On Thursday, my first full day in Tokyo, my mind was filled with the name Hijikata Tatsumi. Today, I went to the Hijkata archives at Keio University. I met with the archivist, who allowed me to watch his films and read books from his library for four hours.
My previous knowledge of him had been supplied only by provocative pictures and brief biographies. I knew that the first Butoh piece was Kinjiki, translated as Forbidden Colors, performed with Yoshito Ohno in 1959. This piece was inspired by Yukio Mishima's novel of the same name. The piece features a homosexual relationship between the two men. It was erotic and violent and met mixed reviews - some were shocked, others were thrilled.
His other well-known piece is the 1968 Hijikata and the Japanese: Rebellion of the Body. This piece made Hijikata and ankoku butoh known, and we know it today by the picture of Hijikata's half-starved body wearing nothing but a golden phallus. He rehearsed religiously and fasted weeks before the show, eating nothing but milk and weak miso soup. This performance seemed to embody two rebellions: of the nation and of the body. Groups in Japan were in rebellion in the sixties; Coincidentally, ten days after Hijikata's performance, a crowd of more than ten thousand of students rioted in front of Shinjuku station with the motto from Mao Tse Dong: "Every rebellion has a reason," (information from Nanako Kurihara's amazing thesis on Hijikata. I will befriend her!). It's also the piece where Hijikata refers to his adolescence in the countryside of Tohoku, due to his idea that the physicality of the Japanese are determined by regional characteristics. His rebellion was a rejection of other forms of dance that did not suit him. The superb Kurihara states "Rejecting the existing dance styles of the West and those of native Japan, and equally uninterested in pedestrian movement, Hijikata attempted to create a dance of ritualistic quality that would transform the human body and mind," (2).
Hijikata moved to Tokyo when he was young, for the sake of his dance training. He studied German expressionist dance (influenced by Eguchi Takaya and thus Mary Wigman) in Tohoku and branched into ballet and jazz in Tokyo. Despite his passion, Hijikata was never good at these forms of dancing. They didn't fit him, his stiff body or lower center of gravity, and not even why he wanted to dance. " He said repeatedly that he desired to create a dance in which life was dance, and in which he could create his own universe.... a style that emphasized the presence of the dancers rather than communicating meaning of demonstrating virtuosity," (Kurihara 24).
He was born in the countryside and moved to the city. There, he always felt like an outsider because of his upbringing. He belonged to a small social circle of avante-garde artists and radical thinkers. He desired to dance, but this drive was not fulfilled by conventional forms of dance. Because of our similar backgrounds, I empathized with him and desired to see his progression throughout life and art. Yes, I do not want a dance that is only about "demonstrating virtuousity." I was questioning whether dance was about "communicating meaning." I have never thought about dance as "emphasizing the presence of the dancers." The sheer presence! Just the power to fill the room and to move people. I have said before that dance is experience. Hijikata did, too. "According to him, one must experience dance directly, rather than merely watch it from a distance and try to interpret it. The spectator must transform himself through the experience, like a ritual," (46).
His ideas about dance are clear and riddle-like all at the same time, pulling me in more as my desire to understand Hijikata's universe grows. His life and theories are intriguing, since he pulled so much of his perspective from German and French writers and visual artists before his time and then fed the Japanese avante-gard art world of the sixties. I love the relationship between the arts, the spinning of ideas, and the creating of a new cosmos. A flyer for Dance Experience 3 (1960) had this written on the back:
"I received secret information which Mr. Tatsumi Hijikata is said to perform a heresy ceremony again. I am peasant to see it and must be ready for black masks and suspicious perfumes for the night.
The classics and the advance guard here come to a crisis. I can find modern symbolic language in his work.
- Ukio Mishima" (page 25 of Tatsumi Hijikata's Butoh)
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