UNDERSTANDING BUTOH "BECOMING OTHER" (SERIES) THE ATOMIC BOMBS

UNDERSTANDING

BUTOH

"BECOMING OTHER"

(SERIES)

THE ATOMIC BOMBS

WRITTEN

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) & the athletic constraints of Western ballet

Instead it seeks to explore the subconscious human vulnerability & the primal raw essentials of the body.

THE

ATOMIC BOMBS

On August 6 & 9 1945 the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima & Nagasaki during World War II.

Codenamed "Little Boy" & "Fat Man," these bombings killed over 150,000 people instantly or within months.

The Bombing of Hiroshima
Date: August 6, 1945

Aircraft and Bomb: A B-29 bomber named the Enola Gay dropped the uranium bomb "Little Boy"

Impact: Exploded at 8:15 AM destroying five square miles of the city and causing roughly 70,000 instant deaths

The Bombing of Nagasaki
Date: August 9, 1945

Aircraft and Bomb: A B-29 bomber named Bockscar dropped the plutonium bomb "Fat Man"

Impact: Exploded at 11:02 AM resulting in about 40,000 instant deaths and destroying a large portion of the valley

Aftermath and Legacy

Casualties: Tens of thousands more people died in subsequent years from radiation sickness and cancer.

I. The Void and the Ground:

The Premise of Ankoku-Butoh

Before the flash tears the sky, there is only the soil—packed, heavy, and indifferent. In the foundational philosophy of ankoku-butoh (the dance of darkness), the body does not rise toward the heavens in classical balletic grace; instead, it sinks, yields, and surrenders to the earth. The dancer is rooted, weighted by gravity, drawing the subterranean stillness upward through bone and tendon.

The stage is a vacuum of anticipation. The posture is low, knees bent in a permanent crouch, the spine curved not in defeat, but in an ancient, primal inquiry. This is the posture of the pre-birth and the post-apocalypse—the zero point of existence where the flesh remembers the mud from which it was sculpted. The white body paint (oshiroi), or chalk ground into every pore, eyelids, lips, and the hollows beneath the cheekbones, is applied not as a mask of beauty, but as an erasure of individual identity. It transforms the dancer into a universal vessel for ancestral grief, turning skin into chalk, bone, and ash, creating a death-mask that still breathes.

II. The Rupture: The White Flash

Incipit: A tearing of the fabric of the world.

There is no sound at the exact center of absolute violence, only an obliterating glare that bleaches the universe of color. The flash does not illuminate; it consumes. The white-painted body stands as a vertical scar against the horizon of fire. Ankoku-butoh begins in the marrow; the dancer does not “perform” the atomic flash, but becomes the moment the light enters the bone. In this split second, the body undergoes a violent internal mutation:

The Spine: Wrenches backward in an involuntary spasm, defying the downward pull of gravity for a single, agonizing microsecond before collapsing inward into the classic ankoku-butoh "crab" posture—shoulders hiked, elbows locked, wrists broken backward, and fingers splayed like the legs of something that has just crawled out of irradiated earth.
The Jaw: Unhinges in a soundless scream, the throat contracting as if swallowing the vacuum left by the displaced atmosphere.
The Hands: Previously curled like dried roots, fingers snap outward into violent, trembling claws—representing rigor mortis and desperate, futile grasping at dissolving air.

The white-painted skin catches the searing, unnatural light, turning the dancer into a calcified monument of living marble, frozen mid-agony. The brilliant, incandescent fire blooms in the background like a mechanical sun, indifferent to the biological terror unfolding in its shadow.

III. The Dissolution: Rending the Hair, Torment, and Denial

As the shockwave rolls outward, the performance moves from shock to internal disintegration, manifesting ma—the charged, living space between movements where time stretches and fractures.

Disheveled black hair falls in wet, tangled ropes across the forehead and shoulders, strands glued to the painted skin by sweat and spit. Driven by a kinetic dissonance where the mind no longer commands the limbs, the hands become claws, digging into the scalp and yanking at the roots until clumps of hair come away in her fists. She stuffs the hair into her mouth, bites down, chews, and refuses to swallow, letting spit and black strands trail from the corners of her lips as the jaw works with the slow, grinding insistence of a creature that has forgotten language.

Torment takes over as the torso twists in opposite directions—hips sinking low toward the earth while shoulders wrench upward and backward. Every muscle vibrates with micro-tremors, a signature technique visualizing the trembling of atoms, the fever of radiation, and the shudder of a soul unmoored from its physical vessel.

Denial is enacted as total self-laceration. She claws her own cheeks, raking white paint into raw pink lines that bloom and are then covered again by fresh white as she smears the powder back over the wounds. She bites her own forearm hard enough to leave crescent marks in the white, and scratches at her collarbones, the soft place beneath the jaw, and her painted eyelids until the white cracks and the living eye stares out in pure refusal.

The refusal is absolute: she will not look at the mushroom cloud, she will not name the light, and she will not accept the heat that has already entered her cells. Each bite, each tear, and each frantic rake of nails is a negation of the explosion continuing to expand behind her.

IV. The Atomic Cloud and Elemental Forces

The atomic cloud rises in the background like a second, inverted body. Its stem is a column of black-red smoke and molten orange; its head is a boiling white-gray mass that swallows the sky. The light is not distant; it lives inside the white paint, turning the skin into a luminous membrane where every muscle contracts against that internal radiance.

Breath is the only sound, coming in short, animal gasps that never quite become a scream. The mouth opens wider, revealing teeth stained with hair and paint. She holds the black strands up to the light of the blast and stuffs them back into her mouth as if trying to re-swallow her own darkness.

Elemental forces move through her completely:

Earth: The weight of the pelvis, the dragging of the feet, and toes gripping the ground as if the earth itself is trying to flee.
Water: The sweat that cuts channels through the white paint and the saliva stringing from her lips.
Fire: The invisible heat that makes every joint lock and unlock in spasms.
Air: The truncated breath that never fills the lungs.
Void: The white face that has already accepted the blankness the bomb tried to impose.

V. The Sediment: The Return to Ash

The climax of the movement subsides not into resolution, but into exhaustion. The fire behind fades into a thick, choking pall of gray smoke that settles over the scene like a shroud.

The dancer slowly disintegrates, collapsing joint by joint toward the floor. The white paint begins to streak with sweat and soot, breaking the pristine facade of the spirit and exposing the fragile, vulnerable flesh beneath. The breath comes in shallow, rattling gasps, and the body curls into a fetal posture upon the ash-covered earth, limbs locked in a final, agonizing contraction.

She does not fall; the technique forbids collapse into ordinary death. Instead, she freezes in the moment of maximum self-laceration: one hand buried in her hair, the other clawing at her own throat, mouth stretched around a silent cry that is both denial and the only possible truth.

The portrait frame holds only her face and upper torso—so close that the viewer can see the individual grains of white powder, the broken blood vessels in the whites of her eyes, and the black hair clenched between her teeth—while the mushroom cloud continues its slow, indifferent ascent behind her.

This is ankoku-butoh: the body as the site where history is refused, re-eaten, and made visible again as living torment, serving as a timeless testament carved in white paint, shadow, and bone.

. . .

(TO BE CONTINUED)

UFURTHER

UNDERSTANDING BUTOH