by Jay Hirabayashi
Sensation…. Memories…. Skin and bones…. In 1980, Koichi Tamano gave a performance at the Robson Street Media Centre and burned an imprint in my brain that resonates to this day. He danced in a way that I had never seen before. It was called ankoku butoh which translates as “dance of darkness.” It said simply, deeply, that dance was sensation, memories, skin and bones. I thought it must be an old, ancient Japanese tradition, but it turned out to have started only two decades earlier.
I had been taking dance classes for a few years. I wanted to learn how to move with grace and precision and look like the beautiful men and women who put together amazing combinations of movements and steps. My dance teachers were training me to point my feet, how to jump, how to turn. They were giving me a technical vocabulary to describe prescribed movements. A plié meant bending the knees. Chassé meant gliding the feet. Sauté meant jumping. In class, we all tried to look exactly like the teachers. The teachers tried to make us look exactly the same. There was a right way and a wrong way to move in space and over centuries of refinement, a standard form had been articulated and dancers would spend years practicing this form over and over again. The form was called ballet and it was largely concerned with making your body appear weightless and graceful.
In 1987, I took my first butoh workshop from a man named Goro Namerikawa who danced with the famous butoh company Sankai Juku. He told us to lie on our backs and to forget ourselves. After awhile, he asked us to stand up without using any muscles.
Every year after that, I encountered other wandering teachers of this strange dance. Each of them gave paradoxical instructions. SU-EN, a Swedish butoh dancer, said that to do butoh was to do the impossible. Hiroko Tamano, Koichi’s savant wife, told us to see a fish swimming across the sky. Minoru Hideshima had us walk as if we were hung from meat hooks from the sky, but emanating love to the entire universe at the same time.
This was something radically different from the way ballet is taught. In 1995, I finally got to go to Japan and took classes with Kazuo Ohno, one of the two men—the other being Tatsumi Hijikata—who started this new no-direction approach to dancing. Kazuo Ohno’s classes were the hardest dance classes I have ever taken. He would talk for an hour about something that was currently absorbing his thoughts. Then, he would ask us for the next hour to dance what he was talking about. There was no instruction except that we were not to imitate him and that we were not to use any technique. We were to find some new way of expressing ourselves that did not come from something that we had been taught. He would watch us for awhile, and then, if was not satisfied that we were understanding his instructions, would stop us and start talking again about the subject that had consumed the first hour of the class. There was never any corrections; never any encouragement. Like ballet, there was a right way and a wrong way, but with butoh, you had to find the right way by yourself.
I think of butoh as the zen approach to dancing. In zen, you either try to sit while emptying your mind of all thought or you work on an impossible-to-answer koan, a paradoxical, illogical question. Eventually, hopefully, you experience the answer to the question of why you are sitting there. In butoh, each dance is a different journey of discovery of who you are. You empty your mind and you are. There is sensation, memories, skin and bones.
2009 is the 50th anniversary of the first butoh performance. In that performance, Tatsumi Hijikata chased a young man, Yoshito Ohno (Kazuo Ohno’s son) around a dark stage. The performance was called Kinjiki after the novel by Yukio Mishima. With its homosexual theme and shocking action—Yoshito Ohno strangles a chicken between his legs after simulating having sex with it—Kinjiki scandalized the Japanese modern dance community and Hijikata was then barred ever after from participating in officially sanctioned performances. Butoh went underground after that but Hijikata and Ohno continued to research and evolve. The two men were like yin and yang. Hijikata was drawn to the dark side of the human psyche; Ohno to the light side. Yoshito Ohno trained with both men. On March 10th and 11th, at the Roundhouse, Yoshito Ohno performs with Lucie Grégoire from Montreal in a piece he choreographed called Flower. He will also be giving a three hour butoh workshop on March 8th at the Scotiabank Dance Centre.
We also celebrate butoh’s 50th anniversary with a week of daily classes, from March 16th to March 20th at Harbour Dance Centre, by Natsu Nakajima who also is one of Kokoro Dance’s primary influences. Natsu Nakajima also worked with both Hijikata and Ohno before forming her own company Muteki-sha in 1969. She will also be giving a lecture demonstration on butoh on March 21st at the Roundhouse.
Kokoro Dance’s butoh continues to manifest in unpredictable ways. At the VIDF, we will be presenting Two Night Stand (March 3rd and 4th) featuring Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq, The Rebel (March 20th and 21st) with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, and F (March 24th to March 28th), a reimagining of the Frankenstein story, with a cast of three dancers, three actors, and three musicians.
How do you watch butoh? What does it mean? My advice is you empty your mind and let sensation, memory, and your skin and bones respond to what you see.
Jay Hirabayashi is the co-artistic director of Kokoro Dance, producers of the Vancouver International Dance Festival, running March 3 to April 4 2009 at various locations throughout Metro Vancouver. www.vidf.ca
