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UNDERSTANDING BUTOH "BECOMING OTHER" Hijikata's Body of Invisible Suffering

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UNDERSTANDING BUTOH "BECOMING OTHER" (SERIES) Hijikata's Body of Invisible Suffering WRITTEN BY ARA FIG MMXXVI Hijikata’s Early Emphasis on the Body as a Site of Invisible Suffering I. Contextual Foundations of Ankoku Butoh A. Emergence in postwar Japan amid rapid modernization, American occupation influences, and rejection of both Western-imported dance forms (ballet, modern) and traditional Japanese styles (Noh, Kabuki refinements).  B. Hijikata’s rural Tohoku origins as formative: poverty, physical deformations from malnutrition and disease (rickets, bowed legs), childhood memories of labor, death, and familial loss internalized as bodily residues.  C. Literary and philosophical catalysts: engagement with Genet’s criminality and abjection, Bataille’s informe and excess, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Mishima’s erotic-taboo explorations, and Surrealist disfigurement.  D. Foundational performances as rupture: *Kinjiki* (Forbidden Colors, 1959) as inaugural act of corpo...
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UNDERSTANDING BUTOH: Performers enter states of “Becoming Other” The Descent into Chalk & Brine

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UNDERSTANDING BUTOH "BECOMING OTHER" (SERIES)   "THE DESCENT INTO CHALK & BRINE" WRITTEN BY ARA FIG MMXXVI  Kazuo Ohno once said of his Work: "The best thing someone can say to me is that while watching my performance they began to cry.  It is not important to understand what I am doing; perhaps it is better if they don't understand, but just respond to the dance." Butoh (舞踏, Butō) is an avant-garde Japanese dance-theatre form that emerged in 1959 as a radical, anti-establishment response to the trauma of World War II & the rapid Westernization of Japan. Originally called Ankoku Butoh (暗黒舞踏) which translates to the "Dance of Darkness" It strips away the structured rules of traditional Japanese performing arts (like Noh and Kabuki) and the athletic constraints of Western ballet.  Instead it seeks to explore the subconscious human vulnerability & the primal raw essentials of the body.  The Decomposition of the Dock: An Elemental But...
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