Butoh: postwar experiments with the body

Posture, weight, muscular states and imagined movement can become material for a performance. A work may use improvisation or repeated choreography, with different costumes and timing.

Modern-dance training and wartime interruption

Butoh’s postwar development also drew on earlier modern-dance training. Kazuo Ohno studied with Baku Ishii from 1933 and entered the Takaya Eguchi and Misako Miya studio in 1936. Military conscription interrupted his performing career in 1938; his first recital followed in 1949. By 1959 he had given five modern-dance recitals. Training and wartime disruption therefore belong to the background of his later work.

Experiments by Hijikata and Ohno

Hijikata’s 1959 Kinjiki is commonly used as a major starting point. Later work connected with avant-garde literature, visual art and music, including the 1965 Rose-coloured Dance and the 1972 performance series Twenty-seven Nights for Four Seasons. Ohno’s 1977 Admiring La Argentina, directed by Hijikata, provides a particular example of their collaboration.

Butoh-fu and images

Hijikata’s butoh-fu material can include art reproductions, poetic movement names and notes. The scrapbook for Nadare Ame from 1972 includes Klimt images. These records preserve a process linking imagery and bodily imagination, while their instructions require the context of rehearsal and transmission.

Attention in the insect walk

A study in the Japanese dance-research journal Buyōgaku records Seisaku teaching an “insect walk” in December 2018. To imagine an insect crossing the chest, he describes drawing the chest slightly inward rather than pushing it out. Attention then moves among the hand, back, leg and chest, returning to a place that has been forgotten. The image works through local sensation, posture and shifting attention, rather than an imitation of an insect’s outline. This is one transmitted practice, separate from the Klimt scrapbook example.

Underground theatre and Dairakudakan

Different company forms emerged in the 1970s. Akaji Maro joined Jūrō Kara’s Jōkyō Gekijō in 1965 and began studying with Hijikata the following year. In 1972 he founded Dairakudakan, bringing elaborate staging and spectacle into butoh. His term temputenshiki treats being born into the world as a talent in itself. This trajectory also links butoh to underground theatre and ensemble creation.

Sankai Juku and international production

Sankai Juku formed in 1975, toured Europe in 1980 and began co-producing new works with the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris in 1982. Other artists and companies followed different routes abroad.

Carlotta Ikeda studied modern dance and worked with Dairakudakan before leading Ariadone, the all-women company formed in 1974. Utt, which Ko Murobushi created for Ikeda in 1981, was passed on to Mai Ishiwata in 2014.

Keio University’s Hijikata archive opened in 1998. Work on the Ohno collections began in the mid-1990s. Dance Archive Network took over management of the Ohno collections in 2016 and opened a digital archive in 2023. Rehearsal notes, photographs and recordings preserve different aspects of how particular works were created and performed.