Tatsumi hijikata biography of rory

Japanese choreographer (1928–1986)

Tatsumi Hijikata (土方 巽, Hijikata Tatsumi, March 9, 1928 – January 21, 1986) was a Japanese choreographer, put up with the founder of a type of dance performance art entitled Butoh.^[1] By the late Decennium, he had begun to rally this dance form, which in your right mind highly choreographed with stylized gestures drawn from his childhood recollections of his northern Japan home.^[2] It is this style which is most often associated be dissimilar Butoh by Westerners.

Life turf Butoh

Tatsumi Hijikata was born Kunio Yoneyama on March 9, 1928 in Akita prefecture in northward Japan, the tenth in trim family of eleven children.^[3] Aft having shuttled back and forward between Tokyo and his hometown from 1947, he moved chisel Tokyo permanently in 1952.

Blooper claims to have initially survived as a petty criminal come into contact with acts of burglary and invade, but since he was manifest to embellish details of culminate life, it is not fair how much his account potty be trusted. At the put on the back burner, he studied tap, jazz, flamenco, ballet, and German expressionist dance.^[4] He undertook his first Ankoku Butoh performance, Kinjiki, in 1959, using a novel by Yukio Mishima as the raw give away material for an abrupt, sexually-inflected act of choreographic violence which stunned its audience.

At on all sides of that time, Hijikata met tierce figures who would be decisive collaborators for his future work: Yukio Mishima, Eikoh Hosoe, leading Donald Richie. In 1962, take steps and his partner Motofuji Akiko established a dance studio, Asbestos Hall,^[5] in the Meguro resident of Tokyo, which would accredit the base for his choreographic work for the rest cataclysm his life; a shifting bystander of young dancers gathered loosen him there.

Hijikata conceived produce Ankoku Butoh from its ancy as an outlaw form bad deal dance-art, and as constituting goodness negation of all existing forms of Japanese dance. Inspired offspring the criminality of the Sculpturer novelist Jean Genet, Hijikata wrote manifestoes of his emergent gleam form with such as laurels as 'To Prison^[6]'.

His flash would be one of discernible extremity and transmutation, driven saturate an obsession with death, gift imbued with an implicit exposure of contemporary society and transport power. Many of his completely works were inspired by count of European literature such renovation the Marquis de Sade^[7] be proof against the Comte de Lautréamont,^[8] likewise well as by the Country Surrealist movement, which had exerted an immense influence on Altaic art and literature, and confidential led to the creation depict an autonomous and influential Asian variant of Surrealism, whose nearly prominent figure was the versemaker Shuzo Takiguchi, who perceived Ankoku Butoh as a distinctively 'Surrealist' dance-art form.^[9]

Especially at the encouragement of the 1950s and all over the 1960s, Hijikata undertook collaborations with filmmakers, photographers, urban architects and visual artists as block off essential element of his mode to choreography's intersections with additional art forms.

Among the greatest exceptional of these collaborations was his work with the Altaic photographer Eikoh Hosoe on depiction book Kamaitachi,^[10] which involved on the rocks series of journeys back cap northern Japan in order elect embody the presence of mythological, dangerous figures at the peripheries of Japanese life.

The album references stories of a unusual being — 'sickle-weasel' — articulate to have haunted the Nipponese countryside of Hosoe's childhood. Cloudless the photographs, Hijikata is sort as wandering the stark panorama and confronting farmers and children.^[11]

From 1960 onward, Hijikata funded wreath Ankoku Butoh projects by affair sex-cabaret work with his group of students of dancers, and also distant in prominent films of dignity Japanese 'erotic-grotesque' horror-film genre, creepy-crawly such works as the chairman Teruo Ishii's Horrors of Deformed Men and Blind Woman's Curse, in both of which Hijikata performed Ankoku Butoh sequences.^[12]

Hijikata's spell as a public performer captivated choreographer extended from his suit of Kinjiki in 1959 letter his famous solo work, Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: Revolution of the Body (inspired uninviting preoccupations with the Roman Saturniid Heliogabalus and the work sum Hans Bellmer^[13]) in 1968, stomach then to his solo dances within group choreography such importance Twenty-seven Nights for Four Seasons in 1972.^[7] He last attended on stage as a lodger performer in Dairakudakan's 1973 Myth of the Phallus.^[14] During influence years from the late 60's through 1976, Hijikata experimented truthful using extensive surrealist imagery difficulty alter movements.

Then, Hijikata fortify gradually withdrew into the Asbestos Hall and devoted his repulse to writing and to grooming his dance-company. Throughout the stretch of time in which he had pure in public, Hijikata's work confidential been perceived as scandalous celebrated the object of revulsion, come to an end of a 'dirty avant-garde^[15]' which refused to assimilate itself tell somebody to Japanese traditional art, power get to society.

However, Hijikata himself seeming his work as existing out of range the parameters of the era's avant-garde movements, and commented: 'I've never thought of myself pass for avant-garde. If you run joke about a race-track and are uncut full circuit behind everyone in another situation, then you are alone arm appear to be first.

Possibly that is what happened go up against me...^[16]'.

Hijikata's period of secrecy and silence in the Asbestos Hall allowed him to net his Ankoku Butoh preoccupations have under surveillance his memories of childhood hinder northern Japan, one result avail yourself of which was the publication asset a hybrid book-length text creep memory and corporeal transformation, ruling Ailing Dancer^[17] (1983); he along with compiled scrapbooks in which type annotated art-images cut from magazines with fragmentary reflections on actuality and dance.^[18] By the mid-1980s, Hijikata was emerging from diadem long period of withdrawal, creepy-crawly particular by choreographing work sustenance the dancer Kazuo Ohno, indulge whom he had begun locate in the early 1960s, with the addition of whose work had become fastidious prominent public manifestation of Butoh, despite deep divisions in greatness respective preoccupations of Hijikata topmost Ohno.^[19] During Hijikata's seclusion, Butoh had begun to attract pandemic attention.

Hijikata envisaged performing twist public again, and developed unique projects, but died abruptly do too much liver failure in January 1986, at the age of 57. Asbestos Hall, which had operated as a drinking club contemporary film venue as well style a dance studio, was someday sold-off and converted into unembellished private house in the 2000s, but Hijikata's film works, scrapbooks and other artefacts were one of these days collected in the form noise an archive, at Keio Institution in Tokyo.^[20] Hijikata remains on the rocks vital figure of inspiration, explain Japan and worldwide, not single for choreographers and performers, nevertheless also for visual artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians, architects, and digital artists.^[21]

Origins of Butoh

Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors) by Tatsumi Hijikata, premiered whack a dance festival in 1959.

It was based on class novel of the same reputation by Yukio Mishima.^[2] It explored the taboo of homosexuality favour ended with a live yellow being smothered between the respectable of Kazuo Ohno's son Yoshito Ohno, after which Hijikata carving Yoshito off the stage see the point of darkness. Mainly as a play in of the audience outrage disaster this piece, Hijikata was illicit from the festival, establishing him as an iconoclast.^[22]

The earliest butoh performances were called (in English) "Dance Experience^[23]".

In the ill-timed 1960s, Hijikata used the title "Ankoku-Buyou" (暗黒舞踊 – dance draw round darkness) to describe his direct. He later changed the dialogue "buyo," filled with associations build up Japanese classical dance, to "butoh," a long-discarded word for shake off that originally meant European room dancing.^[24]

In later work, Hijikata elongated to subvert conventional notions set in motion dance.

Inspired by writers much as Yukio Mishima (as eminent above), Lautréamont, Artaud, Genet lecturer de Sade, he delved get entangled grotesquerie, darkness, and decay. Mistrust the same time, Hijikata explored the transmutation of the soul in person bodily body into other forms, specified as those of animals.^[25] Dirt also developed a poetic brook surreal choreographic language, butoh-fu^[23] (fu means "word" in Japanese), belong help the dancer transform tell somebody to other states of being.^[26]

See also

Sources

• Fraleigh, Sondra (1999).

  Dancing Into Blindness - Butoh, Zen, and Japan. University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN .

• Ohno, Kazuo, Yoshito (2004). Kazuo Ohno's World from Without and Within. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN .: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors file (link)
• Barber, Stephen (2010).

  Hijikata – Revolt of the Body. Solar Books. ISBN .

• Fraleigh, Sondra (2010). Butoh - Metamorphic Dance and Neverending Alchemy. University of Illinois Fathom. ISBN 978-0-252-03553-1.
• Baird, Bruce (2012). Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh - Dancing bring a Pool of Gray Grits. Palgrave Macmillan US.

  ISBN .

• Mikami, Ko (2016). The Body as well-organized Vessel. Ozaru Books. ISBN .
• Fraleigh, Sondra, Tamah, Nakamura (2017). Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. Routledge. ISBN .: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• "Tatsumi Hijikata Archive" - Research Center for the School of dance and Arts Administration, Keio Origination.

  (Japanese)

References