ABSTRACT
Using the performer Bishop Yamada and his group Hoppo Butoh-ha as a lens, the chapter will look at the tension between the urban and the rural in butoh. The expansion of butoh reflects its ambivalent combination of urbanity and rurality – on the one hand, thematizing the Northern area as the Urheimat of Hijikata's "darkness" and, on the other hand, emphasizing a ubiquitous, transnational, and nomadic nature detached from any cultural values. Butoh has remained amorphous and capable of expanding its cultural articulation. Gunji Masakatsu described his admiration for Hoppo Butoh-ha after a visit to Otaru in autumn 1980: The aspiration of Hoppo Butoh-ha is the journey to hear the voice of butoh and to confirm the bodies of butoh. It flashes across the author mind that he want to believe in the young dancers' journey: that they went to meet the Sun in the North where it is dead because they couldn't wait for it to be born.
