Yukio Waguri and ‘Butoh Notation’, Yukio Waguri’s ‘Butoh Notation’ by Takashi Morishita

Tatsumi Hijikata and Butoh Notation

Yukio Waguri began his 45-year butoh career when he entered Tatsumi Hijikata’s studio in 1972. This career was the fulfilment of all he had learned from Hijikata. It is hard to imagine what his life would have been without Hijikata, let alone his butoh career. At the core of Hijikata’s work in the 1970s was his butoh notation, or ‘butoh fu’. After he died, Waguri promoted and disseminated this notational butoh. In simple terms, ‘butoh notation’ is that which regulates and produces the ‘movement’ of a dancing body. Waguri received from Hijikata a great many ‘movements’, recorded using notation. This notation is always preserved in the medium of language; that is, it is linguistically codified. Waguri inherited over 1,000 codified ‘movements’. These language ‘movements’ were cast into his body, and stored there, so that he could perform them on cue. They might seem to have fixed forms, but the dancer’s subjective input and individuality also fed into them. In this way, they seem oppositional to much modern dance technique. Hijikata was not looking to create fixed ‘forms’ or eliminate individuality. The vast quantity of ‘movements’ he created meant the ‘forms’ of his dance could never become fully fixed. Butoh emerges out of convulsions, or minute movements, so its ‘forms’ cannot be straightforwardly broken down and analysed. ‘Notational butoh’ is a mechanical way of constructing and managing this method of creation. But it involves elaborately organising more than the movements of the body; it also involves the complexities of human psychology, deep human emotions, the intricacies of the nervous system, and the harder to control physiological aspects of the human. Hijikata’s dance philosophy emerged out of an anti-modern and anti-subjective sentiment. He had a tendency, as in the work of Henri Michaux, to seek out forms of expression that resisted subjectivity. His work can be considered to bear some relation to the ideas and techniques of Surrealism. Hijikata became more confident in what he was doing as a result of the praise of renowned Kabuki critic Masakatsu Gunji. His work, in its resisting of the individual, can also be seen to resemble traditional pre-modern performance forms.

Yukio Waguri’s ‘Private Butoh Notation’

Waguri was obviously not Hijikata. Waguri analysed, corrected, and edited the ‘butoh notation’ he received or learned from Hijikata. There is no way to reduce the importance of Hijikata’s northern heritage to his ideas about butoh: the folk culture, way of living, landscape, and body types of Tohoku and Akita. These were not something Waguri, born and raised in Tokyo, had access to. But Waguri did inherit Hijikata’s incredible method of ‘notational butoh’, and the core of the philosophy behind butoh. His influence also, in the case of Waguri, gave way to a departure from this world, towards an interest in the traditional performing arts of Edo. Waguri’s commitment to ‘butoh notation’ after Hijikata’s death was almost like the fulfilment of something written in Hijikata’s will. He took out his many notebooks, hidden in storage until then, filled with writing from his time training at Asbestos Studio, and ordered them according to his memory of the time. He organized them according to ‘themes’ which ran through Hijikata’s words: from ‘The Darkness of Redon’, ‘The Darkness of Goya’, and ‘Bacon’, to ‘Festival of the Flesh’, ‘Auschwitz’, and ‘Space of Turner’, to ‘Republic of Nerves’, ‘Wols’, ‘Ghost’, and ‘Evaporation’. In this way, Waguri organised Hijikata’s ‘movements’ under 60 thematic headings. This presented a bird’s eye view of the world of Hijikata’s butoh. Waguri then brought together the transcribed words of Hijikata’s butoh ‘movements’ with the paintings they referenced, which he copied from art journals which Hijikata had used like Mizue and Bijutsu techō, and from other catalogues, books, and magazines like Sansai, under the title of ‘Private Butoh Notation’. On the title page of this handmade book, created in 1991, Waguri wrote an ‘Invitation into Butoh’ in honour of his teacher: ‘Here are the recorded fragments of the method of my teacher Tatsumi Hijikata’. At this point, Waguri was already creating his own works, giving young dancers the opportunity to perform through his butoh company, Kozensha (named by Hijikata after the name of the leprosy hospital on which Asbestos Studio was allegedly built). Waguri’s ‘Private Butoh Notation’ became an important tool for teaching his own students. He would show dancers the ‘butoh notation’, read and explain it to them, and then teach them the ‘movements’. Waguri’s ‘Private Butoh Notation’ can, then, be considered something of a manual and training book for Hijikata’s butoh.

The Tatsumi Hijikata Method

It would be problematic to suggest that Waguri’s ‘Private Butoh Notation’ could serve as a manual for beginners. Needless to say, there is no way to master Hijikata’s butoh using a manual. But it might nonetheless offer a clue to the creation and method of Hijikata’s notational butoh; illuminating the way in which words are the foundation of butoh, as what stimulates ‘movement’; and revealing some of Hijikata’s primary visual sources, which carry the essence butoh. In other words, the images and language reproduced in Waguri’s ‘Private Butoh Notation’ offer a perspective on the world of Hijikata’s butoh. At the same time Waguri created his ‘Private Butoh Notation’, he also established the ‘Hijikata Method Research Group’. This was a workshop that took place at Asbestos Studio. The focus of it wasn’t Hijikata’s method, but the discussion of a wealth of unexplained mysteries Hijikata had left behind. Butoh is not, however, created from concepts. It involves the question of how a dancer’s body reacts to space. This is what the butoh ‘technique’ entails. In Hijikata’s words, it is ‘the technique of capturing obscure things’. He believed you had to understand everything in the universe in order to dance butoh. This wasn’t about knowledge, per se, but rather a matter of understanding a certain psychological, emotional, physiological, and nervous condition of the body, such that it could be made to generate ‘movements’.

Butoh Performances

Waguri not only knew Hijikata’s butoh inside out, he also used his ‘notational butoh’ to create many new works. In the 1990s, he churned out roughly a work a year, beginning with the series “Wings of Castle” and going on to works such as “The Blue Pillar”, “The Story of sun and moon”, “Wedding on the Field”, “Sinking Waterfall”, “Spiral Dream” and “Ellora - The Dream of the Stone”. As is apparent from the titles, these are works created using imagery. What characterised Waguri’s butoh creation was the rich use of literature and stories, along with a skilful structure and careful choreography. Behind this work was Hijikata’s ‘butoh notation’. The freedom of having countless ‘movements’ stored in his body was what allowed for the creation of such various works, developed in collaboration with talented composers, stage designers, and lighting designers. As Waguri’s work flourished, young dancers wishing to learn butoh flocked to him. He would carefully and attentively guide these young dancers through their training, based on the same master-disciple relationship he had shared with Hijikata. As part of this reviving of Hijikata’s ‘butoh notation’ through the creation of new works, it became necessary to analyse the ‘butoh notation’ once more. At the same time as teaching his disciples Hijikata’s choreographic and movement methodology, he also felt it necessary to develop a new form of butoh. As Hijikata put it: ‘Butoh has only just begun’; the work of continually re-evaluating butoh from new perspectives is never done.

‘Butoh Notation’ and Butoh Technique

The only written work of Hijikata’s which was published as a standalone work during his lifetime was Ailing Dancer (Yameru maihime). On the first anniversary of his death, his writings and essays were gathered together in the publication Beautiful Blue Sky (Bibo no aozora). This allowed access to his early ideas and views on butoh. As Hijikata’s statements on his method were fragmentary, however, the only way to guess at his butoh creation is through watching videos of his works.
Following the success of Kazuo Ohno and Sankaijuku abroad, butoh began to spread globally. Ohno was also popular within Japan as a dancer whose improvisational style was praised as a ‘butoh of the spirit’. Takaaki Yoshimoto pointed out in his 1989 work, Butoh Theory, that despite writing on Hijikata being published, there was not much writing on the butoh technique itself. Yoshimoto suggested ‘what people really want to know about is the technique’. As a writer principally concerned with Hijikata’s writings, he clarified the relationship between butoh and language. He suggested Hijikata’s butoh didn’t begin from form, but ‘treat[ed] the body as the letter with which [Hijikata] can write metaphors’. The technique is one of learning how to create these metaphors. But without knowledge of Hijikata’s ‘butoh notation’, Yoshimoto struggled to pierce to the heart of butoh. The first use of Hijikata’s rehearsal notes in the academic research of Hijikata’s butoh was Kayo Mikami’s 1993 thesis The Ankoku Butoh Method of Tatsumi Hijikata. Using rehearsal notebooks, Mikami was able to offer a new perspective on butoh. Kazuo Ohno’s early butoh performances used butoh notation, and were choreographed by Hijikata, so were not, in fact, straightforwardly improvisational. This can be understood from looking at Hijikata’s butoh notes. Looking at his notes, alone, though, isn’t enough to clarify his technique. As Hijikata did not offer any systematic theory of butoh, much remains unclear. If you look carefully through his ‘butoh notation’, it is sometimes possible to guess at the way in which he created works, even if it is not possible to read a clear statement on the butoh technique. Waguri would repeat Hijikata’s esoteric suggestion that ‘technique is contained in the entire spirit’. But the important question remains: what is, then, the butoh technique? Hijikata, for whom improvisation was impossible even when he was improvising, could not ignore the matter of technique. Without technique it would be impossible to dance Hijikata’s butoh. At the same time, he was continuously compelled to create new work, in a drive to prevent his dance from becoming formally fixed or mannerist.

Yukio Waguri’s CD-ROM

In 1998, Waguri was still working with Hijikata’s butoh, when Tatsumi Hijikata’s Collected Works was first published, containing some ‘butoh notation’. Prior to this, ‘butoh notation’ had never appeared in print. The second volume of the Collected Works contained about 100 pages of transcribe butoh notation, and reproduced images of Hijikata’s scrapbooks and loose sheets of notation, which he had left behind in Asbestos Studio. This marked the real lifting of the ban on ‘butoh notation’. Waguri decided to create ‘Butoh Kaden’ based on his ‘Private Butoh Notation’. He wanted to publish this ‘Private Butoh Notation’ as a book, but it was virtually impossible to capture words, image, and the movement of the body on the two-dimensional page. It was Waguri’s meeting with the company director of the software development company JustSystems that gave rise to his idea for a CD-ROM. This developed into an ambitious project to create and publish a new work called ‘Butoh Kaden’, in collaboration with the multi-media trained staff at JustSystems. In his creation of an ‘Invitation into Butoh’, Waguri drew inspiration from The Flowering Spirit of Zeami, which was not a guidebook to the Noh performance technique, but instead illuminated the spiritual world of the artform. Digital media offered the perfect way to bring to light the world of ‘butoh notation’ through moving image, music, voice and various other materials, as well as still frames showing writing and images. The ‘Butoh Kaden’ CD-ROM didn’t rely on the two-dimensional media of paper, but allowed for a multi-dimensional or three-dimensional form of expression. It also allowed users to choose their own route through its multi-media world, giving them options, rather than working as a single video that must be experienced in one sitting. For Waguri, used to being in conversation with his students at workshops, this multi-media outlet presented a real opportunity. CD-ROMs, while seldom used now, were a cutting-edge technology at the time. It was, therefore, quite difficult to know how valuable a resource it would become, even for specialists.
The original plan was to release it in 1996, but a number of twists and turns led to a delay. The gathering and editing of various materials was, of course, time consuming, but what really took time was the designing and visualising of the world of butoh. The only way to do so was through trial and error. In the end ‘Butoh Kaden’ was not released until 1998. There were a number of events organised that year, as the thirteenth anniversary of Hijikata’s death, including, in April of that year, the establishment of the Tatsumi Hijikata Archive at Keio University Art Centre.

The World of ‘Butoh Kaden’

The ‘Butoh Kaden’ performances, which Waguri created in 1996, condensed the process of Waguri’s analysis of Hijikata’s world of butoh. The subtitle of the work was ‘A Journey around the Seven Worlds of Butoh’. Waguri suggested it allowed for ‘a voyage around the seven worlds opened by butoh notation, with butoh notation as a compass’. These worlds were titled: ‘World of Anatomy’, ‘World of Flowers’, ‘World of Birds and Beasts’, World of the Wall’, ‘Hospital for Neurosis’, ‘World of the Burned and Collapsed Bridge’, and ‘World of the Abyss’. This division into worlds is not taken from Hijikata, but comes from Waguri’s analysis of Hijikata’s vast quantity of butoh notation. Waguri drew together the materials and information he had gathered and analysed in the ‘Butoh Kaden’ CD-ROM. In simple descriptive terms, ‘Butoh Kaden’ is a 2-sided disc, with an A side and a B side. Side A contains 88 examples of ‘butoh notation’ and the performance works of ‘Butoh Kaden’; Side B, which I will come to in a moment, contains more background information. It is possible to enjoy the ‘Butoh Kaden’ performances in one go, or to select each of the seven scenes one by one. Each scene reflects a different thematic world: ‘Island, ‘Garden’, ‘Journey’, ‘Ruin’, ‘Prince’, ‘Nest’, and ‘Obi of Light’. These scenes, which bring together dance and computer technologies, can be viewed as ‘virtual performances’. The seven worlds of ‘Butoh Kaden’ are also presented in a way that offers a ‘bird’s eye view of butoh notation’. Once you enter each world through this ‘bird’s eye view’, it is possible to reference the various examples of butoh notation. Each of the 88 examples of butoh notation, with titles like ‘Country of Unseen Things’, ‘Imaginary Garden’, ‘Labyrinth, ‘Monster’, ‘Doppelganger’, ‘Altarpiece of Bosch’ and ‘Vertigo’, connects to the various worlds of ‘butoh notation’. When you select a ‘butoh notation’, you can see a concrete example of the ‘movement’ alongside the language it corresponds to. You are able to see relevant explanatory material, such as any reference images or photographic materials, when you click on the ‘butoh notation’, and it is possible to navigate from here to footage of the movement corresponding to the ‘butoh notation’.
From the ‘bird’s eye view of butoh notation’ page you can access the ‘analysis of butoh notation’ and ‘explanation of butoh notation’. The ‘analysis of butoh notation’ deploys computer graphics and a narrative voice-over, which reveals some of Waguri’s rationale for organising the ‘butoh notation’. From here, it is possible to click through to the performances of ‘Butoh Kaden’ or to the ‘bird’s eye view of butoh notation’. This layering of levels, through which a user can freely move, allows them not only to ‘understand’ the world of Hijikata’s codified ‘movement’ language, but also to actually experience it. Side B contains various materials—writings, videos, photographs—relating to ‘butoh’, ‘Tatsumi Hijikata’, and ‘Yukio Waguri and Kozensha’. The creative design and editing is credited to Yukio Waguri, and the production to ‘Yukio Waguri and Kozensha’. Ikko Tanaka collaborated on the artistic design, and JustSystems was involved in publishing and distributing the work. The original publicity for the CD-ROM reads: ‘The origin of the image triggered by language. The door to the rich world of physicalizing the “butoh fu”-code opens’. Named after this, the inaugural event to celebrate the publication, held at Kinokuniya Southern Theatre as part of their seminar series, was titled ‘“Butoh fu”: A Physicalised Code’. The event, which included the butoh performance ‘A Thousand Eyes’ and the discussion ‘Body and Words’ was well attended by the public, and even garnered media attention. Published around the same time as William Forsythe was disseminating his dance and choreographic analysis via CD-ROM, Forsythe’s work was part of a turn towards multi-media in the dance world. Allowing new access to the performing arts, these digital technologies facilitated wider engagement and research into dance, both for the general public, and for archivists looking to establish digital archives. Waguri’s commitment to the ‘Butoh Kaden’ project allowed him to introduce butoh to the world via the new medium of a CD-ROM.

Consideration of Butoh fu

From this point onwards, Waguri’s work abroad increased: from Europe to North America, Brazil to various Asian countries, like Korea, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Whilst touring works like “Wedding on the Field” and “Journey of Spirit”, he would also offer workshops to local butoh dancers and other dancers. His English/Japanese-language ‘Butoh Kaden’ CD-ROM proved an invaluable resource when giving these workshops, and was often purchased by attendees for self-study. In the 2010s, Waguri disbanded the Kozensha Company and began touring as a solo artist. His work in Asia became particularly busy. Before the Tohoku Earthquake he was invited to work in Beijing, and since then to work in Taiwan, Macao, Hong Kong, and China’s Xi’an and Yunnan Provinces. He became very active in leading workshops, and was one of the artists most proactive in giving workshops and performances globally. What made this activity possible, in part, was the existence of ‘butoh notation’. The teacher-student relationship abroad is not equivalent to that of the master-disciple relationship Waguri learned under. Butoh notation can, however, extend or be universalised beyond the bounds of butoh. It offers a language that has the potential to be relevant outside of periodisation, location, or culture. Even towards the end of Waguri’s life, he was revisiting his sense of butoh in a text entitled ‘Thoughts on Butoh fu’. This is a text which aimed to re-examine and face once more Hijikata’s butoh and ‘butoh notation’. Waguri intended it as a text to accompany his ‘Private Butoh Notation’ and the DVD-ROM version of ‘Butoh Kaden’. He wrote it with Hijikata in his ear, asking him, again, ‘what is butoh?’, and forcing him to address the issues of ‘butoh notation’. In it, Waguri suggested that we need to once more turn to the matter of ‘darkness’, which Hijikata had considered part of the title of ‘butoh’—originally ‘dance of darkness’, or ‘butoh of darkness’. He turned to butoh with a renewed sense of commitment to the idea that ‘butoh is a journey of self-exploration, and nothing else’. It was with this sense of commitment that Waguri re-examined the seven worlds of ‘Butoh Kaden’. He turned again to the worlds of Hijikata’s butoh notation, and decided to expand on the notion of the ‘flesh body’. The ‘flesh body’ led to questions of ‘death’, ‘time’, ‘madness’, ‘nerves’, and ‘ghosts.’ Reflecting on these, Waguri seemed to return butoh to its original struggle with the flesh body. Waguri’s final essay was, in some sense, a requiem for his own struggles with butoh over the course of a 40-year career: he was confronted, in this essay, with the sense that words must be carefully chosen when writing and reflecting on Hijikata’s butoh and ‘butoh notation’.

Takashi Morishita (2018)