By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO
Published: October 22, 2006

ELEVEN students were walking backward in a crouch, eyes closed, with raw eggs cradled in their mouths and potatoes wedged between their thighs. The smell of stale perspiration pervaded the hot room in a yoga studio in Chelsea. Jack Vartoogian

Kazuo Ohno, a founder of Butoh, performing in 1996.“Imagine you are an old woman, going closer to the floor, still protecting this fragile part of you,” the teacher directed in a soft French accent, referring to the egg. “Little by little, you are going to find someone and exchange the potato, from your perineum to theirs. Find a way, as organically as possible. This is not your civilized self.”

Her students groped and grimaced, trailing saliva. Two women sank to the carpet. Potatoes were exchanged.
The exercise was part of a weekly mixed-level class in Butoh, a way of approaching dance that developed in Japan half a century ago. Since the 1980’s, Butoh has spread like ripples of water radiating from a dropped stone. But what exactly it is, or was, remains teasingly indefinable. Ripples are difficult to capture, and the stone itself, like any moving object, is equally elusive.

This fall, New Yorkers will have several chances to explore some of those ripples. On Tuesday, Sankai Juku, the wildly popular Paris-based Japanese troupe, returns to the Brooklyn Academy of Music with “Kagemi — Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors.” Next month Akira Kasai, a Butoh originator, will give a three-day workshop at the Japan Society, and the choreographer Kota Yamazaki will present “Rise: Rose” at Dance Theater Workshop.
People tend to think of Butoh in terms of aesthetic markers: white body paint, shaved heads, slow movement gained through intense muscular control, and a way of manipulating the body that is at once beautiful and grotesque, tragic and absurd. Influenced by German Expressionism, it tends to be imagistic rather than narrative. But while these elements often appear, defining Butoh in stylistic terms is dangerous. There is the beautiful, highly stylized theatricality of Sankai Juku, or the mad kineticism of Mr. Kasai, or the creaturely abstractions of Yumiko Yoshioka. Like contemporary American dance, Butoh is no one thing, but it always has, at its center, a fragile transformative spark. You can’t always describe it, but you know it when you see it, and you know when it’s missing.

In the dance world, practitioners and critics often fret that codified techniques, like Martha Graham’s, will diminish over time as individual steps are lost or misinterpreted. With a non-technique-based art like Butoh, the danger is that its spirit will curdle into a set of stylistic clichés — all aesthetics, no guts. “The question on everybody’s mind today is: Can it be called Butoh if it’s not from Japan?” wrote Vangeline, the New York-based dancer who teaches the Chelsea workshop, in a recent e-mail message. “Can we call ourselves ‘Butoh artists’? How can we allow Butoh to evolve, and not preserve it as if it were in a museum?”

At one point during the class, she asked her students: “How can we exchange in life in a new way, and onstage in a new way? We need to train in an unconventional way.”

Vangeline has been studying Butoh for just five years. She incorporates guided-imagery techniques (think egg) with exercises she learned from Japanese masters and the Mexico-based Diego Piñón, who incorporates his country’s rituals and traditions into his particular form of Butoh. He in turn studied extensively with one of Butoh’s founders, Kazuo Ohno, who turns 100 on Friday.

Along with choreographers like Celeste Hastings, who first learned Butoh as a member of Poppo Shiraishi’s company and now heads the spooky yet satirical Butoh Rockettes, Vangeline is part of a thriving Butoh community in New York, fed by workshops, performances and the New York Butoh Festival, which takes place every two years and is run by the CAVE Organization, an experimental art space in Williamsburg.

Included in this community are contemporary Japanese choreographers like Mr. Yamazaki, who studied with Mr. Kasai in Japan and now lives in Brooklyn, mixing Butoh with everything from hip-hop to traditional dance from Senegal, where he has worked. Like many of his peers, who are wary of the word’s historical weight, Mr. Yamazaki, 47, takes pains to describe his work as “Butoh-influenced.”

Paul Bartlett, who draws on Butoh in his own performances, said, “It was very hard for me to understand what Butoh was when I first got exposed to it.” He is a producer of Tompkins Scare Park, a Halloween celebration this Saturda that will include Butoh workshops for children. “It’s hard to talk about it,” he said, “and I think that’s why it’s a great art: you can’t just tell someone what Butoh is.”

For others, like the Japan Society’s artistic director, Yoko Shioya, this fuzziness is a frustration. “The lack of theory or analysis did not help Butoh’s authentic technique,” she said, adding that Japanese Butoh artists eschewed an intellectual approach. “It’s difficult for it to exist as it did when it was started, when it doesn’t have any theory.”

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Kazuo Ohno performing in Chisato Katata of Shinonome Butoh.Butoh emerged at a time of creative ferment in postwar Japan, led by Mr. Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata, who sought to embody a distinctive Japanese identity, separate from traditional techniques. While the two collaborated, both looking to expand what could be thought of as dance, they are roots of distinct branches. Mr. Hijikata, who died of cancer at 57 in 1986, moved from violent, sexualized early works to a more choreographic approach; Mr. Ohno relied on imagination and improvisation in developing a gentler Butoh. He is often discussed as the lightness to Mr. Hijikata’s Ankoku Butoh, or dance of darkness.

Mr. Ohno, whose son Yoshito is also a Butoh dancer, has continued to perform in his Tokyo studio although he uses a wheelchair. Even now, lying in bed, he will do “dance expression in a particularly subtle way,” according to an e-mail message from Toshio Mizohata, the studio’s manager.
The American Butoh dancer Maureen Fleming, who studied with the Ohnos, was brought to tears remembering a visit to Mr. Ohno’s studio several years ago, which she equated with visiting a grandfather. As she fed him one day, he began moving his large hands, still working to refine his marvelous expressivity. “He was still perfecting the shape of his hand, and how the breath moved through it in relationship to the music,” Ms. Fleming marveled. “He couldn’t waste any time. He had to give everything.”

Mr. Ohno is an extreme example, but Butoh tends to favor the mature performer. Vangeline, 36, describes herself as “a baby” when it comes to the art form. As she and other Americans point out, Japanese masters stress that students must find their own Butoh, a way of moving true to each body, and culture. But finding your own Butoh is tricky for Westerners, undone by an awe of Eastern mysticism (no doubt aggravated by the koanlike “definitions” offered by Butoh’s founders) and too reverent in their approach to an art full of rebelliousness and play.

Speaking on the phone from Granville, Ohio, the Butoh dancer Katsura Kan, an assistant professor of dance at Denison University, said that 97 percent of non-Japanese Butoh is imitation. The question of authenticity dogs Japanese artists as well. For every person who mentions a Sankai Juku performance as a life-altering event, there is someone who dismisses its theatrical, visually arresting pieces as beautiful entertainment, far removed from the work that won the company’s founder, Ushio Amagatsu, acclaim outside of Japan in the early 1980’s, giving many Westerners their first taste of Butoh. “In almost all cases, Butoh is just one moment,” Mr. Katsura said. “There’s no next. But Sankai Juku kept going. It became a business.”

Perhaps this is the fate of all avant-garde work: to solidify into tradition or disperse. As the Japanese dance critic Takao Norikoshi wrote in an e-mail message, Butoh “was born in 1960’s, dead in 70’s, reborn in 80’s, and it has diffused to the undercurrent of Japanese dance.”

But what of American Butoh? In an e-mail note translated by Ms. Shioya of the Japan Society, Mr. Kasai wrote that hip-hop is America’s most authentic Butoh because it is “closely related to the present day, and has a lot of the uniqueness of American culture.”

Hip-hop choreographers have already integrated Butoh; Rennie Harris employed slow contortions in the finale of “Facing Mekka,” using explosive but choked movements to convey psychological drama. But as Ms. Shioya pointed out with an exasperated laugh: “That definition is too broad. I can’t pick anybody, or I have to pick everybody.”

Brechin Flournoy, who helped establish Butoh in the United States as the founding director of the San Francisco Butoh Festival, which ran from 1995 to 2002, says she is optimistic about its future but cognizant of such dangers as its becoming “a museum piece.”

“The advancement in this country for Butoh will have to come from exposure to other dance forms, and art forms, as happened in Japan,” she said. “It’s an ongoing conversation. In 50 years, we’ll be able to turn around and say, ‘Oh, that’s what that was.’"