Hijikata Tatsumi’s Sabotage of Movement and the Desire to Kill the Ideology of Death

Abstract

Death and desire appear as essential characteristics in Hijikata Tatsumi’s butoh, which brings the paradox of life and death, of stillness and movement into play. Hijikata places these con- tradictions at the roots of dance itself. This analysis points out several aspects displayed in butoh’s death aesthetics and performing processes, which catch the tension between  being  dead  and/or  alive,  between  presence  and  absence.  It  is  shown  how  the  physical  states  of  biological  death  are  enacted,  and  demonstrated  that  in  Hijikata’s  nonhuman  theatre  of  eroticism  death  stands  out  as  an  object  aligned  with  the  other  objects on stage including the performer’s carnal body (nikutai). The discussion focuses on Hijikata’s radical investigation of corporeality, which puts under critique not only the nikutai, but even the corpse (shitai), revealing the cultural narratives they are subjected to.Keywords: Hijikata Tatsumi, Butô, Death, Eroticism, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko.

Kindly provided by the author and originally publish in Enligh in Ca’ Foscari Japanese Studies 6 - Religion and Thought 2 - Death and Desire in Contemporary Japan Representing, Practicing, Performing. Edited by Andrea de Antoni and Massimo Raveri, 2017. ISBN [ebook] 978-88-6969-151-5 | ISBN [print] 978-88-6969-150-8. Available at: https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/media/pdf/books/978-88-6969-150-8/978-88-6969-150-8.pdf