Falling dance: Hijikata’s recomposition of the body via Bacon

Abstract

The themes of transformation, indefinite form, and disintegration haunt the work of many post-World War II artists, who had witnessed the animality of human beings as well as the depths to which human beings can fall in wartime. This paper looks at falling as an artistic and phenomenological practice of the body in the work of the Japanese butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata, whose notations refer in places to the work of the Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon and offer new bodily lexicons with which to graph the movement of falling. Drawing explicitly on Bacon and using cross-media collage to produce movement, a body in Hijikata could be deformed or made formless onto the ground. In falling, inhabiting and simultaneously vacating oneself, the body makes contact with a surface and leaves or exteriorizes a graphic mark, visual, and performative, in its wake. This attention to falling was part of an ongoing process at the rise of phenomenological boom in postwar Japan by which artists attempted to understand and recompose the kind of body that could inhabit the nuclear age. KEYWORDSFalling; senses; phenomenology; Tatsumi Hijikata; Francis Bacon "We fall because we are human, it is only because we live that we fall . . . We must discover ourselves and save ourselves, by falling to the best of our ability." (Sakaguchi 1986, 5) Deformation and the sensesIn his 1972 performance Hōsō tan (A Story of Smallpox), 1 Japanese dancer Tatsumi Hijikata performed the body of "not standing," or of "being unable to stand," by crawling on the ground [See Figure 1], nearly naked, covered with white butoh make-up like vernix or some sort of dust or cobweb. Hijikata, emphasizing its weakened, sickened, fragmented state, called it suijaku tai, the weakened body. The performance seems literally to be an attempt to stand in the midst of falling. In Hijikata's performance filmed as Natsu no Arashi (Summer Storm) in 1973(Hijikata 2003, at the Westside Auditorium of Kyoto University, the slow movements of the dancer(s) in the series on leprosy seem to blur the boundary between the living and the dead. In "Slackness," a section performed in darkness and accompanied by chanting a baby's cries, three dancers come on stage making small jerky movements that seem to defy any straight body lines supported by the spine, after which Hijikata, trembling, crumples to the floor, with the make-up seemingly CONTACT Fusako Innami

Body (of) Knowledge: Women, the Body, and Dance in Postwar Japan

“…She brought attention to these marginalized bodies through movement, against the way that both kokutai and nikutai ideas of the body shunned them. This sensitivity would later be taken up in now famous butoh performances, such as Natsu no Arashi (1973), but its origins were with Motofuji and her choice of butoh site (Innami 2021, 7).…”