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Butoh Theatre
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Butoh Theatre
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What are the essential personal, political, cultural, and/or social events that influenced Butoh?
The first official Butoh piece was performed in 1959, but it had been appearing in Japan since the end of World War Two. The end of the second world war left the Japanese society confused by the industrialization and transformation of their militaristic and traditional culture along with the horror caused by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This led to a student uprising and wanting change. Hijikata Tatsumi was inspired by the writings of Jean Genet, the Marquis De Sade, and Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty.
What is Butoh?
Butoh street theatre is a mix of dance and theatre. Personally, I think that Butoh is quite bizarre but it is considered beautiful by some people. It is completely stripped down to reveal the natural body; there are no costumes, no lights and especially no spectacle. The actors do not wear any clothes apart from white underwear. They are painted completely white and all of their movements revolve around the core of the body, with each movement; accentuating each muscle on the actor’s body. Butoh is rooted in Japanese ceremony and tradition. Butoh arose after World War Two had ended. The two main founders were Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo.
What are the essential aspects of Butoh that need to be known and understood?
What are the main principles /conventions of Butoh?
There are a few main principles that are very important. The actor has to be almost naked apart from wearing white underwear and the body painted white, most of them also have shaved heads. The actors are usually skinny but have to be very fit in order to perform extremely slow and controlled movements. Butoh is silent theatre so the audience can create the story them self based on the story that is being conveyed through the "dance" and the music that accompanies it. A large part of Butoh is the lack of spectacle, which different it is to the rest of Japanese theatre and most other theatre around, at the time it was introduced.
To successfully perform Butoh Theatre there are multiple things that the actor needs to accomplish and be able to do. Since Butoh is performed almost completely naked and in public there's a necessary amount of confidence required to perform. Physically and mentally Butoh is a mix between “modern dance, Zen meditation and yoga”(The Guardian). You need full body awareness, fitness and extreme control of your body to imagine your body as an empty bag, animated from within by a variety of items beautiful, ugly, exaggerated.