BUTOH

Butoh (舞踏) was born in a Japan scarred by the aftermath of war, in a society marked by the trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American occupation and forced modernization. Its two founders, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, sought a dance that resembled nothing else — neither Western ballet nor traditional nihon buyō. In 1959, Hijikata's first performance, "Kinjiki" (Forbidden Colors), inspired by Yukio Mishima's novel, caused such a scandal that he was banned from the Japanese modern dance federation.

Butoh breaks with every convention of beauty. Bodies are often naked or dressed in rags, coated in white powder, mouths distorted, eyes rolled back. Dancers transform into what they are not: an old man, a fetus, a dead tree, an insect, a dying flower. Hijikata spoke of a "body of mud," inhabited by ancestors, the memory of the village, the wind, illness. Ohno, for his part, danced in a dress, dedicating his solos to his mother, to La Argentina, to Federico García Lorca; his presence was that of a luminous ghost.

Today, Butoh is a constellation of practices: Sankai Juku brought the movement to international stages with its ritual performances; Min Tanaka developed "body weather" in the rice fields; Ko Murobushi explored the metamorphosed body. It is no longer a school, but a radical way of questioning what a body is, what the stage exposes, what slowness reveals. Many contemporary choreographers — Pina Bausch, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Boris Charmatz — acknowledge their debt to this dance born of ashes.