Butô or butoh is an avant-garde dance style that originated in Japan. First performed by Hijikata Tatsumi in a piece called Kinjiki in 1959 and expanding globally throughout the twentieth century, butô illuminated a specific performance philosophy of the body. A History of Butô is told as the collective histories of the lives of ten butô dancers. As such, author Bruce Baird avoids producing another copy of the master narrative of butô legends. In particular, he highlights the undervalued contributions of female butô performers, including Ashikawa Yoko, Kobayashi Saga, Carlotta Ikeda and Yoshioka Yumiko, and bridges discussions within and outside Japan.
This book has three objectives: first, discussing the diversity of butô today; second, investigating how certain aspects of its development have caused unintended reactions from the audience; and third, providing a rich contextual appreciation of butô as linked to technology/new media studies, gender transformations and cultural interactions and diasporas. Each chapter focuses on one butô artist with their dance company, and chronologically traces the way they were influenced by their teachers. However, this book does not limit its scope to the history, process and practice of individual dancers. It illuminates the historiography of each dance community that surrounded these dancers, especially in relation to the creation and sharing of their personal butô styles with other dancers.
Baird also foregrounds the different support systems that have supported butô. For example, butô dancers could not survive in Japan without working in cabarets. In order to do a dance performance, dancers were required to rent stage space from theatre owners and thus they personally carried the financial burden due to the scarcity of public funding in Japan. To pay these fees and support their lives as butô dancers, performers worked in cabarets (p. 96). In contrast, these same artists could sometimes work in Europe using government support. For example, European arts funding saved Amagatsu Ushio of Sankaijuku, by now a renowned company, from discontinuing his career (p. 192). Previous books on butô rarely discussed these financial conditions.
Another important contribution made by this book is that it powerfully reveals the dark past of butô. Although the butô community had pretended not to see the masters’ exploitation and abuse of dancers, the author explicitly critiques Hijikata, Motofuji Akiko and Maro Akaji for having sent young naked dancers to small cities to raise cash for their endeavours in the capital (p. 101). By revealing the hidden histories of butô, he provides context for understanding recent accusations of sexual and other kinds of harassment in the Japanese film and performing-arts industry.
Although Baird critiques gendered exploitation in butô, however, he himself betrays masculinist gaze throughout the book. For example, in order to analyse Kobayashi Saga's Half-Dream: Double Aura, Baird refers to the text of Didi-Huberman on hysteria which critically examines it, but he ends up eroticizing her performance as he writes, ‘rather than the real Kobayashi, we were confronted with yet another skin’ (p. 95), as though she was titillating and teasing the audience. Here, instead of overcoming the medical, male gaze, Baird cannot help repeating it as if he were the attendee of Charcot's lecture expecting the female patients’ display. Why does Baird set the discussion's framework based on men's achievement, objectifying alternative performers? This is inconsistent with his awareness of the gender imbalance in butô.
Also, the book focuses on Japanese butô artists and only briefly touches on recent developments by immigrant and international performers. If the author had aimed at revisiting the past from the present perspective as seen in his in-depth archival research, he could have delved into the global history of butô communities. In addition, before-and-after-butô must be a required explanation in dance history, which involves Japanese modernization and its interconnecting fields of the traditional, modern and contemporary dance in Japan. As such, how does butô emerge and distinguish itself from its predecessors and successors? In order to historicize butô, rather than culturizing it, archival research needs to reflect upon dance histories and traditions.
Despite these shortcomings, however, the book, with its deeply philosophical performance analyses based on close attention to materials in three languages (Japanese, English and French), is undoubtedly one of the most important resources on butô for English-speaking dancers and performing-arts scholars. It is also of interest for English readers in Japan, who are eager for powerful criticism and deep performance analysis of butô.
