BRATTLEBORO — On Sunday, Oct. 17, a performance/ritual will occur at the Stone Church in Brattleboro unlike anything you, or most people, have ever seen, unless you've seen butoh before.
I had never heard of butoh before my husband, experimental musician John Loggia, told me he would be playing for a performance here in town. A butoh dancer, Angela Martinelli, had recently arrived from Seattle and was eager to bring the form to Brattleboro, where apparently it has not been performed before.
“What's butoh?” I asked, “And who is this woman?”
In researching the answers to these two questions, I've become increasingly intrigued by this unique art form which, although little known here, has a significant history and is experiencing a global renaissance.
* * *
A quick search of the web shows butoh festivals springing up everywhere, and enough old and new videos to hold me transfixed for hours.
The music and movement of these pieces ran like an electric current to my soul. Dancers, often nude or barely covered, spines protruding through skin, were often painted a white that simultaneously reminded me ghosts and the waxy varnax covering newborns.
The dancers moved excruciatingly slowly, then - shockingly - suddenly sprang out like birds in flight. They seemed animated by eerie sounds and music that felt like an outside force beyond their control.
Extreme facial expressions and physical contortions created an isometric tension between darkness and light, pain and freedom, birth and death played out before me like living yin and yang.
* * *
Last year, I was living through a very difficult time. My mother was dying. I felt the physical and emotional pressures and pulls between my child, my mother, and the many other forces demanding my attention and care.
I realized I was caught in a sort of eternal wheel of generations: my daughter coming up, my mother going down, and me suspended in the middle. I had the opportunity to express these feelings on stage as part of the yearly “Gathering in Gratitude” at the Hooker-Dunham Theater.
The whole process of trying to embody and portray my pain was ultimately very healing, but I wish I had been able to access the extreme expressionism of butoh at the time.
I realized it would have been the perfect form for what I had been trying to express: being propelled by forces larger than myself, feeling anguish about betraying my own creativity in order to serve the people around me, a sense of growth and hope (the child) versus decay and despair (the dying mother).
I think my efforts would have been that much more profound and therapeutic, for this is what butoh does.
* * *
Butoh was born in Japan post–World War II. Like tortured green shoots reaching up from the rubble, butoh was an artistic response to the apocalyptic horror of the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on the densely populated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Some characterize Butoh as a reaction against Western domination, a reassertion of a battered Japanese identity that, while drawing from the highly stylized, traditional Japanese forms of Kabuki and Noh theater, turned these forms on their heads. Instead of beauty and harmony, butoh depicted decay and despair.
Butoh was a new way of expressing the pain people felt. It helped them cope with the impotence they felt confronting a devastating reality beyond comprehension.
In Japanese, butoh was a somewhat archaic term literally meaning “dance step.” The originators of the form that came to be called Ankoku Butoh (dance of darkness) were two male dancers - Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata.
The latter is generally attributed with creating the first butoh piece, Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours) at a dance festival in 1959. Based on a novel of the same name, it explored taboos of homosexuality and pedophelia and established butoh's subversive origins and inclinations.
Butoh performers collaborated with German expressionists and surreal artists of the time. It ultimately grew beyond the confines of its home in Japan where it remains to this day a fringe phenomenon.
The tangible growth of butoh around the world today may be a reaction to the state of the planet today, a reflection of our sense of inner conflict, frustration, despair, impotence and, at the bottom of this Pandora's box, the hope and healing we need to face the challenges of our times.
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“Butoh reflects the primal, the animalistic in people and facilitates through ritual our connection to each other, “ Butoh dancer Angela Martinelli explained one Wednesday morning after her weekly butoh class at Luminz Studio. I came to meet her and seven other dancers preparing for the Stone Church event in town.
“Butoh is more correctly termed a ritual because, when performed, it is not normally conceived of as a 'show' in a traditional theater with a traditional audience, but rather a communion of sorts in an alternative space with those drawn to attend,” she said.
Martinelli, who has studied dance for 25 years and has also traveled the world studying various forms of dance rituals, added, “Butoh is not about highlighting one's technical ability as a dancer, though many dancers like me arrive at butoh as a sort of an ultimate form of expression, the rawest form of movement.”
She said butoh frequently attracts actors and others who want to dance but lack the formal training necessary to accomplish ballet, modern, and other forms.
At the rehearsal, a year-old baby tentatively ambled and fell, ambled and fell upon the smooth dark floor, her pink skin glowing in the spotlights. All around her, the butoh dancers writhed on the floor.
“Now your skin is gone,” Martinelli directs, “It's just nerves, muscle, veins, nothing's holding it in.”
The whole cycle of life played out in this improvised spectacle before me, second floor of the Cotton Mill, and it somehow all made sense.
* * *
My husband, John, sat observing the dancers, preparing to direct a group of five musicians who will provide live sound for the performance.
The soundtrack for butoh is often improvised and experimental, focusing on building tension, culminating in release.
“The music makes tangible both the oppressive nature of the world we live in and the potential liberation from its confines,” he said. “The sound animates the performers and aims to physically impact the audience, opening them up to the feelings being expressed by the dancers.”
“I think Butoh can change the world,” Angela says. “It allows people the freedom to feel what's happening. There is suffering happening all around us, the devastation of the planet, a hungry neighbor down the street. We tend to try to ignore the suffering, to numb ourselves to it. Butoh says 'you are going to feel this pain, you are going to bleed the body and come back stronger.'”
In the East, butoh is often done as a therapeutic, individual practice, much as we think of yoga or Tai Chi. People perform butoh in the woods alone.
When performed as a community ritual, as it will be in the upcoming Brattleboro performance, it can be cathartic and therapeutic, and not without humor.
John pointed out that butoh spelled backwards is “hot tub.”
While not as immediately enticing as a hot soak, butoh definitely submerges you into an altered awareness, a shift in reality where healing can sometimes occur.