“Traditionalizing” the expressionist body
I attended one and two-thirds nights of the Second International Butoh Festival at the tiny Seedbox Theatre in southern Kyoto on May 1 and 2 (continuing through 4th).
https://www.facebook.com/events/440822160008397/?notif_t=plan_user_invited¬if_id=1555766739292030
There I discovered that the performances doing “butoh” today stretch from old-style, white-powder writhers to conceptual performance artists with projections, to shamanistic healers. Each performance lasted about 15-20 minutes, seemingly in no particular order, with 12 performances per evening. The Festival is a testament to Katsura Kan, former Byakkosha member whose performances and teaching around the world have stimulated a number of satellite companies, a network of performers who attended this butoh summit in Kyoto during Golden Week. While particular performances stick out in my mind, they stimulated more generally my thinking about the state of the genre.
* *
Butoh has become traditionalized. (Elsewhere I have called this calcification or classicism of Japanese kata "katafication.") Naturally, my head was a scramble afterwards, a soup of recalled images, music, and gesture. However my overall impression—I’m a theatre person, a director rather than performer, more literary than visual in bent—was disappointment that the once shocking and profoundly moving genre had decayed to mannered, personal self-evocation.
The potency of the seemingly improvisatory nature of the dance derives from the inspiration, the breathing of life, into the precise choreography devised through image-based practice. Theatre artists use spontaneous reactions to prepared situations to develop roles in fixed-text plays; many butoh dancers (it seems—I don’t know many, this is derived mainly from readings—begin training with images (“as though walking through water”, “every step causes an electric shock), costumes, projections, then work out their physical actions according to the developed structure. This is then notated, repeated, honed, and eventually performed—the spontaneity found in the gaps in the choreography, flowers budding in a rock-solid vase of formal technique.
In performance, they are “playing” the engendered script with their bodies, the physical instrument accompanied by (and mostly cued by) the musical score. This can be street sounds, nature’s birdsong, electronic pulses, or fragments from jazz or classical music. The resultant harmony, or more often, stimulating dissonance, between visual/musical/body expression, butoh has the power to open up in spectators profound wells of personal emotion and meaning. The struggle of life and death, bonds among humans/animals/nature, memories of love and loss, and a parent-child symbiosis, or the eternal question, “who are we? Why are we here? Where are going?” can all be evoked. Since spectators come to these performances with their own histories and anxieties, even solo dances become intricate duets with spectators, both sides’ internal rhythms synced through the exterior show/concentrated reception. These may be fleeting moments in a long performance, difficult to feel the bigger the theatre, but worth it for these gem-like moments of understanding. At least that’s how I have always appreciated it, when watching astounding work of Byakkusha, Dairakudan, Sankai Juku, Ima Tenko, or Katsura Kan.
However thanks to teachers like Ohno Yoshito, Kasai Akira, Ima Tenko, and Kan, butoh is now a genre, or rather an amalgam of Traditions. It has calcified like the grand traditions of ballet and Graham technique on the one hand, and noh and nihonbuyo on the other. There are set “phrases”—seen in videos of Hijikata Tatsumi and his disciples--repeated here without the passion, precision, or profound meanings. At the Festival, despite participants from South America, Europe, and China, we witnessed the same movements. Bodies were slack vessels, frail and swaying, beginning on the ground then rising and sometimes falling hard, on one’s back or side, legs apart, floating; lifting twitching fingers on hands to side for sky like a slow-motion vertical breast stroke; balanced on rump with bowlegged lower body suspended, an infant awakening, large toe pointing upward in exquisite tension. Rose-petals fall from mouths, arm form “heart” on head, a move offstage became an undulating sideways farewell, a sumo-like stomp of muscular legs resonating with a giant “thump”. Heads pushed out of necks, eyes wide (and sometimes reddened or wearing contacts) like drugged-out geese, bodies undulates or gyrates, more muscular seizure than sexy flirtation. Angelic grace and earthy idiocy seem the dyads. Tongues stick out, mouths drool, eyes stare vacantly in stupidity or fear. Nobility or curiosity is shown by heads, slightly turned to side, stare expectantly into space just above eye-level, as though seeing a mystical manifestation. Few of the dances had a throughline; they were put together, like expressionist lego toys, from these kata, formal patterns. They were distinguishable by the different body-types, costumes, lighting, but most by the personal inflection. So personal and nuanced were these associations that I tuned out, almost embarrassed by this personal display of trauma or naïve searching.
Yet when performed well, these same kata can have an accumulative power; when performed by amateurs--many at the Festival seemingly taking their first solo turn, nervous by being witnessed by their critical, international peers--performances can have the look of the first part of the world skating championships: the technical part. No matter the variety of costumes and body-paint, music and facial expression, performers are “proving their chops” with their ability to carry out these known phrases. Occasional departures—a broom falling loudly by Chikako Bando, a toilet-paper roll falling behind a loin-clothed dancer; a lingering arm from the upstage curtain, a sputtered breathy sound from three freshly hatched “chicks” by the Beijing-based Luna Foxes—drew laughter from their anomalousness, departure from expected kata. However the overall mood was solemn, ceremonial, serious, and sacrificial. These multiple bodies in crises were laying their (mostly) young bodies on the line, near naked, in flimsy dresses, their breasts and backs exposed, thighs exposed, displayed to strangers. And they were also exposing their art—and the training behindnit-- to their colleagues, all trained in similar disciplines, sensitive to the breaths and subtle timings that arise from genius. It was brave recital, intimate and accepting. Yet although I had paid the 3200 advanced ticket (no discounts for students), I felt like I was watching an amateur recital/international showcase. Perhaps this is the only way to develop as a solo performer: to perform before your peers. From this spectator’s point of view, many of these performers needed more group experience before attempting a solo.
Arguably, the sheer variety and mass of performances denies impartial critique. Ten individual and group dances in one nearly four-hour evening is a lot to digest. I was blown away by some and bored by other performances, I can only wonder and reflect on what was learned. It is often from the weaker performances that stay with me. I am left with fleeting images of great power and visual inventiveness:
• Wolfgang H. Scholz piece with dancers Isabel Beteta and Sandra Soto, two Colombian women in one long, white shroud, lying feet-facing, five meters distant, a doppelganger corpse, one 50ish the other 20ish. Projections showed a Woman divided, a streak of pain down her forehead crease through her mouth. Later projected critical, younger selves observe their older selves coming to life, twisting the shroud into a rope, an umbilical cord pulled between them. Projection of the women on a stone bridge beside a chasm; wrapped again in shroud like villagers or nuns, moving forward blankly as babbled words bubble forth from their mouths.
• Juju Alishina’s incongruous buyo-like movements in red-white kimono to gagaku music followed by the even stranger juxtaposition with the street-call of a Yakiimo seller (Sweet potato)
• White Fox Luna from China: Three baby chicks, arms encased in white-red muslin, bobbing their necks with spluttery sounds, eyes wide, mouths open or curled, gaining flight.
• Christopher Fryman, a bedazzling angel with curiosity and fear on face performing before a projection of autumn leaves, jarring electronic sounds.
• The angelic Du Yufang from Beijing, wisp of a frail girl, reaching out to embrace the wind or water, before collapsing into a butterfly or other insect
• Rosemarie Candelario emerging from a balled egg from a white canvas to explore the space try frail wings then float on the breeze, before balling the canvas up for her new nest.
* * *
There were two much-needed intermission to give breath between four x three performances. A cozy café filled with relaxing performers, abutting the tiny dressing areas, served drinks and conversation. However there was so much powder, feathers, and flower petals strewn that often a brief sweeping and pick-up proved necessary between dances. Once, the producer Kan and two other stage assistants meticulously scrubbed the dance-mat floor of these traces, spectators silently observing them in the darkness. The three kneeling figures, their backs to the audience, performing their assiduous clean-up, under blue lights looked like great butoh to me; I felt like clapping when they exited, but refrained, thinking this might draw laughter under the assumption I was mocking them. But now I wonder whether this awareness, the zen-like “butoh-mind”, of appreciating the beauty and efficacy of the musculature of the body at everyday work and play.
I attended one and two-thirds nights of the Second International Butoh Festival at the tiny Seedbox Theatre in southern Kyoto on May 1 and 2 (continuing through 4th).
https://www.facebook.com/events/440822160008397/?notif_t=plan_user_invited¬if_id=1555766739292030
There I discovered that the performances doing “butoh” today stretch from old-style, white-powder writhers to conceptual performance artists with projections, to shamanistic healers. Each performance lasted about 15-20 minutes, seemingly in no particular order, with 12 performances per evening. The Festival is a testament to Katsura Kan, former Byakkosha member whose performances and teaching around the world have stimulated a number of satellite companies, a network of performers who attended this butoh summit in Kyoto during Golden Week. While particular performances stick out in my mind, they stimulated more generally my thinking about the state of the genre.
* *
Butoh has become traditionalized. (Elsewhere I have called this calcification or classicism of Japanese kata "katafication.") Naturally, my head was a scramble afterwards, a soup of recalled images, music, and gesture. However my overall impression—I’m a theatre person, a director rather than performer, more literary than visual in bent—was disappointment that the once shocking and profoundly moving genre had decayed to mannered, personal self-evocation.
The potency of the seemingly improvisatory nature of the dance derives from the inspiration, the breathing of life, into the precise choreography devised through image-based practice. Theatre artists use spontaneous reactions to prepared situations to develop roles in fixed-text plays; many butoh dancers (it seems—I don’t know many, this is derived mainly from readings—begin training with images (“as though walking through water”, “every step causes an electric shock), costumes, projections, then work out their physical actions according to the developed structure. This is then notated, repeated, honed, and eventually performed—the spontaneity found in the gaps in the choreography, flowers budding in a rock-solid vase of formal technique.
In performance, they are “playing” the engendered script with their bodies, the physical instrument accompanied by (and mostly cued by) the musical score. This can be street sounds, nature’s birdsong, electronic pulses, or fragments from jazz or classical music. The resultant harmony, or more often, stimulating dissonance, between visual/musical/body expression, butoh has the power to open up in spectators profound wells of personal emotion and meaning. The struggle of life and death, bonds among humans/animals/nature, memories of love and loss, and a parent-child symbiosis, or the eternal question, “who are we? Why are we here? Where are going?” can all be evoked. Since spectators come to these performances with their own histories and anxieties, even solo dances become intricate duets with spectators, both sides’ internal rhythms synced through the exterior show/concentrated reception. These may be fleeting moments in a long performance, difficult to feel the bigger the theatre, but worth it for these gem-like moments of understanding. At least that’s how I have always appreciated it, when watching astounding work of Byakkusha, Dairakudan, Sankai Juku, Ima Tenko, or Katsura Kan.
However thanks to teachers like Ohno Yoshito, Kasai Akira, Ima Tenko, and Kan, butoh is now a genre, or rather an amalgam of Traditions. It has calcified like the grand traditions of ballet and Graham technique on the one hand, and noh and nihonbuyo on the other. There are set “phrases”—seen in videos of Hijikata Tatsumi and his disciples--repeated here without the passion, precision, or profound meanings. At the Festival, despite participants from South America, Europe, and China, we witnessed the same movements. Bodies were slack vessels, frail and swaying, beginning on the ground then rising and sometimes falling hard, on one’s back or side, legs apart, floating; lifting twitching fingers on hands to side for sky like a slow-motion vertical breast stroke; balanced on rump with bowlegged lower body suspended, an infant awakening, large toe pointing upward in exquisite tension. Rose-petals fall from mouths, arm form “heart” on head, a move offstage became an undulating sideways farewell, a sumo-like stomp of muscular legs resonating with a giant “thump”. Heads pushed out of necks, eyes wide (and sometimes reddened or wearing contacts) like drugged-out geese, bodies undulates or gyrates, more muscular seizure than sexy flirtation. Angelic grace and earthy idiocy seem the dyads. Tongues stick out, mouths drool, eyes stare vacantly in stupidity or fear. Nobility or curiosity is shown by heads, slightly turned to side, stare expectantly into space just above eye-level, as though seeing a mystical manifestation. Few of the dances had a throughline; they were put together, like expressionist lego toys, from these kata, formal patterns. They were distinguishable by the different body-types, costumes, lighting, but most by the personal inflection. So personal and nuanced were these associations that I tuned out, almost embarrassed by this personal display of trauma or naïve searching.
Yet when performed well, these same kata can have an accumulative power; when performed by amateurs--many at the Festival seemingly taking their first solo turn, nervous by being witnessed by their critical, international peers--performances can have the look of the first part of the world skating championships: the technical part. No matter the variety of costumes and body-paint, music and facial expression, performers are “proving their chops” with their ability to carry out these known phrases. Occasional departures—a broom falling loudly by Chikako Bando, a toilet-paper roll falling behind a loin-clothed dancer; a lingering arm from the upstage curtain, a sputtered breathy sound from three freshly hatched “chicks” by the Beijing-based Luna Foxes—drew laughter from their anomalousness, departure from expected kata. However the overall mood was solemn, ceremonial, serious, and sacrificial. These multiple bodies in crises were laying their (mostly) young bodies on the line, near naked, in flimsy dresses, their breasts and backs exposed, thighs exposed, displayed to strangers. And they were also exposing their art—and the training behindnit-- to their colleagues, all trained in similar disciplines, sensitive to the breaths and subtle timings that arise from genius. It was brave recital, intimate and accepting. Yet although I had paid the 3200 advanced ticket (no discounts for students), I felt like I was watching an amateur recital/international showcase. Perhaps this is the only way to develop as a solo performer: to perform before your peers. From this spectator’s point of view, many of these performers needed more group experience before attempting a solo.
Arguably, the sheer variety and mass of performances denies impartial critique. Ten individual and group dances in one nearly four-hour evening is a lot to digest. I was blown away by some and bored by other performances, I can only wonder and reflect on what was learned. It is often from the weaker performances that stay with me. I am left with fleeting images of great power and visual inventiveness:
• Wolfgang H. Scholz piece with dancers Isabel Beteta and Sandra Soto, two Colombian women in one long, white shroud, lying feet-facing, five meters distant, a doppelganger corpse, one 50ish the other 20ish. Projections showed a Woman divided, a streak of pain down her forehead crease through her mouth. Later projected critical, younger selves observe their older selves coming to life, twisting the shroud into a rope, an umbilical cord pulled between them. Projection of the women on a stone bridge beside a chasm; wrapped again in shroud like villagers or nuns, moving forward blankly as babbled words bubble forth from their mouths.
• Juju Alishina’s incongruous buyo-like movements in red-white kimono to gagaku music followed by the even stranger juxtaposition with the street-call of a Yakiimo seller (Sweet potato)
• White Fox Luna from China: Three baby chicks, arms encased in white-red muslin, bobbing their necks with spluttery sounds, eyes wide, mouths open or curled, gaining flight.
• Christopher Fryman, a bedazzling angel with curiosity and fear on face performing before a projection of autumn leaves, jarring electronic sounds.
• The angelic Du Yufang from Beijing, wisp of a frail girl, reaching out to embrace the wind or water, before collapsing into a butterfly or other insect
• Rosemarie Candelario emerging from a balled egg from a white canvas to explore the space try frail wings then float on the breeze, before balling the canvas up for her new nest.
* * *
There were two much-needed intermission to give breath between four x three performances. A cozy café filled with relaxing performers, abutting the tiny dressing areas, served drinks and conversation. However there was so much powder, feathers, and flower petals strewn that often a brief sweeping and pick-up proved necessary between dances. Once, the producer Kan and two other stage assistants meticulously scrubbed the dance-mat floor of these traces, spectators silently observing them in the darkness. The three kneeling figures, their backs to the audience, performing their assiduous clean-up, under blue lights looked like great butoh to me; I felt like clapping when they exited, but refrained, thinking this might draw laughter under the assumption I was mocking them. But now I wonder whether this awareness, the zen-like “butoh-mind”, of appreciating the beauty and efficacy of the musculature of the body at everyday work and play.
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