Deconstruction of the Human Body

from a Viewpoint of Tatsumi Hijikata’s Ankoku Butoh

Kayo　Mikami

Kyoto Seika University, Butoh Dancer, PhD

 

1. Hijikata’s own dialogue for the performance of his Bugs Crawl  

(from a note of one of his own pupils)

 

A bug is crawling on the back of your right hand,

A second bug is creeping down from your left side of your neck to your back,

A third bug is wriggling up along your inner thigh,

A fourth bug is squirming down from your left shoulder to your chest,

A fifth bug …

Ah, where is it ?

You’re so itchy, here and there. You can’t stand still.

Itchiness is shoving you all around,

Itchiness under your chin, itchiness at the base of your ears, itchiness around your elbows, itchiness around your kneecaps, itchiness around your waist,

Ah! There’re five-hundred of them!

Around  your eyes, around  your mouth, in your ears, between your fingers, in every mucous membrane

Five  thousand  bugs

A bug on every hair,

A bug in every pore,

From there two hundred thousand bugs are crawling down into your guts and drilling them voraciously,

Having eaten them up the bugs are coming out of your body through the pores,

Now they are eating the space around your body,

Now the bugs are full of the outer space and are being eaten (together with it ) by another kind of wbugs,

Lo! The whole universe is being eaten up by another-another kind of bugs.

( Half a billion bugs on a tree. The inside is all gone )

This is the end of the world.

All has deceased.

( What is dreamed in mind is what exists as reality in the universe.)

 

２．Tatsumi Hijikata and his Ankoku Butoh

In 1960s’Japan the avant-garde dancer Tatsumi Hijikata(1928-1986) originated  his Ankoku Butoh (Dance

of Darkness). As some critics said, ‘with its characteristic skin heads, white-painted nakedness, exotic 

and messy stage costumes, and amateurish performance with lot of  vehement emotions but without certain

techniques’, Butoh sect had been disregarded, aesthetically or academically, as a pagan in the dance

world.Others said because of its ethnic movements based on the ways of Japanese peasants Butoh could

not go beyond the border and would  end  its life together with the death of the founder.

   Therefore it is rather ironical that although he had never been out of the country during his lifetime Butoh dance prevailed all over the world by the end of the previous century with its 600-800 follower groups that consist of his direct followers as well as the fourth and fifth generations thereafter.

Hijikata choreographed his Butoh dance works not by his physical motions but by his own spoken words. Not only because his vocabulary was so hard to comprehend but because his rehearsal was conducted in a rather esoteric mood, it has been quite hard for academic researchers to approach his inner world.

 Fortunately, however, while I was one of his direct pupils in 1978-81 I managed to dictate as deliberately as possible what he said to us dancers during his rehearsal in his own laboratory. So I will be so grateful if my notes will be one of the primary sources for the further study of Hijikata and his Butoh  school.

Hijikata also left some fragmentary notes concerning his methodology. The annotation of the manuscripts for making the general readers appreciate them will not be conducted without the kindest cooperations of his follower dancers and critics. I wish this will be achieved before long for the further development of the Butoh  study.

 

Today it seems absolutely wrong if we do not acknowledge through Butoh dance Hijikata developed a completely  new prospective to the dance world. His well-known words “What is my work? Yes, it’s myself” and “I’ve nothing to show you but my own body” could be analyzed from a variety of aspects. They will include the study of the body and behavior of traditional Japanese people as shown in Kagura (sacred Shinto music and dancing), Noh-play and Kabuki-drama. Also it may involve the researches of the dance schools of the German expressionism. Sometimes it may be carried out by the cultural anthropological researches by focussing into the problems of center and periphery as well as the way to overcome the deadlock of modernism.

  ( Here I would like to appreciate the greatest influence given by the late Michizo Noguchi who used to be the Professor-Emeritus of Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, and the originator of Noguchi Athletic Exercises.)

 

３．Unexpressed Expression and Unintended Movement:

(Fragments from Hijikata’s  notes)

●Body ｍovements against one’s will

There are lots of dancing styles in the world. All of them must begin with a dancer standing upright. However it seemed to Hijikata that human legs are not always   standing upright. Sometimes they are forced to fold themselves against one’s will. Still one has to try to walk.

It was when he came up to Tokyo for the first time that he tried to mimic the way a condemned criminal is supposed to be walking in a prison yard. He is not walking with his legs upright but with his legs collapsed by despair.  

Therefore we will fail to grasp the reality of the human body if we do not think that sometimes we have to walk with our collapsed legs.

You know if you put some water on burning ashes, an ash column will rise instantaneously for a few seconds. That’s the way we are forced to walk. This discovery led him to the principle of his Butoh dancing.

 

In his home country, Hijikata observed, young babies are crammed in a straw container while their mothers are working in the field. The lower part of their body is strictly buried in straw. The legs are folded tightly and unable to move. They are gone numb in spite of their longing for walking.

     A  condemned  criminal is walking in a prison yard. He is cruelly divided into two: his longing to live and his despair to die before  long.

     Peasants working in a rice paddy has to walk with their legs tightly caught in deep mud.

 

In this way Hijikata redefined that standing and walking are not as spontaneous movements of the human body following one’s own will, but they are unavoidable movements against it. Thus the movement of the human body was redefined as something uncontrollable by one’s mind, intention or reason.

    The theory of dancing all over the world used to be founded on the premise that dancing is definitely based on the technique of a dancer to control his/ her body. While Hijikata tried to see the human body as it is existentially. That is the human body acts against one’s own will.

●From self-abandonment to inevitability

In order to present on stage the discrepancy between one’s own will and his own body, Hijikata constructed his methodology of ‘unexpressed expression’ through ‘enforced movements against one’s own will’. One of the earlier products of this methodology was shown, as we already saw, in his choreographic note for Bugs Crawl..

Hijikata said: “You begin to move not because you would like to move but because some parts of your body itch you and irritate you. You walk not being led by your will but being forced by something else.” Now that your body is completely controlled and governed by numberless hordes of bugs, there’s no way but to abandon your ego and dance on the stage without self-consciousness.

    After bags his suggestions extended as far as eroding sulfuric acid on your skin, sharp needles on your eyeball and odious mucus in your mouth,etc.

By means of these evocative phrases the dancers are driven to bay and their perception become the more sensitive. They are forced to dance being possessed by something inevitable alien to their own ego. In turn they themselves will be transformed to something inevitable on stage without being controlled by reason. This was named by him ‘the revelation of inevitability’.

●From revelation of  inevitability to revelation of esse

As described in the note for Bugs Crawl, bugs ate the space around your body and they were eaten up together with the universe by another kind of bugs. Thus the dancer will be led to a state where there’s no distinction between subjects and objects. “This is the end of the world” is the declaration of the supreme state of your cosmology.

Your body has been eaten up by half a billon of bugs and became void. You are but a column of ashes. You are atomized to the extremity. This is the very state he defined as “Butoh is the dead body standing desperately upright.”

     This made him realize on stage standing upright with the slowest motion, which was inwardly sustained only by the rapidly spinning rotation like of a top.

     Hijikata’s remark “Things to be expressed should be paradoxically realized by not expressing thems” seems to correspond to the famous quotation from Zeami (the eminent Noh playwright and player of medieval Japan) “I feel extremely at ease when my inner self is not recognized even by myself.” This is the ultimate state we artists are yearning after. The performance must deliver something more exquisite to audience than what we dancers intended in advance .

 

４．The human body deconstructed

●Cosmology  revealed

It was only two months before his sudden death in 1986 that he had his last workshop. The last day of the workshop was for the rehearsal of Walking through the Woods of Bresdin. His last message was: “Toward the dying woods, toward the dying dance, toward  light, toward  death and  toward  nothingness.”

It indicated that his last issue was how to describe the way of existence , which is now hovering over the border between life and death, which is now full of light and darkness, through his own body.

●Choreographic note for Walking through the Woods of Bresdin

    (as dictated by one of his own pupils)

The scent of the woods, dead bodies of beasts lying here and there, in a swarm of flies

Your inner feeling is getting thinner and thinner to the extremity,

Your outer feeling is getting higher and higher to the extremity,

The fog is getting thicker and thicker,

He has found himself drawing a ragged mountain,

The universe is full of hydrangeas, the pool of mucus, the withered corn field, then toward the meadow

grown thickly by dandelions.

 

The last line, I believe, corresponds to the climate of northern Japan, where he was born and bred， with its

blurred, obscured and sooted  landscape. His Ur-cosmos has been incessantly transformed  into

transparency  and  nothingness.

      His last attempt was, it seems to me, to describe the process of this ephemeral regression through the

concreteness of the human body which exists physically on stage.

Hijikata’s Ankoku Butoh was the way to ward the bodily transparency and nothingness to attain the

ultimate cosmological transparency and nothingness.

●Weakening body or an absolute passiveness

The novelist and sur-realist Tatsuhiko Shibusawa once wrote: “We should call Hijikata a genius, who

originated Ankoku Butoh which is an absolutely peerless school of dancing based on the nature and people

of ethnic Japan.”

While Western dancing aims at vigorous and rhythmical movements of 'burning flesh', Butoh was born

like a feeble smoke from weeds and is going toward the atomized state of the human body as symbolized by a column of ashes.

Also the dance critic Nario Goda wrote, “Butoh has brought our aesthetically deformed human body

back to its original and innate state by evaluating our ‘bow-legs and shrunken limbs’ as they are, and made them ‘the eternal state of the universe’.

     In his late years Hijikata presented a new concept of ‘weakening body’, which is the state of mind being completely discouraged and at a loss, and cannot do anything but accept everything as inevitable fate like the law of gravity. Here the human being is only a dot existing at a crossing of one’ s fate and esse.

 

５．The human body transforms itself endlessly

Hijikata’s words in his last training, “Your inner feeling is getting thinner and thinner to the extremity, Your outer feeling is getting higher and higher to the extremity”, command his dancers to transform their concepts of the internal human body. The body and consciousness have to be dispersed endlessly until they are entirely reduced to particles or atoms.

When they reached to the extremity and are reduced to nothingness, they will be revived into the inexhaustible world of abundance.

     The human body being tightly bound can do nothing but to accept its doom utterly passively. By accepting everything against one’s own will one will be transformed from something specific into universal nothing. The moment it becomes nothingness. it starts to revive itself as everything universal.

This was Hijikata’s ultimate state that should be achieved by his Ankoku Butoh  dance. The human body does continue to receive everything all the time. The human body is always ready to metamorphose itself to anything else. Still the evolution/revolution occurs not according to the law of cause and effect but according to the providence of Nature. It just becomes something else by itself.

I believe Hijikata managed to attain his final goal theoretically as well as practically by his Ankoku Butoh dance.

 

■Bibliography

Kayo Mikami：'The Human Body as a Vessel−an approach to Tatsumi Hijikata’s Ankoku Butoh'

                (1992, ANZ Publishers)

ibid:‘A Study of Tatsumi Hijikata and his Ankoku Butoh’

                (1997, Doctoral thesis to Ochanomizu Women’s University)

ibid: ‘An Eyesight to the Human Body’(2000, Chapter One of The Human Body−Five Pieces of Advice for   　

　　the Development of Body, Perception and  Movement’ edited by Ken Kubo, published by Sobun 　

     Publishers)

　　　　　 　　 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　    ＜Inter-Congress of IUAES 2002, 23 Sept.＞