Abstract
Anumber of commentators have remarked on the heady atmosphere of the 1960s in Japan. Some speak approvingly of fistfights breaking out between artists who disagreed violently and just as approvingly about their cheerful willingness to bury the hatchet the next day. Hijikata was right smack in the middle of this cultural and political melee, and certainly had the reputation of being an indefatigable partier, drinker, and conversationalist. This image provides a useful counteractive to overly facile notions of Japanese (or Asian) harmony, but it also highlights a deeper characteristic of the times—conflict and competition. I argue that butoh was one attempt to create mind-body techniques to cope with this era. The previous chapter charted a starting point for Hijikata’s dances as socially engaged narratives, and then showed how he began experimenting with widening the expressive abilities of the body as well as exploring how to use the reactions of the audience to hold their interest. The aim of the current chapter is to demonstrate the competitive characteristics of the era (as manifested in part by a preoccupation with athletics), and to show how Hijikata and his peers dealt with these competitive conditions by examining Hijikata’s encounters with neo-Dada, Happenings, and surrealist artists who were not willing to content themselves with commentary on his dances (as Mishima had), but wanted to participate actively in the creation of performances. Hijikata and his peers did not leave behind the quest for actuality, but the search for ways to access actuality in the Japan of the 1960s was shaped by a new orientation to the properties of objects, and a concern with how to manage proliferating and contradictory information. In keeping with the tenor of the times, the impact of those artists’ contributions shapes this era of butoh’s development as the most wild and tumultuous era. There was, in the sixties, an anything-goes attitude, an explosive force that continually threatened to break everything apart. That attitude could not help but spill over into the interaction between audience and artist, so the chapter includes an examination of the ways that the artists engaged the audience and brought them into the agonic ambit.
Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.
Deleuze and Guattari
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Notes
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© 2012 Bruce Baird
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Baird, B. (2012). A Story of Dances that Sustain Enigma: Simultaneous Display and Sale of the Dancers. In: Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137012623_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137012623_3
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