UNDERSTANDING BUTOH: Performers enter states of “Becoming Other”;
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UNDERSTANDING
BUTOH
BY
ARA FIG
2026
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."
It occupies a liminal space between dance, theater, body art, and shamanic practice. Traditional dance prioritizes technique, line, musicality, and often beauty or narrative clarity for an audience.
Butoh rejects these. Movement is not “shown” or polished; it arises from deep internal states, poetic imagery, and the body’s hidden residues.
The result feels closer to performance art or a shared ritual than to ballet, modern dance, or even classical Japanese forms like Noh or Kabuki.
The Lived Experience
For the performer, the core is the *butoh-tai* (Butoh body): a state in which ordinary dichotomies—self/other, conscious/unconscious, living/dead—loosen.
The dancer does not execute steps for external display. Instead, they inhabit images drawn from *butoh-fu* (poetic movement scores or “notation”). These are not instructions like “raise the arm,” but invitations such as “smoke rising from the body,” “an insect crawling under the skin,” “the body melting,” “a horse’s neck,” or “nerves branching like thousands of twigs.”
Movement emerges organically, often slowly, with tremors, collapses, contortions, or sudden shifts, from a near-trance somatic awareness.
The audience is not meant to follow a story or admire virtuosity. They are drawn into a visceral, often uncomfortable co-experience.
The white body paint (*tonoko*) strips personal identity, turning the dancer into something spectral—ghost, corpse, ancestral presence, or elemental force. Time stretches; the fourth wall dissolves.
Viewers may feel melancholy, unease, empathy, or a strange recognition of repressed material in their own bodies. It is less “watching a performance” and more like witnessing (and partially undergoing) a transformation that touches the collective unconscious.
Ancestral Residue
A central thread is the presence of the dead and ancestral memory inside the living body. Tatsumi Hijikata spoke repeatedly of this. He described his dead sister living inside him: when creating, “she rips at the darkness inside my body and eats more than is needed.” He called the dead his teachers—“A person who has died once can die over and over again inside my body.” The Butoh body carries residual gestures, postures, and traumas of the past: the rural Tohoku farmer’s bent, earthbound body shaped by mud, snow, poverty, and hardship; the post-war Japanese body marked by atomic devastation and rapid Westernization; the “body that has been robbed” of its natural state by civilization.
This is not nostalgia or folklore reconstruction. It is excavation.
The dancer becomes a vessel through which ancestral and historical residue surfaces—ghosts, corpses that stand upright “in a desperate bid for life,” forgotten rural lives, the marginalized and the taboo.
White paint and slow, heavy, contorted movement evoke this spectral inheritance without illustrating it narratively.
Animal Spirits, Plants, & Elemental Forces
Butoh systematically dissolves the human form into other states of being. Hijikata developed extensive *butoh-fu* categories that include the “World of Birds and Beasts,” the “World of Flowers,” and imagery of insects, cows, snakes, crows, peacocks, decaying plants, smoke, walls, and geological or neurological processes.
Dancers are asked to “become” these things not by imitation but by allowing the body to be inhabited or transformed by their qualities: the heaviness of a sleeping buffalo, the tremor of a crow in snow, the slow unfolding or rotting of a flower, the crawling of an insect, the dissolution of smoke.
This draws on a pre-modern, animistic sensibility—echoes of Shinto *kami*, folk beliefs, and a raw connection to nature—without becoming religious doctrine.
The upright, refined, socialized human posture is abandoned in favor of the earthbound, the animal, the vegetal, the mineral, the decaying.
The body is treated as porous and metamorphic: capable of carrying animal spirits, plant growth and death, elemental forces, and the residues of the dead simultaneously.
Overall Character of the Encounter
The experience is transformative rather than representational.
Performers enter states of “Becoming Other”;
Audiences are invited into a shared, often unsettling field of sensation and memory.
There is no clear beginning-middle-end plot, no conventional characters, and little dialogue. Instead there is an arc of metamorphosis—birth, suffering, decay, rebirth, or the standing corpse that insists on living—felt through the body more than understood through the mind.
In short: Butoh functions more as performance art and embodied ritual than as traditional dance. Its power lies in making the ancestral, the animal, the vegetal, and the dead present in the living body, so that both dancer and spectator confront what is usually repressed, forgotten, or civilized away. The result is less a spectacle and more a temporary opening into darker, more primal layers of existence.
Instead, it functions as a set of verbal and visual “conditions” or images that the dancer internalizes so the body can transform.
Hijikata himself rarely used the term “butoh-fu.” The name and much of the organized transmission come from his student Yukio Waguri, who recorded the spoken instructions given in the Asbestos-kan studio and later published them (notably in the 1998 *Butoh-Kaden* CD-ROM containing 88 examples).
Hijikata himself rarely used the term “butoh-fu.” The name and much of the organized transmission come from his student Yukio Waguri, who recorded the spoken instructions given in the Asbestos-kan studio and later published them (notably in the 1998 *Butoh-Kaden* CD-ROM containing 88 examples).
Nature of the Notation
Butoh-fu consists of:
- Short poetic phrases or lists of successive images.
- Collaged visual materials (Hijikata kept 16 scrapbooks filled with cut-outs from art books and magazines—works by Francis Bacon, Hans Bellmer, Willem de Kooning, Goya, Picasso, Japanese *ukiyo-e*, anatomical illustrations, etc.—annotated with handwritten notes).
- Named discrete “movements” or states that could be sequenced.
Butoh-fu consists of:
- Short poetic phrases or lists of successive images.
- Collaged visual materials (Hijikata kept 16 scrapbooks filled with cut-outs from art books and magazines—works by Francis Bacon, Hans Bellmer, Willem de Kooning, Goya, Picasso, Japanese *ukiyo-e*, anatomical illustrations, etc.—annotated with handwritten notes).
- Named discrete “movements” or states that could be sequenced.
The language does not describe outward form (“raise the right arm 45 degrees”). It supplies an internal image or sensation the dancer must *become*. Movement arises as a consequence of inhabiting that image. Examples of the style include sequences such as:
- “Nerves: Wols – thousands of branches… the branch at the temple breaks (snap)… nose becomes an ear… a thousand birds fly out from the back of the head… an insect crawls by the foot… crushing the insect whilst walking… the leaves inside the skull (rustle)… the horse’s neck… strange smile…”
- “Twig above your eyebrow falls down… Nose will be ears… Birds fly from your temples… Worms climb up from the sole of your foot…”
- “A cat comes out of your left side… Your neck is slashed… Neck goes back then slump forward… Steam comes up from the ground… You are a ghost…”
Other recurring motifs involve smoke, decaying or blooming flowers, insects crawling under or on the skin, ghosts ascending stairs or looking back, animals (cow, peacock, crow, horse), melting or dissolving substances, and neurological or anatomical distortions.
Waguri’s Seven Worlds
Waguri organized the material he received into seven thematic “worlds” (his interpretive framework, not Hijikata’s own classification):
Waguri organized the material he received into seven thematic “worlds” (his interpretive framework, not Hijikata’s own classification):
1. World of Anatomy — the body liquefying or losing fixed form (e.g., nose elongating down the cheek, fingers extending indefinitely until dandelions bloom from the mouth).
2. World of Burnt / Collapsed Bridges — rough, chaotic, suffering bodies (burning pillars between heaven and earth, diarrhea under relentless rain).
3. World of Walls— hardness, enclosure, or transformation into bark, stone, or architectural elements.
4. World of Birds and Beasts— animal qualities and hybridizations (sleeping buffalo with fire in the armpit, crow shivering in snow, insects emerging).
5. World of Flowers— growth, fading, pollen, seed, and vegetal processes (body made of flower pollen, fingers weaving stamens).
6. World of the Neurology Ward (or Hospital for Neurosis) — delicate, branching, pathological, or hypersensitive states (nerves as twigs, neurological doubling or extension).
These worlds move, in a broad sense, from denser/heavier to lighter/airier qualities, though individual sequences can jump across them.
In the studio Hijikata would speak the images while dancers moved, or present a visual from a scrapbook.
Each named unit became a repeatable yet living state.
A single performance could contain hundreds of such units (one principal dancer performed around 320 in a 1976 work).
The method allowed Hijikata to work with dancers who had little or no prior training: the image itself generated the physicality.
The scrapbooks and loose sheets (thousands of pages survive in the Tatsumi Hijikata Archive at Keio University Art Center) combined visual collage with verbal annotation.
Themes included animals, flowers, nerves, circus, ghosts, and specific artists. The process of making the scrapbooks—selecting, cutting, juxtaposing, and annotating—mirrored the collage-like structure of the choreography itself.
Significance
Butoh-fu shifted Hijikata’s practice from the raw, scandalous improvisation of the late 1950s–1960s toward a more systematic, transmissible method while preserving the metamorphic, non-representational core of Ankoku Butoh.
Butoh-fu shifted Hijikata’s practice from the raw, scandalous improvisation of the late 1950s–1960s toward a more systematic, transmissible method while preserving the metamorphic, non-representational core of Ankoku Butoh.
It treats the body as a porous medium that can be inhabited by ancestral residues, animal spirits, vegetal processes, neurological states, ghosts, and formless matter.
The notation does not prescribe what the audience should see; it supplies the internal conditions from which the visible movement emerges.
Because each dancer recorded the spoken instructions differently, and because Hijikata continued to invent new images, the corpus is not a closed, authoritative score.
Because each dancer recorded the spoken instructions differently, and because Hijikata continued to invent new images, the corpus is not a closed, authoritative score.
Waguri’s compilation remains the most accessible public window onto it, while the Keio archive holds the primary visual and written materials.
The system continues to be used, adapted, and expanded by subsequent generations of Butoh practitioners.
Sound plays an important but usually non-traditional role in Butoh.
It is rarely conventional “dance music” that dictates steps or provides a steady beat. Instead, it functions as atmosphere, internal stimulus, or co-equal presence alongside the body. Silence itself is often a deliberate and powerful element.
Early Hijikata Works
Documented examples show sparse, disruptive, or mixed sound:
In the 1959 premiere of *Kinjiki* (*Forbidden Colors*), the opening used soft harmonica music under focused, partial lighting. Later the stage went dark and a recording of ragged breathing and scuffling was played while Hijikata repeatedly called out “Je t’aime.” The piece ended in silence.
In "Rebellion of the Body" (*Nikutai no hanran*, 1968), the soundtrack combined live piano played on stage with a recording of engine noises.
These choices already signal the approach: sound is not accompaniment in the classical sense but part of a raw, multi-sensory environment that can include mechanical noise, human vocalization, and abrupt shifts into silence.
General Character of Sound in Butoh
Across Hijikata’s later notational period and the work of his students (including Waguri’s lineage), sound tends to be:
Across Hijikata’s later notational period and the work of his students (including Waguri’s lineage), sound tends to be:
Atmospheric or Sparse — drones, ambient textures, industrial or environmental recordings, low-frequency rumbles, or fragmented musical phrases rather than continuous melodic scores.
Non-synchronous— the music or noise does not tightly cue movement the way a ballet score does. Dancers respond to internal images (*butoh-fu*) more than to external rhythm.
Body-generated— breathing, scraping, vocalizations, or the physical sounds of contorted movement often become part of the sonic texture.
Variable by Artist & Era — some performances use almost complete silence or near-silence; others layer experimental electronic music, traditional Japanese instruments (occasionally), Western classical fragments, or live improvisation.
Chants in the religious or ritual sense are not a core or consistent feature of Hijikata’s or Waguri’s documented practice.
Occasional vocalization, spoken text, or quasi-ritual utterance can appear, but the dominant mode is closer to ambient, industrial, or minimal sound design than to structured chanting.
Later and Broader Practice
Companies and individual artists who developed after Hijikata (Sankai Juku, for example, or many independent practitioners) expanded the palette: sustained electronic drones, processed field recordings, sparse percussion, string textures, or carefully chosen classical excerpts.
Companies and individual artists who developed after Hijikata (Sankai Juku, for example, or many independent practitioners) expanded the palette: sustained electronic drones, processed field recordings, sparse percussion, string textures, or carefully chosen classical excerpts.
In workshop and contemporary contexts the sound environment is often designed to support the internal imagery of the seven worlds or specific *butoh-fu* rather than to impose an external pulse.
In short: music, noise, and silence are present and carefully considered, but they serve the metamorphic, internal logic of the Butoh body rather than the external logic of conventional dance accompaniment. The most characteristic sonic experiences are often the quiet ones—breath, subtle friction, sudden mechanical intrusion, or the charged absence of sound itself.
CREATED
BY
J. BECK
#TYS
DISCLAIMER:
ALL AI GENERATED IMAGES CREATED BY USING WORD PROMPTS
2026
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