ABSTRACT
The apocalyptic images in the atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1945, and the Great East Japan Earthquake with nuclear accidents in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex, 2011, have made Japanese people face with an age-old question: How could we represent disasters, human-made or otherwise, both in the moment and over time? Focusing on Ohno Yoshito’s butoh piece, Flower and Bird/Inside and Outside (2015) in which Navel and A-Bomb by Hosoe Eikoh is inserted, this chapter will discuss its concept of healing and emotional ties to the past, and, furthermore, its function as prayer and religious offering to quiet or pacify both trauma of the living and ‘unlaid spirits of the dead’. According to Yoshito, butoh is a source of liberation from any preoccupation with the oppressive situation of crisis and enabling a sense of compassion and appreciation for life: ‘the concept of Butoh has its origins in painstakingly tending to the soul and existence itself’. His butoh reminds us that, even in the face of apocalyptic realities beyond our imagination and capacities of representation, our performance should still work as a ‘theatre of prayer’.
