Butoh - Defining Butoh

Defining Butoh

Critic Mark Holborn has written that butoh is defined by its very evasion of definition. The Kyoto Journal variably categorizes butoh as dance, theater, “kitchen,” or “seditious act.” The San Francisco Examiner describes butoh as "unclassifiable". The SF Weekly article "The Bizarre World of Butoh" was about former sushi restaurant Country Station, in which Koichi Tamano was “chef” and Hiroko Tamano "manager". The article begins, “There’s a dirty corner of Mission Street, where a sushi restaurant called Country Station shares space with hoodlums and homeless drunks, a restaurant so camouflaged by dark and filth it easily escapes notice. But when the restaurant is full and bustling, there is a kind of theater that happens inside…” Butoh frequently occurs in areas of extremes of the human condition, such as skid rows, or extreme physical environments, such as a cave with no audience, remote Japanese cemetery, or hanging by ropes from a skyscraper in front of the Washington Monument.

Hiroko Tamano considers modeling for artists to be butoh, in which she poses in "impossible" positions held for hours, which she calls "really slow Butoh". The Tamano’s home seconds as a “dance” studio, with any room or portion of yard potentially used. When a completely new student arrived for a workshop in 1989 and found a chaotic simultaneous photo shoot, dress rehearsal for a performance at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, workshop, costume making session, lunch, chat, and newspaper interview, all "choreographed" into one event by Tamano, she ordered the student, in broken English, “Do interview.” The new student was interviewed, without informing the reporter that the student had no knowledge what butoh was. The improvised information was published, “defining” butoh for the area public. Tamano then informed the student that the interview itself was butoh, and that was the lesson. Such "seditious acts," or pranks in the context of chaos, are butoh.

While many approaches to defining butoh—as with any performative tradition—will focus on formalism or semantic layers, another approach is to focus on physical technique. While butoh does not have a codified classical technique rigidly adhered to within an authoritative controlled lineage, Hijikata Tatsumi did have a substantive methodical body of movement techniques called Butoh Fu. Butoh Fu can be described as a series of cues largely based on incorporating visualizations that directly affect the nervous system, producing qualities of movement that are then used to construct the form and expression of the dance. This mode of engaging he nervous system directly has much in common with other mimetic techniques to be found in the history of dance. For example Lecoq's range of nervous system qualities, Decroux's rhythm and density within movement, Zeami Motokiyo's qualitative descriptions for character types, etc. Such methods heavily leverage mechanisms of suggestion typical of hypnosis. In this author's experience, when studying with various students of Hijikata, a tradition of Butoh Fu seems to be a common trait, more pronounced than in students of Ohno. The continuity of Butoh Fu as a methodical approach to training and building performance does provide a line of analysis for traditional continuity and dissemination, just as do parallel techniques do for other performance traditions.