History of Tatsumi Hijikata's Butoh

//Kae Ishimoto is here just for a week! Come for her talk on the history and nuances of the Hijikata Method. Born into a family of traditional Japanese dancers, she began studying traditional Japanese dance from the age of three, jazz dance from the age of four, and has since trained in modern, contemporary, and butoh dance. Since 2002, she has been working with Hijikata’s disciple, Yukio Waguri. In 2011, she performed her solo “Transformation Girl”, choreographed by Waguri using the Hijikata method of butoh, in 7 countries in Asia and Europe. In 2004, she co-created a company with 8 musicians called Wangnin Bunmei (“Fool’s Civilization”). She and her company have been invited to perform in 14 countries in Asia, Europe and the US. Kae’s dance style blends Eastern and Western movement influences to create a genre-less form of expression that can express both specific and universal themes. //A brief history : Butoh appeared first in Japan following World War II and specifically after student riots. The roles of authority were now subject to challenge and subversion. It also appeared as a reaction against the contemporary dance scene in Japan, which Hijikata felt was based on the one hand on imitating the West and on the other on imitating the Noh. He critiqued the current state of dance as overly superficial. The first butoh piece, Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours) by Tatsumi Hijikata, premiered at a dance festival in 1959. It was based on the novel of the same name by Yukio Mishima. It explored the taboo of homosexuality and ended with a live chicken being held between the legs of Kazuo Ohno's son Yoshito Ohno, after which Hijikata chasing Yoshito off the stage in darkness. Mainly as a result of the misconception that the chicken had died due to strangulation, this piece outraged the audience and resulted in the banning of Hijikata from the festival, establishing him as an iconoclast. The earliest butoh performances were called (in English) "Dance Experience." In the early 1960s, Hijikata used the term "Ankoku-Buyou" dance of darkness) to describe his dance. He later changed the word "buyo," filled with associations of Japanese classical dance, to "butoh," a long-discarded word for dance that originally meant European ballroom dancing. In later work, Hijikata continued to subvert conventional notions of dance. Inspired by writers such as Yukio Mishima (as noted above), Lautréamont, Artaud, Genet and de Sade, he delved into grotesquerie, darkness, and decay. At the same time, Hijikata explored the transmutation of the human body into other forms, such as those of animals. He also developed a poetic and surreal choreographic language, butoh-fu (fu means "word" in Japanese), to help the dancer transform into other states of being. 26th November, 2016 3:15pm - 4:00pm