Color on Butoh Performance

Student's Name:
Instructor:
Subject:
Date:
Color on Butoh Performance
Butoh is often referred to as the Japanese dance of darkness, developed after World War II as an avant-garde dance. Initially, the dance was known as Ankoku-Buyou but later changed to Butoh to associate it with Western-style dances. Butoh is characterized by grotesque movements, graphic allusions, and arrhythmic body contortions whereby performers move slowly and awkwardly with shuffling steps, like the walking dead (Baird et al., 2018). The dance was developed by renowned dancer Kazuo Ohno, and the choreographer, Tatsumi Hijikata, to reassert Japan's sense of self through art. All forms of expressionism in the dance tell a story that reflects the traditional Japanese commoner, movements accustomed to sleeping on futons, praying at alters and shrines, the intrinsic connection with nature, toiling in arable fields, and sitting in Seiza style on tatami flooring. The themes of Butoh include darkness, transformation, and desire.
The use of Grotesque is a defining characteristic of Butoh's performance style created by its obsession with death, movement, taboo subject matter, and use of makeup and lighting. The grotesque can encompass monstrous, dead, awkward, sick, and awkward characters. The dance movements flow outward from the dancer's inner world to evoke emotions and memories from the audience (Breiten, Jonathan Bradford, 2016). The dancers can connect directly with the audience by eliminating meaning from their movements. Butoh's aesthetic incorporates several elements concerning grotesque realism with tendencies towards exploring deformed, broken, crippled, and decaying human bodies. Grotesque allows the dancer's body to take multiple meanings and gives them a way of creating movement that incorporates communication and contradictory movements in a single moment.
Butoh lacks technique because dancers use symbolic representations as a direct channel for the audience's emotional communication, making it resistant to critical int...