1. art and entertainment
2. dance
3. modern dance

The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography:
Reflective writing on choreographic research by Frances Barbe
Photos: S.Mitsos
“Our bodily wounds eventually close
and heal. But there are always hidden
wounds, those of the heart, and if you
know how to accept and endure them,
you will discover the pain and joy
“There are things which are not
which is impossible to express with
apparent in our daily lives. This is
exactly what I want to show – those words. You will reach the realm of
poetry which only the body can
aspects of our lives which are not
express.”
apparent to us.”
“My dance is far removed from
conventions and techniques…it is
the unveiling of my inner life.”
TATSUMI HIJIKATA
‘Notes by Tatsumi Hijikata’ In: Butoh:
Shades of Darkness p185
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
KAZUO OHNO
‘Notes by Kazuo Ohno’ In: Butoh: Shades
of Darkness p176
By F.rances Barbe
1
Introduction
Heralding from 1960’s Japan, Butoh came into existence
through the collaboration of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo
Ohno. Originally named by Hijikata as ankoku butoh or
‘dance of utter darkness’, it rejected the formalism of both
traditional Japanese performance, and of western ballet and
modern dance. It also became famous for its exploration of
the dark side of humanity, so often avoided in dance. Butoh
dancers sought to manifest ‘inner life’ in the body and asked
again the fundamental questions: What is dance? What is the
body? What is it to be human?
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
2
Butoh has taken many forms over the decades and the rejection of ‘formalised
dance’ inherent in its inception, means that Butoh is constantly changing and
evolving, making it very difficult to define. However, there are some key
qualities or ‘intentions’ behind Butoh or Butoh-based work that distinguish it.
Butoh means not to move, but to ‘be moved’, not to dance, but to allow the
body to ‘be danced’. It requires the dancer to work in a more receptive,
responsive mode than other ‘technique-oriented’ dance. Butoh prioritises the
‘inner life’ or ‘soul’ of the movement above technique; it is more interested in
the experience of the dancer and the audience than in technical prowess for its
own sake. It does however require skill. The skill it values most highly is the
ability of the dancer to transform. Butoh often works in the area of the absurd,
or the grotesque, and might seek the double-edged image: the beautiful within
the ugly, the old within the young, dark within the light. Extremity is a feature
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
3
of Butoh. Extreme slow motion, frenetic movement, extreme emotional
expressionism, animal states, strange hybrid characters or material qualities
that ‘re-form’ the body. Alongside that extremity, there is an art of containment
in Butoh. However much is being shown, there must always be more contained
within, so that even that which is not overtly shown is present somehow.
“Butoh is how you use your imagination, how you make your own journey
and how you discover it.”
Miyoko Urayama, Ensemble Dancer
“Butoh is never as successful as when it is obviously giving out more than
one thing at once, even contradicting itself in some way. This is something I
have tried to incorporate into the music: that there should be a fundamental
uncertainty about its interpretation, whilst being in some ways perfectly
clear.” Keith Johnson, Composer.
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
4
My interest in Butoh grew out of a deep questioning of dance as an art form.
After fifteen years training in ballet and modern dance I wanted to push the
boundaries of dance, and to explore more the relationship between form and
content, and the complex interactions between the dancer, their instrument and
their audience. The questions Butoh posed for dance resonated with my own,
and the challenges it presented have helped me to understand the more subtle
forces at work in performance. Through Butoh I am looking for a greater
connection between the ‘inner world’ and ‘outer form’ of dance. I enjoy the
emphasis on ‘reduction’ and ‘distillation’ in Butoh, which challenges the
presence and energy of the performer.
After a decade of exploring Butoh, I took what I knew into a three-week dance
research project in London at The Place’s Choreodrome in September 2002. I
was joined by composer Keith Johnson, four soloists, and five ensemble
dancers.
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
5
The aim of the research was to innovate my choreographic process through the
model of Japanese Butoh dance. The research questions focused on:
• Inner Worlds: The relationship between inner-life and outer form.
• Distillation: The Potency of Reduction.
• Music and Movement.
• The thematic starting point was “The Figure in the Landscape”.
• The methodology was to generate solo and group choreographic material,
and to develop training and improvisation structures.
A reading list is provided to facilitate further research.
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
6
Inner Worlds
Butoh encourages the dancer to draw dance from within,
to arrive at a state in which we can connect with
impulses deep within the body and the creative self.
Photos: G. Frusteri
How do we ‘prepare a dancer’ for Butoh-based work?
How do you work in a way that balances physical
virtuosity and imaginative virtuosity?
How do you train interiority?
What is this ‘within’ that we always refer to when
discussing Butoh?
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
7
One is not only ‘dancing the steps’ in Butoh. The dancer must be going through
something, a real experience that occurs between the imagination, the body
and the space in the moment of performance. For this reason, the use of
images is key in Butoh. Images also feature heavily in the creation of
movement vocabulary, drawing movement from individual bodies of each
dancer, encouraging ‘dancing from within’ rather than from without. The use of
images provides a dimension beyond the physical for dance. This dimension is
central to maintaining the ‘artistry’ of dance as opposed to dance as ‘sport’.
The nature of the images used in Butoh varies greatly, depending on the
individual artist and the work being performed. Some might relate to
objectifying the body, seeing it as a rock, or a ‘wet rug’ or an animal - cat,
deer, snake. Others might be more related to embodying emotions or
characters, such as an old woman, or an intensive state of fear. Often they are
poetic, surreal or irrational which is significant in creating certain kinds of
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
8
experiences for the dancer on stage. For example, you should dance
simultaneously young woman and old woman or a soldier and the mother who
lost a son to war.
I came to discover that perhaps the most important element that makes a
performance Butoh is the energy and conviction with which the dancer
performs…My realisation was that I was attempting an extreme level of
conviction
towards
the
mental
image
that
I
wanted
my
body
to
communicate. The energy and clarity of my image must allow the audience
to see something alive and real and not just movement!
Tamzin Hale, Soloist
To explore this area I was inspired by the idea of Hijikata’s ‘Butoh Fu’ - or
‘Butoh score’ - and the way Hijikata is reported to have used words to draw
movement from his dancers, to unlock something from within them.
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
9
Hijikata had attempted to capture all kinds of emotions, landscapes, ideas
and so on, by using words that were physically real to him… Hijikata saw
human existence as inextricably part of the body. But this body only comes
alive when it is chased into a corner by words and pain - that is,
consciousness”
Nanako, Kurihara. “Hijikata Tatsumi: The Words of Butoh” The Drama Review 44.i (p15, 17) Spring
2000
Hijikata’s attempts to “awaken and embody physical images through words” is
considered a kind of ‘method’, according to Yukio Waguri, a student of Hijikata’s
who has documented his work. Waguri describes how each word or phrase
represented a specific dance form, movement and relationship between the
body and space. An example of Butoh Fu given by Waguri is:
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
10
“A person is buried in a wall, He becomes an insect that dancers on a thin
sheet of paper. It makes rustling noises, trying to hold falling particles. The
insect then becomes a person, so fragile that he could crumble with the
slightest touch.”
Butoh Kaden: Butoh Fu by Yukio Waguri.
I realised in my own way, I was also making choices about how I used words in
the choreographic process, and wanted to look more critically at that. I avoided
the use of Hijikata’s words at this stage and tried instead to find new ways of
working with my own words and encouraged the dancers to create their own
imagistic scores.
I created what I called ‘image streams’. For example:
You are cramped in a small space. Unsettled you fidget.…
A smile grows in your belly…and catches a ride with your breath to your
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
11
face.
Your heart becomes heavy… Its weight ruins your smile.
You carry this strange face, with your body, out of this small place and
into the world. Gradually your mouth falls open, wide, you look with
your open mouth at the world around.
You are looking for a place to stop.
Suddenly icy coldness descends, drenching you.
You shuffle on, growing colder and colder.
Until finally you stop - frozen solid
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
12
“You see with your open mouth” led to a physicality
that interested me. It gave the dancers a certain
‘presence’ and came across very differently in each
of their bodies.
Photo: S.Mitsos
‘Image streams’ can be used to
guide improvisations or to provide the inner life or
transformational journey for a set choreography.
They can also help the dancer to remain ‘present’,
actually experiencing something when they perform,
both physically and imaginatively, and to do more
than just show what they rehearsed.
The following is an example of an ‘image stream’ written by Rachel Sweeney for
her solo:
Squatting on warm rock, hovering over the water’s edge
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
13
backs of hand spread their surfaces and gather heat
warm solace in old faded tunes
melody sings through broken shell lungs
colour all in blues, saturates and deepens the throat
sound pours over skin, warms the joints
cloth gathers swirling around legs as the hand turns a skull piece
shrapnel splinters bone, interlocking ribs
small cormorant strains out of the mouth
cragged tiny tongue with beady eyes
fingers search for gull eggs hidden in billowing folds
rattling bones turn metal
to stone
ears search the horizon
echoing primal rhythms.
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
14
Writing image streams, inspired by the idea of Hijikata’s ‘Butoh Fu’, was a way
for me to feed, test and develop the dancer’s imaginative engagement with
their dance.
With the focus shift to the ‘inner life’, Butoh can sometimes be seen as too
internal and inaccessible. Of course it is not enough for the dancer just to have
the images in mind. The question is how creatively they manifest that in the
body. Ultimately, Butoh is an engagement with an audience through the body,
as is all dance, and that strong ‘inner life’ must in the end be ‘manifested’ in the
body, energy, space and time, and it is important to interrogate the skill of the
dancer in manifesting images in the body, in form, energy, rhythm and space.
I developed training exercises and improvisation structures that engaged and
connected the dancers body AND their imagination, and those that I felt would
reveal their ability to fill form and movement with an ‘inner life’. One exercise I
have developed is what I call ‘Sour Lemon’. I asked the dancers to generate a
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
15
kind of full body picture from a given impulse. For example I used states such
as ‘sucking on a sour lemon’, ‘happy toddler’, ‘sad baby’, ‘cold shock’, ‘heavy
stomach’. I asked them to make these as big as they can, and expressionist in
style. They were asked to arrive at them either ‘in an instant’, that is on my
clap/command, or slowly over a certain period. They were encouraged to
involve the face as fully as possible, as an exploration of what is often referred
to in Butoh as the ‘living mask’, using the face as a kind of mask. The use of
the face often reveals self-consciousness and tests if dancers can really commit
to something fully, such as a big smile, or a distorted face and, crucially, to
keep it alive when asked to maintain it for an extended period. It is important
too that dancers experience different ways of working with the face, from very
calm neutral face, through small subtle changes, to outbursts of different states
and emotions on a large scale. Being asked to hold the ‘state’ for pro-longed
periods, forces a constant renegotiation of the energy and life force behind the
form. You feel immediately when the life force drains from such a state.
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
16
I found the use of extreme expressions useful in exploring the area between
inner life and outer form because the bigger the outer expression or form, the
stronger the dancer’s inner life must be. However, a very small subtle smile
might also be used, which carries its own challenges of making something
potent though it is small. Being asked to hit expressive states on cue explores a
performer’s ability to work with inner life with as much discipline as they work
with physicality. On stage, you cannot always spend half an hour drumming up
a state, sometimes its timing is determined by something outside of you. How
do you learn how to arrive at a state on cue without it being false? Empty?
Purely physical? That is what I wanted to know about.
Throughout the project we acted as audience for each other to interrogate this
area between inner life and outer form in relation to the audience. Articulating
what we saw, without always knowing the intent of the dancer, we tried to
assess the relationship between the body and the image, and the level at which
the image was really manifested in the body in form and energy. We came to
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
17
appreciate the wide variety of interpretations that even the smallest movement
can have for an audience through articulating the associations, ideas or worlds
that emerged for us as an audience. These varied a little or a lot from the
dancer’s actual intent. Of course there is no clear equation for the complex
interaction between internal world and its physical manifestation, or between
the dancer and the audience. But an interrogation of it helped us to specify the
way we think and talk about this area, and move beyond certain assumptions
about it.
At the outset I had articulated that Butoh allowed ‘space for the audience’. I
wanted to learn how I could better articulate what I meant by that. Butoh
works on a very poetic, visceral and emotional level with its audience. You can
experience something very directly from Butoh, though you might not be able
to clearly define it in words. In dialogue with my mentor, Lorna Marshall, I
came to differentiate between an audience’s ‘experience’ of a work, and their
‘interpretation’ of it. While I am responsible for guiding their experience, I
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
18
cannot control their interpretation. If I work with great clarity and specificity
with the entry points I design for them, then hopefully the audience will involve
their own imagination, life experience, and interests in interpreting it. This
space between the intention of the artist and the experience of the audience is
powerful because it is mysterious. The temptation is to deal with that unknown
area by being too direct and leaving no space for our audience to bring
themselves to the work. Or the other extreme is to accept that you need no
intention because they will interpret what they will anyway. The way I see it,
Butoh does neither of these. It generally has a very clear ‘intent’ or experience
to offer, but is best when it does not deliver that too literally or directly to its
audience, leaving them ‘space’ for their interpretation, yet guiding it in some
way. Butoh values mystery.
“Interpretation is translation, an enrichment of perceptual exchanges
between the work, the performer and the witness.”
Sondra Fraleigh “Witnessing the Frog Pond” In: Researching Dance p.192
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
19
Through this research I have changed the way I refer to this area between
audience and dancer or choreographer. Instead of talking about communicating
something to an audience, I might refer instead to ‘entry points’. For example,
an ‘entry point’ might be rapid changes of focus with head and eyes while
keeping the body very still, or making the body as small as possible, or making
the body shake intensively. From these the audiences builds meaning. There is
not a clear, single line to the audience that the artist controls. There is a
messy, mult-levelled interchange between the artists ‘entry points’ and the
audience’s subjective interpretation.
“It is the performers intention and purpose that makes dance ‘more than
movement’.”
Sondra Fraleigh “Family Resemblance” In: Researching Dance. p15
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
20
Separating the choreographer’s intent, movement or form, the dancer’s intent
and the audience’s experience and interpretation, I have come to a greater
understanding of what I called ‘space for the audience’.
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
21
“The performance must deliver something more exquisite to the audience
than what we dancers intended in advance.”
Kayo Mikami, “Deconstruction of the
Human Body from a Viewpoint of Tatsumi Hijikata’s Ankoku Butoh”
“The work made me think about emotions a lot. The work did not overtly
ask for expressing emotions, however it also did not refuse them”.
Stephanie Sachsenmaier
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
22
Photo. G. Frusteri
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
23
Distillation: The Potency of Reduction
I believe that Japanese art is rooted in the beauty of
simplicity. It looks simple, but still it is very expressive.
As Eugenio Barba says - expressivity of the body is "maximum efforts and minimum results)
Miyoko Urayama, Ensemble Dancer
Photo: W. Omija
One of the most powerful aspects of my experience of Butoh has been
exploring slow motion, stillness and isolation in movement. I combine these
under the term ‘distillation’ because the word suggests that something becomes
more potent through reduction. I wanted to explore this in more depth during
this research, asking questions about what is required to perform ‘distilled’
movement. When is it captivating and when is it boring? What is the ‘result’ of
distillation on stage, what effect can it have? I wanted to develop working
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
24
methods for exploring these aspects in training and choreography and to
articulate the importance of distillation for contemporary dance.
Slow motion: Not just taking a long time to do something.
We worked on slow motion through two main forms; slow walking and slowly
rising and falling. In walking, oppositional force in the body was important to
maintaining energy. There are different ways of working with oppositional or
dynamic forces into the body. One is more ‘technical’ and the other ‘imagistic’.
The technical aspect I understand through Tadashi Suzuki’s idea of ‘energy’ and
‘brakes’, that forward motion requires a pulling backwards. The three rules that
inform his ‘Slow Ten’ exercise have also informed my work in slow walking in
Butoh. They are:
1) don’t sway from side to side
2) keep the centre moving constantly, not allowing it to stop with each step
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
25
3) maintain the centre at one, fixed level throughout
These rules develop balance, ‘centeredness’, ‘groundedness’, and a sense of
‘energy’ and ‘brakes’. All this provides a technical base on which to build a more
imagistic approach, common in Butoh. Butoh for example might create
oppositional force in the body using the image of walking through mud, or in
water. Of course, the technical and the imagistic approaches complement and
support each other, and ultimately a performer is probably working with both.
Working in slow motion forces dancers to deal with transitions very fully, being
constantly aware of what is happening in the body in each moment of a
journey. Ideally, we should be just as attentive when working at faster speeds,
but of course this is even more demanding. Slow motion also allows time for
the audience to be more attentive to each moment of a movement.
Working in slow-motion is not just about taking a long time to do something.
Working slowly forces the dancer to work very precisely with their energy and
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
26
with ‘embodiment’. Time and space can be ‘created’ or changed when we work
in slow motion, taking us out of an everyday rhythm, it can show us different
‘time worlds’. As Tadashi Endo once said, it can deal in the timescales we
cannot see with our eyes, that of children growing children or plants changing.
It can present the past or memory because it is not a ‘real’ or ‘present’ time
frame. Also, working in extreme slow motion made me more acutely aware of
the rhythm and speed of real time gestures and motion, allowing me to be
more creative in my use of all kinds of speed and rhythm in my choreography.
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
27
Stillness: Where more is revealed, not less
What does it take to be really still?
How do you make stillness alive and captivating?
Photo: G. Frusteri
We observed the constant trembling that goes on in the body when one
attempts to stand still. We observed how an arm’s shape tends to fall and
droop with gravity when held for long periods in stillness, requiring an upward
or opposition movement to be really still. Inner movement is required to
achieve stillness.
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
28
The importance of ‘stillness’ to appreciate ‘movement’ and ‘silence’ to
appreciate ‘sound’ and vice versa has never been so clear to me. As a
dancer I feel that my training has been in ‘moving’ and that my teachers
have neglected to train me in how to ‘stop’! True stillness is an enormous
skill, a private dance within the body which allows an audience to really
appreciate what comes before and after it.
Tamzin Hale, Soloist Dancer
Physical tension in the body can block the energy channels and make stillness
seem dead, stiff or inanimate. Constant monitoring of the body’s state of
relaxation and openness is important to stillness, and so small changes are
required to maintain stillness. Our body makes small shifts constantly which we
need to monitor and readjust if we are to be physically still. And we must
constantly ‘breathe’ life into stillness, so outer stillness requires inner
movement to be truly alive.
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
29
One way of energising a still posture is to find something that is or feels
between two things. Something that is about to become something else. For
example, stopping at the height of an upward movement which is about to
become a downward movement. In a sense this contains within it BOTH up and
down. I often refer to ‘arresting’ movement rather than coming to stillness,
because I like the sense that something is stopped in full flight, rather than
being reduced to stillness. To experience this I might ask people to move in a
constant flow and call suddenly ‘stop’, so they do not plan where they will stop,
but are ‘arrested’ in motion and perhaps have a sense of being in-between.
“We can be still…If we could not we would not know movement…We know
things partly through contrast…”
Sondra Horton Fraleigh Researching Dance p4
The project highlighted for me the primacy and immediacy of stillness. With
training in dance, my body ultimately desired to fill in the gaps to create
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
30
movement even when there was no motivation. I found myself in a constant
battle; the motive being to reduce the body to essence or stillness yet my
body was going through the motions of attempting to create ‘filler’. I found I
was aware of twitches and small movements to readjust weight and at
times this did lead to moments of tension as I tried to find my stillness; a
stillness that was never quite still!
Nicola Gibbons, Ensemble
Dancer
I wish contemporary dancers and choreographers would use stillness more
often and address the quality of stillness in their work. As an audience of dance
I often feel that I choke on movement after movement, without any stillness or
space from which to feel the full force of any movement or phrase. A lot of
movement is thrown away in dance, undigested by its audience, and in some
cases ‘un-experienced’ by the dancers. It’s as if the dancer only exists when
moving. Butoh has taught me the power of existing on the stage in stillness,
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
31
and the way that can challenge a dancer’s presence and draw their audience in.
Through Butoh I have came to appreciate stillness as an essential starting point
for dance. Stillness is to movement what silence is to music. Without silence we
cannot experience sound and music. Without stillness we cannot fully
experience movement. Stillness allows an audience to experience even the
smallest movement to great effect.
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
32
Isolation
What connections must occur when parts of the
body move in isolation?
What is the effect or result of isolation?
Photo: W. Omija
Our study of isolation explored head movement, arms, legs and face in
isolation. I became very interested in the isolation of head movements, simple
shifts of focus, combined with the slow motion walk forward. I used the rolling
rhythm of Arvo Part’s ‘Spiegel Im Spiegel’ music as well as silence and a low
hum to accompany these explorations. Isolating the head while the body was
still or walking in another rhythm began as a research question about isolation
but was very suggestive choreographically and conceptually. It connected the
bodies to the space through their gaze, which became more powerful because
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
33
of the simplicity of the rest of the body. It suggested an environment that was
invisible but present, at times fearful, at others seemingly exciting.
There is a kind of synaesthesia which seems to play out in the language of
Butoh, whereby the dancer can mix up the senses… to send the normal
sensory functions into disarray, allowing the ears to feel, or the eyes to
smell...An arm might explore all the crevices and contours of its own skin
with all the objective distance of a gloved and estranged limb.
Rachel Sweeney, Soloist Dancer
Each dancer used some aspect of isolation in their solo as well. For example
Rachel Sweeney’s solo figure explored arms in isolation, giving them their own
life force.
It was Yumiko Yoshioka who first articulated to me the idea that isolation
required connection.
While isolation suggests a feeling of disengagement or
cutting off, it also paradoxically requires a deepening of connections. You
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
34
cannot cut a connection that does not exist strongly for you.
I realised isolation can contribute to a sense of something being ‘done to’ the
dancer, happening to them rather than a result of their own conscious action,
and this is key in Butoh where the dancer should not so much MOVE by BE
MOVED. Is isolation a key to allowing the body to start speaking for itself? Can
isolation
reveal
invisible
forces,
seemingly
separate
from
the
dancer
themselves? The Butoh dancer needs to listen to the body and follow it, rather
than control and force it, following the thoughts of the body.
Distillation, whether it is isolation, slow motion or stillness, requires that
something much bigger is going on in the interior than what we see on the
exterior. The imagistic process is engaged, the body is packed with energy and
the dancer must be very present. The results of distillation can be mystery, a
sense of another time or another level of experience. The audience’s attention
should be drawn to notice and appreciate the smallest detail of a movement.
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
35
The audience should not be alienated by distillation.
A very important part of this research was observing and understanding when
reduction, makes the movement stronger, revealing more, and when it merely
reduces and in fact weakens the impact. I have watched one dancer turn on the
spot in slow motion and been utterly bored, and watched another dancer doing
the same thing and been transfixed, because I could feel their energy, thoughts
and sensations flowing out of the body. The smallest details were magnified,
transitions were visible, and I could experience time in a completely different
way.
Restriction or reduction can potentially increase the force of movement and
focus the power of dance. It is not slow motion or stillness in themselves that
are interesting. It is what the dancer does with them, how deeply they
experience something different about the body through those states. How they
draw out the potency of that reduction to reveal the small invisible dances of
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
36
life, and the space between things.
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
37
Music and Movement
“I think that, in dance, one of the roles that music serves is to express
those things that the choreography is apparently denying, or furiously trying
to suppress.”
Keith Johnson, Composer
Principles of ‘distillation’ were explored in music and sound as much as in
movement. Composer Keith Johnson and I shared from the outset a common
understanding of the importance of simplicity to finding greater depth. We
found points of comparison between silence (in music) and stillness (in dance),
and shared a focus on these elements in our work. We were also interested in
allowing movement and music to pursue parallel journeys from a shared
starting point, looking at how these two journeys impacted on each other. We
didn’t want the music to follow the dance, or the dance to follow the music, but
to see two journeys or processes unravel simultaneously. The theme of ‘figure
in the landscape’ was explored in both sound and movement. We explored how
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
38
music functioned as a landscape for the more ‘figurative’ image of the dancers,
especially in the solo work. We also explored how we could make the music a
figure ‘moving’ in a landscape of bodies. At times I also challenged dancers to
work in silence, to reveal more about the rhythm and dynamic of their dance
through the absence of sound and rhythm.
Keith was there from the outset seeing how dancers responded to the sparks I
gave and would then respond himself, adding either support or friction to what
they were doing. Barbara was irritated at first by the music he put to her solo
exploration, but the result of that friction was that she had to find her own
journey more strongly, and not rely on the music to work in obvious support of
her. We found that the pursuit of harmony was not always the most useful way,
and used this research project to acknowledge and work with discomfort and
what it could teach us about our preferences, expectations and habits.
In challenging the dancers with silence, I worked with the opening bars of Carl
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
39
Orff's ‘O Fortuna’ in 'Carmina Burana'. This piece is an obvious example of
music that can completely transform any space, even an empty rehearsal
studio. It is big in energy, clear in phrasing and dynamic. I asked the dancers
to try to create movement that, when performed in silence, attempted to
‘energise’ and fill the space in the same way that music did. They worked ‘with’
the music and then we took it away. This led us into a very interesting
exploration of volume and texture in movement, and how much the
involvement and embodiment of the dancers affected their impact on the
space. This was silence as a ‘process’ to go through. We also looked at the use
of silence in performance for the final presentation, which was also challenging,
frustrating and interesting. There was of course never silence! The audience
was coughing, and there were drums or pianos playing in rooms above us at
different times.
So actually working in silence usually means accepting
whatever ‘score’ your surroundings provides for you. In rehearsal sometimes
we had managed some moments of beautiful silence, and it had a profound
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
40
affect on one’s awareness and perception when watching the dance, but
unfortunately that kind of silence doesn’t always come.
Out of this came the idea of creating the sense of silence through the use of
sound. Keith composed ‘sound’ that functioned to create silence – like a low
hum, which was just enough to focus the ear away from the incidental sounds
of the building or the audience, but not enough to register as music or rhythm.
Keith also came up with a piece of music that was so full and loud and constant
that it bombarded the ears, exploring if this could have a similar effect to
silence, because the ear really couldn’t focus on individual sounds or motifs as
easily.
The dance was not created ‘in time’ with the music. The music was not
composed with specific beats or rhythm of movement in mind. The dancers
knew what ‘imaginative forces’ they were responding to, in what order, but the
duration of each movement phrase was determined by them in the moment of
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
41
performances. This explored synchronicity between the dancers in ensemble
work and a deep state of being I present. New relationships with events in the
music occured all the time.
“Keith's music triggered my imagination and worked my inner-expression.”
Miyoko Urayama, Ensemble Dancer
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
42
The Figure in the Landscape
I wanted there to be a thematic focus for the
research,
to
guide
our
exploration
of
‘content’,
although the goal was not to create a finished piece
on a particular theme. Butoh founder, Tatstumi
Photo: S. Mitsos
Hijikata is quoted as saying that dance artists must:
“drink from the wells within their own bodies…drop a ladder deep into their own
bodies and climb down it.”
I wanted this challenge to inform my work, to engage with Butoh not on the
level of style or form, but in the spirit of Hijikata’s deep searching inside
ourselves for our own interest, our own dance, our obsessions.
The ‘Figure in the landscape’ resonated with my experience of growing up as a
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
43
white Australian and a ‘city-girl’ living in rural Australia. I felt that this theme
was also sufficiently universal to engage my collaborators, and it had
interesting implications for movement and music.
Could music be a ‘figure’ in a landscape of bodies? We explored this question in
part through the large group choreography. Dancers mostly faced upstage, so
as to remove the social human zone of the face, and their movement were very
minimal and often multiplied over many bodies, amplifying it through
repetition. This allowed us to explore a sense of objectifying the body as
matter, or elements of a landscape. At times, it really was as if the music
moved through the bodies like a wind or a person running, and the
choreography at times gave the effect that the music was a kind of force acting
on the bodies, making them move to one side, making the floor shake or
forcing them to flinch. Keith and I both felt we would not have created this
work without the contact with each other. It represents something very
different for both of us, and so is a sign of true collaboration.
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
44
Photo: W. Omija
I asked each dancer to think about the theme of the ‘figure in the landscape’,
bringing their own thoughts, memories and fantasies into the project. They
were given questions prior to the research project, and asked to bring images
and pictures with them. The questions they were given were designed to have a
physical answer, an answer that could be given with the body. From their
‘answers’ we started to generate solo material, and to create their ‘figures’. For
example:
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
45
If you imagine a ‘figure’ in a landscape, is s/he standing, sitting or moving, and
how? What is s/he humming? If s/he were an animal, what would s/he be?
What is s/he holding? How is the breath of this figure?
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
46
Research Outcomes
I've experienced how it is to be moved and just
be present in the space. I became very aware of
shared space and energy, shared air, where
even a small change could have a huge
impact…. At the end of this project I finally
realize what the sentence ‘being present’ really
means. Barbara Kukovec, Soloist Dancer
The research issues I focused on in this research - distillation, interiority,
image, content and form, generated a very new choreographic process for me.
The focus on research questions deepened my work and helped me to avoid
falling into usual patterns, because it made ‘not knowing’ acceptable. Only
when you accept that you don’t know exactly where something will take you
are you free to notice new pathways. Research questions force you to plan
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
47
thoroughly your jumping off points, without allowing that planning to
predetermine outcomes.
I created choreography in response to research questions and could then ask
“what is my work really about”? Allowing my work to speak back to me. For
example, a lot of the group work spoke to me of anxiety, tension, anticipation
and animalistic instinct, which I decided to pursue as the thematic basis for a
new work. Through the research I could ‘get out of my own way’.
My usual process would be:
A theme or idea generates movement, design and music material, that
has been shaped or refined with an audience in mind.
In this research process this expanded to be more like:
Choreographic questions defined starting points that led to a ‘mining’
process, digging underneath these starting points to see what was there
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
48
beyond the obvious. Material emerged from the ‘mining’ process and we looked
at that material for what themes were present, and later refined or shaped
the material to better deliver that those themes or ideas to an audience.
The research outcomes of this project were five ‘sketches for solos’ and two
group pieces.
Finding new working methods and challenging your established process is not
easy. The artist/practitioner engaged in research benefits from the research
structure enormously. That is, being forced to articulate questions, define a
method and avoid assuming or pre-determining the results. They are also
encouraged to articulate to themselves using spoken and written words. The
research working in the area of somatic experience must face the challenge of
articulating what is very difficult to put into words. Can words be used to
describe what went on inside the bodies, between our bodies, and within our
consciousness in such a project? Respect for the complexity of experience tells
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
49
us words can only go part of the way to explaining it. Respect for the art of
language tells us that it is important, exciting and useful to try to articulate our
experiences in words. As an artist-researcher, I seek to unravel to unravel and
reveal greater complexities and mysteries in performance through the
difficulties of articulation, not to reduce or definitively explain them.
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
50
Bibliography
Barbe, Frances. “Catching a Glimpse of Something Vast: Training for Butoh and
Butoh as a Training” Total Theatre Vol 15 Issue 1 Spring 2003
Fraleigh, Sondra Horton. Dancing Into darkness: Butoh, Zen and Japan Uni of
Pittsburgh Press, 1999
Fraleigh, Sondra Horton. Researching Dance: Evolving Modes of Enquiry. Dance
Books 1999
Hijikata, Tatsumi. “Man, Once Dead, Crawl Back”
Twentieth Century
Performance Reader Ed Michael Huxley & Noel Witts Routledge 1996
Holborn, Mark. Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul. Aperture 1991
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
51
Pia D’Orazi, Maria “The Way of the Butoh Performer” Japanese Theatre and
the International Stage Ed Stanca Scholz-Cionza & Smauel Leiter
Brill
2001
Roquet, Paul. “Towards the Bowels of the Earth: Butoh Writhing in Perspective”
available for download from www.butoh.net April 2003
Mikami, Kayo. “Deconstruction of the Human Body from a Viewpoint of Tatsumi
Hijikata’s Ankoku Butoh”
Kyoto Seika University, PhD. From an article
published on internet, downloaded 17 Oct 2003.
Nanako, Kurihara. “Hijikata Tatsumi: The Words of Butoh” The Drama Review
Vol. 44.i Spring 2000
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
52
Viala, Jean & Nourit Masson-Sekine. Butoh: Shades of Darkness Shufunotomo,
1988
The Drama Review 44.i Spring (contains a number of articles on Butoh and
by Hijikata) 2000
VIDEO
Michael Blackwood Productions, Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis
1990
(available via the internet)
CD ROM
Waguri, Yukio. Butoh Kaden. Butoh Fu. Kohzensha /Justsystem 1998
The Way of Butoh and Contemporary Choreography
By F.rances Barbe
53