My Butoh

“My Butoh...”

If you hang out with Butoh dancers long enough, this is a phrase you’ll begin to hear repeatedly. Butoh artists tend to act somewhat proprietary, occasionally even territorial, in regards to their practice. Not that they think they have all the answers (although some do act this way). It’s just that they’ve spent a great deal of their lives developing a performance style and/or training regimen that both defines them as individual artists and is reliant on their own idiosyncratic interpretation of any number of aesthetic, practical, and historical factors.

I probably hear this discussion most often from Japanese artists. Many that I’ve met in Japan sooner or later ask me something like, “What is your Butoh?” or “What do you think Butoh is?” The multitude of possible answers to such questions is essentially old hat for them, especially the older ones, who have had to answer such inquiries themselves (and for themselves as well) far too many times over for it to retain any real meaning.

It’s a stereotype, of course, but interpersonal relations in Japanese society as a whole are more formalized than most Western cultures, which may be why I’m asked, before anything else and even more often than the above questions, “Who’s your teacher?” There’s an implicit sense of hierarchy and lineage in this, and frankly I never know what to say. I often mention that I studied Tanaka Min’s Body Weather Laboratory technique for three years in Los Angeles with Oguri, one of the original members of Tanaka’s Mai Juku dance troupe in the 1980s, and his wife, dancer Roxanne Steinberg. However, Body Weather is a more of a kinesthetic training form and not a specific performance style, none of the three consider themselves Butoh dancers, per se, and I never considered myself a student in the traditional master-apprentice sense.

The fact is, I learned to perform mainly from my first theater director, performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, and I am mostly self-taught as a dancer. Perhaps this has skewed my perspective on the issue of what makes a Butoh artist to a very loose definition that fundamentally involves self-definition and personal interpretation. Someone who’s trained with an older generation “master” for years will probably have a different, more formal or hierarchical conception. (A longtime student of Ohno Yoshito that I met, upon hearing that I had been a dancer for 15 years, called me his “Butoh big brother.”)

Moreover, of course, is that this all begs the question, why even bother asking what Butoh is? If there’s no way to productively limit it to one definition and it is inherently open-ended in practice, why does it matter how the word is used?

Well, on the one hand, my own answer is that it doesn’t. One’s artistic practice is just that, regardless of what labels may or may not be applied to it, and it has whatever place in the world it does. This can’t be helped, no matter how hard artists work, audiences applaud or neglect, or critics praise or denigrate.

On the other hand, I do care that artists continue to be able to push certain boundaries of embodiment, identity, socialization, and, most of all, being.  Generally speaking, the type of work, the type of body, if I can use that word holistically, that I’ve witnessed over the last 15 years in Butoh-based performance is more genuinely in and of the moment than many other performance forms that I’ve witnessed. I feel that Butoh-based dancers, or at least the ones that I’m most affected by, tend to emanate a sense of interiorized struggle, an inherent tension between (seemingly) contradictory, psycho-physiological elements within themselves. In a word, for me the most effective Butoh performers are liminal beings, embodying neither who or what they seem to be or desire but rather the struggle itself of becoming, of what in Buddhism is called form and emptiness, of life, death, and rebirth.

Perhaps what is most useful is not to delineate the limits of Butoh’s parameters but rather to contemplate its potential. Instead of asking what Butoh is, perhaps we should simply consider what it could be. Instead of asking myself, “Am I a Butoh dancer?” it might be more meaningful to ask, “Could I, or should I, be a Butoh artist, and what would that mean for my practice?”

So then, getting back to the real world…

Why do I consider myself a Butoh artist?

Good question.