Ghosts of Pre-Modernity: Butoh and the Avant-Garde Shannon C. Moore
In 1959, Japanese performance artist Hijikata Tatsumi founded a style of dance theatre that drew from both Japanese and European creative sources. What attracted Hijikata, and his contemporaries were the ways in which these sources dealt with modes of expression that were marginalized and suppressed by modernizing practices of the late 19th century. Hijikata’s Ankoku Butoh (Dance of Utter Darkness) was one of several post-war, avant-garde developments that sought to articulate the post-war crisis of subjectivity, as well as reintegrate Japan’s modern consciousness with that of its native, pre-industrial roots. The repression of Japanese pre-modernity in combination with the death and devastation of WWII had resulted in a resurfacing of cultural elements that was often uncanny and grotesque...
