Your intrepid ace reporter, Kristin, was on the spot December 11, at Soil Gallery in Seattle Washington to start her evening with a little Butoh. According to my friend Soil regularly hosts such events as well as a variety of visual art shows and other performance events- check them out yourself and form your own opinions at www.soilart.org. For those of you who don’t want to go to the trouble but would still like to know about Butoh performance- read on!

First, what is Butoh?… It is a stylized form of modern dance involving a single dancer as well as music (or not). A modern phenomenon originating in Japan in 1959, it has spread worldwide except Africa. In the US, it is primarily in Seattle for a variety of reasons. Butoh involves a lot of intense expressions like you might see in Kabuki theater- dramatic gestures combined with stylized eye and facial movements. Also drawing a lot from modern dance and its tendencies- there is that interpretive dance feel. Most performers wear white body makeup all over and little clothing. On the night I attended, the performers wore loose short baby doll like tunics and I got to see plenty of nipples (how can something I normally feel very excited to see be so bad in the wrong context?) The other important thing to understand about Butoh is that the artist manipulates and directs energy at the audience for artistic expression. It is art making on the boundary of religious experience, in theory anyway.

Soil is quite a beautiful space and was nicely transformed into a steep and intimate black box setting with the stage at the lowest and most central point in the room. The performance area was incandescently lit and the floor covered with white sand. Sheer white curtains hid the back area of the gallery from view and further amplified and diffused the glowing illumination. The staging immediately recalled the famous existential work, The Woman In The Dunes, a good omen. However my hopes were quickly dashed. Just as the hero in The Woman in the Dunes struggles to escape the dune repeatedly, once I felt the dance, I instantly wanted nothing more than to flee into the cold night air outside. I reminded myself of Kobo Abe’s words that there is no joy in flight without the threat of punishment so I decided to stay for a while longer. Butoh theoretically plays in a rich field of inquiry- the unseen aspects of lived experience, which excites me to no end. However, the work that I witnessed did not, in my opinion, engage its possibilities. Rather, it fell far short of my hopes and also into a variety of pitfalls, which are troublesome for the creation of quality performance work.

To begin with, there was a high level of Orientalist feeling all around. An astonishing level of “Aren’t we cool because we are interested in something so exotic and Asian?” I have to admit that I bristle when westerners borrow so heavily from an Asian cultural context without making any efforts to truly center the work in their own experience. There is nothing wrong with anyone using foreign concepts or symbols in one’s work, or in taking an interest in things outside of one’s own culture, but to do so with an attitude of exoticism and specialness is really offensive to me. Does no one read Edward Said in touchy feely art realms? Borrow all you want, but do it with knowledge, respect, integrate it into your own world and hey, open doors for your audience so that conceptually they come away with more than shallow posing.

Maybe Butoh should continue to evolve because these performances felt like classic ‘Dead Theater’ as described by Peter Brook in The Empty Space. Performers were going through motions that felt forced and stylized, not spontaneous and affecting. No matter how many times a piece has been rehearsed; it should feel fresh in performance, discovered. Though basically competent technically, these dances were boring and over dramatized. The musical accompaniments for each piece were the most interesting thing happening and they were really not that different from so much Wyndham Hill New Age sounds from the 80’s and 90’s. Hanging onto a duct near the ceiling while I watched, cloistered in all of the warm air rising up, the room , the audience and the performers all felt stuffy despite efforts to be spacious (if I’d only had two buckets of cold water, would I have plunged my hands or done something else?….).

My next criticism is more elusive and difficult to elucidate. Butoh is supposed to be an art of the invisible, as I mentioned earlier. Each dancer is manipulating energy and sending it to the audience to be experienced on physical/spiritual levels. The performers that I saw were not very skilled at working with energy despite this being Butoh’s main goal. Working with energy is magic for any live performance and can happen in many ways. It is not always easy to do and I have both failed and succeeded at it myself. The issue here was not just a lack of skill but an energy output to the audience which was both aggressive and sickly- a real feat!! Rather than interplay, it felt like being sprayed with someone else’s psychic garbage and angst very slowly and persistently. It would have been comical in its overblown angst if it had not been so much like taking a stroll through a septic tank. I kept wishing for a level 4 psychic biohazard suit! So much yuck, so painstakingly displayed with a real affection for self-pity. I left there feeling like I wanted nothing more than a shower and a funny movie- stat! Again I thought of Kobo Abe, and monotony, life in the dunes, accepting one’s mind, but that did not involve standing in someone else’s garbage, just my own.

Why is it not okay for performers to douse their audiences with energetic bilge? After all, it does make us more aware of where we are! It’s not an issue of hostility. Wilson and Heath (a personal favorite) engage their audiences with definite aggression when they burn human hair or vomit on cue but their antics are more of an energetic challenge to audience participation internally than an unloading of emotional refuse. Many artists, in all genres of performance, do amazing things on multiple levels every day. I think perhaps there is a difference between having energy played with, manipulated at an audience and with an audience. Ultimately these Butoh dances felt like the body removed from the body for the purposes of art. I do not believe that the emotional and spiritual unloading taking place was even a choice by the dancers (who seemed stuck in their own little worlds), they needed something, and Butoh made them feel better. If such actions had been positive or ecstatic rather than aggressive, it would have been no more appealing as it involved no give and take with the present, no awareness.

In short, Seattle Butoh seems to me like an art on the boundary of cult experience rather than religious experience. There was no space being created for everyone to find meaning in the moment spontaneously, instead a closed door was foisted upon the audience and perhaps the performers as well. I want to live on the earth, under the earth, in the clouds. I want to play consciously and unconsciously with others I find there. All I have to say to the world of Seattle Butoh is – “Get off my cloud!!! You’re messing with my vibe, man!”