Butoh Dancing (舞踏): Discovering Emptiness, Embodiment & Environment in an Archeology of Body

Katsura Kan (L) and Masaki Iwana (R)

Body, Space & Empathetic Participation

If Butoh is carried within the body, where in our world does it belong as performance? Aside from any demand to define Butoh in its totality, there could hardly be a more challenging question.

Most often, we experience Butoh in a theatrical context, knowingly observing the dance as performance on a deliberate stage — whether traditional or simply an area that has been adapted for performance. Yet, there has never been any particular requirement for a staged Butoh and, in an almost dismissive manner, neither has there been need for even an audience. It is easy to then attribute a kind of mystical hermeticism to the Butoh dancers who perform their dance as secret rituals of the subconscious, in reclusive locations like caves or sand dunes in the desert. Certainly these ascetic experiences serve a purpose for the dancers, but they do risk alienating us as audiences in our curiosity to observe and understand Butoh form.

Here is where Butoh begins its truly contextual evolution in the heart of not only the dancer, but also the audience. With an unlimited opportunity to call any space a stage, Butoh dancers may deliberately engage their environments as instinctual sources of inspiration for their choreography, or as symbolic enhancers for the audience’s appreciation. Of course, it is ideal to have both — for the result is then a destruction of the passive relationship between dancer and audience, which so toxically feeds off of judgemental entertainment, so that everyone present can lucidly engage with the Butoh experience.

Skull, from Homage to Yukio Mishima Portfolio, 1975 (on left), The Artist and his Audience, London 1973 (on right), Sankai-Juku performer in Paris, 1980 (bottom) © Abe Frajndlich

Our naturally inhabited environments often serve as superior spaces for the Butoh experience than a stage that fundamentally carries within its architectural identity the tendency for segregation. Our cities, these cults of information, can never promise us constancy, which makes them magnetic for dancers who wish to take advantage of their innate spontaneity. The emotional complexities of accidental audience and the power of inescapable architecture allow Butoh dancers to engage the body as narrative in the most formidable ways, forcefully and with great relevance. The fluid environments of city streets challenge the temporal experience of spectacle, while conscious composition on the part of the dancer against the characters of buildings expresses a contrast to the monumental. We are constantly urged to consider the sensuous flexibility of flesh against the imperturbability of concrete; we are charged with interpreting the symbolic visual of Butoh which confronts us, but also, and perhaps most importantly, with comprehending the great absurdity made obvious within our constructed chaos.

And here we arrive at a most critical and surprising point: no matter where it is experienced, Butoh is not the sole responsibility of the dancer. It is a truly complete communication that involves everyone present. Butoh dance does not begin and end with the dancing body. Its puzzling spirit overflows from under the flesh of the dancer and absorbs into the essence of its viewers. Without our complete emotional surrender, Butoh performed with an audience is somewhat lessened. When the intention of the dancer is to share the Butoh experience, the dance is danced equally by the audience which opens its heart unconditionally, and to do this requires an immense faith in the emptying of a conditioned mind. There must be a desire to dissociate from the aesthetic conditions harbored within one’s self and to simply accept the intimate reality expressed by the dancer. Only in this way will there be space created for an empathetic experience of Butoh as opposed to a dancer’s voyeuristic exploitation.

Using Space To Engage Body: Tetsuro Fukuhara & Space Dance Tube

Tokyo-based dancer and choreographer Tetsuro Fukuhara is leading what is perhaps one of the most experimental Butoh projects in the world. Fukuhara channels the quality of surrender in Butoh into a playful engagement with architecture. Participants enter a womb of cloth where, losing balance and even orientation, every movement they make shapes the space from within.

“Space Tube is not only a space to take balance away from the participants,” he explains, “but also to give a beloved feeling to them, because always, their movements decide the shape of Space Tube. We can’t find this kind of experience in our modern architectural society anymore.”

By interpreting the submission and physical improvisation of Butoh, Space Tube becomes less of an installation and more an extension of dance. “In short,” says Fukuhara, “the person who throws out his body naturally and makes one unity with Space Tube as a given environment is an expert.”

After bringing the Space Tube experience to Kampala, Uganda in 2009, Tetsuro Fukuhara received great praise from the local United Nations office. The simple experience of surrendering the body to its natural movement, and the openness to experience this almost embryonic joy, was rightfully recognized for its potential to heal. “Space Dance,” says the official United Nations statement, “could be a constructive technique working with rehabilitating children associated with armed conflict, and vulnerable youths orphaned by war.” Could there be a better reminder of the immense and humbling power that comes with the simplest interpretations of dance?

Tetsuro Fukuhara‘s Space Dance Tube.

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