Hijikata Tatsumi

Tatsumi Hijikata (土方 巽, Hijikata Tatsumi, March 9, 1928 - January 21, 1986) was a Japanese choreographer, and the founder of a genre of dance performance art called Butoh. By the late 1960s, he had begun to develop this dance form, which is highly choreographed with stylized gestures drawn from his childhood memories of his northern Japan home. It is this style which is most often associated with Butoh by Westerners.

Tatsumi Hijikata was born in 1928, March 9 in the Akita region of northern Japan, the tenth in a family of eleven children, as Yoneyama Kunio. After having shuttled back and forth between Tokyo and his hometown from 1947, he moved to Tokyo permanently in 1952, the year in which the American Occupation of Japan ended. He claims to have initially survived as a petty criminal through acts of burglary and robbery, but as he was known to embellish details of his life, it is not clear how much his account can be trusted. At the time, he studied tap, jazz, flamenco, ballet and German expressionist dance (Nobutoshi Tsuda). He undertook his first Ankoku Butoh performance, Kinjiki, in 1959, using a novel by Yukio Mishima as the raw input material for an abrupt, sexually-inflected act of choreographic violence which stunned its audience. At around that time, Hijikata met three figures who would be crucial collaborators for his future work: Yukio Mishima, Eikoh Hosoe, and Donald Richie. In 1962, he and his partner Motofuji Akiko established a dance studio, Asbestos Hall, in the Meguro district of Tokyo, which would be the base for his choreographic work for the rest of his life; a shifting company of young dancers gathered around him there.

Hijikata conceived of Ankoku Butoh from its origins as an outlaw form of dance-art, and as constituting the negation of all existing forms of Japanese dance. Inspired by the criminality of the French novelist Jean Genet, Hijikata wrote manifestoes of his emergent dance form with such as titles as 'To Prison'. His dance would be one of corporeal extremity and transmutation, driven by an obsession with death, and imbued with an implicit repudiation of contemporary society and media power. Many of his early works were inspired by figures of European literature such as the Marquis de Sade and the Comte de Lautréamont, as well as by the French Surrealist movement, which had exerted an immense influence on Japanese art and literature, and had led to the creation of an autonomous and influential Japanese variant of Surrealism, whose most prominent figure was the poet Shuzo Takiguchi, who perceived Ankoku Butoh as a distinctively 'Surrealist' dance-art form.

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