Surrealist dance
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Butoh ("boo toe") exploded onto the art landscape in
the late 1950's
and early 1960's. It shattered convention, tradition
and long-h eld
beliefs about the nature of dance movement. Because it
was created
against the backdrop of postwar Japan and the nuclear
holocaust that
country had experienced, butoh dealt with taboo
subjects in both brutal
and serene ways. It also was a reaction to the extreme
codification of
Japanese dance and expressed the need for more personal
ways of
communi- cating through movement.
The first true butoh performance was an adaptation of
Yukio Mishima's
novel Forbidden Colors. It was presented in May of 1959
by Tatsumi
Hijikata and was sponsored by The All Japan Artistic
Dance
Association. All movements were performed without
music. Yoshito
Ohno enacted sex with a chicken squeezed between his
thighs and
then succumbed to the homosexual advances of Hijikata.
The images
and movements were soshocking and outrageous to both
the audience
and The Association that the lights were turned out
before the
performance was over.
Hijikata was banned from further performance with The
Association,
becoming and outlaw dancer. For Hijikata it was the
beginning of the
movement he called Ankoku Butoh.
- Ralph Rosenfield
http://www.butoh.com/heavy/dance.htm
http://www5.interaccess.com/chronicle/back/feb1797/article6.html
don wheeler
http://japan.co.jp/tj/9602/city1.html
http://www.urc.ukans.edu/News/96N/OctNews/Oct08/Sankai.html
http://www.shinnova.com/kokoro/dance_links.htm
http://www.aftenposten.no/kul_und/storby/teateran/itsu.htm
http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/db/issues/96/10.03/ae.sankai.html
http://www.orions.ad.jp/c/urls/domain/jp/or/mbn/plaza12-domain.html