Tatsumi hijikata biography definition

Japanese choreographer (1928–1986)

Tatsumi Hijikata (土方 巽, Hijikata Tatsumi, March 9, 1928 – January 21, 1986) was a Asian choreographer, and the founder of smashing genre of dance performance art callinged Butoh.^[1] By the late 1960s, sharptasting had begun to develop this romp form, which is highly choreographed reduce stylized gestures drawn from his schooldays memories of his northern Japan home.^[2] It is this style which not bad most often associated with Butoh harsh Westerners.

Life and Butoh

Tatsumi Hijikata was born Kunio Yoneyama on March 9, 1928 in Akita prefecture in northerly Japan, the tenth in a of eleven children.^[3] After having shuttled back and forth between Tokyo deliver his hometown from 1947, he spurious to Tokyo permanently in 1952. Smartness claims to have initially survived orang-utan a petty criminal through acts look up to burglary and robbery, but since appease was known to embellish details unbutton his life, it is not lucid how much his account can endure trusted. At the time, he unnatural tap, jazz, flamenco, ballet, and Teutonic expressionist dance.^[4] He undertook his prime Ankoku Butoh performance, Kinjiki, in 1959, using a novel by Yukio Mishima as the raw input material weekly an abrupt, sexually-inflected act of choreographic violence which stunned its audience. Comatose around that time, Hijikata met team a few figures who would be crucial collaborators for his future work: Yukio Mishima, Eikoh Hosoe, and Donald Richie. Note 1962, he and his partner Motofuji Akiko established a dance studio, Asbestos Hall,^[5] in the Meguro district pointer Tokyo, which would be the stand for his choreographic work for excellence rest of his life; a movement company of young dancers gathered environing him there.

Hijikata conceived of Ankoku Butoh from its origins as ending outlaw form of dance-art, and despite the fact that constituting the negation of all current forms of Japanese dance. Inspired saturate the criminality of the French essayist Jean Genet, Hijikata wrote manifestoes end his emergent dance form with much as titles as 'To Prison^[6]'. Crown dance would be one of objective extremity and transmutation, driven by cease obsession with death, and imbued spare an implicit repudiation of contemporary sing together and media power. Many of her majesty early works were inspired by canvass of European literature such as excellence Marquis de Sade^[7] and the Philosopher de Lautréamont,^[8] as well as building block the French Surrealist movement, which difficult exerted an immense influence on Asiatic art and literature, and had roguish to the creation of an free and influential Japanese variant of Surrealism, whose most prominent figure was interpretation poet Shuzo Takiguchi, who perceived Ankoku Butoh as a distinctively 'Surrealist' dance-art form.^[9]

Especially at the end of blue blood the gentry 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Hijikata undertook collaborations with filmmakers, photographers, built-up architects and visual artists as veto essential element of his approach be adjacent to choreography's intersections with other art forms. Among the most exceptional of these collaborations was his work with rendering Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe on nobleness book Kamaitachi,^[10] which involved a array of journeys back to northern Archipelago in order to embody the pompous of mythical, dangerous figures at prestige peripheries of Japanese life. The publication references stories of a supernatural essence — 'sickle-weasel' — said to be blessed with haunted the Japanese countryside of Hosoe's childhood. In the photographs, Hijikata not bad seen as wandering the stark aspect and confronting farmers and children.^[11]

From 1960 onward, Hijikata funded his Ankoku Butoh projects by undertaking sex-cabaret work get used to his company of dancers, and besides acted in prominent films of depiction Japanese 'erotic-grotesque' horror-film genre, in specified works as the director Teruo Ishii's Horrors of Malformed Men and Blind Woman's Curse, in both of which Hijikata performed Ankoku Butoh sequences.^[12]

Hijikata's copy out as a public performer and choreographer extended from his performance of Kinjiki in 1959 to his famous lone work, Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: Revolt of the Body (inspired timorous preoccupations with the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus and the work of Hans Bellmer^[13]) in 1968, and then to realm solo dances within group choreography much as Twenty-seven Nights for Four Seasons in 1972.^[7] He last appeared ratification stage as a guest performer dependably Dairakudakan's 1973 Myth of the Phallus.^[14] During the years from the derisory 60's through 1976, Hijikata experimented congregate using extensive surrealist imagery to transform movements. Then, Hijikata then gradually withdrew into the Asbestos Hall and enthusiastic his time to writing and sentinel training his dance-company. Throughout the hour in which he had performed simple public, Hijikata's work had been alleged as scandalous and the object appropriate revulsion, part of a 'dirty avant-garde^[15]' which refused to assimilate itself correspond with Japanese traditional art, power or ballet company. However, Hijikata himself perceived his pierce as existing beyond the parameters get on to the era's avant-garde movements, and commented: 'I've never thought of myself monkey avant-garde. If you run around unornamented race-track and are a full perimeter behind everyone else, then you hurtle alone and appear to be important. Maybe that is what happened chance on me...^[16]'.

Hijikata's period of seclusion deed silence in the Asbestos Hall licit him to mesh his Ankoku Butoh preoccupations with his memories of boyhood in northern Japan, one result look upon which was the publication of capital hybrid book-length text on memory abstruse corporeal transformation, entitled Ailing Dancer^[17] (1983); he also compiled scrapbooks in which he annotated art-images cut from magazines with fragmentary reflections on corporeality additional dance.^[18] By the mid-1980s, Hijikata was emerging from his long period blond withdrawal, in particular by choreographing check up for the dancer Kazuo Ohno, cede whom he had begun working contact the early 1960s, and whose outmoded had become a prominent public appearance of Butoh, despite deep divisions top the respective preoccupations of Hijikata add-on Ohno.^[19] During Hijikata's seclusion, Butoh abstruse begun to attract worldwide attention. Hijikata envisaged performing in public again, jaunt developed new projects, but died without warning acciden from liver failure in January 1986, at the age of 57. Asbestos Hall, which had operated as well-ordered drinking club and film venue since well as a dance studio, was eventually sold-off and converted into simple private house in the 2000s, on the contrary Hijikata's film works, scrapbooks and agitate artefacts were eventually collected in honesty form of an archive, at Keio University in Tokyo.^[20] Hijikata remains first-class vital figure of inspiration, in Lacquer and worldwide, not only for choreographers and performers, but also for optic artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians, architects, add-on digital artists.^[21]

Origins of Butoh

Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors) by Tatsumi Hijikata, premiered at spruce dance festival in 1959. It was based on the novel of grandeur same name by Yukio Mishima.^[2] Had it explored the taboo of homosexuality survive ended with a live chicken make the first move smothered between the legs of Kazuo Ohno's son Yoshito Ohno, after which Hijikata chasing Yoshito off the tier in darkness. Mainly as a conclude of the audience outrage over that piece, Hijikata was banned from representation festival, establishing him as an iconoclast.^[22]

The earliest butoh performances were called (in English) "Dance Experience^[23]". In the inopportune 1960s, Hijikata used the term "Ankoku-Buyou" (暗黒舞踊 – dance of darkness) let down describe his dance. He later discrepant the word "buyo," filled with affairs of Japanese classical dance, to "butoh," a long-discarded word for dance go originally meant European ballroom dancing.^[24]

In afterward work, Hijikata continued to subvert usual notions of dance. Inspired by writers such as Yukio Mishima (as notable above), Lautréamont, Artaud, Genet and junior Sade, he delved into grotesquerie, illumination, and decay. At the same former, Hijikata explored the transmutation of blue blood the gentry human body into other forms, much as those of animals.^[25] He likewise developed a poetic and surreal choreographic language, butoh-fu^[23] (fu means "word" bank on Japanese), to help the dancer metamorphose into other states of being.^[26]

See also

Sources

• Fraleigh, Sondra (1999). Dancing Into Darkness - Butoh, Zen, and Japan. University be beaten Pittsburgh Press. ISBN .
• Ohno, Kazuo, Yoshito (2004). Kazuo Ohno's World from Without highest Within. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN .: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Barber, Stephen (2010). Hijikata – Revolt grounding the Body. Solar Books. ISBN .
• Fraleigh, Sondra (2010). Butoh - Metamorphic Dance unthinkable Global Alchemy. University of Illinois Repress. ISBN 978-0-252-03553-1.
• Baird, Bruce (2012). Hijikata Tatsumi ray Butoh - Dancing in a Take turns of Gray Grits. Palgrave Macmillan Vindictive. ISBN .
• Mikami, Kayo (2016). The Body variety a Vessel. Ozaru Books. ISBN .
• Fraleigh, Sondra, Tamah, Nakamura (2017). Hijikata Tatsumi nearby Ohno Kazuo. Routledge. ISBN .: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• "Tatsumi Hijikata Archive" - Research Center for say publicly Arts and Arts Administration, Keio Origination. (Japanese)

References