Dance – Butō teaches that man is still a beast
Japanese dance goes beyond the formalism of Kabuki and Nō.
“Sometimes in early spring I would fall down in the mud and my child’s body, pitiful to its core, would gently float there. I try to speak but it’s like something has already been spoken. I have a feeling a knot of wood somewhere in the lower abdomen stuck there in the mud, that is screaming something.(…) But I can, I know, declare that my Butō started with what I learned from the mud in early spring, not from anything to do with the performing arts or shrines or temples. I am distinctly aware I was born of mud.” (Tatsumi Hijikata)
In 1959 the choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata premiered his work Kinijiki (Forbidden Colours) at the Japanese Festival of Dance in Tokyo, a work based on the novel by Yukio Mishima. According to eye witnesses the performance, supposed to last a mere five minutes, turned out to be so obscene and shocking that the curtain came down even before the piece had ended.
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