Eight years ago I saw my first butoh performance. At the time I was only a few months into the incapacitating awkwardness and loneliness of living as a foreigner in Japan. I had been studying Japanese, doing my best to use it to avoid the litany of grocery shopping tragedies that resulted from my struggles to translate, and trying to blend in. I watched my neighbor fuss over her bonsai trees as it rained softly outside my apartment on the outskirts of town. I would ride my bike to the Kamagawa river and sit on the banks to practice homework, sit and drink tea, or get lost is music, or the details hidden in the intricate Japanese maple leaves. At the bathhouses the little old japanese ladies would exclaim: Takai desu ne! (so tall!) as they handed me things to put on the top shelves and higher lockers. Many proportions some would say, pointing at my naked body, and pinching my hips. Kyoto felt constructed from toothpicks: elegant and intricate down to the centimeter. Every drop of dew on every pine needle, every whisp of morning mist dusted the perfectly groomed, pleasant smelling streets. The delicacy of the colors and the curated plants only exacerbated my clumsy, bombastic american-ness, which I had already grown a healthy resentment for in the years leading up to Japan. I had just returned from a trip to Hiroshima, horrified. I was tumbling the images of 11 inch finger nails, the hair from corpses and the medical photos of huge swollen wounds and cancerous lumps like a spin cycle over and over again in my head. An older gentlemen survivor had given a personal account of survivors climbing up out of the rubble glowing like lanterns as they roamed the streets the first night after the bomb; glowing sickly greens and oranges in the dusk, joints locked in place, arms stuck outstretch, like zombies he had said. It was only weeks later that I saw my first butoh performance at Kyotos interpretation of Halloween. Between the swarms of Japanese youths dressed up in costumes, I saw a dancer all painted in white. I did not know exactly what it was that I was seeing, but the shape-shifting expressions, the defiance of line and the absolute absurdity and viscerality crawled right down into my bones. I recognized a kind of shame boil in me, I felt the shadow of my humanness quake. I was rattled to the bone marrow of my ancestral guilt. I was aware of the thousand changing faces and textures of being human, and the capacity to meet our shadow through art. If you have never seen butoh before, take a look. Its an underground performance art that came up out of Japans need to process the horrors of war and Hiroshima, and our selves, and the world of taboos.
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 04:35:39 +0000