer. The workshop takes place at the Kanazawa Center for Crafts and Culture, a beautiful complex of restored traditional farmhouse buildings. The daytime dance sessions took place in one building, the cooking in another, and the sleeping in the many nooks and crannies of the upper spaces of the living quarters. Rooms were shared, food was shared, and so was dancing. For those four days, we would form a community, working together throughout the day. In the studio, Moe Yamamoto led us through the Kanazawa ButohKan method which he created from his experience at the Asbestos-Kan and primarily from his role in Shomen no Issho (Costume en Face, 1976). His sincere and on-going commitment to his teacher, Hijikata, and to the method of

82  Structure: The Students Butoh-fu comes across in his teaching style. Yamamoto (with Shirasaka) continue to propagate a corporeal inquiry that began decades ago in the latter part of the 1970s. The Kanazawa Butoh-Kan method includes elements of choreography and improvisation, alongside drawing, writing, and late-night theory debates about Surrealism. ~ I attended the Kanazawa Butoh-Kan’s autumn workshop twice, in 2013 and 2014. On my second visit, I was eager to engage Moe Yamamoto in a conversation about his time with Hijikata and specifically Shomen no Issho, one of my favourite works of that period. I knew this shouldn’t be just about talking, but that it had to be complemented by studio-based movement research on this theme; I was hoping to gain access to the words and images that sparked the hypnotic dancing of this seminal work, one of the final ones of Hijikata’s frenetic phase of Butoh-fu. Yamamoto generously accepted my proposal and offered to guide me through some of the foundational choreographic elements of the piece, exactly as he had learned them from Hijikata in 1976. He made it clear though that he would not share the choreography in the order he danced it, as it shouldn’t be copied or re-performed in the way he had danced it.43 I have transcribed the two-day session that took place at Kanazawa ButohKan’s smaller studio near Yamamoto and Shirasaka’s home on September 16 and 17, 2014. We were joined by Minami Chihiro, a Kanazawa Butoh-Kan student, who demonstrated and helped me to practice the choreographies we were exploring. Teruko Suzuki was there too, interpreting between Japanese and English and assisting Yamamoto with explanations. Many of the choreographic examples shared with me are a direct response to the questions I had prepared for the transcribed conversation with Moe Yamamoto that follows this section. ~ “Shomen no Issho” Choreographic Research Project with Kanazawa Butoh-Kan Animals

We must focus on one specific image that Yamamoto shows us. MONKEYS

1 A small furry one 2 A long-limbed lanky one

Structure: The Students  83 Minami has image number 1. I have image number 2. As we examine the images, Yamamoto gives some instructions: – Feel the speed of the monkey’s impulse when picking up a banana. – Incorporate the head of the monkey. – Think of the intention of the neck: for example, putting the neck closer to the shoulders. – Where is the centre of gravity in the image? TURTLES

1 A small turtle 2 A large turtle – How does the face become “turtle-face”? – Thinking of the eyes: how far or how close are they? – What happens to the turtle’s neck? For each image, Yamamoto adds more and more “conditions” to the basic image, while we improvise movements: conditions are descriptions of elements that develop a more and more precise image, leading to deeper layers of sensory awareness. The next stage is to combine the images in a type of surrealist metamorphosis of monkey and turtle. This involves: – A change in posture and weight between each image. – A facial transformation guided by the animal’s horns as another form of eyes. – The animal doesn’t have a “human face” so the face itself is loose, part of the head rather than an identity. What happens to the chin and the nose now? – There is continuous variation between the images which increases the power of the image. ELEPHANTS

Yamamoto explains that in Hijikata’s Butoh-fu system, “monkey” and “turtle” were animals that the dancers were free to interpret. The “elephant” image, however, is a fixed sequence of movements which all dancers must perform as a set: 1 2 3 4

Pick a branch Eat Splash water (with the right arm, four times) Big ears

84  Structure: The Students This pre-arranged sequence is performed within a specific time and with a specific rhythm. Each aspect of the body – posture, the angle of the arms, and the direction of the gaze – is instructed by the choreography. For example, “big ears” = arms back, at right angles, fingers and hands pointing down. Yamamoto uses this first sequence of animal images to demonstrate that in Butoh-fu, there are two types of score: the first one – monkey and turtle – allows the creative input of the dancer, in response to an accumulating number of conditions that describe every aspect of the animal with increasing granularity. The second type – the elephant image – is a choreographic sequence that contains precise instructions the dancer must follow exactly in the order given. In this first part of the research study, transformation between images has only been demonstrated in the first type of score (turtle + monkey), where the morphing is activated by adding conditions as prompts for the dancer’s imagination. The Dancing Face

The “dance of the face” is one of the most striking aspects of Hijikata’s choreography in Shomen no Issho: in his role, Yamamoto displayed complex facial metamorphosis. In this second stage, we will practice the preparation he went through with Hijikata. Again the process involves a gradual layering of conditions, as imaginative suggestions for the neck and eye position, the intensity of the gaze, and the pace of a movement. Because the turtle and monkey image have no prescribed look in Butoh-fu, the dancer can use the conditions of these particular images to discover the appropriate facial dance: but even this “dance of the face” takes training. This kind of transformation is what we explored with Yamamoto. There is some freedom in the first two images (turtle and monkey), and they can oscillate from one to the other. The elephant image has a specific and relatively fixed facial look, and in some way it acts as a stable pillar to support the open images that precede it. >

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TURTLE (t)MONKEY(t)ELEPHANT This is the logic of the sequence with t as the point of transformation. The most creative part of the work for the dancer occurs within the t zone, in other words between images. HEAVY FACE

Image condition: a piece of gauze is placed over the face, the chin is heavy, and the face expands. Instructions: – How are the eyes affected, pulled, disturbed by the gauze? – How does this thin layer of fabric change the mouth? Yamamoto presents two more images along with their conditions:

Structure: The Students  85 IRON BALLS

Carrying iron balls in the hands; they get heavier as you advance. THE CHAIR

Carrying a chair in the hands; it becomes heavier and is pulled up into the air, and then immediately down again. We start by carrying a physical chair as a prop to feel it’s weight, shape, and materiality. Later, the chair is created by the imagination of muscle memory. Instructions: – How do your legs react to the chair? – Do you receive the energy generated by the movement of the chair? After exploring each image, its associated conditions, and set instructions, Yamamoto offers two combinations of components for us to discover how t (transformation) links them: Combination A: 1 Walking with iron balls in the hands/they become heavier/gauze envelops the face 2 Pick up chair and turn it in the air 3 Heavy walk 4 Turn chair the other way 5 Elephant trunk eating fruit Combination B: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Turtle Monkey Elephant/first part of sequence Iron balls and gauze Chair Elephant/second part of sequence

Instructions and notes on image formats and names: – The timing of the phrase and the points of transformation are most important. – Phrases are named on a case-by-case basis and there is no general rule. The “iron balls and gauze” is a set piece, meaning there is no freedom in it. In contrast, the “big turtle” and “long monkey” images are relatively free phrases. – At the Asbestos-Kan, some of the phrases were named after the dancer who had created them.

86  Structure: The Students SOME CHOREOGRAPHIC NOTES FROM SHOMEN NO ISSHO

Yamamoto has numerous notes and scrapbooks from his time at AsbestosKan containing writing and drawings. In his Hitogata (Human Shape) scrapbook, there are descriptions of space. Some of these bear some similarities to Yukio Waguri’s Butoh Kaden, though there are also interesting differences: in Yamamoto’s notes, a “Space of Stuffed Birds” is described; Waguri’s notation has “World of Bird and Beast”. Yamamoto explains that at Asbestos-Kan, phrases or groups of phrases were first practiced by all the dancers together. Each phrase was then numbered and given to an individual dancer. Only once each phrase was assigned, then Hijikata would keep adding conditions to the images. There are very detailed drawings of birds in Yamamoto’s notebook (see Figure 2.3), which he tells us are related to a head exercise that Hijikata assigned to him. The dead birds on the right are the “base” of the image – its foundation – from which a set movement is created; on the left, an image of ghosts is incorporated into the set movement. In this instance, the facial choreography was linked back to the body through the image of the three dead birds (named shigi). There are more images for the “dance of the face”, including some named “metallic flower”, “forest face” (mori no kao), and “masked Hanako”.44 By learning these practices from Yamamoto, working directly with the images that he had acquired during the choreography of Shomen no Issho, it became apparent that in practice, Butoh-fu is much more complex than what you might expect from a dance notation. It works as a system of kinesthetic painting that demands the kind of physical training that allows a dancer to carry out a phrase precisely, and according to a set instruction. But because the dancer is no passive interpreter of commands, it also requires an agile imagination capable of responding with immediacy as each condition is added. Both creative freedom and intense discipline must exist in the same body, this is what it took for Hijikata and his students to paint their inner landscapes through Butoh-fu.

Structure: The Students  87

Figure 2.5 Performance 2, performance series celebrating the twentieth anniversary of formation of school of dance of utter darkness and the opening of Kanazawa Butoh House by Yamamoto Moe: Asbestos hall performance in October: Paragon of sacrificing great dance, Moe Yamamoto dancing in Shomen no Issho, “Costume In Front: A Model of Darkness for Boys and Girls”, (1976). Courtesy of Keio University Art Center and Butoh Laboratory, Japan.

88  Structure: The Students Face Things with Immediacy: Moe Yamamoto Kanazawa Butoh-Kan Studio, September 16 and 17, 2014 Interpretation and translation assistance: Teruko Suzuki ~ Moe Yamamoto:

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The image was based on a goldfish bowl. The lighting created the effect of an image of headless men: now I could leave this bowl. The piece ends in the white dress, as the image of a dry bone. That last image was of a burnt, dry bone: the goldfish left the bowl to become a dry bone. The finale was with dancers in green and I was in white: they were the algae in the fish bowl. The subtitle of the piece was Manual of Darkness for Boys and Girls. The [promotional] image for the piece showed a goldfish bowl with the fish leaving the bowl to go to the ocean – or somewhere: they just know that they are leaving the bowl. The essence of Shomen no Issho (translated as Costume en Face) is “to face” anything directly, correctly, “don’t try to turn away from it… face the costume”. In other words, you have to face things with immediacy. This piece was my graduation piece from AsbestosKan to celebrate my independence from Hijikata. Hijikata also gave other dancers a graduation choreography when they left. For example, Saga Kobayashi also did one. Koichi Tamano and Natsu Nakajima had already left and were independent, but they returned to receive a choreography: in fact, they requested a choreography, and Hijikata offered them one. For me, the choreography of Shomen no Issho was very difficult to take [on] as it is so precise and minute. What was the spirit of the graduation piece? Hijikata was expecting the graduated students to return with something they had discovered by themselves, and this could contribute to continuing the development of Butoh. For example Yoko Ashikawa asked me to come back to the Asbestos-Kan to visit at least once a month. Hijikata expected graduated students to bring something new and original back to him. How long had you been involved with Hijikata and the Asbestos-Kan when this piece was created?

Structure: The Students  89 MY:

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When I went to university, I joined the theatre circle. My senior there was Kobayashi’s husband, Tachibanasan. When Tachibana graduated from university, I heard he joined a theatre group. One day he came back to the university to promote the piece he was in. It was a Butoh performance. I saw the advertising for the piece Shizuka no Ie (Quiet House), and there I saw Yoko Ashikawa perform. That was in about 1973. Six months later, Tachibana visited our theatre circle at university and announced that they would be having another performance at the Art Village in Shinjuku, and they needed people to help. I volunteered and helped out. Tatsumi Hijikata was going to have more performances at Art Village, but I had to go to a summer camp with my theatre circle. After a fire at the Art Village, it was decided to do the performances at Asbestos-Kan, and Ashikawa asked me if I would like to dance. When I returned from the theatre camp, I decided to join. It was when Hijikata moved the performance to the Asbestos-Kan that I began to perform in pieces. I was at Asbestos-Kan for about three years before Shomen no Issho. At first, I was still attending university so I could only join the practice once a week; at this time, other dancers were already living in the studio community. In the first performance I did at the Asbestos-Kan, I was sitting on a table just moving my face in five different angles, with another performer. This was in 1974. But when I saw Hijikata and Ashikawa in Shizuka no Ie, and they already had trained bodies, I felt conscious that I should prepare my body. After my first performance, a piece called Evisuya Ocho, I wanted to train my body so I attended more frequently. I began to go to Asbestos-Kan almost every day and six months after Evisuya Ocho, I went to live at Asbestos-Kan. Hijikata had a home separate from the AsbestosKan, so it was only the students who lived on the premises. In the later years of Asbestos-Kan, they finally renovated the place so Hijikata and his wife and daughters also lived there. The development of Hijikata’s Butoh-fu began in the 1970s and according to Takashi Morishita, Shomen no Issho marks the completion point of this process. How long did the process of choreographing Shomen

90  Structure: The Students

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no Issho take? Did Hijikata already have imagemovements in mind? And how easy was it for him to transmit his ideas to you through Butoh-fu language? The other dancers were already developing a lot of the movements before this piece: for example the shigi bird to “ghost bird” images45 so that already many layers of images had been created. At the beginning, when I joined, they were making movements with specific forms, for example animals, which could create a powerful performance through clear images. Yukio Waguri was [already] very good at the “horse movement”, so for Shomen no Issho, new qualities were added to this horse image, although it was still “horse”. For Shomen no Issho a space image was also created: we worked with amorphous images, clouds, mist, electricity, and in this way the image became more complex. Hijikata spoke to us about the amorphous nature of the spaces he was seeking to create: his interest was in moving from clear forms to amorphous ones. Thinking more about specific aspects of the piece, and with reference to your notebooks, there are a few points I’d like to discuss. Facial expressions make up a large part of the choreography of this piece: whereas the body might simply be rising and falling repeatedly, the face is engaged in all kinds of movements, grimaces, and transformations: – How did Hijikata choreograph the face? I saw drawings of faces in your notebook. Was the face choreographed separately from the body or was the same image penetrating the face through the body? For example, there is a vivid motif of open-mouthed ecstasy towards the end of the piece? – A recurring theme in Shomen no Issho is a sudden change in movement dynamic that goes from very low or squatting positions to standing upright. How did Hijikata prepare students for these extremes and contrasts and how did he communicate the choreography of such changes in dynamics? In Shomen no Issho, all the movements were choreographed. Face choreography was worked on separately and some training sessions were solely focused on facial expressions. Those used in Shomen no Issho were initially developed for another piece entitled Kohigasa (Small Parasol), and they were then reused. Through the development process they were given fixing words such as one named “pomegranate”.

Structure: The Students  91 In the facial choreography process, Hijikata gave the same image to all dancers, then he expected each one of us to use our imagination to develop the image. Dancers had to find their own way, and Hijikata encouraged us to experiment. It was through our responses that Hijikata could become aware of each dancer’s strong points. I got many of my ideas from the intensity of the stage space, and by being closely watched by Hijikata: as I was the main character, I received a great deal of attention and it was this relation, of my body to the choreographer’s gaze, that improved my performance. To set off the dynamic from low positions to standing, apart from offering conditions to induce this complex dynamic, Hijikata would also demonstrate his idea, as well as demonstrating his idea, by showing how to pick up the skirt, for example. Sometimes he showed movement as well. The energy needed for coming out from a low position was part of Hijikata’s direction. The most important aspects of Butoh for me are the conditions that are added to the movement. To transfer to a heavier movement, you add some lightness so that the contrast is stronger. Usually, people note the flow of movement but not the conditions. To make the notebook complete, the work on the conditions is required: even if you don’t take notes, you can then remember the conditions. I kept a notebook in order to remember the conditions. During the face [choreography] session, Hijikata said he felt that “dance people” don’t use facial expression because it’s not sophisticated or classy, it is seen as vulgar or indelicate: but he wanted Butoh to have precisely those qualities. DSB: MY:

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So Hijikata was interested in using the face to dance? Yes, he did want to use the face, especially after AsbestosKan began to be used for performances, because in this space, the performers were close to the audience. The performers were simply told to twist their face like a towel or contract all the skin to one single place: only the face is moving, there is no head movement, although for some forms, for example manto hihi (the hamadryas baboon, a relative of the gorilla) face, Hijikata demanded that students use the body as well. The “ink spot” exercise that I teach is an exercise from Hijikata, which I found in one of my notebooks. Androgyny is a defining feature of Shomen no Issho embodied in your character that seems very gender-fluid. Did Hijikata discuss femininity or gender with you? The androgynous quality of this piece was not a choreographic intention specific to Shomen no Issho. I was already famous for being androgynous amongst Asbestos-Kan people, outside of this work, and so Hijikata adapted the choreography and stylistic aspects of the work to my existing androgynous persona.

92  Structure: The Students DSB: MY:

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Was there any text linked to Shomen no Issho? There was no text: nobody knew what this performance would be about. Hijikata maybe spoke about it a little, but no themes were discussed: there was no analytical aspect presented for us students to consider. After the practice, we would drink together and then Hijikata was interested in what people’s thoughts were, and we would have a discussion around issues not only linked to the dance but also to our lives. Hijikata’s mind moved so quickly. In one scene around 27 minutes into the piece there is a movement which seems to incorporate breathing. Was there any focus or choreography linked to breath? Hijikata never talked about how to breathe, or how to use the breath. About the actual staging of Shomen no Issho: – The music creates an incongruous contrast to the dance; it seems light and frivolous, like music from a soap opera series or an advert. Did you rehearse with the music or was it decided later in the process? – The dress that you wear as a costume is a dark colour at the beginning and light or perhaps white at the end.46 You also wear a very “sci-fi” looking head-dress. Can you talk about the meaning of the costume? – The lighting often cuts the dancers off at the neck and creates four headless bodies. As facial expressions seem so important otherwise, was this “beheading” intentional? – What was the aim of the moving rhinoceros panels?47 Hijikata chose the music but didn’t give a reason for his choice. He decided on the music later so we didn’t rehearse with it. Once he put together the movement phrases, then an atmosphere was created, and music was found to fit that feeling. As concerns the rhinoceros, I don’t know. Again, Hijikata chose it and nobody asked why – I didn’t feel it was my place to ask. One thought I have is that the goldfish has scales and Dürer’s rhinoceros has a very hardened skin, or scales, it is more like armour and becoming like a white bone as it hardens. Or maybe after my character leaves the goldfish bowl, the moving (rhinoceros) panels are a metaphor for the knocks I will encounter in society… About the costume: the dress is black and becomes white at the end. The head-dress was a tortoise-shell

Structure: The Students  93

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material, maybe plastic. Again Hijikata decided everything, all of this…like a dictator (he laughs). Takashi Morishita has commented on the importance of the Master-Disciple/Student’ relationship in the creation of Hijikata’s choreographic period and the development of Butoh-fu in the 1970s. How important was this relationship in your experience? What “choreographic imperatives”48 were a part of this relationship: for example, physical disciplines you had to follow or perhaps a diet, certain kinds of behaviour? Were there any repercussions on your life outside the studio? Did Hijikata expect dedication to one master only? Hijikata didn’t want students to dedicate themselves to him, but many already came with a great deal of respect for Hijikata. When I was with him, we had continuous performances, so there was no time to go to other teachers. There were some people who just wanted to perform, but Hijikata stopped the performances after Lady on a Whale String (1976). One by one people left after that, and the female dancers were sent to the cabaret to dance. Kayo Mikami came after that period, and she wasn’t really satisfied with not performing, so she spent time talking with Hijikata. Hijikata would say many things when he was drinking, for example he talked about sharks, and Mikami interpreted this as meaning she shouldn’t stop dancing. How relevant do you think the Master-Disciple/ Student relationship is to the continuing development of Butoh? To trust somebody’s eye is the most important aspect in choosing a master. You want to do something with your body, but the eye that sees is important to the dance. In Butoh, Hijikata gives a material and the dancer brings out a movement, but Hijikata would then mold it with his eye. It’s necessary to have another person to help create the movement. I witnessed many dancers asking people who saw a work, how it was, but many opinions cause confusion. I learned that you can’t ask everybody, you just ask the person who has a good eye. From a Japanese point of view, we don’t feel comfortable with the independence of the artist, it’s safer, and easier in Japan to have a master, to save yourself from being seen as narcissistic or self-aggrandizing.

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There is a time when you need a master, when you’re trying to find out on your own. When you find what you want to do with your art, then you don’t need a master anymore. What could “contemporary Butoh” mean to you in terms of the world and the society we live in today: taking into consideration the attitudes to technology, as well as global movements of people, through migration and travel? How do you think these affect the contemporary body when thinking of Tatsumi Hijikata famously saying that his dance should flaunt its aimlessness to a society too focused on production? The times are completely different from after the war, when people were seeking ways of living. Then, it came from the struggle of old traditional ideas and new modernity, so the grotesque for example, had quite an impact. But now society has matured, so Butoh is not expected to revolt against society. What is important though is how Butoh can be passed to a younger generation as a matured form of dance, but not as a revolt against society. What is important is to present Butoh as a dance form: contemporary Butoh shouldn’t lean on the concepts of revolt, the grotesque, shock, but it should demonstrate how Butoh has also matured, and we have to make clear what can then be passed on. What is the importance of legacy to choreography, considering that words can grant a certain form of immortality to the creator or choreographer in this case? I haven’t created something of a legacy yet but I intend to do so. Perhaps Hijikata thought he’d be remembered as a person who created a new form of dance and he had a desire for this. However making Butoh-fu was not part of a conscious effort towards a legacy. Maybe he thought Yoko Ashikawa would take on the role of developing Butoh notation because she has so many precise notebooks of his process, but she didn’t do that. So the Archive at Keio University aims to develop a Butoh notation as their project, and through Akiko Motofuji’s donation to the Archive.

Structure: The Students  95 A Life of Dance: A Butoh Day Camp with Hiroko and Koichi Tamano 18/02/2012 Thank you for your contact. Today is 18th. Sorry for delay of my reply. We will leave to California on Feb.22nd. So, if you have time on 20th or 21st, noon~2PM. We can give you a small outdoor WS (Butoh Day Camp). Please let us know. (We are at [ Senzoku-Ike] in Tokyo.) Koichi & Hiroko TAMANO ~ Watery grey clouds hung over Tokyo like a layer of stale gelatin as my plane landed. That same day an email arrived: an invitation to a “Butoh Day Camp” with Hiroko and Koichi Tamano. The famous photo immediately formed in my mind: Hijikata wearing an eye-patch, striking a low pose and Koichi Tamano, dressed only in a fundoshi g-string attempting to emulate him. Two days later, I was finding my way through the spaghetti junction of Tokyo’s public transport system for the first time. When I eventually exited at a small station, south west of Gotanda on the Ikegami Line, the map I was holding was clammy with sweat. I had arranged to meet Hiroko at SenzokuIke station. In the corner of my visual field, a pair of red velvet geta thongs flashed out: something told that me she was in the vicinity. Riding on the crest of a rainbow arrangement of skirts and floating scarves, was a small and energetic form, bright vermillion cheeks framed on both sides by the two crescents of smiling eyes and mouth, a sunbird surveying the downcast monochrome of the commuting crowds: it was Hiroko Tamano. She led me away to a nearby apartment block, and within 30 seconds, the lift doors opened out onto the fifth floor. An eerie coolness greeted me. I learned that this was the home of Hisaki Yasuda, a friend of the Tamanos. I entered the spacious penthouse apartment with its large windows overlooking a vast pond, a park, and beyond that, in the far distance, I could see mountains tracing faint outlines in the winter haze. The walls of the main room were richly hung with African prints. Woven cloths covered in geometric patterns were draped all over the sofas and furniture. Djembe drums, marimbas, African banjos, and other assorted stringed, wooden, and skin instruments lay strewn all over the place. I learned that Yasuda is a graphic artist, a musician and instrument-maker, a contemporary and friend of the composer Yas-Kaz (Sato), who himself was an early Butoh collaborator. Camouflaged in this kaleidoscopic scene sat a hunched figure under a mound of electric grey hair; it was the reflection of the light flashing in his small round John Lennon glasses that gave him away. I realized that I was being peered at inquisitively. Koichi Tamano, the previously bald-haired, semi-naked, “bow-legged Nijinsky” (as Hijikata affectionately called him) from the picture, sat coddled up in blankets, warding off the cold of the under-heated apartment.

96  Structure: The Students Hiroko and Koichi are Butoh veterans. Koichi was one of the early dancers who joined the experiments of the 1960s. Hiroko arrived at the AsbestosKan in the 1970s. They both danced in the epic series of performances entitled Twenty Seven Nights for Four Seasons (1972). In the late 1970s, Koichi visited the United States and performed in San Francisco. Allen Ginsburg was in the audience and allegedly was quite taken by the performance. Perhaps, it was this accolade that prompted the Tamanos’ move. They emigrated there, taking Butoh with them to serve it up along with sushi in the Mission district of San Francisco. It may well have been in the kitchen that they learned to cross-pollinate their art, because the Butoh Day Camp that I attended with the Tamanos on 21 February was a real all-rounder. More than just dance, it featured cooking, learning temple, and shrine etiquette, as well as an extraordinary gargling practice. Though I was rather bemused by this Butoh approach at the time, with time, I recognize that Butoh practice quite easily leaks into other aspects of living. Butoh’s perpetual inquiry into how the body negotiates its relations with the world may well expand into “a life of dance”. ~ The first lesson was learning how to wash rice – rinsing it, not once or twice but seven times. Then, swirling it around with your hand in a claw-shaped gesture. I was shown how to use the Japanese rice cooker. And finally, after having cut the nori seaweed sheets very precisely, we rolled the o-nigiri rice balls with salty hands. Hiroko then draped me in a few spare cloths she pulled off the sofa. This attire was for added warmth she said, and soon the three of us headed out – Koichi trailing us at a distance – towards the area of Senzoku-Ike park. We visited the Buddhist temple located at the entrance and then headed towards an impressive crimson red Shinto Shrine located on a small island at the far corner of the pond. Hiroko explained that the temple was dedicated to Saraswati, the Indian deity of music and dance – I didn’t think to ask why a Shinto shrine was built for a Hindu goddess, and I still wonder about it to this day. In front of the temple entrance, Hiroko demonstrated the Shinto bowing ritual called ni-rei ni-hakusyu ichi-rei – two bows, two claps, one bow – and then rang the clattering brass bell suspended above the entrance steps. The next exercise of the day-camp was to spread ourselves out on the dusty area at the front of the shrine to perform “Life of Dance”. This is a sequence of movements which Hiroko barely explained to me, but that she expected me to follow from her and Koichi’s example. It resembled a Tai Chi form. And so the three of us danced in front of the shrine for some time, under the sidelong glances of passers-by, who were obviously intrigued but dared not make eye-contact with our garish trio. Hiroko wandered off at some point. She came back again having located an appropriate spot for the next part of the day’s lesson. She summoned us right up to the bank of the pond where some long bamboos were growing that acted as a screen, concealing us a little.

Structure: The Students  97 She handed each of us a small bottle of water that she’d prepped at the apartment. This was the “gargling” lesson. My instruction was again to follow their example. We took large gulps of water and swished it around our mouths. The water was salty: according to Hiroko, this would help us sense “the depth and breadth of our throat”. She called it “gargling through the chakras”. The groans of our digestive tracts rose like a ventriloquist’s composition, and again I noticed the covert attention we were attracting from other earthly creatures, humans, turtles, and perhaps even the gods of the shrine. Whether it was suppressed inner laughter, or my chakras responding to this exercise, I felt rather warm and fuzzy as we walked back in the cold sunlight. Making steaming ginger coffee was the final lesson. These were served in the icy kitchen with its rattling windows. As she had done all day, Hiroko spoke constantly – the opposite of Koichi who remained silent. She shared a haphazard collage of Butoh memories, life advice, and random thoughts and questions which she never seemed to expect an answer to. The stream of words just flowed on regardless of my attempts to react or respond. I was quite happy to listen and observe my effervescent new friend. Suddenly she instructed me to take notes. I obliged and pulled out my pen and blank notebook, happy to become her scribe. Butoh dance now really needs to speak to audiences of all ages, from young children seeing performance for the first time, to older viewers whose own wisdom from life experience can reveal a totally different perspective of the same work. She announced this statement slowly as if dictating. More than anything “Butoh needs entertainment!” she insisted looking me in the eyes. Koichi sat in a corner of the living room, glancing up at us from time to time – was he suspicious and wary, or was he longing for inclusion and his poor English was an obstacle? I couldn’t tell because at that moment, the colours of the setting sun were again reflecting in his shiny spectacles hiding his expression: I have no idea what he was thinking. He quickly lowered his glance, back towards his lap, and the other more pressing task he was engrossed in: that of harpooning pieces of pink octopus tentacles out of a plastic container with a wooden toothpick. I was very flattered when Hiroko nicknamed me her “Spring Goddess”. She would prove to be my fairy godmother. As the day concluded and I was about to leave, we lingered next to a large houseplant hanging in the arch between the kitchen and the living area. Hiroko was examining its leaves and suddenly she turned to me: “Do you like plants? Can you take care of them?” She fired the two questions at me and again, without waiting for my reply, she continued her train of thought. If I did like plants, I might be able to stay in this apartment while Mr Yasuda was away in Hong Kong. My fingers began to twitch with excitement. The thought of having a place to live during my stay was already making me yearn to plunge my arms straight into

98  Structure: The Students the soil. The fact was that I hadn’t arranged any accommodation in Tokyo, beyond my Couchsurfing host’s initial welcome, and this was about to run out. In a short second, Hiroko was convinced by her brainwave. She took a selfie photo of the two of us and sent it off to Yasuda along with a message giving me her highest praise and recommendation. Two days later, I was back at the flat, rolling my large suitcase behind me. I entered the empty apartment – by now the Tamanos had returned to Berkeley, California. I took up solitary residence and my Tokyo life began. ~ Some months later, it was in that very same kitchen that I sat down with Nobuo Shiga, a Tokyo-based art and dance critic with a particular interest in Butoh dance. By that circularity of coincidence, Shiga had interviewed Koichi Tamano in that same apartment, a few weeks before I met the Tamanos in February that year. Shiga and I had been introduced at a Butoh performance and when I told him where I was living – he also knew Mr Yasuda – he suggested that we work together on translating the interview he’d done with Koichi Tamano. There, under the watchful eye of that very auspicious houseplant, we did just that.

Structure: The Students  99 Half a Century of Butoh: Koichi Tamano Speaks to Nobuo Shiga Based on a conversation between Koichi Tamano and Nobuo Shiga Translation assistance: Dominique Savitri Bonarjee49 ~ He was the first student of Tatsumi Hijikata and very well known in the 1970s. But now in Japan, he is less known, this is because from 1979 until this year, 2012, he lived in the United States. He is memorable for his performance in “The Palace Soars in the Sky”, a show which Kazuo Ohno created in 1993. He also danced in the show at Ise Shrine with the musician Kitaro. Into Butoh

The point at which I entered into the world of Butoh was when Tatsumi Hijikata danced in a duet at the Show Club (a cabaret) where I was working when I was 18 years old. Backstage, Hijikata told me to come to his studio. So I went to the Asbestos-Kan where there were many beautiful women, so I’d go there every day! The style of the class at that time was barre exercises, a technique from ballet, also jazz dance, cha-cha, and mambo. Mr Hijikata had a very good physical discipline and he was very skilled at jazz. After a few days, I went to dance in a cabaret in Asakusa with Akira Kasai and Akiko Motofuji. Mr Kasai was a student at Meiji Gakuin University near Meguro. Mrs  Motofuji, Hijikata’s wife, was a judge in modelling shows, so there were always many beautiful women around her. There were a great deal of large-scale cabarets with a capacity of a 1,000 people (or more) and many artists who are famous today, began their careers in these cabarets. Why did Hijikata start doing cabaret? Because somebody who had seen one of his Butoh shows invited him to create a “Love Butoh” with a slightly erotic style, for a cabaret in Ueno. It was very well paid. So I went on a tour of the whole of Japan with Tomiko Takai as well as other troupes that were dancing with Ishii Mitsutaka. Mr Hijikata had three or four troupes…and before entering into the dance world, Yoshito Ohno was a conga player in the cabaret. The costume was always in the style of jazz dance with black trousers or a short skirt and high heels for the women. Mr Kasai, however, was always dressed as a woman in these shows. I would always bring the music score to the musicians: one tune was the national anthem of Malaysia, but I wasn’t aware of this fact. Later, I went to Malaysia and I was going  to  dance with this music but the producer said no, and eventually I realized. Later, the dancers began to cover themselves in gold powder, and moving in the style of Nijinsky, and the female dancers were naked in the “showdances”: it became more and more like Butoh.

100  Structure: The Students Rose-Coloured Dance (Barairo Dansu)

My first show was Barairo Dansu (Rose-Coloured Dance) in 1965, and Natsuyuki Nakanishi was the artist who painted female genitalia on my back: my head was shaved in order to create the shape of a penis. At the premier, there were many artists from the Neo-Dada movement who were also in the show: Sho Kazakura was shaved, Genpei Akasegawa had created a scenographic painting showing specific points of the body, and Yasunao Tone, a musician (and later a member of Fluxus), created the music with the sound of drops of water. Mr Kasai and Mr Ishii danced like the embryo in the womb. After that, Kazuo Ohno and Hijikata danced a homosexual duet. Mr Yoshito (Ohno) was beating his stomach and his body was becoming pinker and pinker, perhaps that was the rose-coloured dance (he laughs). It was also the space for a “ceremony for the dead”, and Mr Akasegawa had used a white piece of cloth to hide other students who were also on stage. There was also a dog figurine by Nakanishi. My second show was Tomato: I was upside down, feet in the air with women’s panties on my head. I was also in Mitsutaka Ishii’s Butoh Genet as well as Tomiko Takai’s Keiji-Jogaku (Pata-Physics). My costume was a pair of diving goggles placed in between my thighs. In another performance, I was a waiter on roller skates. I have a memory that Mr Yukio Mishima, the famous author, saw these shows. The majority of the audience of Barairo Dansu were foreigners (from the embassies). Hijikata’s strategy was to invite foreigners. But he himself never left Japan. Then Hijikata found Yoko Ashikawa. She and Saga Kobayashi came to the Asbestos-Kan. All the dancers danced in the nighttime cabaret. After that, at 1 am, they would train until dawn. The training was very strict. Hijikata choreographed Yoko Ashikawa and then she began to dance. I would really like Ms Ashikawa to come back to the stage now to show her Butoh in public again. In 1972, Hijikata choreographed me in the piece Nagasukujira (Fin Whale/ Balaenoptera Physalus) and then I created the group Harupin Ha so as not to depend on Hijikata anymore. In the United States

Masanobu Yoshimura, an artist (founder of Japanese Neo-Dada), organized a union of artists in the Matogrosso Gallery in Shinjuku. It wasn’t really a union but rather a network of artists, so we did exhibitions together throughout the whole of Japan and I would participate as a dancer. The San Francisco Arts Council invited us to do an exhibition. So in 1976, I went to America. I danced in music clubs as an opening act for punk-rock bands. I also went into the gay community and taught workshops: more and more men would invite me to dance.

Structure: The Students  101 At the San Francisco Contemporary Arts Museum, I danced at the opening of sculptor, Isamu Noguchi’s exhibition. It was an installation with a large shoji (a door made of paper), which was about the size of four and a half large tatami mats, in other words very big. There was also a wall of bamboos and a mosquito net. But the floor was marble so I had a wooden pathway built. Some older guy told me “no” I couldn’t do this: it was in fact Isamu Noguchi! He frustrated me with many demands, so I had to say to him “This is my dance”. When he saw my show though, we became friends. So I went to see him in New York and also in Japan. One day he wrote me a letter saying, “I would like to see you”, but a week later he died. The first time I danced with the musician Kitaro was only for a few minutes during one of his concerts. After that, we did a tour of the United States, and in Japan we collaborated in a show at Ise Shrine (the great shrine of Wakayama, the largest belonging to the Japanese Emperor). In the United States, I met many people: the poet, Allen Ginsberg; Bill Graham, the rock producer who organized an AIDS benefit charity concert where there were 8,000 people; Laurie Anderson; Philip Glass, etc. When Bill Graham died, 100,000 people attended the concert. The translator Slava Ranko helped me a lot with translation: he had lived in Japan for a long time and translated the oldest Japanese literature, called kojiki, as well as Yukar Aino (the legends of the Ainu, an ancient Japanese civilization of Hokkaido). Mr Ranko played the biwa, a Japanese instrument. At the time of his death, he was the president of the Translation Association of the United States. Mr (Francis Ford) Coppola also asked me to act in one of his films, etc. There were many opportunities. At the Sushi Restaurant

When I arrived in the United States, at first I did part-time work as a carpenter or painter-decorator. But there was a visa problem; in order to obtain a work visa, it was a good idea to work in a Japanese restaurant. So I worked in a Japanese restaurant in Canada, and then in San Francisco. In 1995, I opened my own sushi restaurant in San Francisco in the black area of Mission. I stayed in Mission two years before opening a restaurant in the middle-class area, which I ran for three years. At the same time, I would teach workshops in Japan. Now it’s nearly 30 years since I left Japan and as concerns Butoh, it’s been nearly 50 years that I’ve been dancing Butoh. Now I’ve closed my restaurant and I’m returning to Japan. The Future of Butoh

In the United States, in Seattle, Colorado, New York, Arizona, there are Butoh festivals. There are also some in Latin America in Mexico and in Chile,

102  Structure: The Students as well as in Europe (in France), in Paris, and in Germany. But in Japan, there is only the Kazuo Ohno Festival. I am going to create a festival to Hijikata based around the day of his death, dedicated to his memory, and in this way, I can create a meeting space for international dancers. It is my ambition. Internationally, Noh, Kyogen, Kabuki, and Butoh are known as the arts that represent Japan, but the first three are traditional performing arts. In other words, in contemporary times, there is only really Butoh. The origin of Butoh is in Japan but there is no theatre festival for letting international dancers come in, and it’s a real pity. Little by little, I want to create a more international direction for Butoh. I would like to teach young people and to train Butoh dancers. Notes 2 Koichi Tamano is a bit of an exception here as he was already dancing with Hijikata in the 1960s and continued to do so in the 1970s as he recounts to Nobuo Shiga. 4 Takashi Morishita, Hijikata Tatsumi’s Notational Butoh. An Innovational Method for Butoh Creation (Tokyo: Keio University Art Center, 2015). 5 See Chapter 2 in André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance : Performance and the Politics of Movement (London ; New York: Routledge, 2006).



10 Morishita, Hijikata Tatsumi’s Notational Butoh. An Innovational Method for Butoh Creation, 25. 11 Morishita, 14. 12 Morishita, 21.

Structure: The Students  103 15 Morishita, Hijikata Tatsumi’s Notational Butoh. An Innovational Method for Butoh Creation, 57. 16 Morishita, 51.

20 Morishita, Hijikata Tatsumi’s Notational Butoh. An Innovational Method for Butoh Creation, 25. 21 Morishita. 22 Morishita. 23 Morishita, 30. 24 Nanako Kurihara, The Most Remote Thing in the Universe:Critical Analysis of Hijikata Tatsumi’s Butoh Dance. (Ann Arbor: UMI dissertation services, 1996). 25 Kurihara, 153. 27 Waguri. 29 Morishita, Hijikata Tatsumi’s Notational Butoh. An Innovational Method for Butoh Creation, 25. 30 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (New York: Vintage Books, 2017), 79. 34 Morishita, Hijikata Tatsumi’s Notational Butoh. An Innovational Method for Butoh Creation, 46–47.



104  Structure: The Students 40. Hijikata, Tatsumi. ‘Inner Material/Material’. TDR/The Drama Review 44, no. 1 (March 2000): 36. 41 An alternative translation of this quote can be found in Hijikata, Tatsumi. ‘To Prison’. TDR/The Drama Review 44, no. 1 (March 2000): 44.



3

Dispersion The Mavericks

Figure 3.1

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112211-4

106  Dispersion: The Mavericks Expanding Butoh: Dispersion, Diffusion, Migration Along this journey, the year 1968 comes up again and again, an important timestamp in the history of Butoh. It marks a turning point after which Butoh’s trajectory changed irrevocably. It was nine years since Butoh’s genesis with Kinjiki, the year of Tatsumi Hijikata’s solo Nikutai no Hanran, and also the year that resulted in Hijikata’s four-year absence of self-reflection which ended with his resurgence in 1972, equipped with the new choreographic technique of Butoh-fu. After that first process of emergence, early collaborators had already begun to scatter, many moving on to develop their own artistic practices (Natsu Nakajima and Akira Kasai for example). This tendency would continue into the 1970s and 1980s, leading to an eventual dissemination of Butoh sentiment along diverse strands through the practice of other dance artists. Butoh had been wild and unwieldy when Hijikata first conceived of it. It was through the body of Kazuo Ohno that it was birthed into existence (the reason why Kazuo Ohno is considered the co-founder, the “mother” of Butoh). In July 1968, in a conversation with the novelist, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, one of Butoh’s earliest supporters, Hijikata was obviously ruminating on what this “offspring” had achieved so far. Shibusawa already hinted at possible prodigal interpretations of Butoh and the potential risk of its dilution, when he asked Hijikata: “When you read poetry or look at paintings, you’re likely to say: “This is Butoh”. Does that mean that anything at all can be Butoh?”1 Hijikata replied by inventing a new and memorable term, Butoh-sei, translated as “Butoh quality”2 also translated as “Butô-ness”3 – what I just called “Butoh sentiment”. As Hijikata puts it, Butoh-sei sounds like a totalizing gesture meant to cover every possibility for Butoh: After all, since ancient times solemn ceremonies have gone smoothly only with the help of dance. Paintings, too, are created by human beings and reveal their ultimate “Butoh quality” (Butoh-sei). Really, it can be seen by anyone. But people stick to their own little world, their own particular genre and lose sight of it. Lots of people are now calling for an end to genres, but if they would just apply the idea of ‘Butoh ­quality’ (Butoh-sei) to everything, the problem would be totally resolved.4 In this grand sweep, Hijikata conveys a fascinating allure for Butoh, as a principle whose plasticity would mean “an end to genres”, because potentially, Butoh-sei could be applied to anything and everything. However, it would be wishful thinking to imagine that wrapping Butoh in this vague indeterminate quality could solve the problem of genres and categories (in society, in culture, etc.); or to think that someone encountering such a vital artform might be thrust out of their “little world” of home and habit. It’s possible

Dispersion: The Mavericks  107 to interpret his statement as further obfuscating Butoh, making it ever more murky and unidentifiable. But the generosity of Hijikata’s Butoh-sei did in fact hold a creative charge. ~ In this section, I turn to some of the “maverick artists” of Butoh, Ko Murobushi and Masaki Iwana. I sought these dancers out because I was curious about the dispersion phase of Butoh, which would also be its diffusion. A brief explanation of the terms. In physics, dilution on the one hand is a process of weakening of a solute and dissolution is when the solute’s particles disintegrate. Diffusion on the other hand is when the particles of the solute disperse and spread through a solvent without losing their atomic structure. In French, the word diffusion also has the meaning of a transmission that expands the reach of a message beyond the particular location of its communication – a radio broadcast for example. Expansion as I intend it here can also be compared to the distinction Henri Bergson makes between the “possible” – the immediate surroundings – and the “virtual” – an unknown radius of reach.5 These two dancers have certainly spread Butoh quality. In order to get closer to their role in the dispersion phase of Butoh, I will linger a little longer on Butoh quality, by imagining this conversation between Hijikata and Shibusawa as having released an imperceptible detonation of energy into the atmosphere, whose unknown resonances might well have been conducive to Butoh’s diffusion and eventual dispersion. ~ When Hijikata, as a young man, was thrust out of the “little world” of Tohoku, his expulsion would sprout the seeds of Butoh. The next “little world” to breach would be the “underground art” milieu, which he considered “mere trendiness”6 when externally (superficially) motivated. His critical attitude towards his artistic contemporaries also afforded him distance and the space that allowed his own dispersion beyond what he perceived as the “desert” of the art scene of the times. His strategy of being the perpetual outsider meant that he was in a position from which he could keep inventing and pushing Butoh without being categorized or pinned down by identifying with a particular established “-ism”. Up till 1968 and before his Butoh-fu phase, Hijikata enacted this kind of dispersion by consistently scuttling away into the darkness, to embody his own explanation that, “Butoh dancers have got to position their bodies so that no one is able to guess their next movement”.7 Hijikata’s solo (Rebellion of the Body: Tatsumi Hijikata to the Japanese) performed in October 1968, was a direct confrontation between his irreverence towards Western dance and his revolt against Japanese national identity, perhaps in equal measure. When he spoke to Shibusawa just a few months before that, he was bristling with disdain not just for the avant-garde art scene (perhaps a reason why he would embrace stage arts in the 1970s) but

108  Dispersion: The Mavericks he also lay into all the other institutions that “control the body”, flipping between frustration and his legendary obtuseness. Finally, he concluded the exchange by claiming he didn’t have “a vision”.8 No vision after having spent nine frenetic years engendering (Ankoku) Butoh? Whether he felt he had a vision or not, this ineffable Butoh-sei – Butoh quality – that he articulated in this conversation was compelling enough to unleash a seism, which would gather its full force over the coming decade, to only become perceptible when the maverick dancers began to disperse beyond the little world of Japanese Butoh. ~ The word “ineffable” is somewhat similar in meaning to (Bergson’s) “virtuality”, mentioned earlier – not something abstract but real, just too slippery to grasp. The translation of Butoh-sei as “Butô-ness” exudes a certain grandiosity. It immediately evokes certain core Buddhist principles – being-ness and nothing-ness. Take beingness – tathata in Sanskrit – translated as suchness or thusness. Tathata is a difficult thing to translate because it is not a concept, rather it aims to transmit the mystery of being-ness itself, before it is conceptualized as language or thought. The word tathata is an attempt to apprehend the changing, morphing nature of ultimate reality through language, and so it is a designation9 rather than a name (as such). The difficulty of naming the phenomenon of being is what leads to vague terms like thusness and suchness: because, how should one articulate the ultimate nature of reality? When Hijikata speaks of “ultimate ‘Butoh quality’”10 I immediately hear such an attempt to name the unnameable. What if the very unnameability of something drives that thing’s own desire to be named, in other words being nameless is a force of liveliness, aliveness even? Without a name, a free agent – a body freed from a “particular genre”, or a readymade identity – is capable of erring beneath the surface of known things, to tempt the unknown. Hijikata’s dis-identification with the artistic field surrounding him and his search for that ineffable something, that he designated Butoh-sei, did not however tempt him to heed his own call: he returned to the stage in 1972 with a new incarnation of Butoh, much more  nameable because of his authorial takeover. But it did reach others who interpreted Butô-ness as the need for true revolution at the very core of identity: they were seduced by the challenge of encountering the unnameable. They were Masaki Iwana and Ko Murobushi, both of whom pursued Butoh’s revolt far beyond the borders of Japan’s clot of islands. In doing so they grew Butoh by further dispersing its seeds. Iwana and Murobushi encountered Hijikata at different times, and each dancer only spent a very brief period following Hijikata’s studio work at Asbestos-Kan. Masaki Iwana worked with Hijikata in 1971 when he was a member of the theatre company Ningen za (Theatre of Humanity). Much

Dispersion: The Mavericks  109 later, in 1983, he participated in a piece Hijikata had choreographed with Min Tanaka11 and some other dancers. Murobushi entered the AsbestosKan in 1969 and studied there with Hijikata, over a period of 18 months, before going off to develop his own dance. Despite these brief encounters, they proved intensely meaningful to these two dancers’ lives. Both would eventually set out to wander along paths of existential exile, far from the familiar world of Japan, on something of a quest to “reveal their ultimate Butoh quality”.12 Dispersion would happen through the perpetual outsiderness that often comes from migration and which can be truly nourishing – I know because I experienced that same “outsiderness” when I exiled myself to Japan. Their journeys beyond the little world of their birth and origins allowed these dancers to un-home themselves,13 and induce conditions for a state of constant otherness within their own bodies. For Iwana and Murobushi, unhomeliness (unheimlichkeit) precipitated these vital acts of migration which allowed them to develop their Butoh quality, and ultimately their own Butoh dance. Iwana and Murobushi are considered amongst the most accomplished dancers of their generation, remaining active and relevant up till their death. They initially dispersed along parallel trajectories: both landed in France. Masaki Iwana found his base in South Normandy where he established La Maison du Butô Blanc. Alongside teaching regular workshops, he also produced annual dance festivals at La Maison over many years and gradually moved towards independent film-making. Ko Murobushi first went to Yamagata prefecture to follow ascetic retreats with the Yamabushi mountain monks. After this, he also headed to France. There, he led a more itinerant existence, presenting his work in solo at times, at other times with the female group Ariadone, which he founded in 1974 with fellow dancer Carlotta Ikeda, and sometimes also with the male group Sebi which he founded in 1976. The conversations that follow with Iwana and Murobushi reveal the significance their dispersion of Butoh had on their lives and their artistic process. I have included my encounters with Akira Kasai in this section. Kasai was one of the early collaborators of Butoh, like Yoshito Ohno and Natsu Nakajima. And like both of them, he also worked with the two founders – Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. But already in the 1960s, he distanced himself and in 1968, he was vocally critical of Hijikata’s work, Nikutai no Hanran.14 Kasai moved his whole family to Germany in 1979 to study Rudolf Steiner’s Eurythmy. When he returned to Japan, he also returned to Butoh, fusing it with Steiner’s method to create his own original dance approach in yet another mutation of Butoh.

110  Dispersion: The Mavericks

Figure 3.2 Masaki Iwana at Kid-Ailack Hall (2012). Photo: Dominique S. Bonarjee.

“You have to sacrifice yourself”: Masaki Iwana One thing I immediately noticed when I first met Masaki Iwana in June 2012 was that his teaching was different from the Butoh lessons I’d encountered till then. I didn’t know what it was exactly, but it was something about his presence, especially his gaze. He witnessed his students’ dancing with an unfaltering attention and the expectation of absolute bodily truth. If he thought otherwise, he would simply state, “you are lying!” “Lying” as I understand it was an accusation that you were being an imposter in your own body. On the very last workshop I attended with him in August 2018, he gave it a more telling twist. “Do not treat your body like an employee” was his feedback to our dancing, another way of saying “you are lying”. These words reveal that his gaze was looking for more than just truth in dance, he was looking for truth in society at large, through dance. I’d heard many rumours about Masaki before I met him. Perhaps it was due to the roughness of his lifestyle in rural France, but I heard he too was tough, ruthless, rude even, that he could break a dancer, humiliate them. I was nervous when I attended that first workshop held at Kid Ailack Hall in Medaimae, Tokyo. I wanted to be prepared for the workshop so I began

Dispersion: The Mavericks  111 to read some of his writings at the Hijikata Archive, specifically his book The Intensity of Nothingness (2011). It was his writing that brought the question of contemporary Butoh to my attention. He had written that Butoh’s contemporaneity must be considered through its capacity to go “beyond the reach of styles, schools or labels”.15 I found these words arresting, as I heard in them my exact motives for pursuing the path of Butoh – as a way to create beyond the scope of names, identities and -isms. It made me realize how much my own deeply personal endeavour of undoing identity, was (nonconsciously) guiding me in my art practice. His words ignited my curiosity, I needed to speak to him. My muteness – from being outside of (Japanese) language – dissipated. When I met him in person, he was a softspoken and obviously sensitive being, very elegantly dressed, his movements intriguingly light and graceful. His deference towards me was a real surprise: he had in fact been afraid of me he admitted. He’d noticed from my registration that my name was French, and he was nervous and concerned about his French not being of an adequate standard. He seemed to blush when he told me this: any of Masaki’s students reading this will know exactly what I mean. After five days, I could feel the love one develops for one’s teacher, and how it opens up the path towards a lasting and committed relationship of learning. He kindly agreed to answer my questions on the last day of the workshop, and so it was there in the basement bar of Kid Ailack Hall where we sat together for that “transmission”. Meeting Masaki was also the turning point for me because that first interview ultimately led to the next nine conversations included in this volume. ~ Kid Ailack Hall, June 16, 2012

Masaki Iwana:

There are three essential aspects for defining Butoh dance: a Whether or not you are dancing your interior landscape. b If you can dance “dark intentions” (akwi). I mean to dance completely, not only the positive aspects of life. Contemporary dance occupies the positive and Hijikata (Tatsumi) chose the darkness. Butoh goes against aesthetic beauty and explores disability, handicap, and illness.

112  Dispersion: The Mavericks c If the dancer can develop a personal method. In contemporary dance on the other hand, there is a hierarchy of form, and there is a benchmark. When Hijikata developed Butoh, it was during very chaotic times, and as such he was facing his own times. Contemporary Butoh must take into account the present times in which it is situated. “Butoh-ist” is a term that Fumiaki Nakamura (a poet and Butoh researcher) used to describe a Butoh dancer. Butoh is an artistic path which one must decide to take. Perhaps the younger generation interprets Butoh in a different way. DSB: You said in your writings that you transformed your body into an “object”. Why was it important in your process as an artist to make this transformation and is it something you still do in your dancing? And what do you mean by “Total Body”? MI: The “Total Body” is the whole body including memories, intelligence, habits of the body.  

 

DSB: MI: DSB:

When you stated your intention of “turning my body into an artistic medium”, how do you do this? What is your process when you develop a piece? The body is the raw material of Butoh. I used to have more of a fixed structure or choreography in my work, but nowadays it is always improvisation. In your work, there is an emphasis on stage appearance, in that the costume should be “a personal betrayal”, a means “to turn oneself inside out”. But you also advocate dancing naked or by creating costumes that reveal the body in an unexpected or subversive way. Clothing and costumes are heavily saturated with signs; the naked body is as well. What are your thoughts on costumes and other stage scenography, bearing in mind the role of the audience?

Dispersion: The Mavericks  113 MI:

DSB: MI: DSB: MI: DSB:

MI:

DSB:

MI:

The costumes, the music, the audience, are not there to amplify the dance, but rather to create a contrast with it. It can be an attack. There is an exchange between the artist and the audience; there is an oscillation of energy. Tachiani is someone who actively observes, it is important, and critics say that my dance is “difficult”. The dancer can change the rhythm of the audience through the power of their own presence: you have to sacrifice yourself. By active observation do you mean that the audience has to become active in witnessing Butoh? Even refusing the dance is an active choice. What do you think of the notion of transcendence in Butoh, is this even possible? I don’t think it’s possible: I am very objective, Butoh dance is a mechanism. We are completely different from the shamans: Butoh is not a shamanic dance. You use the term “readymade” stating that Butoh “demanded a philosophical uprooting which categorically refutes all modes of readymade ‘culture’”. Can you imagine a link between Butoh  – with regards to dance and the body – which could be compared to Duchamp’s idea of the readymade, thinking specifically about the change in perception that art can induce, in this case, art as dance? Pina Bausch, Hijikata Tatsumi, Marcel Duchamp transformed daily life by inserting something into the slit of the readymade. By doing this they transformed something ordinary into something significant. Taiga Ikeno, a Japanese painter, did something similar with his paintings. We have to find a new aspect of the body. The readymade in the case of the body, is the body of daily life. We therefore have to discover things in a new way like Ikeno did and rediscover the body, as if for example it had been released from the ropes and knots of kinbaku.17 There are many words for “body” in Japanese: nikutai, shintai, karada are some of them. Hijikata’s focus was on the nikutai (the meat body). Can you talk about the importance of the term nikutai versus the shintai in your Butoh process? What do you mean when you say: “difficulties Butoh dancers are often faced with are related to the difficulties of realizing nikutai”?18 Nikutai is the body that can transform; the interior landscape. Shintai is the biophysical body (nerves, muscles, tendons). For example in the work of Pina

114  Dispersion: The Mavericks Bausch, the shintai is dancing. They (the dancers) move through the biophysical body and the interior landscape does not emerge – except perhaps Pina Bausch’s own interior landscape. The movement of the dancers remains within the contemporary dance form, which makes use of the shintai. Hijikata in fact changed the definition of the nikutai, because in Japanese it is closer to the meaning of “flesh”. He is the one who gave the term nikutai to Butoh and in it the meaning of interior landscape and therefore of the body that can transform. Hijikata also changed the meaning of butoh, which in Japanese means a “dance step”, a definition that could also include “flamenco” for example. It is Hijikata who gave Butoh the meaning we understand today.

Dispersion: The Mavericks  115 Spinning Threads of Nothingness “Slightly travelling on a sea, until lungs become blue” a dance haiku by Masaki Iwana. Walking towards the place where the dance begins – “not directly at the centre and not too close to the viewers” as he would advise – is not walking. Separation from the everyday body, made invisible by habit, is imminent: already the torpor of the flesh drags. But you can’t retract because something is pulling you, piercing your soft tissues at the point where moist air gathers in the little crevasse just below your nose. Through that slit you are being stretched between the past – a moment ago – and the presence of right now, towards the spot where you arrive and settle to wait for the dance. And as you do, you begin to feel the textures of the old barn approaching: all the grooves and scratches are like knife edges sharpening themselves on your skin. Imagine that this masonry is your gravestone: only this can induce the metamorphosis. You breathe into that groove above your lip. It rips open; a fish caught on a hook that tears through your flesh every time you gulp for air. You accept your conviction: you must stand up, rediscover your feet, your limbs, your gills. “Do nothing is best”; do not look for the sea. Be still until stillness nabs you in the teeth, drowns your tongue in bile. The bitterness will make you swim or flail or do whatever it takes to “travel slightly upon the sea”. Realize that attached to the hook, is a string of muon-sized beads. They extend through your soft palate into deep time, deep space. With the unknown partner at the other end of the thread, you are conjoined in a secret fluidity. The water rises to waist level, and the sand banks of the room are closing in. The skylight above is darkening. The scene below becomes clouded and ochre grey. Our dark shadows shiver, ancient ghosts facing an eternal sentence, again and again: to move without moving, to dance without intending to. And right then, a blade slices under the ball and heel of the foot; one clean gash dividing the floor from the sole. Falling, falling – ’s’effondrer’ is the name of this dance. A dance of taut muscle fibres tenderized by the sudden ability to glide and slide, with succulence. This is falling in the way the waves break, not vertically, but diagonally, haphazardly. Dance the liquid odyssey of an astronaut who tried to re-enter the universe through the soft creamy belly of a star-fish and could only advance by kissing every rock with her entire body. Memories of the Last Workshop, La Maison du Butô Blanc, August 2018

~

116  Dispersion: The Mavericks “Do nothing is enough … do nothing is best!” How many times have I heard Masaki’s mantra? Whether uttered in admonishment or advice, Masaki has definitely gotten more gentle over the years. “Doing nothing” is our labour inside the cool interior of the studio. Under Masaki’s gaze, I have waited, I have yearned, to abide, with my body, beyond boredom, with patience, and eventually with betrayal: how could I free my body from being my “tool”? Only by letting nothingness enter me, would I allow the space to come into being, so that dance would bloom. When Masaki Iwana moved to France in the 1980s, he purchased a crumbling old farmhouse in the small village of Réveillon, in South Normandy. The scale of the compound made it quite impossible to maintain; it was a ramshackle arrangement. I once slept in a large unheated barn accessed by a ladder, with holes in the roof. There was no bedding and the mattress was so ancient I think it was made of straw. Learning with Masaki meant accepting discomfort, even welcoming it. The cold, the dilapidation, the absolute lack of “mod cons” meant that if you attended his classes, you had to plunge your hands in the dirt, and share duties – cleaning, cooking, maintenance – all of this was part of the pedagogical transmission. Masaki himself focused his attention on the large dance studio built above his own living quarters, which in later years he shared with his wife Moeno Wakamatsu and their son Ryuto. The dancing barn was a cavernous space, that never got warm, even in summer. This patch of rural France became La Maison du Butô Blanc where Masaki taught seasonal workshops, and produced festivals and performances for many years. The last residential workshop took place in August 2018. One evening during that last workshop, we were sitting outside under the trees, at the long plank that served as a table. We were entering the dessert course of the elaborate communally cooked dinner. Together with my cooking mate, we’d made an “octopus pie” from foraged blackberries (following a recipe from Donna Haraway).19 I had moved up the table to sit nearer to Masaki so that we could continue the thread of Japan versus France chatter that we’d been having for years. He turned to me, his face a little rosy from the wine: “I  hate France!” A pause – he was waiting for my reaction. And then he broke into a smile: “But I hate Japan even more!” he confessed with vigour. And then he asked me if I could describe the trait that makes French people the way they are – of course, these are total generalizations, but this was our banter. My reply: “les français aiment mettre des bâtons dans les roues”, which basically means, “the French are fond of throwing a spanner in the works”. He nodded at my analysis in agreement. I turned the question to him now. He answered with an example. “In Japan people don’t cross the street if the light is red for pedestrians. But if one person dares to cross, then all the others will follow. That’s what the Japanese are like”. We chuckled knowingly. Still, I wondered what kind of ancient karma had driven him to such a quiet corner of this “hated country” for all these years. That evening we laughed with complicity – we understood each other and the positions we’d experienced when we swapped locations. We had both experienced the state of being “in-between” of never belonging in any

Dispersion: The Mavericks  117 place, which makes you have to create an imaginal space to call “home”. Articulating it made it easier to bear which is no doubt why we kept that thread of cultural comparisons going. His manner of telling me these things was always tinged with a discomfort, which I share. I read it as a sign of an existence lived in suspension – neither this (Japanese) nor that (French). That strangeness materializes in the body, and makes it overly salient, uncanny (unheimlich) even, by never allowing the body to disappear into the background. But this in-betweeness also enlivens the body – it is a generative discomfort. In Masaki’s case, it had propelled him through life with courage, determination, and terror. In Masaki’s terror, I recognized the terror of desire, which is the emotional charge of eroticism. This eroticism arises when one’s flesh is so inescapably present, as to be nonhuman, to be alien to one’s (sense of) self. And it is this alien material that one is which drives the artistic oeuvre, rather than the “sense of self”. I know it, because I live it, and it is in Masaki’s notion of the “human as material entity” that I realized what karma had brought me to him. Because he emits and transmits matter’s pure eroticism, in all the anger and the love he gave to those who learned with him. Masaki through his hate was always in love. ~ Once we perceive our body as a material entity, morals, dark intentions, desires, concepts of beauty, life and death, violence and eros become like tiny leaves and are swept along by a torrent into a vortex of the immensely truthful nothingness existing within all the blameless origins of the universe. For dancers this nothingness must have intensity.20 The Intensity of Nothingness, Masaki Iwana Masaki’s method is undoubtedly enmeshed with his life philosophy. At its core is the transmutation of Butô-ness into nothingness; a search for a quality of intense nothingness that arises from real-izing the “body as material entity”. Bringing matter and nothingness into such direct correspondence appears illogical at first: matter is something as opposed to nothing. How could matter reveal nothingness? This is the logic of Masaki’s dance and thoughts; to get to the heart of it you have to crack this riddle. Nothingness is the first koan presented to a student of Zen Buddhism. The koan originates in the Gateless Gate, a 13th-century Chinese compilation of koanic riddles, which became a pedagogical form of transmission in the Chan (the Chinese word translated to Zen in Japan) Buddhist tradition. The koan of nothingness asks whether a dog has Buddha-nature. To this, the student, Zhao Zhou, allegedly replied “mu”. In Japanese, nothingness is mu, which is also the core philosophical concept of the 20th-century Japanese philosophical group called The Kyoto School, founded by Kitaro Nishida (1870–1945). The Kyoto School philosophers perceived the central question of Eastern philosophy to be “what is nothingness?” (in contrast with Western philosophy’s which is “what is being?”).

118  Dispersion: The Mavericks In Sanskrit, nothingness is sunyata: sunyata is the counterpart to tathata – beingness, suchness – as mentioned earlier. You could say it’s like saying the glass is half empty or half full. “Absolute nothingness” as Nishida calls it is not nihilism, it is the grasp of both suchness and nothingness in the same moment – in the “absolute now”.21 This resolution occurs in the field of inter-relations – Nishida calls it basho, space. The space (of nothingness) is where relations between subjects and objects play out, by emptying the self – embodying nothingness – again and again. Masaki didn’t speak of Zen Buddhism overtly (though he did sometimes mention koans); probably like Nishida, he wished to avoid unnecessary “mystical” glossing.22 The “intensity of nothingness” is a method to be ­ practised, rather than theorized, via an endless rumination about the mu koan, through the body. The very name “Butô Blanc” reveals Masaki’s long-term (embodied) philosophical inquiry; Butô Blanc is not a negation of Hijikata’s darkness – Ankoku Butoh. In Masaki’s cosmology, the whiteness, the brightness, is achieved when darkness has been so intensely amplified that a “white sun” rises – the light of total exposure.23 Masaki’s first step was to understand how matter and light interact. At the start of his career, he danced Invisible (1980–1981), a serial performance where he stood naked and still under a skylight, letting his body be transformed by the light’s changing hues and colours. This practice was a way to turn himself into “an object sculpted by nature”.24 Becoming-object was Masaki’s early attempt at finding the otherness within. An otherness that could transport him beyond the body. As an object, he lacked a soul, and by real-izing the object state of his body, he grasped the nihilism of nothingness. But once he’d discovered this stage, he then sought to reinvest matter with soul and emotions. This was the phase of seeking the state of “human as a material entity”. It was through his solo Nama-Nari (Half-Demon, 1985) that he encountered this state.25 As a method, Masaki’s Butô Blanc, is a sort of cartography (of practice) for the journey of nothingness; it goes all the way to the object state of nothingness; then it returns through the more challenging route of the “human as material entity”. Masaki’s method doesn’t stop there; he is keenly aware of how space impacts on inner state. Space must be experienced as a dynamic field of relations between, subject and object, perceiver/witness and perceived/dancer. Dancing only occurs when one is being seen by another: this is fundamental for Masaki, and the key distinction he makes between “movement” and “dance”. Movement is a purely subjective activity; dance only happens at a vital threshold where dialogical relations can unfold. And this “dialogue” can only occur by shifting out of self-consciousness into a state of (non) consciousness that is so molecular (microscopic) that it becomes immense, and perceives all. This is when the body instead of occupying time and space, begins to produce it. The gaze is the portal in Masaki’s metaphysics. Exchange or transference between dancer and audience happens there. But this gaze is not the visual sense belonging to the two physical eyes. It is the third eye that sees. Your third eye looks at a “detached eye”, which is “your

Dispersion: The Mavericks  119 own objective eye”: these (other) two eyes are located at the pineal gland centre and the other at the outermost rim of the space respectively. By maintaining this energetic relation – between the absolute centre and the furthest periphery – the audience becomes held – immersed – in the field created by the dancer: “when your outer skin is quickly shed by facing the audience and you can see another you that is looking at you beyond the audience”.26 This (shifting) field produces time and space. This direct confrontation of the dancer’s (expanded) body, with the viewer/witness, is the source of a psychically charged somatic space, what Masaki calls “realizing nikutai”. Nikutai is the meat body, a Japanese word that has stuck to Butoh since its beginnings (see the preceding interview). The more common term for body in Japanese is karada, which connotes an anatomical understanding of the body; there is also the word shintai which is the institutional or philosophical body. So, realizing nikutai is coming face to face with the (unknown) depths of one’s materiality; that is before this body is co-opted by social role or measurability and knowability. To emphasize this, Masaki makes a distinction between the term “human” and “person”. “Person” is linked to the shintai – the body as a philosophical concept. It is what Masaki calls the readymade body and which he says is the protagonist of modern dance. The Butoh dancer must be ejected from genealogy, society, history, and culture to go beyond personhood and become “the body as a living and changing sculpture fashioned by life itself”.27 ~ Masaki’s vocabulary of transmission is a sort of lexicon of words as container images: for example melting, withering, peeling paint, lotus flower, stagnation, blooming, and rainbow. And sometimes he proposes lines of haiku poetry (as above). Combining words and haikus is his choreographic method. Unlike Hijikata’s Butoh-fu, where often images even describe the transformational phase, in Masaki’s case, the process of metamorphosis between images is the creative work of the dancer’s imagination. It isn’t enough just to dance the images though. Each image exists in a particular experiential dimension of space, approached through Masaki’s core practice of absolute nothingness. The final aspect of Masaki’s dance that I want to touch upon is gender. The requirement of “total openness” (to space and the witness) entails an intense exposure – the white light he associates with Butô Blanc. Such exposure marks the moment when the body-material’s eroticism leaks out. In this case, gender must be explored internally, as opposed to externally (physically). Through his dance, Masaki seeks to attune to both sexual energies (masculine and feminine) that inhabit his (outwardly) male-gendered body. He subverts socially imposed codes from inside the body. Jean Baudrillard in considering the role of “nullity” in art intuits that it “is a secret quality that cannot be claimed by just anyone…The poetic operation is to make Nothingness rise from the power of signs – not banality or indifference toward reality but radical illusion”.28 Masaki’s body unleashes this “radical illusion”: nothingness dismantles gender from a binary sign, making it

120  Dispersion: The Mavericks appear indeterminate, flickering, morphing between through the underlying play of the dualities that animate this human body: a dance of polarities. And dancing liberates Masaki from an external physically male appearance, enabling a fluidity that disentangles him from the conceptual body as sign (the shintai) and consequently liberates the body from gender and even species ­“performativity”: he writes “I don’t need to be a man on stage. I can be a woman, an animal or whatever”.29 ~ These ideas are not philosophical or merely poetic, Masaki did this to, and through, his own body and this is why he understood his method at a visceral level of truth. Perhaps this explains why “he hates France but he hates Japan more”: he exiled himself from the conceptual body of Japanese identity, and maintained his outsiderness from social life, even in France, by choosing a rural existence. His withdrawal may have reduced his chance at global artistic recognition, but it did keep the ground of his creation always uncompromisingly rich and fertile.

Figure 3.3 “Masaki Iwana: The Last Season”: based on a photo Masaki Iwana took of himself in the mirror of his hospital room in the very last days of his life. Pencil drawing on paper, dimensions unknown, Tudi Deligne (2020).

Dispersion: The Mavericks  121 Masaki Iwana as Heard by His Students It was at Kid Ailack Hall, the same art space where I attended my first workshop with Masaki Iwana and then interviewed him in 2012, that he performed Invisible in the early 1980s. In preparation for this publication, I wanted to have a follow-up conversation with him to expand on some of the ideas we’d touched upon in that first exchange and in subsequent lessons I attended with him. He’d agreed. But it was May 2020, the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, and travel restrictions were in place. Masaki and I continued to plan our meeting, hoping rules would ease up. At the time he was also committed to his new feature-length film project, The Music Box of Nyon, scheduled to be filmed over the summer of 2020. The pandemic would also affect that, and the film shoot had to be postponed. Then, over the summer, Masaki began to post news of illness on his Facebook page. Often he posted in Japanese, and I had to ask friends to help me understand. Week after week, the illness was progressing. I was still planning on visiting him at the earliest opportunity, hopefully in October. We were in touch in September, and Masaki warned me that he was extremely weak and had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for October 7th. He said he didn’t want to disappoint my expectations. I didn’t want to be too insistent and decided to let things settle. But I should have been more insistent, or “arrogant” as Masaki often urged me to be. Within ten days, it was too late, the chance to see him again had passed; he was slipping away. He left this world on 11 November 2020 from lung complications linked to asbestos inhalation. No one had realized how serious this sudden illness was and how rapidly he would leave us. The sense of shock and disbelief was widespread amongst his students. We all mourned, albeit in virtual space. I had already prepared the questions I wanted to ask him and sent them to Masaki in July. Now, those questions remained unanswered. It was my friend, the artist Elly Clarke, who suggested I invite Masaki’s students to answer the questions in his place. These questions became a communal space to remember Masaki’s legacy by articulating what our bodies had learned from him. This has been the final work in completing this book; my meeting with Masaki was the beginning of this oral Butoh project and it also marks its end. All quotes from Masaki Iwana’s book The Intensity of Nothingness are referenced at the end. All other quotes in my questions, which I attribute to Iwana, are from my own workshop notes. ~ Question: Please explain what you (Masaki) called “natural rhythm and speed”30 in a material entity, and how it’s different from “intentional rhythm and speed” that you say is “norm-regulated’ in the (institutionalized) person. How do you think we experience these differences? Does each dancer and each material entity have its own particular space and time and rhythm and speed?

122  Dispersion: The Mavericks Answers: Natural rhythm and speed are born in every dancer and every material entity in a completely different way: it is unique. There are many processes already in the body that have their own rhythm and speed: blood circulation, heartbeat, digestion activities, and so on. It’s not about who you are, but about wider phenomena which you cannot completely control. Intentional rhythm and speed are imposed by society’s rules, but most people are not aware of this. Intentional speed is to neglect those inner processes. When we act daily, in society, we have a rhythm and speed that we need in order to survive, by relating to others according to systems and codes that are common and acceptable (to the majority); when we dance, we can validly use other sensitivities of space and time. A “material entity” possesses and follows, by its very nature, a specific rhythm and velocity. Even a person possesses them, but having adapted to the social rules, that are the same for everyone, they acquire a rhythm and speed of movement different from their original ones. First you realize and you accept that you are normregulated, then you come to experience your body as a material entity, then you find your own rhythm and speed. Q:

“A human as a living entity different from a “person” is analogous to matter”.31 You wrote that there is a rivalry between the “speed of consciousness” and the “speed of the body”: how do you recognize it in the person, and how is it different from the material entity?

A:

The person is steeped in intentions because of their social existence; we must break with this level of experience to allow being to emerge as a material entity. The quality of the dance emanation is indeed a different matter and reaches the audience’s being through a different bodymind. We can talk about of how many layers are touched, or rather how many layers are removed?

Every exercise that Masaki taught (“fragrance”, “melting”, “withering”, and “rotting”) was a training to let your body become each subject’s natural rhythm and speed. While truly becoming a process, an entity, an image, a creature, etc., one’s body and spirit (consciousness) are able to synchronize with these inner rhythms and speeds and be moved by them. Every dancer in their dance possesses, creates, and manifests a rhythm and a speed which expresses itself (as a) dance by giving it characteristics. Each process, each entity, or each image or creature has its own rhythm and a speed they evolve, they move with, and they are moved by. These rhythms and speeds – most of the time – do not follow those of modern daily life; they are different from the human use of time as measured by a watch. External speed and rhythm is very different to internal speed and rhythm. How? This opposition refers to the difference between Butoh dance and modern/contemporary dance. When a dancer relies only on movement, without a connection to their “inner landscape” (as in normal contemporary dance),

Dispersion: The Mavericks  123 they lose the possibility to work with their own body’s speed – a speed which differs a lot from moment to moment in a performance. For dancers to “cut off their heads” is a question of forgetting any intention in the use of their body, precisely in order to bring out the rhythm or natural speed – to reinforce interior time – in relation with the environment. Q: You often would say “do nothing is best!” It’s very difficult to do nothing, the desire to dance is related to that intention to do something? How do you do nothing? A: Very difficult? (surprise, smile) This is something very difficult for me: to do nothing. Doing nothing is not easy, but dancing is not easy either. “Do nothing” – the most difficult part. You do nothing, you wait, and the manifestation of something new begins. If you succumb immediately to your desire to dance, you will lose the chance of waking up the sleeping forces inside your body. Doing nothing is not nothing… It is a process consisting not only in cancelling all intentionality in the movement (intentionality = action to be carried out/objective to be achieved in a social context) but also in reducing to the strict minimum, or rendering as quiet as possible, the influence of the environment on the body. It requires a lot of concentration and allows you to develop hypersensitivity and inner time. “Dancing the void” means simply being still but having the predisposition and patience to listen to every single input provided by the body and amplifying them in a state of mind that can shine through and reach the attention of the public. This involves a continuous search to enrich and actualize this apparent immobility and make the emptiness acceptable in the sphere of dance (or artistic expression in general). During this difficult search, it’s better to express little, but to be truthful, rather than something without foundation. There is also a difference between “do nothing” and “do nothing at all”: many students struggle with that. “Do nothing” for me is to be extremely active and at the same time, totally empty and open to the sensations from your body and the external world. I think Masaki also wanted to help new students to begin their dance; it was a great help for me to not lose myself in a lot of movements without power. Desire or will in dance has nothing to do with the intention to do something in the institutional sense of the word. Desire or will rather refers to the movement of life through a material entity; to grasp time and space (moving space). It is not enough to be moved by space – it is necessary to move the space through a certain orientation/direction which is deeply rooted in the relation to the public. There is also a difference between “doing” and “happening”. Things can happen through the body, and the person can be a simple observer. Desire likes novelty. To meet it, one has to go to new places, leaving the known. The

124  Dispersion: The Mavericks intention itself can only be this wish of leaving the known. And then by happening one might discover unknown territories. It’s hard to accept that the fact of simply existing is already enough: “I do not have to do anything to be, to deserve being”. This is also true in dance. Even if I know the strength of it, can desire be present without doing? Being a visual artist and a dancer, the necessity is the same, it’s only in momentarily giving up our own desires – intentions – that those of the work can arise instead. Only in that way, a work of art gains its own life, its own inner logic, and its overall integrity. Otherwise, it is merely a vessel subordinated to its maker’s beliefs and ideas. I believe that this is capital because it is only when a work of art reaches full integrity that it becomes an alterity to the viewer, granting, in reciprocity, their own integrity, as a person, to that spectator. And to be a spectator, in other words, to be the self-aware source of the gaze, is at the root of the process of individuation that defines consciousness and a human life. Now, I don’t think there is any way to ever explain “how to do nothing”, because that is the work of art itself. The history of art can be considered as an endless list of processes and techniques developed by artists of all kinds to let their art exist beyond and despite themselves. Q: “Butoh is a dance of presence”: how is this presence related to the time of the present that is emitted by the dancer? Memories, inner landscapes, desires, and emotion from the past become the habits (gestural/physical habits) of the present? How does presence shift between (what Masaki distinguishes as) “person” and “the human as material entity”? How can presence be “a mechanism”? A: Presence is to be distinguished from the personality or the person. It refers to the articulation of time – internal space and time within external space. So, presence as a dance mechanism is a personal treasure to be unburied, not a habit. It’s one of the three pillars of becoming a dancer, the personal pillar, the dancer’s self-created element. But to no longer be “a person”, you have to modify your cells, their texture. This way we can connect to strong and living energies and sensations through memories, desires, emotions, remembering dreams, etc. and it is possible to make the present moment and movement alive by filling it up with these energies. Because Butoh really is a dance of presence. Masaki said “ I am not teaching you how to dance, the dance, you have to have yourself”. And what is presence after all? It is to be there on stage with every single cell of your body and mind: “not only the body has to break, your mind also”. Your inner landscapes, all your memories, desires and emotions are reflected in your dance, like your body’s reflection on a lake; you are not expressing them, you are not reliving them. For example, I have a strong and precise memory from the past. While dancing in the present moment, the force of lived experiences within the memory can enrich, charge and expand the movement happening in my present body.

Dispersion: The Mavericks  125 In a process of slow movement in an open landscape in nature, I once found myself perceiving the horizon with my eyes. Soon, I realized I could focus on noticing how the visual stimuli arrived into my perception – first as a sensation – before becoming the concepts of a specific image. As I wished to find a way to become open, to really absorb all that was there around me, I realized I could, or should, discover a speed with which my eyes would be able to really see. So, I tried not to hurry, not to move my gaze forward – out of curiosity, out of hastiness, out of “mechanical incompetence”? – but rather, to avoid the jumps and abrupt bounces of the eye. I realized there was a certain unique speed to doing that, which enabled me to receive the information from the continuum of the horizon and the objects existing within the landscape. If I moved my gaze forward slower than this speed, then it felt like stalling – creating a void in the circuit of energy, a gap in the flow of stimuli, and my body would instantly assume a static feeling of stopping. If I moved my gaze quicker, I jumped to the next point before assimilating the information still coming from the previous one. At that moment, this effect revealed to me that there must be a physical speed of observation in which a person can really appreciate the reality reaching them, and this has to do with the natural and biological aspects of the body. This limited point of focus (not quicker or slower) is not a limitation, but the result of a natural cycle of stimuli, sense, sensation, perception, some sort of processing of these inside the body – who knows through which, condensed, obscure and instant mechanism. And finally the emission of some response: in the form of breath, and perhaps the creation of some emotion or intention towards the initial source, an inverse movement from the person back to the stimulus. This cycle seems to be a natural circuit of perception and response. In this “self-method” in which I assumed the role of a witness, consciousness could select variable speeds, according to thoughts, wishes, and choices, and I could decide to direct my gaze to many different directions, through different speeds and frequencies. In this way though, I could equally have lost the continuum of the experience of the real surroundings, by choosing to “see” fragmented versions of it. In reality, there was only one natural speed – in a given moment and circumstance, for a given body (mine) – to absorb reality through this mechanism, and it manifested as a cycle. So, this “speed of the body”, defined by the natural rhythms of a material entity, did indeed rival the “speed of consciousness”, which, if not tamed by this mechanism, would float freely, randomly, and in a fragmentary fashion, directed through, let’s call it a cultural disposition. This would then produce an intentional rhythm, guided by the person. And this rhythm could be norm-regulated in the person. The choice to be tamed by the natural rhythm, and to follow its course, might also appear as doing nothing, in opposition to culturally or even institutionally made choices, because in the former case, these are not choices made by the “person” anymore. I also remember Masaki once said, “if you don’t know what to do, better do nothing”. To “do nothing” is not the only option then. If the conscience of a person is quite clear as to what path to take, maybe then the intentional

126  Dispersion: The Mavericks rhythm would exist to manifest a truth, and would not be directed solely by culture or by the institution. It’s a possibility. If a tree could dance, it would be its rings engraved on the trunk that would dance. Q: You recommend developing a personal method for “actualising presence” and you said that “deep religious faith or absolute nihility” can create “an intense level of internal time”.32 How do you develop this sensitivity to time and this presence outside the dance studio, in daily life? A: Very good question! It’s not always easy, daily life can absorb you completely with all the things you have to do. But in the end, dance and daily life are not so separated. Creating internal time requires patience and courage, knowing how to deviate from everyday life and habits, knowing how to return… The principle of self-method is at the heart of Butoh dance, with the nikutai – the interior landscape that must come out of oneself and enter into a relationship with the public – and the obscure, dark intentions. Finding your own method is experimentation within dance, although it is possible to develop a thought or discourse about dance outside the studio: you have to work in the studio and outside to relax your mind and body – soft spirit/soft body. What helps me to develop this sensitivity is being in nature, which can range from simple observation to moving, dancing, walking in it, with it, working in the garden, and being aware of my breathing at any moment. The use of computers (and screens) and too many sitting postures are on the other end of the scale. Meditating is being close to nature, just being silent. Silence helps you to just be: being is doing nothing. How do I experience “presence” in my life? When I cook, I cook; when I walk, I walk; when I dance, I dance, and sometimes there are moments when I become presence. Q: Do you think that sometimes dancers who come to your workshops absorb your (Masaki) time and space and not their own? What difficulties have you faced teaching about presence and time? A: I’m not sure about absorbing time and space from Masaki, if that is even possible. But Masaki’s teaching and pedagogy was such a structured and tightly built system, that whether he liked it or not (and I believe he didn’t) it would necessarily draw students towards a specific direction, so that you would often end up with very similar dances in tone or atmosphere, from very different dancers. Over the years I came to discover dancing elements in my own body, postures, ways of constraining my own body, etc. only to find out much later that Masaki used to dance those exact same elements and postures, way before I knew him. It came to me without any knowledge of it, so it wasn’t a direct influence or a copy. I believe it was just a logical outcome of a certain system.

Dispersion: The Mavericks  127 It is useless to imitate if you haven’t worked out the process that leads you to be humble and honest with yourself. The difficulty is that if you do not observe the multiple steps that allow you to deal with your body and essence, if you proceed quickly and without a project, the work has gaps and is not believable, then, an artificial, purely aesthetic image is created, and this is counterproductive. I sometimes observe dancers who let themselves be absorbed by the time/ space of others; this happens because they do not support the core. There are several ways to support the “core”, each dancer must find their own method. Supporting the core, for example, happens when one is in a situation of imbalance or physical limitation. The final years’ dancers were very innocent…almost all of Masaki’s students have been absorbed by his time and space, even just once… I only know that I danced differently because of his presence. Q: “Regression and limitation” are integral to the nature of the living entity.33 To dance by seeking regression and limitations, and what is “left behind” or left out of the institution, has a very strong political significance. Do you take a strong political position in your art? A: In dance, when the body is limited or strongly constrained, the elements and presences which live inside the dancer – and which are usually kept in silence due to institutional norms – can emerge or reveal themselves in various ways and forms: a plant, an animal, a person of the opposite sex, a demon. I too am a “left behind”. Butoh takes aspects of life which are usually eclipsed. This can be considered political, although I have never had any political intention whatsoever with my dance or in the studio. I strictly avoid making my work directly political, because it limits the artwork to being a vessel subordinated to my own opinions; in other words, it transforms art into propaganda. The statements, principles, the structure of concepts upon which the work of an artist is built are necessarily political and meaningful, but the work of art itself should be beyond any of it, for it doesn’t belong to the realm of accuracy, communication and purposes. In terms of intellectual meanings and communicating my opinions, if I ever have something to say, I just say it. I knew Masaki was very interested in politics: he was a political human being and there was a political position in his art, it was not so obvious though. Q: Here I want to talk about the audience: you wrote that Butoh is meant to be felt rather than understood (like modern dance is) by audiences. How does the world in which we live, affect the ability to feel? What kind of spectator do you hope for? A: “I consider each member of the audience like a chip that I have to devour during the performance”.34

128  Dispersion: The Mavericks He told me several times “… you are too modest.” And during the workshops if he was sitting and nodding in the corner by the computer, you better do something to wake him up because he was bored. Once he said “you have to grab the audience by the throat”. I don’t have particular expectations from the public: the dance feeds and develops thanks to their presence and the particular relationship or dialectic that is formed between the audience and the dancer. Most of the time you don’t even have time to feel, or to pay attention to your feelings. Plus, the mass media has well-orchestrated ways to make us feel. So I would rather form the question like this: what kind of attitude helps the spectator to sense the wholeness of the dance the most? The audience has to be active, in the sense that their perception, openness, and awareness are part of their experiences, the performer’s experience, and the experience of the whole group. The visual input is only one part of the thing: this is one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to reproduce a Butoh performance on video. Perhaps the spectator all Butoh performers hope for is the one who is open to gradually forgetting what they know and entering into this new landscape that the performer creates; people who are open, clear, and without prejudices, ready to be surprised, whom dance can reach directly to the heart without too many intellectual passages. One of my art professors told me once “art that is entirely understandable isn’t art, it is propaganda”. I don’t think Butoh, or any dance, or any art for that matter, is meant to be totally understood. In that sense, I suppose we always wish for the most open-minded spectators. Especially when you take the risk not to give them what is instantly gratifying – in a world that is increasingly infantilized, where instant gratification is becoming the norm. But ultimately, it isn’t up to the artist to choose their spectators. Everyone is entitled to see, experience, judge, and critique. It’s a matter of ethics: what part of the work can reach what kind of spectator? What is it to show a work to a highly educated dance critic? What is it to show a work to the janitor of the studio who might be there just by chance before cleaning the stage after everyone is gone? How do I manage access to the work for both of them while keeping my own integrity as an artist? The first time I saw Masaki dancing it was a clear physical experience for me: I could not walk down ten steps to go to the toilet afterwards. Theoretically, I knew how to do it, but the information did not arrive in my body. There was just empty space in between. I remember once in Rome, many years ago, the impression I got by watching an old woman walking in the street, slowly, along the wall, getting further and further, with her black dress. Q: In the dance journey from object to human (as a material entity) that you went through during the 1980s, how did you experience the emotions of a material entity that make it human, instead of an object? How is this different from personal feelings and emotions? For example, you told me in

Dispersion: The Mavericks  129 the last interview that inner time can be enriched through personal memory but what happens to my individual emotions in this remembering? A: We must distinguish between ordinary emotions, which unfold in everyday life (sometimes from evoking memories), from real emotions which emerge or become perceptible during the dance. We usually associate our ordinary emotions with something that would be our privacy, and these emotions are shaped by social life/institutions. The real emotions that emerge from the performance have a quality that resists any form of categorization or social rule. During the dance, ordinary emotions are likely to intervene, and they must then be treated as materials so as not to be left with the intentional gesture of expressing emotions. Let these standardized emotions pass like clouds pushed by the wind, so that real emotions – unspeakable, indecipherable – can take over. A life is built from a series of events that are inevitably linked to emotions – the memory of these events. A memory can be the evocation of sensations and emotions as if they were landscapes. Drawing these landscapes with the body can express circumstances that can be experienced by everyone, and not only by the charge of our personal emotions. It’s an interesting journey to look for pure emotion itself beyond the personal story. Though personal memory can evoke or induce an emotional process to unfold where the one experiencing it can be completely identified with it, what if one manages to extract the personal part from it and only stays with the emotion itself as a pure physical experience? Or taking it from the other direction: during the dance (also in life), one can experience strong emotions without any personal content. Then the question is: How do you deal with it? What to do with it? I enjoy these moments while dancing; it’s like an unexpected surprise. Of course, with experience, you suppose that it’s going to happen, but you never know what will happen exactly as it is – at least partially – unknown, it makes me more attentive, more present, and more charged. I don’t like becoming emotional, as a reaction, as interaction. This displacement to the human memory dimension of the dance is not because there are emotions, the memory itself is a wet cloth, there is a distance in the memory now duplicated in the dance, but the water in the cloth can still soak me… My personal attempts at life are not directed outwards in the dance. Q: You always taught a specific look or gaze – taking in the audience, almost insistently, sometimes even inhumanly. Can you talk about this look and how it belongs to a human as a material entity rather than an object? A: This question of the gaze is very important in dance. First, we have to clarify that the gaze is located at the border between the interiority and exteriority of the dancer, and this gaze can circulate through the landscapes between these two worlds. It involves adopting a very broad inner perspective, the public gaze, etc. Finally, if one develops such a gaze

130  Dispersion: The Mavericks during the dance, it intensifies this encounter, it is the dance itself that becomes a gaze, or an eye for the audience. The dancer’s gaze is the look of interiority that comes out of the body. It is the emotion that invites the audience to be involved and establishes a bond. There is not only the dancer and the immediate space surrounding them, but a wider zone in which the public is inserted and incorporated. The gaze expands even further. It’s a gaze towards the outside and towards the inside at the same time, abolishing the limits between outer and inner. Instead of looking at something, by creating distance between the thing looked at and the person looking, so that there is a subject (the observer) and an object (the observed). With this out-of-focus gaze there is no distance, no separation, just unity. Often Masaki talked about eyes of glass, eyes as windows, so it’s more than an intention to look: it’s an opening so that people can enter through the eyes of the dancer. And for this, something has to be kept, something has to be retreated, removed. These crystal eyes are maybe not so different from the eyes of the “300 year old woman”35 when she goes for a walk. This windowgaze also means some loss of hierarchy in the body system; in general, the eyes are the sense organ that organizes the action, not just in humans but even in the animal; it’s the primary sense necessary for survival. In this sense, the window is an attempt to step behind or before this (primary) stage. Using the eyes and especially “looking without seeing” – and not closing your eyes under any circumstances – projecting your look behind the audience to make the space larger: “you can really connect with the audience through the way you use your eyes”. Q: I’m interested in your thoughts on gender and sex. Institutional norms “contain the woman as the woman”,36 but for you, femininity and masculinity in the (human as) material entity is not related to physiological gender. How does the gender of the material entity become eroticism? How can the skin be a costume and for which gender? A: “Don’t be ordinary when you are on stage!” Don’t be that person that you are when you go shopping. Be all the other entities that live inside you, make their costume, dance their dance. Of course, we are both male and female, and so, of course each dances in a very different way. I work very much with costume especially to bring the female side out, because she makes maybe as much as 90% of my dance. Masaki allowed me to never hesitate, whatever gender it was that danced [in me]. Masculine and feminine do not mean “man” and “woman”: they are universal sexual forces. It can be people, places, music, life events, etc. A person – man or woman – has both masculine and feminine energy. Eros is the life force, the antidote to death, and the sense of joy… Of course, it can be expressed and also sensed as more feminine or more masculine depending on

Dispersion: The Mavericks  131 the form in which it manifests. Sexual polarity is a natural force that flows between any masculine and feminine pole. In the stage of dancing as an object, the skin is the physical limit of the body, regardless of the physical gender it belongs to. But within this limit, the skin can take on many aspects depending on the exposure to the environment in which it is located. The effects of “the dance of the skin of the body” can transform the material entity (of the dancer) by way of poetic as well as erotic nuances that the dancer and the audience create and perceive. Q: You wanted to dance as a way to escape words and the domain of acting. How do you feel about language, words, and the body now? A: I first encountered dance when I felt a deep fatigue from language and ordinary thought. Here I want to distinguish language from poetry. Poetry is more a matter of breathing than of categorizing reality. In this sense, breathing must be conceived, like the gaze, as a place of articulation, between interiority and exteriority. Today I try to remember to breathe when I dance, until the breath starts to dance, to develop in its own way. The dance, and the breathing that underlies it, allows me to come to terms with the poetry that I had abandoned by mistakenly associating it with a movement of thought. The dance would be rather a short circuit of thought which carries within it poetry, namely breathing. I have passed through the world of words and the territory of theatre. Starting my dance studies (and finishing with poem recitals I’d been doing since childhood) around 2000, I acquired the saying “Fuck verbality!” I have found a world that is much more honest and precise within movement, rather than in words, as a performer and also as audience. Since then, I made a long journey and nowadays I have a connection to both. I still feel a deeper connection and understanding through movement and the body. With words I almost always have the sensation of lack, that it is just a partial reality while the body has access to the whole(ness). Through years of learning, with different teachers, and teaching a bit myself, I’ve come to fully realize the impact of words on the body. You can observe that in the way a given dance subject is worded for example. Each word is capable of having an impact on the nervous system. I could observe that on myself. Certain dance subjects that I came to work on many times never did much to me, apart from evoking a bit of vague imagination; from my “consciousness” (as Masaki would say). But one day, just because someone would word it in a slightly different way, my body would a have direct and vivid physical reaction; imagination becoming instantly physical. In the same way, certain sensations within my own body were out of reach for many years, until someone suggested to observe them, using other words, and suddenly that sensation surfaced in my awareness. Of course, this is absolutely personal, as the relation between the brain areas of language and the rest of the nervous system is probably very different for each person.

132  Dispersion: The Mavericks The language of words is very different from body language, still, perhaps they can meet for a few moments. Hijikata’s sophisticated notation system (Butoh-fu) was also drawing a lot on the impact of words themselves, on the body and its memory, as certain kinds of poetry would do, rather than from description or any logical notes about movement and their meaning. I believe, as a material for the dancers, there is a very wide area at the intersection of the nervous system and language. Q: Many who live in cities and urban places enjoy a “convenient” life. This domestication of the flesh body is the reality of life.37 How can such domesticated dancers realise nikutai in their dance: do you have any advice? A: Not so easy. Create a clear project and insist on carrying it out. Be observant and dedicate time to practice, proceeding slowly without taking your possibilities for granted. Walking in nature and dancing can help. Imagination can be a powerful tool for everything we can’t experience in a physical way. Q: “Openness and gentleness” are essential to your vision of dance, and developing these qualities is the most important thing: you said it “breaks barriers”.38 Can you tell me more about how this attitude helps in dance and again, if there is a political aspect to it? A: Dance like life is a continuous search, hoping for some kind of perfection, but perfection is also not an absolute. You have to be ready to receive criticism to eventually affirm your point of view, and certainly be ready to change it to make it better. There is no dance that is valid for everyone and there are no absolute positions: as such, openness and gentleness promote flexibility in body and mind and help to overcome the barriers between the intimate, private, and public by allowing for an original spatio-temporal encounter. Dance, and art in general, has the possibility to bring people beyond the curtain of life, maybe for just a short moment, to stop all thoughts and to feel, to be a true human. That is why it’s so important with art because it is the only language that can bring people together. All politics and religion do nothing but separate people from each other, and the world gets more and more crazy. Openness and gentleness can open doors and break barriers: they are qualities of acceptance, they require sensitivity. Sensitivity is usually an underestimated force, since it is through sensitivity that you connect with your being, and with the whole universe. How different your dance can be when you are open to the unknown! Politically, it could be a non-violent way of acting for your rights, and not just re-acting. Q: I remember when you told us in a workshop “do not treat your body like an employee!” And again in your book you warn about “exploiting

Dispersion: The Mavericks  133 the body as a tool of expression”.39 We live in societies so focused on production, putting bodies to work – “time is money”, etc. Many of us were told at school, and at home, the message of being useful and good and it’s absorbed into our bodies: how can we stop treating ourselves like a tool? A: Notice that there is a paradox here that can be perceived between the invitation to treat the body as an object, while refraining from treating it as a tool. Treating the body as a tool or an employee is to induce it to perform intentional actions. Treating the body as an object consists in allowing it its autonomy, as a material entity – letting it take on a texture and qualities of its own, beyond all intention. There are two different issues here: how we treat the body on stage and off the stage? In daily life, maybe nowadays, most people treat their body as an employee but certainly not as a tool. On the contrary, we live in a world that tries to forget the body or at best tries to keep it infantile. The use of a tool is not to be despised in itself: it is actually what signals the rise of self-awareness. But with the exception of a bit of sport, which is necessarily competitive, we are not taught where our body is, and what it can do. I discovered dance pretty late in my life, and before that, I didn’t grow up as a very sporty kid; basically I never considered the potential abilities of my body. But then I discovered dance, and I also happened to become a capoeirista. Capoeira, a playful martial art, taught me how to play with my body, to walk on my hands, to do sophisticated acrobatics that I always thought to be reserved for professional athletes. I realized my body could do so many things. Even now, for example in a domestic space, I don’t use only my hands to function anymore. I can close a cabinet with my head, another with my elbow while I am opening another with my foot and my hands are chopping some vegetables, all at the same time. To discover the infinite abilities of one’s body can really change the way we (and our bodies) relate to our material environment. Again, the concept of time is essential: if you give time and space to your body, if you listen to it, something new will be born. We can confront our limitations and try to express our truths; this takes time and practice. We have the capacity to observe nature and the life of human beings without having gone through the filter of rational education. And we don’t have to feel obliged to be “the saviours of humanity” or the greatest dancers, but rather to discover a language of dance that speaks through sensitive beauty and understanding, not the rules of appearance and competition. To the institution, time is money. For us (dancers), it could be time is timeless. The main way to reach Butoh essence is to get away from the concepts of the institution. Now on stage and indeed in dance, I believe I must forget all of this, because the status of the body as a tool is almost the opposite of the status

134  Dispersion: The Mavericks of a dancing body. The body in dance isn’t subordinated to any use, goal, or purpose. The dance is that place where this hierarchy is turned upside down, in order to make visible a part of reality that is usually hidden. I don’t know if there is any way to teach such a reversal. For sure, a good way is probably to start by “cutting off your head”, and your hands. To forget about them – at least at first – for they are what identifies us socially and what we turn the most into a tool – the most intellectual part of the body. One might want to purposefully dance without them. To be lying down and trying to stand, slowly, without your hands and without creating any unnecessary tension anywhere in your body is a whole experience in itself and does begin to subvert the usual hierarchy within the body. Then it is mostly a matter of listening. Of awareness. To sharpen the senses more and more. To notice the tiniest sensorial signals possible and to let them drive you. In daily life, our nervous system (either) operates or conceals a selection of signals which are necessary to carry out any task we need to achieve. But the more we become aware of those signals that our system receives – constantly receives – the more we become overwhelmed by them, and the less we are able to “function normally”… as we think a body should. But the more they take over, maybe the more we can dance? “Go where the body wants to go not where you want it to go”. Become a servant of your body, servant of your life, kick your fucking ego, parents, and schoolteacher in the ass and start listening to your own voice. Who are you? What is your dance? Don’t be a copy, bad or good, be the original. (“I am there present, watching carefully and ready for a direct and honest exchange with the actual manifestations being distilled from the dancers.”) Q: When you called your dance Butoh, you wanted “to expand the scope of Butoh”.40 Would you encourage others to do this too? Do you think that the name Butoh has “universal existence or relevance” now that it’s freed of its Japanese historical connotation? A: This is a very sensitive topic: the answer can only be highly subjective. The political and artistic connotation of Butoh is to represent the aspects of life that society wants to keep hidden; in this sense, Butoh is contemporary, compared to its genesis in Japan. Masaki always encouraged his students to dance their own way: this could be an expansion of the scope of Butoh. (I imagine Masaki answering): “The art of transmitting Butoh dance has been central to my life as a dancer. It was not, however, a question of transmitting the teachings of an inheritance fixed once and for all by founders or followers. Rather, it is a method that invites the development of a self-method for each dancer. Dancing Butoh today cannot have the same meaning as when Butoh emerged in Japan, against a backdrop of social, political and artistic revolt. When I recommend to the dancers to forget everything, it is also a way of making them understand that it is necessary to first forget any image

Dispersion: The Mavericks  135 or fantasy that they have with respect to Butoh and to Japanese culture. I remember a European dancer asking me to bring him some white makeup from Japan so that he could use it for his own performances: I firmly refused. The meaning of this white make-up and the way in which the Japanese have used it in their performances is part of a unique social and cultural trajectory. A fanatical and disconnected appropriation of the socio-historical context in which a dancer finds themselves does not make them a Butoh dancer; on the contrary, it takes them away from what I mean by Butoh”. Talking with people in France about Butoh, I have the impression that it still has very strong Japanese connotations: World War 2, the atomic bombs, and it is directly translated as “la danse des ténèbres”. Slowness and white paint are also very much connected to Butoh. In a more international context, I would say that Butoh is a more open concept and that the wholeness of life experiences (including death) are more present and not only the darkness of the body. This is closer to my understanding. At the same time, I think that the historical, social, and economic circumstances and geographical location of the moment when an art-movement appears are all very important. It is not simply by chance that they appear in that specific period and space in the history of mankind. I consider the personal life and personality of the founder(s) to also be important and characteristic of the movement; this is true for Butoh too. This does not mean that it cannot be appropriated by other people, cultures, etc. If we go to the roots and the basic concepts, we embody them and translate them to the culture, historical period, and personal life we live in; then it can be relevant at any time (not only in the specific moment and country). I don’t think Butoh was ever a thing, or even existed anywhere concretely. If only as a name that one artist, Hijikata, gave to his own work for a performance series, after calling it by different names and before giving it a new name once again. It really is an unlikely chain of events that led one word to survive until now. I don’t really understand people who call their work Butoh: I wouldn’t dare. I have avoided calling my dance “Butoh” but it’s a very good label when people ask what I do. I can see that there are many different methods of dance that go under the label Butoh. As much as I can, I try not to be identified with Butoh, because I don’t have an interest in what the term came to represent in Western countries during the last decades. It has almost nothing to do with a radical, political, and aesthetical stance in art and performing arts anymore. Instead, for the most part, Butoh nowadays belongs either to a solidified set of clichés and “stage uniforms”, or to the market of well-being, as a vaguely spiritual emotional gymnastics meant to offer a pleasant – and supposedly deep body-experience to the customer of a workshop. Of course, it doesn’t sell very well to set yourself on the hard, demanding, life-long path of being an artist in your own right, instead of offering a moment of “feel-good” experience. In that sense, Masaki as a teacher was divisive in the community of so-called Butoh

136  Dispersion: The Mavericks students. He never bargained with art and what it meant and involved: from that point of view, he was exemplary. Unfortunately, I’m afraid the future of Butoh belongs less to art, than to religion. Q: Can you say possibly in only five words what you most want to share in your work? A: Openness, gentleness, experience in dancing, wisdom, a unique way of seeing underneath the surface. Selfless, becoming, being moved, unknown, emptiness, love. Breathe. Feel space. Forget everything. Contributors: Sahra Caluori Marilisa Chronea Tudi Deligne Brigitta Horvath Sebastian Liljedahl Helene Marche Marianela Ruiz Leon Evi Tortzvi

Dispersion: The Mavericks  137

Figure 3.4 Ko Murobushi (1979). Photo: Takeshi Sakai.

From the Writings of Ko Murobushi HINAGATA It is a question which violently cuts off the continuation of my thought. How and from where can the total fulfilment of this existence be fathomed within this alien form, which is the fate created by nature? Standing on that precipice of interruption, the layers of darkness pile up, the blood drips down, life emerges, bubbling up: I want to see it, I want to possess it. Life is inclining, the breath is laboured, the ship is inclining, a one-winged flight, an omen of death by drowning, of careering down from the sky, form decaying, the hidden coming to light. Edge, corner, margin, frontier, border, boundary of the being, the smell of the corpse, makes life stand out, stand out desperately. The origin of Butoh is the intensity of this stance, and the trembling that is both the cruelty and humour as the impossible necessity to move, Which is branded upon the face of the precipice. Therein lies the matrix of life. I am a catastrophe at the center of a laceration, every crisis. I don’t know to which world I am arrested to be taken away In this peril. I am the den of the demon apprehending this world away. I must be my medicine man.

138  Dispersion: The Mavericks I am the beaten corpse. I want to rob my existence of its totality. The emergency towards the unknown is Eros beyond limits: a love. I stop being a God, I become an insane king, unifying myself with the immeasurable. The fear of anxiety does not fill my existence or my non-existence. The chaos of the primitive sea in my center, the faraway land from which this sense of existence washes up, in front of the ocean of reality, I am a trembling bridge. I am a body, runaway and suspended in this escape. The body, masochistically filled with a sense of pain, is conjoined with the darkness of this land: The urgency towards tension, trembling, pulverization, towards the absolute silence… This pain and fascination is unbearable, I lose myself. The situation that lies on the boundary of the non-self, the foolish state, is also the origin of Butoh. I kill myself in the Butoh space. But I am immortal, I will be reborn, When the power, which makes me die, revives as a totality, and appears from the dark void (hina) with tornadoes and gales, This dark shape (hinagata) will be harvested as a sentient steel. 1977 for ‘HINAGATA’ Ephémère

In an encounter with the inscrutable, the unknown, the experience of a loss of words, a loss of self dance is the sensual formed in this transient moment All forms break down. Exposed in their collapse. Furthermore our dance is a risky process of disappearance and appearance It is an incessant throwing of the body An ephemeral fraction, To dance is to overflow our bodies with a “loss of words.” It is to be at a loss, faced with the excess of the senses, It is not that we face ourselves in that moment

Dispersion: The Mavericks  139 we become unfamiliar to ourselves, we roam, not turning to the known, but wandering to the memory of the unknown and the unknowable. Dance is the absolute flow within stillness In the “crevice” we might become shifts, Quivers and fluids. In the passage of the dashing meteorite lies the afterglow of “Hou”. To dance is to tremble, and to jump ecstatically. Our century…it is the century In which dancing was deprived of the origin of dance. We forgot the origin, And we shall stand at numerous new beginnings: At the place which is nowhere; At the time which never exists; The eternal repetition; The eternal beginning of this moment. We recognize Our dance outside the dance, Where the outside world is dragged into The whole of the inside. It is to make our inside stumble Like Nietzsche, Like Nijinsky, Be it Japanese, Indians, Mexicans, Animals, roses, cherry-blossoms, Meaninglessness in a stone, All of these things, And all of nothing, this is an accident

140  Dispersion: The Mavericks Called life.

February, 1988, Paris translation Katja Centonze Koichi Kano Dominique S. Bonarjee

I am writing this: “The first dancer was an ironsmith.” Our body is made of metal, alone in the world, searching, roving, wandering, going up North, attracted by the call of metal, undertaking a “great passage” like the migratory bird: dying when falling down? Many gaps, “ma”, can be encountered: in the “in-between”, the “interval” or the “interstice”, that which cannot be fathomed, here will and power exists, and therein lies their entrance into the metamorphic order. In fact it is metal, which is neither water, nor earth, nor fire, nor air, but it is the result of their fusion and through this hybridity, metal transcends these elements and evades them. Orphaned! Severed from everything! It is both hard and soft at the same time, its muscles are balanced with nerves, it has a lightness that lacks weight, a weight that lacks lightness, for it is a traveler that moves anywhere. I am writing this: “The first dancer was a traveler.” A traveler then, or an ironsmith, in other words “metal”: “a sharp metallic instrument that engraves a deep wound on the tender body of nature” which opens the cleft of destiny between community and nature. And so the community previously closed deep in itself, opens outwards, laying itself open to pathways of connection. The smelting of buto starts with the sound of a hammer! It is in the black furnace that everything takes place. This is the beginning without ending, a way leading to chaos as well as extending into the cosmos. I am writing this: “the first dancer was one-eyed, one-legged…one-armed.” Hephaistos the cripple, Alberich the dwarf, Tatara-shi the blind in one eye…a race of one-eyed, one armed and left-handed people still alive through “One Eye Jack,” “Tangue-Sazen”

Dispersion: The Mavericks  141 The one-eyed ones, the limping ones, but not in the sense that their role would contribute to an illusion of the ‘community’: their role in the reconstruction of a fictional “whole”. They play about, they tease this fiction inherent in the concept of community and evade it with the footsteps of buto, the footsteps of a Ninja, stealthy footsteps, velvet footsteps and, become metallic, nomadic, hermetic! In nomadism, the only question is that of surface. For, within a space, even if it is rationally squared and segmented, in other words split up into inside and outside, it is always possible to slide, to stretch the surface like an expanse of skin. For the nomad, the inside extends into the outside: this is why… Everything is revealed on the bare face. So… I am writing this: “The first dancer spreads the metal like an expanse of skin on the stage.” A slash of metal severs us, it makes us reject any kind of technical perfection, any kind of memory-based experience, any scopic sense of ownership. I whisper to myself; “Yes, however, I have got nothing to do with this theater? Yes, however, is there a space for me on this earth?” 1992, Paris for ‘Ai-Amour’

From diary At a café in Vienna, it looked like a lonely eagle, my image reflected on the tiles of the washroom this morning. And then I lived the whole day wearing this eagle. But nobody recognized my eagle; because I didn’t fly like an eagle; neither cry out the eagle’s words. Would anybody notice even if I were to cry out with eagle’s words and fly like the eagle does? No, the reality is that I am sitting here in a café in Vienna looking like a lonely eagle, as a waiter watched me with a doubtful look, as if he recognized a suspicious and sick bird when my beak touched the coffee cup making a strange sound.

1994, Vienna

142  Dispersion: The Mavericks The Enthusiastic Dance on the Grave I want to talk once again about things that are the core of Butoh. No, I want to talk about things that are impossible to talk about…and about impossible experiences. I want to talk about things at my very depths that erode and collapse my thought when I start to think. I want to talk about “emptiness”=”indifference” that are at my origins and endlessly empower me. You start to talk about your silence with silence. You start to talk about your burned, blackened dead body, about that explosion whose sound vanished. I cannot acquire the experience of Hiroshima because it is the experience of others, it is outside of my experience. But I will continue to talk about my experience of Hiroshima. I will continue to talk about “Emptiness= outside of experience” that has no beginning and no end and already lies inside my core with the power of that shadow, and the power of darkness and light. 2013 for ‘Enthusiastic Dance on the Grave” translation Mayuko Watanabe Dominique S. Bonarjee Becoming and the Momentary In the process towards the work, a great deal of immature wildness is cut down, and the cruel explosiveness of its singularity, the energy of becomingpower, and the thrill of direct power connecting the spontaneous forces are sublimated into the technical training. Therefore, I would think of the way to dance whereby these powers shall not be lost – what could create the real meeting place for us if we took out the becomingness, the thrill, and the pain from the performance? It is not to make the works familiar to our eyes, by excluding the element of contingency from the works, by (=dance?) turning to the arrangement of a steadily controlled power. On the contrary, it is to utilize something my dancing body is familiar with as the power for generating the unknown

Dispersion: The Mavericks  143 works. It is to hide an unexpected stone, which makes you stumble on the path of my dance. Like it or not, it is to surrender myself in such a situation to the overwhelming aid required by the dormant powers which have directly accumulated in my body due to the loss of my thoughts. That is to say, it is to demand crisis. Then and there, from this confused body, the various diverse powers not yet known to me are evoked. The powers’ freshness of becoming and the moment: it is to follow the positive power that is touching the edge. − Prepare only the minimum framework. − Introduce external relationships and be momentarily conscious to affect the flow (of the dance). − Leave it unfinished. 1985 Paris for ‘Ko: Nomadic Body’ translation Koichi Kano

Figure 3.5 Ko Murobushi dancing Faux Pas (2014). Photo: Laurent Ziegler (unstill.net).

144  Dispersion: The Mavericks

Dispersion: The Mavericks  145 The Origins of Aloneness: Three Days in Yamagata “…with love there is truly something other that is possible for me than the life I am leading…”41 ~ “It was like falling in love”. Ko Murobushi gets passionate and emotional as he says this. Like a smitten teenager, he returns to this “love affair” on numerous occasions: the story of how on seeing Tatsumi Hijikata’s dance Nikutai no Hanran, “he fell in love”. From that point onwards, he was hooked. The following year, 1969, he entered the Asbestos-Kan to study with Hijikata for a short period. And then he headed north to contemplate his infatuation and to really put his love to the test. In Yamagata Prefecture, he followed the ascetic practices of the Yamabushi mountain monks. Out of this experience, he created the solo Hinagata (1969). He showed it and Hijikata praised it. Perhaps this was the reciprocation of his love which he needed to liberate him from its hold. From then on, he began to forge his life’s journey through Butoh. ~ Ko and I had already spent many hours in conversation between 2013 and 2014. His producer, Kimiko Watanabe facilitated and encouraged these meetings. She was also the one to suggest we all go on a research field trip. In October 2014, we set off. We went to Yamagata, where Ko had encountered the Yamabushi monks long ago, at the very start of his dancing career. By then I’d already realized that this experience had an ambiguous place in his practice. In our exchanges, Ko was particularly prickly on this subject, extremely wary of emphasizing this phase in his dance path; he refused to be associated with religious or shamanic practices. But as this was the destination of our field trip, it became apparent that the experience had made an indelible mark nonetheless. Our little research group comprised of Ko, Kimiko, Arihiro Yamada, another student of Ko’s who was also an artistic collaborator of mine, and myself. We headed to the Dewa Sanzan in Yamagata prefecture. These are three mountains that symbolize the cycle of existence: Gassan is linked to birth, Hagurosan to death, and Yudonosan to rebirth. These three peaks are amongst Japan’s most sacred sites. Here, we would be introduced to Ko’s oldest teachers: the Miira. Miira is often translated as “mummy”: this isn’t an accurate translation. The Miira are indeed bodies preserved well beyond their human lifespan, but their entry into the sacred realm of immortality has more in common with the bog bodies of Northern Europe than with the mummies of Ancient Egypt – the Tollund Man of Aarhus in Denmark as a prime example. Here again there’s a difference. Whereas the Tollund Man was believed to have been a ritual sacrifice made by the “old man-killing parishes” as Seamus Heaney described them in his poem of that name, the Miira – the mummies of Japan – are self-made sacrifices. This difference is crucial to understanding Ko’s relationship to this practice. ~

146  Dispersion: The Mavericks That Monday (October 6, 2014) we met at Tokyo station to catch the early morning Shinkansen. Tokyo station was bustling. Everyone was running for cover from torrential rains. Ko and Kimiko were already there, waiting on the cold grey platform. Ko looked restless as he often did. I could read his thoughts – he can’t smoke here, but he wants to smoke, he resents rules, he’s still a rebel. He offered a polite but painful half-smile which barely cloaked the ache of addiction. The jittery movement of his hand repeatedly tracing the contours of the cigarette pack hanging in the pocket of his famous beige overcoat, revealed it all. Arihiro appeared as noiselessly as the doors of the shiny bullet train that slid open at that same moment. Soon, vacuum-locked inside the coach, we were gliding away, and Tokyo’s skyline looked like a choppy heart-rate graph seen through the window now streaked with rain. The outline eventually flattened into the low horizons of the murky brown countryside. Arriving in Yamagata City in the late afternoon, Koichi Kano was there to welcome us. Kano, a lecturer at the university in Yamagata and a Buddhist priest at the local temple, had offered to be our guide in Yamagata City. Kano is also a personal friend and the two of us worked together on translating some of Ko’s writings and diary entries over the summer of 2014. The task of rendering the poetics of Ko’s language into English had brought the two of us closer. The complexity meant we often resorted to entering Ko’s “imaginal realm” to attempt to understand its meanings and images, somehow visualizing the components of Ko’s mind. After that, Kano was very eager to meet the person whose brain he’d been combing through for the preceding months. At the breakfast table on the first morning, I found myself alone with Ko. He was still sleepy, moving groggily about the buffet table. Sitting down opposite me, he kept his eyes lowered, but when he noticed my container of fermented natto beans, he sparked to life: “You like natto!?” His smiling face was sizing me up as if really seeing me for the first time. And then he began to giggle, covering his mouth timidly like a young girl. A carton of fermented beans could result in this sudden intimacy. A few hours later we had arrived at the Shrine of Yudonosan, the Mountain of Rebirth. Here, the ritual began, shoes and socks off we padded into the sacred place. It began with a slow climb over a slimy mottled formation of soft orange rock. An incarnation of the Dainichi Nyorai, the Universal Buddha, I was told. The top of the mound was wetter, and the circular dimpled depressions in the ground were larger, making the ground feel dangerously smooth and slippery. This humped protrusion was covered in tiny ground springs, all ejaculating fluids from an imperceptible source, to gently bathe the mound in a constant stream of warm water. The muddy clay clung to the soles of our feet, with the stickiness of quicksand. We might get sucked into the Buddha’s body at any moment. At the top, the misty view that enveloped the two other mountains, Hagurosan and Gassan, thrust our bodies up into the void beyond the edge of the slope. Acting as a counter-balance, it expanded our breath across the valley, saving us from being engulfed by the sacred mud at our feet. When we released ourselves from its tentacles, we were met by the hard, dry stone path that led us down to a seated foot-bath. The four of us sat

Dispersion: The Mavericks  147 down to imbibe the warmth of the volcanic water through our tingling feet. We were silent. Until Ko muttered something. He squinted up momentarily before quickly, again rather bashfully, lowering his gaze back to the water. I had understood correctly: “It was forty-seven years ago…” It was 47 years since his first experiences in Yamagata; it was 47 years of being a perpetual rebel, driven by the fervour of love. And after 47 years, he was finally returning to the landscapes of his inner inspiration. Suddenly we became his confidantes. I’m convinced we all sensed a shift, as he drew us closer. Now, he was immersing us into his body, through the portal of time and memory. The time capsule felt vast; it held all of Ko’s adult life. And he looked relieved, as if this muttered revelation had made the morning fog dissipate. The sun was out. Excited now, he jumped up and led the way to the small shrine stall to offer us each a charm to mark the occasion. He chose a crystal dragon for me. He was charming, full of youthful excitement, as he prepared us for the next stage of the pilgrimage: the visit to the Miira. ~ To visit the Miira is to come into eerie proximity with flesh made sacred: a manifestation of the mysteries of a somato-spiritual alchemy. This was the essence of the field trip: Ko wanted us to experience what had moved him for all those years. Then we might understand the origins of his Butoh. The memory of this encounter with the sokushinjobutsu “flesh-icons” had evidently lasted a lifetime. And this (final) trip to Yamagata in 2014 would be a necessary encounter helping me to hear the unspoken subtext of our conversations. In the first temple we visited at Churen-ji, the evidence of the Yamabushi monk’s extreme process and the faith it must have required was totally arresting and deeply unsettling. In a glass display cabinet, a metre or so away from me sat the monk Tetsumonkai, who “became a Buddha in his own body” in 1829. I was facing an entity of pure flesh – pure nikutai – held in the state of suspended animation called nyûjô42 … awaiting the end of time.43 This encounter is still crystal clear in my memory and remains imprinted in my cells. The experience is an anchor to which I return to regularly, because through it I grasp Ko’s enduring fascination and reverence for the Miira. These bodies with their darkened, desiccated skin, became an interface, the medium through which Ko came into dialogue with death itself – and death’s absolute aloneness. His first, and this his last, chapter in Yamagata offers a profound insight into his understanding of time, flesh, discipline, and his need for this perpetual (and generative) aloneness: all of which are threaded through his entire body of work. ~ The Yamabushi mountain monks, also called Shugenja, are followers of the Shugendo cult, a syncretic belief tradition of Japan which combines aspects

148  Dispersion: The Mavericks of Buddhism, Daoism, and Shinto animism. It is formed around principles of asceticism and self-sacrifice, and the Miira is the term used for those who achieve the status of “flesh icons” – sokushinjôbutsu. This radical asceticism originated in ancient Japanese Buddhist practices thought to be derived from secret Tantric practices which began in India, travelled through China, and there came to the knowledge of Kukai, the Buddhist scholar, who would then have introduced them to Japan around the 11th century. There are reportedly only 16 sokushinjôbutsu in Japan, eight of which are in Yamagata Prefecture. The practice was outlawed in the 19th century at the start of the Meiji Period. Becoming a sokushinjôbutsu flesh icon was a long, arduous process, sustained by a committed belief in the body’s ability to transcend the visible passage of time. It took determination and complete dedication to the completion of thousands of practices undertaken over many years. The principal aim was to preserve the body as a relic to inspire others. The monks’ tenacity and commitment was demonstrated in their ability to achieve immortality through their own decision to self-sacrifice. The aspiring monk would first gradually eliminate cereals and cultivated foods from his diet to starve the flesh and thus preserve the body. He replaced these by foods with natural embalming properties: tree bark, walnuts, pine needles, and other wild foods. This diet called mokujikigyo – green-eating or tree-eating ordeal – was accompanied by severe ascetic practices, including walking in the mountains, cold water ablutions, and absolute solitude, alongside regular visits to the sacred Shrine of Yudonosan. When the monk felt his body was ready, he returned to his temple and instructed one of his disciples to excavate an underground meditation chamber. Upon entering, the monk sat cross-legged in the lotus position to be interred with a bell in his hand and a slim bamboo stick protruding from the chamber at ground level. Alone in the pitch darkness he sat, chanting sutras, ringing the bell from time to time, and advancing towards his meeting with death. The disciple, at ground level, would come back over the following days to listen out for the bell. When he no longer heard any sound, he would retrieve the bamboo and seal the cell. The ascetic was left, alone, on his final journey into the darkness of the earth.44 The monk’s body was exhumed three years later. If it was found to be uncorrupted by decay, the monk (his flesh) was enshrined as a sokushinjôbutsu. To face the unknowability of death by walking directly towards its horizon must have taken immense courage. This is what makes the Miira’s sacrifice, a self-made one. This distinction was very important to Ko. He spoke of “killing himself” through his dance, in his case not for society but as a commitment to facing the darkness, the unknowability, of the body. He sought to carry out this investigation with the same dedication as the Miira brought to their ascetic practices. Death in Ko’s practice was a way to extract himself from everydayness by “sacrificing” the stable safety of a body shaped for and by the social. Aloneness meant encountering death within life. Here, no longer subjected to the rhythms of social time, he could “harness time” – just like the monk who decides on his moment of entry into death. Ko thought about time constantly and in doing so was profoundly inspired by Gilles

Dispersion: The Mavericks  149 Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense (1969), even borrowing Deleuze’s terminology of Chronos and Aeon – Chronos is linear time, countable and consistent; Aeonic time is cyclical, vast, unpredictable, and generative – to define his temporal approach in his dance. He wanted to make time malleable. By opening up a time portal, he might evade a single, socially prescribed identity – which belongs to the measure of Chronos – in favour of slipping into the temporal and metamorphic infinities of Aeon, to embody a mercurial identity, like the Yamabushi monks. Ko resisted what he perceived as the mainstream, because he wanted to discover the “true nature of time” within flesh, where he might ultimately discover his “real identity”. This quest chimes with that of the sokushinjôbutsu who “did not believe that humans should simply accept what other people tell them about the nature of reality”.45 In the short story, The Hunger Artist, Franz Kafka tells of a man who fasts in a cage for the entertainment of others. He keeps a clock inside his cage so that the onlookers can evaluate the ascetic’s feat according to its measure. In Ko’s dance, time has an exact opposite function. What he seeks in his encounter with spectators is the forgetting of time as the measure of minutes or hours, but through his presence, he induces a time and space where such counting becomes impossible. Ko calls this space of temporal embeddedness, “the plane of immanence” using Gilles Deleuze’s term. To achieve this plane of immanence, affecting the border zone between dancer and spectator is ­crucial – there is no cage or glass vitrine around the artist. Ko’s notion of “the edge” is that (imperceptible) threshold that separates the dancer from the observers, the audience. Immanence in Ko’s logic implies a shared register of time, capable of breaching this boundary limit. In this sense, time can be altered by the dancer’s body and its effect on time. Ko wrote, “the first dancer was a traveler”. It would be this commitment to the experience of time that destined him to a life of radical aloneness achieved through his nomadic wanderings. Again, the Yamabushi monks were his mentors in this. At the same time though, rather paradoxically, his freedom also thrived under the gaze of the audience, and the society he sought to be free from. This question of edge, the boundary as the p ­ re-condition for his dance to exist, is the recurring mystery and quest in Ko’s dance and thoughts. And through dance, he must transgress it as he tells me in our ­conversation: “to become something like the Yamabushi, not on either side, on the edge, where the border is moving, fluid”. His 47-year–long wanderings were always happening along this zone, between life and death, at the edge of time. ~ “It was forty-seven years ago”. Forty-seven years since Ko had visited the Miira of Yamagata, an experience that stayed with him for almost a half ­century. It propagated his life-long commitment to harnessing time through dance, to revisit again and again the instant of time’s suspension: the moment of falling in love.

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Figure 3.6 Eclipse flag hanging in Ko Murobushi’s apartment, print on linen, exact dimensions unknown, Ko Murobushi. Photo: Dominique S. Bonarjee.

“What is my name?”: Ko Murobushi Conducted in Takadanobaba and Yamagata-ku, various dates between December 2013 and October 2014. Translation assistance from Kimiko Watanabe. ~ Dominique Savitri Bonarjee:

Ko Murobushi:

In an interview with Tatsuro Ishii,46 you mention one reason for dancing Butoh as the “experience of distances… distance from my body”, can you talk about this feeling of “distance”. Is it a dissociation [you feel] in your own body? Is this what drives you toward towards Butoh? My real family name is not Ko Murobushi, but I always think, “what is my name?” Together with my (extended) family, my parents named me, but it’s not me. It’s just one role. And I don’t think it’s correct. Of course when I went to school, I used my name but at the same time, I felt, this is not what I am. I have this same feeling with my sexuality: I’m a boy but I also felt

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something different. The education of society says “you must grow up a good man, a good boy” but I didn’t feel this social system is fit for me: it’s not real. So I always thought about what is my real identity. I always felt some distance between these differences. When I moved, with my body, it didn’t correlate with the condition of my body, and it wasn’t only about the name: the body has another dimension with both emotions and thoughts. These feelings led me to write poems in Japanese but I felt that the Japanese language or words were also something distant from my feelings. My body wanted to speak in a slightly different way and I wondered what this was, it became my question: this condition of my body, this problem, this “distance”. That was before I started Butoh. So you felt this before you did Butoh. Was it that then when you saw Butoh you felt this is the kind of practice in which you could explore these feelings? I entered university and I tried to join the theatre club – it was 1967 and I wanted to try something. There were student confrontations, so when I joined the theatre group I expected they might be more radical, more political. But when I entered this group there wasn’t such political activity; it just wasn’t right for me, and it was bad, very bad (he laughs)! I started to think about dancing because [in dance] we don’t need to speak. I started to think more deeply about the difference between dance art versus theatre art and I felt more drawn towards dance art. At that time, there were many Japanese artists influenced by avant-garde movements, for example, there was a Japanese painter who stopped painting and did events on the streets or “happenings”. Do you know the group Hi Red Centre? They wanted to “meet their own bodies”. I liked their activities; they did very political things with very good sense. There was another group Zero Jigen from Nagoya; they also did events and happenings with a different direction and quality. This kind of difference is normal. But I knew for sure that I liked the quality of Hi Red Centre’s happenings. Perhaps this was an influence for me; with some friends, I began a performance group called Mandragora.47 We found this name in a book and we did three or four happenings. We then made mailing art: we made a paper sack and we put some objects into it, maybe a letter or an object and we sent it, asking “please send it to another person with your own offering added to it”.

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Finally I wanted to receive it with the additions to see how it had changed, but I didn’t receive anything back. I also did a Japanese flag, the Hinomaru: I cut into it, so one part becomes grooved inside and some of it disappears, like an eclipse. I asked a flag maker to make it. At that time, I think Yukio Mishima had already planned his suicide: he died from harakiri in 1970 and people felt something from this. Maybe three years before he had already prepared his own private military. So I wanted to send this flag piece to Yukio Mishima. I sent it but I got no reaction… I still like this flag and I have one or two in my room. I sent this flag to Natsuyuki Nakanishi of Hi Red Centre: he was doing an exhibition in a gallery and I wanted to give it to him. In 1970 in Osaka, there was the Japanese Expo, and it had many artists who came from an anti-expo movement. Nakanishi misunderstood the idea of the flag as being something from the antiexpo movement: he didn’t accept it. But he advised me, “you should think or research more on the possibility of creating through your body”. And he told me, “you know there’s that performance next month? You should go”. Another artist also recommended it: it was Tatsumi Hijikata’s performance. I went and I got a shock. Hijikata did perform in the Osaka Expo though, and he was in a film especially made for a 360º projection screen called Astrorama. He also performed in the Pepsi Cola Pavillion and Gakken Pavillion. He choreographed an adagio; it was very cabaret-like and it became known as “Gakken-style”. Coming back to the performance Nakanishi recommended, which one was it? The original Nikutai no Hanran: this title was also about the times, because the subtitle is “Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese”. Before that of course I knew Noh and Kabuki or Japanese Buyo dancing…and also American Musicals: I watched films, but I didn’t feel I wanted to study this dancing, this wasn’t my direction. I felt that I had to find a different way because I didn’t study modern dance or Japanese dance but then I saw Tatsumi Hijikata: I was shocked, and at the same time, I felt, “this is my dance”. I encountered something in it. I didn’t know much about Butoh but already Hijikata was calling this the “Dance of Darkness”, Ankoku Butoh: at that time though, “Butoh” was not a fixed word it was also called Ankoku Buyo.

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Was it after you saw this performance of Hijikata’s that you had the Yamabushi experience? Afterwards. What was your initial experience as a Yamabushi: why did you do it? I know that you reject the path of linking dance to spirit or religious ideas, and you also don’t encourage emotions in dance. You have talked about sacrifice in your dance: this is normally connected with faith or belief: how do you understand sacrifice when it is devoid of this? Sacrifice can be studied in anthropology. In Japanese ethnology, kokugaku 國學 is a type of research into the national roots of where the Japanese come from, such as the Emperor cult – where does it come from? These questions were linked to the times because (Tatsumi) Hijikata, and Yukio Mishima also wanted to find out “what is Japan?” The Japanese Expo is linked to this. When I started dancing, the most important book for me was Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. In this book, he talks a lot about dance and music: it’s the origin of art, before Greek mythology I think. Nietzsche says the most important thing is “primal unity” (kongenteki issya): it’s when you “become”. When dance and music begins, this moving together, it’s the body meeting with god – not only god – this condition of the body as one unity. In my body, there is also another sexuality because I always felt different from the Japanese identity or sexual identity. For example, I like coffee, but that one taste is not always the same: everyday, all the time it’s different. Now I like this coffee, but perhaps in the next moment, I don’t like it: there is this changing. But for Nietzsche, in talking about dance and music, the mind-body finds one unity: absolute unity. But Nietzsche said, it’s not god. Aloneness is another question: thinking of community, the idea of one community has disappeared. With primal unity, he talks of “original aloneness”. It’s a very delicate problem related to when you begin the dance. For example in a festival, everyone goes crazy, like an orgy, and if you mix into it, you step out of your social role, and everyone becomes “the children of god”: they purify themselves. This is an anthropological thought, and many anthropologist writers talk about that. The origin of the festival is the feast; when a sacrifice is made, a special person must be presented to the god as a sacrifice. In this situation, many people go into a trance,

154  Dispersion: The Mavericks an ecstasy, and through this trance, they overcome their sexuality, their social role, and they can start to have sex with each other or kill each other: this is the orgy. What is the purpose of the sacrifice? This is my question. This problem and theme enters my dance and makes me question “what is my dance?” I am not dancing for sacrifice but by dancing “I must kill myself”. My body and my dancing are a sacrifice of myself. But I don’t want to give it to the society or the community. This question of the community is very important, thinking about national identity and what is the Japanese Emperor?, I cannot accept that somebody uses my body as a sacrifice for society. But I can sacrifice my body, by myself. DSB: Willingly? 

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My next question is what is the origin of this oneness and need for totality? I’m “Ko Murobushi” – that is, female, male, animal and stone, metallic elements, and many other identities, materials, together – and I start to think of what is transformation? What if I want to become animal? Sometimes I feel animal; or sometimes I’m more natural together with humanity; “what is a human?” that’s another question. Between animal and human, which is reality? I can discover that I’m half human, half animal: this meeting point is inside my body. This is the feeling of edge. I need to go deeper into the possibility of my body. You asked about the Yamabushi: for me, the Yamabushi is interesting in many different ways. The Yamabushi is a very ambiguous character; for example, in history, many professions belong to the society or community. In Japan, your personality belongs to the community, and if a person has money, he must pay tax… but the Yamabushi is not one identity, he is moving, nomadic.  Mercurial? Yes! They knew things because of their ancient origin, maybe you can even say shamanic. They had a natural knowledge. I talked about the mandoragora plant; the Yamabushi know if it is possible to eat it or if it can be used as a drug or medicine. When they go to the mountain, they know the animal tracks, and whether many

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animals come to this place, because they can track the animals’ footsteps. They have knowledge of how to cut an animal. They move, between the mountain and the seashore, and not always in a human way: there are many stories about them, and they don’t believe in one god. So why were you interested in the Yamabushi? Why did you want to join them? Because I wanted to escape from Japan, and this possibility was in Japan. You have said of the Yamabushi mountain priests that “they walked a path somewhere between the holy and the worldly… they pursued a ‘wandering life’ without any religious or group affiliation”. The word “mercurial” also applies to your piece Quicksilver. You also said they had techniques for “travel” emphasizing this idea of mobility, fluidity, that seems important to you: how do you relate this to your identity and then incorporate it into your dance, and into your life as well? It is through the character of Hermes: I read several books about European alchemy, and mythology is also very important here. You said mercurial quality, but it’s also Hermes, like the word “hermetic”. Around that time – the end of the 1960s – I was reading many books about alchemy and mythology. The “Golden Embryo” is a symbol of alchemy; the “homunculus” also has several sexualities in one sex. I liked this kind of symbolic material. It was the same idea with Yamabushi history. The Yamabushi is free from society and free from nationality, and the homunculus is free from gender. Yes and because of the Yamabushi’s history, there is a network. At first, their motivations were different; they wanted to find gold and other metals, because they knew the course of the rivers, from the mountain to the ending point. If they found silver and mercury in the rivers, they knew that if they went up to the mountain, to the source, there may be gold. There is a relation, because many of the famous Yamabushi places have this kanji symbol 丹 (tan) for “mercury”. So the Yamabushi would go deeper and deeper into the mountain to find the gold or the silver: a sort of El Dorado. The Yamabushi have a similarity to alchemists? Yes, they have a relation to religion and Japanese Buddhism. Some radical Buddhists don’t want to join society; they want to live alone, travel alone. Do you know the most famous Buddhist, Kukai? Yes.

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But Kukai was not the first. Before Kukai, there was one, a shaman; his name is En no Ozunu. He could fly from mountain to mountain, this is the legend, he is the origin of the shaman, and also the origin of the god of the Yamabushi. Religious history is very complicated: Daoism, Buddhism, and Shintoism. The Buddhistic influence is strongest for Japanese society, because hotoke,48 Buddha, and god are different. Shinto has no god, but symbols, the kami and the mirror. I think for the Yamabushi, there is a mixed influence of Daoism, Buddhism, and Shintoism. I went to the Yamabushi twice: two weeks each time for research in Spring time and Autumn time. It was like a workshop situation. You said in the interview with (Tatsuro) Ishii-san that “there was a feeling that being lost was the true state”: do you feel you’ve achieved this in your present day wanderings? Not so much that you are like the Yamabushi, but that you are something mercurial, or hermetic, that passes through society. One ritual they have is, they must “die” in the mountain: for them, the mountain is the mother’s womb. When they start climbing up the mountain, for their travel, they are moving inside the mother’s womb. If a baby is going to come out, then you have to start from a dead body for a new cycle to begin – growing, then coming out as a new life again: rebirth. It’s very interesting, because there are many dangerous spots in the mountain, so they must change camp often, every two or three days and they go to many secret spots. There are strange symbolical places that they must touch and then they go to cascades and waterfalls and they chant some mantras, and in the end, this magic summons a certain power, and finally, they have a fight: do you know Japanese Sumo? Yes I do. Do you know the character Tengu49? Yes I saw it in Akita. Fighting each other through Sumo is a preparation to be Tengu: if you win, you become Tengu. This fighting is called “Tengu-Sumo”. I was it… So you’re a Tengu? (he laughs) They make a big fire in the night: many “normal” people come to watch the final. When the fire is going to finish, and there are ashes but still fire and embers, then they walk through this, and it’s very hot.

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The connection with my life and dance was that I wanted to find out what is the dead body? and also what is this experience for them (the Yamabushi). Also, I wanted to research and to make a report for the university. I wrote a very long paper, but finally I stopped; I couldn’t finish. I want to talk about Antonin Artaud; I know you just performed in Hel Gabal in Tokyo (12/2013). Artaud has an idea he returns to which I find relevant here: he often said that he was trying to give birth to himself. In order to be freed from history, from a mother and father, he had to give birth to himself. I feel this relates to what you say about the Yamabushi and this ritual “death”: in a way, this dying is cutting yourself out from your history and past. That’s also related to the lifestyle of the nomad: not having a nationality, a family, and a home. European history is linked with Christianity, so Artaud wanted to cut out Christian history and identities: he wanted to create a different blood. This came from the famous story about the Paris Expo, when the Balinese theatre came to dance and he was very shocked. This kind of dance is very different to European dance. He also wanted to research the Tarahumara people of Mexico and it’s similar to my research because he wanted to encounter a different blood – through ceremony or culture, and another language. Perhaps the similarity also is that his historical “god” was represented by this hierarchy he wanted to escape from: the hierarchic God of culture and religion in the West. He wants to kill the power of art history: the basic motivation is resistance. You spoke about hierarchy: I don’t want to become part of the hierarchy either; I don’t want to be a “child”. I can compare this with Nazism, in WW2. With the advent of Hitler, Nazism made a hierarchy and all the people became like “one family”. Then a soldier must kill other soldiers, and if Hitler believes in a god, this god is a part of the hierarchy. At that time [in Japan] in the 1960s, the ultra-left party and the ultra-right party were changing their cultural identity, but they were both like sects, always fighting with the hierarchy. Of course, this was my generation and I felt it was interesting. Mishima also wanted to fight the ultra-left because he wanted to become ultra-right: it was like a stage act. But I wanted

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to become something like the Yamabushi, not on either side, on the edge, where the border is moving, fluid. The origin of the word “anarchy” means “without a head”. The French Revolution interpreted this in a very literal way by cutting people’s heads off. “Hierarchy” then implies “with a head”. I’m thinking about sacrifice, on the stage, or in the performance: in order to access certain parts of yourself, this cutting off of the head – this anarchy of the self – is that the sacrifice? Acéphale50 is a review where Georges Bataille was writing about a “secret sect” which he named Acéphale… no head. During the Conference of Female Dancers at Keio University in which I participated (12/2013), there was mention of “the politicization of the body through Butoh”. For my part, I don’t see Butoh so much as (just) dance, but as a process through which you put your body, and this can inform a politics. What’s your opinion on the idea that the body can become political through Butoh: in your lifestyle as a lone Butoh artist, what do you think is the strength of the outsider position? Can you explain a little bit? One voice that comes to mind is Slavoj Zizek in his book Violence (2009); he suggests that the most politically powerful statement is to be the outsider, that “silence” is very powerful. Do you think that the body attaining this state is possible through Butoh? He (Ko) said, sometimes impossibility is the strongest power against political power. Impossibility is very political sometimes, because someone says to you, “do something” but you say, “I want to do it but I cannot because I have an impossibility to do it…” Just going back to the Yamabushi ceremony: he dies many times, not just once…He will come out as a new baby, over one or two weeks, but in the mountain, they are walking all the time, climbing up and coming down, and the ceremony has many different moments of birth and death, and reversal or restart. Many actions have this cyclical element, and I found that if I use my own body, I must find this moment of death, and then its reverse direction, so that it’s always changing and that moment of change is not completely distinct. One of the elements is perhaps dying, but another part is reversing it at the same time. It’s not just one line, there are many. I mentioned that even if I become animal, at the same time, I’m still human, so the audience or the space must find this real tension in different ways: I cannot control

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through my concentration; many different possibilities are happening concurrently. For example, if one audience watches me become animal, it’s not just one animal he’s seeing; for him, it might be very real: “Today’s Murobushi is very strong for me”. But another audience might be sleeping. It’s not possible to name one [moment], and it’s not my role to do so; it’s just a system, a theatre system. If I go to ImpulsTanz, they say “please name your piece”. I say Ritournelle (2013) but it’s only one performance, and it’s not possible to give a name that applies for all of the performances in time – it’s one sign. But in Ritournelle, there are many different things and themes, there isn’t one fixed meaning, and also there is no meaning; it is meaningless; there are many senses. It is political. It’s anarchism, maybe. Those popularly named “anarchists” at the moment are people who go and protest against, for example, the G20 summit, but there is another kind of anarchism as well. The body can become politicized through a process like Butoh: when my interest in Butoh appeared, it wasn’t just about dancing; I needed to change something in my life and my ideas as well, and maybe I needed to “kill myself”, or who I thought I was, to find something else that I was looking for through the body. Everything was pulled up by something, not necessarily just Butoh, but Butoh created an anarchism in my body, the need to destroy, which I feel politicizes me, in a far deeper sense than being overtly political or activist in the traditional way. Linked to anarchism, the most important thing when I am dancing is always that if I feel “I become a dancer” or “I’m dancing”, I have to stop: I cut the moment. The most important thing is no name, nonsense. Through time and space, and the audience watching my movement, it can become “dancing” – a continuity – and then they feel: “Ko Murobushi is dancing, and the concentration is very good and this communication makes some sense, and there is some story”. And then if I hit the ground, there is pain, and maybe then they need some reason, and they start to think in this way so that they can find it. At that point, I must become more unpredictable. So you have to constantly break meaning, stopping before it arrives at meaning? Yes, exactly, that’s why I say cutting, continuity and cutting: it’s a sort of method or theory. I always need

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to criticize my body or criticize my dancing by myself. And this creates another art, another performance, for the normal audience. Being on stage is both edge and sacrifice. We talked about sacrifice. Now you’ve said that you don’t prepare much, as you want to feel a “state of emergency” [on stage]. How do you deal with it? Does your presence on stage relate to different notions of time like Aeon and Chronos? If you take Chronos to describe the time when you’re on stage, when you’ve got to do a performance, and this takes a certain amount of time to do, and Aeon is the quality of time that you have to enter into, through your performance. This “state of emergency”, of not being overly prepared – because if you rehearse, movements can become very chronological – how do you deal with it? I studied the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense. In this book, Deleuze talks about different kinds of time: daily, countable time is Chronos; more creative time, that you cannot count is Aeon. I first encountered it [Chronos and Aeon] in this book although he wrote about it in other books. Deleuze referred to Nietzsche frequently, for example, he takes up the concept of kongenteki issya (primal unity) from The Birth of Tragedy and relates it to the “innocence of becoming”. I read about these two notions of time in a science magazine, about how we advance on one time, which is Chronos, but there is another aspect of time, that is almost like a circle and that you are going back and around, going back into moments or lives, something like Aeon. For example, if we met each other and we fall in love, in this moment, there is Aeon time because there is no counting, just one moment but it is continuous, it feels like such a long time. In West Side Story, the Hollywood dance musical film, the most beautiful moment is very symbolic. The Sharks gang goes to the dance party, and it’s the beginning and all of the gang try to fight, through dancing: I like it! But the image goes to Tony and Maria, because they are different from this gang. They are enemies but they watch each other, and the music stops, it’s just Maria and Tony watching each other, and that’s the moment they fall in love. It is the strongest moment. Of course the dancing is beautiful but this stands out.

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How do you use this idea of time? You’re on stage and say you’ve prepared a little: how do you go into Aeon time? As I said I criticize, but I must always watch myself and I must disturb myself. He is prepared enough. But it’s something else: he is on the stage with a prepared situation, but each moment is an emergency for him, through the critical eye. By “a critical eye”, you mean that you are seeing yourself – looking at yourself? Yes And you are going in between [being] yourself, and seeing yourself? I don’t want to become only one identity so I always watch myself: the body is moving but my thought continues to watch, and between them there is distance. This distance also has eyes. My body always feels the audience, and my senses also feel the audience. Through these two perceptions, I find another moment: between them, there is some special sensation. Do you feel you are oscillating between seeing and being yourself or is it always externalized? It is always the two, a double. Between this one and that one, maybe there is another one, I find it inspires something – something happens. You are also sometimes expecting something to happen? Do you see it as yourself dancing or as some thing dancing? Do you say “it’s me dancing”. For example in yoga, the position at the end of a physical asana session is called “corpse position”. In this position, you allow your consciousness to leave your body so you see your body. Your body is there – you can feel it – but you are really not attached to it. It’s like two awarenesses. I think it’s more double: “I” and “he”. This double is like this. The body feels something, and it is also thinking: a consciousness is watching the body’s continuity, but of course this double is also me because I am not just one entity, I am two, three, four. With this consciousness, in this moment, there are many possibilities: I watch this, or I want to take this (he picks up a cup)… Something happens that he is expecting but something also happens that he isn’t expecting. For the last performance, I wanted to smoke on stage. Before the performance, I asked the theatre but it was

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too late to get permission. It was impossible. I don’t know what happened but I prepared a table and an ashtray and I brought smoking stuff in my pocket. I was just acting. But I don’t know what happened finally I took the cigarette, and I started to say something, and because Toshio Otani’s music was the Blues, I thought “yes now I must smoke”: up until this moment, I still didn’t know if I would smoke or not. But I did smoke! Yesterday we talked about performances with some objects. He was very critical about dance with objects. You (Ko) said to Katja [Centonze] that to dance with objects is stupid in your opinion? Katja said that she saw a performance with objects, and at the moment, many Butoh dancers dance with objects. She said that dance with objects has another meaning. It’s possible to dance with objects. It’s an easy action, but now many European dancers also bring materials onto the stage – a chair for example. Of course in normal daily life, a chair is for sitting, but they don’t want to use it for sitting. The chair becomes some “dance material”, and the dancing takes on another meaning – they want to “explain” something and their acting, or their movement becomes a deconstruction of the chair, and this is an easy way…too easy. I do a performance where I use chair. There’s no story or narrative, but the idea of the body and the chair is linked to being active or being passive. Sitting on the chair changes the weight of the body: the body resting leads to a sense of passivity, inertia, gradually getting closer to not moving. So I use the chair to feel a different density in my body. Butoh dancers often adopt a low position, for example, lying on the floor, though we are never normally lying on the floor in daily life. But many people sit on chairs, the chair is a middle point, in between lying on the floor and standing up. You mean for the European body? Yes, bodies influenced by European culture. So much of our society now is based around sitting on a chair – being an office worker. Sitting on a chair is a powerful symbol of the social body. But many dancers, not only European, also Japanese dancers use a chair. For dancers, to use a chair not for sitting seems too easy. Do you mean in the sense of playing with “what else can this be?” Giving the chair different meanings.

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What you’re talking about might be a physical theatre performance? At yesterday’s [German Theatre] conference at the university, the theme was Postmodern Theatre: it was a German director talking about contemporary new theatre. My way for dance comes from Gilles Deleuze’s immanence: it’s not only inside the body, even talking is also like this… The feeling is of my inside coming out to communicate with you, and your reaction mixes with this, and this makes some continuity and awareness of space and time. Now Kimiko invited Katja [Centonze] to talk at this discussion, about the plane of immanence inside the body. It’s not only inside it’s also talking, mixing, changing, and during these moments, some noise, some disturbance comes into this plane of immanence, and another element appears inside of it. The plane is like a map of immanence. The dancer must exist within this map. But the map is changing, always moving… So [the dancer is] travelling through this map? …and during this moment, transformation happens… In a sense, the currents moving through this map of immanence are generating transformations, or changes that the dancer responds to? Yes that’s right. Each moment is changing, moving, creating new immanence. But you don’t think objects can exist within the plane of immanence? No. No it’s because for me also the body, as “dead body”, becomes an object: by killing your “time”, you become object. And this is the strangest moment because an object cannot move, but the dead body can move therefore it is paradoxical. This can exist in the plane of immanence. I understand. I think there is a difference between say corporeal mime or physical theatre, where they might use a chair, or a glass and they transform it into many things so that this object comes to life. I think it’s different in what you’re saying about dance though. In your own work, there are a few aspects that I want to mention. Your face: what is the importance of the face in your work? I’ve seen this animal that you do: is there an image that you have of an animal? Do you use imagery? Sometimes there’s a movement

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that might be more comical, and then also pedestrian movement, very “daily life” movement too. How do you mix all these elements within your work, as well as very strong forms like the animal? Can I say? …Once Ko said something about some daily gesture: “If I start to dance, everybody starts to think ‘oh it’s Butoh’. So I stop: ‘How stupid you are, it’s not Butoh!’ I want to kill this kind of thing”. For me, it was very interesting: these people maybe they want to believe it’s Butoh, I can show them Butoh… but it’s not Butoh…cut. You mean it’s not what they think Butoh is? If people start to believe, he cuts. Do you sometimes think: “In order to cut this, I’m just going to use this kind of movement? Or I’m going to use my voice”… or do you improvise? Sometimes it’s planned, sometimes unplanned. It’s a mix… (Ko speaks to Kimiko in Japanese) (translating Ko’s words) It’s a very good question: for example, he danced, and from the beginning he’s trying to dance “non-dance”. The idea of “non-dancing”: In the moment of nondance, I want to find dance. I want to give this idea to the audience…I want to realize it. How is all this mixed, the planned and the unplanned? I don’t know, you should tell me the answer. I don’t want to become “I’m Ko Murobushi, I am Ko Murobushi”. For example, Akaji Maro or Akira Kasai, dance in this way: “I’m Akira”, “I’m Maro Akaji”. This is expressionism; they believe their own expression and presence. I cannot accept this. Please transform! Akaji Maro is not just “Akaji”. I want to find another angle. I feel they don’t know their own self, it’s very boring for me. Perhaps your approach is not like “I am Ko Murobushi” but “This is a body, and this body has done these things”, something like the history embedded in the body? You are talking about his presence? Not personal history, but a resonance of how you live your life: I sense many things come out in moments of comedy, pedestrian movement through your body, the way you hold your body. I don’t mean this expressionism as you said of “This is Ko Murobushi”, but this is a human being who has a world around him. It’s like a plane of immanence? Existence in a world.

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But this “existence” would still exist even if there’s no audience…This plane of immanence, though, if there’s no audience it’s not happening: it is always created together with an audience – people watching, a system of eyes, laughing and me “not dancing”. It is the plane of immanence that is happening. It’s a relationship between the self and others? Existence within this plane of immanence… Together. Ishii-san says “…by nature, your dance works appear to be ones that could only be performed by your own body…” I agree with this statement and so I wonder how you can pass on your ideas through choreography, and what challenges you face with new, other bodies. For me, attempting your work or choreography would have to fall into a sort of performance art, [by that I mean] an analysis of how my body performs a method created specifically by a body like yours. For example, your “animal” is it a form? An image? An experiment? A metamorphosis? Just for your body or for all bodies? For example, I’m very interested in working with dancers. In Yokohama, recently I presented an idea for a new choreography, and of course, I gave the theme of “animality”: but it’s not only a cat! I feel I now want to explore this subject more deeply, I want to work together with one dancer, she or he might have great potential. My animal is the “cat” or “tiger” – someone said that. But it’s not just one animal, there is also a “bird”, but a bird is changing into “horse”. I want to work with this kind of idea, I want to explore it. It’s interesting to work with Yamada [Arihiro], if he continues to develop, maybe it will become a very strong element, a motivation, or it may become a different method. I’m not just looking at form though, only in the last piece [1001 Festival, Yokohama, 2013], I wanted to give this choreography. My choreography though is one “passage”… Ko is waiting… “what is your dance?” He gives a subject, and he waits. But the dancer is also waiting. Form is more of a technical thing, but another aspect is just asking them to breathe: a choreography only with breathing. But breathing is very difficult and I felt it was not successful, although I tried many times. “Breathing is dance, you can dance with breathing”, he kept saying this. But though they understand they can’t understand with their body.

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It’s interesting: I asked them to relate it to the idea of “final breath”, when people die: I watched my father passing away. During the choreography, I told them to explore this. Breathing stops with this moment in death (he makes a deep rasping sound as he breathes). When I visited Kazuo Ohno, Yoshito told me Kazuo knew that Ko Murobushi is coming. It wasn’t his last breath, but he was breathing with a tube. Yoshito explained to me that the noise of his breathing in the tube was getting louder when he knew I would visit. I told this episode to the dancers, and I said “please do the final breath like this to the audience”, but it was not successful. All the dancers were too young; though I don’t know, if experience is necessary, but they can only “imagine” the crisis of breath. Between silence and breath is your dance: it is very delicate. For your choreography, you need the correct dancer. It’s about what you say and what they can understand with their head and their body, both. It’s very difficult. I don’t just need professional dancers, or an imitation of me. But they should bring their own experience, and their own imagination, if that’s possible. This discussion about choreographing Butoh is very interesting. When Hijikata started off, he was doing things which were about testing or experimenting with his body, through dance, but then his work became far more structured: perhaps this happened from him wanting to leave a legacy. Butoh is so much about questions you ask your own body, and then you answer these questions through your body as well: if you start putting the answers onto other bodies, is this still Butoh? I do think about that and I have been doing workshops for a long time and I always think to myself, “what is necessary in order to give movement or exercises to young students?” And my ideas are changing but the most important thing is that they are changing along with my age. And finally the impossibility of movement is Hijikata’s “dead body, standing”: that’s dance… That’s what he wanted to say. It’s the first manifestation and it’s from death. He called it the “dead body”, but this dead body is something like Aeon time. The impossibility of movement and what happens as well as the movement: if it’s imitation, or if it’s pantomime, it’s not interesting, and one should discover one’s own experience. If for example Yamada-kun or Yuu-chan

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get this metallic body, what happens next? This next is the most important exercise for them. This kind of subject or material is some of the most important material I can choose: it’s my own idea of dancing. It’s looking for the feeling of edge of [the] body, through the impossibility of the movement and the possibility of the movement. In the workshop you did with me, I did “cockroach shock”: it’s a very simple and easy exercise. Well it’s not easy, but it’s easy to understand, everybody has this kind of experience of shock. Through this, you already touch Aeon time: this happens with “cockroach”. But after that moment how do things change? This is another strong exercise, melting or breaking. The meaning of “choreography” is researching by themselves. He gave some materials but they should research by themselves. But there wasn’t enough time, only ten days. Anyway I believe they got something. I was thinking that to pass some kind of choreography to someone, it’s necessary to take into consideration that the person who is choreographing is not the body that is dancing it. Any choreography is like that I feel, not just Butoh. But Waguri-san he just gives a form, like a collage… I watched Takao Kawaguchi’s performance: Homage to Kazuo Ohno. He’s not a Butoh dancer… Still, I thought it was very interesting. Relating it to your practice Ko, perhaps this is what happens through the form of the animal: you get into that form, and that form is not your form, but through that form you learn something about your body, and what then can become your form. Takao Kawaguchi copied Kazuo Ohno’s choreography exactly: it’s not his [own] choreography but it’s his body. It made me wonder how Butoh can be communicated or moved from one body to another body, when it is so personal and  based around this immanence or phenomenological presence? Ko gave choreography to one woman. I said to him, “this choreography was so nice to watch, please give the choreography to another girl”. But he said “it’s impossible and it’s not good for this dancer, because I made this choreography with her so I don’t want to do this kind of thing”. But now she wants to give this choreography to others so I wonder how that works.

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It’s interesting though, I don’t feel that there is a particular way that you can choreograph something like Butoh, something that comes from experience and process. Maybe through techniques that are almost emotionless, simple, a dry way of doing it, and that develops the person who is “the experiment” into the artist? This subject is very interesting for me. About katachi (form): what is form? It’s another question I think. Takao Kawaguchi did Kazuo Ohno and his question is about Kazuo Ohno. I remember we saw it, and I thought about it, and I liked his approach but after that I forgot about it. But Mr Keisuke Sakurai a dance critic, called me because I talked about Takao’s performance, and he also watched it. He said he didn’t like it: for him the most important thing about Kazuo Ohno is something more transcendent. But Takao just wanted to show form, form, form, so there was nothing about Kazuo Ohno for Mr Sakurai. I agreed. But the first day you said he was very good, because it was really Takao Kawaguchi and not Kazuo Ohno: so he was honest as “Takao Kawaguchi” and that was very good but the next day… I was talking about Takao’s idea, “what is form?” But I agree with Sakurai’s impression. The first shock of Kazuo Ohno is like the shock of Tatsumi Hijikata which was very strong for me. Coming back to Nikutai no Hanran, in the introduction, he comes to the stage and he starts to dance and at first he creates the body through this golden penis, and then he disappears and returns wearing many different costumes. But it’s the first impression: if it is very strong nothing can compare with this moment. It is Aeon time: it’s like falling in love. For 40 years. And I became completely blind, and in blindness, this picture is completely burned into my memory. It was such a special moment. I suppose Sakurai’s impression of Takao’s Kazuo Ohno is nearly the same thing: this first strong memory Sakurai has of Kazuo Ohno… Cannot change… Takao’s performance is form. But this first impression is not about form. It’s a moment when Chronos time disappears, so it’s not possible to compare. You mean form has no meaning? Form has no form. Maybe it’s possible to compare with a Japanese cooking professional, or a professional of

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Japanese traditional arts: to get that professionalism you should study just one aspect of it for ten years. For example, the cooking master says, “please just cut the cabbage for ten years”. This is not form, but there is form. I understand, it’s something I’d like to examine more. “What is form”…? What Kawaguchi did, seems very “dry”, perhaps analytical, scientific almost, and I found that interesting. I think that Butoh is performance art, through each artist’s method of approaching it, questioning the work: it’s more than just about dance. That’s why I’m questioning how you can create something like choreography or pass on your idea so that people will develop it in their own way. Perhaps it’s somewhere between these things. I don’t think Hijikata’s work became more interesting when he developed the Butoh-fu forms. Ko sometimes says “we need technique to kill technique”. Yes we have a form already. If I have a body, I have a form. In a way, you must accept that form exists, but form is not the end, so maybe through [accepting] form you destroy form. Also through form, you recognise form. That’s why Ko is a “super technician” to kill his technique. Butoh has gone beyond Japan. Natsu Nakajima was saying at the Female Dancer’s Conference at Keio University (2013) that more than 50% of dancers in Mexico call their dance “Butoh”. She said it’s the same in South America, that they call themselves Butoh dancers. I also read the review by the Guardian critic, Judith Mackrell, of your performance with Bartabas at Sadler’s Wells in London (2011). She described the performance’s “excrutiating slowness” and wrote that it was “one of the toughest openings to any piece of dance theatre”… That was a very bad review. I don’t think it was bad, not overall, it was her personal feeling about slow movement. The approach to the body and to performance and what is acceptable on the stage, varies greatly throughout the world. And also people understand Butoh differently throughout the world. Do you think this UK critic’s comment reflects something of the Western approach to dance, or is it something specifically British, because in France,

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people have a different response and also if you think that so many people in Mexico and South America are calling themselves “Butoh dancers”. What do you think this means in considering contemporary Butoh? What has Butoh become to all these people? Maybe the first question is about the Guardian critic’s comment? Do you think it’s the Western approach to dance, that something must always be happening? It’s about slowness especially the British critic’s response; during my workshop, I talk about “slowness”, this is still a Chronos word: it is speed, so slow, and how slow… If it’s possible to count, there is no idea of Aeon. Maybe she missed my Aeon because her eyes were completely overcome by Chronos time – I don’t know. Now of course Aeon time is difficult to enter every time, and I  forget how many times I performed with Bartabas in the UK. Maybe four or five? More I think, maybe one week. One or two times I was very successful by myself, but another two or three times my concentration was very… I don’t know. Maybe you moved “slowly”. It’s true that it depends on the day of the show of course. Ko says slowness is “outside of Chronos time”, but each moment is also cutting: it isn’t just continuity, slowly, there is also cutting within each moment. Butoh is also perhaps difficult as an import in some places, as if there is a resistance towards understanding it, and so it becomes very form-based. How about Mexico and South America, where everyone is a “Butoh dancer”? Kimiko can explain. It’s become a business, because there are so many “fans” that if I say, “I come from Japan, I am a woman and I know Ko Murobushi”, then I can teach Butoh, and I can earn a lot of money! Even if I go to Japan for one week, and then go back to Mexico, now “I’m a Butoh teacher”: that’s possible. Many people come to study with this “teacher”: they wear white makeup and they feel very happy, thinking “Oh I’m doing Butoh”. They start to dance something ridiculous, it’s fine because for them it’s Butoh. It’s mainly like that. In South America, is Butoh also linked to the revolutionary ideology?

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You mean against the politics? It is more about animism, spiritualism, not Japonisme. Japonisme is for Europe. This Japonisme in Europe manifests as a strong exoticism linked to Butoh. But I can imagine in Latin America, from what I have seen in images, it seems that the attraction might be shamanism, spiritualism, something like that… And against power. But another way to show resistance to power: it’s more representational and they wear heavy make-up and show “I’m against!” (she mimes an action)…like that… I’m not sure. I’ve heard people in Japan mention differences between the Western and Eastern body: what does this mean for you? Again thinking about how Butoh has now travelled abroad, how do you think these ideas about the body relate to people’s understanding of Butoh. Maybe people in the West are dancing what they think is (their) Butoh, maybe it’s not what you or other Japanese dancers might think is “Butoh”, but maybe this is also linked to their body experience, to their Western body? If “Butoh” is the name of the dance, then it’s possibly not Butoh. If Butoh is not the name of the dance then the Eastern or Western body is not important. But do you think there is a difference between the Western body and the Eastern body? I don’t believe the Butoh body is the Japanese body, I do not believe this. And my reading of Butoh is very different from another Butoh teacher. For example, Akaji Maro, Akira Kasai and Yukio Waguri, Natsu Nakajima, they are very different I’m sure, so I cannot answer in a general way. I want to cut these Japanese body parts. The idea of body experience is about time, and I’m also talking about breathing. Of course these things are not separated. At the beginning, for warming up, I start breathing together with the students and everybody wants to imitate my movement: but we’re just breathing together, it’s not technique! And it’s not yoga either, but it’s a very concentrated movement with the body. And anyway it’s necessary to breathe, for life. Every day I ask them “please breathe out and breathe in” and I repeat it, but even if they come to the workshop

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five times, I don’t know if they recognize the aim of it or not. I want to find what Butoh is for me – the sense, the core – through shaking and the standing dead body. The human body is very similar when devoid of cultural history. It’s not necessary to differentiate, that’s why I choose this basic line up. It’s just one selection of my ideas or my understanding of Butoh. For me Butoh is not just dancing. In this sense, there is no difference between the Japanese and European body. You mean bodies will react in the same way? Staying with thinking of the body, what can it be if it’s not form – thinking of it socially, politically, culturally? Butoh in the early days had some very strong currents of anarchy and revolt. Today we are in a different situation and it’s not just a Japanese situation, the whole world knows about Butoh now. What possibility does contemporary Butoh hold, not just in terms of the body? Ask Kimiko… No, no (she laughs), but during 40 years, I saw many texts that he wrote, but during 40 years, you (Ko) changed nothing from the beginning to today. And if he will live a 100 years, I don’t think he will change. Many people ask questions like “What is Butoh?” or will say “that’s not Butoh”? You talk about edge: how does your concept of balance, as being a kind of death, relate to modern life, which is all about creating an acceptable, “middle-class” sense of balance through security, ease and the removal of threat and risk – let’s call it the culture of convenience. This tends to make the body inert and perhaps a little “dead” in contemporary society. Butoh is perhaps about taking you out of balance, when the whole thrust of society is towards this middle. The body is a machine… You want to ask him a question about the relationship between body and time? Body and society. Society is changing, now it’s the robot age. Robots can make war, now the world doesn’t need humans, it needs robots, and also if I am [bed-ridden], a robot can help me. If you lose your arm, you can have a robot arm… But I can’t change my ideas of 40 years of life. Always researching the same direction…

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I t’s the most important thing about the future of Butoh dance. In our daily life, how do you think we can put ourselves out of balance, on the edge. I mean experience that, so that it’s not just a stage technique. How is it possible to feel the edge in daily life, because otherwise life is very safe. F  or example, I don’t always come back to my work, as one step, two steps: if you go right and left during this walking exercise, you can find thousands of different ways. Also when I pick up a glass, my finger’s sensation is very different from another experience. If you concentrate on how to touch, or what is elegance, you can taste your hand more, your foot more, and many different possibilities appear with being “out of balance” or “in crisis”. Of my fingers: if one finger touches the ground at a different angle, there are so many different tastes. This is my answer: if I cut, I can explore these kinds of “a thousand deaths” in my body, in the parts. This researching is the same as daily life: in daily life, we create at the same time as we research. I said this plane of immanence, this map is changing every day. This is outside of [the framework of] the 1001 Festival, and it’s difficult. In our festival, we invited many teachers for example Professor Satoshi Ukai, a famous philosopher and activist. H  e is fighting against racism. …  as well as the Fukushima situation. We’ve come to an interesting point. In the festival, you included a lot of political or philosophical strands, like the Palestinian film. Is this because you want to convey the sense that not everything in the world is in this situation of balance? I feel I’m fighting with my performance. But my identity is as an artist, so my performance is stronger than one election, or just talking: I believe this. At least if I have an audience of 50 people, I want to catch them and if I can touch them, this is my direct action, and after that it’s not necessary. If out of 50 audience, maybe only one person likes my performance, and another 49 don’t like “Ko Murobushi”: then I’m sorry but it’s enough. I believe in me, but as minimal.

174  Dispersion: The Mavericks Butoh Utopia: An Imaginary Ship After a performance, it seemed customary to go for a drink and a shared meal at a local izakaya bistro. I was usually invited and became party to the many conversations that happened during these gatherings – mostly in Japanese but graciously translated for my understanding. Here, I interacted with “Butoh observers” – the critics, the writers, and the producers. I noted a recurring topic: the “problem with Butoh”. The principal problem was the lack of a cohesive formal repertoire, making it difficult to define what Butoh is exactly. I have to agree that the diversity of dance practices that exist under the name Butoh does make the organism somewhat chaotic. Might it be possible to identify and thus protect a certain pure form of Butoh? This question would come up in one form or another and the observers would often react with a gesture of certainty – a grave nod while repeating so, so… indeed, indeed. The certainty was that nobody nowadays seems to be doing it “right”. I wondered if Butoh was in danger of becoming a utopia. It would be difficult for a Butoh dancer to uphold both Hijikata’s 1960s lineage and his radical shift towards forms in the 1970s. In which one of these two distinct (and possibly more according to Takashi Morishita’s analysis)51 phases can an uncontaminated Butoh be found? The added problem is that already by the 1970s, Butoh begins to disperse along different trajectories and lineages – the theme of this section. And to compound this, while Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno worked closely in the early days of Butoh, Kazuo continued along a different path in subsequent decades. Which of all these shoots leads directly back to a pure Butoh form? How can we judge if a dancer’s maverick Butoh falls far off the mark, or is so wildly outlandish that it is precisely what Butoh “should” be? And what should Butoh be? An idealized form of genre-defying bodily rebellion that recedes into the past like a historical mirage, and is at the same time paralysed in the present because of the paradox that mimicking these radical origins would invalidate its own legacy? Or, would quite simply not amount to pure Butoh. This apparent concern over the “quality of Butoh” – the nemesis of “Butoh quality” (Butoh-sei)? – holds a particular dancer in exception to this imaginary benchmark, at least for many of the observers I conversed with. Akira Kasai was highly recommended, an exception and an exceptional dancer I was told: he had resolved this apparent paradox of origins and innovation, and amassed many prizes for it along the way. ~ The rumours were true. He knows how to leap: he was known as the “Nijinsky of Butoh”.52 He also knows how to pull faces almost incessantly, break into laughter unexpectedly, deliver impromptu monologues during his performances, or address the audience with the flippancy and goading of a stand-up comic. When I saw Kasai’s work for the first time, I was confused. Was he making fun of his audience, or was it irony, or was he being so serious about

Dispersion: The Mavericks  175 life, that he took it to be one big tragicomic joke and he was using all means available to him, framed by the medium of dance, for conveying this? Akira Kasai was one of Tatsumi Hijikata’s and Kazuo Ohno’s earliest acolytes for their 1960s Butoh experiments, dancing alongside them in Barairo Dansu, (Rose-Coloured Dance, 1965) amongst other works. He was reputedly a skilled and fearless dancer, and his confidence no doubt made it easy for him to take an independent direction very quickly. Already by 1967, he had distanced himself from Hijikata, rejecting his method and famously criticizing Hijikata’s solo of 1968. Despite this rejection, he still held onto the name “Butoh” and did remain close to Kazuo Ohno. He was especially influenced by Kazuo’s preference for improvisation as opposed to Hijikata’s move towards choreography and Butoh-fu. Improvisation continues to be at the core of Kasai’s dance. His method also includes elements from Rudolf Steiner’s Eurythmy, a technique he chose to focus on when he moved to Germany in the 1970s. In his Butoh, he incorporates voice and language to explore connections between sound, speech, and body through free improvised movement alongside choreographed dance phrases. I hadn’t known of Akira Kasai until I arrived in Japan. But because of the numerous recommendations, when I found out he was offering a rare Butoh workshop – he does teach regular Eurythmy workshops at his home studio in Kokobunji – I signed up straight away.53 I have included an account of this workshop and my notes and reflections below, and this will help to understand Kasai’s artistic themes and choreographic decisions. Overall, what I learned from him in six days was like nothing else I’d come across in Butoh. First, he favours extremely fast dynamics and pace, which is at odds with the “slow register” Butoh is often associated with. One exercise for example was imagining that you are standing in a precarious balance on the very pointed peak of a mountain top and have nowhere to put your feet; the demands of this dance are that you never allow your weight to sink into the ground. It was amusing to be part of this frantic swarm darting about the studio like trapped birds for about ten minutes. Afterwards he was beaming with satisfaction at our efforts. This was his favourite exercise and the most interesting dance he’d witnessed, because we were moved by reaction and instinct devoid of any thought, premeditation, or judgement, he said. In French there is the saying, “avoir le diable au corps” meaning “to have the devil in the body”. This kind of unstoppable movement is what Kasai loves, and when I saw his dance, the phrase immediately came to mind. His performance Utrobne (Imaginary Ship)54 which I saw in June 2012 was a showcase for his fondness for speed and non-stop activity on the stage. Let me describe it to you: He enters the stage wearing shiny black PVC pants and an impressive square-cut jacket which looks like it came out of Klaus Nomi’s wardrobe. His long hair, curled and darkened, frames his grimacing face. Above neck level, the activity never ceases: he twitches, wears a mock-sulk, bares his teeth, while all the time his eyes glint with trickster energy.

176  Dispersion: The Mavericks There are four female dancers, one male dancer, and Kasai himself performing in the piece. Strutting about the stage he behaves like an orchestra conductor, or a master of ceremonies, navigating the stage as an omnipotent presence watching, checking, interfering even, manipulating, changing, and challenging his dancers sometimes mimicking or mocking them.55 It’s as if he were charging their batteries with alternating voltages of energy to arrive at the precise dynamic he wishes. Later, he appears to compete with the male dancer in what looks like a show of one-upmanship, which turns into some gentle wrestling as both of them end up shoving each other around the stage. He grunts, makes noises, addresses the audience, always provocatively, and throughout the performance, he leaps on and off the stage, and even falls off at one point. All the while a bombastic sound accompaniment blasts out. A classical music score which has been layered over by an Italian conversation spoken sottovoce so that it sounds like a mistake, though of course it isn’t. At one point, large carp-shaped helium balloons are carried in by the dancers who float them above their heads. Kasai looks up at them and makes an off the cuff comment, the audience laughs. The dancers, like puppets or puppeteers, continue impassive. Their dance is mostly fast, wild, and emotionless, and demonstrates impressive contemporary dance technique, but their clawing hand gestures and the jaggedness and staccato feel of the dance bears definite traces of something that might be called “Butoh”. Kasai ejects another verbal missile at the audience (my neighbour kindly translates it for me): “Light is the fastest thing, but the dancer’s body is faster!” As the dancers jump around and fling themselves on the floor for the umpteenth time, a pattern is emerging. In Kasai’s movement vocabulary, speed is used for breaking. By being out of balance, the body is literally thrown, and this thrown-ness (a reminder of Heidegger’s term), is the condition for an existential beingness: the body erupts into a dance of being, not at the speed of thought, but through reaction, becoming faster than the speed of light. In the workshop, I attended with Kasai he talked about different ways to experience the body on stage. One is the feeling of being far away in space, and seeing your own body on Earth, as if you’re sitting on the moon or another planet. Utrobne demonstrates this in action. He and his dancers maintain this imaginal separation from their bodies, observing their body dancing, with an outer-consciousness, as if wondering, “What is this body?” “What is this dance?”, a strategy that diverts the body’s self-consciousness by splitting it in two: into a nonconscious materiality that can react at speed and a fully conscious one that witnesses. Kasai’s perception of the body is not achieved through the cool detachment of irony. Irony functions by a sort of disembodiment of consciousness, achieved by putting the body to work in service to a concept that consciousness is already aware of and knows. But Kasai’s cryptic blend of grotesque humour and esoteric inquiry seems to instead pursue the profound mystery of the body’s materiality, by stretching it to its furthest (unknown) limits across a spectrum bounded by tragedy at one extreme and comedy at the

Dispersion: The Mavericks  177 other. And (self)consciousness certainly doesn’t know what these limits are. By pursuing this, Kasai encounters what he considers an “aberration”: When a human being sees the essence of matter on stage, there is born an aberration which is neither matter nor a human being and goes far beyond any existing universe. It is not that I am dancing ‘in order to’ create such aberration, but it should come inevitably into being.56 Kasai’s aberration is both abject and uncanny. Abjection is linked to horror and brought about by a “collapse of meaning”.57 The uncanny, according to Freud, is a phenomenon thought to arise when something is both familiar and threatening.58 When the body loses its “normal” stable motion coordinates, and begins to move at lightning speed, it becomes radically defamiliarized. Is Kasai’s use of language linked to this collapse of meaning? He  “define[s] dance, or Butoh as the act of connecting one’s body with one’s language”.59 In Utrobne, this is enacted not only in the moments when Kasai actually utters words but also when the dance’s intensity disrupts the speaking body. Usually speaking and language tend to familiarize the strangeness of the body, but in this case, the garble of words and movements and expressions do the opposite. Here words are catapulted out as expletives that disrupt and continue the action of “breaking” the body. These speaking bodies – Kasai and his dancers – instead of looking tame and human look as if they are possessed with innumerable movement ticks and a constant nervous reactivity that actually pushes their bodies further into aberration. Kasai’s belief is that “in dance… Your body should run at full speed, so that any words or their conceptions can’t catch up with it, however fast they run after it”.60 ~ The question remains, is this really Butoh? Even this dancer, who is obviously well-respected for his work, I heard described as “no longer making Butoh”. Does this mean he’s veered off too far on his own path? Perhaps. But although Kasai’s work may not look like Butoh at first glance, he certainly embodies a visceral fury that Hijikata once gave the name “Butoh”.

178  Dispersion: The Mavericks Notes from a Workshop with Akira Kasai Although I did invite him to this conversation project, Akira Kasai was one of the only dancers who refused my questions. I wanted to include him nonetheless as I find his practice and his method should absolutely be included in “what I heard” about Butoh during the time I was in Japan (2012–2017). To resolve this lacuna, I opted to include my experience of his teaching. I attended a six-day workshop with Kasai at Studio Terpsichore, Tokyo, from March 19–24, 2012. The instructions and explanations of exercises and images were translated into French by an interpreter who was assisting another dancer on the course. I have summarized the main aspects of the work and the prompts given by Kasai. I add to this my (embodied) reflections on these provocations and any reflections or insights these led to in my own dance research. ~ In the workshop, Kasai begins by drawing our attention to the energy emitted by the vocal chords. He explained that in the embryo, this part of the anatomy is amongst the first to develop. The energy of the vocal chords vibrating can be felt in the tips of the fingers – in Japanese the fingernails, tsume, means “little light of the hand”. Herein lies a clue to Kasai’s approach of enmeshing voice, physical energy, and light speed. For example, in one exercise, we voice vowel sounds – “a”, “e”, “i”, “o”, and “u” – while moving in pliés and arabesques, making the apex of the movement and utterance coincide. Then, we repeat the exercise, this time silently voicing the vowels but still feeling the vibration of our vocal chords with the movement in the silent utterance. Moving with an awareness of voice gives intention and energy to the whole movement. Through this movement, between voicing and silence, we shift from solitude to opening our awareness to group energy. Four bodies become apparent: the social, the personal/individual, earth, and heaven. ~ The next day we practice “breathing in colour” evoking colour images linked to oxygen and carbon dioxide to then sense how this imagery affects movement. The colours, in this case limited to the three primary colours, are related to the way plants process oxygen. The colour-breath is a way to imagine how this process might occur in the human body, through blood circulation, and especially paying attention to the neck. Kasai remarks that the neck kanji is incorporated in the kanji for tao/do, a Chinese character associated with many body disciplines such as ken-do, ju-do, taekwon-do, etc. It means the “way” or the “path”. The neck is a connective path between mind (associated with the brain) and body. This work immediately reminds me of the Yogic energetic system I’m familiar with where blue is the colour of vissudhi, the neck chakra. Kasai then goes on to the subject of the crown point, and “opening the head”. A baby’s head remains open at the top of the skull until around the age of three. As we dance, we focus on this opening by opening the head on the in-breath to take

Dispersion: The Mavericks  179 in energy and closing on the out-breath to hold energy. Again, I see a connection to the crown chakra in the Tantric energetic system, which is linked to the unfolding and opening of consciousness. It turns out that consciousness will be one of the main subjects of this workshop. For Kasai, just as in the medium of painting, paint is the material, in dance, consciousness is the material, and our work is to elaborate and knead the plasticity of this material through the movement tasks and provocations he offers us. On the third day of the workshop, Kasai introduces “The Five Elements of Breathing’. The earth element is linked to diamonds, as in crystals of carbon dioxide. Light is linked to the image of sunlight on plants. The air element is evoked through the image of a storm of cherry-blossom petals. The water and fire elements, though not directly attached to an image, are located within the body’s anatomy. Water is at the centre of the body around the solar plexus. Fire is located at the third eye position, between the eyes. This point also features in Tantric yoga anatomy as the psychic centre ajna. Our task is to shift from one element to the next – earth, light, air, water, and fire – in cycles of quick succession, while vocalizing vowel sounds and repeating a specific movement phrase. We bring all our attention to the image’s embodied visualization to explore how it affects the quality of movement and sounding. Through this exercise, the function of the neck within the structure of the body as a whole becomes really salient. It feels like a frontier between facial expression and bodily movement. How can this limit be transgressed? Breath is the thread that weaves the two together again: breathing through the five elements establishes a connection. “The global body” is a term Kasai uses to evoke a body not constrained by barriers of language or words but connected to myth. Japanese mythology is characterized by stories of the birth of language. The belief is that before the universe came into existence, language already existed. Again, I find a connection here. There is a similar origins story in the Indian Vedas: the universe is brought into being through the sound om/aum. And the Vedas themselves are shruti, texts transmitted my gods and nonhuman entities to humans – the Sanskrit word shruti means “knowledge that can be heard”. Kasai continues by explaining that in Shinto cosmology, there are gods of words and a god for each vowel. It is by listening to the gods speaking that people learn to use language to communicate – but the words themselves pre-exist human affairs. A shamanic process instigates the accession to language. In Kasai’s creative ontology, dance is integral to this process because myths were originally transmitted orally and in a ritualized way. The ritual was uttered, expressed, and danced. Kasai reminds us that Homer warned that once the myth becomes inscribed it will die. The death of the myth, no longer transmitted body to body, but written, is the dawn of ballet as dance, devoid of any voice or words. My understanding of this practice is that the images and elements that Kasai uses in his method become experiments in re-inscribing language into the body. By way of movement, the body becomes a “word carrier” again, and the dance lures these external energies – the ambient “gods of language” – back into the body to let matter itself speak these more-than-human

180  Dispersion: The Mavericks

Figure 3.7 “The five elements in the body, showing vowel locations according to Akira Kasai’s Ephesus Method”, Dominique S. Bonarjee.

words. In this way, nouns, verbs and adjectives can also trigger different sensations in the dance. We sing a sound or a word and feel the resonance in the body, a method Kasai calls the Ephesus Method recalling how in Ancient Greece, the King of Ephesus reputedly used this method to awaken his subjects’ consciousness through particular words. In Kasai’s Ephesus Method, vowel sounds are associated with an element and the resonance of the element and sound is located in different parts of the body: “i” = light /top of the head “e” = fire /third eye “u” = air/the throat “o” = water/the centre, the hara, solar plexus “a” = earth/the feet The principle of consciousness in Kasai's work resembles a sort of fluid that permeates the body at different saturations and this varies at each stage of life. The saturation also changes most noticeably between sleep and wakefulness cycles and during different activities in the day. According to Kasai, total (100%) consciousness-saturation of the body is not possible in modern life because our cells have become as he puts it, “lazy by being habituated to an easy and comfortable bourgeois lifestyle”.

Dispersion: The Mavericks  181

Figure 3.8 “Diagram of ego development” based on Akira Kasai workshop notes, Dominique S. Bonarjee.

The final day is dedicated to very important work: the question “who is dancing?” We explore this through the pronouns associated with identification: does consciousness take the form of “I, you, we, he/she, they”? To answer this question, we must develop a consciousness of our (existential) existence through dance; an awareness that comes from attuning to invisible physiological functions – the bloodstream, the organs, tissues, fasciae, etc. We move between the pronouns “I” and “you” as we do this sensing work. Kasai tells us that the dance of the pure “I” is to dance alone in the universe. To dance with others, that “I” must be touched by “you”. Before the age of three, when the ego begins to develop, a baby sees itself as “we” – as a part of a vaster world and not separate from it. This coincides with the babies’ inability to fully focus its eyes. When the eye can’t focus, there is a different ego consciousness. In the baby “we” includes everything around it including nature, sunlight, and space. In the adult, “we” usually refers to other humans. The third person singular – he/she (and the current use of “they”) – is someone further away than “you”. The third person pronoun is the “self” taking an objective perspective and looking from very far away: “she is dancing”. The distance has an impersonal aspect, which awakens the nonhuman element of consciousness. It could be somebody very far away in the universe witnessing this dance: being watched from far away and therefore “being danced” by this viewer. By dancing for this, “he/she/they” it is no longer me – my self – dancing. Seeing oneself dance by an external, impersonal consciousness renders the physical body into a corpse or a puppet, without soul, moved by a disembodied spirit.61This disposition of consciousness could be compared to what is considered a form of possession. [It dawns on me that the word “possession” itself conveys a culturally specific position based on the assumption that the normal state of embodiment is possessed and thus controlled by the ego’s (I/my) ownership of self – “I am the possession of my ego”. This seems to me to be derived from

182  Dispersion: The Mavericks the Western model of the individual, a model which doesn’t represent the case of many non-Western cultures. In retrospect, I understand what Natsu Nakajima meant when she said the hardest thing to teach Western students was “how to vanish humanity”, “how to become unconsciousness”, because if consciousness is limited to the “I”, it is stalled in human identity.] But seeing the self [“I”] dance from this distant vantage point [“he/she/ they”] is only one state. Shifting back to “you” (singular) invites a closeness, the familiar sensation of the known human being. The technique for the dancing body is to be capable of travelling between these states of consciousness with flexibility and skill – consciousness itself is deemed to be plastic and so must the artist/dancer be who creates with it. A further exploration of this part of Kasai’s method involves delving into the question of the universal “we”. How to practice the state of “we” by dancing with the feeling of “YES” or “NO” – positive or negative sensations of movement, sensed in the body as subtle release and resistance techniques occurring during the movement. Kasai asks us to evoke an image of a landscape of a lake with a boat leaving a wake in the water. This visualization is intended to focus our consciousness very precisely, so that when the image dissipates, consciousness can be freed to expand out of the tight aperture of focus, towards a multi-directional sense of space. To encounter the cosmic, “we” space means remembering that consciousness is not uni-directional but is always in a mutual relation with multiple sticky anchoring points such as objects, images, others. Through this, I realize how much more the dancer’s craft is than just ­practicing or discovering movement. To dance means being conscious of ­others, dancers, and the audience, including nonhuman dancers and ­witnesses. Dancing is to embody these multitudes of consciousnesses by developing the skill of navigating between states of I, you (sing.), he/she/they and we, through the practice of dancing. Entering multiple points of consciousness enriches the dance by opening to the “total consciousness” of the all. At the end of those six days, Kasai returns to the theme of the neck once again. Movement is not the most important aspect of dance he says. The connection of the body through the neck is, because it enables the development of expression. This ability goes hand in hand with being open to total consciousness – to “we”. Without these two aspects working in sync, the dancing “I” wanting to self-express would be mere (self)indulgence. In the past, the shaman was the medium through which sound and language was heard. A shamanic dance of this kind would require a total saturation of consciousness (100%) in the body, and this can only be done by breathing through the five elements; by asking who is dancing? who is being danced? who is watching?; by fine-tuning the plasticity of consciousness as a material for exploring states of I/me, you, he/she/they, we; through a dance that makes the vocal chords vibrate with affectively charged oral utterance (the Method of Ephesus). The state of trance in dance is associated with the universal “we”. To practice the “we” state, Kasai asks us to dance with the sense “I am human” while all the other bodies are plants. Our dance becomes one of giving and receiving – through breathing, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and mutual awareness. This dancing can only be spiritual, because “spirit” is breathing.

Dispersion: The Mavericks  183 Notes 2 Shibusawa, ‘Hijikata Tatsumi’. 3 Rosa Van Hensbergen, ‘Discovering World-Ness: The Imagination in Butô’, ARTLET Keio University Art Center Newletter, 2014. 4 Shibusawa, ‘Hijikata Tatsumi’, 49.

9 With reference to the (nameless) Dao in Chinese ancient philosophy, Hui makes a distinction between a name and a “designation”, the Dao being latter in that it enables cohering around a principle. See Yuk Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics (Minneapolis: e-flux, University of Minnesota, 2021).



14 Takashi Morishita, Hijikata Tatsumi’s Notational Butoh. An Innovational Method for Butoh Creation (Tokyo: Keio University Art Center, 2015). 15 Masaki Iwana, The Intensity of Nothingness (Réveillon, South Normandy: La Maison du Butoh Blanc, 2011), 7. 16 Iwana, 7. 20 Iwana, The Intensity of Nothingness, 54.

23 Iwana, The Intensity of Nothingness.

184  Dispersion: The Mavericks Iwana, The Intensity of Nothingness. Iwana, 64. Iwana, 37. Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art (Los Angeles, CA; New York NY: Semiotext(e) ; Distributed by MIT Press, 2005), 27–28. 29 Iwana, The Intensity of Nothingness, 2000: 63. 33 Iwana, 2011:13. 36 Iwana, The Intensity of Nothingness, 2011: 16. 41 Félix Guattari, Machinic Eros : Writings on Japan (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2015), 36. 42 Ken Jeremiah, Living Buddhas: The Self-Mummified Monks of Yamagata, Japan (North Carolina: McFarland & Co, 2010), 12. 43 Jeremiah, 12. 44 Jeremiah, 96. 45 Jeremiah, 42. 25 26 27 28

48 Hotoke is a Buddhist term in Japanese that refers to a person who has achieved the enlightened state of satori. 49 Tengu is a creature from Japanese folklore with a long red nose. 50 Acéphale is derived from the Greek akephalos, meaning “headless”. 54 Utrobne at Shizu Hall Nishi-Kokobunji, 26 June 2012. 58 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books, 2003). 60 Kasai.

4

Complexity A Contemporary Generation

Figure 4.1

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112211-5

186  Complexity: A Contemporary Generation What Is Contemporary? “To perceive, in the darkness of the present, this light that strives to reach us but cannot – this is what it means to be contemporary. All eras, for those who experience contemporariness, are obscure”.1 ~ What does it mean to be “contemporary”? Already this question is about time, about being with time. Contemporary as a disposition towards time is perhaps most closely associated with culture to indicate temporal relevance – the zeitgeist – and placed in relation to art or dance or music, qualifying a cultural output that is truly of the current times. In other uses though, it might act to distinguish a form from the “modern” period, in dance for example: contemporary dance is not the same as modern dance. In truth, my question is not intended to further the debate on categorizations or historical classifications of culture. My question is a knife. I want to slice through the word contemporary to explore what “being with time” – con temp – might be in creative practice and more specifically, to explore what being with time might mean to fleshy, bodily matters. How is it possible to value a body’s capacity to chime with the meter of contemporary culture? My question is specifically aimed at Butoh. ~ Any artist/creator working with a preferred medium will experiment with it to become intimate with the physical properties of their chosen material. The intimacy exuded by material processes is intricately enmeshed with the (lived) experience of time. An artist whose medium is clay knows the process of making a particular work through their understanding of the temporality of the material; how long it takes to air-dry, and then to fire, glaze, etc. The “body as material” is a little different from clay. Everybody, dancer, artist, or neither has to deal with the passage of time, with their own “weathering” over time.2 The body might well be the most unfathomable of all materials. In the past, rites of passage at birth, death, puberty, and marriage were social events that attempted to grasp the inexorable passage of time through the body: these rituals were a way to be, to exist, with time. In modern urbanized societies, rituals have more often become aesthetic practices aimed at counteracting the effects of time, to evade it somehow. I remember receiving my first watch at age seven. I recall becoming obsessed with the endless revolutions of the hands across its face, and especially the repetitive motion of each minuscule shift as the seconds passed, which I came to understand to be an instant that could not be repeated. Every time the hand clicked, something had slipped out of reach, into the past, never to return. This was a hard lesson to learn. How would I deal with the “tragedy of time”? How could I hold onto time in some way? I began to spend long stretches of time staring at the watch face, all my attention trained

Complexity: A Contemporary Generation  187 on it, keeping count of the seconds. I was hypnotized: perhaps this was my very first “embodied method”. Forced interruptions – meals, homework, and sleep – caused me great distress as I was “losing time”. I was utterly convinced that if I counted each passing moment, I could harness the reigns of time and learn its ephemeral logic. Later in life, I discovered that this method was not quite so naive or sui generis but had something in common with strands of conceptual art. The painter Roman Opalka (1931–2011) also devised such a numerical obsession which allowed him to stay immersed in time by counting numbers. In 1965, Opalka began a series of paintings based on the concept of counting from zero to infinity. It allowed him to fill a continuous series of canvasses, as he went on counting for the rest of his life. By the time he died in 2011, he had reached the number 5,607,249. Alongside Opalka, perhaps the other most notable time artist is Tehching Hsieh known for his one-year performances constructed around practices that seek to crack the mystery of time by placing his body in durational time commitments: a way to “be with time”. In his seminal work Time Clock Piece (1980–1981), he punched a time clock in his studio every hour on the hour for a year. The performance highlighted the body’s entrainment to the rhythms of work and labour, and he documented each time he punched in with a photograph. When the photos are viewed in sequence, the passage of time manifests in the growth of his hair, beginning from baldness to reach below shoulder length by the end. In an earlier piece in this series, he created a prison cell inside his studio (1978–1979) and locked himself inside vouching (in a written and signed statement) to “NOT converse, read, write, listen to the radio or watch television”3 for an entire year. ~ My initial fascination with Butoh was in discovering the potential for the body to become salient as matter itself. When Tatsumi Hijikata danced his solo Nikutai no Hanran, he was addressing the “Japanese people” – Japanese identity – directly. While identity works to familiarize the flesh’s irresolvable uncanniness, Butoh sought to enter the darkness behind the veneer provided by national identity, and all the other social framings that would make light of this darkness. Hijikata wanted to encounter the absolute strangeness of the (his) body as pure matter. My encounter with Butoh replaced the watch-face I used to stare at. This is how I understood it anyway, and so I saw Butoh as a “scopic” device – like a microscope into the body, or a telescope aimed at the body from an alien planet. Butoh was my guide, leading me away from the world where the body is a readymade– the false assumption of being “known” which identity tricks you into. Dancing Butoh meant devising tools for delving into the body as an “unknown”. Kneading it, stretching it, investigating its properties, and perceiving its limits in order to subvert them; sometimes also holding back and waiting to allow processes of transformation and metamorphosis by

188  Complexity: A Contemporary Generation “doing nothing” as Masaki Iwana would say. In my artistic practice, this process continues to bring me into contact with embodied time, to be with the time of the body (con temp). In this sense, Butoh is already contemporary, because more than any other (dance or art) practice I’ve encountered, it ­presents the movement of living, breathing time. Time as method means that the artist’s body becomes so temporally sensitized that even slight changes in the material can transform the experience of time. Until the body itself becomes a zeitgeber,4 emitting and absorbing time, the texture, the rhythm, the scents, the sounds, that seep out of the body’s mysterious relationship to time’s flux: then, the body becomes spacetime. I would say that to be contemporary is to nurture such embodied acuity to time, and to develop practices that attend to a relationship of intimacy with time. Butoh does this: if there’s one aspect that Butoh elucidates from its darkness, it’s a particular method for grasping – though never halting – time’s flow in the body. The body as time’s container reflects the ever-changing tempos of time as its currents penetrate and affect each singular body. But this kind of temporal pondering makes the question of “being contemporary” a whole lot more complex: if different bodies experience time in manifold ways, can the notion of contemporaneity ever be socially and culturally – as opposed to individually – meaningful? While I was ostensibly researching the relevance of Butoh’s flesh body – the nikutai – to current times, more than 60 years after Butoh’s first emergence in post-war Japan, this other question, about time itself, was also lurking in my mind, mostly as a nonconscious inquiry. No doubt it surreptitiously found its way into the conversations included in this book, and it was only after having heard each dancer, each artist, and the philosopher, Kuniichi Uno, talking about bodies and time, that I was finally able to articulate it: what is the meaning of contemporary… for the body as material? ~ There’s an anecdote about Hijikata denying he was an avant-garde artist and responding to claims that he was, by suggesting that “if you run around a race-track and are a full circuit behind everyone else, then you are alone and appear to be first. Maybe that is what happened to me…”5 A comical depiction of being “left behind” that might reveal the true intentions of Butoh; to create a temporal revolution by being “a full circuit behind”. Political revolutions well before Butoh’s “revolt of the flesh” have instinctively wanted to transfigure time as part of their anarchic upheaval. The French Revolution introduced “French Revolutionary Time”6 in 1792 to completely reinvent time, wanting to dismantle the tempo of history and its associations with monarchy. Butoh’s (temporal) revolution was less extreme than French Revolutionary Time. Tactics were more subtle: lagging, dragging the feet, trailing the rapid transformation of Japan from a post-war wasteland into an economic miracle.  This revolution found its rhythms amongst the “left-behinds”,

Complexity: A Contemporary Generation  189 because as Masaki Iwana understood it “they deny progress as dictated by the norms of proper society. Instead, they remain opulently in place – in their proper place”.7 For Hijikata it had been the manual workers, “boys wiping up at metal-plating workshops or squatting in garages”,8 the old and the infirm (the suijakutai, the sick body) those unable to be useful to “a production-oriented society”9 who embodied the spirit of this revolution – though unknowingly to them – through their inability to move with the times. These bodies were the counterpoint that jars the rhythm of capital, a rhythm which according to Henri Lefebvre’s analysis is “the rhythm of producing (everything: things, men, people, etc.) and destroying…”10 Butoh’s pace was the tactic of revolt that sought to disrupt the mainstream’s metronome of forward advance, by not succumbing to the “mere trendiness”11 of contemporaneity. The lag of untimeliness, being out of time, set Hijikata apart from his times. ~ Nietzsche’s meditations on contemporariness led him to the term “untimely”: to be contemporary is to be conscious of a dissociation, of not being in time. Giorgio Agamben’s inquiry into “what is the contemporary?” begins from the “out-of-jointness”12 implied by Nietzsche’s untimely. He remarks that to be “truly contemporary” means never attempting to be “of one’s time” or wanting to move “to its beat”.13 Instead, to be contemporary is to perceive the darkness from a particular era’s light, because in this darkness lies the “fracture”,14 which is the nexus of past, present, and future.15 If the contemporary goes beyond just the present moment, to intermesh all these dimensions of time (past, present, future) at once, what it means to be contemporary – to be with time – expands out of a particular philosophy (and measure) of time to take on other possibilities. Contemporariness of this kind evokes “being-time”, the philosophy of uji set out by the 13th-century Zen philosopher Dogen Zenji. The temporality of uji is a principle of embodied time, in which past, present and future coincide. The philosophy of uji would later influence Heidegger’s thought and inspire his seminal work, Being and Time (1927). Uji is not a personal experience of time but comes from absolute immersion in the reality of the world: it is a moment of timeless and direct insight into the relation of being and time.16 What if con-tempo-rary is the experience of a paradoxical state of being with time by being out of time? This means understanding an era’s “chronometrics”, its light, its pulse, what can be measured and observed of its culture, but in the same token, being incapable of or choosing not to move to the major scale. To adopt a contrapuntal attitude, listening for the silence inbetween beats, to hear another order of time there. A dual acuity which gives an insight into uji, being-time, being with time. Butoh nurtures this paradox as is evident in the practices of being-time of many of its practitioners – Ko Murobushi and Masaki Iwana in particular. For Butoh to be contemporary,

190  Complexity: A Contemporary Generation it would have to foster practices of temporal-disobedience, dance tactics as ways of listening and amplifying those frequencies of the times that roam through bodies imperceptibly? ~ Butoh’s emergence in Japan and the diversity of its dispersion through the works of multiple artists offers a unique cartography linking the materiality of bodies to contemporary culture(s). (Early) Butoh’s non-hierarchical and non-lineage-bound modes of transmission make it even more relevant to the complexity of the current times, where diverse contexts and tempos intermingle. While the body itself is quite evidently not “common” but contextually inscribed by gender, race, education, religion, etc., what is common is the body-as-material. What I mean is that Butoh doesn’t highlight a body’s social identity but its spiritual metaphysics. How can this body material attune to the darkness of the times? My meandering inquiries have by no means found a resolution, but they continue to function as generative devices for keeping me committedly engaged with the potential (and the virtual) of Butoh’s contemporary relevance. ~ There are many (contemporary) artists working with Butoh’s legacy today in inventive ways which don’t necessarily resemble the Butoh of the 1960s or 1970s. Two artists who have gained significant attention for doing this – the kind of attention “Butoh dancers” hardly receive, or perhaps have never sought in the first place – are Choy Ka Fai and Trajal Harrell. Both have gone about reviving the bodily representations of Butoh’s past in a somewhat more conceptual way. In his work Unbearable Darkness (2018),17 media artist Choy Ka Fai resurrects the ghost of Tatsumi Hijikata. He explores the issue of time, delving into the legacy of Butoh by creating a technologically saturated fantasy narrative involving motion sensors and virtual worlds in which Hijikata roams as a revenant brought back to life by the interaction of body material and computational technology. Another artist working in this way is Trajal Harrell who imagines speculative dance fictions that bring Butoh in relation with Harlem’s 1960s voguing scene, via the Judson Church Dance Theatre in a postmodern fusion of genres. In their work, The Return of La Argentina, Harrell revives Butoh co-founder Kazuo Ohno in a performance work inspired by Kazuo’s solo Admiring la Argentina. The dance bears traces of movements from Kazuo’s work in a citational way. In unearthing the past, Harrell is interested in what is hidden from a culture’s history. He doesn’t intend his dance to be “authentic”, and in the end, it appears more ironic than matter-real. Still his quest is relevant: he wants to make dances that are meaningful to him and relevant to today.18 It’s the hard task of being with time in the sense intended by Dogen, embracing what Agamben describes as

Complexity: A Contemporary Generation  191 the obscurity of the contemporary, while at the same time being held in its light – gaining recognition in one’s time. Because the contemporary is indeed complex and even more so when addressing Butoh, the Complexity of this section is also intended as a space for imaginings. Although I don’t (strictly) consider myself a “Butoh dancer”, Butoh continues to steep my embodied practices and informs the ways I “move” with materials: how can Butoh allow me to “drop a ladder deep into my body and climb down it”19 so that I may listen to the darkness of the contemporary era? This is indeed a persistent inquiry. To explore this question, I introduce the work of dance artists for whom Butoh’s legacy is a vital ingredient but who also don’t necessarily call themselves “Butoh dancers”. Like Harrell and Ka Fai, the artists included in this section sometimes look to Butoh’s distant past, some to dance with its spectres, others to nurture its essence, and one to keep vivifying the darkness at its heart. Of these four only one identifies as a “Butoh dancer”. Yukio Suzuki is a choreographer and dancer making work with his contemporary dance troupe Kingyo. His wish is to work across bodies by bridging the visceral body material favoured by Hijikata’s Butoh – the nikutai – with a more conceptual, philosophical, and social configuration of the body – the shintai. The next is Takao Kawaguchi, a performance artist and dancer who was part of the artist collective Dumb Type. His Butoh resurrection entitled Homage to Kazuo Ohno is a work in which he meticulously copies Kazuo Ohno’s dances to explore their contemporaneity through his (living) body. Yuko Kaseki is the only one to call herself a “Butoh dancer”. Now based in Berlin, she shares the long-term maturing of her process and dance, which came about by being forced to betray the master-student relationship she had with Anzu Furukawa. These three represent a later generation of artists whose work bears traces of Butoh in one way or another, though this doesn’t mean they see themselves in the lineage of Butoh. Looking at their work offers perspectives on imagining contemporary ways of incorporating Butoh into dance research and performance art. The fourth artist is Kubikukuri “The Hangman” Takuzo (d. 2018), not a Butoh dancer, but a performance artist who knew Butoh in its earlier days and was profoundly inspired by it. Kubikukuri is of the ilk of Tehching Hsieh. In 1997, he conceived of a simple and repetitive practice as a “time ritual”. Every day he would hang himself from a tree in his garden, suspending his body over a shallow pit. He did this to “fight the boredom of daily life”,20 he claimed. Once in a while he would open up the ritual to viewers who came to sit by the fence at one side of his narrow garden. When I saw his body material swaying, silently, precariously, from the branch, like a fleshy pendulum, I witnessed being with time.

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Figure 4.2 The Right of Spring, Yukio Suzuki Projects (2015). Photo: Bozzo.

Complexity: A Contemporary Generation  193 “Keep doubting and asking, what is dance?”: Yukio Suzuki (2012) Yukio Suzuki is a dancer and choreographer whose work bears the hues of Butoh. He first ventured into Butoh dance in 1997, later performing in other dancers’ works, notably with Ko Murobushi’s company Edge. Soon after in 2002, he established his own company through which he could take different perspectives as choreographer, performer, and director. Suzuki doesn’t consider himself a Butoh dancer and describes his interpretation as being more concerned with “the character of dance language” than with technique. As well as making work in solo and with his company Yukio Suzuki Projects (previously Kingyo), he also teaches workshops to dancers and nondancers. He is the recipient of several awards in Japan. In 2008, his work “Confronting Silence” won the Grand prix at the Toyota Choreography Award. I attended one of Yukio’s workshops at Morishita Studio in Tokyo. That’s how we met and our conversations began. They continued in informal settings as we got to know each other better and gradually became friends. I  visited Yukio and his partner Nao (Ashimine who dances in the company) in their home in Fujino in 2012. There I discovered the bookshelves of philosophy that are Yukio’s cultural and theoretical fodder. Yukio’s sources are international and eclectic as he discusses with me. What is obvious is that Butoh’s early concerns with how to face the reality of the body, continue  to interrogate  him, and dance is his way of unravelling his own philosophy. I have included two conversations with Yukio to trace the development of his dance ideas over the last decade. ~ August 21, 2012 Dominique Savitri Bonarjee:

I saw video extracts of your performance I am not jealous of a dog’s vein (2009). The title seems to be a direct response to Hijikata’s text entitled From Being Jealous of a Dog’s Vein (1969) from which I noted this quote in particular: Only when despite having a normal healthy body, you come to wish that you were disabled or had been born disabled, do you take your first step in Butoh. A person who dances Butoh has such a fervent desire, much like a child’s longing to be crippled.21 Can you tell me more about your piece and why you gave it this name? Did something provoke you in

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Hijikata’s writing? Is your dance also inspired by the failure of the body through disability or disease? At the age of 24, I went to the Asbestos-Kan. Motofuji Akiko invited different Butoh teachers there so I met many teachers over a short time. I knew the surface of Butoh and I heard stories of Hijikata. So I took many workshops for two years. Motofuji-san performed in many places and I would go with her and be an extra, or help her in some way. Then I joined the group of Sal Vanilla. Sal Vanilla used multimedia in their work. This was around 1998. In 2000 I started Kingyo, my own company. I only studied Butoh, no other dance, but some of the members of Kingyo learned classical ballet and contemporary dance. As regards Butoh, my mind has changed from the white paint and shaved head. Before, I felt that if I didn’t have this look, I couldn’t dance, but this felt like imitating and so I had to find my own dance. An important event was meeting Murobushi Ko in 2003. Murobushi-san was looking for a young dancer for a piece in Mexico. A friend told me and I contacted him. Then I went there and met him. He was a good influence. I joined his work for six or seven years. With him I learned about Butoh’s essence. After three years, I started to understand his idea. It was really good learning with Ko-san. He said “dance does not exist”, so we have to think, “what is dance? ”, “what is Butoh?” I went into making my own group from that time. I’m not jealous of a dog’s vein was made in 2006. Before this I made Confronting Silence which won the Toyota Choreography Award. My work takes over Butoh’s essence. My thought was that I didn’t want to make dance. I am not inspired by the disability of the body but I try to “fail”. I use the idea of failure, of making gaps, changing the timing. When I read Hijikata’s text “From Being Jealous of a Dog’s Vein”, my conclusion was that I sensed a constant thread of the objectification of the body, a masochistic desire for sublimation of the body. When I interviewed Masaki Iwana, he explained that in his process of developing his own method he started off by “transforming his body into an object”. What do you think of the body as object in dance or on the stage?

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I sometimes use the “body as object”: stillness is very strong so I use it. Many people don’t move because it’s easy and then sometimes dance can just be movement for its own sake. I try to find a middle point. It’s difficult to find the balance, but I try to have a strict idea. In an essay by Katja Centonze,22 you said that the younger generation are more comfortable with calling Butoh a “dance form”. What do you think Butoh was at its origin, and how has it changed and morphed into a dance form? There are many types of Butoh dance. First, there was Hijikata, he takes many different aspects: he wore European dress, then a kimono, he took inspiration from ceremonies like matsuri – that’s why some people think it is a spiritual dance. I saw his bookshelf at Asbestos-Kan. He had books on Japanese traditions as well as African ones, such as body painting. He took many influences. His idea was original. In the 1960s, many things were happening and changing, and of course he also learned modern dance. Afterwards many dancers developed Hijikata’s Butoh in their way, for example Sankai Juku. When I came to Butoh, Hijikata had gone, so we just imitated Butoh dance from images that were left. That’s a problem. Fortunately, I never learned dance: sometimes that’s a good thing because then I can make my dance, my movement. But dance people know how to “show” their body on stage, and with Butoh too, we have to take the work onto a stage. I didn’t know how to use my body in that way. For three or four years, I searched for ways to do this, and I developed my own method. I tried to learn ballet from dancers in my company and I found out that there are similarities between Butoh and ballet. You also mention that by not formally categorizing Butoh, there can be the danger of it being diluted, where anything and everything can be thought to be Butoh.23 How or in what context do you see this happening? Akira Kasai apparently said that “hip hop is Butoh, so maybe everything is Butoh”. It’s like saying you like rock music, your life is rock. What is Butoh?: it means to try to keep doubting and asking “what is dance?” Dance is very easy, but very difficult  – everything is dance. There is some method in Butoh, which I learned from Murobushi Ko. Many different Butoh dancers have a sense of this. Sometimes Butoh dancers try to

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find forms, but it becomes something close to mime. It’s different to represent an image, or to be an image. I’ve come to look at the variations in Butoh practices as two different aspects of the form. On the one hand, there is the appellation “Butoh dancer”: these dancers are those finding forms and a technique to follow the way of Hijikata’s legacy. Then there are “Butoh artists”: those who are using the energy set off by Butoh as well as a particular philosophy of the body proposed by Butoh, in order to create new forms. Some examples of Butoh artists would be Masaki Iwana or Akira Kasai. How do you feel about these two perspectives? That’s an interesting idea: I try to be a Butoh artist. In Japan, they teach dance just for enjoyment, but they don’t learn the history of dance. Abroad though, many dancers want to learn Butoh. Butoh is very important, but in Japan, we don’t recognize it. And some people just imitate it. Coming back to your work, I’m interested in the “look” in your pieces: it’s not the inward look of Butoh but it isn’t the emotionless look of much contemporary dance. It’s quite enigmatic, like a half smile and sometimes something of an emotion comes out. What are you aiming for? Many dancers see the inside, they agree with it and understand it, but I try to see the outside at the same time as I see the inside. Some people try to see the inside completely. I don’t think it’s good. With the nikutai, it can be too emotional. Of course, we are human and we sometimes leak emotions, but I want the audience to see my body, not me. You also make use of body sounds and the voice in your work. What is the idea behind your use of these sounds? How does it link into the intentions of your dance? I learned this from Butoh. Using voice and sound confirms the presence of the body. Hijikata and Ohno couldn’t agree on how to create a work in terms of choreography versus improvisation. What do you think of the relative value of the two? How do you use them in your own work, and can you tell me a little about your process in developing a piece? In terms of process, one piece will normally lead into another. After one piece is done, it creates a problem,

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which has to be solved in the next piece. Then I might find a title. I use writing and images. We will do rehearsals and then I’ll write. In my last piece Collapsing Head, I used writing quite a bit. In terms of structure or improvisation, I will choreograph many points as a choreographic structure, and improvisation will happen in between these points. There are many words for “body” in Japanese: nikutai, shintai, karada are some of them. Hijikata referred to the nikutai, the meat body. You tend to use the word shintai.24 Can you tell me more about your thoughts on the shintai versus the nikutai? In the 1960s, the use of the word nikutai was very popular. Maybe the focus of the body is [now] changing: I want both the shintai and the nikutai. Nowadays a great deal of performance is conceptual, which is very important, and in this you see the shintai, but then I watch it and I want more nikutai. The aim is to move between the two and be conscious of both: from the shintai to the nikutai. Now, we have to navigate an oscillation from “seeing ourselves to being ourselves” it seems. What do you think about the idea of a “contemporary Butoh”: what are its possibilities? Butoh started off as an embodied form of revolt against social institutions and structures: what can it achieve, or respond to in our current times? I don’t know if it’s possible to say there is “contemporary Butoh”. Japanese Butoh critics and dancers like typical Butoh. They say my dance is “hard” because I’m “not Butoh”. I don’t say I am a “Butoh dancer” either. If I say that I am, then some people might get angry. I’m different from many Butoh dancers because I’ve separated myself from it. Sometimes I see my work as contemporary dance, but the Japanese contemporary dance world is small and they dance for fun and there is no responsibility or a social theme. I like the nikutai and shintai theme, but that idea is not so popular in Japan. I want to find the crossing between skill and concept.

198  Complexity: A Contemporary Generation “Stay in the now”: Yukio Suzuki (2020) Conducted online on Zoom, November 23, 2020 ~ DSB:

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Thank you for sending me the videos of your recent works. I wanted to do a follow-up interview because I thought it would be good to revisit what we talked about last time and see how these ideas changed or developed in your work since then. We had previously talked about how you learned about Butoh with Akiko Motofuji, and then you danced with Ko Murobushi. So now, today, how much is Butoh part of the choreography and dance that you currently create? Butoh really influenced me. My feeling, in my mind, is that I keep the Butoh spirit. But when it comes to performing or choreography, I am always thinking, “what should I do now?” Which means [what should I do] contemporarily. There are many contemporary dancers and some whose background is ballet technique, or modern dance, or some others dance hip hop. But my background is Butoh. At first, if someone asks me, what part does Butoh take, it’s a very difficult question because Butoh is not everything. I mean not everything can be explained, it’s a very inside thing, it has to do with imagination. But imagination is the same thing: other dances also use imagination just as Butoh uses imagination. So what’s the difference between Butoh and other dances? It’s very difficult to explain. But it is quite different. Nowadays, I don’t [do] white painting, nor do I shave my head, so it doesn’t look like Butoh dance. But what is Butoh dance? It’s very difficult to say. In the last interview, you said that Ko Murobushi had asked you questions: “why do you dance?” and “what is dance?” He also asked me the same questions, and I still think about these questions whenever I make work. Also the first time we spoke, we talked about the difference between the different words for the body in Japanese – the shintai and nikutai. Maybe you remember this? Originally in Butoh, it was the nikutai that was emphasized, and then you said that younger dancers working with a notion of contemporary Butoh were now more comfortable with using the shintai instead. You also mentioned that sometimes in contemporary performance you see just the shintai and you want more nikutai. That’s good; I feel it’s a very clear answer. Yes, I still think so. Now, I’m always standing at the edge, the border between the shintai and nikutai. Sometimes I use the nikutai, sometimes it’s

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the shintai. Though I don’t decide it. My background is in Butoh dance, so I sometimes use the nikutai, and at other times, I go for the shintai because I now perform more on the contemporary dance scene, but I feel I am different from other dancers. So that’s maybe [why] I use the shintai and go towards the nikutai. I’m always very much standing there between, and I think it’s better, though it’s very difficult to see for an audience. Some audiences just see me for my dance. They think: “Yukio’s dance is just contemporary”. But then some of my Butoh friends say: “You keep Butoh spirit”. Some of my friends admit me into Butoh dance, and other Butoh dancers don’t like me, they feel “you don’t know Butoh dance”, because I’m always just between, and it’s very fuzzy. Would you say that there’s a difference between your solo and your group works? In the videos that you sent me, some were solos and then there were other pieces where you were dancing with your company dancers. I was wondering about two things: One, about the choreography. How much do you think about these ideas of the shintai and the nikutai within the choreography? Because I think it’s quite difficult, and this is an area of interest for me. In my practice for example, I went more towards placing dance within contemporary art to rethink how to stage the body in art and I really need to work with the nikutai in the sense of the body’s materiality. My question is about how you work with the shintai or the nikutai distinctions when it’s not your body, but your company dancers’ bodies, and you are creating the choreography. Yes. It’s very difficult when I choreograph other dancers, because maybe I think when we use the word nikutai it includes a very deep philosophy. But in the case of the shintai, although some people have a philosophy of it, when we use the term shintai, actually it means “no philosophy”; it doesn’t have a philosophy. So I think that whenever I use the nikutai word – “we have a philosophy” – and it’s very difficult to share another person’s [philosophy] because the idea is that it’s a very private thing or a very strong (personal) identity. I understood the shintai to mean the “philosophical body” within society. Do you mean there’s more of a personal philosophy attached to the nikutai? Yes that’s right. But these last four or five years, I tried to share this with another person: how can I do that shared philosophy in my choreography with my dancers? Now I keep trying to share that philosophy, or idea of Butoh spirit. Of course it’s very difficult, but it’s very interesting work for me because it’s very difficult, so I can enjoy this very hard work. And if I can do it, it will have a return: I can clarify my method in this way.

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With your company Kingyo, how long have you been with the same dancers? Only three of the dancers have worked with me for between seven to maybe ten years, up till now. They understand my method, and their own body ability – they learned classical ballet. Their body has shintai: they have a very strong shintai.25 It’s very interesting for to me to give them my “nikutai method” to the kind of shintai body that they have: that’s the collaboration. It’s not so clear, but from me, they learn the influence of Butoh’s philosophy and method, and feeling. When Hijikata was working with other dancers, he started using Butoh-fu. Kazuo Ohno would propose some sort of discussions or storytelling. Do you do something like that when you meet with the Kingyo dancers? Do you do these kinds of discussions or something which is not just about dance, but something which is more personal, let’s say? And I remember that last time we talked about the themes of your work, like social themes or philosophical ideas and concepts. How much is this also part of the choreographic method? Of course, we talk about many things with Kingyo, and I tell them basic Butoh methods, but now at the same time, I learned how to explain my own method. Before I couldn’t explain it, so I just showed something. Now I understand my dance so I can explain many things and for young dancers it’s easier to learn from me. The method I use is a little bit different from Butoh’s method; I can tell them in a more technical way, but also they should know about deeper things, and so we will discuss and talk about these things. And when I choreograph them, if I make a dance in unison, I always choreograph dancers one by one and not everyone at once: I just choreograph one at a time. It takes a very long time. But for me, it’s very important to talk face to face to a person. If I use many dancers, I always choreograph one person at time, it’s important because this way we can go to a deep place, and we can understand each other more. And when you work with them choreographically, one to one, what kind of method are you using? Is it based on a conversation, and maybe some images or sensations? Perhaps the most important thing is the reaction when you move. I offer some word, some situation, some movement. But, if I propose a movement… “One, two, three, four… don’t do it! Don’t move like me, don’t imitate my movement. Just react; like touching fire  – ouch!” That’s something I give dancers, something to motivate them and fight: “What motivation makes you move? It’s very important, so don’t imitate my movement”. I always say to them, “just react with your feeling, and please erase your future”, because the reality is that we don’t know the future: choreography

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is making a future happen. “Please do it, just do it now, now! Always stay in the now although its choreography, even though I make your future. You’re always standing in the now, now, now. And the next part comes next: you should move like this’. I always say that to them. That’s very interesting this idea of time: is the improvisation in the now? Is there the possibility to do something outside of the choreographic structure in the present, now? Yes, it’s very improvised, even though I have decided a point and the next point, and the next point. When I make the work, it’s almost fixed because I have decided many points; between this point and this point exists the dancer’s sense, and the dancer is free. But I do make many points. In the end, it’s almost fixed, but the choice of movements is according to the dancer’s feeling. This is very important: I decided that the dancers’ feeling is how they move on their own. Would you say – this is an idea I’m suggesting – that the structure that you create for everybody for the piece is the shintai of the piece, its group body, and all these points that you decide are part of this structural “anatomy” of the shintai of the work, and then the nikutai is what appears in between the points? Yes, exactly, that’s right, very nice! I think so, and now I understand it. I  make the correct specific structure. But it’s as if the nikutai leaks. I like that aspect. Only nikutai, I don’t like that. Only structure  – only shintai – I don’t like that either. But the structure I create is very strict, but it’s leaking, sometimes with the nikutai and sometimes with the dancers’ identity. This way, at times I can find their originality as they improvise things, sometimes they make mistakes. A mistake is very exciting for me; because the dancers want to keep my points, my structure, but despite this, sometimes they want to go outside (of the structure) and then they make a mistake. Maybe the mistake is the true creative moment in some sense. Yes, a good dancer does it sometimes. What about the themes you explore: I’ve watched all the videos you sent me and I was wondering what are your themes at the moment. What are you thinking about? Like in the Rite of Spring (2016). In the video, there are many images – sharks and Nazis and all kinds of things – but I couldn’t understand the text. My question is, what is the theme that you research now? The Rite of Spring is a very famous music score. Many choreographers have tried to do it. I was thinking I would try to connect world history and dance history. Because Spring is when everything that has died comes back to life, and now the world is in a very difficult situation, with many wars and fighting.

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In dance history, many artists tried to base it on their moment in history, they wanted to create a new thing to fight the old system. It’s a very similar intention and they show their situation, their country’s situation that way. The first thing I did was to watch many videos, historical videos, many choreographic videos. In the second part, we try to break the wall – we just used file boxes for the wall and in each file box there are many choreographers’ history files or materials about World War 2. Would you say that in your choice of theme you’re thinking about something more global, or do you think about Japan, or about a particular situation in Japan? What are the most important themes in your work at the moment? These last few years, I was concerned about the Japanese situation, because we have the problem of radioactivity after the tsunami [of 2011]. I cannot understand the Japanese government’s attitude in these last few years; I tried to show something in my performance and in The Rite of Spring as well. Because Japan is a very small island, sometimes we don’t like change, we just obey the government rules: but we should appeal to (and question) their opinion. I tried to do it in my performance. I also used a text about Chernobyl, the author got the Nobel Prize (Voices from Chernobyl, 1997). Her name is (Svetlana) Alexievich, she’s a Ukrainian writer. I chose that text because the story is about the experience of catastrophe, like an earthquake or a radioactivity disaster: how do people act? The story is about how humans agree, in part, but otherwise for humans there is the hard part, the heart part. In Japan, there is also the same situation, so I used that text for that performance. For the dancers, dance can be playing, like a child, but that text is very serious. I used this text in the piece called Accumulations (2017). Accumulations means many things: radioactivity accumulates, history accumulates, so I named it “accumulations” and I used the text from Alexievich’s book and I wanted to show this to Japanese people. Now radioactivity continues to be emitted [from the site] and it’s still a very serious situation, but the government doesn’t report that, they say it’s safe, and that’s why I made that piece. But in most of my new work, I now don’t use a political message. Before that, in the last three or four years, I tried to use a very strong political message, but I did things a little bit differently in the next two [works]. What will the next theme be if it’s not political? What is it? In December, I will do a solo work. For that project, I will collaborate with a poet. It’s not political, but this time, I’m trying to just concentrate on word and body.

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I wanted to know if in your dance you have a sense of wanting to discover something. What do you want to discover through your dance? When I do one performance I always find the hint for the next work, because this idea cannot be included in this present work, so I’ll try it in the next. Sometimes I find new movement, or a new sense of my body to try next. When I do a performance, I can find that hint of the next theme, or the next body. Usually I try to connect the new theme to the body’s new hint – what I want to try with my body. Because I started dance at 23 years old, I feel it was very late so I can always find something new, and it’s still fresh Just to return to this question to end off, do you think of the work you do as Butoh or you don’t think about Butoh so much when you talk about it? How much do you consider the history of Butoh when you do your work now? Actually, maybe now it’s no longer Butoh. I always explain I’m a choreographer, I’m a dancer who learned Butoh, and who was influenced by Butoh. I worked with Ko (Murobushi) for ten years and I only learned Butoh dance, so it is a truth for me in the very deepest part of my body. My body is not like the body of a ballet or hip-hop dancer; I always carry chaos. I have a “chaos body” and that is a very Butoh aspect. But I think that in my mind perhaps I don’t use Butoh: I’m not a Butoh person.

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Figure 4.3 Homage to Kazuo Ohno at BankART1929, Yokohama, Takao Kawaguchi (2014). Photo: Teijiro Kamiyama

Complexity: A Contemporary Generation  205 Dragging in the Past: Matters of Grace Tatsumi Hijikata divulged it once: “form becomes vivid in disappearing”. Bear this in mind. The problem in attempting to contemporize a legacy is that the past dematerializes the bodies that instigated it. Tatsumi Hijikata is gone, Kazuo Ohno is gone, and one by one their contemporaries are leaving us: at the time of writing Yoshito Ohno, Ko Murobushi and Yukio Waguri have all gone. Masaki Iwana has just passed away. Presentifying their contribution to art and dance remains a physical enigma: it has something to do with physics – matter and gravity – and metaphysics – time and memory. Safeguarding the continuity of a seminal cultural legacy is the job of archives, academic research, and theory; safeguarding the practices is the work of bodies. It’s the work of dragging in the past. The bodies I want to talk about here need some definition. Three Japanese terms for body have already come up in the conversations so far: the nikutai, the shintai, and the suijakutai. These are only three out of many terms for “body” in Japanese. Each emphasizes a different perspective. Nikutai emphasizes the flesh, the meat – niku – of the carnal body. Shintai is the philosophical term: the body as concept, and it denotes the body’s symbolic function within society. The suijakutai is the diseased body, hidden, repressed, or denied. By exposing age, illness, and imperfection, it makes itself unacceptable to the spectacle of society, and so it embodies its own resistance to this order.26 For Tatsumi Hijikata, the nikutai offered a way to emancipate the body from social and economic systems especially the post-war politics of capitalism.27 His strategy consisted in exposing the body’s participation in its own de-materialization at the hands of the concepts that make up society’s underpinnings. Because of the era in which they lived, for the earlier generations of Butoh, the flesh body was primary. The body’s matter had to be encountered and ensouled for dance to emerge. The shintai – the body as concept – was relegated, perhaps pejoratively at times to modern dance and ballet. When Yoshito Ohno would say that dance happens between zero and one – “when you get to one, go back to zero” – it was a way to remind his students of the ease with which the bodymind seeks to escape the reality of its own enfleshment in favour of conceptual captivity. Hijikata’s description of Butoh as a “corpse desperately struggling to stand upright”, perhaps best captures the fateful problem of having a body. A body made of perishable matter and that over time has to perpetually witness its own entropy. The struggle of the “corpse” is against gravity as it drags on matter. Hijikata and the earlier generations of Butoh dancers resisted the readymade body, seeing it as an absolute fiction. They were intent on removing the veil of transparency afforded by society (shintai) and did so by delving into the impermanent

206  Complexity: A Contemporary Generation nature of flesh and inevitable death. The nikutai (and the suijakutai) invoke unpredictable forces that are an integral part of life’s physical reality – gravity first and foremost. The “problem of having a body” drives much of culture, which in turn offers an “apparatus of capture”28 bearing the promise that the problem can be forgotten (though never quite solved). Classifications, categories, codes, and other such attempts at taxonomizing existence – be they nationalist, gendered, racial, classist, or otherwise – construct conceptual frameworks that offer the sleight-of-hand of dematerialization: the body as material becomes an assumption, known and therefore transparent to awareness. The body as readymade is a technique capable of slackening the pull of gravity, and it may even seem to dissolve it entirely, doing away with the pull of gravity portents the possibility for grace. Grace appearing in life is the quest of the shintai: a conceptual body, a mechanism honed to defy gravity’s inert reality. Grace is that elusive quality ballet is most often associated with. The “performing body” within a corps de ballet is tellingly called interprète in French, an interpreter, but not the thing itself. The conceptual body of ballet, modern and contemporary dance, and sometimes also performance art should be a medium for communicating an idea, and the technique is often aimed at reducing or even obliterating the interference and noise of the flesh. The contemporary problem of the body for artists working with Butoh’s inheritance has now become two-fold. The nikutai of Butoh has already shifted into conceptual territory, having succumbed to its own theorization and archiving. In order to grasp this historical nikutai, it isn’t the nikutai of Butoh that has to be grasped, but a nikutai (flesh body) twice removed. The artist who wants to learn about the history of Butoh must resurrect the historical nikutai of Butoh with another nikutai – their own flesh body, the one doing the research – and deal with the weight of both in the present moment. What I want to say is that in this situation, there is a double drag on matter, from the past and the present. Grace must be remote. ~ “Takao Kawaguchi perfectly copied Kazuo Ohno’s movement sequence in Admiring La Argentina, The Dead Sea, and the other performances. This is the thrilling stage in which you meet Kazuo Ohno through Takao Kawaguchi, the medium.”29 I wait on the first floor of BankART. Now as the “viewer”, I feel I must prep myself, intellectually. I must develop an opinion. I am about to witness a homage to the great and “incomparable” Kazuo Ohno. But all that is left of him are traces, in the mediatized immaterial form of an archive. I wait, I think. Gradually, I become aware of a figure nearby; it wears a motorbike helmet and a blue tarpaulin sheet as a cape floating along its back. Some sort of superhero riding a bicycle through the sombre concrete of the hall. He

Complexity: A Contemporary Generation  207 begins to slalom through the crowd. He pulls me out of my drifting thoughts; I land in the right now to witness Kawaguchi’s adventure into Kazuo Ohno’s legacy. The crowd had been standing in a hallway landing outside the performance space until the cyclist appeared. His unpredictable movements now become the cues for the crowd’s incremental shifts in the space. Eventually, he leaves the bicycle to one side to begin to randomly comb through a messy assortment of objects strewn about in bags, cases, or on the floor. He discovers ping-pong balls, torn scraps of fabric, empty plastic bottles, even grabs my own umbrella which has gotten caught in the maelstrom of objects. He rushes across from one corner to the next, indulging in child’s-play, ham-acting. I’m thinking, is this a ruse for portraying Kazuo Ohno’s legendary naiveté? From this perspective, what I’m seeing is the dancer Takao Kawaguchi, trying to act like a child. Despite my misgivings I follow him, I want to know where he’s going to take us along this path of “playfulness”. He grabs a banana-shaped water pistol – a cultural reference to Banksy’s graffiti of the Pulp Fiction duo John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson with bananas in place of guns, I wonder. And so the postmodern bricolage begins. The man-child begins to section the room with swathes of roughly cut bunting and an air of desperate enthusiasm. The scraggy flags look more like bandages than a celebration. Out of a random suitcase, he pulls a “puppet” made of plastic bottles tied together to resemble a pelvis and legs, and a plastic rose. The loose and fluid movement of this simple object manages to convince the more pliant parts of my imagination – “aha! I get it, this is the Kazuo reference”. I’m following the circular motions of the swinging plastic bottle-legs, as the dancer climbs up a piece of scaffolding. My mind feels secure, like I know what he’s up to, and this feeling of knowing creates a passive blankness. I’m at the brink of losing interest after all the aimless running about. In this temporary (cognitive) absence, I begin to recognize a sort of physical fatigue. I’m traipsing about as if I’m entranced. I’m swaying absentmindedly to the Elvis Presley music – Elvis was one of Kazuo’s music staples. Fast-forward through various other meanderings, jogs, and runs, to the point when I suddenly notice a piece of lurid green astro-turf that looks like it’s alive and is gradually swallowing the dancer. Soon his body has almost disappeared, ingested by the whole pile of things that were previously littering the stage. The helmet chews his foot, a suitcase has latched a ride on his leg, a standing fan is dragging alongside, tracing a wake in the moving mess. He has become the shadow image of homo consumens trapped by “the burden of objects”. He reminds me of the city’s urban homeless who bear the burden of society’s attempts at grace – the bodies of the tramps at Tokyo station, and those resting their weary flesh under the blue tarpaulin tents that line the banks of the Sumida River and Yoyogi Park, the “outsiders” that drag down the social shintai, because they have been stripped of their ability to dematerialize. The weight of this heavy body I’m now witnessing, this diva of the debris, stumbles and wades around

208  Complexity: A Contemporary Generation silently, almost shamefully though I feel it’s “we” the viewers who feel shame. Suddenly Bach’s Toccata in D minor rips through the space. Unperturbed, the diva’s slow, purposeful ambulation continues, a palpable tension building as the vortex created by her growing train of flotsam and jetsam drags her back more and more. She claws out desperately to grab a ping-pong ball, and it ricochets away. The lights have now faded to just a few stark spots, and a single white light reflects itself insistently inside a glistening dark sphere. A floating eyeball glares out once more from beneath the mound of rubbish, and then the eclipse. The diva vanishes into the cavernous performance space. We follow her into the obscurity. Here there are no more objects; grace might then exist in this place. I notice a diaphanous body, standing naked, next to a rail draped in pendulous layers of fabric. I recognize the material archive of Kazuo’s stage persona, the costumes I had once glimpsed tumbling out of the wall cupboard at the Ohno studio. Overhead, the names of his works – My Mother, The Dead Sea, Admiring La Argentina – appear and disappear, projected onto the back wall. The living dancer begins to dance. A strong body, a cryptic face morphing from young to old, male to female, expressive hands that grab my attention, with stilted steps he hops, and then suddenly breaks off into flights of free dance, just like I saw Kazuo Ohno do in the documents at the archive. I even recognize Kazuo’s “ecstasies” from the documentation. But this isn’t Kazuo’s body, so it isn’t his ecstasy: what is it then that animates Kawaguchi’s flesh body (nikutai) and his own ecstasy? The soundscape feels hollow. It has been lifted directly from the archival material and retains the spatial interruptions of coughs and claps: the sonic memory of bodies that were once present, now recorded for posterity. A double haunting: a dematerialized dancer and the spectral body of his audience. Despite the ghostliness, something in this disembodied performance bleeds with the memory of material. A nikutai is usurping the conceptual body of the “interpreter”. Perhaps Kawaguchi’s body really vanished into the heap of things. Am I witnessing an event in which matter and spirit coalesce through time and through bodies by ignoring the boundaries of individual bodies? Instead it turns bodies into a field of interaction. And now, harnessing the present by the exactitude of mimetic technique, (Kazuo’s) spirit and (Kawaguchi’s) matter can play together. ~ The homage as a form is bound to invoke a strange mix of imitation, admiration, and often the pursuit of perfection, believed to be buried in the grace of the (now) fleshless past. Kazuo Ohno himself performed a most famous homage when he created Admiring La Argentina (1977) and premiered it when he was well into his 70s. In this homage, he recreated the gestures and movements of the Spanish dancer Antonia Merce that he had witnessed in 1929 and which became etched into his sensory memory. What appeared was not a copy of Merce’s dance.

Complexity: A Contemporary Generation  209 I first saw an extract of Admiring la Argentina at the V&A Museum in London, on the occasion of the Postmodernism exhibition held in 2011. A grainy encounter in a dark gallery space, surrounded by the likes of Grace Jones, Talking Heads and Klaus Nomi mannequins: it was intriguing in its cultural illegibility. Some visitors next to me were chuckling and commenting about this “strange drag queen”. I didn’t know what to make of it, but one thing I was convinced of was that this wasn’t “drag” in the sense implied by this visitor’s comment. The following year I was confronted with another homage. One of the dancers who regularly attended Yoshito Ohno’s workshops was presenting a dance piece. In it, she had recreated the identical look, costume, and movements of our teacher Yoshito. Yoshito was alive, sitting there in the audience close to me. My gaze moved from the dancer to Yoshito: was this a dance of respect, devotion, a show of “having mastered the master’s technique”? I had difficulty in understanding the value of such a performance outside the context of theory, or as a conceptual exercise. I felt resistant to what looked to be an embarrassing act of flattery… Or, had I misunderstood and it was in fact an ironic form of postmodern appropriation and “pastiche”? I spent many weeks at the Kazuo Ohno Archive, watching all of Kazuo’s films. I wanted to unpack the enigma of the Postmodernism exhibition and understand the meaning of this student’s performance. In Kazuo’s homage to Antonia Merce, there was no trace of irony; it was neither drag nor pantomime. Dressing up as La Argentina wasn’t a performative wink at the fluidity afforded by socio-cultural identity – the conceptual body of the shintai that is – a theme familiar to postmodernism. Instead, the lightness of Kazuo Ohno’s dance was steeped in total gravitas. Instead of drag as a stylized and often cross-gendering performative form, Kazuo was doing experimental physics: he was dragging in his memory of La Argentina, attempting to grasp the mystery of her vanished flesh, with the hope of re-animating her dematerialized body – her nikutai. ~ “The circle is the symbol of monotony which is beautiful, the swinging pendulum of monotony which is atrocious”. Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil Butoh, through its cultural theorization, has been given a shintai: a conceptual or philosophical name or form. But its original nikutai has vanished, and in doing so, it has become intangibly graceful. To make Butoh’s flesh body contemporary would require “realizing its nikutai”, one of Masaki Iwana’s conditions for dancing Butoh, within the living body that seeks to reanimate the archive. How can this be done? Grasping time’s flux through bodies, through materiality, and so, through society, is the work of cultural history. In Western art history, originality30 is often seen as an evaluation criterium through which a work is judged as

210  Complexity: A Contemporary Generation capable of inscribing the cultural timeline. The advent of postmodernism presents a problem. Appropriation has been a key postmodern practice in contemporary art where artists “borrow” the imagery or ideas from a preexisting work of art. What does originality mean in light of this practice? Are we dealing with the essence – circles – or the repetitional monotony of form – the pendulum? In Japanese art, there is a tradition of copying. It originates in part in an ancient Chinese painting theory which states that a painting carries the spirit of the past through copying.31 The effect of such edicts, many of them also applying to literature, has deeply influenced Japanese culture.32 Acknowledging that the artists of the past gave rise to a style and tradition fosters a particular self-consciousness in the living artist: the artist’s task is to bear the weight of this past. The consciousness of participating in a temporal trajectory (a “lineage”) that is of the order of deep time is the reason why copying has been so central to cultural practices in the East. Assiduous dedication to a master style allowed the transmission of the spirit of the tradition to be kept alive over time. Because of this commitment, artists were seen as custodians of a visual or performing art style, called its kata,33 and so the ability to perfectly copy a style, was far more valued than any form of individual talent or originality. In the Edo period (1615–1868), such principles were explicitly noted by a painter of the Kano School, Yasunobu Kano (1615–1685). He wrote that training was more valuable than “talent because innate talent could not be reproduced, whereas methods learned through training could be transmitted down the generations”.34 This would suggest that Japanese art history has been more concerned with propagating spirits than with the originality of individuals in the here and now. The artists’ bodies simply provided the material mediums for the time-defying spirit of the artform to merely occupy for a life-time’s interstice. In Western art, appropriation subverts the expectation of originality attributable to one unique author, by presenting an authorial riddle in its place. Such an enigma could allow past artists and present-day ones to interact over deep time through criteria that surpass and subvert “individual originality”. Appropriation could be an artistic force capable of revealing the materiality of time itself, with each artist merely holding it – time – and then passing it on. It makes me wonder if (postmodern) appropriation might allow a deeper engagement between Western art history and non-Western art traditions? Enacting such a shift in perspective would impact the notion of selfexpression in (Western) art; saying this, I am not aware of many postmodern appropriators who value the spirit of the artform so much that they are prepared to forego their individual identity and host this spirit in a nameless body. Because, whether as postmodern appropriation or the faithful copy that transmits the kata, the “self” that safeguards the continuity of spirit and style would become a replaceable form, therefore not unique. Once the self is not the one expressing, then the (social, named) identity that yokes to that self would also need to be examined. And this may lead to a long and

Complexity: A Contemporary Generation  211 complex journey of ontological – spiritual – inquiry that might take (at least) all of a lifetime to unravel.

~

As we’ve seen throughout, Butoh’s legacy is problematic for cultural history, because of its rhizomatic nature, because of its multiple authors and their diverse paths, because of its mixture of master, students, and maverick innovators, because of its perpetual slipperiness and refusal to be pinned down. When considering approaches to historicizing art movements over time, Butoh definitely sits at the fertile threshold between originality and continuity. This threshold can best be imagined through the paradox of spirit and form that has always haunted Butoh – the well-known anecdote of how Hijikata always claimed that form was primary, and Kazuo disagreed and believed that spirit comes first and form follows. The challenge for Butoh is to keep oscillating between the self-conscious readymade shintai and the immediate matter-reality of the fleshy nikutai. What if through this temporal ricochet, Butoh’s present might be vivified, because then, something impossible can happen? The energetic charge of past, present, future – being-time or uji – would become latent in the body material itself, the drag of matter would dissolve, the moment when “presentness is grace”.35

212  Complexity: A Contemporary Generation A Contemporary Homage: Takao Kawaguchi After directing the contemporary dance company ATA DANCE from 1990 to 1995, Kawaguchi joined the acclaimed artist collective Dumb Type. He performed for O.R. (1997), memorandum (1998) and Voyage (2002). He  began working solo from 2000, collaborating with artists of different disciplines across theatre, dance, visual image, and fine arts. From 2008, he began the solo performance series A Perfect Life. He approached Butoh through the work About Kazuo Ohno in which he explores Kazuo Ohno’s dance legacy through the mimetics of the homage. I saw the world premiere of the work at the annual Kazuo Ohno Festival in 2013. Since then it has been performed more than 80 times in over 35 cities around the world. This entrée into Butoh has led to Kawaguchi’s ongoing involvement in a form of contemporary Butoh citation. This includes Duo no Kai, choreographed by Akira Kasai, which is a reconstruction of Kasai’s duets with Kazuo Ohno. In 2021, Kawaguchi was the artistic director of the online festival, Tokyo Real Underground. Currently Kawaguchi is working on a new project Rosentanz – Critique of Pure Sexualization, inspired by Tatsumi Hijikata’s Barairo Dansu (Rose-Colored Dance, 1965). ~ Tokyo, November 4, 2013

The attitudes many people hold towards Kazuo Ohno and his dances, are very personal, and this could make your performance proposition immediately exposed to comparison and criticism. But the prelude was almost a sort of hypnosis that suspended this. When I walked into your performance, I first had these thoughts of wanting to compare – why were you doing this? – so I was surprised that the performance started like that, with you on a bicycle with a blue tarpaulin wrapped around you. Then I was thinking, I know you’re a performance artist, so is this your way to bring contemporary references into it, or something like that. I wasn’t really following you in that (first)

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space, I was not totally engaged by what was going on – I had a feeling of déja vu, like I’d seen this done before. But then something changed, it was when you picked up my umbrella actually… Oh yes I passed that place two or three times and I thought “I must use this somehow”. So yes, it continued and still I was vaguely following you, watching and then there was some point where I really felt like I was both bored and hypnotized by your actions. Somehow, through what you were doing, the judgement that I’d felt at the beginning had been suspended. Then you created this very strong image – I’ll call it an ambulante because it reminded me of Francis Alys’ photo series in Mexico City of people carrying many things on top of them, street vendors, etc. It’s a fascinating image and somehow you created that image in an organic way. I didn’t see it coming, and suddenly, there it was. That beginning became a catalyst into the homage part. Can you tell me more about what your intentions were in creating this opening? Did you see the film The Portrait of Mr O? Yes I did. Kazuo Ohno created it with Chiaki Nagano, the film maker. He did three films, prior to 1977, when he did his (re-)debut with La Argentina. During the ten years before La Argentina, he danced for various people but he didn’t do his own solos. [With Nagano], he did an inner exploration of his own dance, going to the forest once a month, going to places, and he touched objects, he played with these objects. He really did all sorts of weird things. And I thought that was a very important thing for him in order for him to come up with the things he did in his dance life. I wanted to do something like this. Of course I can’t really copy the film, it would be a little bit difficult, but I wanted to take, I wouldn’t say the essence, I took sort of the idea of it. That’s something I wanted to do, so I left that opening really random and spontaneous. Of  course I had a few things set and prepared, so that’s what I used to help me and to go into La Argentina and Divine  – the character from Jean Genet’s novel Our Lady of the Flowers. Divine is an old male prostitute who goes really badly and dies in shit and mud, etc. And what Ohno does is, he dresses very impeccably,

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beautifully with his hats and dresses, I wanted to twist that a little bit. So you used this as the passage to get into La Argentina? Yes. And I interviewed several people in the creation process, and one said, Ohno was very spontaneous in grabbing things and just starting to dance with them, like pots and pans, making noises, or he grabs a rope and puts it up and starts hanging stuff. And he would really go into it, and that energy would push him from one state of being to another and I think he got inspired, and he would jump into the dancing. Uesugi (Mitsuyo), she’s the one who told me that, and she said the scene that best represents Kazuo Ohno, who he is, is the scene from The Portrait of Mr O in which there are flags of all the countries of the world. There’s a little tiny scene in the mountain in the forest where these flags are hung. I  remember that scene and I thought that’s something I could do. So I borrowed that idea for the bunting hanging part. Yes, that bunting looked like bandages. The beginning sections are actually inspired by that film and the episodes that I heard about Kazuo Ohno: his spontaneity. Spontaneity was really important. In August, one week before the premiere, I did a runthrough in the Arts University in Tokyo. There they had a space and it was a dump – there was a lot of stuff. It was used as a cafeteria as well, so many students hang out there. I decided to do a full run through and to do this (opening) scene. It went well and we took all the stuff, the junk, from that space and used it in the actual performance. But you were improvising with the objects right? With regards to your choice of objects, did you have any ideas or references within them? Sure, I had vague links but I didn’t really…well I didn’t write a thesis about it (he laughs). I left it open as Kazuo does, and of course I have watched a lot of performances and a lot of contemporary art, and of course when I see the object, and I see my way with it, then maybe I recognize something. Maybe I saw Banksy in your banana water pistol. Did you think of the way the audience would read these actions or read what you were trying to create through them? There were two objectives: one, I simply wanted to cleanse myself. I  told myself – “Don’t try to create a

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wonderful scene, don’t try to be big, if you fail to create this scene, it’s ok, just do, and calm down. Don’t hurry, don’t try too hard, don’t sweat, just be there, and open” – for me to be with the flow, the moment, and the people. I could sense that because suddenly I was with what you were doing. And I also felt that you disappeared through this. I read in the programme that you were attempting to be a “medium” for Kazuo Ohno, and I thought, well that’s true, because now I’m not judging you as a dancer, thinking “he can or he can’t do this”, or “how he does this good or not in comparison to Kazuo”. I was more thinking “this is how Kazuo Ohno moves”. It was like watching answers to the questions I have about Ohno’s movement, and also the history of Kazuo’s body, which of course you don’t have. It was a strange experience because I have been fascinated by that movement for so long and to see it (live); I felt I was understanding it but through another body. The second thing was to be physical; I wanted to be physical by using the objects. You must have been tired after the prelude. It’s like going for a really good run? I’ve done that too in a performance. Going out, running for half an hour, then coming back to start the performance. Why did you want to be a medium for Kazuo Ohno? Kazuo Ohno believed that spirit preceded form, Hijikata thought the opposite – from form, spirit emerges. Did these ideas influence you at all in the development of About Kazuo Ohno? The reason I wanted to do this was very simple: I’ve been doing solo performances, and they were physical, but not really “dance physical”: I didn’t really listen to my body to do this kind of physicality. Then two years ago, I did a 45 minute solo – just me dancing, improvising. And I wanted to do it again but the two people I worked with couldn’t do it, so I had to do it on my own and I thought “what am I going to do?” Then I thought “ok I’ll do Kazuo Ohno”, just like that. Obviously once I had that idea, the practical side is that to do Kazuo Ohno and About Kazuo Ohno would be a very interesting, touching title for a performance, because nobody else would dare do such a thing, and there’s so many myths and legends, but nobody knows who he really was. Nobody would

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touch this. So I thought why don’t I do that. Then the dramaturg – my colleague, Naoto – said “why don’t you copy?” Until that moment, I didn’t really have any idea how to do it, but there was no other way I could think of, but he mentioned it. I borrowed the DVD from Toshio Mizohata.36 I couldn’t afford to have the same costumes they were too valuable and also fragile. Did you see the sketches? They were on one wall in the entrance of BankArt. There were many papers pasted on the wall on which I sketched from the video, the shapes in each moment, in each scene. I took specific images and tried to copy them. Almost like an animation? Yes. It’s because it’s not a clear choreography or movement, so all I could do in order to memorize the sequences was draw them. I read books and articles, so I knew the idea of the “dance of soul”, but I didn’t go into that spiritual space, because all you can do is imagine what he felt, or what he had in mind. You could read it, but how could you possibly understand what he was going through mentally. Did you try? Not to express it, but I feel that Kazuo Ohno regressed in some way after his experiences in the war. I always remember these lines Heinrich von Kleist wrote in his essay On the Marionette Theatre after self-consciousness has, so to speak, passed through infinity, the quality of grace will reappear; and this reborn quality will appear in the greatest purity, a purity that has either no consciousness or consciousness without limit: either the jointed doll or the god.





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What I hated the most was the spiritual, almost religious, guru-status (of Kazuo Ohno), I wanted to be totally away from that kind of reverence and worshipping. Basically he was always improvising, all his performances were based on certain structures: I decided that I wouldn’t do anything based on any assumptions and decided to depend wholly on the videos. A more formal approach?

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Until I had memorized all the movements, I didn’t have a sense of lightness, of vaporization. He is evaporating. He has this sense of lightness. Of course, I was just learning from videos: I never saw him dance on stage. I feel a little guilty that I didn’t try to take myself into the inner role, the spiritual space, but I tried to be really strictly into the dance. Seeing where his movement came from – is it this or this? – from the chest or from the hip? I found out that to hold the flow, his collarbone is very important. I found that kind of discovery through precision. I didn’t try to interfere by crossing this with my own [movement]. I realized that I should empty myself, make a hollow, and let this thing come in, take me over. That was how I thought I should do. Some people say that’s what Butoh is about. Hijikata said that “expression comes through not expressing”. You weren’t expressing something linked to Kazuo Ohno, but through the form you created, perhaps it was the spirit of the audience that could come out? I felt the audience was made active through this, as if the “spirit” was emerging through me, as an audience member. But it wasn’t your spirit, or the spirit of Kazuo Ohno, it was the spirit of my questions perhaps, about dance, Butoh, bodies. It’s interesting that the audience was seeing Kazuo, what they remembered of Kazuo, and me, and sometimes they saw both, a double, and sometimes it was one of us or the other. Most of the audience said that. That’s a very interesting thing; dance is what happens in their minds: dance is dance within the audience’s mind. I was about to get into that trap of wanting to portray and convey the image I had of Kazuo Ohno. For example, if this person is seeing something, or following something, and I imagine that, and I do this, and then I try to picture this; if I have this thing of myself and Kazuo Ohno, this gap, that’s something I was about to get caught in and didn’t want to. I was not sure sometimes, the scenes were very long, like 15 minutes hardly moving. It was long but it seemed like a journey. What are your impressions of Kazuo Ohno as a performer, did you study Butoh, and how does it feature in your work if at all? Well, I watched many Butoh performances, and I went to those performance art festivals in Tohoku in 1986–87. I watched, but I didn’t really study Butoh.

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And Kazuo Ohno… well watching those videos, I felt he was a very talented dancer but I didn’t think he had that much talent in directing or choreographing. He was great at improvisation that’s what I thought. These three pieces  – La Argentina, My Mother, and The Dead Sea – that I  copied were in fact directed by (Tatsumi) Hijikata. Especially at the premieres of them, Hijikata would be in the wings whispering to Ohno: “teacher, master don’t move, don’t move, not yet”. In La Argentina the part by the piano, that was when he was doing that. I didn’t really value Ohno’s performance, given that I haven’t watched everything so I may be wrong, but from those videos of the later performances in the late 1980s, 1990s, I didn’t really like it. Somehow the pace is gone, he just does what he wants to, or feels like, and there’s no control, there’s no resistance. That’s what I felt from the videos I saw, that’s why I copied from the earlier works. It’s like where there’s warm currents and cold currents in the ocean, there’s a very fertile fishing area: that’s what I feel with Ohno and Hijikata, when they worked together, something very interesting was created. I always feel that what Hijikata imagined as Butoh wouldn’t really exist without Ohno, but then it couldn’t exist without Hijikata either, because he saw it, he identified it in the body of Ohno, their collaboration is very rich. Because my baptism into performing arts was sort of Butoh, when I started watching performing arts, the presence of Butoh was very strong. I didn’t really have much to say about Butoh, I watched some Butoh performances but didn’t really have that conscious influence, I wasn’t really aware of how Butoh has influenced me. But when I started dancing: I’ve always wanted to be free of the methods or typical styles, forms, techniques of dance. And Butoh had its modality but Butoh’s physicality, Butoh’s body, was interesting in that respect. But then recently I haven’t seen many good Butoh performances. Things from Europe, yes: in 1986, Pina Bausch came, then William Forsythe, then some French dance companies. I wanted to know, does Butoh feature in your work at all? The dance critic, Tatsuro Ishii, describes you as “a performer who uses his body as his sole medium”. 37 I read that you studied mime and contemporary dance. What performance forms or techniques most influence

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your own interrogation of your body? Because you talk about this physicality, how do you approach the body? I don’t really know where my interrogations come from, I don’t really know how to explain it very well. When you’re working on a piece, you use text, film. How do you start the process with your body, without using any forms? When I create my own piece I don’t start with any techniques, I start from a bigger picture, or how things are. But always there’s this relation to time and space, and the notion of the audience’s perception, as well as story, meaning. So I try to find an interesting relationship between things and stories and concepts and objects and history, sounds; whatever I can use, and my body as well. I try to situate each element into different (areas) and this process is not very easy or methodical. If the physicality of the body – this abstract energy of the body – is the theme, then I would focus on that, and that would be the centre of the narrative. So not like “he did this, he did that, etc”. But I would make sure that the things are in a certain way of presentation, that the way things are presented, the design, although I am open…it’s so cliché to say “I’m open and the structure is open” (he laughs). Perhaps in a similar way, I’ve been developing a performance for a few years and it has a narrative to it, but I can’t say exactly what it is. I suppose it’s a sort of subconscious narrative, but I know that if I do things in a certain way, I can make this more communicable to an audience, but I can’t say “oh yes you got the story!” or “no you didn’t get it”, because there is no one story. Although maybe it just becomes clearer, an essence becomes more concentrated through time. In that way, I really love some architectural contemporary art installation pieces (which are open to interpretation). I was going to ask you about Dumb Type and your work with them. You have been involved with Dumb Type since the 90s: can you talk about your work with Dumb Type and if your own practice is influenced by this experience? Dumb Type creates an environment within which a human is placed, and how he negotiates it is the piece. Working with Dumb Type helped me form the foundation of how I approach space. I became more flexible in bringing practically anything into the space. Before

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Dumb Type, I really stuck to dance and didn’t really bring much else, but with Dumb Type there was video, objects, costumes, stage architecture, sounds; it really opened up and freed my way of thinking of what is interesting on stage. What is interesting on stage is narrative. And I think that I learned that I’m allowed to do anything… As long as…? As long as you can build your own architecture or structure, so that I don’t have to stick to my own body or stick to video or to beautiful dance. I can bring junk and put it on me and become the object – that can be done – space and time and story and senses. I’ve watched some of Dumb Type’s performances and I saw one on the internet I think you were involved in O.R. It uses technology, lights, electronic music. There was also a live feed of you I think that was projected. You also use technology and media in your own work. What is your relationship to it as a performer? How do you relate to your own “mediatization” in your work? They’re tools and materials. Di Que no Ves (Say You Don’t See) is a collaboration with this artist (Atsuhiro Itoh) who works with fluorescent light, he amplifies the noise that happens within the tube when he controls the voltage and frequency of it, so the light flashes on and off and it makes noise, so he amplifies it to the max and plays that sound with drums. My approach was how can I live with it, how can I counter it? I didn’t know what to do, it’s so aggressive and strong, so I thought it makes me dizzy, so maybe I can spin, fall down and lose my balance. So I did it (spinning), but I didn’t fall, I got used to it. Then I made a story of how you can get dizzy, or what is the experience of dizziness. I drew some pictures on a mirror, and I started explaining inside your head there is this kind of thing, and there is water here and if you spin around this water starts to move, and this water’s movement sends signals to your brain and this is how you keep your balance. So in order to train your balance you have to get used to the movement of your water.



S o for a training, I had to move my head from side to side. That was the beginning of my solo performance career, and that was the first performance in which I

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did a kind of lecture performance: speaking, explaining, doing some experiments, it was a 20 minute performance. The next one was DDD, the other guy – Fuyuki Yamakawa – amplifies his heartbeat and connects it with lightbulbs and he sings khomei (Mongolian throat singing). This affects the rhythm of his heartbeat so it changes the light and sound. So light and sound was the main theme for me of those years, and my impulse was to smash my own body onto something – that was my first idea for that piece. Then I went to his concert and the venue was going to be our venue too. I thought if I stand on a table, the audience will gather around and then I can be seen from anywhere, like a boxing ring. So with the concept of the heartbeat, there was the muscle inside the body and the muscle outside of the body, sort of fighting against each other. In the middle of the performance, he (Yamakawa) counts how many heartbeats per minute he has, and then he brings out the life expectancy table so at the age of 30, he is supposed to live how many years and then converts it to days and then minutes, and it’s 10 million or so minutes, and so he multiplies his own heartbeats per minute, times the life-expectancy and then he says, “before I die, my heart will beat this… many times”. That kind of story… A human being negotiating the environment and his body… For me that was a very interesting thing; you need to see your own standing point very objectively in relation to the space in which you’re in, both literally and metaphorically – the human condition. Also Dumb Type had a lot of banal humour and jokes, bad jokes, or subcultural influences: it was an interesting mixture or blend of very highly philosophical or hypothetical thinking and concepts, plus subcultural almost instinctual humour, local culture, together creating an unexpectedly unique narrative. That’s something that I really learned from working with Dumb Type: a very immaculate and very precise way of working. I think that’s important to make it clear, to make your proposition clear; and to make a strong image. That is the way Dumb Type uses technology and it’s good I think. Sometimes it feels aggressive, did they intend it to be? I think back in those days, with O.R. and together with Ikeda Ryoji’s sound, of course we were really wanting

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to be provocative. It was about how we look at the world and how we look at the phenomenon of death, so how we see was a very important concept. The lighting designer wanted to test that and bring human vision to the extreme and human audio to the extreme. That was truly integrated within the concept of the piece, which was how we can see the point of death which is like the central point of the circle: you know it’s there, there is a centre somewhere, but you can’t really pinpoint it, it’s not tangible. Death is something like that, you know that it comes but you can’t say “this is death”. But through religion and technology, medicine, etc. we are trying to identify that. But we can’t because that point is very abstract. So that basic concept or thinking is behind all this technology (we use). Talking about the actual physicality of your work, you said “in the beginning, I wanted to do a kind of performance in which I would slam my body against a floor or a wall”. You said this about DDD in which you wear a wrestling mask and keep throwing yourself over a table. Wrestling as a form is a good way to explore this urge. How do you relate the primal physicality of the body to expression? I want to put it in a context in a narrative way, yes, but so that the rawness of primal physicality is still there, so I try to put it in an interesting context so that it has a different meaning. For me it’s not that interesting to just put raw energy as it is. Mmm maybe sometimes… yes. So by taking the raw energy and putting it into some narrative form or context, the expression comes through that? Yes for me, I often do that. Do you want to express something, do you think that the physicality comes from a need to express something? No. So the expression comes more from setting out to express something [through narrative], and the physicality is not completely linked to it? I’m not sure if we are using the word “physicality” coherently. I mean what is physicality? Is it the need to make a show? I think I first offer my physicality, be it body or state of being, or in other words, what I am or how I am, and see what expression or narrative there

Complexity: A Contemporary Generation  223 is. Expression or narrative is not something you make up and express, but something you must find lying in there, and scoop it up and present in a way that it becomes relevant or strong. I did a solo show, A Perfect Life in a very small studio apartment – Tokyo-size. I went there every day and spent all day there thinking, “Is it this? Is it that?” And then – it was on the fourth floor of a building with a view over a huge river from the terrace – and I thought, “I’m stuck”. So I went jogging. There’s this beautiful place with a really nice feeling. I came back after half an hour or so. Back in those days, my neck was hurting, I had very bad pain, and this finger (shows his thumb), I couldn’t move. It was bad. It happened that way, I thought “ok I’ll take my physical problem as a scene”. I took a shiatsu therapist – anma massage therapy – and I recorded a session with him: he was talking, etc. And I also remember it was during the Beijing Olympics, and he was talking about the women’s marathon in which a Japanese runner had to retire in the middle of the race due to the pain in the foot. I also interviewed my mother because I remembered she had the same kind of pain in her neck and back and that she would often complain about the pain. So that became my personal story in A Perfect Life. And in the running part, I decided to – and this is pure idea – put my computer on stage and I connected it with Skype with my mobile. So as I am running, I have my mobile and I talk about what I see and what I experience, so the audience as they come in will listen to my voice as I’m running. And I come back and the audience is there. Now it’s August, so I’m very sweaty, I take off my shirt and I lie down on the floor and the sweat makes a mark. I trace my sweat mark with tape, and this becomes the map of the river. Then I explain, I ran here, I ran there…. Another one – the one I did this February – which was based on the performance I did in Okinawa, two years ago in 2011. It was right after the earthquake and the tsunami, so I was in shock about the radioactivity and everything. And I knew that in two weeks, I had to go to Okinawa. Now Okinawa is a huge politically problematic place, with the United States military base, so I knew that people would expect me to do something special down in Okinawa: for a performer

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coming from Tokyo to Okinawa, they will expect this. I didn’t know what to do, and with this earthquake happening, and people dying and lots of problems, I knew even less. And then there was this exhibition The Power of Art at Spiral Gallery (Tokyo), and they asked artists to write A3 sized messages and they would exhibit them, and they asked me too. I didn’t know what to do, and I decided to tear up the paper because I didn’t know what else to do. So I went to Okinawa: I still didn’t know what to do. I had to live in Naha city and the studio where I worked was in another city, very far, about 25 km away, I didn’t have any transportation. I decided to buy a bicycle and ride. It was 1 hour 15 minutes each way. I did this every day for three weeks. That became the centre of the piece: one of the stories. During those three weeks, I still didn’t know what to do in the studio. I tore up paper for example as a way to start. I bought the newspaper and I started to tear it up. After one month’s worth of paper torn up, it became a sort of small geography. I decided to fill the studio with paper strips, and I remember as a child you make tunnels, so I used cardboard boxes to make tunnels. Many associations came up: during these three weeks, my family called to tell me my aunt had died. I remembered my aunt she was like 89 or 90 years old. It  was a little shocking because I wanted to do something about my relatives, because every time I visit home, they are getting older and older and they’re about to die, and that’s a shock because you remember their days when they were young and so strong and now they’re about to die. And my aunt died, and that became a story. What I did was ride the bicycle or tear the paper, and I’d go in and out talking about those stories, and I actually made a doll from the paper on the stage, and started talking to my aunt. It’s always my physicality bringing those ideas and stories, so the entrance into narrative is through me: I have to find those ideas. Dramaturgy is a medium for those ideas. So it’s based in the experience, in the life experience that is currently happening. Right, that’s the main theme of A Perfect Life. My physicality – my own stories and experiences with the actual space – is what I am working with.

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Linked to how you develop your work, you said to Tatsuro Ishii, Say, you come up with a new language of saying something, and that something can only be said in that language…For me, the core is using the body for expression, but I want to pioneer forms of expression that transcend conventional sense of values.38





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What I want to say emerges from the message or narrative I come up with within those performative ideas. What I want to say and what I do is the same thing. My pieces are often very sentimental, emotional, especially A Perfect Life and they trigger the memory of the audience themselves. They start overlapping their own story with mine. For example, the death of my aunt: I wish I had spent more time with her. When I saw her for the last time several years back, she was in bed and I went to see her with my mother, and when I went into the room, my mother started talking to her and massaging her, and I couldn’t do anything. In the performance, I explored what I wished I had done. I wanted to know how the audience experiences or reflects on your work. I guess it is not just a personal story of yours, but it becomes more…? Connective: well I think that’s very important – sympathy or sharing emotions. When you can really touch on something people connect to, then it becomes their story too. There is so much talk about audience participation, wanting the spectator to do particular things. Sometimes performances can have a very forced attitude towards “active spectatorship”, making or coercing people into doing things, so that they “appear” to be participating: you want to change the relationship of the performer and spectator, so you force the spectator to do things or tell them to do things, and as an audience you end up feeling “I know you want me to be involved, but I’m not involved”. The way through which an audience can be involved by a narrative that can become theirs, is much

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more subtle. They become active by creating their own narrative as they watch… Because I don’t write from the beginning, I don’t make a spectacle drama. And so, people can relate. I hate to describe – I don’t know if I’m describing what I have in my mind very well. The real interest is to do such a simple story or simple experience and to transfer it, or transform it into something else, some other dimension, and this movement creates a certain sensation, and this movement for me is dance. I try to present something and rotate, or slide it, or transfer it, or put it in contrast with, so that it vibrates and creates space for you to be something. Like creating a myth? A mythologizing of ordinary moments in your life? I would rather say, putting it into another dimension, and that putting into another dimension causes you to generate excitement, or shifts, or move, or feeling, or sensation, or intellectual stimulation. This shift in dimension is something I really get off on. I don’t know if you can attribute all to that. Your work has been described as “mixed media performance art”. Can you define what performance art means to you? And do you think definitions of performance art vary according to cultural context? There is this famous picture in which there is a guy who hangs horizontally over the gap between two walls or objects, like two chairs, and he puts his hands on one chair, and his feet on the other and hangs in mid-air: I forget if it was two chairs or two walls… That was very eye-opening for me. That kind of thing doesn’t mean anything, but it really opens another dimension in the otherwise very fixed notion of objects, the given functions and meanings we are really fixed and bound to. And those actions cut through that and leave you free. It takes the whole thing into another dimension and this is really something. That’s performance art. Do you think the body is essential to performance art? It doesn’t have to be a privileged body: the body doesn’t have to be trained. What you’re saying about objects reminds me of a feeling I have sometimes in relation to objects, and which can change very much after deep concentration. It’s a change in the relation based on a momentary (sense of) materiality that comes from my body being in a particular space. Sometimes after meditation it’s as if I have come to a point of total presence which is unrelated to

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the past, as in my historical understanding of a particular object: it becomes new or strange. I was doing a lot of exercises of making this (he picks up a glass), something other than glass, or use a chair as if you don’t know what it is, etc. Do you think performance art varies according to cultural context? What do you think? I don’t know. Performance art, yes, at a certain level it is very affected by cultural context. For example, the performance of Okinawa, if you don’t know what Okinawa is or you don’t know about the earthquake, you lose so much information, association. And then the architecture of associations that I’ve constructed doesn’t work. So in that way, yes. And then language, if you use text. There are certain things you really need to deliver certain information you need to make a point. But then it depends. I guess it also depends on how people relate to their own bodies. In Japan, I sense there is a different attitude to the body. In a way, we don’t touch each other so much. The lack of touch has been quite a shock for me; it’s hard for me to understand how people live with little touch. And Japanese dancers are so afraid of contact, they don’t know what to do. When they have to grab or touch etc. I remember going to a dance class in Tokyo and we did an exercise where you’d touch your partner to create some response to that touch. But my partner wouldn’t touch me and instead pointed to the part of her body that she intended me to respond to. I find it really odd and embarrassing, I feel sorry for them… Yes there are different politics of the body in different countries. Lastly, I wanted to speak to you about what “contemporary” means to you? For me, contemporary – whatever the context is – to be contemporary is to be free from existing conventional methods and modes and ways to face reality, so you have to invent. And you’re determined not to depend on any fixed, readymade. Of course you have to have that spirit of challenge, that you are there, and you don’t have anything like a readymade formula to solve things, but you have to go through the whole process.

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Of course, you have knowledge, heritage, but then you have to go through an unbeaten path or channel. That challenge, that uncertainty, is what is “contemporary”. It’s sort of looking at things from new angles, finding new perspectives and ways of seeing. It’s rebuilding the whole world from that very plane that you are standing on. How do you relate that to dance or the body? How can dance be contemporary? I don’t want to ask you specifically about Butoh dance but thinking of it in terms of a “revolt of the body” as a politicization of the body, where the body becomes this statement of existence, of identity, of your presence in the world. Can you imagine a contemporary version of that idea that began with Hijikata’s solo? What do you think the possibility of the contemporary body could be? I think when Butoh started, they had to throw away lots of methods and lots of notions of “body” to find the modern concept of the body and the social, political, economic body. So when you say Butoh, or when you say a Butoh dancer, you really have to be empty and to recreate the energy which we rely on “to stand as a dead body” – you know Hijikata’s words “Butoh is a dead body trying to stand upright”. Ohno said “To live with the dead…” In either Hijikata or (Kazuo) Ohno, to their bodies, there is this lightness, this freeness of the body in which life takes its form. But our body is really defined by lots of things Modern society is quite individualistic, there is a focus on ego. If individualism could be applied to the body, perhaps there could be a positive change in society. Through the individuality of the body? If individuality could be examined from the point of view of the body, through it, people might become conscious of the power of their bodies, and therefore themselves, and of their agency as human beings. Perhaps there is a huge amount of positive possibility within that. Many of the problems in society today seem linked to manipulation of a “mass-individualism”, consumerism for example. Ah ok, Kota Yamazaki39 was asking me “what do you think of Ohno’s dance and capitalism and individualism?” and I didn’t really understand what he was trying to say. Now with what you said, I get it.

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Figure 4.4 SHOOT JEEZ MY GOSH at Dock 11, Berlin, Yuko Kaseki (2015). Photo: Sigel Leicht.

Butoh Bizarre: Yuko Kaseki I saw Yuko Kaseki’s work Unspelled in 2014. The performance took place in an unusual venue in the suburbs of Tokyo, called Espace Kiten. News of the event came to me through word-of-mouth. All I know of Espace Kiten is that it was someone’s apartment, and they had decided to host art gatherings there, perhaps wanting to rekindle the heady days of the Asbestos-Kan. The space was cramped as about 20 of us crowded into the small main room of the ground-floor apartment. I wondered how Yuko would find the space to move in there. But she did: she surprised us all by appearing outside, gradually making her way in by climbing through the window. She used objects – plastic bags – in a compelling way, she also used her voice. She obviously has a keen sense of scenography, and the work had a strong dramaturgic arc, something I hadn’t often seen in Butoh dances. After the performance, the room was transformed into a kitchen as somebody brought in a stove and began to cook the customary post-show meal. Here, Yuko and I reconnected; our paths had already crossed earlier that year in March, when I danced at Tatwerk, Berlin, as part of a group of female Butoh dancers who had trained with Masaki Iwana.40 I settled in Berlin after my return from Japan in 2015, and there, Yuko and I saw each other much more frequently. Berlin is Yuko’s base where she

230  Complexity: A Contemporary Generation is incredibly active working in solo, duos, and often with theatre groups, and larger collaborative projects. I realized that her inventiveness with objects and spaces is very much part of her approach and informs the ways she works across these different artistic contexts and genres. After getting to know each other through the local dance scene, it turned out Yuko and I were living on the same street. I had been wanting to hear the voices of more female Butoh dancers. Her input was one of the last conversations I had with the dancers included in this book, and the only one that happened outside of Japan. Hers is a novel perspective which bridges her varied experiences of Butoh, first in Japan, and later in Germany. She shares the trajectory of her early commitment to her teacher, Anzu Furukawa, and their subsequent, and complicated, separation which eventually allowed her to develop her own direction. ~ Berlin, March 3, 2017 Dominique Savitri Bonarjee: Yuko Kaseki:

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How did you become involved with Butoh? Long story of course. At the beginning I was at university, and I visited a friend’s theatre group at another university. When we all graduated, we formed a new group: I felt I wanted to do something, so I joined the group. We all wanted to do outside experimental theatre. But although it started experimental, it was also getting more and more dependent on text. At the beginning we wanted to make it with no director, we wanted to do dance and music and theatre, everything together. We did that for three years. It was also a very interesting group, because once a year we’d perform. For this, we used on old ex-American airport in Chofu, a big field, but it was no longer used as an airport; it had become a park. It was a big field with a lot of grass, a very wild park, and we would rent a part of it, stay there, putting up tents and rehearsing and cutting grass. It was like a ceremony on September 23rd: like the day of autumn. The Autumn Equinox? Yes, that’s it. This was our target. It was fun and we did it for three years. But then we would spend a lot of money renting light and things and then in the end we were in minus figures, we didn’t get enough income. One year’s labour for one performance, it was something like this. Sadly then, things were becoming harder, and also as they started to depend on the text,

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it was becoming more theatrical. I felt that I was so bad at remembering the text, and I was not committed with text. Then some Butoh people like Kota Yamazaki and another Butoh dancer became involved with the group. Kota showed a performance and that’s why I started to get interested in Butoh. Before that I didn’t know it. So it was through Kota Yamazaki? In this group, there was also another Butoh dancer and she gave short workshops. Then I saw Kota’s performance in a museum, and it was amazing because he was jumping. He studied ballet and he can really jump high and do free improvisation. I didn’t know Butoh could be like this. I started to get interested in dance and I began to search for a teacher. There were several different people, but in the end I met my teacher, Anzu Furukawa. Actually it was not so much about Butoh because I didn’t know much about it, or the ideas, but I went to a dance workshop with Saburo Teshigawara and some other teachers. I didn’t have so much information about Butoh or “dark Butoh”. Then somehow I went to Anzu’s workshop. It was a very strong experience for me and so I wanted to study from her. Where did you go to her workshop? It was in Japan, it was a summer workshop. Before that I saw their group performance and there was a dancer Kim Itoh: I was fascinated by both him and Anzu. Also the performance was very strange and funny, so I was curious and I went to Anzu’s workshop. After that I wanted to study from her and I joined a one-year programme. But then she decided to move to Germany, so I just followed her. You came to Germany only to follow her? She became a professor at an art university in Braunschweig. Actually I didn’t study anything else, just her class. It was a strange time because in Braunschweig, there was not so much going on and I didn’t speak any German. I just tried to study from her because at the time I didn’t know my body, my feeling and I really wanted to study, so I continued and continued and continued. How long did you study in Braunschweig? In 1991, I moved to Braunschweig, and then later in ’95, I moved to Berlin. I continued to go there from Berlin, but I couldn’t finish in the end.

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But you learned what you had to learn? Yes somehow. Also in Braunschweig, there was nothing to do, only dancing. Actually, my own work started since ’95, before that I feel I was mainly studying. You were dancing with Anzu Furukawa’s company as well? Was that before ’95? Before ’95 there was this project – she didn’t have a company as such – she choreographed the school students. Often she invited guest dancers from Helsinki, Oslo, and other countries. I joined this type of performance, and several times I joined her company, for some works such as The Insect and The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, but mainly it was more school performances. She really invested time in it, it was a big performance. Anzu Furukawa became involved in Butoh in the 1970s and danced with Dairakudakan is that right? Did she teach according to a certain method that came from Dairakudakan? What was the format of her teaching? I don’t know Dairakudakan but Maro (Akaji) uses a lot of Noguchi Taiso, she used it too and developed it in her way. She also studied music composition, she had a very strong awareness of musicality, and she did very precise choreography: I really studied this. She almost had no improvisation, everything was choreographed for the final performance, in the rehearsals she might allow some. It was beautiful choreography. I was reading about her and I read that she studied music at first. I saw Dairakudakan when I was in Japan and I saw Maro Akaji dancing. Dairakudakan and Akaji do seem to have a very specific style, in terms of look and movement. I think hers was a bit different but there is humour: Dairakudakan has humour too. After Dairakudakan, she had a company Dance Love Machine with Tamura Tetsugawa. They were very special as a company, but I don’t know really, I just saw some photos and short videos. You know in Dairakudakan, there is an element of celebration, of ritual, man and woman and a huge operatic sense: Dairakudakan are like this. But Tamura and Anzu, in their company Dance Love Machine, they did something more down to earth. You mean it wasn’t stylized? No, it wasn’t. There was also a very interesting chemistry between them. They are very different but they have a great collaboration, I heard this from many people.

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When did they have that company? I think in the 1980s. So, when you were dancing with her the name of the company had changed to Dance Butter Tokio? Yes, Dance Butter Tokio was founded in Japan, and after she moved to Berlin in ’97, we had a project company called Verwandlungsamt, which means “metamorphosis department” – amt in German means office. She made a piece called Goya oder la Quinta del Sordo. What prompted you to start making work by yourself in 1995? I moved to Berlin, and the first project was with some students of Anzu’s who came from Berlin. The director, Marc Ates, was later my husband, now ex-husband, and we did a group show in a gallery, and then together we started a company. We did a lot of duets. He was a dancer as well? Yes. We had a dance studio later, and when Anzu moved to Berlin, she also used the studio, and we used it to rehearse company pieces. Marc and I organized the studio, but in the end, we didn’t have any more money and we had to give it up. It was a golden time to have a studio to rehearse anytime, but it just lasted a short time. We also did a lot of performance series and it was very good. What area was it in? It was in Mitte, Rosenthaler Strasse. Now, that would be impossible! Yes but at the time, things were still available. So you started making your own work in ’95 and your company name was Cokaseki? Yes that’s right. Thinking from then until now, how do you think your work developed? Can you talk about your process of developing work, and how it has evolved or changed in the last 20 years? It’s changing all the time of course. It was in ’95 that I started, before that I was studying really, I wanted to study how to move. Also because Anzu was so strong, I cried again and again, it was this kind of training. But in ’95 I started to work on my own piece with Marc. Then later maybe around the end of the 90s, I started to make solo work, this was the first change. Marc was the outside eye, and also doing light and sound, it was our collaboration: it wasn’t just me, we did it together.

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We also had a company, and then Marc began to go out and do the direction, so we also did group pieces. Then I was invited to the New York Butoh Festival. I did my solo, but at the time, I began to struggle. I had started to make my own work, and I was beginning to feel that in the choreography, I was not free. This feeling was so strong. It was a great collaboration with Marc, because I had some idea and he would watch the process and then he criticized or gave suggestions, and then I worked more, and so we continued this process. It was great but in the end, it was fixed, and I couldn’t change anything in my feeling, I was trapped in the choreography. Then I saw Akira Kasai’s performance in New York. I saw the same piece over two days. It was sort of the same structure, but he’s a person who is totally free. I was so shocked, and impressed, I thought “wow”. I went to talk to him, but he didn’t answer anything. But his wife told me, “Akira, every day he’s different, when he wakes up, what the air is, what the sunshine is, and then his dance will be different”. I was very impressed and I started to do more improvisation. Around what time was this? It was 2005. I had already started an improvisation series but I felt like I was just repeating aspects of my vocabulary. I struggled and my work with improvisation was very limited. But when I saw Akira, I got a big shock, I was forced to do more improvisation, and then slowly, something opened because there was always a block, so I was challenged through this. It benefitted the choreography of the piece, I could find more possibilities, even with just some idea, and I really liked how I could switch between [choreography and improvisation]. When you started to do the improvisation series, did you do it with an audience? Yes. Sometimes I was very stuck, thinking “oh what should I do?” There was this really crazy fear moment and I felt sorry for the audience, but for me, this was a challenge, so it was very interesting. At the beginning, I used different places, but later it was at Dock 11 or the studio, sometimes a theatre space: so it might be the same place, but [the question was] how to change the audience seating or to perform in a different way each time? I tried some structure: it was a structured improvisation more or less. This made me study.

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You said that when you were with Anzu Furukawa, she used choreography and it was very strict, so it was only from the year 2000 that you started to explore improvisation in your own process. Out of this time of improvisation, did you start to develop a method that was different from what you’d learnt from Anzu? Of course, especially at the beginning. When I started my own work, Anzu’s voice was always here. In ’95, I moved to Berlin to start doing things, and at the end of the 90s, I made a solo piece. We also worked in the studio, and several works she watched, she gave her opinion and some criticism. But there was one solo she saw and she said she liked it, and she gave me a certification. You mean as “a certified Butoh dancer”? (laughing) It was funny. She said she really liked the solo, it was good work. Then we did a performance, the group piece, called Goya oder La Quinta del Sordo. On this occasion, we each presented her a flower, and she gave my flower back to me: that was the certification. Even after she passed away, she was still very strong: she was always around me, always speaking to me, and I struggled. Really, it takes time because I studied a lot from her. During a Q & A I spoke at in Tokyo with another dancer, Camille Mutel, she mentioned the “betrayal of the master” – the need to go against the person who taught you. Do you feel you did that through this period of improvisation? Actually, it was before that. She passed away in 2001, and at the end of the 90s, we worked in the studio, but in parallel, I had started to do my own work. She was very strong and sometimes I was weak or not strong enough to have a discussion, so in the end, I had to tell her “sorry I cannot work anymore”. Of course she was very angry, but it was really important for me to make distance and to find my voice. Then soon she became really sick. She was planning for a new piece, and I said I couldn’t do it, and she was very upset. She was getting very sick and then she passed away. Somehow I am sad about this, because we could never come to talk about this, to be at the same stage to talk about things. She was always above me – I mean like a “master”. It’s like this, especially for the Japanese. But maybe if we’d had a little distance

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and I continued my work, maybe we could have talked in a different way but it was not possible at that time. This is my regret. I don’t know if she’s still here now and if she talks to me, maybe criticizing me – or I can argue with her. This I can just imagine. You can imagine through the work and sense if she’s watching. In these interviews and my research, I’ve been tracing the timeline of Butoh: what interests me is how it developed, where it came from. How in the 1960s and 1970s there were different phases: the 1960s was much more experimental, the 1970s was more choreographed. So which period do you feel closer to (if any)? Actually, I am sort of out of “Butoh society”. I’m working here more (in Berlin). And then Anzu was already a little bit of an outsider to the Butoh group because she did things more in a Western way, choreographed and also had something like a “pop” feeling. Then, if I look back, I don’t know if I studied “Butoh”. But for me, it’s more the experimental side that’s important, like Anma, Masseurs (1963). I really like it, when Hijikata’s still searching, and a lot of artists collaborated with him: this is the period I really love. Then later on I understand this process, but in a way, it’s becoming a product, fixed, but it’s still amazing what he created in his short life. Actually I am also curious, if he still lived, after this period of the 70s, what would he have done? He didn’t dance for a long time, then he decided to dance again but then he passed away. The whole development is so complex, that’s why I decided to stay in Japan for those three years, because the way Butoh developed is not just as a dance form, it’s really a process that went from that experimentation that then inspired other artists to take it up and do their own thing, then there were the students, and then Hijikata enters this choreographic period. That’s why Butoh is so difficult to fully understand. Yes, and each person has a different time, and process. Actually before Anzu passed away, she was starting to work more with city theatres, and amazing ballet and contemporary dancers, she was working with them and she was so proud of this. I saw a video and it was beautiful – choreographed – but I was questioning it, because they can do whatever she wants them to, physically, but something was missing. I saw this in the video. It was this bigger, more amazing, more dynamic

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vision and I felt a little bit lost. When she became sick, we talked a little and she remembered Tamura, but he had passed away when she moved to Germany. And anyway they had already split at this time. She was thinking of him, and thinking about Butoh and what it is, it was as if she was going back to the beginning again. She also said, “I cannot go back”, but she was still thinking of a new way to look back. I also felt with her, if she were still alive, what would she do? No one knows. If you think of Hijikata, it was a little the same. Butoh seems a very good way to experiment with the body, but as soon as the person, the artist, finds this form, they want to go towards the product, just to show something beautiful or impressive. It’s becoming like porcelain, you know, finished, and of course then there’s the [idea of the] “world tour”. It’s really the beginning impulse that is important… To keep hold of that. This is something Ko Murobushi thought about and we discussed it in relation to choreography. In fact, in the case of Butoh, it’s choreography that separates the 60s from the 70s. As soon as you employ choreography, you want to make something that you can repeat again and again, then it becomes difficult to keep the raw quality of experiment that comes through improvisation. Also, some choreography can change the dancer. This is true of course with big companies with a long history where there is a sort of universal movement that develops. There is a struggle. Of course, with a solo it’s easier, but with the group it’s different. I wanted to ask you about the choreography of your work. I  watched extracts of Ame to Ame / Rain and Rain (2004) on your website. This piece looks very choreographed and precise in its structure. If you work with another dancer, or if you work in a group, how do you manage the choreography or improvisation? This is a duet piece with Shinichi Iova-Koga in San Francisco, and Marc (Ates) is “outside”. We improvised of course, and he (Marc) watched and he created the structure and the choreography. We do something and he suggests many different ways, it was really a collaboration, two dancers, and one director as outside eye. Did Marc fix it in the end, as something you could repeat?

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Yes, though I don’t know if we could repeat it now, because it’s a very physical piece. In 2004 and 2005, we did it a lot, and then maybe three or four years later, we performed and we were like… (she mimics heavy breathing]. Firstly, in the frantic part, the music is short and we were wondering, how did the music become so short, but we had become slow. Then we forgot some parts, so we studied the video for the movement. In the brain, we were thinking the same way, but we were always slower. It took such a long time to catch up this speed. Now it’s more than ten years ago, it’s a long time, so I don’t know if we could perform it now or not. Maybe it would become a very different piece. I’m curious. That could be very interesting actually, ten years has passed, so your body’s changed, time changed, your rhythm changed. Yes, we are different now. But yes, that piece was very precise, the music and the collaboration made it like this. The 1970s phase of Butoh centres around Hijikata’s development of Butoh-fu for choreographing his students. Natsu Nakajima says that Butoh-fu is like a “code”: Hijikata used to code these dance forms into his dancers. This code uses language and description with the aim of inducing a physical response in the dancer that corresponds to the image the choreographer, Hijikata, has in mind. In  other words, it was a language to make the dancer do what they wanted without Hijikata actually showing the movement. When you work with others or even when you work by yourself, do you use images or language to create? I use both and either way so more elements of the movement develop. But sometimes I feel there’s too much narrative inside me and this makes too much of a story. So, I need to work around this, and focus on it. Often, I have a story constructed in a word or atmosphere. How do you describe this to the dancers that you work with? Yes, I use images, or words. Now I also work with mixed ability people, and my German is not good, so some things I try to describe, and I see how it goes. But do you ever show the movement, or do you try to make the dancer do or find the movement?

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Both ways, it depends. I am not so much about choreography, it’s more about directing, especially since I started working with mixed ability people, because here again it’s different steps. Of course, they don’t do what I say, so I don’t say, because they cannot: they just don’t do it. They are so special: each person is different. My movement is not translatable onto their bodies, because their body is different, their imagination is also different. Sometimes I imagine something, or give them some suggestion, and then amazing things are coming out, things I’d never thought about. That’s what I really love about this. So I don’t want to fix it in my brain. I have some sort of stepping-stones, but each person is growing in their own way, and maybe becoming like physicalized words. The difference with Hijikata’s Butoh-fu might be that he had a very specific idea, and he would say all these things so that the dancer would then create that idea. But you just give some images and then they, the dancers, create something and then you think “maybe this is a nice idea”. Yes, and I have some thread, but maybe it’s growing in a different way, and I like the surprise. I am not Hijikata, though I really respect him. At the beginning maybe he was more abstract and aware that each artist has some different direction, but later on, he became “master of the world”. He can do this part, but I don’t, I cannot do it and I don’t want to do it. You also use language and words though. I was reading on your website some of the texts and poetry that you wrote. I also remember in the piece I saw in Tokyo, it was Unspelled in that little apartment. Oh yes, it was Espace Kiten. It was so small. Yes there were about 15 people or so. I enjoyed that space, it was so good to see it there, and not in a theatre. Yes I remember the balcony. And there was a guy cooking in the corner of the room? At the end, it was very powerful when you shouted a word. Yes, kutte, it means “eat”! Eat, and also “consume”? But also it was powerful in the way you did it, because otherwise you didn’t speak throughout the piece. How do you use language? In this case, it seemed that you’d been working with how language comes or appears, through movement?

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Yes, it’s interesting because I refused to start theatre work because I didn’t feel connected with words and so I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to dance with my body, in order to talk. But later there was more desire because language has a power. Also language  could be very physicalized: perhaps this is because I left Japan and I distanced myself from the Japanese, and I could find the beauty and depth of sound and language. Maybe also because I started improvisation, I started to use sounding and fragments of words, but totally differently from theatre, or narrative explanation, more like fragments of physicality. I would like to use singing now. Sometimes I take voice lessons because I have a limited experience. Also, in improvisation I try to use voice more in a sounding way, but it feels limited so I study it. Something is emerging around the possibility of language, the power of words. The spoken word and the sound? I would like to find a good way to mix these. Somehow, I have desire, but I think all dancers maybe have this: dancers have an “urge” to the music and the musicians to the dance. It’s like sound is such an amazing thing and physicality sometimes feels limited, whereas sound is surrounding, and sometimes also very dominant in a way, or it spreads, it has this bigness, this vastness. To be bigger than yourself through sound? Yes, so sometimes I want to do more music or physicalized music performance. I worked with theatre before, with words and language, and it was when I began to explore Butoh more, that I decided I didn’t want to use words anymore. It lasted a long time, from 2008, I decided to no longer use text. I had the same feeling at a certain point in 2014 when I did a performance for an event curated by Natsu Nakajima. She produced and curated a programme for five female dancers in Tokyo in September 2014. On this occasion, I suddenly felt a strong feeling that I must use voice and sound. I think I felt my isolation from (Japanese) language. I made a paper crown with the word “hello” written on it. In the end, I ate the crown. But during the performance I used my voice to find out how my body could move. I haven’t gotten to words yet, but I’m exploring sound for now. I look at other dancers, for example, Ko Murobushi, he started to use words or strange unformed words.

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Yes, it’s very interesting. How do you decide? And the moment that you do is amazing, isn’t it? I think it’s almost like part of a process, and an important part is to cut the sound, in order to get to the body. When the sound returns, it’s a new stage of this process. It’s all our parts [together]. Are you now developing more work with sound? I did the improvisation series with musicians: how can movement become sounding and how can sounding become more physicalized? It’s something like this: language is not just meaning, it’s also sound. I want to work more around this. Now with Theatre Thikwa,41 we’re working a little bit operatically and also with beat-box in the piece Ur-Kunft. We want to create the music and we’re challenging ourselves now. It’s funny, but I’m trying things. From the reviews you sent me of your work, it seems that what stands out especially in a piece like Shoot Jeez My Gosh (2014) is the political aspect of your work. I saw that piece and the way you used recordings of war zones from the internet: the shock of hearing these sounds is very direct. Butoh at its origins was not so overtly politically critical, what do you think? But in the beginning, Hijikata was going into the street in a very radical way. Yes, that’s true, he was making a statement, but not a direct political criticism. Anzu’s work addressed political issues. She worked around the subject of war in the piece Goya. For me, I wonder if my part is critical or not? I’m actually observing. Also, this is why I wanted to work with this, because of frustration at this flat world: with the internet and so much information, we’re just passing through, and we forget all the time. I am a part of this trend. And then why am I dancing on stage? I am living here, but [there] I am just creating a fantasy of beautiful amazing dance. What is the meaning? Maybe it’s to criticize myself, because I am also in it, rather than being an outside critic it’s more about me as one of the others. You mean how you can accept [this position]? Yes. I wanted to put on this reality. So, you express a political subject? Do you think Butoh today needs this political awareness?

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I don’t know about “Butoh should be”, but Butoh is, I think, necessarily contemporary and that’s why I respect Hijikata starting his experiment. This for me is Butoh: he didn’t finish the work, he was still at a middle point. For me his spirit – this spirit of Butoh – is still challenging me. I personally want to keep changing, but I am not responsible for “Butoh”. Whatever we want to think Butoh is…, we can’t contain it, it’s not one thing or another. Some people archive or want to carry some parts of Butoh. This is also respectful, but this is not my work. I want to confront something for myself. I don’t want to repeat what I did. So, you employ it as a way to constantly ask questions of each time, each moment? Yes, because right now I am living. I am not alone in a theatre. I am surrounded by reality and what’s coming: what is my hope or desire for what is carrying on, now? How can I open [myself] to this? Of course, it’s also looking back and thinking again in a different way. You’ve done collaborations with visual artists and video artists. How does this process change your work? Do you see that what you create in this context is different from your normal personal practice? I think each collaboration is totally influenced by the circumstances: I study it and try to create something new. You worked with Nikhil Chopra.42 Were you creating Butoh in your mind or something else? How do you see it? Maybe it’s performance, but I am dedicated to Butoh, so what I am doing is Butoh. I am not sure what the definition is. It’s just a name, to give recognition to something, but what you do with it is also your own process. Yes, and because Butoh also is not just one way… There are many colours to it. Something can be a “Butoh moment”: just someone walking on the street, or a theatre piece or a concert as well. Do you mean something like what Hijikata called “Butoh quality”? Yes. This is what I want to search for rather than this or that movement “is Butoh”. It’s a kind of core or truth. Each piece could have a different appearance, but I look for this core.

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You said that you’re a “Butoh outsider”… “Outside Butoh” is having an outsider view. I want to be outside. It’s interesting because at the beginning, Butoh was about outsiderness – being thrown out of the official dance organization for example. But then from the outsiders, a new group formed who became “insiders”. Yes, there is always this movement in this type of community, and then this makes a wall. That’s a dangerous thing. You mentioned how Anzu used comedy a little in her work. I can’t say comedy, more humour. It’s more like someone’s tragedy is someone’s comedy. A sort of tragicomedy? Yes, like this. Maybe also stupidity: for example, if someone is very serious, then from the outside it might seem like stupidity. This is life, everybody’s doing this, but do you want to try to hide it? Life is something like this, how seriousness can become stupid, or funny. The absurdity also becomes a part of it. In one review, Deborah Jowitt of The Village Voice43 describes you as “the naive clown, the holy fool who often appears in Butoh”. You use humour, even slapstick, in quite a theatrical way, and it does seem clownish. What is the relevance: do you look for moments of absurdity in your work as an important aspect? That was for Ame to Ame, and this was special, it was a little bit pop. There was this relationship, and it was explored in a slapstick way. This was the theme of the performance, as well as humour. But I never think of comedy: it’s just human nature, this breaking, and another brightness appears, so it’s not only darkness. If it’s only darkness, you can’t recognize the darkness, because you need light… To make the contrast, yes. In your stage presence, you have the ability to be funny, for example, using your face in grotesque ways, or sometimes your body. In a way it seems a part of you. My nature is to be a fool, maybe that’s true. I like something to be light, bright. In the pieces that I have seen of yours, I definitely see this: it’s not all dark. Some of it is of course, but there is contrast. I like something “pop” and “bizarre”. It’s not just one tone, but there is “popness”, lightness.

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I saw the performance Description of an Elephant that you made with Theatre Thikwa in Berlin. How long have you been working with them? The first time was in 2009. Then we did a few big theatre pieces and about six smaller studio performances during this time. Tell me about your work with this group and how you think Butoh is relevant, or how you use your practice of Butoh in this context. Does your understanding of Butoh develop through your work with Thikwa? They are like a box of miracles: they all have totally different abilities. This is what Butoh looks for, something outside the “socialized” body. This is the darkness – different possibilities not just beauty, or a functional body, even this idea of negativity can be brought on the spot. Yes, Hijikata compared Butoh to “a desire to be crippled”. I see it with them: it’s really amazing. When I ask them, they do something totally different. Always when you ask something, there is an expectation of the answer, but what they offer is so different. I think “wow”; it makes me open, and there is a joy that they are opening up something like this. They recognize that they are special, and this I feel is my work. I study from them and feedback to them so they can develop themselves. Do you think that your own work and your own development of your solos or group pieces have changed since you work with Theatre Thikwa. Yes, I think so. Although if I perform with them, people say to me: “you look like a dancer”… And they look so natural? Yes, I look artificial. This is always challenging, and very interesting at the same time. As I explained, one reason I wanted to interview you as my last interview is because out of the previous interviews I did, only one other is with a woman, Natsu Nakajima. I really wanted to get the point of view of women in Butoh and how they respond to the original founders, who were all men. Do you think there is any difference based on gender in the work of Butoh artists or in their aims? I am also not so “woman, woman”: I always play in between. Though I am also a woman, and there are different aspects from a man, but of course each person is

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different as well, so I think it is in the approach that I try. If you see my work, what do you think: do you see a woman? Is it different from a man’s work? There is androgyny. I feel you manage to erase the gender divide in your work. I wonder if there’s a specific purpose in this. Since the beginning of Butoh, there was this ongoing experimentation with gender difference. In Japan, the society is still very gendered, maybe Butoh was trying to break the binary in some way. In my own work, I like to play with ideas of gender, because by creating this androgynous body, the body is more pure in a sense, you can focus on the material of the body, as opposed to the form, woman or man. I’m not sure if this is your purpose that you want to specifically play with this boundary? It was my complex too, so I play. But sometimes I also push, really between to the point of bone and meat. This disturbs the [distinction] between human and thing. Like human as matter? Yes, I like to find this when I perform. Or, when creating a piece, I don’t know what the difference is between how a man works on this to how a woman works on this: I cannot define it. Before I felt there were difficulties – I can perform, but I cannot choreograph a piece – it was especially Marc working from the outside view. I felt I am more “inside”, so it’s difficult for me to be “outside” making the piece. But in the process, I started to work on this, and it’s very interesting because both improvisation and making a piece – inside and outside – offer very alternate perspectives. I thought the outside view is like a “man’s thing”, and I felt myself divided. But now I try to do it with a different view, so I’m not thinking about “man’s work” or “woman’s work”, but I try to find delicateness, dynamic and a vaster view. I’m still studying this. Do you mean then, that it is not really about gender – not a man or woman's role – but it’s a different view on it? Before I had more the understanding, and maybe indirectly I had studied this, that the woman’s perspective cannot do certain things, and so I avoided them. But I wanted to challenge it, thinking “this is not about man or woman”. The result is, I try not to think about the gender question, I just do my own way. Through

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my experience, I’m challenging the excuse that “as a woman, I cannot do this”. Do you think it helps you to think like this, living in Germany, away from Japan for such a long time, did it change your way of thinking? Before I was part of a couple, working together, and he had his role and I had mine. Now I have to do everything. Then, I had a woman’s role in a way, but now I have to decide. Sometimes I have to be tough, I have to make a decision and I feel this is like a very “male power” in a way. So how can I balance both now? I think for creation, you need both powers. It’s easy to say “male”, but [what it is] is very strong clarity, but you also need softness. It’s like hardware and software. In the end, each person has a different vision and a different way to work. You presented the group project Subliminal Affair at Dock 11 as part of a festival exploring Ausdruckstanz/ German Expressionist Dance (2015). I participated in some of the development of the work, and I was interested in your intentions. You gave the participants a great deal of freedom in showing their “own” Butoh, and there were many individual aspects, which were visible in the final piece. You didn’t try to change them or control them in any way, perhaps you only gave them some small task they had to do. There were all these very individual Butoh dances in the end: it seemed chaotic, and everyone was very enthusiastic… It was a party! Exactly. I asked myself about it: it seemed a very democratic idea of Butoh? Yes, that’s the reality, they continue to develop their own way. Yes, maybe a reflection of the freedom of choice, faith or religion, speech and human rights that come with modern societies. More than Butoh or Ausdruckstanz it seemed to be about society and people and how they interact. I felt it was a very conceptual piece. What then was your aim? I want to put out a question. I have no answer though. No one has an answer: Butoh continues to spread everywhere, and everyone has a different understanding. Even contemporary dance is like this. Especially now, globally, everything is spreading. But for example in a street, people have different motivations and ways, and

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it’s chaotic, but there is harmony. It’s not that everybody has to be military in a certain way of doing things. So many things are happening, and this is building the world. I really like this, rather than making one answer and seeing just this beautiful choreography. Here each person has their own universe and creates the world. Though it’s very sensitive work, and the danger in chaos is of it having no point. Something I would like to feel is this thread between different aspects. There were very sensitive moments and there were contrasts and sometimes it was very chaotic and individualistic: many individuals doing their Butoh. It made me think of the work of some conceptual choreographers, for example, Jerôme Bel or Mårten Spångberg whose work questions the work itself. This interested me more than the individual “Butoh quality” of the dancers, or whether or not this can be called Butoh. That’s why on this occasion I preferred to watch it than to participate. Butoh is also such a small community, maybe someone never even heard about Butoh: this is the reality. So that’s why I had the question “what is Butoh”? Maybe it’s just “bizarre”, as you said during the rehearsal process. And this “I am Butoh and you are not Butoh” and this bizarreness and also maybe the beauty too. Hopefully everybody will say, “I love Butoh”. This is the interesting point that you made concerning “Butoh is this or is not this” – a “Butohpia” is how I think of it. For example, many times in Japan I was told, “you’re not quite Butoh”, and I thought that’s great, that’s interesting: I’m indefinable. Or someone says “I do Butoh”, and I think what does that mean? Yes, at which point do you separate “I’m Butoh, from I’m not Butoh”. Yes, I have a question about this. I had some friends who came to the performance (at Dock 11). They’d never seen Butoh before, and they asked me “is that Butoh?” I don’t want to make a “Butoh” piece. “What is Butoh?” is the question of the piece. I could see that you were not trying to make “Butoh”, but rather, that you were inviting all the participants, to ask “what is Butoh?”, and they were very enthusiastic

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because they were doing their own Butoh as part of this question. It could be compared to a presentation, or a lecture-performance in a way. Yes, that’s good. It’s not about the piece, that’s why I wanted them to melt into the audience. There was also this “Butoh dance class” in the performance based on my piece Shoot Jeez My Gosh, where we invited the audience to join and it becomes a parody of dance classes, similar to aerobics. I wanted to find out how to blend things: the performers, the stage set, performer, and observer, all in the same place. Throughout all these interviews, I’ve been gravitating around the question of what “contemporary Butoh” can be. For example, Min Tanaka who developed the Body Weather method believes that Butoh died with Hijikata, and he categorically states, as do other Body Weather practitioners that they are “not Butoh”. Or Ko Murobushi says that “Butoh has not yet happened”. Or others say only Japanese people can do Butoh. Butoh was very relevant to the changes that took place in Japanese society after the war and how the community and the individual were affected, economically, socially, and politically. It was a way to ask questions about the individual, and the identity of the body, within this new social landscape. The other fact is that Japanese national identity is very strong; perhaps this is something hard to understand for many people who are not from Japan. How is Butoh relevant today in the global context? I think I come back to the first things: how did Butoh start? This is interesting. Maybe it could be under a different name. There is something in this kind of desire and experiment in the history of the body, and someone starts to search. Maybe this is “Butoh”, and it could be in any country. Often in many places, there is a very traditional or strong religious idea, and from there comes this rebellion. I think Hijikata’s was a strong rebellion of dance: that is something. But it could happen anywhere, and it doesn’t need to be called Butoh. That would be great. I think that Butoh is often just a name to use so we can talk about this “something”. It’s also a way to question the history of the body, the matter of the body, and how it takes on names, words, identities which are

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national, religious or gendered, but underneath all of this is just the body. There is never really this one point. There is history behind it, but also the coming future, and what is it: what kind of body, and how to explore this? Hijikata worked on this challenge, and no one can do it the same way, but there can be different ways. I also feel that now people are starting to be interested in Butoh again. In the 90s, in Europe, people were very interested. Now the new generation is not interested to just become a “Butoh dancer”, but to challenge their own bodies. So, it’s not a desire to copy something. And I even think it’s a different field of people who are interested in experimenting physically. I think Butoh is a more physical philosophy. Butoh is a process, and it’s not finished. Yes, and today there is so much information; everybody is performing with selfies, so it’s difficult to know what is special, what is new. Each person has a different knowledge. For young people, everything is new and they have to experience and work on this, but maybe they need to repeat something and that could be a process for the future.

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Figure 4.5 “Anarkhos: Kubikukuri”, pigment ink and collage on paper, 420 × 600 mm, from a series, Dominique S. Bonarjee (2016).

Complexity: A Contemporary Generation  251 Kubikukuri Takuzou the Hanging Artist “What I do is simply my reaction to being born. Or perhaps it’s being done to me”.44 It was June 2014. I found myself at Kunitachi once again, the same station I’d arrived at when I first landed in Tokyo. I began to venture into the suburban sprawl. My hand-written directions, kindly prepared by Takashi Morishita from the Hijikata Archive, were my guide. I had a long way to walk. I began along the main road that stretches out from the station. Along it I would encounter some anchor points that would lead me to what I’d heard was a tiny old cottage buried away in the neat residential streets. June in Tokyo is muggy, it’s the beginning of the rainy season which lasts about a month. I could feel the heavy moisture in the air sucking at my own fluids; I would let the water molecules transport me to my  destination. I needn’t worry about getting lost; I surrendered to the weather. The sounds of young voices awoke me from my somnambulism. I was approaching the school indicated on my piece of paper. Here I should turn left. The students in their sailor-style uniforms were loitering outside the school entrance which was on the right. I felt their gaze on me, probably intrigued by my stealthy cowering as I sneaked past the summer foliage already exploding out of the gardens that lined the sidewalk. I entered the open space of a car park. I could sense I was close. Like the entrance to a burrow, concealed beneath more blankets of leaves, I noticed a small gate. Behind it I could make out the roof of a wooden hut, squashed by the cycle of the seasons; a decrepit cabin, luxuriating in a sea of fiercely overgrown plants and trees. A thin, muddy path along a low wall is all that remained as an approach. Angling myself like a crab, I slithered in sideways, holding onto the wall, afraid to slide into the swamp. A short way down just about at hip level, I encountered a small opening in the wooden fence. I discovered it was a makeshift box office, manned by a person with a mass of spiky grey hair and ruddy cheeks. I handed him a ¥ 1000 note and he waved me out towards a clearing at the back, behind the wall. Here a tiny seating area had been erected: two short rows of wooden blocks about 1.50 m wide on the narrow end of a clearing in the garden. I sat down. Another visitor soon appeared, taking the spot next to me. Finally, a third woman hurried into the back row. The three of us settled into silent expectation – though I really didn’t know what to expect. A few thick warm drops of rain had begun to fall. The light of the day was changing into the murkiness of twilight, made darker by the rainclouds. To my left, there was nothing but a flimsy blue tarpaulin, shielding our experience from the external reality of the suburban street. Ahead, emerging from the very centre of the narrow rectangle of garden lay a great ancient tree, its branches leaning on the low roof of the house. The thickest branch pointed directly at us. A red noose hung from it. Beneath the

252  Complexity: A Contemporary Generation noose was a circular pit dug into the muddy ground. The house was a traditional Japanese construction with a raised external passageway running all along the side of the house. About midway, the white glare of a ceiling light illuminated the chaotic interior beyond the sliding doors. I could make out movement inside. Just as the overhead light went out, an outer spotlight was switched on, aiming our attention towards the noose and the great tree. The box office man had shape-shifted into a performance artist.

~

Kubikukuri appears on the dark walkway, side-lit in dramatic painterly contrast. He wears a glittery turtleneck jumper over crimson trousers and burgundy velvet tabi slippers. He sparkles in the light as if exuding gold dust. With a spectacular and decisive thrust, he slinks down to ground level, his gaze opaque but fixed, seeing nothing but the noose. He moves soundlessly. His speed warps what stands in its path. He is drawn forwards by a relentless attraction, although something in his body seems to resist nevertheless. Is it in dreams that we experience the true density of lightspeed, matter’s desire to race with time’s infinity? I watch a man running in a dream. The yard is turning cobalt blue. Particles of light still defy the cloying body of night. Insects awakened by the impending darkness and the soft rain are busying themselves with sound. The symphony of the ecstatic cicadas is the dense composition of an implicate order enclosing us all in the mystery of this charged instant. Another world about a metre beyond the outer side of the tarpaulin can still be heard in the laughter of the school children and the noise of passing cars. The gold and red figure continues to follow that imperceptible thread that leads him to where he must be. Gently placing one foot onto a large rusting anvil dissimulated by the brown earth at the edge of the pit, he finds his balance and leans forward to grab hold of the fraying noose. In one swift movement, he slides off the anvil and now the crimson rope frames his head. In the sudden shift, he becomes the centrifuge of this teeming corner of spacetime. Swinging, a body suspended in a vertical levitation, eyes closed, surrendering to the churning field of sound, rain, and twilight. Two red slippered feet point into the void, dancing at the still point of the turning world. At the top of this column of flesh, a glimmering radiance twinkles from the corner of his puckered mouth where his saliva is slowly bubbling out. His glassy skin resembles a death mask. Then, following the logic of flight, his shoulder blades unfold allowing his arms to float above the dark pool, until with a sudden power, his strong hands reach to grab the torque, wrenching it away. He has landed on the anvil, leaping back into another order of time. His body sways. The vertigo of the vortex still washes over the garden. My nauseous sweat is mixing with the raindrops. I see him through the haze, his arms carried upwards again, testing the waters as his fingers trail at the magnetic edge of the pit, the conductor of a liquid music. His velvet feet scratch at the ground around the

Complexity: A Contemporary Generation  253 trunk as he glides in careful increments, dragging at the chains of his bones, his flesh, and blood. He circles back to the foot of the tree. In this sticky night, of sweat and spit and rain, the tide rises again drawing him in. Blindly, he climbs onto the iron altar that he knows so well. Willingly, he leans into unconsciousness to be embraced by the red noose a second time. He shudders as his mass morphs into time’s pendulum once more. He trembles with every oscillation as if measuring an unknown rhythm. His flesh tolls a familiar frequency: the weight of bodies whose fate is their ultimate desiccation. The cicadas know it too well, having waited for 17 years buried under the earth, their repetitive yelling is the measure of their short lives. Their pulsing cries rise into a wave of sound making each curve and line of this human apparition more pronounced: is this the face of a man dying or a being about to be born? He is back on this earth. Time ends. The evening returns. We are sitting in the dripping garden, facing the steely anvil point. He pads into the hazy light of the veranda and bows to us timidly, acknowledging our presence. The hollow echo of our syncopated clapping punctuates the night. I still feel this journey weaving its whiplash along my spine. Kubikukuri’s silhouette is waving at us, inviting us to come closer, to come in. ~ Solemnly we entered the white-lit space of the shipwrecked interior. Kubikukuri’s laughter was the accompaniment as he served us a carton of saké at a small low table. We settled around it on the flattened cushions as he brought out a large plate of udon noodles that he’d prepared for us beforehand. A large cockroach ran across the table, between the bowls and chopsticks, then a second one appeared and crossed as if in cannon. Insects were everywhere in this place where the wall that separates life and death had been eroded little by little, every day, for years now. We sat in the mess of entanglements, a space of equality, surrounded by food, drink, vinyl records, books, cockroaches, and each other. Perhaps it was the saké, but on the way back, I was still swaying with vertigo, suffocated by the heavy moisture of the air, and the labour of each inhalation kept bringing back the image of those red velvet slippers suspended like thick drops of blood in the dark night. Notes 2 “Weathering” is a way to speak of processes of change that are intermeshed with environmental and contextual socio-cultural and political forces. See Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Mae Hamilton, “Weathering”, Feminist Review 118, no. 1 (April 2018): 80–84, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-018-0097-8. 3 Adrian Heathfield and Tehching Hsieh, Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh (London: The Live Art Development Agency & MIT Press, 2015), 66.

254  Complexity: A Contemporary Generation Life: The Biological Clock That Control the Daily Lives of Every Living Thing (London: Profile Books Ltd., 2005). 7 Masaki Iwana, The Intensity of Nothingness (Réveillon, South Normandy: La Maison du Butoh Blanc, 2011), 21. 9 Tatsumi Hijikata, ‘To Prison’, TDR/The Drama Review 44, no. 1 (March 2000): 44–45. 10 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 55.

12 Agamben, Nudities, 11.1. 14 Agamben, Nudities. 15 Agamben. 18 https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/aug/01/trajal-harrell-the-dirty-dancervoguing-his-way-into-history. 20 The Hangman, HD, 2014, https://youtu.be/FebkS2qarwI. 23 Centonze. 24 “…the contemporary shintai reflects the gap in human relationship and the dilemmas which emerge from the contemporary society, the hysteric way of life, and its uneasiness in communication”. Centonze, 128.

Complexity: A Contemporary Generation  255 27 Centonze, 118.

32 33 34 35

Kameda-Madar. Kameda-Madar. Kameda-Madar, 712. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood : Essays and Reviews (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). Italics mine. 38 Kawaguchi, Takao. Artist Interview: Takao Kawaguchi. Interview by Tatsuro Ishii, 6 September 2007. https://performingarts.jpf.go.jp/E/art_interview/0708/1. html. 44 The Hangman.

5

Exhaustion The Future of Butoh

Figure 5.1

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112211-6

Exhaustion: The Future of Butoh  257 Duet with Stone: The Riddle of Bones What is the riddle of bones? Bones form the structure of the body, but they are also the in-between. They are the support but also the limitation. They are not soft, not fleshy, not malleable, but enduring, hard, unyielding. Bones are the stubborn substance that withstands the body’s entropy the longest. In them lingers the DNA that far outlasts a human lifetime. Bones are that most durable of body materials, the soul’s relic, and the crude shape of its ghost. In my bones’ hardness lie the origins of my resistance, to the ground, to gravity, and to the elements; my bones allow me to stand up and walk the struggle of the corpse concealed inside me. Bones know something of form and spirit. I discovered “the riddle of bones” in Tatsumi Hijikata’s provocation in that most pivotal of years in Butoh’s trajectory, 1968.1 In the same breath as inventing the quality of Butoh-sei, he immediately challenged his fellow artists to “pluck the darkness from within”, because by “drinking from the wells within their own bodies”, they might taste of the absolute that hides within “a single piece of bone”.2 Because only a dancer who is “able to relate to… a frozen bone that transcends gender”3 will grasp the principle of Butô-ness. Such desire to be other than human exudes a pure unbounded eroticism; it is the seduction of an encounter between bodies and things, human and nonhuman, when “the object calls for a spirit, the spirit of the dancer, which means that a human being is transformed into something not human”.4 ~ The underlying quandary of what I’m calling the riddle of bones is the enduring enigma of spirit and form that reputedly made Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno polar opposites. Hijikata claimed that form is what invites spirit to enter, Kazuo was convinced that spirit attracts form. In Butoh, this turned into the question of improvisation versus choreography in dance. They never agreed on the order of creation, so the story goes. Hijikata’s longing to become a bone was his imagined portal into ultimate Butoh-sei. But Kazuo’s desire was to become a flower, one of the most ephemeral of things. Bones or flowers? In their irreconcilable stance, the two founders embodied an ontological inquiry that is at the core of Butoh: How to relate to a bone? How to become a flower? How to dance permanence and impermanence? ~ When Hijikata first saw Kazuo Ohno dance in the autumn of 1948, he recognized in his movements the mysterious interaction of a crafter, his material, and his tools: he compared Kazuo to a master cabinet-maker. He perceived an occult eroticism in the older dancer’s gestures which “paralysed” him. He wrote: “Yet where did that dancer get his hands, unlike any I have ever seen? They were the hands of Maldoror”.5 These words intrigued me, and when

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Figure 5.2 Performance celebrating the cooperation of school of dance of utter darkness, Barairo Dansu: A la Maison de M. Shibisawa (Rose-Coloured Dance: To Mr. Shibusawa’s House), Hijikata and Ohno duet (1965). Hijikata and Ohno’s duet in Barairo Dansu (Rose-Coloured Dance) (1965). Photo: Tadao Nakatani. Courtesy of Keio University Art Center and Butoh Laboratory, Japan.

Exhaustion: The Future of Butoh  259 I  then heard Yoshito recounting how Kazuo had “grown his hands” over time, Hijikata’s fascination was transmitted to me. How could (inanimate) materiality in-form dances through the haptics of touch, which largely originate, at least for the crafter, in the hands? Over the course of my Butoh training, and in the many other forms of dance I practice, I’d always focused on release technique, on softening, and surrendering, because this is the delicious aspect of movement, and dance’s seduction. But when I wanted to solve the “riddle of bones”, I wished to do so by feeling the unyielding resistance and hardness buried deep inside my body, in my bones. I chose to do so by listening to the feedback of one of the hardest of materials. Through stone I would explore spirit and form within my bones. ~ Stones have long been symbols of time and space, marking the span of the territory and the rites of passage. I chose grey granite, the material of tombstones. I picked up the steel chisel and the kilo weight of the wooden mallet. With these tools, I would carve out a contact interface between my will to find form and the stone’s resistance to it. At first, the stone would not cede, not a single chip budged. My thwarted intention became fiercer moment by moment, fuelling an unstoppable energy that kept pounding at the stone, demanding it respond. With total determination, I aimed my might at that stone, focusing it all into a point where I hoped to tear straight down into the cold slab. Again and again I hammered, each blow more violent than the previous. And then I began to hear it as exhaustion flooded my muscles: it was fear. It was the fear of being denied entry into the secrets of matter. The stone’s silent refusal was seeping into my joints, my hands and arms and knees, and I felt it as pain and tension. My body was afraid of this thing’s muteness, and not convinced of its life. Beating out my demands that a form appear is nothing more than a monologue. If I hoped to dance with a stone and learn from it, holding onto life and surrendering none is no way to duet. The stone was also exhausted; two long thin cracks had become visible in the granite. With a low groan the granite fractured along the two grooves, all the way down and through the slab. It fell apart at my feet in three separate pieces. I learned that the error of my technique was that instead of working on a form, I had worked on singular points along a line. Although from the outside, nothing seemed to be moving, my energy aimed directly into the mass had gathered inside of it. Material holds an energetic memory of each blow, and it will accumulate at the very heart of the stone. Without an outlet, the trapped energy will eventually detonate from within, and even the hardest material can break; just like a person I thought. The line is the mind’s desire for form. But hardness on hardness doesn’t give rise to forms. In stone carving, form appears from a technique of curves

260  Exhaustion: The Future of Butoh applied with a diagonal impact as opposed to directly down, so that instances of hardness and softness alternate. It feels something like what is known as effleurage in body massage, a surface method for loosening the skin: ef-fleur-age also has something to do with flowers. Form arises from meandering along the external interface, moving quickly at gentle angles, never 90º, allowing the energy to ripple across the surface. Undulation opens up a dialogue. The stone has an opportunity to respond to a suggestion, to improvise at the level of materiality in a manner that is largely unpredictable to the stone carver. Through this call and response – which really has the lightness and agility of dancing – the stone will gradually reveal something unknown. Faced now with a salmon-coloured piece of marble about half the size of my torso with green veins that made it look like a block of raw meat, I wondered about the tempo of this dance: how could I allow form to appear? The marble’s solidity felt insurmountable. It made me feel too full: I knew its heaviness because I’d carried it to the workbench, and its weight made me heavy, it sunk my legs into the ground. I needed to shed some of my fullness to make space for this (unknown) “other” to appear. Placing my hands on it, I explored its roughness. My gaze dissolved into a wider focus. Its unpolished grittiness was uncomfortable to the touch, and my skin already flinched at the abrasion caused by scratching at coarse stone. But in the moments of discovering an inch of smoothness, my trepidation was replaced by intense pleasure. As if roughness is the generative contrast that sharpens the tender senses and makes smoothness even smoother. The three pieces of granite still lay in the grass at my feet, at the edge of my vision, reproachful of my past impatience. Now I should listen to this stone: I didn’t rush into it, I waited to begin. I placed both hands on it and picked it up. I heard the brittle scratching sound of coarse marble. In my lower back, a hollow space just beneath where my organs would be was narrowing, in the way an athlete pulls back in preparation to spring forward. In a moment, it would be wide open, ready to receive. My body was becoming a glassblower, preparing an oval-shaped bowl of black obsidian, and each deep inhalation of my breath would blow open its delicate contours. My inner eye shifted to the points of contact with the stone. Upon closer attention, the tiny crystals along the raw edge between my hands and the marble were emitting a soft frequency that made imprints in my palm and fingers. Crystal space was penetrating me through millions of invisible incisions. Flickering light surrounded the outline of a morphing translucent form that was expanding with each pulsation of the yellow crystalline light as it edged further into me with the probing motion of a needle of mercury, rising with the heat of touch. I felt the precise instant of transference between my body and the stone. When its mass entered me I felt a rocking motion. It settled inside my body, in the glassy nest – a delicate moment of intimacy, between animate and inanimate. The more I took of its weight, the more “my” body, my parts

Exhaustion: The Future of Butoh  261 were crumbling into invisibility, until all that remained was a dark receptacle cradling a large pink stone. Then in a single motion, the slab and my body separated once again, and air passed between us. But the crystal path was still glowing between the radius and the ulna, illuminating my elbows: my bones palpitated with the frequencies of this exchange. When I picked up my tools again, the rhythm moved between two centres, to and fro, knowing where it needed to go. ~ You want to open yourself, accept the external and live from moment to moment in order to seize that most real moment. This in turn, removes any distinction between the improvisational and the prestructured…6 Masaki Iwana Does form give rise to spirit or does spirit seek out form? This is an eternal question not just for Butoh. Religions, philosophies, wisdom traditions continue to seek the answer. How to become other, across spirit and material form? The ancient philosophy of Samkhya described in Indian Vedic thought is perhaps the oldest known system of spirit-matter dualism. Samkhya divides the cosmos into two forces – Purusa is pure disembodied consciousness, and Prakriti is matter, the creative force of nature. As polarities, Purusa and Prakriti are held in a (generative) tension sustained by a third element which is cosmic breath, Prana. Everything in the universe is thought to be made of differing saturations of these two forces, and this influences every entity’s form and consciousness, its inertial density and its spiritual lightness. The relation between these dual forces is not fixed, but animated (by Prana), and changing, meaning that it moves continuously between these two aspects, and this is how it gives rise to a world of visible and invisible phenomena, of animate and (seemingly) inanimate things, where nothing is fixed, all is impermanent. In time, Samkhya philosophy evolved. Vedic thinkers began to perceive a deeper level of interaction between these apparently dual forces of spirit and matter. The focus moved to the interplay between the two; the field of their interaction was a space of play rather than the reality itself. A deeper more opaque and (imperceptible) unifying principle was the “true nature of reality”; despite appearing as two irresolvable aspects, the reality is ultimately non-dual (advaita in Sanskrit). Such a non-dual principle is at the heart of many spiritual traditions including two which (as already noted) have had a lasting influence on the beliefs and social practices of Japan, namely Buddhism and Daoism. To return to the riddle of bones (and flowers) and Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno’s different opinions on how to dance, it might be more fitting to approach this conundrum by evoking a (non-dualistic) spectrum of possibilities, where each dancer had set off from the opposite bank. They happened to

262  Exhaustion: The Future of Butoh meet somewhere in the middle zone, where form and spirit interact, so that it becomes difficult to know which comes first. Whether “becoming a flower” or “becoming a bone”, both dancers were seeking images and metaphors to speak of the encounter between the two. And whether through hardness or delicacy, resistance or receptivity, their dances were alternate ways of navigating the in-between, that zone where spirit and matter swirl around each other. The confluence of the two is Butoh. ~ This Butoh journey ends with this section entitled Exhaustion. The final conversation is with the philosopher Kuniichi Uno. His usage of the word “exhaustion” is influenced by his reading of Gilles Deleuze’s text “The Exhausted”. In our exchange, exhaustion becomes a way to think beyond human bodies, to imagine dancing with the non-human, “the other than the other” as Uno puts it. The questions that have recurred in many of these conversations concern Butoh’s legacy and its temporal resonance today. Propelling Butoh beyond human body-material, making it a practice for embodied encounters with all that is other-than-human, through the very material of our bodies feels like the “rebellion of the body” that our era calls for most urgently. “A dance and a presence of the body that takes place in a certain catastrophic dimension of life and being”,7 as Uno writes, is perhaps the most pressing dance of contemporary times.

Figure 5.3 Tasogare no Katachi (The Shape of Twilight) at Shin Banraisha Noguchi Room, Tokyo, Dominique S. Bonarjee (2013). Photo: Aleksandr Drozd.

Exhaustion: The Future of Butoh  263 The Exhausted Body: Kuniichi Uno Kuniichi Uno is an author and philosopher. He was the sole doctoral student of Gilles Deleuze and is the translator of works by Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari into Japanese. He has written numerous books in Japanese with two publications in which he attends to his encounter with the body of Butoh. The first is The Genesis of an Unknown Body (2012) and the most recent publication in French, Penser un Corps Épuisé – Tatsumi Hijikata (Considering the Exhausted Body of Hijikata Tatsumi, 2018). I met Uno at a festival organized by Ko Murobushi in Yokohama in 2013. Because Uno was fluent in French and keen to speak it with me, we stayed in touch and met a few times. He also provided me with his writings in the original French version, and where I quote him, I am quoting from the French documents he sent me. We met for this conservation, for me to find completion and closure to this extended Butoh research journey. This exchange also became the stepping-stone into my doctoral research project which began just three weeks after this encounter with Uno. ~ September 2, 2017, Tokyo

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You wrote that Hijikata’s text Yameru Mahime (The Ailing Dancer) is a book in which “dance is perpetually, the becoming other”.8 What does “becoming other” mean in dance and what could it mean today? I say today because recently I participated in an exhibition in Berlin (2016), and the curatorial statement introduced the term “post-other”. I wonder how a different nuance in the word other might have a ripple-on effect on our understanding of Butoh. The question I’m pursuing with Butoh (in my own practice), and through each of the interviews I’ve already conducted is, “what possible relevance could Butoh have on the contemporary landscape”? Because it’s no longer just a Japanese phenomenon. Can this dance still be “a becoming other” as you have proposed, or are we entering a postother phase? You mean all these ideas in the context of research around Butoh? Let’s say the context of the beginnings of Butoh, in the 60s, the post-war period when the idea of the individual began to develop in Japan. Society changed, and my interest lingers

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at the threshold of the individual in relation to the social dimension. By individual here, I mean to emphasize the intimate dimension of being – that of the body. What does the body itself signify today: is it a working body, or the creative body? Do you mean in the global sense? Yes exactly, perhaps some “universally” applicable notion of the individual body. Hijikata said that he was looking for the unproductive body: the lazy body, the sick body, and the body unable to produce. All this feels a little chaotic: I’m trying to find a singular point, I’m trying to get in… It’s difficult. Recently, a book about Butoh appeared in France, it has been translated into Japanese, what is the author’s name? I think you mean Sylviane Pagès.9 Was it a doctoral thesis too? I didn’t read the book, but I read Patrick Devos’ presentation of it. There are many things that interest me in it, but I find it is a sort of “meta” point of view, very social in tone. It annoys me in a way, because I am a little against this way of looking at the arts in general. It’s endless if we work in this way, and for me, art is always something completely singular that does not immediately allow a point of view like that. To dive in is always a little, or even, very, myopic: I prefer to be myopic and start with some concrete bases, ask one or two specific problems and to develop these a little. With regards to Butoh as well, I do not allow myself to talk about Butoh without adhering to the singularity of Hijikata, and of each dancer – Murobushi too – who are all very different for me. The terminology of Butoh already seems to me to be too general, too abstract. I was very marked by my encounters with Hijikata. They urged me to think not only about dance but also about the body, about my own work on Antonin Artaud and my philosophical thoughts inspired to a greater or lesser degree by the French philosophers and (literary authors) like Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, etc. I had already met Min Tanaka before I met Hijikata: it is Min Tanaka who introduced me to the world of contemporary or experimental dance. And already for me these are two very different dancers. I met them at the same time, but they are absolutely different, and I cannot imagine the terms that can resonate simultaneously with the characteristics of these two dancers. If I think of Murobushi again, he too is very different. This is my main point of view at the outset.

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So I said, “other”, becoming other? I read your texts that you sent me about Min Tanaka. I also read the interview that Félix Guattari did with Min Tanaka in Machinic Eros (2015). Perhaps then we can start by speaking about the contrast between Min Tanaka and Ko Murobushi in relation to “becoming other” in dance. During our conversations, Ko Murobushi always talked to me about how he was trying to become other, other than Japanese, that is. He wanted to be outside Japan. Yes, outside. Always outside for Ko: that’s what he was exploring. What resonates for me is what you wrote about Min Tanaka’s practice around time, of being able to perceive in the body, measures of time that are non-human, or beyond human… like geological time, etc. If we say that Murobushi explores “the individual” and Tanaka explores “time”, what is time in the contemporary body, and then, what is it to be an individual in one’s own epoch of time? It’s a question about time and also about space of course. At a particular period, maybe in the 1960s, or 70s, we often talked about space. For example, there were magazines like Hihyo Kukan, the Space of Critique. There was [also] a book entitled the Literary Space, etc. Kukan, space, meant many things at that time. I don’t know why, but there must be reasons. Gaston Bachelard specifically spoke about space. [Michel] Foucault was also a philosopher of space rather than time. Structuralism is the philosophy of space, it spatializes problems: it is a little anti-Hegel, against dialectic, against Marxist time as well. And after that we began to talk about time again. It is Gilles Deleuze who insisted a little on the “time image”. It’s possible that it was a way to get rid of space. For example, Jean Genet who spent a great deal of time in prison, repeated several times in interviews, that space can be reduced, removed, and when you are a prisoner you are deprived of space; but time… even if you are made to work in the prison, time remains something sacred: “my time cannot be touched, it’s untouchable”. It’s very strong, the way he put it, it really moved me. So within time, there is something infinite, interminable, and indeterminate, and imperceptible too. And all these traits of time also correspond to the experiences of the body. Of course it becomes necessary to speak about the memory of the body, the memory of gestures, and the memory of the violence that comes from outside onto the body.

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I believe that there is a kind of change, a conversion of the problematic, philosophically as well as meta-physically, and which in turn, corresponds to some social changes, such as capitalism for example. Capitalism which still manages to rob us of our “untouchable” time? Technology too… Yes, for technology, it’s always about space and time as well: to dominate space, and to calculate time, to control time; it’s the same thing, to work on the measures and modulations of time. It’s a terrible thing, a problem of the society of control. So it’s a bit of a war of time: there is the war of space, of territory, but there is also the war of time. In any case, it is not unilateral, when you are interested, when you reflect a great deal on time, there comes a point, when you can change the problematic a little. That’s what happened to me: at one point, I was attracted to this way of positing the problem in terms of space, even if I was in fact interested in time. I worked on the texts of Michel Foucault who had declared the need to think of space, as I said in a way that was a little anti-Hegelian: anti many things in fact. All of a sudden, it was Foucault’s way of posing the problem: to get rid of time, and to make everything in the spatial context. In other words, the panopticon – as in the prison system – [a space in which] to monitor and punish. It was in order to create a “space of control”, of surveillance – both very effective and economically efficient – and which would be the model of the whole society, as a system of surveillance: prison, school, factory, army, etc. I always go back and forth: when there’s too much talk about time, I want to talk about space instead, and when we talk of space too much then… I’m going back and forth. Basically, it’s because the problem is not the difference of space or time, but rather how to live the problem of time, how to live the problem of space. How to live the problem of space or time through the body also. You said that Jean Genet thinks that time is untouchable, that’s relevant in a society where everything is controlled, where the body is used for work or for leisure – leisure as another thing to consume – and so we are pushed to do just that, consume the body even. Then all we have left is time: time embedded within the body, as a personal, an untouchable time. How did Ko Murobushi or Min Tanaka attend to time, so as to touch it in some sense? If we pose the problem in this way, Hijikata lived his time through the body. Tanaka, Murobushi, etc. as well.

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Hijikata even asked the question through his extremely experimental writing: Yameru Mahime was really a search for the lived time of childhood – as the child Hijikata. Looking at his creative beginnings, he seems to have worked rather a lot on space – theatrical space – and even with a great deal of violence – there are violent images. And up until The Revolt of the Flesh (Nikutai no Hanran, 1968), he seemed to want to create a certain kind of space: a delirious space, a revolutionary space, an orgiastic space, a festive space. And after this, all of a sudden, it all changed. In any case, it’s as if he had mutated after this period. This begins with The Revolt of the Flesh, and after that it’s Twenty Seven Nights for Four Seasons (1972), and there already he made changes. He introduced many Japanese gestures and he began to work with women, female dancers, and with many images from his childhood in the Tohoku region. In the end, Yameru Mahime is really about discovering all the molecular elements of his life as a child, and it is becoming child again: both very serious, and very experimental too. It’s Deleuze and Guattari who have talked at length about “becoming child” as something essential for art – for music also, in the form of the refrain. Becoming child is to leave the adult subject in some sense and also to leave this separation of the adult from the child. It’s a little like breaking the line of time that follows from childhood to old age. Would that mean opening up time? Yes of course. So that is what he [Hijikata] did, but he did not write his memories of childhood – that’s very important to note  – and so Yameru Mahime is very different from a memoire of childhood, or images of childhood, landscapes of the mother or the family, etc. If there are landscapes, they are always made of tiny elements: really imperceptible. This choice of images is extraordinary. It’s a little anti-image too, anti-landscape, anti-reciting memories, etc. That’s what made me write so much about this book. With Tanaka what I felt at first, what I perceived in the first period when I saw him in Paris, was the extraordinary slowness. It’s as if a flower or a plant was opening. Very slow but nevertheless very alive. It was really as if I discovered something like the time of the body: a little unbelievable, a little non-human: not so much animals but rather material, mineral, vegetal. So it was very stimulating at some point. A little anti-movement too: a questioning of the movement. Maybe that is the becoming-other…

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Yes absolutely, the inhuman or non-human is to become other. When I told you about the notion of post-other – after the other  – the other in this context is a term applied to the human being, so the post-other would be after the human as well. “Beyond human” is what I see in this kind of dance. Yes, in philosophy the problem of the other exists. For example, Emmanuel Levinas was a philosopher of the other. There, I found something fascinating for me as well, and I find Levinas very important, because at the same time his philosophy is absolutely committed to the human. He is integrated with Heidegger too, even he speaks of “there is” (il y a), this corresponds to the “being” (Dasein) of Heidegger. Levinas wanted to return in some way from the being (l’être) to being (l’étant): to the human (being) in other words. To him Heidegger’s being was not able to avoid the concentration camp – this problem of Heidegger’s engagement with Nazism is complicated. In any case, the philosophy of the other was absolutely an ethical problem. There is another human who also has a face: so there is the other, [and] there is me, etc. For Levinas, the other is absolute: not me, it is the other one who is absolute. The other is something unknown, something that we cannot fully know. Deleuze spoke rather early on and with a negative slant, not of Levinas, but about Sartre, because he too spoke of the other. About phenomenology as well, and Heidegger too, after Sartre, then Levinas, everyone began to reinvent a philosophy of the other. It is Deleuze who has very clearly pronounced that the other is still another [hu]man, there is always a symmetry so we must then find “another than the other” as well: the non-human that is… We can bring up Michel Tournier’s novel, Friday (Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique, 1967), in which Tournier has reinvented the story of Robinson Crusoe and the desert island. It’s very interesting because Robinson finds another, but an other than the other. Deleuze talks about the “post-other” in his text in The Logic of Sense, which is based on Michel Tournier’s novel. There is an appendix of four or five essays that are very important. Deleuze also wrote this text as a preface to Tournier’s novel. The island is an obsession of Deleuze. Very young he wrote a text about the meaning of the desert island. I do not know what Murobushi’s time is, but no doubt he had a strong sense of time too. His articulation of immobility and then a sort of breaking, a falling: I think he really

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wanted to break the line of time with his dance, to extract himself from linear time. He talked about this all the time. I don’t know how to speak of his dance systematically in terms of time, but reading his texts, his writings, it seems that it is another question that concerns him. I am impressed that he poses problems of externality, of the outside, and many inspired by the philosophy of Deleuze, Foucault, even Artaud. He wanted his dance to be this exercise of going outside and the manifestation of the outside too. He was always negative about dance, about his own dance. He always wanted to go somewhere else. That’s what motivated him. So already it’s a bit of a search for time but of a very different type. With these three dancers, Hijikata, Tanaka, and Murobushi, each has his own sense of time. Someone who dances and does not have a sense of time, does not interest me. This is very important, the dance must be highly sensitive to time: invent time, forge time a-new. What really sustains me in Butoh is how to have an experience of the body, through a particular awareness of temporality. These three dancers do indeed try to extract the body from daily time, linear time, but each one with a particular and personal technique. Yet what they have in common is something that looks towards the non-human, through this notion of “other as the other than the other” that you mentioned. For Murobushi, for example, it was through a becoming animal. During the time of childhood, the child does not completely belong to society, because her time allows her to interpret the world in her own way; she does not need to obey the rules of society and its socially constructed measures of time. So the time of childhood is a time that is not completely “human” and not altogether inhuman/nonhuman, but it is still more open and vast. This may have been Hijikata’s approach to time. When you talked about Min Tanaka, you said that his is a “mineral, vegetal” relationship to time, that it always goes in the direction of another than the other, again an-other that is not part of social and daily time. Hijikata also spoke about fogs, moisture, molecular things that move all the time. Yameru Mahime is the story of all this, there is a lot of fog! I have not been able to read Yameru Mahime because it has not been completely translated. Yes only a few sentences. My book will be published in French this autumn, and I have many quotes from Yameru

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Mahime. I thought it was impossible to translate Yameru Mahime. Even for the Japanese it’s almost an illegible book… You really have to be very interested in it. But it’s the little things, the humidity, the smells, the insects, the small objects in the home. There is very little human presence. The [character of the] Ailing Dancer exists but mostly it is these small objects, all the time… You have mentioned in your writing that the body is both subject and object, and this seems relevant here. The way you describe the contents of Yameru Mahime it’s as if the child is very aware of being both subject and object, and from this awareness, she connects with other objects in the world: children always invent characters for objects don’t they. That’s it. Perhaps this intense precision you mention is in the text, these descriptions, are there in order to manifest an experience of simultaneity of subject/object. If I remember correctly it is Merleau-Ponty who said that subject/object awareness is something fundamental for the body. That’s why it’s difficult to talk about it because the body is not a pure object: as soon as the body is considered as subject it immediately becomes “the body without organs”. That is, the body which is not an object, which is not a collection of organs is something indivisible. Through this problematic Merleau-Ponty arrives at what he calls chiasmus: “what touches, is touched at the same time, what sees, is at the same time absolutely seen”. It’s a beautiful thought, but it’s not enough it seems. For Merleau-Ponty already, who posited that, it was an interesting question around the body. But as soon as the body is at the same time an object and a subject, it is an object that is a little infinite, a subject that is a little infinite, a kind of crossroads – an infinite arrangement – that is also very mobile, in terms of the relationships between the forces that traverse it. We can pose many problems around the subject/object notion, and I think that already, philosophically speaking, Hijikata with his vision of a body that is very dynamic – and in Deleuze and Guattari’s language, something molecular – he goes much further than Merleau-Ponty did. And with this aim, Hijikata really worked at the level of both writing and dance, and from that, he really wanted to create a new stage, a new dance, but he died before he could do so. It’s important to read this book Yameru Mahime (The Sick Dancer). I’m looking forward to reading it.

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There is a project to translate Yameru Mahime, into French, but I don’t know much more… Are you going to translate it? No, although I have already translated quite a few passages as quotations in my new book. What’s the title of your book? Hijikata Tatsumi: penser le corps épuisé is the French title. It is what Hijikata said, this is one of the subjects of his dance research: “a collection of exhausted bodies”. Bodies exhausted by what? By life, by desire, by movement, passion, human relationships. He did not say this, it’s me who says it. I’m wondering because in one of your texts, you mention “giving birth to one’s body”. I began a project with my mother (Choreography as Gift, 2016). It was a way to make her rediscover a body: an other one, not the one she is familiar with. I know that her body belongs to a certain role – mother, wife, woman – and that this role is what she lives on a daily basis. Therefore my proposition was to involve her in something else, by creating a situation in which she is invited to exist through her body, as what Masaki Iwana calls “a material entity”, and to listen to the silent questions that inhabit this unknown body, this shadow body. Perhaps this is a way to birth, or re-incarnate a body spent, exhausted, by being filled to the brim with the names, the roles. Paradoxically the birth and emptying occur in one body: it’s the same body that is both the giver of life (object) that is emptying, and also that comes to life (as subject) through the birth. It may be discovering another relationship with her body… For the child Hijikata in this story – where the child is the subject and the object – it’s as if the child knew everything in his own way. It’s a somewhat reversed situation, where the child makes the adult Hijikata dance: as soon as he is born, the child wants to dance, and think how to dance, he wants to discover dance everywhere… It’s something like that. This subject/object situation is not fixed, and the child is very voyeuristic, very contemplative, without looking. Hijikata often says that the child has eyes, but he can also detach that eye freely – he has this power. It’s also the intuition of childhood of looking for the dance in things – in what is already dancing. Childhood also has the temporal aspect of duration, in that childhood appears as a horizon open towards time.

272  Exhaustion: The Future of Butoh KU:

DSB: KU:

When talking with Hijikata, I do not remember what I told him, though I remember what he told me… in any case in discussion with Hijikata, I often saw a connection with what I had found in Deleuze. One of these things is the exhausted body. Do you know a little text by Deleuze about Beckett? It’s called The Exhausted (1995), it’s important for the subject of your research too. Beckett wrote several works in his final years, pieces for video, and one of the most famous pieces is Quad. There are four or five of Beckett’s texts-for-video. Deleuze wrote about these texts in The Exhausted. He began by saying that “the exhausted is in another dimension than the tired: tired is not enough, exhausted is exhausting the possibility, it is a pure virtuality”. The virtual and the possible is not the same thing according to Bergson: the possible is a kind of copy of reality for Bergson, whereas the virtual, when it becomes actualized, is something else – the unknown. This “possibility” is something unsavoury for Deleuze and Beckett. So, to exhaust the possible is a very good thing. Because it opens the door to the virtual? But it’s also tragic, lamentable. Deleuze wrote this text when he had only one lung, he had just lost his other lung: he survived years with artificial respiration. That’s why he committed suicide because he couldn’t take it anymore – we surmise this in any case. Exhausted was something positive, also for Hijikata at that time – Deleuze had not yet written this text so it’s impossible that Hijkata would know it – but it was in the 70s, 80s and he spoke a lot about the suijakutai, the exhausted body, as something very positive. The exhausted body is also curiously enough the body of the child, it corresponds a little: it is to completely identify the virtual in the body of the child. I’m sure that Hijikata had a very strong sense of the virtual, that’s what I admire the most.

Exhaustion: The Future of Butoh  273 Notes

3 Shibusawa, 51.

7 Kuniichi Uno, A Gênese de Um Corpo Desconhecido/The Genesis of an Unknown Body, trans. Christine Greiner and Melissa McMahon (Sào Paulo, Brazil: N-1 Publications, 2012), 55.

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures. agency 54–56 aging body 25–26; see also suijakutai anarchy 52, 158, 172 ancestor 16, 75 Ankoku Butoh 9, 13, 19, 108, 118, 152 Artaud, Antonin 49, 157, 263 Asbestos-Kan 11, 12, 20–22, 32, 37–39, 49, 51, 54–56, 58, 62–66, 77, 81, 85–86, 88–91, 96, 99, 100, 108–109, 194–195 Ashikawa, Yoko 29, 37–39, 61–62, 66, 70–73, 69, 88–89, 94, 100; see also Hakutobo atomic bombs 2, 74, 135 Bausch, Pina 26, 30, 41, 113–114, 218 Bergson, Henri 107; see also virtual body: global body 13, 179; as material 53, 55–56, 119, 190–191, 211, 257, 262; meat body 10, 113, 119, 197; as object 112, 194–195; readymade body 119, 205–206; total body 33, 41, 112; see also flesh, nikutai, shintai, suijakutai Body Weather 248; see also Min Tanaka bone 16, 88, 92, 217, 245, 257–261 Buddhism 34, 117–118, 148, 155, 261 Butoh-fu 5, 6, 32–33, 38–39, 49–58, 63–67, 71–74, 77–78, 81–86, 89–90, 93–94, 106–107, 119, 132, 169, 175, 200, 238–239; see also code Butoh Kaden 38, 53, 56, 58, 60, 67, 72–73, 79, 86 Butoh quality 106–109, 174, 242, 247; Butoh-sei 106–108, 174, 257; Butô-ness 106, 108, 117, 257

cabaret 11, 37–38, 54, 70, 93, 99–100, 152 Centonze, Katja 195 choreography: in Butoh 22, 31, 37–40, 49, 52–54, 62–72, 74, 77, 82, 84, 86, 88, 90–94, 112, 165–169, 175, 196, 198–201, 216, 232–239, 247, 257; see also Butoh-fu choreoratory 54, 57 code: Butoh-fu as code 32, 40, 53–55, 67, 71–72, 238; social codes 31–32, 54, 119, 122 conditions: choreographic 83–86, 91 copy 208, 210–211; and original 75; see also homage costume 3, 16, 24–25, 27, 50, 52, 92, 112–113, 130, 168; dressing as a woman 99, 112; see also drag Costume en Face see Shomen no Issho Dairakudakan 20, 41, 44, 232; see also Akaji Maro Dance Love Machine 232; see also Anzu Furukawa dance notation 29, 38, 51, 86 Daoism 148, 156, 261 darkness: Dance of (utter) Darkness 51, 87, 152, 258; see also Ankoku Butoh direct transmission 5, 54 Dogen Zenji 189–190; see also uji drag 209 dust 2–6 edge 149, 154, 158, 160, 167 Edge, Ko Murobushi’s Dance Company 193

276  Index embodied: method 187; research xii– xiii; time 188–189 eroticism 117, 119, 130, 257 exhaustion 3, 6, 262, 271–272 exposure 118–119 expression 210, 217, 222–225; selfexpression 5, 54, 59, 164 expressionism 36; (German) expressionist dance see Neue Tanz

homosexual 9, 20, 32, 36, 43, 100

femininity: in the work of Kazuo Ohno 24–25; see also onnagata in Kabuki theatre flesh 10, 70, 114, 115–117, 147–149, 187, 205–209, 252–253; see also nikutai, Rebellion of the Flesh Forbidden Colours 9, 17, 19; see also Kinjiki Furukawa, Anzu 191, 230–235

Ka Fai, Choy 57, 190–191 Kabuki (theatre) 24–25, 51, 80, 102, 152 kami 34, 156 Kamihitoe 17 Kanazawa Butoh-Kan 49, 52–53, 81–83 Karada 119, 197; see also body Kasai, Akira 20–21, 29, 36, 40, 99, 164, 174–177, 178–182, 195–196, 212, 234 Kingyo 191, 193–194, 200 Kinjiki 9, 12, 17, 19–21, 23, 36–37, 50, 106 koan 117–118 Kobayashi, Saga 38, 45, 88, 100

gender 119–120, 130–131, 155, 244–245; androgyny 91, 245; cross-gendering 209; see also femininity, homosexuality gravity (centre of) 41, 83 Hakutobo 29, 39 hands 17, 26, 134, 257, 259–260 Harrell, Trajal 190 Harupin Ha 100; see also Koichi Tamano healing 33, 42, 75–76 hierarchy 52–55, 69, 77–78, 112, 130, 134, 157–158; see also masterstudent relationship Hijikata, Tatsumi xii–xiii, 1, 3–6, 9–13, 17, 19–30, 32–33, 49–57, 82, 86, 106–109, 132, 144, 174– 175, 188–191, 205, 211, 257, 258; with Ko Murobushi 145, 152–153, 166–169; with Koichi Tamano 99–102; with Kuniichi Uno 263–264, 266–267, 269–272; with Masaki Iwana 111–114; with Moe Yamamoto 88–94; with Natsu Nakajima 36–44; with Takao Kawaguchi 218, 228, 236–244, 248–249; with Yoshito Ohno 19–30; with Yukio Suzuki 194–200; with Yukio Waguri 61–80 homage 206, 209, 212–213

identity xiii, 4–5, 50, 107–108, 111, 120, 149, 151–155, 157, 161, 182, 187, 210, 228, 248 improvisation 18, 22, 28, 30, 32–33, 39, 52, 70, 73–74, 82, 112, 175, 196–197, 201, 232–237, 240–245, 257 irony 44–45, 174, 176, 209

language: in dance creation 33, 41, 55– 57, 67–71, 131–132, 175–177, 179, 238–241; as kotodama 69 magic 55–57, 156 Maro, Akaji 20, 38, 164, 171 master-student relationship 54–56 Mikami, Kayo 29, 67, 76, 93 Mishima, Yukio 9–11, 20–21, 28, 100, 152–153, 157 Mitsutaka, Ishii 21, 29, 37, 99–100 Morishita, Takashi 52–55, 63, 78, 89, 93 Motofuji, Akiko 21, 99, 194, 198 Neue Tanz 20–21, 30; see also expressionism (German expressionist dance) nikutai 10, 52, 70, 113–114, 119, 126, 132, 147, 188, 191, 196–201, 205–206, 208–209, 211 Nikutai no Hanran xiii, 22, 39, 49, 106, 109, 145, 152, 168, 187, 267 Noh (theatre) 21, 40, 69, 80, 151 non-human 33, 262, 265–269 nothingness 116–120

Index  277 Ohno, Kazuo 10–13, 15–18, 100, 106, 166, 167–168, 174–175, 191, 200, 205–209, 211, 257–261; with Natsu Nakajima 37, 39–45; with Takao Kawaguchi 212–218, 228; with Yoshito Ohno 20–30 onnagata in Kabuki theatre 24–25 performance art 4, 50, 165, 169, 191, 206, 217, 226–227 possession 76–77, 80, 181 postmodernism 209–210 Rebellion of the Body, Revolt of the Flesh see Nikutai no Hanran revolution 23, 108, 188–189, 267 ritual 15, 96, 156–157, 179, 186, 191 shaman 26, 33, 42–44, 71, 80, 113, 145, 154–156, 171, 179 Shibusawa, Tatsuhiko 9, 21, 28, 106–107 shintai 113–114, 119–120, 191, 197– 201, 205, 211 Shinto 34, 96, 148, 156, 179 shironuri 51; see also white powder Shomen no Issho 53, 81–86, 87, 88–92 spiritual: spirituality in Butoh 10–11, 13, 33–34, 41–42, 69, 147, 171, 182, 190, 195, 211, 216–217, 261

suijakutai 189, 205–206, 272 sunyata 118; see also nothingness Takai, Tomiko 37, 99–100 Tamano, Hiroko 95–98 Tamano, Koichi 37, 49, 73, 88, 95–98, 99–102 Tanaka, Min 109, 112, 248, 264–267, 269 Taoism see Daoism technique: in Butoh 43–45, 69, 72, 99, 106, 168–169, 182 time: being-time 189, 211; Deleuze’s notion of Chronos and Aeon time 149, 160, 168–170; see also embodied time Torifune Butoh-Sha see Mikami Kayo tragicomedy 176–177, 243 uji see time: being-time virtual: in Henri Bergson 107–108, 272 white make-up: body paint 51, 63; powder 25; see also shironuri Yamabushi 109, 145–149, 153–158 Yamazaki, Kota 228, 231 Zen 54, 117–118, 189; see also Buddhism