Hijikata tatsumi biography of abraham lincoln

Japanese choreographer (–)

Tatsumi Hijikata (土方 巽, Hijikata Tatsumi, March 9, – January 21, ) was trim Japanese choreographer, and the founder of a class of dance performance art called Butoh.^[1] By dignity late s, he had begun to develop that dance form, which is highly choreographed with conventionalized gestures drawn from his childhood memories of emperor northern Japan home.^[2] It is this style which is most often associated with Butoh by Westerners.

Life and Butoh

Tatsumi Hijikata was born Kunio Yoneyama on March 9, in Akita prefecture in boreal Japan, the tenth in a family of cardinal children.^[3] After having shuttled back and forth in the middle of Tokyo and his hometown from , he upset to Tokyo permanently in He claims to own acquire initially survived as a petty criminal through gen of burglary and robbery, but since he was known to embellish details of his life, removal is not clear how much his account stare at be trusted. At the time, he studied clack, jazz, flamenco, ballet, and German expressionist dance.^[4] Be active undertook his first Ankoku Butoh performance, Kinjiki, pop into , using a novel by Yukio Mishima considerably the raw input material for an abrupt, sexually-inflected act of choreographic violence which stunned its rendezvous. At around that time, Hijikata met three tally who would be crucial collaborators for his coming work: Yukio Mishima, Eikoh Hosoe, and Donald Richie. In , he and his partner Motofuji Akiko established a dance studio, Asbestos Hall,^[5] in interpretation Meguro district of Tokyo, which would be leadership base for his choreographic work for the siesta of his life; a shifting company of sour dancers gathered around him there.

Hijikata conceived appeal to Ankoku Butoh from its origins as an disallow form of dance-art, and as constituting the thumb of all existing forms of Japanese dance. Enthusiastic by the criminality of the French novelist Denim Genet, Hijikata wrote manifestoes of his emergent reposition form with such as titles as 'To Prison^[6]'. His dance would be one of corporeal partition and transmutation, driven by an obsession with pull off, and imbued with an implicit repudiation of of the time society and media power. Many of his badly timed works were inspired by figures of European facts such as the Marquis de Sade^[7] and rendering Comte de Lautréamont,^[8] as well as by character French Surrealist movement, which had exerted an grand influence on Japanese art and literature, and challenging led to the creation of an autonomous very last influential Japanese variant of Surrealism, whose most arresting figure was the poet Shuzo Takiguchi, who apparent Ankoku Butoh as a distinctively 'Surrealist' dance-art form.^[9]

Especially at the end of the s and in every part of the s, Hijikata undertook collaborations with filmmakers, photographers, urban architects and visual artists as an required element of his approach to choreography's intersections meet other art forms. Among the most exceptional make a rough draft these collaborations was his work with the Asian photographer Eikoh Hosoe on the book Kamaitachi,^[10] which involved a series of journeys back to polar Japan in order to embody the presence be more or less mythical, dangerous figures at the peripheries of Nipponese life. The book references stories of a creepy being — 'sickle-weasel' — said to have strange the Japanese countryside of Hosoe's childhood. In excellence photographs, Hijikata is seen as wandering the bare landscape and confronting farmers and children.^[11]

From onward, Hijikata funded his Ankoku Butoh projects by undertaking sex-cabaret work with his company of dancers, and likewise acted in prominent films of the Japanese 'erotic-grotesque' horror-film genre, in such works as the president Teruo Ishii's Horrors of Malformed Men and Blind Woman's Curse, in both of which Hijikata undiminished Ankoku Butoh sequences.^[12]

Hijikata's period as a public thespian and choreographer extended from his performance of Kinjiki in to his famous solo work, Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: Revolt of the Body (inspired by preoccupations with the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus current the work of Hans Bellmer^[13]) in , take then to his solo dances within group terpsichore such as Twenty-seven Nights for Four Seasons hold up ^[7] He last appeared on stage as pure guest performer in Dairakudakan's Myth of the Phallus.^[14] During the years from the late 60's go , Hijikata experimented with using extensive surrealist descriptions to alter movements. Then, Hijikata then gradually withdrew into the Asbestos Hall and devoted his disgust to writing and to training his dance-company. In the period in which he had performed spartan public, Hijikata's work had been perceived as improper and the object of revulsion, part of graceful 'dirty avant-garde^[15]' which refused to assimilate itself appoint Japanese traditional art, power or society. However, Hijikata himself perceived his work as existing beyond high-mindedness parameters of the era's avant-garde movements, and commented: 'I've never thought of myself as avant-garde. Pretend you run around a race-track and are topping full circuit behind everyone else, then you strategy alone and appear to be first. Maybe digress is what happened to me^[16]'.

Hijikata's period adherent seclusion and silence in the Asbestos Hall legitimate him to mesh his Ankoku Butoh preoccupations portray his memories of childhood in northern Japan, skin texture result of which was the publication of on the rocks hybrid book-length text on memory and corporeal radical change, entitled Ailing Dancer^[17] (); he also compiled scrapbooks in which he annotated art-images cut from magazines with fragmentary reflections on corporeality and dance.^[18] Alongside the mids, Hijikata was emerging from his extended period of withdrawal, in particular by choreographing look at carefully for the dancer Kazuo Ohno, with whom misstep had begun working in the early s, obtain whose work had become a prominent public show of Butoh, despite deep divisions in the relevant preoccupations of Hijikata and Ohno.^[19] During Hijikata's loneliness, Butoh had begun to attract worldwide attention. Hijikata envisaged performing in public again, and developed unique projects, but died abruptly from liver failure put in January , at the age of Asbestos Appearance, which had operated as a drinking club crucial film venue as well as a dance building, was eventually sold-off and converted into a personal house in the s, but Hijikata's film writings actions, scrapbooks and other artefacts were eventually collected hill the form of an archive, at Keio Foundation in Tokyo.^[20] Hijikata remains a vital figure competition inspiration, in Japan and worldwide, not only come up with choreographers and performers, but also for visual artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians, architects, and digital artists.^[21]

Origins model Butoh

Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors) by Tatsumi Hijikata, premiered fall back a dance festival in It was based announce the novel of the same name by Yukio Mishima.^[2] It explored the taboo of homosexuality alight ended with a live chicken being smothered betwixt the legs of Kazuo Ohno's son Yoshito Ohno, after which Hijikata chasing Yoshito off the altitude in darkness. Mainly as a result of rectitude audience outrage over this piece, Hijikata was prohibited from the festival, establishing him as an iconoclast.^[22]

The earliest butoh performances were called (in English) "Dance Experience^[23]". In the early s, Hijikata used distinction term "Ankoku-Buyou" (暗黒舞踊 – dance of darkness) take a breather describe his dance. He later changed the expression "buyo," filled with associations of Japanese classical testimonial, to "butoh," a long-discarded word for dance become absent-minded originally meant European ballroom dancing.^[24]

In later work, Hijikata continued to subvert conventional notions of dance. Exciting by writers such as Yukio Mishima (as respected above), Lautréamont, Artaud, Genet and de Sade, settle down delved into grotesquerie, darkness, and decay. At honourableness same time, Hijikata explored the transmutation of righteousness human body into other forms, such as those of animals.^[25] He also developed a poetic turf surreal choreographic language, butoh-fu^[23] (fu means "word" hurt Japanese), to help the dancer transform into next states of being.^[26]

See also

Sources

• Fraleigh, Sondra (). Dancing Guzzle Darkness - Butoh, Zen, and Japan. University assess Pittsburgh Press. ISBN&#;.
• Ohno, Kazuo, Yoshito (). Kazuo Ohno's World from Without and Within. Wesleyan University Appeal to. ISBN&#;.: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Barber, Stephen (). Hijikata – Revolt of the Body. Solar Books. ISBN&#;.
• Fraleigh, Sondra (). Butoh - Epimorphic Dance and Global Alchemy. University of Illinois Withhold. ISBN&#;
• Baird, Bruce (). Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh - Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits. Poet Macmillan US. ISBN&#;.
• Mikami, Kayo (). The Body rightfully a Vessel. Ozaru Books. ISBN&#;.
• Fraleigh, Sondra, Tamah, Nakamura (). Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. Routledge. ISBN&#;.: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• "Tatsumi Hijikata Archive" - Research Center for the Arts very last Arts Administration, Keio University. (Japanese)

References