Visiting professor explains Butoh

From painting to literature, sculpture to drama, Japan has always been an innovative nation when it comes to the arts, so much so that they have often ended up creating their own school of a particular art form. Naturally, the Japanese also have their own unique dance form, but one that is vastly different from Western dance.

Professor Bruce Baird, associate professor of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, visited Middlebury on Sept. 27th.  Baird, who received his Ph.D in Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is an expert on Japanese Butoh dance. Early in the lecture, he showed the audience two clips of Butoh performances. The first one consisted of a dance that involved several athletic men running back and forth across traditional tatami mats and then playing baseball. The second was of a single man in very sparse light. I could barely make out the actual dynamics of his movements but I did notice a giant golden phallus strapped to his groin. The performers were all nearly naked.

Butoh is a theater movement that was started in 1959 by choreographer and dancer Hijitaka Tatsumi. The characteristics of Butoh movement include tension, contortion, changes of direction and being off-balance. Hijitaka took inspiration from watching the movements of all sorts of figures, from animals to prostitutes, from farmers to handicapped people. Baird even threw in a few demonstrations in which he would pose in a way that his upper body was contorted around one axis and his lower body around another.

According to Baird, the purpose of Butoh is for the performers to access “a transcendent, primal reality” and to “yield authentic movement.” It is based on the “particularities of the Japanese body.” He also  made the point that the movements in Butoh are incredibly restricted. Much of this restriction comes down to the performer controlling their body. What was most interesting, however, were the restrictions imposed by the imagination. Not only might a typical dancer imagine a bug crawling on their neck while doing a move but also he or she would have to consider how that movement would be affected with an extra bug — or an extra hundred.

Central to Baird’s lecture was the ability of Butoh to mimic the movements in pieces of visual arts. An example was the notes for creating the figure in English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley’s “The Peacock Skirt”. Professor Baird included Hijitaka’s actual notes on how to create this figure. The directions were fascinating and unconventional. One of the notes, for example, calls upon the performer to imagine that they are made of nerves and that they have a nerve extending out of the back of their neck. Another called for the performer to imagine a deer was nearby. Baird himself said he didn’t know how one achieved this but that it would allow the performer to mimic the figure in “The Peacock Skirt”.

The origin of the “grey grits” idea is confusing but an amazing concept. It comes from a story in the collection A Certain Lucas by Argentine writer Julio Cortazar, in which a scientist discovers that it is possible for humans to swim in grey grits. The discovery becomes a phenomenon, particularly in light of a Japanese swimmer, who sets a world record for swimming through a five-meter long pool of grey grits. One of the lines in the lecture mentioned how the swimmer who could dive further over the grits than the next would have a crucial advantage of centimeters. Baird further linked this to Phelps beating Cavic in 2008 Olympics and how the difference came down to millimeters. This hits home at the central point of Butoh: complete control over the tiny movements of the body. With this control comes freedom and with freedom comes catharsis.

Baird said his goal was simply to examine dances and try to figure out what is going in them, perhaps so that he might come closer to defining this form that Japanese consider indefinable. Overall, the lecture did well to provide a thorough insight into this fascinating form of dance. Amidst all its restrictions, Butoh challenges the audience to reconsider the nature of movement altogether and the dancers to reinvent it.