TOKYO NOTICE BOARD 05 JULY 2013, p. 23
BOOK REVIEW
HIJIKATA TATSUMI AND BUTOH: DANCING IN A POOL OF GRAY GRITS
By Bruce Baird
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 293 pp., $95.00 (hardcover)
Reviewed by Gianni Simone
The first time I encountered butoh was at a Carlotta Ikeda’s solo performance in my hometown. I only remember a few details ? the empty stage, and this tiny white-painted woman with an old-fashioned hat perched on her head. She spent most of the time struggling through the stage, an umbrella in her hand, as if she was about to stumble at every step. Most of all, I remember my confusion in experiencing something that was so distant from the kind of dance, and performance in general, I was used to. It was so utterly different that I didn’t know what to make of it. Maybe, I later realize, I didn’t have to think; it was enough to feel.
Even now, more than 50 years after “Forbidden Colors” ? the first officially recognized butoh piece ? premiered at a dance festival in Tokyo, butoh continues to mystify and confound, eluding people’s expectations. This book tries to make sense of this alien entity that, in the words of author Bruce Baird, “is always an unfinished project” which resists interpretation. By chronicling the life and painstakingly analyzing the work of one of its protagonists, Tatsumi Hijikata, Baird highlights the contradictions that make butoh beautiful and grotesque, poetic and nightmarish, erotic and austere ? all at the same time ? mesmerizing the audience while escaping the usual cliche´s that make mainstream performance art attractive and easily digestible. One of the book’s best qualities is that Baird firmly puts every new phase in Butoh’s development within the context of the richly creative cultural milieu of postwar Japanese culture. Especially the ebullient and often violent climate of the 1950s and ‘70s seems to be mirrored in an art form which rejected traditional technique for a form of sometime extreme physical and mental training whose goal was the release of that primordial energy that modern society had gradually suppressed. Today even the casual observer is acquainted with butoh’s performers whose white-painted corpse-like bodies struggle through unnatural movements and contortions. In the middle of all this experimentation we find Hijikata, a contradictory figure who never sold himself cheaply and through his Surrealism-influenced poetic seemed to revel in misleading people through exaggeration. The Akita-born artist helped shape and codify this “theater of pain” that he saw as an answer to social violence and inequalities. Baird helps the reader go beyond the confusion and shock effect through minutely detailed descriptions of Hijikata’s works. Based on his Ph.D. thesis, the book is a veritable treasure trove of information and reflects the many years it took to complete the project. Indeed, this is first and foremost an academic study, and casual readers could be overwhelmed by all the details and Baird’s preoccupation with approaching each idea from different viewpoints. This said, it is also a book which rewards the curious reader who wants to learn about postwar Japan from a different perspective.