I was not aware until today that Mishima’s book Forbidden Colors was the subjectof the world’s first Butoh performance.
Here’s the recent Vancouver Sun article on Butoh that tipped me off:
CULTURAL OLYMPIAD: The discrete, ineffable appeal of Butoh
By Kevin Griffin
From Wikipedia:
Butoh appeared first in Japan after the second world war and the student riots there. The roles of authority were being challenged and subverted at this point. It also appeared as a reaction against the contemporary dance scene in Japan, which Hijikata felt was based on imitating the West and Noh and was too superficial.
The first butoh piece was Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours), by Tatsumi Hijikata, which premiered at a dance festival in 1959. Based on the novel of the same name by Yukio Mishima, the piece explored the taboo of homosexuality and paedophilia and ended with a live chicken being held between the legs of Yoshito Ohno (Kazuo Ohno’s son) and Hijikata chasing Yoshito off the stage in darkness. Primarily as a result of the misconception that the chicken had died due to strangulation, this piece outraged the audience, and resulted in the banning of Hijikata from the festival where Kinjiki premiered and established him as an iconoclast.
In the very first “butoh” performances, the style was called “Dance Experience” (in English), but in the early Sixties, Hijikata used the term “Ankoku-Buyo” (dance of darkness) to describe his dance, and later changed the word “buyo,” filled with associations of Japanese classical dance to that of “butoh,” a long discarded word for dance that originally meant European ballroom dancing[1].
It would be interesting to see a Butoh based on, say, Sun and Steel. Or, perhaps even better, on the events of November 25, 1970.
More Butoh:
“We need to stop this accelleration, stop the speed.”
