13 Aspects of Butoh
Gillum’s 27 years of butoh research have culminated in “13 Aspects of Butoh”. The material has been presented in a lecture-demonstration format in settings such as Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, Lviv Arts Center in Ukraine, STOA Retreat Center in Śirinçe, Turkey, and an art bar in Tbilisi, Georgia. Julie’s teaching practice and performance are based on this research and writing. The 13 Aspects are listed below, with some interpretation and explanation of their roots. They interweave and overlap with each other but are a way to break down and develop the methods and ideas of butoh.
1. Invisible Forces
— “Butoh is the body forced into a corner by words and pain.” Tatsumi Hijikata
— “There is an entire universe inside of my body.” Kazuo Ohno
— The human anatomy comprises the 4 elements: earth, air, fire, and water.
— Forces: Physiological, Sociological, Intellectual, Earth, Evolution, Heredity
2. Time: Past, Present, Future, Ma
The butoh dancer’s presence reflects the past, carrying their lives, society, and evolution. The weight of history bears down upon the body molding it through habits, work, age, disease, and injury.
The present in time speaks to the conditions and environment at the moment of the dance. Through focused meditative perception, the dancer connects to the universe, all that came before, and all that is to be.
The dancer’s metamorphosis is an act that prays for, predicts, or commands a change for the future. The dance, born out of life in all its misery and joy, strives to balance the shadow and the light within the dance, the dancer, and the audience. As the audience leaves the performance to resume their normal time stream, they are transported by the experience of an ephemeral plane, with a subconscious message that leads them into the future.
Ma is a Japanese aesthetic principle meaning “emptiness” or “absence”. It is the space between objects, the silence between sounds, or the stillness between movements. The term describes both time and space and is much more than a “lack” of something. The emptiness is, in fact, a palpable entity. Ma is the aesthetic of space-time. Think of ma as potential: potential presence, potential sound, potential action.
3. Space: Interior /Exterior — the mind-body-spirit and its relationship to the surrounding environment.
“The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”
Hermann Minkowski, Address to the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, (Sep 21, 1908)
— The Incas regarded space and time as a single concept, named Pacha
— The butoh dancer and everything else in the universe cannot move through space without moving through time. The transformation of the body can alter the perception of space-time for dancers and witnesses alike.
— Other spatial concepts: Geometry, Dimensions (height, width, depth), Directions, Level, Shape /Form, Planes (horizontal, vertical, sagittal)
4. Body Speak “Allow the body to speak for itself. Movement should be derived from the body rather than applied to it. The body teaches itself.” (Tatsumi Hijikata)
— The composition, function, and actions of the anatomical body
5. The Realm of the Senses
– The 54 Senses: https://www.greensong.info/natural-senses
– Sight is the most highly developed
– Smell is the most evocative
– Synesthesia – This phenomenon is inspiring for artists. Butoh dancers are familiar with exploring synesthesia: translating sound, smell, taste, or visual image into rhythm and form, the “butoh-fu.”
Maurice Merleau Ponti, the founder( was an Existentialist philosopher who believed that our bodies are our means of knowing and affecting the world around us; through an “intertwining” or “overlapping”, with no sharp division between the sensing and the sensed. He also said that the artist “lends his body to the world” to create a carnal “icon” of this relationship of “situated embodiment”. Ponti believed that science only describes and measures the structures, forms, and forces in the world from an external place; it cannot embody them.
6.“Actions from daily life are present in your dance.” Akaji Maru
Daily actions, conditions, and the environment, such as work, weather, age, disability, habits, social conditioning, religion, mental and emotional states all serve to mold the body.
7. Ghost of Yourself “. . . Vanish your human identity, personality, character; allow the ghost of yourself to appear. . . ” Natsu Nakajima
Esoteric information makes for great “butoh-fu” (poetic imagery designed to elicit an artistic, physiological response in the body instrument) connecting the whole being, engaging the intellect, emotional and primitive consciousnesses.
8. The Facial Mask
In butoh dance, emotion is felt on the inside, but not expressed by the body in conventional ways. The face is a mysterious “mask” which is extremely produced. The idea of the face as a “mask”, allows it to be used as a theatrical convention rather than to just identify the performer. In modern dance, performers often maintain an expression of focused yet relaxed regard for body and audience alike. Contemporary ballet dancers typically have adopted the modern dance demeanor. The story ballets are primarily told through pantomime, elaborate gestures, and illustrative countenance layered on top of a 300-plus-year-old tradition of steps and positions. Jazz, tap, musical theatre, and folk dance allow the performer to directly relate to the audience with personal expressions of individual presence.
9. “Every dance is a prayer.” Kazuo Ohno
The word prayer comes from the Latin ‘precari” which means to beg, a heartfelt or impassioned plea, to express an ardent desire, a sincere or urgent appeal. Prayer, an act of petition, is engaged in, to stimulate affinity or to consciously communicate with an exalted entity.
Prayer is practiced in groups or as an individual act using words, chants, songs, prescribed movements, or in full silence and stillness. Strict recitations or impromptu monologues can be spoken. There are many reasons for prayer. It can be to give thanks, to ask for direction or assistance with a personal issue, for the benefit of others, to express intimate feelings or soaring ideas, or to confess and beg for forgiveness.
Different forms of prayer are used in most religions; anthropologists believe that early modern humans expressed prayers within their developing primitive cultures using movement and sound rituals and ceremonies.
10. “Dance like a child. . . see the world through a child’s eyes ” Yoshito Ohno
. . . as if there is no difference or separation between yourself and the world around you, playful, uninhibited, with no learned social or cultural habits or behaviors, open, possessing the ability to assimilate, accommodate, and respond with immediacy . . . DANGEROUS!
11. Gender Fluidity
In 1949, French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir wrote that “no biological, psychological or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in “society” and “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” an idea that was picked up in 1990 by American philosopher Judith Butler, who theorized that gender is not fixed or inherent but is rather a socially defined set of practices and traits that have, over time, grown to become labeled as feminine or masculine.
An ongoing debate about sex and psychology concerns the extent to which gender identity and gender-specific behavior are due to socialization versus inborn factors.
Julia Serano notes that masculine girls and women face much less social disapproval than feminine boys and men, which she attributes to sexism. Serano argues that women wanting to be like men is consistent with the idea that maleness is more valued in contemporary culture than femaleness, whereas men being willing to give up masculinity in favor of femininity directly threatens the notion of male superiority as well as the idea that men and women should be opposites.
12. Accumulation and Release
— Form and formlessness, phrasing; principles of Japanese aesthetics and Western artistic composition
— Jo-ha-kyû is a Japanese concept of modulation and movement applied in a variety of traditional Japanese arts, from the tea ceremony to martial arts, from ikebana (flower arranging) to Zen gardening, from Noh theatre to shakuhachi flute music. Roughly translated to “beginning, break, rapid”, it essentially means that all actions or efforts should begin slowly, speed up, and then end swiftly.
— Western and Eastern principles of composition, universal patterns in nature, concepts of beauty, art, and culture
13. Essence of the Flower
PRESENCE dwells in the unseen; it is a mysterious ability to question and to know at the same time. There is an uncanny, nonlinear sense of present, past, and future connected in TIME. Presence is similar to, more subtle than (SUB meaning under, beneath) “charisma”. How does a dancer become capable of finding, feeling, communicating /exhibiting PRESENCE?
You must practice your existence in space and time, carrying your body’s weight as a holy vestment. Your royal garment is a cloak of ancestral forest trailing behind you, leaving abandoned hieroglyphic slug trails. You possess the awareness of a JOKE of universal proportions, for example, the “Mona Lisa” smile or the characters painted by Balthus.
We have a body that is adaptable, creative, curious, and perfectly suited for the extreme conditions and challenges of the dance of life on this earth. We humans are capable of connecting to the external world through our senses, interior feelings, subconscious, intellect, and primitive instincts. In other words there are so many sensations to experience and share through the body. Alertness to these stimuli requires PRESENCE.