UNDERSTANDING BUTOH "BECOMING OTHER" (SERIES)

UNDERSTANDING

BUTOH

"BECOMING OTHER"

(SERIES)

WRITTEN

ARA FIG

MMXXVI

"Butoh training emphasizes “body weather” (a term later formalized by Min Tanaka) and the cultivation of an “empty” or “dead” body that can be filled by external or internal forces."

(Exercises often involve standing for long periods while imagining the body as a landscape, or moving while visualizing specific elemental transformations.)

Butoh (舞踏, *butō*), often rendered in English as the “Dance of Darkness,” is a radical postwar Japanese performance form that emerged in the late 1950s through the collaboration of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno.

It rejects Western ballet’s verticality, classical Japanese dance’s refined elegance, and conventional narrative storytelling in favor of an elemental, pre-linguistic, and frequently non-linear mode of expression. An “elemental narrative” in Butoh does not mean a plotted story with beginning, middle, and end.

Instead it refers to a primal, almost alchemical unfolding in which the body itself becomes the primary medium through which the four classical elements—earth, water, fire, and air—along with darkness, decay, and the void, are incarnated, transformed, and released.

Origins and Philosophical Core

Hijikata’s early works, such as *Kinjiki* (Forbidden Colors, 1959), already displayed the elemental impulse: the dancer’s body was treated as raw material—meat, soil, ash—rather than as an instrument of beauty. Hijikata spoke of “the body that has been stolen” and sought to recover a pre-social, almost mineral existence.

Ohno, by contrast, brought a more lyrical and spiritual dimension, often invoking memories of his mother, flowers, and the sea.

Together they established Butoh’s dual poles: the dark, subterranean, and grotesque (Hijikata) and the luminous, floating, and nostalgic (Ohno). Both, however, treated narrative as something that arises from the body’s encounter with elemental forces rather than from literary or dramatic structure.

The Elemental Body

In Butoh the dancer’s body is not expressive in the conventional sense; it is *possessed* or *inhabited* by elemental states. Practitioners speak of “becoming” rather than “representing”:

- Earth: The body sinks, becomes heavy, cracks, or crystallizes. Movements are slow, grounded, and often involve lying on the floor, crawling, or remaining almost immobile while micro-tremors pass through the flesh. The white body paint (traditionally rice flour mixed with water or now commercial theatrical paint) emphasizes the body as clay or bone, erasing individual identity and linking the dancer to soil, corpse, and mineral.

Water: Fluidity, dissolution, and vertical dripping. The dancer may undulate as if submerged, or allow limbs to “melt.” Tears, saliva, or actual water on the skin are sometimes used. The famous image of Ohno performing as an old woman by the sea or as a floating embryo evokes water’s memory and its capacity to dissolve boundaries between self and other.

Fire: Sudden intensity, internal combustion, or the sensation of being burned from within. Movements can become sharp, staccato, or convulsively erotic. Hijikata’s “Ash-Pillar” imagery and later works involving heat and transformation treat the body as something that can be reduced to pure energy or residue.

Air / Wind / Void: Extremely slow rising or falling, suspension, and the sense of the body being hollowed out. The dancer may appear weightless or as if the bones have been removed. Silence and the interval between breaths become compositional elements. The void (*ma* in Japanese aesthetics) is as important as action; narrative emerges in the gaps.

These elemental qualities are rarely pure. A single performance may cycle through all of them or hold contradictory states simultaneously—an earth-bound body that suddenly becomes aqueous, or a figure of fire that collapses into dust.

Narrative Structure Without Plot

Butoh’s “narrative” is closer to myth, dream logic, or geological time than to Aristotelian drama. Typical strategies include: 1. Transformation sequences: The dancer begins as one elemental state (a corpse, a stone, a fetus) and slowly metamorphoses into another. The audience witnesses the process rather than a finished image. 2. Memory as sediment: Personal, cultural, or collective memories are treated as layers of earth or strata of water. A gesture may evoke wartime trauma, childhood, or the afterlife without ever becoming explicit storytelling. 3. The grotesque and the sacred: The body is allowed to appear ugly, deformed, aged, or animalistic. This is not shock for its own sake but an attempt to reach a more fundamental human condition beneath social masks. The white paint, disheveled hair, and distorted faces create a mask that paradoxically reveals rather than hides. 4. Time dilation: Movements are often decelerated to the edge of stillness. What would be a single second of ordinary action expands into minutes, forcing both performer and spectator into a different temporal register—closer to the time of erosion, growth, or decay. 5. Space as elemental field: Stages are frequently bare or minimally lit. Darkness, shafts of light, dirt, water, or scattered objects become co-performers. Outdoor performances in abandoned sites, forests, or ruins (including derelict hot springs) further dissolve the boundary between body and environment.

Training and Method

Butoh training emphasizes “body weather” (a term later formalized by Min Tanaka) and the cultivation of an “empty” or “dead” body that can be filled by external or internal forces. Exercises often involve standing for long periods while imagining the body as a landscape, or moving while visualizing specific elemental transformations. The goal is not technical virtuosity but the capacity to surrender control so that the elements can “speak” through the flesh.

Contemporary Extensions

While the classic Hijikata–Ohno lineage remains foundational, later generations have expanded the elemental narrative into ecological, queer, feminist, and postcolonial registers. Performers may stage the body as polluted earth, rising sea levels, or the aftermath of nuclear fire (references to Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain potent). The white paint can become a surface for projected images or be washed away mid-performance, enacting erosion in real time.

In short, a Butoh elemental narrative is the slow, often painful, sometimes ecstatic revelation of the human body as a site where the classical elements, death, memory, and the void continuously interpenetrate.

It does not tell a story so much as allow the spectator to witness the body becoming the story—earth that remembers water, fire that collapses into ash, air that carries the last breath of a vanished world.

The result is less entertainment than a confrontation with the elemental conditions of existence itself.