Butoh as inter/section and in/fusion (English)

How can one comment on this unique event? An attempt to encircle Yuko Kaseki's specific method and transformation – her dance, or more precisely, the performance form of Butoh – with language is akin to a tentative walk on uncertain ground.

This walking – perhaps itself a form of kata? (that is, the specific manner of walking in Japanese Nō and Butoh) – takes place here more in an exploratory mode, not least because what was seen in Kaseki's performance differed from what had been experimented with during the rehearsals beforehand. This very divergence already reveals the transformative quality that is so essential to Kaseki's artistic work. A thesis-like and fragmentary way of describing (or writing about) the performance seems to me – also from a methodological standpoint – to be the more appropriate approach to Yuko Kaseki's performance.

For darknesses, ruptures, and – both literally and metaphorically – entanglements and knots are a central characteristic of Kaseki's thinking and performing: allowing the unexpected to emerge through leaps; a form of thinking that seeks to leave all binaries behind and instead explores the fluidity of bodies, species, objects, and spaces through crossings and processes of transference. In short, Kaseki's embodiment of contemporary Butoh could be seen as a critical, queer-feminist reinterpretation of traditional Butoh principles: in the way she hijacks and translates the insurgent potential of Butoh and its transformative power into a feminist-critical performance of diversity and inclusion. And in the way she carries forward Butoh's foundational concept of a »rebellion of the body« into contemporary frameworks – by reflecting on it, by transforming activist intervention into a re-play to dissimulate stereotypes of the (female) body through the means of shock and alienation.

How is this reflected in Kaseki's current pieces?

First, a preliminary remark on the term »fusion«. Perhaps the term is a bit too casual; it has become commonplace as a label for »mixtures« in cultural practices and discourses – in taste entanglements drawn from different traditions, whether in food, fashion, or ways of life.

However, »fusion« also indicates that what we experience, what we enjoy or reject, is cross-culturally blended from different areas – without it often being possible to identify the exact origin. It appears as something new, with different ingredients and appropriations; decolonial theory and critique have pointed to this in many voices.

In this respect, the same could also be said for Butoh. Of course, there is one crucial difference: fusion is smooth. It is an assemblage with smooth edges and elements fused into one another.

Not so with Butoh! Here, especially in the encounter of different movement cultures, body concepts, historical and social contexts, there are sharp ruptures. The clashing aesthetics, physical techniques and modes of presentation are not woven smoothly into one another, but have gaps, sharp, often cracked edges.

The »in-between« – for example, between text, story, voice and movement – appears disparate.

And it is precisely this structure that opens up and provokes different, highly diverse readings. 

The very emergence of Butoh – the »dance of darkness« (Ankoku Butoh) – and the performances of the founding generation are already characterized by these crossings and fractured structures. This is a body-political and aesthetic program. Much has been written about it. Therefore, I will outline here only in broad strokes those structures of Butoh that imply cross-cultural encounters and transformations – fusions.

The dancers regarded as founders of very different concepts of body and aesthetics of Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ōno, both had knowledge of and connections to Western dance styles – as well as to Western (particularly French) avant-garde literature. These bodily practices and dance aesthetics circulated indirectly, moving back and forth, for example through the dancer Ishii Baku, who opened a school for modern dance in Tokyo after touring in Europe, where the curriculum also included rhythmic gymnastics.

Both Hijikata and Ōno were also influenced by the performances of Takaya Eguchi, a student of Mary Wigman, who performed and taught together with his partner Misako Miya. Their interest extended not only to expressive dance (Ausdruckstanz) and modern dance (as presented, for instance, by Katherine Dunham), but also to Flamenco.

Hijikata's concept of Ankoku Butoh, as a new form of a »dance of darkness«, open to an embodiment of the dark, irrational-wild side of the body, was also decisively influenced by Western literature: by Lautréamont, de Sade, and above all by Jean Genet, whose »The Thief's Journal« (translated into Japanese in 1952) became an important source of inspiration for him. Like Genet, Hijikata conceived of a »wild body« that naughtily follows its desires and does not serve as an instrument of the social relations of production.

While the founding generation of Butoh was predominantly shaped by men, the number of female dancers, choreographers, and teachers grew significantly in the second and third generations: Carlotta Ikeda, Minako Seki, Anzu Furukawa, Yuko Kaseki – to name just a few.

At the same time, the question of crossing – that is, of fusion between cultures, between genders and species – is raised anew. For the concept of Butoh emerged as a Japanese modern dance of a »rebellion of the body«, through cross-cultural encounters with Western modern dance, with expressive dance (Ausdruckstanz), and other styles. But this in no way implies a one-dimensional direction of reception. Rather, the expressive models of expressive dance (Ausdruckstanz) within the Western avant-garde themselves represented – albeit in a milder form – a kind of »rebellion of the body«, by rebelling against the fixed structures of traditional dance styles such as ballet. These East-West-East transmissions took place in an »in-between« of culture, history, aesthetics, texts, and bodies. In this respect, the encounters between these dancers and their various modes of performance functioned as a catalyst – both in postwar Europe and in postwar Japan. It was in this historical constellation that the forces, dynamics, and body-myths were unleashed which came to define the spirit and body of Butoh.

A fundamental characteristic of Butoh is transformation, or metamorphosis: the transformation of physicalities, the fluidity of processes of transition – between genders, between bodies at all ages, from newborns to fragile ageing bodies, and between bodies of different species and objects.

The choreographies, performances, texts and documents in the Butoh archives bear impressive witness to this. 

This historical and body-political cultural history is also presented here – without further detailed movement analysis – as a historical framing and aesthetic-political reference to the context that underpins Yuko Kaseki's performances.

To illustrate the fusion between Butoh and expressive dance (Ausdruckstanz), between literary texts from Japan and Germany and dance pieces through one example, I have chosen a figure that could be seen as the leading figure in this »in-between« of transformations: It is the mythical figure of the witch.

The figure of the witch stands for the untamed, for the unruly body: the body of a female or transgender figure who fully embodies the rebellion against a stereotype of femininity – that of the beautiful, young, functioning, system-affirming and clichéd body.

Before I turn to Kaseki's embodiment of the witch-like, the »witchy«, let me return to the expressive dance (Ausdruckstanz) and the crossings between Germany and Japan.

Kazuo Ōno was familiar with the film recording of Mary Wigman's solo »Hexentanz« (»Witch Dance«, 1926). He saw it during the rehearsals for »La Argentina« and said that it made him feel »as if guided by a foreign force« on stage.

The witchy, the bewitched, the transformative appears as a figure of boundary dissolution in the borderline existence of the witch. The witch marks the beginning of modern female dance in the 20th century because she fundamentally revolutionizes the prevailing body aesthetics: a »rebellion of the female body«. Here, the female body finds, for the first time in dance, extreme gestures – gestures that completely defigure the ideal of beauty and grace.

The Other that appears here – in »Hexentanz« as an expressive dance (Ausdruckstanz) as well as in Japanese Butoh and its witch-like transformation – emerges as the power and effect of the demonic: a female, a transgender demon in the form of a witch.

Mary Wigman's »Hexentanz« was created in 1914, the year the First World War broke out. A later version (1926) is preserved in a short film.

Here, Wigman very consciously pursued an iconoclasm of dance. Her performance is an aesthetic act that is both political and rebellious; connected to the crisis of the time – both the artistic crisis and the crisis in the world. The world is in turmoil and marked by violence: the First World War.

Wigman wrote in 1918: »The war has changed life. Revolution and suffering have led to the shattering and destruction of all ideals of beauty«. 

The reception is divided: There are critical voices, and there are those who appreciate the tremendous newness, this rebellion of the body, of this entirely different dance: both in terms of dance aesthetics and in the radical suspension of common images of femininity. Wigman developed this dance as perhaps the strongest in her series of »demonic« pieces. Here, demonism refers to the witch-like – as the Other, an alien figure within the self. The qualities of the possessed, of rebellion and of violence are characterized in this period with the common formula of the »primitive«, with the adjectives »wild«, »barbaric«, »demonic«.

There are thus double and ramified crossings between dance cultures occurring »in the name of the witch«, as a transformation and, in Japan, also as a return from the Nō Theater. 

That the witch – as the embodiment of the bad girl during the war and postwar periods, including the Weimar Republic – was also a key figure for the liberation of women, social critique and a different aesthetics of dance, body and theatricality is evident in the fact that the dancer Valeska Gert, whose extreme dances and gestures caused a sensation during the interwar period, titled her autobiography »Ich bin eine Hexe« (»I Am a Witch«). Here, the emphasis is certainly more on the shrillness of appearance; it is no longer the pathos of the demonic as with Mary Wigman. Valeska Gert pursues a different aesthetic guideline: the dissonant, the grotesque as a carnivalization of bourgeois order.

But especially the wild and defiantly cheekiness that Valeska Gert stages as a bad girl with her »rebellion of the body« is born from an aesthetic of »crime against grace«. It is this aesthetic, which plays with the surreal and chimerical, that is also crucial for Butoh – and in the specific queer interpretation by Yuko Kaseki – as an uprising, rebellion and exceptional state of the (meta-)physical. Fluid bodies, torn limbs and pierced flesh appear in female body landscapes, conveying the impression of something Bakhtinian grotesque: a physical–demonic–surreal ordo inversus.

Thus, the »rebellion of the body« – the feminist riot of a rebellious plurality rising up against patriarchal power – reveals itself: a, if you will, Pussy Riot, which is also characteristic of Kaseki's performance concept.

Kaseki is trained in Butoh; she studied performing arts for a while at the University of Fine Arts in Braunschweig, where she worked with Anzu Furukawa, a highly influential second-generation Butoh dancer. This educational path already shows elements of »fusion«: the layering and personal transformation of Butoh tradition and Western performance approaches. Collaborations with artists of diverse backgrounds and aesthetics are formative for Kaseki's style. It is particularly the open spaces, the gaps and breaks between the aesthetics and artistic modes of expression in image, text, sound, scene and light that are important to Kaseki. She therefore speaks of bricolage regarding her working method. This is linked in a very idiosyncratic way to the idea and handling of material. Material in a very broad sense: as objects, fabrics, textures and texts, voice (screams) and sounds, clothes and wigs – as well as ambient materials (sand, clay, old tarps, speakers and lamps). But first and foremost, her body is the »material« she works on and with – in ever-new transformations.

In the interview, she said: »I think my body is action. Action is my language«.

This concept of »body as action« implies performativity in multiple senses: In the sense of embodying, of engendering, of course, not as acting or role embodiment, but in a more fundamental sense characteristic of Butoh, as the permeability of the material, the physicality of bodies.

Their ongoing transformation, the transition into other states of matter, into fluid bodies, between binary gender concepts and between beings of a metaphysical world (spirits and demons) and crude physical reality. This transformative quality often becomes a theme itself: it is reflected in the performance, in the interaction itself. For example, in the performance »Divine« (May 25 to 28, 2023, Dock 11, Berlin), where Kaseki and Megumi Eda explore questions of similarities and differences in »tragic tales of wronged and resilient women«. They quote from Western and Japanese dance traditions: from the ballet »Giselle« and the classic Japanese ghost story »Oiwa«. The performance stages and reflects – with intense physicality, sound and light – »the suffering and persistent echo of the paths of Giselle and Oiwa, joined by countless other women, whose divine spirits have endured objectification, coercion, and violence in lives, that are not of their own choice« (Quote from the program booklet).

This announcement already reveals the artistic approach and interventionist »spirit« of this performance: It is a reflection and an activist counter-story to patriarchal traditions and structures defining female life. The demonization, which simultaneously calls for an insurgent, quite violent rebellion and a self-empowerment of female performativity, appears as a variation of the witch-like, the witchy-demonic of (queer) metamorphosis. At the same time – and on a performance-praxeological level – the performance of »Divine« involves a negotiation of and reflection on aesthetics, that is, on the body-political and bodily-technical structures that these respective dance systems produce – read as a suppression of the female body. This becomes tangible in the opening scene of the performance. Here, the two performers demonstrate, in the manner of a lecture performance, how they have each undergone their different training practices (ballet, Kabuki, traditional Japanese dance). And they gradually unbind themselves – in solidarity with the diversity of dance cultures – in a humorous, grotesque, and witty way from the movement disciplines and their body-regulating regimes. This is where the witty witches already appear (similar to the sculptures of visual artist Leiko Ikemura), who are then depicted in the second part of »Divine« in a literal »dance of darkness«, veiled with wigs and fabric panels – an excessive, furious witches' dance. 

Kaseki moves along the borderlines, the borderlines of social attributions of the body. Seen in this light, her performance is a masquerade in the sense of Joan Riviere, Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam and Paul Preciado. A political-intervening masquerade around the question of an identity that CANNOT (!!!) be determined.

One could call it an uprising of the »I am NOT«, referring not only to a »rebellion of the body« but to the power of becoming-other.

Perhaps this is exactly what Kaseki performs in her pieces: a rebellion that emerges as action somewhere between the political and the poetic; a moment of the »in-between«, of stepping in-between – that is, an inter/vention as both interruption and prospect of transformation.

Text by Gabriele Brandstetter