Introduction: And, And, And

Abstract

Butoh defies description. Observers seem compelled to verbal contortions to articulate what they see: “the grotesque and the beautiful, the nightmarish and the poetic, the erotic and the austere, the streetwise and the spiritual.”¹ Either in spite of or due to these contortions, this performance art—which was founded by Hijikata Tatsumi during a two-decade span from the late 1950s to the 1970s—has spread around the world, and one can now find butoh companies or dancers based in nearly every major city in the world. Several cities outside Japan have annual butoh festivals, and other theater and dance festivals almost uniformly feature butoh performers. One can go to see butoh several times a month in many cities and nearly every night in Tokyo. In addition, many of the particulars of the art form have crept into the consciousness of the performance world, and numerous artists—while not claiming to specifically practice butoh—cite a period of studying butoh as a formative part of a larger artistic trajectory. Butoh has even infiltrated the wider world; one can walk the streets of Omote Sando or the Ginza in Tokyo and see sixty-foot-tall billboards advertising fancy watches or other hipster products with bald white-skinned butoh denizens peering out at the passersby. However, even as butoh has spread and gained popularity, it has not been well understood within the context of the sixties, seventies, and eighties in Japan. Observers have been drawn to the striking images of butoh, but usually know little else about it.

Dreams, works of art (some), glimpses of the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?) catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important.

Elizabeth Bishop