Darkness into Light:
A Decade in the West
Transforms a Butoh Troupe
BUTOH hit New York in the fall of 1985, like a thunder bolt from the gods. Tanztheater also took hold that season, and critics and choreographers were forced, kicking and screaming, to reconsider expressionism.
Both forms of dance, one incubated in post-war Japan, the other in post-Adenauer Germany, wrestled with demons internal, external, and existential. Butoh, with its contorted, oozing, naked bodies, expressed its suffering—and joy—through the grotesque. "Anokoku butoh," as founder Tatsumi Hijikata named it, was literally a "dance of darkness," developed not as a technique or a vocabulary to be mastered, but as a practice to be lived. For Hijikata, butoh was a transgressive gesture, one that aimed to surpass, and displace, the limits of acceptable social behavior.
But Hijikata died, in 1986, before his planned American debut. Today, butoh has become another dance technique—the "butoh" (dance) without the "anokoku" (darkness). You can sign up for a workshop in butoh almost as easily as you can one in contact improvisation. Min Tanaka, who worked closely with Hijikata, has felt the need to renounce—if only rhetorically—any connection with "butoh," as it has evolved in the West.
Tanaka’s improvisatory work is still raw and gritty, still focused on the moment of performance as a space of transformation, still opting for "freedom" over "beauty." After his October 15 performance of I . . . Sit at P. S. 122, Tanaka took questions from the SRO audience. When asked about the presence of the butoh tradition in his solo, Tanaka bristled. What is butoh, he replied. "People want to fix it. Why? It’s good for making money. It’s good for teaching."
But is it good for what Hijikata called the "unlimited power of butoh," its "hidden violence"?
Of the half dozen or so butoh performers to appear in New York during its heyday in the mid-1980s, Sankai Juku has become the most popular. Currently, the five-member company is in the midst of an 18-city U. S. and Canadian tour, performing Yuragi: In a Space of Perpetual Motion (1993), the sixth of seven commissions garnered from the Theatre de la Ville, a key player in the increasingly institutionalized international touring circuit. Yuragi plays at the Brooklyn Academy of Music November 12 through 16.
Yuragi has been described by Seattle Times critic Jean Lenthan as "a satisfying, highly accessible blend" of "dancerly phrases" and trademark butoh. She sees in it shades of Martha Graham and Trisha Brown, and the "haunted open-mouth expressions" are "downright pleasurable."
This taming of the inscrutable and, therefore, dangerous Other has been crucial to Sankai Juku’s success in the west. (In 1990, a New York Newsday headline for a review of Sankai Juku’s Unetsu proclaimed gleefully that: "Buto Takes a Western Step at Last.") From almost the beginning, during the company’s second American tour, in 1985, artistic director Ushio Amagatsu proved quite savvy, staging for the media in every city an outdoor performance (which read more like a daredevil stunt) in which the dancers descended long ropes, with fatal results for Yoshiyuki Takada, who plunged to his death.
Typically, Yuragi is recognizably "beautiful." It is a visual spectacle, whose elegant production values are "mesmerizing." The internal has become externalized, and the grotesque has been banished. The difference of butoh has been erased: it has become another western spectacle, in which audiences can admire the stage picture or gasp at the physical technique. There remains just enough of the "exotic" (bald heads, powdered bodies) to arouse an appetite.
"But please be careful," Tanaka warned his audience more than ten years ago, "not to become an easy-going fan."