BUTOH AND ANCIENT GREEK DANCE

By ANNA LAZOU

Butoh, the new form of aesthetic movement created by the modern dancer, Tatsumi Hijikata, in
1959 in Japan, tried to rehabilitate the separation of man from nature and his personal identity. Butoh,
which means dance (bu) and step (toh), searches for the physical body in the dancer and is different
from both Japanese and Western dance. Butoh dance does not require a specific technical training but is
based on the development of the senses, while the body itself becomes the centre of expression. In
parallel with the awareness of the self it develops the consciousness of as well as contact with the other
dancers. Butoh dance is an exclusively improvisational dance, as the butoh dancer tries to react to the
impressions of the moment, to space, climate and the environment.

Kazuo Ohno, one of the founders of butoh dance, states, while guiding his class, (as described
by Jean Viala and Nourit Masson-Sekine in their book Butoh: Shades of Darkness) – states: “My art is
an art of improvisation. It is dangerous. To succeed, one must first reach the very depths of the human
soul, and then, express it ...”

What Butoh proposes as starting point for the dancer’s preparation is the "dead body" as a
theme of improvisation. “What could be the life of that which is dead? It is this impossibility that we
must create”, Ohno suggests and adds, “for dance, we must not try to control the body, but to let the
soul breathe life into the flesh”. His instructions to the student go like this: "Be free! Let go!" Being
free is not doing what we want or what we think. On the contrary, it means being liberated from
thought and will.

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 Ohno, although he will sometimes correct a pose or explain the elementary movement of the
body, he generally avoids imposing the slightest technique; it is up to the student to create whatever
techniques are necessary. Ohno is there to open up the imagination, to help discover the soul. He guides
the student so that he can become like "the creator of the world, he who has no identity, he who existed
before the appearance of the individual. Then, all is but a game."

On the other hand butoh dancers intend to harmonize with nature, invoking the memory of our
supposed origin from previous forms of existence, while they also try to base their dance on a
biological and religious background and content.

Atsushi Takenouchi, the famous butoh dancer and choreographer who has been working on his
own "Jinen Butoh" style since 1986, feels that dancing in harmony with nature has brought back the
memories which were sleeping, in his DNA. He uses the memories of once having been a tree, grass, an
animal, wind, soil, fire or water in his dance. He also transfers while performing on stage the feeling of
life and of the earth harmonizing with the environment. Takenuchi supports that “The body is a
container for one soul, which cannot be changed by anything”, and that dancing with this kind of body
is a common culture for all human beings. Performing this primitive dance in the space of nature where
people have gathered together since ancient time, where music and dance were born from prayer, is an
important ceremony which traces back to where we came from and leads to where we are going.”

Improvisational elements on the other hand are recognized in a wide series of ancient Greek
dances, since homeric time and up to late antiquity. It characterizes mainly samples of individual
dances of a free, liberating and mimetic nature. In tragedy and comedy, there is alteration of the strictly
formalistic dance schemata of the chorus with a sort of freedom of dancing expression of the
protagonist in certain solo pieces or during the kommos (the lament). In most examples of ancient
Greek dances there is a connection with deities and religious ceremonies in general. Demeter and
Dionysus, figures of prehistoric origin, are mostly dancing and ritualistic deities. Another particular
characteristic of these gods is their relation to Hades and metamorphosis, both characteristics of
homeric dances. Hades and the Underworld are symbols of a large family of metaphors of ancient
Greek culture concerning a view of space and man’s orientation to it. This conception of reality as
consisting of an upper and a lower la er of the world and human awareness of this view of reality are
paralleled with belief in the importance of subterrestrial spaces and caves - with their specific
successive alteration of light and shadow - for the storage of wealth and for the conservation of life.
They constituted certain standard beliefs of the homeric man and were involved in his dancing
expressions. Belief in the transformative power of fire and water, belongs to the same category of
beliefs as those above, corresponding to therapeutic and liberating procedures and practices.

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 The human being is considered as a micro cosmos in the universe. In several myths of archaic
origin we have the phenomenon of the transformation of some heroes into stars or the connection of
deities and gods with heavenly bodies. On the other hand the main starting point of the technique of
ancient Greek dance is walking, as the basis of metric and musical structure, rhythm and speech. The
origin of ancient Greek dance may be placed in the basic as well as revolutionary phenomenon of
standing and walking and their varieties (running, jumping).

According to the inspirer of butoh dance, Tatsumi Hijikata, butoh dance means an unveiling of
the inner life and contrary to other forms of dances, its movements are not derived from a fixed
technique and are far removed from conventions. The dancer of Butoh should dance in an absurd spirit
as a mirror, which thaws fear.

He also stated that “Western dance begins with its feet firmly planted on the ground whereas
Butoh begins with a dance wherein the dancer tries in vain to find his feet. What has happened to the
tucked-in feet?”

The way butoh dance develops touches the inner reality of the human being – the origin of fear
in man, the need for rebirth and for a new identity: Hijikata also showed a totally new perspective in
dance when he asserted: “When I begin to wish I were crippled - even though I am perfectly healthy -
or rather that I would have been better off born a cripple, that is the first step towards Butoh."

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 Hijikata related dance with a primordial experience of suffering: “When one considers the body
in relation to dance, it is then that one truly realizes what suffering is”, he said, and continued, “No
matter how much we search for it from the outside, there is no way we can find it without delving into
ourselves”. The dancer, through the butoh spirit, confronts the origins of his fears, as Hijikata declared,
butoh is a dance which crawls towards the bowels of the earth. An interesting idea is the connection of
butoh unceasing improvisation with the recall of memories – pure body memories, as Hijikata was
asking, “What is memory if not the sum of all those things that have been eaten, erased, eliminated - in
a word, all that has ceased to exist? And is not the world made so as to attend to that sum?”

To return to ancient Greek traditions and Greek culture more generally, food and eating are
connected with memory as a repetitive motto in myths and folk traditions. Plouton, (cf. the Greek word
ploutos meaning wealth) the king of Hades, dominates in the dark place of storage of wealth and other
precious goods and possessions. From the sacredness and importance attributed to this event, it can be
assumed that food was considered to possess a transformational function as well as a mental and
psychological effect, a connection therefore with memory and emotions.

As for the identification of dance with the natural world, we know that a representative
category of ancient Greek dances refers to the physical and animal world, imitating sometimes many
and various animals’ behaviour or refers to flowers and trees and to the processes of cultivation of
plants necessary for nutrition and survival.

Butoh dance is presented as a dance interested in the grotesque and absurd qualities of human
expression, as well as for the nostalgic search for a primitive society, a timeless universal world, before
and beyond civilization. Ohno explains in his class that the illogical is liberating, that the impossible
opens new paths.

A favourite theme is the relationship between male and female, may denote either the conflict
between man and woman or the harmonic relationship between these two opposing poles, or, normally,
the archetypical pair of mother and child, sometimes with their reunion after a tragic separation, or their
search for their lost unity after death and loss.

In ancient drama on the other hand we can see the development of an internal relationship of
movement, space and dance. Dance, - horos, therefore means collective musical action, in contrast with
orchesis, which signifies particularly individual or solo dancing. The space of the orchestra, came as
the result of the archetypical cyclical arrangement of the dithyrambos dancers in relation to –
opposition and/or dialogue with the exarchon, the leader of the dance. Around the orchestra we have
the koilon, with the position of the audience, as a physical geometric expansion of the acting agents
space, creating therefore, a natural relationship, both organized and continuously reorganized and
transformed through the centuries, demonstrating the movement of the human soul.

Butoh is internally connected with space and time. Just as the spider creates and weaves its
web, butoh creates its own space identifying immobility and movement as dance and not necessarily
what is conventionally considered as dance. Butoh establishes a kind of balance through situations of
unbalance and has rejected the social standards of beauty and ugliness or morally good and bad, in
order to substitute for them an uninhibited continuity of movement characterizing all natural
phenomena, perhaps only with the exception of human situations.

Butoh which has a definite and strong philosophical background remains however a performing
art, in front of an audience. Each dance without losing its internal desire, ought always to find ways of
transmitting to the spectator what it has to communicate. This can only be actualized and controlled in
action during the performance. Which brings up two key points: the first is that much butoh movement
is derived from an inner image that the dancer holds during the dance. The movements then come from
impulses created by the image rather than conscious choices by the dancer. The other issue this raises is

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that the audience cannot usually discern what this internal image is - nor should it. The audience reads
their own story in the actions of the dancers.

The close connection of body with earth that butoh develops reconstructs the lost identity of the
psychophysical whole of the dancer. The starting point is the body while the agent as subject withdraws
itself in order to let something else, an inner self, dance through the body. One of the many ideas that
constellate around Butoh is the concept of the empty body. This refers to an opening up of space in the
body to allow oneself room to be moved: to move without conscious intention or desire for self-
expression. The aim of butoh dance is not to realize a concept but to create those preconditions
necessary for the emergence of the dance of the body that already exists in the dancer.

We observe and follow the body just like as if it were playing a game or dancing a folk or
traditional dance or participating in anniversary festivities and celebrations throughout the year. A
corresponding conclusion has been drawn out of my research into the meaning of the Dionysian
element in Greek dance culture, diachronically : Starting from the philosophical investigation of
concepts like traditional, physical and historical I have attempted to identify the dionysian element of
the Greek dances and to demonstrate that the human body as the locus communes of the morphological,
biological and psychological aspects of dance can be also an operator of moral, as well as social and
political dimensions.

Descriptions on the basis of texts as well as historical and archaeological testimony can help us
to formulate a vocabulary of movements and situations of dance that characterize the dionysian
element. But only the actual, live participation to a social language and a community tradition of dance
can provide proof of its therapeutic and transformative function. Ecstatic dances, ritual and initiation
performances with orgiastic and mystery content and character, zoomorphic dances are the main forms
of dionysian culture existing worldwide, associated with various fertility cults and deities. The ecstatic
character – losing of oneself through movement and musical patterns – epitomizes the main functions
of these dances and rituals where the dances appear. Jerzi Growtoski said that to have a desire to
express oneself means that one is divided - part of you commands, part of you obeys. True expression,
he said, is that of a tree. This idea is resonant with Butoh. Around the tree on the other hand either as
reference to the physical body of the tree in the center of the action (δρυς – δράση – δράμα), or as the
play around the tree – or, as in tree worshiping religions – the ceremonial dialogue with the tree –
ancient Greek dance and drama evolved.

Butoh, apart from being a performing art and a specific aesthetic event – quite spectacular – is
also a form of psychosomatic therapy and kinesiotherapy. Tamah Nakamura has ascertained that butoh

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psychosomatic action begins from 1) self – perception, 2) inter – subjective awareness and leads as a
consequence to 3) social consciousness. It can be a form of consciousness, that is, being more aware of
the reality of the social-cultural structures combined with action for the transformation of reality. The
therapeutic function of dance and drama in the ancient Greek world is apparent and widely recognized.
The dionysian element in movement, more particularly, is therapeutic both for its bio psychic and
physiological balancing functions and effects and for its sociopolitical dimensions.

The body in Butoh practice, then, is a vehicle for intervention and transformation of embodied
political structure, it allows a specific interaction between structure and agency using improvisation
throughout everyday life and practices. The individual agent adopts a collective attitude in thought and
employs it in action. New forms of existence, practice and movement have to be found in order to
restore the structural inequality of human bodies, which is continuously reproduced through the
centuries in the estranged forms of our practical life. When we learn to move in a new way we will
learn to “speak” through movement and enter into a true dialogue with the other beings in the world. In
this way we compensate for the agony of our body in everyday practice, for the sorrow of Demeter, the
pain of Persephone and the tearing up of Dionysus. As we keep on searching our body in this way, a
rupture with the past will replace what was previously controlled and suppressed by the usual form of
labor and will permit the spelling out of the new word, with a very different quality than before.

Philosophy of dance leads to the creation of a “text” that concretizes the meaning that the
individual attributes to his movement experience and extends consciousness. This therapy as an
outcome of the butoh educational procedures is therefore the restoration of those parts of ourselves,
which were destroyed by today’s society and kept in the dark, those parts that are not accepted as
knowledge. Butoh gives a place to the oppressed emotions through unstructured movement by
exploring new and different ways of moving in our lives. This dialectic and complete relationship
between emotions, movement and word has been proposed in an exemplary way by the chorus in
ancient Greek drama.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adler, J., The collective body, in the American Journal of Dance Therapy, 18(2), 1996, p. 81-94
Fraleigh, S., Dancing into darkness: Butoh, Zen and Japan, Pittsburgh, PA, Pittsburgh University Press, 1999.
Kasai, T. & Takeuchi, M., Mind-body learning by the Butoh dance method, in Proceedings from the 36th Annual
Conference of American Dance Therapy Association, Raleigh, North Carolina, October, 2001, σελ. 11-14.
Orchesis, Texts on Ancient Greek Dance, A. Lazou - A. Raftis - M. Borowska, Ways of Life Publications &
Greek Dances Theatre “Dora Stratou”, Athens, 2003
Viala, Jean & Masson-Sekine, Nourit, butoh: Shades of Darkness, Tokyo, 1988