Butoh - Butoh in Popular Culture

Butoh in Popular Culture

A Butoh performance choreographed by Yoshito Ohno appears at the beginning of the Tokyo section of Hal Hartley's 1995 film Flirt.

Ron Fricke's experimental documentary film Baraka (1992) features scenes of butoh performance.

In the late 1960s, exploitation film director Teruo Ishii hired Hijikata to play the role of a Doctor Moreau-like reclusive mad scientist in his film horror movie Horrors of Malformed Men. The role was mostly performed as dance. The film has remained largely unseen in Japan for forty years because it was viewed as insensitive to the handicapped.

In the Bust A Groove 2 video game released in 2000, the final boss' style of dance battle is butoh, set to a very fast and experimental Japanese techno track.

The influence of Butoh has also been felt heavily in the J-Horror movie genre, forming the basis for the appearance of the ghosts in seminal J-Horror Ju-on: The Grudge.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa used butoh movement for actors in his 2001 film Kairo, remade in Hollywood in 2006 as Pulse. The re-make did not feature butoh.

Butoh performance features heavily in Doris Dörrie's 2008 film Cherry Blossoms, in which a Bavarian widower embarks on a journey to Japan to grieve for his late wife and develop an understanding of this performance style for which she had held a lifelong fascination.

A portrait of Kazuo Ohno appears on the cover of the 2009 Antony & the Johnsons album The Crying Light.

Butoh has greatly influenced the Sopor Aeternus and the Ensemble of Shadows, the musical project of Anna-Varney Cantodea. Its visual motifs are used in for the project's publicity photos and videos.