Cultural Statement

My work is profoundly rooted in Japanese Butoh.

Butoh was founded by the Japanese choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata in the late 1950s. His technique is a development of a path that ties the body and imagination.

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"All of dance starts with two slender legs but Butoh starts where you cannot stand up although you are trying very hard" stated Tatsumi Hijikata.

His dance does not take for granted that legs are part of the body. He perceived every part of the body as a function of itself: legs are for standing and arms are for grabbing. He let every part of the body be reborn through his dance aesthetic.

"In European Modern dance, the dancer is the 'subject', and the manner that they interpret a piece is an expression of their individuality. However, in Butoh, this concept is reversed," wrote Akira Kasai, another important Butoh pioneer who studied with Hijikata, in The Dance in the Future. 2004.

The Butoh dancer has to become a body without any thought and focus upon what is causing the movement. 'What moves you' is always prioritized rather than 'What you think to do'. When a dancer quiets his mind, and instead allows the imagination to lead movement, then he will be engaged in a universal mind. Only at this moment will the audience be free and witness to a genuine human condition. Hijikata named this dynamism "Butoh".

To complete his own style, Hijikata looked back to his childhood during World War ll. He talked about his brothers going away red faced from their final sake toast and then coming back as a box of ashes. "In Tohoku, there is a baby in the basket sitting by the rice farm. He is crying because the grown-ups are all working in the soil, cold wind blowing their cheeks. They are too busy to take care of the baby. The baby is crying and crying and then he starts to eat his darkness. He nips the darkness out to eat it. Butoh was born in this initiation of devouring hopelessness for survival".

Perhaps, Hijikata witnessed a real strength of human beings in the dark: the deepest desire for Life, and tried to transmit it to the performance.

Tatsumi Hijikata’s last words were, "There is a bright world like a musical theater beyond the dark tunnel".

I inherit his vision and desire to see it.  

Mariko Endo© Cultural Statement 2016.

Edited by Tomoko Kawamoto (Public Information Manager at Museum of the Moving Image).