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DANCES OF DEATH, SACRIFICE, AND SPIRIT
of butoh as choreographed performance. However, those who maintain the spirit of Hijikata and Ohno’s butoh, Nakamura terms “butoh-ists.” Clearly, Hijikata and Ohno provide the term “butohist” its original meaning and restive force. From the very beginning, Hijikata and Ohno intrigue audiences as much as they baffle them. In several ways their butoh is like all dance in this regard. Dances don’t tell stories, except in the tales of ballet and in narrative forms, and even then the stories are seldom literal or linear. Narrative in dance, as in the early modern dances of Martha Graham, is cast in metaphors and symbols that peak the body’s deep responsiveness to kinetic images. To dance is to explore human consciousness through bodily means. Hijikata and Ohno invert consciousness, however, sublimating the body while extending its liminal states, as we explore in analyzing five of their dances in this chapter. These men are not narrative or symbolist modern dancers; neither are they neutrally postmodern. As butohists, they move past modern categories altogether. One does not so much read their butoh works to find meaning there; rather, one enters into morphing states of awareness through the performances. There is a difference between metaphoric and metamorphic imagery; butoh does not ride on metaphor, but rather on change and an ethos of becoming. As the root word of ethics, ethos, points to a matrix of values, attitudes, habits, and beliefs. Here we refer to a cultural disposition that appreciates the ongoing nature of life and the life/death/life cycle, never-ending in solid form, because it comes from emptiness, itself not really empty, but in process of emptying and filling, like the process of breathing. Meaning in butoh comes through one’s experience of the dance, and not from deciphering a message or choreographic intent. Surely there is an element of subjective reflection in being an audience for any kind of dance, but Hijikata and Ohno are the first to proffer wholly experiential avenues for relating to dance. Hijikata’s offering comes in the form of sacrifice; Ohno’s comes through reverence for life and the healing of trauma. Hijikata dances his darkness, constructs his body of pain and absurdity, and the audience morphs through these aspects of themselves. As for Ohno, people feel better in his presence and through the spirituality of his performances. The audience for butoh is offered an experience of theater that is not distanced – filtered through centuries of movement styles and character development – as in Kabuki and Noh, or even Western ballet. As Japan’s first butohists, Hijikata and Ohno circumvent