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DANCES OF DEATH, SACRIFICE, AND SPIRIT
mysterious crisis is prepared for that. Sacrifice is the source of all work and every dancer is an illegitimate child set free to experience that very quality. Because they bear that obligation, all dancers must first of all be pilloried. Dance for display must be totally abolished. Being looked at, patted, licked, knocked down. A striptease is nothing to laugh at. (2000a: 39–40)
NIKUTAI NO HANRAN (REBELLION OF THE BODY, 1968)
In 1968, Hijikata choreographs the work that marks Ankoku Butoh as a new genre. His dance Hijikata Tatsumi to Nihonjin: Nikutai no hanran (Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese: Rebellion of the Body), also known as Rebellion of the Body and sometimes Revolt of the Flesh, is performed at Nihon Seinen Kan Hall. This shamanist dance, signaling Hijikata’s maturity as a surrealist and his further embrace of the subconscious, is symptomatic of the inner turmoil through which he is living; his preoccupation with personal identity as a native son of Japan from the remote Tohoku region finally explodes. His concern for explicating culture has been building. In June of 1968, he performs in Ojune sho (Excerpts from Genet), a recital given by his student Ishii Mitsutaka. Hijikata dances Hanayome (neko) (Bride [Cat]) in a kimono. He also dances Kirisuto (Christ), and later develops these dances into episodes of Rebellion of the Body in October that same year. Antonin Artaud’s The Theater and its Double was translated into Japanese in 1965 and had a profound influence on a new generation of Japanese directors and performers including Hijikata. This is evident in the directly experiential aspects of his work and the anarchy of Rebellion of the Body. In this work, Hijikata under the influence of Artaud and still in the thrall of Jean Genet, enters the stage through the audience, borne on a palanquin, a long kimono covering his naked body, and in his hand he holds a golden phallus – as in Artaud’s From Heliogabalus, or The Anarchic Crowned. Hijikata transforms episodically through several scenes in this concert length work, morphing from the demonic to the satiric, waving a large strapped-on golden penis, dancing as a man in a gown, and binding himself with ropes in crucifixion, his sleek and browned body wrapped in swaths of white cloth. The wildness of his long hair and beard seem to mock the short pink dress and ankle socks he wears in a