Butô: Expanding out to the World

The Holland Festival is featuring the butô-related dances of Trajal Harrell, the American-born artistic director of the Zürich Dance Ensemble. Perhaps it is no coincidence that literally just days ago (May 28, 2025 to be precise), a half a world away from the Holland Festival, an article appeared about the recent influence of butô on First Nation and Maori performers in Australia and New Zealand¹. Butô seems to be experiencing a renaissance. But Harrell’s biography induces a certain vertigo: Butô and voguing? butô and hoochi coochie? Butô and Judson church? How did we get to both Harrell and First Nations’ artists using butô?

Hijikata Tatsumi
Butô (also Romanized as ‘butoh’) is the name for a kind of dance or performing art rooted in the activities of Hijikata Tatsumi (1928-1986) in the late 1950s and 1960s². The word “butô” may to call to mind powerful and grotesque images of performers covered in white paint moving at an achingly slow pace, but the dances did not originally look like that. Initially, Hijikata led a small group of dancers trained in German Expressionist Dance, tap, ballet, flamenco, and jazz dance as they experimented with new kinds of dance. His early dances in 1959 and 1960 were somewhat representational or mimetic pieces of narrative dance-theater. These dances remind one of the stark and angular movements of the Standard Bearer and Death in German Expressionist pioneer Kurt Jooss’s dance theater piece The Green Table.

For various reasons, Hijikata and his cohorts forsook representational dance in pursuit of new kinds of dance. Experiments on stage included eating cake, running wind sprints, riding bicycles, and taking pictures of the audience. To these they added a focus on gender-reversals, disease, madness, violence, senility, pain, and technology.

In the late ’60s, Hijikata began a two-pronged venture has some similarities to other psycho-physical transformation techniques such as the Stanislavski System, the Chekov Acting Technique, or Method Acting. He studied people and things not usually used to generate dance movements, such as low-class prostitutes, farmers, and diseased people, as well as animals. He also looked at all sorts of paintings and sculpture, and even things such as the qualities within paintings, as sources for movements. From these, he developed a method of using imagery exercises to modify movements or poses. For example, one might imagine different background media in which one does a movement, such as doing the movement in water or in the glass. The act of imagining each different background medium would affect the movement accordingly. Or, one might imagine various things such as being eaten by insects, or shocked by thousands of volts of electricity to transform the movement. Hijikata then strung the movements together to create full performances.

As Hijikata continued developing his surrealist psycho-physical transformations, artistic differences caused the butô movement to fragment. Some performers remained relatively faithful to Hijikata’s experiments but sought to explore new paths. Maro Akaji (founder of Dairakudakan) tried to be attentive to accidents as a means for finding new movements, and then he “flavored” those movements in a way that is similar to Hijikata’s techniques. Kasai Akira (founder of Tenshikan) studied eurythmy and began to use the properties of language to alter movement. He might imagine himself dancing as a noun, adjective, or verb to see how each would transform a movement differently. Ôno Kazuo (1907- 2010) used his own form of Hijikata’s imagery work, but he didn’t talk much about his methodology but rather spoke of his dances as meditations on near-universal natural cosmological processes such as birth and death. Whereas Hijikata and Maro both developed minutely choreographed dances, Kasai and Ôno, by contrast, favored improvisation. Tanaka Min originally came from the outside of butô and had made a name for himself improvising in nature. For a time, he studied with Hijikata and came to use Hijikata’s techniques with his dance companies. In his solo practice, however, he pursued improv work in collaboration with musicians from the free jazz movement.

Beyond the stereotypical

However, butô’s multiple approaches were not equally visible to non-Japanese audiences. Maro ascribed to the philosophy, “One person, one troupe,” and following his encouragement, in 1976, several of his disciples (including Carlotta Ikeda, Murobushi Kô, and Amagatsu Ushio of Sankai Juku) formed their own companies and relocated to Europe. For a time, Maro and his lineage (particularly Sankai Juku), Ôno and Tanaka were the public face of butô. Only later, artists became aware of the original variety in the art form. As artists discovered Hijikata (and other dancers such as Kasai), both the artists themselves and their audiences began to go beyond the stereotypical understand of butô (but the process of educating the public about the original richness of butô is still ongoing).

Butô in the future

Currently, there are several continua along which self-styled butô performers sort themselves. One is improvisation (often in nature) as opposed to minutely structured dance using imagery work. Another is narrative versus (often surrealist or happenings-based) abstraction. A third is spectacle and entertainment in contrast to simple personally cathartic, emotional, or authentic experience. In practice, these approaches have overlapped with each other, so the reality is much messier than my presentation might suggest. In addition, performers currently use butô to address a wide range of issues including political protest, public mourning, ecological degradation, gender non-conformity, the relationship between humans and technology, post-humanism, and historical memory and responsibility.

When Trajal Harrell takes the stage at the Holland Festival, his dances may not look like the stereotypical image of butô, but Harrell is part of an exciting new wave of dancers taking a new look at butô and making it their own. No one can guess where butô will take dancers next, or where dancers will take butô next, but if the past is any indication, butô will continue to inspire dancers as they wend their way into whatever future may be in store for us all.