His experiments were known at first by the English term “experience,” then ankoku butoh 暗黒舞踏, and later simply as butoh. The word butoh (from bu 舞 “to dance” and toh 踏 “to step, to tread”) originally meant “stamping dance,” but that sense had long fallen out of use. Instead it appeared more commonly as butohkai 舞踏會, meaning a Western social dance ball. In the early 1960s the term ankoku buyo 暗黒舞踊 (“dance of utter darkness”) was coined to refer to Hijikata’s dance experiments, but was soon switched to ankoku butoh. Some people point to the word butoh’s signification of Western dance as a gesture to the intercultural influences on the dance, but I follow Baird’s suggestion that the sense of “foreign” implied by the term was employed not to reference specific dances, but rather to signal that this was something entirely unfamiliar, something that had not been seen before.25 The use of butoh rather than buyo allowed the group to clearly delineate themselves from Japanese dance (buyo), just as they had already drawn a clear line between their work and modern dance by leaving the All Japan Art Dance Association. As dancers such as Ohno, Akira Kasai, Akaji Maro, and others struck out on their own, they continued to call their work butoh, but the “utter darkness” qualifier was dropped along the way.26 Eventually the word came to encompass all the iterations and adaptations of the form developed by Hijikata and Ohno.
There is a tendency in the West to connect the “utter darkness” of butoh to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, effectively ending World War II, but this link is simply not evident in the work of Hijikata and Ohno.27 Eiko & Koma do directly connect themselves to this moment, although this connection came explicitly many years later, only after Eiko witnessed the fall of the Twin Towers from their apartment window.28 Although the “utter darkness” of ankoku butoh was not in explicit reference to larger societal conditions, it may be useful to think of the postwar period broadly as one of utter darkness. While there are certainly aspects of this time unique to Japan, including a massive epistemological shift from understanding the emperor as divine to his being merely human, there are many ways this period in Japan is analogous to what was happening around the world. It was a time in which societies and economies were being rapidly transformed through large-scale industrialization and urbanization, the arts were being deeply questioned in part for their association with fascist ideologies, and radical politics spilled into the streets.
In its first decade, butoh’s search was for what could be expressed through the body and how. Marotti points out that from the start ankoku butoh lacked a recognizable style precisely because of its antiformalist nature.29 Throughout the 1960s Hijikata experimented with how to fundamentally alter the uses, techniques, and significations of the body, often through collaborating with other artists.30 In a series of “Hijikata Tatsumi DANCE EXPERIENCE Gatherings,” he shared the stage with dancers, writers, and artists, including Masunobu Yoshimura, Isao Mizutani, Shūzō Takiguchi, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, Tadanori Yokoo, and Mishima. In the publicity materials, the programs, and the gatherings themselves, movement was but one aspect of the multilayered and multivalent productions, which drew heavily on surrealism and neo-Dada. Miryam Sas argues that intermedial practices like this not only led to unprecedented cross-genre collaboration and borrowing, but also “reconceived relationships among art, technology, and environment.”31 This kind of relationship is evident throughout Eiko & Koma’s body of work, particularly in the way they bring together their moving bodies with natural and built environments, video, musicians, and other elements.
Despite butoh’s resistance to explanation and interpretation, identified by Baird,32 there have been countless attempts to define the form by describing its aesthetic elements, categorizing major themes, or outlining creative processes or methodologies. Nanako Kurihara, who wrote one of the first in-depth examinations of butoh in the United States, defines the dance, in typical fashion, as a “contemporary dance form…. Typically performed in white makeup, with shaved heads, ragged costumes, slow movements and crouching postures.” She goes on to say that “butoh portrays dark emotions—suffering, fear, rage—often by employing violence, shocking actions and mask-like facial expressions that transform instantly from one extreme of emotion to another.”33 Her description of the form is a common one, but while it is frequently associated with the “original” butoh, I contend that these descriptions stem from later works, particularly those by Sankai Juku, an idea I expand on in chapter 3.
Eiko and Koma found their way separately in 1971 to Hijikata’s Asbestos Hall in the Meguro neighborhood of Tokyo. Koma says that Hijikata “had a big house and free groceries. I had nowhere to stay and no money. I was lucky and Mr. Hijikata said, ‘Okay, tomorrow you can come to my house.’ Sometimes very nice things start from coincidence, not your own determination. Three months after I moved into his house, Eiko, whom I had never met before, came into that same house for food and lodging.”34
Hijikata’s wife Motofuji established Asbestos Hall in 1950 as a live/work space with a bright, high-ceilinged studio and plenty of room for other dancers and students to stay. In 1974 the studio was transformed into a theater space, but until then it was used primarily for training and rehearsals. In exchange for room and board, Eiko and Koma and others trained with Hijikata and performed with other students in cabarets and theaters one, two, and even three times a night. Since 1959 Hijikata and Motofuji had been producing cabaret shows as a source of income that also provided financial support for Hijikata’s “real” dance work. These lucrative shows featured scantily clad men and women performing “artsy” dances for American GIs and Japanese men.
At this point, twelve years after his groundbreaking 1959 performance, Hijikata was a well-known and even notorious member of the Tokyo avant-garde arts scene. As such, it is no surprise that he would have attracted student activists and questioning young people, drawn to his daring acts and wild charisma. And yet 1971 was a peculiar time to be with Hijikata. His dance experiments throughout the 1960s, fueled by close collaborations with other avant-garde artists, had culminated in the 1968 performance Hijikata Tatsumi to Nihonjin: Nikutai no Hanran (Tatsumi Hijikata and the Japanese: Rebellion of the Body).35 That solo represented a major shift in his choreography, with its constantly transforming personas from a weary and diseased old man to thrusting, large golden cock-wearing virility, to young girl enthusiasm, but it was not yet the style for which Hijikata remains best known. That technique, a tightly choreographed and specific method of layering images to produce a movement vocabulary, announced with 1972’s epic Great Dance Mirror of Burnt Sacrifice—Performance to Commemorate the Second Unity of the School of the Dance of Utter Darkness—Twenty-seven Nights for Four Seasons, had not yet congealed. Some of the dancers who had been with Hijikata since the 1960s, such as Ko Murobushi and Bishop Yamada, were leaving to start their own projects. There is also a sense that women like Yoko Ashikawa were becoming more important in Hijikata’s work at that time, whereas his dances in the early and mid-1960s had been quite male centered. Although Hijikata’s dancers continued to perform between 1968 and 1972, both in “high art” venues and cabarets, this period is often overlooked by Hijikata scholars, in part because in retrospect Twenty-seven Nights overwhelms what came before it, and in part because Hijikata’s cabaret dances have for the most part not been taken seriously