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An excerpt of this article was published in the Vestiges of Butoh events catalog edited by SESC.

After the event that took over the Sesc Anchieta Theatre in São Paulo for ten days of intense activities including presentations, workshops and conversations, a clear sensation remains that it is possible to construct the memory of an artist in very different ways. It is not only in the pages of books or in recorded documentaries that this memory lives. It is also a memory that self-organizes itself in bodies. Enduring, it survives and maintains itself alive in the processual web of history. It was in this way that a tribute to Takao Kusuno became interwoven with the Japanese Butoh (a traditional dance), which then wove itself into Brazilian dreams and slid along the borders of French surrealism to then become based on the studies of the body in both Japan and Brazil. This appears to be the thread of memory between recordings and omissions.

In Search of the Past

Butoh originated during the 1950´s in Tokyo, and since then it has remained a paradox. There are those that say that it does not exist anymore, and then there are those that believe strongly in its continuity as a process, one that is always in transformation. Since the year 2000, extensive material was made available for the study of dance at the Genetic Archive of Keio University. Nevertheless, the research continues to be obstructed by problems of practical order. There are, for example, recordings of original performances by the creator of Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata that are not exhibited due to questions of authorial rights. A portion of these images has deteriorated. Some films were modified with sound tracks that were superimposed over the originals. In addition, many of the artists and critics that followed the movement up-close have already died. The complete work of Hijikata was published in two volumes and only in Japanese, not to mention the fact that it has a limited circulation and is already out-of-print. Such obstacles have become a serious problem for the dance’s diffusion outside of Japan, since they demand of the translator a profound understanding of the metaphors and onomatopias invented by Hijikata.

Here in Brazil, we entered into contact cautiously with Butoh during the end of the 1970s with the arrival of the artist, Takao Kusuno. During this period, we knew very little about the fertile production of the Japanese vanguard, which included Gutai performance movement, the revolutionary theatre of Shuji Terayama and Juro Kara, the films of Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura, and the poems of Shûzô Takiguchi and Yutaka Haniya, among many other experiences.

Without classifying what he did, Takao began to work with Brazilian artists from diverse areas, (dance, theatre, plastic arts, etc.) revealing little by little the most precious proposition of Butoh: the investigation of how an artistic body changes its state, moving from a lifeless body to a live body, from apparent immobility to action, from silence to incarnated word. The reception was immediate given that the country was fertile with the experimentation of masters like Klauss Vianna, Célia Gouveia, Sonia Motta as well as an entire legion of artist-creators such as J.C.Violla, Umberto da Silva, Mariana Muniz, Vera Sala, Helena Bastos and Denilto Gomes, among many others. In 1986, Takao helped to organize the arrival of the legendary Kazuo Ohno to Brazil, firming bonds and propitiating a trap completely by accident. During the same year that the history of Butoh officially began among us, Japan buried an entire era of radicalisms, stifling the birth of a new training method for young artists with the death of their mentor, Tatsumi Hijikata. Between the word, the image and the flesh, Butoh thinking searched for a form of systematization.

It is during this discontinuous time-space of shadows and unusual events that the Vestiges of Butoh appears to have emerged. At first, it appeared as a posthumous tribute to Takao, presenting the artist’s last works. Then, it appeared as a theoretical-practical exercise of investigation, bringing among other things, the great names of Butoh such as Yoshito Ohno and Akira Kasai (first generation) as an unprecedented duo; and Yukio Waguri (second generation), famous for the CD-ROM that he organized with a personal version of Hijikata´s lessons. In addition to the Japanese guests, the event brought two Brazilians; Ismael Ivo, who worked with Takao at the beginning of his career, and Marta Soares, a choreographer that studied with Kazuo Ohno and began to use the new teachings as an entropic element in her own contemporary dance performances.

Furthermore, to expand the dialogue and highlight some important connections, there was a theoretical panel discussion about several topics, including the artist Antonin Artaud (more specifically about the body without organs); the artistic experience of the image of corporal fragmentation proposed by George Bataille and Hans Bellmer; studies of distinction between Western and Eastern anatomy in relation to muscles and states of precariousness; and a more ample reflection of the Butoh movement outside of Japan, seeking some of its vestiges in the contemporary world.

It was a special opportunity to discuss the remnants, seen even today, of a line of thinking that exposes human fragility to the world while at the same time pointing out possible paths for survival. Takao declared that even he was unable to form a Butoh dance company in Brazil. Even when it appeared that such a feat would be possible with the Tamanduá group, the fact that the entity was trying to survive without the aid of a sponsor made it too complicated. It was impossible to gather all of the dancers and maintain them united when there existed the need to take on extra, outside jobs that inhibited the concentration that was fundamental to the process. Even so, in observing the works “Galinhas”, “O Olho do Tamanduá” and “Quimera”, one can perceive a leap in its artistic projects and a maturation that would have pointed out a new path.

Butoh in the Contemporary World

When studying fragments of the complex research that permeates the history of Butoh, it is possible to see that it cannot be restricted to a local manifestation (caused by postwar in Japan) or to a dance style or anti-style (to contra pose Western and Eastern traditions) and much less a species of therapeutic self-interest or self-knowledge instrument. We are not talking about trying to see one’s own belly button. Considering how it was conceived, it appears more appropriate to understand Butoh as a field of knowledge and a body research methodology that haunts the convictions and dogmatisms that permeate our existence. It deals with allowing the body to be invaded by the outside environment, by the other. It is essentially means taking in the words and images of the world and of other bodies.

The fist ankoku Butoh (dance of darkness), elaborated during the 1950´s and 1960´s, interconnected the cursed connection of the writers Yukio Mishima, Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet. From there, it continued by investigating the Dadaist dancer Nobutoshi Tsuda, the jazz ritual of Katherine Dunham, the malignant virtuosity of Vaslav Nijinsky and an extremely rich iconography of images that included the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Hans Bellmer, Marcel Duchamp, Wolz, Picasso, Goya and many others.

An aspect of Zumbi divided the composition of bodies and images through its articulations, denying the construction of a prepared model and fertilizing a species of oracular blindness. The idea of Butoh training was, in the beginning, to work with the condition of the body instead of the specific movements. The imposition of pain had much to do with this. An artifice, for example, was the famous white makeup used for the first time in 1961 with the collaboration of the plastic artist Masunobu Yoshimura for the performance entitled “Secret Ceremony of a Hermaphrodite in Three Chapters.” Yoshimura, who had founded the Neo-Dada organization years earlier, decided to shave Hijikata´s head and roll his entire body in plaster gauze like a mummy. The plaster substance hardened quickly on the body and its temperature dropped significantly. Little by little, the plaster began to fall like colloid scars on the skin and the cold provoked muscular spasms. It is probable that this experience gave life to some of the movements used in Butoh that were gradually transformed into standards, as occurs with everything that lasts over time.

It was during the 1970´s and 1980´s, when Hijikata stopped dancing, that the systematization of what would be the new Butoh-kabuki began, creating for the first time possible methods of teaching and training for young artists. There is much more the investigate about this period, just as the Tohoku Kabuki project is an inaccessible masterpiece that will be forced to roam in pieces until the end of eternity.

Observing the presentation of Yukio Waguri, it becomes evident that one of the most important vestiges of Butoh was the aptitude for metamorphosis, the transformation of the states of the body.

As Heiner Müller once said, in a universe where history is always precarious and wanting, to observe the vestiges of this unfinished movement is to witness it with our own eyes. It appears that awaiting the dream is the foolish destiny of those that drink from the pain.