Why Should Butoh Dance Be A Part of Actor Training?
by Jordan Rosin, with contributions by Yokko
What is Butoh?
(From Jordan & Yokko’s Butoh Course Syllabus at Dell’Arte International)
Butoh, or sometimes Ankoku Butoh “dance of darkness”, is an experimental, avante-garde art form. It originated in mid-twentieth century Japan drawing influence from art forms such as Dada, German Expressionist dance (Neuer Tanz), Spanish dance, corporeal mime, as well as theatre (western and national/underground), literature and fine art. Beginning in 1959, Butoh’s founder Tatsumi Hijikata began to develop Butoh, often highly collaboratively with other artists and dancers… Hijikata eventually created his own Butoh training system and is famous for the creation of thousands of small language and image-driven choreographic units called Butoh-Fu (notational butoh). Kazuo Ohno, one of the most influential Japanese dancers, collaborated with Hijikata and toured their collective work worldwide. Ohno’s approach to teaching and performing Butoh focused on more improvisation-based and spiritual approaches.
By the start of the 21st century, butoh became a global phenomenon encompassing artists and practitioners from many walks of life with varying aesthetics, processes, and approaches. Butoh training often promotes physical endurance and expressiveness, spiritual consciousness, and creativity. For an idea of how prolific Butoh is today, check out Jordan Rosin’s Directory of Butoh Artists / Dancers Worldwide.
Butoh Dance in Actor Training
Many modern-day actor training programs have required courses in Movement for Actors, dedicated to such outcomes as relaxation, concentration, balance, strength, flexibility, endurance, coordination. Movement training can also aim to develop physical awareness, confidence and good anatomical use. Despite the many transferable skills from Butoh training, Butoh is currently found in only a handful of professional actor training programs, mostly as an elective or crossover with dance. The blurred boundary between dance and theatre in Japan and the popular conception of Butoh as a “dance-theatre” form may distance it in many practitioners’ minds from what we think of as theatre in the United States. However, as noted above, the history of Butoh, intermingled with influence from mime and Antonin Artaud makes it ripe for application as a form of actor training, alongside the techniques of Jacques Lecoq, Michael Chekhov, and Lee Strasberg with many of whose methods Butoh shares important commonalities.
In the last ten years, courses in Butoh Dance have been found in universities / conservatories such as Brooklyn College, Bennington College, Vassar College and Dell’Arte International’s Professional Training Program. My longtime creative partner Yokko has offered butoh-driven courses and workshops in schools such as SUNY New Paltz, St. Lawrence University, University of North Alabama, Amherst College, City College of New York, The Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University, Stella Adler Academy of Acting (Los Angeles), The Actors Studio (NYC), Brooklyn College MFA Acting Program, and the BFA Acting Studio program at The New Group/LIU Brooklyn. Our company, The Ume Group also partnered with the T. Schreiber Studio in NYC in 2017 to offer a butoh-driven Physical Theatre course for their acting students.
Though Butoh has often been intermingled in courses on Physical Theatre and side-lined as a somehow ‘exotic’ movement form, I believe that training in Butoh deserves its place as a primary approach to developing the movement and imagination of actors across genres.
What can Butoh teach actors?
There are many great things that Butoh can teach actors. Here are just a few:
- Relaxation ⸺ Exercises from the Hijikata lineage like Sunpo No Hoko 寸法の歩行 – “Walk of Fixed Height” which were designed to activate Butoh-Tai 舞踏体 Sensitive / Receptive Body rely on a mix of relaxation and engagement, parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system activation. Therefore, not only are Butoh-trained actors working on relaxation in isolation, but even more powerfully, they work to access relaxation inside crisis states and as one of many tools towards performative expression.
- Concentration ⸺ Exercises from the Hijikata lineage like the aforementioned Sunpo No Hoko 寸法の歩行 or “Walk of Fixed Height” involves a collection of no less than 35 images, intended to be embodied by the actor simultaneously. Learning this technique, being able to rotate your awareness through different parts of the body to keep the images alive, represents an incredible challenge for the actors’ concentration and mirrors the connection to a multitude of given circumstances which all actors must adopt in the act of playing a role.
- Balance, Strength, Flexibility, Endurance ⸺ As a dance-theatre form originating from an impulse to create “new movements” and to shock audiences, Butoh training prioritizes play with limits and extremities. Butoh training can involve movement which is extremely fast and extremely slow, extremely big and extremely small. Articulation and disarticulation of joints into less habitual, more poetic ways of moving is a hallmark of the practice. And the relationship with gravity which—quite unlike many western dance forms—is foregrounded and often exaggerated provides an excellent forum for the exploration of balance. My own quantitative research has shown that work in Butoh can enrich actors’ understanding of other systems like Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints by expanding their conception of tempo through endurance-testing durational work (Rosin, “Empowering Actors”).
Butoh can enrich actors’ understanding of other systems like Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints by expanding their conception of tempo through endurance-testing durational work
Jordan Rosin
- Coordination ⸺ Much like “waiting inhibition” in Alexander Technique, the diverse modes of motor execution in Butoh: Visualization-Led Motor Execution, Motor Imagery, Stop Signals (Vangeline 66-73) can prime actors for a sophisticated degree of self-study and provide tools for re-patterning habitual movement and ways of being. Attending to the neurological basis of movement can provide a foundation for a more coordinated, efficient, and intentional way of moving.
- Imagination ⸺ In both the Hijikata and Ohno lineages of practice, embodiment of images (much like Lecoq and Michael Chekhov technique) is a key to access the transformative power of the body and activating Kano-Tai 可能体 or “Possible Body” an aspirational orientation of mind-body that is not only open, sensitive, and receptive, but playful, curious, and unlimited in their potential for embodiment and transformation. Classic Butoh images include flowers, silk, fabric, lightning, insects, and more. One of the chief differences between Butoh and Lecoq or Chekhov techniques is the surrealistic layering and isolation of images which is fundamental to Butoh. It is not uncommon in a Butoh practice to simultaneously embody 2 – 3 images in different body parts and one or more overall conditions / attitudes, an application of imagination which stretches its limitations and creates more possibilities!
- Emotional Availability ⸺ Though approaches to emotion differ significantly across schools of Butoh training, the aforementioned work with images and extreme conditions can be much akin to Strasberg’s work with sense memory / affective memory, imaginative work designed to elicit an emotional response. (In a reverse example, actors well-versed in the Method through training at Actors Studio (such as Yokko, Dave Herigstad, Byron Hagan, Kaitlyn Rosin and others) have felt especially at-home in the Butoh-driven physical theatre work of The Ume Group.) Much of what Butoh training has to offer in terms of emotional availability are challenging physical exercises which quiet the self-censoring mind, break through social conditioning, and unlock our more raw, honest, and expressive ways of being. As Vangeline, founder of the NY Butoh Institute says “When we access the body through repetition there is a part of the mind that surrenders and we begin to access emotions” (Learning to Dance…).
- Drama ⸺ Especially at higher levels of study and performance, a Butoh dancer is able to embody extreme contrast, tension, and conflict inside their own body. In this way, practicing Butoh can sensitize actors to what Lecoq might call the mimodynamics of drama. Practices and concepts like Jo Ha Kyū 序破急 “introduction, break, speed” (common to many Japanese performing arts) and Miburi/Teburi 身振り手振り – “purposeless movement” (from the Akaji Maro Butoh Method) can create incredible physical reference points for dramaturgical counterpoint, tension, conflict.
Vangeline in Learning to Dance with Your Demons on “Great Big Story”
“Resonant Bodies” – A Butoh-based approach to Actor Training.
My own movement/acting pedagogy is an evolving program which I call Resonant Bodies and which draws on my 12-year specialization in Butoh Dance along with work in somatics, yoga, contact improv, Alexander Technique, Noguchi Taiso, martial arts, acrobatics, and mask in order to expand the receptivity, dynamism, and expressive range of the actor.
The pedagogy has been developed through my work as School Director of The Ume Group School (2012 – 2016), as an Adjunct Instructor at Dell’Arte International (2022) and in the 2018 North American tour of my Resonant Bodies Butoh & Movement workshops with nearly sold-out workshops in 6 cities, including Vancouver B.C., Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, & Richmond.
My particular approach to Butoh in Resonant Bodies expands on butoh teacher Tetsuro Fukuhara’s notion of Affordance, blending it with principles of mask performance from the Lecoq tradition and enhancing it with language of weight and inhibition from Alexander Technique and Contact Improv. One of my signature exercises, a kind of crowd-sourced Butoh Fu inspired by the Akaji Maro Butoh Method draws inspiration for surreal imagery from students’ preferences and lived experience, making for an accessible and multi-dimensional set of pathways into finding students’ “personal dance.” I explicitly call for students to navigate the boundaries between states of consciousness and I incorporate trauma-informed and consent-based principles from my training in Theatrical Intimacy Education, Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, Nicole Brewer’s Antiracist Theatre, as well as my certifications in yoga (Loom Yoga SchoolRYS) and Psychological First Aid (Johns Hopkins University).
This training is currently available via one-on-one online coaching, at select actor training programs where I teach, and in my “Intro to Butoh” Digital Workshop (next offered August 8 – 17, 2023!)
References
“Learning to Dance with Your Demons” YouTube, uploaded by Great Big Story, 10 Feb 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcO2Ip0rMic.
Rosin, Jordan. “Empowering Actors Through Viewpoints” Association for Theater in Higher Education, 10 August 2019, Orlando, FL. Association for Theatre Movement Educators Debut Panel. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/97004.
Vangeline. Butoh: Cradling Empty Space. New York Butoh Institute, 2020, p. 66-73. https://www.vangeline.com/butoh-book
Discussion Questions
- What other benefits are important part of Butoh training for actors?
- What other similarities / differences exist between Butoh Dance and Michael Chekhov Technique or Strasberg’s Method?