Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh

Author: B. Baird
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137012625
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 588

Book Description
Hijikata Tatsumi's explosive 1959 debut Forbidden Colors sparked a new genre of performance in Japan - butoh: an art form of contrasts, by turns shocking and serene. Since then, though interest has grown exponentially, and people all over the world are drawn to butoh's ability to enact paradox and contradiction, audiences are less knowledgeable about the contributions and innovations of the founder of butoh. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh traces the rollicking history of the creation and initial maturation of butoh, and locates Hijikata's performances within the intellectual, cultural, and economic ferment of Japan from the sixties to the eighties.

Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo

Author: Sondra Fraleigh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135133171X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Book Description
Now re-issued, this compact book unravels the contribution of one of modern theatre’s most charismatic innovators. Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo combines: • an account of the founding of Japanese butoh through the partnership of Hijikata and Ohno, extending to the larger story of butoh’s international assimilation • an exploration of the impact of the social and political issues of post-World War II Japan on the aesthetic development of butoh • metamorphic dance experiences that students of butoh can explore • a glossary of English and Japanese terms. As a first step towards critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners are unbeatable value for today’s student.

Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo

Author: Sondra Fraleigh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134257856
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : cs
Pages : 193

Book Description
Part of the "Routledge Performance Practitioners" series, this book deals with the contribution of two of modern theatre's most charismatic innovators. Including a glossary of English and Japanese terms, it presents an account of the founding of Japanese butoh through the partnership of Hijikata and Ohno.

Butoh

Author: Sondra Fraleigh
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252090136
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
Both a refraction of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a protest against Western values, butoh is a form of Japanese dance theater that emerged in the aftermath of World War II. Sondra Fraleigh chronicles the growth of this provocative art form from its mid-century founding under a sign of darkness to its assimilation in the twenty-first century as a poignant performance medium with philosophical and political implications. Through highly descriptive, thoughtful, and emotional prose, Fraleigh traces the transformative alchemy of this metaphoric dance form by studying the international movement inspired by its aesthetic mixtures. While butoh has retained a special identity related to its Japanese background, it also has blossomed into a borderless art with a tolerant and inclusive morphology gaining prominence in a borderless century. Employing intellectual and aesthetic perspectives to reveal the origins, major figures, and international development of the dance, Fraleigh documents the range and variety of butoh artists around the world with first-hand knowledge of butoh performances from 1973 to 2008. Her definitions of butoh's morphology, alchemy, and philosophy set a theoretical framework for poetic and engaging articulations of twenty butoh performances in Japan, Europe, India, and the West. With a blend of scholarly research and direct experience, she also signifies the unfinished nature of butoh and emphasizes its capacity to effect spiritual transformation and bridge cultural differences.

Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan

Author: Adam Broinowski
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1780935978
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Book Description
Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan examines how the performing arts, and the performing body specifically, have shaped and been shaped by the political and historical conditions experienced in Japan during the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. This study of original and secondary materials from the fields of theatre, dance, performance art, film and poetry, probes the interrelationship that exists between the body and the nation-state. Important artistic works, such as Ankoku Butoh (dance of darkness) and its subsequent re-interpretation by a leading political performance company Gekidan Kaitaisha (theatre of deconstruction), are analysed using ethnographic, historical and theoretical modes. This approach reveals the nuanced and prolonged effects of military, cultural and political occupation in Japan over a duration of dramatic change. Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan explores issues of discrimination, marginality, trauma, memory and the mediation of history in a ground-breaking work that will be of great significance to anyone interested in the symbiosis of culture and conflict.

Post-Fascist Japan

Author: Laura Hein
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135002581X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
In late 1945 local Japanese turned their energies toward creating new behaviors and institutions that would give young people better skills to combat repression at home and coercion abroad. They rapidly transformed their political culture-policies, institutions, and public opinion-to create a more equitable, democratic and peaceful society. Post-Fascist Japan explores this phenomenon, focusing on a group of highly educated Japanese based in the city of Kamakura, where the new political culture was particularly visible. The book argues that these leftist elites, many of whom had been seen as 'the enemy' during the war, saw the problem as one of fascism, an ideology that had succeeded because it had addressed real problems. They turned their efforts to overtly political-legal systems but also to ostensibly non-political and community institutions such as universities, art museums, local tourism, and environmental policies, aiming not only for reconciliation over the past but also to reduce the anxieties that had drawn so many towards fascism. By focusing on people who had an outsized influence on Japan's political culture, Hein's study is local, national, and transnational. She grounds her discussion using specific personalities, showing their ideas about 'post-fascism', how they implemented them and how they interacted with the American occupiers.

Theatres of Immanence

Author: Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137291915
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance is the first monograph to provide an in-depth study of the implications of Deleuze's philosophy for theatre and performance. Drawing from Goat Island, Butoh, Artaud and Kaprow, as well from Deleuze, Bergson and Laruelle, the book conceives performance as a way of thinking immanence.

World Dance Cultures

Author: Patricia Leigh Beaman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000956121
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 640

Book Description
From healing, fertility, and religious rituals, through theatrical entertainment, to death ceremonies and ancestor worship, the updated and revised second edition of World Dance Cultures introduces an extraordinary variety of dance forms and their cultures, which are practiced around the world. This highly illustrated textbook draws on wide-ranging historical documentation and first-hand accounts taking in India, Bali, Java, Cambodia, China, Japan, Hawai‘i, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Africa, Türkiye, Spain, Native America, South America, and the Caribbean, with this second edition adding new chapters on the Pacific Islands, Southern Africa, France, and Cuba. Each chapter covers a certain region’s distinctive dances, pinpoints key issues and trends from the form’s development to its modern iteration, and offers a wealth of study features including: • Spotlights zooming in on key details of a dance form’s cultural, historical, and religious contexts • Explorations—first-hand descriptions by famous dancers and ethnographers, excerpts from anthropological fieldwork, or historical writings on the form • Think About—provocations to encourage critical analysis of dance forms and the ways in which they’re understood • Discussion Questions—starting points for group work, classroom seminars, or individual study. Offering a comprehensive overview of each dance form covered with over 100 full color photos, World Dance Cultures is an essential introductory resource for students and instructors alike.

Film's Ghosts

Author: Stephen Barber
Publisher: Diaphanes
ISBN: 9783035801477
Category : Butō
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"Tokyo during the 1960s was in a state of uproar, full of protests, riots, and insurrection. Tatsumi Hijikata - the initiator of the 'Butoh' performance art and the seminal figure in Japan's experimental arts culture of the 1960s - created his most famous works in the context of that turmoil. Central to Hijikata's vital 1960s work are his many films, from experimental projects undertaken in collaboration with artists, to horror and sex films made for Japan's ailing studios, to his participation in the corporate, state-power spectacle of the Osaka World Expo '70. Based on original interviews with Hijikata's collaborators as well as new research, Film's Ghosts illuminates Hijikata's world-renowned, spectral 'Dance of Utter Darkness', Butoh, and explores Hijikata's films directly against the backdrop of 1960s urban culture in Tokyo, with the rise of its screen-constellated mega-towers, its fierce protests and riot-police battles, its ascendant security-guard and surveillance industries, and its experimentations in art, sex and tourism. This will be an essential book for readers engaged with film and performance, urban cultures and architecture, and Japan's experimental art and its histories"--Back cover.

Butoh, as Heard by a Dancer

Author: Dominique Savitri Bonarjee
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100098625X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
This book explores the origins of Butoh in post-war Japan through orality and transmission, in conjunction with an embodied research approach. The book is a gathering of seminal artistic voices – Yoshito Ohno, Natsu Nakajima, Yukio Waguri, Moe Yamamoto, Masaki Iwana, Ko Murobushi, Yukio Suzuki, Takao Kawaguchi, Yuko Kaseki, and the philosopher, Kuniichi Uno. These conversations happened during an extended research trip I made to Japan to understand the context and circumstances that engendered Butoh. Alongside these exchanges are my reflections on Butoh’s complex history. These are primarily informed by my pedagogical and performance encounters with the artists I met during this time, rather than a theoretical analysis. Through the words of these dancers, I investigate Butoh’s tendency to evade categorization. Butoh’s artistic legacy of bodily rebellion, plurality of authorship, and fluidity of form seems prescient and feels more relevant in contemporary times than ever before. This book is intended as a practitioner's guide for dancers, artists, students, and scholars with an interest in non-Western dance and dance history, postmodern performance, and Japanese arts and culture.