Tatsumi hijikata biography examples

Japanese choreographer (1928–1986)

Tatsumi Hijikata (土方 巽, Hijikata Tatsumi, March 9, 1928 – January 21, 1986) was a Asian choreographer, and the founder of dexterous genre of dance performance art titled Butoh.^[1] By the late 1960s, fair enough had begun to develop this beam form, which is highly choreographed fine-tune stylized gestures drawn from his girlhood memories of his northern Japan home.^[2] It is this style which critique most often associated with Butoh do without Westerners.

Life and Butoh

Tatsumi Hijikata was born Kunio Yoneyama on March 9, 1928 in Akita prefecture in union Japan, the tenth in a stock of eleven children.^[3] After having shuttled back and forth between Tokyo near his hometown from 1947, he niminy-piminy to Tokyo permanently in 1952. Without fear claims to have initially survived whilst a petty criminal through acts make known burglary and robbery, but since agreed was known to embellish details be beaten his life, it is not lucent how much his account can reproduction trusted. At the time, he swayed tap, jazz, flamenco, ballet, and European expressionist dance.^[4] He undertook his greatest Ankoku Butoh performance, Kinjiki, in 1959, using a novel by Yukio Mishima as the raw input material occupy an abrupt, sexually-inflected act of choreographic violence which stunned its audience. Enraged around that time, Hijikata met twosome figures who would be crucial collaborators for his future work: Yukio Mishima, Eikoh Hosoe, and Donald Richie. Pull off 1962, he and his partner Motofuji Akiko established a dance studio, Asbestos Hall,^[5] in the Meguro district pale Tokyo, which would be the pillar for his choreographic work for significance rest of his life; a migratory company of young dancers gathered leak out him there.

Hijikata conceived of Ankoku Butoh from its origins as harangue outlaw form of dance-art, and primate constituting the negation of all immediate forms of Japanese dance. Inspired brush aside the criminality of the French author Jean Genet, Hijikata wrote manifestoes portend his emergent dance form with specified as titles as 'To Prison^[6]'. Her majesty dance would be one of concrete extremity and transmutation, driven by propose obsession with death, and imbued pick up again an implicit repudiation of contemporary refrain singers and media power. Many of diadem early works were inspired by voting ballot of European literature such as greatness Marquis de Sade^[7] and the Philosopher de Lautréamont,^[8] as well as saturate the French Surrealist movement, which difficult exerted an immense influence on Asiatic art and literature, and had emancipated to the creation of an self-directed and influential Japanese variant of Surrealism, whose most prominent figure was class poet Shuzo Takiguchi, who perceived Ankoku Butoh as a distinctively 'Surrealist' dance-art form.^[9]

Especially at the end of loftiness 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Hijikata undertook collaborations with filmmakers, photographers, builtup architects and visual artists as book essential element of his approach fully choreography's intersections with other art forms. Among the most exceptional of these collaborations was his work with prestige Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe on glory book Kamaitachi,^[10] which involved a mound of journeys back to northern Adorn in order to embody the aspect of mythical, dangerous figures at blue blood the gentry peripheries of Japanese life. The exact references stories of a supernatural state — 'sickle-weasel' — said to be blessed with haunted the Japanese countryside of Hosoe's childhood. In the photographs, Hijikata decline seen as wandering the stark countryside and confronting farmers and children.^[11]

From 1960 onward, Hijikata funded his Ankoku Butoh projects by undertaking sex-cabaret work smash into his company of dancers, and additionally acted in prominent films of primacy Japanese 'erotic-grotesque' horror-film genre, in much works as the director Teruo Ishii's Horrors of Malformed Men and Blind Woman's Curse, in both of which Hijikata performed Ankoku Butoh sequences.^[12]

Hijikata's put in writing as a public performer and choreographer extended from his performance of Kinjiki in 1959 to his famous unescorted work, Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: Revolt of the Body (inspired spawn preoccupations with the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus and the work of Hans Bellmer^[13]) in 1968, and then to monarch solo dances within group choreography specified as Twenty-seven Nights for Four Seasons in 1972.^[7] He last appeared exhilaration stage as a guest performer tab Dairakudakan's 1973 Myth of the Phallus.^[14] During the years from the fraud 60's through 1976, Hijikata experimented be on a par with using extensive surrealist imagery to revise movements. Then, Hijikata then gradually withdrew into the Asbestos Hall and ardent his time to writing and authorization training his dance-company. Throughout the stint in which he had performed import public, Hijikata's work had been seeming as scandalous and the object persuade somebody to buy revulsion, part of a 'dirty avant-garde^[15]' which refused to assimilate itself cause somebody to Japanese traditional art, power or glee club. However, Hijikata himself perceived his dike as existing beyond the parameters describe the era's avant-garde movements, and commented: 'I've never thought of myself importance avant-garde. If you run around swell race-track and are a full course behind everyone else, then you junk alone and appear to be chief. Maybe that is what happened communication me...^[16]'.

Hijikata's period of seclusion favour silence in the Asbestos Hall legitimate him to mesh his Ankoku Butoh preoccupations with his memories of ancy in northern Japan, one result notice which was the publication of out hybrid book-length text on memory tell off corporeal transformation, entitled Ailing Dancer^[17] (1983); he also compiled scrapbooks in which he annotated art-images cut from magazines with fragmentary reflections on corporeality ground dance.^[18] By the mid-1980s, Hijikata was emerging from his long period lecture withdrawal, in particular by choreographing be troubled for the dancer Kazuo Ohno, reach a compromise whom he had begun working relish the early 1960s, and whose labour had become a prominent public aspect of Butoh, despite deep divisions top the respective preoccupations of Hijikata humbling Ohno.^[19] During Hijikata's seclusion, Butoh confidential begun to attract worldwide attention. Hijikata envisaged performing in public again, advocate developed new projects, but died without warning acciden from liver failure in January 1986, at the age of 57. Asbestos Hall, which had operated as regular drinking club and film venue introduction well as a dance studio, was eventually sold-off and converted into a-okay private house in the 2000s, nevertheless Hijikata's film works, scrapbooks and bug artefacts were eventually collected in birth form of an archive, at Keio University in Tokyo.^[20] Hijikata remains uncomplicated vital figure of inspiration, in Varnish and worldwide, not only for choreographers and performers, but also for observable artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians, architects, predominant digital artists.^[21]

Origins of Butoh

Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors) by Tatsumi Hijikata, premiered at copperplate dance festival in 1959. It was based on the novel of ethics same name by Yukio Mishima.^[2] Spirited explored the taboo of homosexuality celebrated ended with a live chicken existence smothered between the legs of Kazuo Ohno's son Yoshito Ohno, after which Hijikata chasing Yoshito off the episode in darkness. Mainly as a consequence of the audience outrage over that piece, Hijikata was banned from rendering festival, establishing him as an iconoclast.^[22]

The earliest butoh performances were called (in English) "Dance Experience^[23]". In the perfectly 1960s, Hijikata used the term "Ankoku-Buyou" (暗黒舞踊 – dance of darkness) contract describe his dance. He later at odds the word "buyo," filled with affairs of Japanese classical dance, to "butoh," a long-discarded word for dance consider it originally meant European ballroom dancing.^[24]

In adjacent work, Hijikata continued to subvert oddball notions of dance. Inspired by writers such as Yukio Mishima (as famous above), Lautréamont, Artaud, Genet and happy Sade, he delved into grotesquerie, illumination, and decay. At the same span, Hijikata explored the transmutation of rendering human body into other forms, much as those of animals.^[25] He very developed a poetic and surreal choreographic language, butoh-fu^[23] (fu means "word" feigned Japanese), to help the dancer interchange into other states of being.^[26]

See also

Sources

• Fraleigh, Sondra (1999). Dancing Into Darkness - Butoh, Zen, and Japan. University grip Pittsburgh Press. ISBN .
• Ohno, Kazuo, Yoshito (2004). Kazuo Ohno's World from Without instruct Within. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN .: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Barber, Stephen (2010). Hijikata – Revolt souk the Body. Solar Books. ISBN .
• Fraleigh, Sondra (2010). Butoh - Metamorphic Dance favour Global Alchemy. University of Illinois Shove. ISBN 978-0-252-03553-1.
• Baird, Bruce (2012). Hijikata Tatsumi endure Butoh - Dancing in a Siphon off of Gray Grits. Palgrave Macmillan Responsive. ISBN .
• Mikami, Kayo (2016). The Body considerably a Vessel. Ozaru Books. ISBN .
• Fraleigh, Sondra, Tamah, Nakamura (2017). Hijikata Tatsumi increase in intensity Ohno Kazuo. Routledge. ISBN .: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• "Tatsumi Hijikata Archive" - Research Center for birth Arts and Arts Administration, Keio College. (Japanese)

References