Celebrating 50 years of Butoh
Butoh is a form of movement originated by dance artists Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno in Japan after the Second World War. This approach to movement emerged at a time when many artists in Japan were seeking to escape from the weight of Japanese tradition and the force of westernization that followed World War Two. The butoh founders were seeking a redefinition of Japanese contemporary dance and rejected western ballet and modern dance, although German Expressionist dance was a strong influence on the early butoh founders.
Butoh found ways of tapping into organic, spontaneous body movement by drawing on inspirational imagery. Butoh can be light-hearted but was also known as ‘dance of darkness’ for its poetic exploration of dark, grotesque, and surreal worlds. Most butoh dancers are focused in some way on transformation, often drawing on an eclectic range of animal or material qualities to explore the process of transformation in performance.
From September to November 2009 a festival of workshops, talks and screenings were mounted by the Theatre Training Initiative (TTI) to celebrate the 50th anniversary of butoh, and Birkbeck’s Centre for Media, Culture and Creative Practice collaborated in this exciting festival by hosting the screenings. London Butoh Festival sought to celebrate the past butoh traditions as well as highlight the emergent developments in this art form with a focused debate on the future of Butoh and its contributions to contemporary dance performance.
As Director of the Dance Programme at Birkbeck I was interested to speak further about butoh with Fran Barbe, Artistic Director of the festival, to discuss the influences of this art form on her work as choreographer and performance artist. Fran has also taught choreography on the Birkbeck Certificate in Performance: Dance for many years, and I was interested to see how butoh had influenced her approach to choreography with Birkbeck students.
In conversation - Fran Barbe and Maria Koripas
MK: Tell me about the beginnings of your dance training…
FB: I trained originally in Ballet (Royal Academy of Dance syllabus) and Modern Dance (ISTD) till the age of 21. Then I studied theatre at the University of Queensland where I focused in particular on the development of dance theatre and physical theatre in the late twentieth century. I was introduced to butoh by a fellow student in my post-graduate year, and then went to Japan to study more, before settling in Europe, where I have trained and performed butoh with Tadashi Endo’s Mamu Dance Theatre since 1997. Based in London since 1996, I have continued my training in modern dance with various teachers, especially the Graham technique with the late Bill Louther.
I set up my own company in London in 2002, and have made group and solo works that have toured the UK and internationally.
MK: What are the key characteristics that define Butoh for you?
FB: The key point that interests me about butoh is the notion that the body should not be inscribed by codification. Ballet is an example of a highly codified dance form, where all choreographic works draw on a set vocabulary of movements. Choreographers can and have innovated the form in recent years, but generally speaking, ballet is a codified form of dance. Although modern dance challenged ballet’s rigid definition of dance movement, in the end it also formulated itself into a codified form.
Butoh set out to free the body from such formulation and codes. Hijikata is often quoted as saying that he wanted to ‘drive dance from within the body, rather than having it imposed from without’. For me, butoh is an attempt to uncover the limitless possibilities of the body, and to find movement and form that related to any new theme or idea a new choreography was based on. Butoh allows each piece you make to potentially use a new vocabulary of movement, drawn from the choreographer’s own body, or from that of her dancers. The theory and philosophy of this is inspirational, but I also recognise that butoh has been formulated by some practitioners over the years. Perhaps the same can be said of the release technique, that should really free the body, but can also be taken on in a way that is rigid and calcifying. Perhaps that is the nature of physical practice, but still, I take the challenge from butoh that dance is not a code for moving, but a chance to explore the body’s true expression. The real source for dance is the choreographer or dancer’s particular body, imagination and perspective. That will always be infinite.
There is some cross-over with American post-modern dance in all of this. The notion of setting the body free from codification for example. At face value, some philosophies across butoh and American post-modern dance seem similar, and they did emerge at similar time periods, but how those ideas were manifested in movement couldn’t be more different.
MK: How has Butoh influenced your creative thinking and process in relation to the body and theatre?
FB: You could say my creative process appreciates stillness much more than it used to. I think western dancers only think they exist when they are moving, whereas butoh challenges the dancer to be captivating and communicative, even in stillness. In recent years I have developed a number of devising structures that demand the dancer stay in a certain position for a long period of stillness before starting to move in an improvisation. In the stillness, we allow the imagination and the body to start to vibrate with the desire to move and with poetic, fictional ideas to fill the movement. There is a quote I read once – “the butoh dancer stands in stillness, and waits”. That is not a rule of course, but it is an indicator of some of the values at work in butoh. Stillness brings to our attention the deeper sensations at work beneath the surface of both physical and mental processes. A dance might begin simply from a sense of weight and gravity in the right leg, or from a sudden imaginative sensation that the body is in a certain landscape. It’s not just stillness, but also slow motion that butoh uses to heighten the awareness of both dancer and audience. I call it ‘distillation’ – and that is something I use much more in my choreography after training in butoh.
The other thing about butoh that has had a big impact on my work is that the body is often transformed, it is heightened, it is rarely quotidian or purely pedestrian. Butoh and its approach to transformation uses a kind of creaturely or animal body, or even and object body, to make the body seem ‘other’. Or perhaps more importantly the body is often ‘hybrid’ in butoh – part animal part human, for example. One of my teachers, Katsura Kan, once said to me that he tries to offer the audience something that they cannot immediately recognise or categorise, something unusual. In this way he hopes that his audience will have to dig beyond their easy surface categories to a deeper level of their unconsciousness to relate to his work. It is just one butoh dancer’s reason for making the body unusual, but it shows that however internally driven butoh is, it is always oriented towards the audience’s experience.
Butoh seeks a body which is ‘not moving, being moved’. This is a fascinating quality that many teachers I have worked with explore. I think it is an incredible way to keep the dancer in the process, and searching, and always in a responsive, questioning mode. The dancer works imaginatively and physically to set up invisible forces that seem to move the body. In this way, butoh is never a product you repeat. The activation of physical and imaginative forces results in the dance. Butoh is interested in the process through which dance is made.
We often talk about the soul or spirit of a dancer, and I am sure that is just as important in the end to a great ballet dancer as it is to a great butoh dancer. However, the distinction I would make is that in the process of training in butoh there is a very different hierarchy or balance of values. In butoh, there is no dance without soul, that is only sport. Butoh places equal weight on the imaginative development of the dancer and her spirit or life-force as it does on her ability to move well technically. I think western dance values virtuosic technique first and foremost, and pursues the other aspect in a secondary capacity.
MK: Looking particularly at the Birkbeck Dance Course, what connections did you make between Butoh and dance in the choreography classes you taught?
FB: The nature of Birkbeck’s learners on the Dance Course mean you are dealing with people from very diverse backgrounds, of very different ages and levels of experience and confidence with dance. Butoh strongly values the fact that the body already contains the potential for dance and movement, and that we need to find ways to seek out that unique bodily language. Getting people to feel confident with creating their own choreography, when they are really at the very beginning of their own training in dance, can be challenging. I found butoh’s value of each individual body as a source for dance was conducive to getting people confident with creating their own movement vocabulary. It informed my approach to working with bodies with limited training because it engaged them creatively and mentally. Often people on the dance course are mature, have worked in other areas, and have very good conceptual abilities, that are beyond what they can do physically at the point they enter the Performance Certificate of Continuing Education. Butoh gives them scope to employ those conceptual and creative abilities and lets them work with the body they have at present. Creative, poetic ideas could be pursued with the bodies we had in a way that still allowed students at the beginning of their technical training to think differently about dance and to explore and push the boundaries of choreography.
The greatest gift Butoh gave to international dance was to value mature bodies. Butoh artists like Kazuo Ohno was still touring the world in his 70s and 80s. Many great artists I know are now in their sixties and show no sign of leaving the stage, in fact they get better and better. Western dance doesn’t traditionally allow for this, and Butoh makes a great statement by accepting mature bodies, and in fact suggesting that you get better with age, because your presence deepens, you have more gravitas. Butoh doesn’t value the aspect of dance that is about technical virtuosity for its own sake – that is sport, circus and gymnastics. Butoh values the ability of a dancer to bring some deep and revelatory meaning to the stage. It is the soul of the dancer that is the great value, and not only his or her physicality.
MK: From my perspective, having observed some of your classes at Birkbeck with our students over the years, I could see elements that define your approach in teaching choreography and these seem to be drawn from your Butoh background. These elements I speak of relate to the way the student deals with a deep inward journey in their movement exploration, which goes back to the idea of the inner self within the creative process, as you had mentioned before.
I saw how creative tasks seemed to prize open past experiences and helped students tap into their own unique realities to draw out movement ideas, which are meaningful and fully embodied.
Improvisational work where you used carefully guided words immediately triggered the student’s sense of wonder and play with movement. I could see how words helped students find their ideas with fascination as imagery created in the mind enabled them to manifest movement qualities ranging from delicate lightness to highly controlled sustained movement. This process revealed interaction between physical and intellectual engagement, and showed how students searched for truth to create movement. They consciously sought to manifest unaffected movement and their artistic choices demonstrated how they avoided using readily available stylised vocabulary, which can be surface like and incidental.
Another key element for me is the way there is a deep sense of containment in this process. Where there may not be a great deal of physical activity occurring but there is artistic intent, which has intensity and holds the outside eye in suspense. It seems that butoh’s philosophy embraces truth in movement and this comes through the body, clear focus and sustained concentration of the dancer.
FB: Butoh does not seek to be realistic but looks for elements of truth, that are presented more poetically, in terms of form, rather than realistically. For example, when I choreographed a butoh inspired version of the mad scene from Giselle, I was not interested in the narrative drama of the story, but the potential to give poetic, physical form to the state of a woman dying of a broken heart.
Butoh is a lot about containment. About finding a movement structure that has more going on internally than is expressed externally. That is a notion that Japanese performing arts in general knows very well, and butoh certainly shares that value. It’s not to say Butoh isn’t sometimes wild and moving a lot, its just when they do that, they have to have even more going on energetically and internally. It can be traced – however indirectly - to Zeami’s treatise on Noh theatre where you must ‘ have ‘10 in your heart but show only 7’.
That notion of containment or compression is something that has had a huge impact on the way I work in dance. I have also come to focus on the idea of ‘distillation’ in dance in reference to stillness and slow motion. The word distillation suggests that something gets stronger, not weaker through reduction.
MK: While butoh is not exactly a method or style of dance, it is a very specific practical approach which encourages the performer to find a deep connection with their inner landscape, personal responses and imagination. Therefore, in terms of butoh’s contribution to contemporary dance, it is possible to say that this is one of the most important art forms to emerge in the past 50 years because it has allowed the performer to profoundly express themselves, regardless of age, traditions and technical ability.
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