The body is danced by trauma

The noisy city fell silent in an instant. It didn’t have time to utter its final scream. A colorless sky hangs over a place that has known true fire. Where once life pulsed, now stillness hangs in the air—dense like smoke. Shadows cast no light here, only memories. In the cracks of the sidewalk, in the curve of the wall, in the bent neck of the kneeling woman. This is not prayer; this is the atom-dusted dance of death—Butō. And the woman is a dancer—her body, bent like a rice stalk in a storm, moves not to the rhythm of music, but to the rhythm of spirits churning beneath the earth. Butō is not dance. Butō is endurance. Gymnastics of death, whose inspiration is Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Born in Japan in the 1950s, Butō is the expression of a deep wound in Japanese society. It is a manifesto against aesthetics, structure, the Western concept of beauty, and the Japanese need for decorum. Hijikata Tatsumi and Kazuo Ōno—the fathers of this art—created a school of theater as though opening an abyss. In Butō, the body is a shell through which everything rejected, suppressed, dormant escapes—grief, sex, hunger, laughter, pain, transformation. A Butō dancer does not play a role—they become clay, fire, a larva, a wartime scream. The white paint on the skin is not decoration—it is the ash of Hiroshima, death hidden in a gesture. Every movement is a story of disintegration. The body in Butō does not dance—the body is danced. By something: by memory, by ancestral spirits, by pain that never had time to be expressed. By death, which was supposed to arrive but stopped—leaving the dancer in a trembling limbo between life and nothingness.

What, really, is Butō? A dance? A prophecy? A corpse’s whisper? In this article, we delve into the heart of this black prayer—from etymology and the first performance featuring a live chicken, through the philosophy of the “skinless body,” to controversy, collapse, and global rebirth. You’ll also discover Butō’s connections to Master Mishima, Zen, surrealism, and the ashes of rice fields in Akita. Some say that certain dancers can tremble so long that their bodies forget who they are—and become shadow, water, ash. In one performance held in total darkness, the audience saw nothing but blackness for the first ten minutes. Because Butō does not begin with light. Today, let us peer more deeply into what hides within those black depths.

What Does "Butō Theater" Mean?

Butō—a word that sounds like a step into darkness. The kanji that form it carry a tension between movement and resistance: 舞 (mai) is ceremonial dance, a swirling, fleeting gesture performed for the gods; 踏 (tō) is the weight of the foot pressing into the ground, stamping, stepping with force. Together—舞踏—this is no light or elevated dance, but a ritual born from heaviness. The earth is not a backdrop here—it is an adversary. Every step is a struggle for presence.

In his revolt, Hijikata rejected the term buyō (舞踊), commonly used for classical forms of Japanese dance, from Nō to kabuki. Buyō carried with it an aesthetic of discipline and traditional harmony. Meanwhile, butō—an archaism, an extinct word once referring to foreign (European) ballroom dance—was reclaimed by Hijikata, erased from the memory of language, and then revived, like a paralyzed body regaining movement. He gave it new life: deformed, heavy, full of resistance.

The original version of this art was called ankoku butō (暗黒舞踏)—“dance of darkness.” But ankoku is not ordinary darkness. It does not signify moral evil. It is rather a primordial, maternal darkness. A space where everything begins before light appears. It is the depths before birth, the shadow before gesture, the dream before sleep. In Hijikata’s philosophy, darkness was not something to flee from—it was a place one must emerge from if one truly wishes to dance life.

Butō also uses its own internal language. There is butō-fu (舞踏譜)—not a musical score, but a score of the body, a record of surreal images meant to enter the dancer and transform them from within. These are not instructions, but visual narcotics: “your body becomes a growing root,” “your fingers are the tongues of the dead,” “dance as if you were a wet cloud falling down a spine.” Each notation is like a spell.

There is also the concept of ganimata (がに股)—literally “legs like a crab”—a stance where the legs are spread wide outward, as if stuck in rice-paddy mud. This is no accident. Hijikata came from Akita—a harsh region of northern Japan where rice grows in heavy soil, and bodies labor in rain and hardship. Ganimata is a return to that earth. To heaviness. To a past that does not let go.

Butō does not begin with the spotlight but with a language that resembles a whisper from the underworld. And each of its signs—whether in kanji or in the body—rebuilds, transforms, and deforms the meanings we thought we understood.

Born from Ash: The Birth of Butō

Tokyo, late 1950s. The concrete hasn’t yet cooled from the explosions of war, and shadow-people wander the streets. The air smells of dust in which one can still sense the trace of burning. Life returns, but not triumphantly—more like the shadow of a person who vanished too quickly. The Japanese soul, split by two atomic blasts and the silence of occupation, finds no place in ballroom dances, nor in kabuki, which pretends nothing happened. It is precisely in this void, where the body no longer has a language, that a new language is born—a skinless language.

The year is 1959. A young Hijikata Tatsumi stages Kinjiki (禁色 – Forbidden Colors), inspired by Yukio Mishima’s controversial novel about homosexual desire and forbidden beauty. On stage: his body, moving as if from another world, and a scene that would go down in history—Yoshito Ōno holding a live chicken between his thighs, and Hijikata chasing him into darkness. The audience falls silent—not in awe, but in disgust. Scandal. Exile. A beginning. Butō was not accepted—it was rejected. And it was in that rejection that it found its roots and its strength.

This is when two forces meet: Hijikata—the architect of shadow, who builds a labyrinth of ideas from movement—and Kazuo Ōno—the soul of Butō, whose body, even in old age, dances like a bitter prayer spoken too late. This encounter defines two paths: one brutal, soaked in darkness and pain; the other melancholic, nearing ecstasy. But both lead to the same place: into the depths of the body, which has forgotten its shape and purpose.

Butō is rebellion—not only against the West, which brought the bomb and capitalism, but also against Japan, which wanted to forget its terrible crimes. It is a gesture against a Japanese society that sought a return to politeness, to ceremony, to the quietude of Nō and the beautiful gestures of kabuki. Hijikata did not want beauty. He wanted truth—even if that truth was deformed, brutal, groaning.

In his movements, one sees echoes of Dadaism, Surrealism, Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, and Grotowski’s Poor Theater—not because he imitated the West. They, too, regardless of continent, responded to catastrophe: war, society, the soul. Butō fits this language—the language of absurdity, the language of revolt against form, the language of a body that ceases to be human in order to speak of what human speech cannot carry.

And so a dance was born that does not seek the stage but depth. Not light, but ash. Not applause, but silence.

The Dance of the Skinless Body: The Philosophy of Butō

The body in Butō is not an instrument. It is not a vessel of aesthetics, nor a space to showcase technical perfection. The body in Butō is a landscape—cracked, dry, like a rice field after a drought. It is earth that remembers too much and tries to speak not in words but through spasm, twitch, the slow, desperate lift of a finger. Butō is not about dance in the traditional sense. It is not about “performance”—it is about presence. A deep, unsettling, almost shameful presence of the body stripped bare—of identity, of gender, of cultural context. A skinless body is not one that acts—it is one that reveals.

Hijikata once said: “Do not try to be beautiful.” This single sentence sums up the entire aesthetic of Butō—or rather, its anti-aesthetic. In a world trying to rebuild itself from rubble and return to normalcy, Butō cast an accusation: normality is a lie. In a post-Hiroshima world, there is no place for beauty—not the kind we once knew. “After Auschwitz, there is no poetry,” wrote Adorno. Butō follows a similar path—except instead of the language of words, it chooses the language of muscle. Movement not as ornament but as testimony. Trembling not as technique but as the echo of survival.

The philosophy of Butō is the philosophy of being moved. The body does not dance—the body is danced. By something: by memory, by ancestral spirits, by pain that never had time to speak. By death, which was supposed to come, but paused—forever captured in a gesture. In this sense, Butō is a mystical medium, a channel for the flow of something greater—not in a religious sense, but an existential one. The Butō dancer does not choose movement—they allow something to move them. It could be the wind. It could be a shadow. It could be the spirit of a child from Hiroshima, whose final scream still quivers in the air.

In this philosophy, man ceases to be the center. The body becomes a plant, a stone, a larva, a shadow. Butō dissolves the boundary between human and nature. It is an echo of Shintō, in which every object has a soul. It is also the spirit of Zen, in which form disappears, and only the movement of presence remains. Butō is also a dialogue with the invisible—with ancestors, with the dead, with those who never had the chance to speak. The dancer enters the stage not alone—but with them. With those whose bodies were turned to ash, but whose gestures still demand to be expressed.

That is why Butō is not performance. It is not a dance to be watched—it is a ritual to be felt. In its climactic moments, the viewer does not know what they are feeling. They cannot name the emotion. Because they do not see the dancer—they see themselves, reflected in something cast beyond the clarity and logic of language. Butō is a question without an answer, a scream without a voice, a form without form. A skinless body that tells the truth—even if no one can name or utter it.

The Psychology of the Body: Individual and Archetypal Depth

Butō does not move on the surface. It goes downward—into the body’s depths. It is a dance that brings forth what lies in the shadow of the psyche. A dance of trauma. A dance of the unconscious. A dance of the shadow—in the sense given by Carl Gustav Jung: that part of us we do not accept, do not show, do not know. The Butō dancer does not portray this darkness—they become it. In Butō, the body becomes a mirror—not for the external world, but for the inner world that never had a voice.

In this descent, slowness is key. The modern world glorifies speed, efficiency, immediacy—Butō answers with a radical “no.” Movement in Butō is slow like a root piercing concrete—not to demonstrate something, but to reclaim the body, to feel it anew. The slower you move, the more you see. Or perhaps rather: the more things see you. Slow means deep. It means against the current. It means like the breath of the dead—without haste, without purpose, with only existence.

Tatsumi Hijikata did not see dance as comfort. His practice was extreme. He used deprivation of sleep, hunger, and pain. Exhaustion as a gateway to another state of consciousness—a state in which you do not dance, but are danced. A body that is tired, depleted, out of control—becomes true. The involuntary, the unplanned, the escape from the oversight of the ego—becomes the source of movement. Psychologically, Butō is an encounter with what has long awaited in the dark: with fear, shame, memory inscribed in the muscles. Dance becomes an initiatory rite—not a display, but a passage.

In one of his most enigmatic statements, Hijikata said:

“Every person carries within them their own Tōhoku.”

Tōhoku—his home region, harsh, cold, poor, immersed in spirituality and the rhythm of nature—becomes here a symbol of the primal place, a psychological landscape to which one must return. In a psychological sense, Tōhoku is not a physical location but a psychic matrix, a point of origin from which we grow, but never fully leave. Everyone has their own Tōhoku—their traumas, their archetypes, their spirits and demons whose dance has yet to happen. Butō transforms the local and the personal into a universal language. Because where the body stops pretending—we all speak the same tongue.

Butō Beyond Japan: Darkness That Crosses Borders

Although Butō was born in the ashes of postwar Japan, its spirit never remained confined within the borders of the Japanese archipelago. Since the 1980s, this peculiar, raw dance has begun to appear at avant-garde theater and dance festivals in Europe and North America. Over time, its language—not so much aesthetic as existential—has been embraced by artists around the world. Today, Butō is danced in the dark basements of Berlin, in the monastic spaces of Tuscany, in the industrial halls of New York, and also on stages in India and in ritual contexts of West Africa. What was once a voice of Japan after catastrophe has become a whisper of universal human experience—pain, transformation, memory, endurance.

Butō crosses borders because its essence is not nationality, but the human condition. Just as yoga does not belong solely to India, and Sufism not only to the Islamic world—butō is not a technique, but a philosophy of embodied existence. Like haiku, which captures a moment of eternity in a few syllables, Butō seeks truth in minimal movement, in a body that becomes a landscape. From this perspective, the question of whether one can dance Butō without understanding Japan is a misframed question.

Butō is a language, and like any language—it is open. Hijikata warned his students: “Do not try to dance like me.” What, in his case, was a return to Akita and the spirits of ancestors, for others might be a struggle with war in Bosnia, with the AIDS epidemic in New York, with the experience of colonialism or racism. Sankai Juku, with founder Amagatsu Ushio, is one of the most renowned Butō troupes in the world—their style is quiet, meditative, almost cosmic, with movements that ripple like dust across the surface of the moon. In contrast, Dairakudakan, founded by Akaji Maro, moves toward spectacular, almost carnivalesque expression—with costumes, grotesquerie, and theatrical deformation of the body.

In the United States, Butō evolved through Koichi and Hiroko Tamano, who formed the Harupin-Ha collective and brought the dance into San Francisco’s urban landscape—performing in restaurants, alleyways, and empty warehouses. Later came the LEIMAY group from Brooklyn, combining Butō with elements of installation, sound, and spatial work—their actions sometimes resemble site-specific performances in which the boundary between body, object, and place becomes ambiguous or even vanishes.

A surprising and deeply important voice on the international Butō scene is Eseohe Arhebamen from Nigeria, known as Edoheart—the first Butō dancer from the African continent. She created her own form of “Butoh-vocal theatre,” combining dance with ritual songs, mudras, and traditional Edo dance (Edo here referring to the historical kingdom of Benin in Africa—not to be confused with old Tokyo, formerly called Edo—a coincidental namesake), thus bringing Butō to an entirely new level of intercultural dialogue.

In Europe, a significant figure is Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, a dancer who has collaborated with the widow of Hijikata as well as with Kazuo Ōno. Her works have appeared at the Royal Opera House and the National Theatre in London, as well as in the film The Northman and in Robert Eggers' upcoming Nosferatu, where she created Butō-inspired choreography for the leading actors.

Butō is also growing within the realm of education. The New Butoh School, founded by Sayoko Onishi in Italy, continues a path of teaching based on her encounter with Yoshito Ōno, developing a new approach to Butō—one more open to contemporary sensibilities, yet still rooted in the spiritual depth of the tradition.

What unites all these artists is the recognition of Butō not as a closed style, but as an alphabet from which each person composes their own sentences. For some, this will be a dance that is almost motionless—composed of tremors and pauses. For others, it is ecstasy, frenzy, an eruption of emotion. Improvisation is not chaos, but conscious movement against the background of a defined score (Butoh-fu). It’s like jazz: not the absence of rules, but their reinterpretation in the moment.

Today, Butō has become a living, organic phenomenon that can be both ritual, performance, and a deeply personal existential practice. And though its roots are Japanese, its pale hands reach toward the clouds of every continent’s sky.

A Dance That Dies and Is Reborn

Like all living things, Butō undergoes the process of death. Tatsumi Hijikata, Kazuo Ōno, and Yoshito Ōno have passed away. The bodies that were the epicenters of this dance—bodies that trembled to the rhythm of ancestors, to the rhythm of death, to the rhythm of something that cannot be named—are gone. Their departure left behind a void, in which the question still echoes: Can Butō still be danced?

Contemporary Butō grapples with the shadow of its own myth. On the one hand, it flourishes across the globe—it is taught, performed, analyzed. On the other, accusations arise of formalization, of commercialization, of hollow imitations: white-painted bodies, grotesque grimaces, slow movements—but without inner depth. Without trauma, without Tōhoku, without the true question. Is this still Butō, or only its mask?

And yet—something endures. Something stirs softly beneath the ruins. Butō does not need stage lights or festival banners. A dark basement, a solitary room, an abandoned cemetery is enough—and a body that finally stops pretending. Because Butō is not an answer. It is not a style, a school, a dance to be mastered. It is a question. Open. Raw. Scratching from within. A question that lives on because it cannot be contained. The dance of darkness does not die—it decays, ferments, spreads like moss on the walls of forgetfulness. And in that mold, in that dampness, in that silence—it begins to sprout once more.

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Note: This April, we have a rare and intriguing opportunity to experience the art of Butō here in Poland—on April 23–27 in Warsaw:

BUTOHPOLIS. VII INTERNATIONAL BUTOH ART FESTIVAL
"Dreaming the New World"

Event link here:
👉 https://www.facebook.com/events/627846640129174

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"Strong Japanese Women"

see book by the author

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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