In the late fifties butoh rushed in Japan avant-garde dance stage, driven by emormous power of several dancers, Tatsumi Hijikata with his "Ankoku Butoh" (Butoh of darkness) and Kazuo Ohno were among them. Declaring the destruction of any formby their art, they were those revolutionists who turned upsight down the whole conseption of dance, theatre and the way artist behaves onstage.
The butoh-actor is free of any behavioural stereotypes, he throws away all social masks, dives into his own experiences, memories, impressions, dreams and then appears on a scene bared and uncovered as a baby.
He dances not the scenario, but the pure idea of movement which is being born through his appearance; he bares main principles of things and phenomena, he tells parables by the language of dance.
Japan has endured nuclear bombardment, its traditional culture has been invaded by American masscult influence, and all these post-war Japanese conditions were absorbed by butoh. The first butoh-dancers were a kind of theatrical kamikaze, who showed their outcry and breakdown on the scene.
In 80s butoh was going out of Japan bounds and becoame world-known. Many butoh-patriarches were vigorously going on tour, founding dance-studios, moving to Europe and America, searching and developing their own dance. Many noted art people took part in their master classes, studied in their dance-schools. Therefore now it is not an easy task to define which art has butoh touch inside, which one hasn't, but the butoh influence on the modern art is undoubted. You can read or compose a number of fine words, you can even make up rather picturesque descriptions, but you may still seem to be so far from understanding the authentic butoh. Try at least once, and if you can catch "it", then... IT will stay with you forever as a feeling, as a special quality of existence, and you will notice it in many other different aspects of life.
If you ask Japanese dancer what the butoh is, most likely you would hear him waffling and dodging the question in every possible way, or at least it may seem like waffling for us. Generally, it might be any image like: "look, as the river flows" or "the flower grows" . Oriental person consider such answers quite proper, but from our european "reasonable" and "conscious" point of view... at first it looks rather vague and twilight. It happens because we, Europeans, do not think here about the very beginning of dance and where is the source of movement and why such typical for butoh immobility could be ever considered as a dance. "Who has told what if I stand without movement, I do not dance?" - asked during his interview in Moscow one of butoh path-breakers, Min Tanaka. And this magnificent dancer really is able, staying on a scene without movement, to dance. Nine years of his artistic search were devoted to immovability. Yes, nine years he did not move, and intensively danced while. Paradox, it's undoubtedly paradox.
Our whole world is full of movement. Even when we sleep or we are in a clod, or we are corpse-like, our body keeps continuous and vigorous life. The heart is beating, blood is running in veins, cells are dividing, etc. That's why while living in a body and doing it the whole life, it is totally impossible to be motionless. It is impossible to start and finish a movement, but it is possible to enter into the movement, to exist in it consciously and to leave it. The body is just a border between inner and outside worlds. Inner world includes person's emotional experiences, philosophical concepts, poetic spirits, fears, dreams etc. Butoh-dancers have learnt to transform all this inner world outpouring into dance. Thus, dance becomes very individual, intimate and frank existence. And it is the personal choice of dancer what to dance: cry, hate, childhood memories, immersing into imagination, one or another fantasies.
And here we've got the guestion: Why butoh is art, not just art-therapy activity in that case?
Really, to learn butoh you have to understand yourself very well and "to discover, to awake your nature", as advises another remarkable dancer and butoh-master Masaki Ivana. Butoh is strictly connected with simple components of the nature - "a river, a cloud, a fog, a flower", the same as with each unique identity of any human being. Any accomplished dancer is constantly upon the look, he finds and observes evolution of this being. And the deeper his understanding of this process is, the more complete pass on the torch to public it will be. Thus he can touch heart, mind or other parts of human body, and may be no one understands him clearly, but with incredible force of feelings he leads away public imagination and increase the intensity of the moment to such a high degree that someone who observes his moving act begins his own story creation based on this performance. And this story is really important from the butoh point of view - the story which has been brought to light by spectaculor, not that one which dancer meant.
Butoh is being born where words are absent. People haven't made up words for butoh yet, therefore any explanation is just interpretation (sort of lie and distortion). That is the reason why Japanese dancers use word-painting for the description of butoh.
According to Masaki Ivana, mentality is the first dancer's enemy. For the European person it is obvious to understand everything mentally. Such "dancing head" is unacceptable in butoh-dance, as the thought, feeling and movement should join together in one flow . To achieve it the dancer refuses the form, he does not build any strong-willed or mental constructions to exploite the body. Here and now butoh puts the person face to face with himself. Destroying the form, the dancer becomes open to life and to the truth about his life whether it is awful or not.
Buto
