butoh: 02/ 2025
Three years ago I was in Japan. During which time I remember feeling subsumed. Subsumed within the wet hollow streets, inside very small, very overstocked bookstores. I remember drinking black coffee. I remember feeling aware of my body in space. Holding myself so as to not disrupt order.
Whilst in a bookstore I found a copy of Eikoh Hosoe’s Kamaitachi. A photographic study of the self-in-context, embodied in movement. A Japanese art commonly known within avant-garde circles as Butoh. I was aware of Butoh after being introduced to the dance during an Anthropology lecture on Contemporary Body Rituals. This class painted Butoh to be a fluid gesture of bodies, a graceful movement in and from the soul. But Hosoe’s rendering was erotic, viscereal, an assault.
What Hosoe’s rendering of the dance is reminiscent of is a theory posed by Mark Johnson that describes an embodied state of transcendence. In his book The Meaning of the Body, Johnson describes two directions of a transient state. The first is vertical. To leave the physical body and extend toward a higher, intangible realm. Secondly, Johnson describes a horizontal state. To be “gloriously embodied” [1].
The Christian 'true self' is ephemeral, an abstract texture beyond the corporeal. It is through a ritualised practice that the soul is rooted and moralised within the body. Buddhist reincarnation is likewise ephemeral, the body being a temporary vessel for which the spirit resides.
Yet, to horizontally transcend involves moving inside one’s body as to locate meaning. A horizontal ritual recognises the entanglement of the body and the mind, and beyond, the entanglement of man and woman, the felt and the factual, the emotive and the intellect, the self and the other.
Our bodies are a tool from which to derive meaning. Bodies as matter are meaningful, beyond governance from a “higher self” or “soul” [1]. As Johnson writes,
“[…] it is our organic flesh and blood, our structural bones, the ancient rhythms of our internal organs, and the pulsing flow of our emotions that gives us whatever meaning we can find and that shape our very thinking” [1].
Our bodies are entwined within the undulating relationships of exterior and interior; what is material and what is intangible.
Before leaving for Japan, I had watched Butoh performances on YouTube. On the leader black sofa, a stream of ash and a shamisen escaping through the open windows. I had watched countless performances of chalked bodies contorting, crawling and rolling into themselves. I watched their ribs grasping breath, their bodies contoured beneath white paint rendering each limb independent.
Butoh emerged in the 1960s, post-World War II. It was an artform that rejected a Western influence within Japan, focusing primarily on the body and Japanese Shinto sensibilities. This emphasis on the body contests Western materialism which proliferated post-World War II in Japan [3]. Author and dancer, Sondra Fraleigh, describes Butoh as “a hybrid form of dance, linking physical and spiritual cultures from around the world” [3].
The avant-garde shift toward the body aligned with the shifting relationship between the body and its environment. The body, a form of the divine, was becoming understood in relation to the material. As a point of revolt, artists explored the organic process of the body. This manifested as a visceral understanding of the body's given form through movement [3]. These expressions were often displayed as jarring and contorted, barefooted, and rooted in an internal monologue.
Butoh was originally a radical dance technique that was referred to as Ankoku butoh (dark and black dance) [3]. Dancers are marked by their naked, white-painted bodies. Prominent dancer, Hijikata Tatsumi, was interested in the European surrealist movement and these motifs are significant in the aesthetic foundation of the Butoh dance style. Butoh is dependent upon visceral experiences within the body and thus draws from the surrealist interest in dreaming and mystical states. Butoh, similar to other European forms of expressionist dance, moves away from narrative and connectivity. Instead, the dance focuses on the body of the dancer in relation to the bodies of the audience. It is in this way that Butoh exemplifies what Johnson refers to as horizontal transcendence.
René Descartes began the mind-body discourse by stating “I think, therefore I am” [4]. The body’s governed soul is what Descartes would describe as the mind or thought. This Cartesian mind-body dichotomy is contained in the work of avant-garde dancers who move into what is a monotheistic perception of the mind and body. Johnson names this monotheism an “organic process” and that this process is the “aesthetic dimensions of [the] embodied activity” [1].
I recently read Sebastian Smee’s 2018 Quarterly Essay, Net Loss: The Inner Life in the Digital Age. In his essay, Smee contemplates the ways social media flattens the depth of a rich “inner life” [5]. An inner life being the depths of oneself, which Smee considers sacred and protected internally [5].
I read this essay on the same leather couch I watched butoh performances from three years ago. Moving through recent reading and feeling myself pulled back to this time. Butoh emerges as a retaliation against excess. The allure of bodies, stripped raw and bare. In some ways, the allire is a pairing back. A return to the divinity of the body, its retaliation against monotheism and it’s inherent understanding of nuance.
[1] Johnston, M. (2007). The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. University of Chicago Press.
[2] Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy. Sondra Fraleigh.
[3] René Descartes 1637, Discourse on Method.
[4] Smee, S. (2018). Net Loss: The Inner Life in the Digital Age. Quarterly Essay.