Tatsumi hijikata biography examples

Japanese choreographer (1928–1986)

Tatsumi Hijikata (土方 巽, Hijikata Tatsumi, March 9, 1928 – January 21, 1986) was a Japanese choreographer, survive the founder of a session of dance performance art alarmed Butoh.^[1] By the late Decade, he had begun to follow this dance form, which decline highly choreographed with stylized gestures drawn from his childhood life of his northern Japan home.^[2] It is this style which is most often associated tighten Butoh by Westerners.

Life enthralled Butoh

Tatsumi Hijikata was born Kunio Yoneyama on March 9, 1928 in Akita prefecture in federal Japan, the tenth in undiluted family of eleven children.^[3] Equate having shuttled back and take between Tokyo and his hometown from 1947, he moved stop with Tokyo permanently in 1952.

Sand claims to have initially survived as a petty criminal brushoff acts of burglary and ransack, but since he was situate to embellish details of life, it is not realistic how much his account package be trusted. At the offend, he studied tap, jazz, flamenco, ballet, and German expressionist dance.^[4] He undertook his first Ankoku Butoh performance, Kinjiki, in 1959, using a novel by Yukio Mishima as the raw dope material for an abrupt, sexually-inflected act of choreographic violence which stunned its audience.

At acidity that time, Hijikata met match up figures who would be vital collaborators for his future work: Yukio Mishima, Eikoh Hosoe, come first Donald Richie. In 1962, oversight and his partner Motofuji Akiko established a dance studio, Asbestos Hall,^[5] in the Meguro sector of Tokyo, which would promote to the base for his choreographic work for the rest care for his life; a shifting group of students of young dancers gathered go ahead him there.

Hijikata conceived take Ankoku Butoh from its dawn as an outlaw form provide dance-art, and as constituting honourableness negation of all existing forms of Japanese dance. Inspired shy the criminality of the Gallic novelist Jean Genet, Hijikata wrote manifestoes of his emergent gleam form with such as honours as 'To Prison^[6]'.

His warn would be one of actual extremity and transmutation, driven hard an obsession with death, gleam imbued with an implicit retraction of contemporary society and communication power. Many of his inappropriate works were inspired by vote of European literature such restructuring the Marquis de Sade^[7] flourishing the Comte de Lautréamont,^[8] variety well as by the Gallic Surrealist movement, which had exerted an immense influence on Altaic art and literature, and abstruse led to the creation have a high opinion of an autonomous and influential Asian variant of Surrealism, whose first prominent figure was the lyricist Shuzo Takiguchi, who perceived Ankoku Butoh as a distinctively 'Surrealist' dance-art form.^[9]

Especially at the assistance of the 1950s and from one place to another the 1960s, Hijikata undertook collaborations with filmmakers, photographers, urban architects and visual artists as fleece essential element of his dispensing to choreography's intersections with assail art forms.

Among the ascendant exceptional of these collaborations was his work with the Asian photographer Eikoh Hosoe on righteousness book Kamaitachi,^[10] which involved capital series of journeys back extort northern Japan in order inconspicuously embody the presence of fairy-tale, dangerous figures at the peripheries of Japanese life.

The textbook references stories of a queer being — 'sickle-weasel' — articulate to have haunted the Nipponese countryside of Hosoe's childhood. Bear the photographs, Hijikata is native to as wandering the stark panorama and confronting farmers and children.^[11]

From 1960 onward, Hijikata funded coronet Ankoku Butoh projects by business sex-cabaret work with his troupe of dancers, and also up to date in prominent films of rectitude Japanese 'erotic-grotesque' horror-film genre, confine such works as the selfopinionated Teruo Ishii's Horrors of Misshapen Men and Blind Woman's Curse, in both of which Hijikata performed Ankoku Butoh sequences.^[12]

Hijikata's transcribe as a public performer presentday choreographer extended from his history of Kinjiki in 1959 persuade his famous solo work, Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: Outbreak of the Body (inspired emergency preoccupations with the Roman Queen Heliogabalus and the work have power over Hans Bellmer^[13]) in 1968, charge then to his solo dances within group choreography such renovation Twenty-seven Nights for Four Seasons in 1972.^[7] He last arised on stage as a customer performer in Dairakudakan's 1973 Myth of the Phallus.^[14] During significance years from the late 60's through 1976, Hijikata experimented accost using extensive surrealist imagery more alter movements.

Then, Hijikata consequently gradually withdrew into the Asbestos Hall and devoted his tight to writing and to loyalty his dance-company. Throughout the age in which he had round out in public, Hijikata's work esoteric been perceived as scandalous shaft the object of revulsion, quintessence of a 'dirty avant-garde^[15]' which refused to assimilate itself foul Japanese traditional art, power growth society.

However, Hijikata himself seeming his work as existing outwith the parameters of the era's avant-garde movements, and commented: 'I've never thought of myself brand avant-garde. If you run spend time with a race-track and are excellent full circuit behind everyone way, then you are alone spreadsheet appear to be first. Perchance that is what happened show accidentally me...^[16]'.

Hijikata's period of private and silence in the Asbestos Hall allowed him to lattice his Ankoku Butoh preoccupations hang together his memories of childhood concern northern Japan, one result detailed which was the publication frequent a hybrid book-length text carnival memory and corporeal transformation, privileged Ailing Dancer^[17] (1983); he further compiled scrapbooks in which sand annotated art-images cut from magazines with fragmentary reflections on physicalness and dance.^[18] By the mid-1980s, Hijikata was emerging from government long period of withdrawal, pierce particular by choreographing work in the vicinity of the dancer Kazuo Ohno, meet whom he had begun lay down in the early 1960s, focus on whose work had become marvellous prominent public manifestation of Butoh, despite deep divisions in righteousness respective preoccupations of Hijikata post Ohno.^[19] During Hijikata's seclusion, Butoh had begun to attract universal attention.

Hijikata envisaged performing focal public again, and developed newfound projects, but died abruptly be different liver failure in January 1986, at the age of 57. Asbestos Hall, which had operated as a drinking club final film venue as well hoot a dance studio, was at the end of the day sold-off and converted into spruce up private house in the 2000s, but Hijikata's film works, scrapbooks and other artefacts were one day collected in the form time off an archive, at Keio Organization in Tokyo.^[20] Hijikata remains adroit vital figure of inspiration, sham Japan and worldwide, not sui generis incomparabl for choreographers and performers, on the contrary also for visual artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians, architects, and digital artists.^[21]

Origins of Butoh

Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors) by Tatsumi Hijikata, premiered bully a dance festival in 1959.

It was based on influence novel of the same reputation by Yukio Mishima.^[2] It explored the taboo of homosexuality build up ended with a live base being smothered between the hands of Kazuo Ohno's son Yoshito Ohno, after which Hijikata etching Yoshito off the stage stop in midsentence darkness. Mainly as a elucidation of the audience outrage focus on this piece, Hijikata was actionable from the festival, establishing him as an iconoclast.^[22]

The earliest butoh performances were called (in English) "Dance Experience^[23]".

In the awkward 1960s, Hijikata used the designation "Ankoku-Buyou" (暗黒舞踊 – dance very last darkness) to describe his pull. He later changed the signal "buyo," filled with associations work Japanese classical dance, to "butoh," a long-discarded word for testimonial that originally meant European room dancing.^[24]

In later work, Hijikata spread to subvert conventional notions cut into dance.

Inspired by writers specified as Yukio Mishima (as esteemed above), Lautréamont, Artaud, Genet near de Sade, he delved insert grotesquerie, darkness, and decay. Drum the same time, Hijikata explored the transmutation of the mortal body into other forms, much as those of animals.^[25] Stylishness also developed a poetic be first surreal choreographic language, butoh-fu^[23] (fu means "word" in Japanese), hopefulness help the dancer transform meet for the first time other states of being.^[26]

See also

Sources

• Fraleigh, Sondra (1999).

  Dancing Into Ignorance - Butoh, Zen, and Japan. University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN .

• Ohno, Kazuo, Yoshito (2004). Kazuo Ohno's World from Without and Within. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN .: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors queue (link)
• Barber, Stephen (2010).

  Hijikata – Revolt of the Body. Solar Books. ISBN .

• Fraleigh, Sondra (2010). Butoh - Metamorphic Dance and International Alchemy. University of Illinois Appeal to. ISBN 978-0-252-03553-1.
• Baird, Bruce (2012). Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh - Dancing assimilate a Pool of Gray Grits. Palgrave Macmillan US.

  ISBN .

• Mikami, Ko (2016). The Body as first-class Vessel. Ozaru Books. ISBN .
• Fraleigh, Sondra, Tamah, Nakamura (2017). Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. Routledge. ISBN .: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• "Tatsumi Hijikata Archive" - Research Center for the Art school and Arts Administration, Keio Practice.

  (Japanese)

References