Dance Journal, Week 12 (Apr 22, 2010)

DNCE 320
Journal, Week 13
April 22, 2010

Stein, Bonnie Sue. "Butoh: ‘Twenty Years Ago We Were Crazy, Dirty, and Mad’." Moving History / Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Ed. Ann Dills and Ann Cooper Albright. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 376-383. Print.

This paper presents an overview of the development of the Japanese contemporary dance form “butoh” as well as short artistic biographies of butoh’s important personalities. Butoh is described as “an anti-traditional tradition seeking to erase the heavy impact of Japan’s strict society and offering unprecedented freedom of artistic expression.” Butoh was developed in the late 1950’s when Japanese dancers turned away from traditional Japanese dance, but also wanted something that was still inherently and uniquely “Japanese” and not Western. (Ironically, Eiko and Koma, two New York-based butoh dancers, say that their most revered teacher is a German, Marja Chmiel, a student of Mary Wigman.)

The developers of butoh wanted to explore the things that Japanese society hides or ignores, “such as deformity and insanity.” Thus, butoh was very controversial from its beginnings. One choreographer, Hijikata, says that he created butoh dance with three principles in mind: 1) to emphasize “discontinuity, imbalance, and entropy” in direct contravention of the Western ideals of “rhythm, balance, and the flow of kinetic energy”; 2) to use traditional Japanese sources of inspiration; and 3) to recognize that Japanese bodies have different proportions from Western bodies, resulting in a dance form with movements specifically designed for the Japanese body.


"Moving Contexts." Moving History / Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Ed. Ann Dills and Ann Cooper Albright. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 370-375. Print.

This reading is an introduction to the fourth and final section of our anthology textbook. The authors tell us that “readings in the final part of the book help us to see how contemporary dance is negotiating – at times resisting, and at other times stimulating – an increasingly global world view.” After discussing the new interest in multi-culturalism, its ideas and art, and warning against taking anything at face value (that is, without regard for its historic, present, and perhaps even future context), this introduction ends by giving a short overview of each paper presented in this section and why it was chosen.


PRACTICE JOURNAL

This past weekend, I presented a concert in Menlo Park (in the SF Bay Area). I stayed with friends and after the concert, in the course of our meandering discussion, I demonstrated some of the dance moves we’ve been doing in class. My friend responded, “You dance while you play [handbells], but each movement is completely controlled. But when you dance like this now, your body seems so out of control.”

My prof wrote: "I think that is okay in this context."

Upon my return home, I mentioned this conversation to my husband, who replied, “When you play bells, you do dance, but dance is not the purpose of the movements, the movement is incidental, derived from what the music requires your body to do. Whereas, when you dance, the purpose of the movement is ‘dance’. I think that’s the difference she saw.” I don’t know if that has any significance beyond “I need to learn to control my movements a little better,” but there it is. :-)


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