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
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Epigraph: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 1.
Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1996), xi-xiii.
Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 211.
Hosea Hirata, The Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Juzaburô (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 151–52.
Akasegawa Genpei, “Namaniku de tsutsunda konpyutâ” [Computer Wrapped in Flesh], Geijutsu Shinchô 49, no. 579 (March 1998): 46–47.
Akasegawa Genpei, “Asubesutokan wo meguru” [Encountering Asbestos Hall], Shingeki 33, no. 396 (March 1986): 36.
See Haniya Yutaka, “Tainai meisô nitsuite,” [On Womb Meditation], Shingeki 24, no. 292 (Aug. 1977): 18
Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 69.
See Munroe ed., Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1994), 151–52.
Thomas R. H. Havens, Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts: the Avant-garde Rejection of Modernism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 134–43.
Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983), 1–2.
Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright eds., Moving History / Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 350–61.
Michael Raine, “Ishihara Yujirô: Youth, Celebrity and the Male Body in the Late- 1950s Japan,” in Dennis Washburn and Carole Cavanaugh eds., Word and Image in Japanese Cinema (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 216–17.
See Ian Buruma, “Prologue: The Tokyo Olympics” in Inventing Japan: 1853–1964 (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 3–9.
Ann Sherif, “The Aesthetics of Speed and the Illogicality of Politics: Ishihara Shintarô’s Literary Debut,” Japan Forum 17, no. 2 (July 2005): 191, 199, 202.
Chiaki Moriguchi and Hiroshi Ono, “Japanese Lifetime Employment: A Century’s Perspective” in Magnus Blomstrom and Sumner La Croix, eds., Institutional Change in Japan, (New York: Routledge, 2006), 152–76.
Joe Morre ed., The Other Japan: Conflict, Compromise, and Resistance since 1945 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), 49.
George R. Packard III, Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).
Vera Mackie, “Understanding through the Body: The Masquerades of Morimura Yasumasa and Mishima Yukio,” in Mark McLelland and Romit Dasgupta, eds., Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan (London: Routledge, 2005), 131.
John Bester as Sun and Steel (New York: Grove Press, 1970, 1967), 36.
Claire Rousier ed., Être ensemble: Figures de la communauté en danse depuis le XXe Siècle, (Pantin, France: Centre National de la Danse, 2003), 277.
John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography (Rutland, VT and Tokyo: Tuttle, 1974), 119–30.
Hugh T Patrick and Thomas P. Rohlen, “Small-scale Family Enterprises” in Kozo Yamamura and Yasukichi Yasuba eds., The Political Economy of Japan, vol. 1, The Domestic Transformation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 331–84).
Kent E. Calder, Crisis and Compensation: Public Policy and Political Stability in Japan, 1949–1986 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 240–41, 314–15.
Daniel I. Okimoto and Thomas P. Rohlen eds., Inside the Japanese System: Readings on Contemporary Society and Political Economy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 83–86.
Gavan McCormack, Chang Tso-lin in Northeast China, 1911–1928: China, Japan, and the Manchurian Idea (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1977), 223–34.
Allen Guttmann and Lee Austin Thompson, Japanese Sports: A History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), 75.
Nakanishi Natsuyuki, “Hijikata Tatsumi to no owarinaki taiwa” [My Endless Conversation with Hijikata Tatsumi] Gendaishi techo 29, no. 3 (March 1986): 30.
David Goodman, Angura: Posters of the Japanese Avant-garde (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 72.
See Albert J. Koop and Hogitarô Inada, Japanese Names and How to Read Them: a Manual for Art-collectors and Students, Being a Concise and Comprehensive Guide to the Reading and Interpretation of Japanese Proper Names both Geographical and Personal, as well as of Dates and other Formal Expressions (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 37.
H. D. Harootunian, “America’s Japan/ Japan’s America” in Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian eds., Japan in the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 204.
Stephan von Wiese, Jutta Hulsewig and Yoshio Shirakawa, eds., DADA in Japan: Japanische Avantgarde 1920–1970: Eine Fotodokumentation (Dusseldorf: Kunstmuseum Dusselddorf, 1983), 120.
Jean Viala and Nourit Masson-Sekine, eds., Butoh: Shades of Darkness (Tokyo: Shufunotomo, 1988) 16.
Nam June Paik’s essay “To Catch Up or Not to Catch Up with the West: Hijikata and Hi Red Center” in Alexandra Monroe ed., Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1994), 80.
Kurata Satoshi’s Jidôsha zetsubô kôjô: aru kisetsuko no nikki [Automobile Despair Factory: The Diary of a Seasonal Laborer] (Tokyo: Gendaishi Shuppankai, 1974).
Benito Ortolani, The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 233–42.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations, ed., Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken, 1969) 221–22.
Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann eds., Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 64–94.
Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 290–92.
Nishitani Keiji, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 304.
Arthur Coleman Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2003), 3–4.
Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” The Collected Essays and Criticisms, ed., John O’Brian, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengence, 1957–1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85.
Tezuka Osamu, Princess Knight = Ribon no kishi trans. Yuriko Tamaki. (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2001), vol. 2, Chapter 12, 108.
Copyright information
© 2012 Bruce Baird
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137012623_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29858-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-01262-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Theatre & Performance CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)