ABSTRACT
This work gives an account of Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo, telling the story of the founding of Japanese butoh through their partnership as performers and choreographers, extending to the larger story of butoh’s international assimilation. It also weaves the aesthetic development of butoh with the social and political issues of post-World War II Japan. Bu means dance and to means step. Most simply speaking, butoh is a dance step; also known as Ankoku Butoh – darkness dance. The dance begun by Hijikata and Ohno is now identified as “butoh” (sometimes “buto”) and practiced around the globe. For contemporary dancers in the lineage of Hijikata and Ohno, butoh is still dark, but not entirely; bodies of light often ensue from darkness, as in Takenouchi Atsushi’s Jinen Butoh – dance with nature. Keenly aware of the strictures of society, Hijikata wanted to uncover the dance already happening in the body. As one of his many inheritors, Takenouchi works with a similar principle: “everything is already dancing” (Takenouchi, Interview with Fraleigh, 2003).
