Butoh: Japan's Dance of Darkness and Its Influence on Contemporary Theater

Introduction

Butoh (舞踏) is one of the most radical and visually arresting performance forms to emerge from postwar Japan. Born in the late 1950s as a reaction against Western dance conventions and against traditional Japanese performing arts alike, butoh has since spread far beyond Japan.

Often described as the "dance of darkness" (暗黒舞踏, ankoku butoh), the form is characterized by slow, controlled movements, white body paint, grotesque or otherworldly imagery, and an engagement with themes of death, transformation, and the body. Yet to reduce butoh to a list of visual characteristics is to miss much of its appeal: it is less a codified technique than an approach to the body.

For international audiences curious about Japanese theater, butoh is worth understanding as a living art form and as part of the same postwar questioning that produced Japan's underground theater.

Origins: Hijikata and Ohno

The story of butoh begins with two men: Tatsumi Hijikata (土方巽, 1928--1986) and Kazuo Ohno (大野一雄, 1906--2010). Though they are often discussed as co-founders, their contributions were quite different.

Hijikata was born in Akita Prefecture, in the Tohoku region of northern Japan. His 1959 performance Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors), based on Yukio Mishima's novel, ended with a live chicken smothered between the legs of Ohno's son Yoshito, and is generally regarded as the founding moment of butoh. Audience outrage led to Hijikata being banned from the dance festival where it premiered.

What Hijikata sought was an aesthetic that embraced a squat, earthbound physique and the natural movements of common people, rather than the upright, outward-reaching body of Western dance. He also drew on surrealism and on writers including Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, and the Marquis de Sade.

Kazuo Ohno, by contrast, was a devout Christian who began studying modern dance in 1933 with the pioneers Baku Ishii and Takaya Eguchi. His 1977 solo Admiring La Argentina, directed by Hijikata and performed when Ohno was seventy-one, became one of butoh's most celebrated works. It was a tribute to the Spanish dancer Antonia Mercé, "La Argentina," whom he had seen perform in 1926.

Hijikata and Ohno are often presented as the twin poles of butoh: provocation and tenderness, the grotesque and the sublime.

Aesthetic Principles

While butoh resists rigid codification, several aesthetic principles recur across its many manifestations:

The Body as Crisis: Butoh treats the body not as an instrument to be mastered but as a site of crisis and transformation. Performers often explore states of collapse, distortion, and dissolution.
Slowness and Stillness: Many butoh works unfold very slowly, drawing the audience's attention to minute physical details.
White Body Paint: White body makeup is traditional in butoh and remains one of the form's most recognizable visual signatures, though not all butoh uses it.
The Grotesque and the Beautiful: Butoh embraces imagery that conventional dance would reject as ugly or disturbing, such as contorted faces, twisted limbs, and abject physical states.
Nature and the Elemental: Many butoh practitioners work with imagery drawn from the natural world, using it as a catalyst for physical transformation rather than as a subject to be represented.

Butoh and Japanese Theater

Butoh developed alongside the angura (underground theater) movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the two shared concerns. Angura artists questioned the modern Japanese project and what had been lost in Westernization, and they favored unconventional spaces close to the audience. Directors of that period include Shuji Terayama, whose company was Tenjo Sajiki, and Juro Kara, whose Situation Theater performed in a red tent.

Hijikata and Terayama moved in overlapping circles, but how far butoh shaped any particular theater director's work has to be judged case by case.

Butoh on the Global Stage

One of the most remarkable aspects of butoh's history is its journey from a specifically Japanese phenomenon to an international practice. Butoh groups were performing outside Japan by the early 1980s.

Sankai Juku, founded by Ushio Amagatsu in 1975 after he left Akaji Maro's Dairakudakan, played a large part. In 1980 it performed in France for the first time, at the Nancy International Festival, and its appearances that year helped spread the word "butoh" across Europe. Since 1982 it has premiered new work at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris about every two years. In September 1985, during an outdoor performance in Seattle in which dancers were lowered upside down from a roof, the rope holding Yoshiyuki Takada broke and he fell to his death. The group canceled the rest of its U.S. tour.

Today, butoh is practiced well beyond Japan, including by many artists who are not Japanese.

Experiencing Butoh Today

For international audiences visiting Japan, it is worth checking the listings of small theaters and galleries and of experimental dance programs in Tokyo and other cities.

For those who cannot travel to Japan, several books provide entry points into the form's history and aesthetics. They include Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo by Sondra Fraleigh and Tamah Nakamura (Routledge) and Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits by Bruce Baird (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

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