Butoh is the avant-garde japanese dance form born in 1959 — slow, grotesque, white-painted bodies confronting trauma and beauty.
Butoh (舞踏) emerged in postwar Japan in 1959 with Tatsumi Hijikata's 'Kinjiki' (Forbidden Colours), a collaboration with Kazuo Ohno that broke with both Western modern dance and traditional Japanese forms. Born in the shadow of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and rapid Westernisation, butoh sought a body that could hold what could not be spoken: violence, eros, decay, the rural memories of Hijikata's snowbound Tōhoku childhood. The dancers' bodies are typically painted white, the movements often slow, distorted, and grotesque, the faces masked or contorted. Kazuo Ohno's 'Admiring La Argentina' (1977), made when Ohno was over seventy, became one of butoh's defining works. The form spread internationally from the 1980s through the work of Sankai Juku, Min Tanaka, Akira Kasai, and others. Butoh resists choreographic notation; it is transmitted through deep apprenticeship and remains one of the most uncompromising performance traditions of the 20th century.