What is Butoh?
Butoh is a form of Japanese dance theatre that encompasses a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for dance, performance, or movement. The art form is known to “resist fixity” and is difficult to define; notably, founder Hijikata Tatsumi viewed the formalisation of butoh with “distress”. Common features of the art form include playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, and extreme or absurd environments. It is traditionally performed in white body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion. There is no set style, and it may be purely conceptual with no movement at all.
Butoh is not a codified technique but rather a philosophical orientation toward performance. There is an aesthetic core of embodying grotesque beauty and a philosophical orientation toward transformation in an almost shamanic, certainly ego-transcendent sense. It embraces the dark side of human beings, the traits that many people don’t want to face. The form challenges both performer and viewer to confront raw aspects of human existence—death, decay, sexuality, suffering—through a body made strange.
Origins & Lineage
Following World War II, butoh arose in 1959 through collaborations between its two key founders, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. The first butoh piece, Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours) by Tatsumi Hijikata, premiered at a dance festival in 1959. It was based on the novel of the same name by Yukio Mishima. The performance, which explored taboos of homosexuality and featured Kazuo Ohno’s son Yoshito, caused scandal and launched the movement.
Butoh’s creators, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, sought to express the trauma of war, social change, and the search for identity in a changing Japan. The inspiration for this new style was in part a reaction to post-war shock as well as the influx of western influence on Japanese dance, but also a desire to create something which differed from the strict, classical forms of Kabuki and Nōh theater. Butoh developed at the height of the Japanese Counter Culture Movement and was influenced by surrealism, neo dada, French mime techniques, ballet, flamenco, Neue Tanz (German Expressionist dance) as well as French and European literature.
Tatsumi Hijikata (March 9, 1928 – January 21, 1986) was a Japanese choreographer, and the founder of a genre of dance performance art called Butoh. Kazuo Ohno, born in Hakodate, Japan, in 1906, got a late start to dance. In the 1950s, shortly after Ohno’s choreographic debut, they met studying under Takaya Eguchi (a student of Mary Wigman). In Jean Viala’s and Nourit Masson-Sekinea’s book Shades of Darkness, Ohno is regarded as “the soul of butoh,” while Hijikata is seen as “the architect of butoh.”
In the early 1960s, Hijikata used the term “Ankoku-Buyou” (暗黒舞踊; dance of darkness) to describe his dance. He later changed the word “buyo”, filled with associations of Japanese classical dance, to “butoh”, a long-discarded word for dance that originally meant European ballroom dancing. Under Tatsumi Hijikata’s guidance, in the late 60’s early 70’s, butoh reached a new stage, marked by the entrance of female dancers on the butoh scene. Female butoh dancers such as Yoko Ashikawa, Natsu Nakajima, Saga Kobayashi profoundly influenced the course of the art form and its development.
Major butoh groups emerged from the lineages of Hijikata and Ohno. The late Ushio Amagatsu founded Sankai Juku in 1975, today one of the most internationally renowned Butoh companies. Amagatsu’s work was known for its poetic and visually stunning performances that often explore universal themes of life, death, and rebirth. Other influential companies include Dairakudakan, founded by Akaji Maro in 1972.
How It’s Practiced
In Butoh, dancers may move in a trance-like state with eyes rolled and legs bent. They may shake their bodies and twist their faces, or bend and shuffle as they walk awkwardly. Common forms include inward-bent legs, titled heads, rolled eyes, and contorted limbs. The signature aesthetic features white body makeup—though in the origins of the dance by founder Tatsumi Hijikata, the body was darkened with the color black, blending with the shadows of the dimly lit scene, evoking the sounds of the body as it struggled in the half-light.
Butoh practice emphasizes transformation and the dissolution of fixed identity. First, erasing the self. The goal is to transcend personal ego and emotions in order to reach a more universal form of expression. A key element of Butoh is imagining the body as an ‘empty vessel’, which is filled and emptied with substances of all kinds then expressed through the body. The body is also the site of transformation between known to unknown, real and surreal, visible to invisible and even from beauty to the grotesque.
Training methods vary widely from pure improvisation, to strict learning of choreographic forms, to doing something outside of dance to learn about the body and human movement, such as the farming practices of Tanaka Min and his Body Weather-trained practitioners. Butoh practice may start with relaxation exercises to release physical and mental tension, lying on the floor with closed eyes focused on breathing. Breathing plays a crucial role in Butoh.
Butoh Today
In the 1980s, butoh, which had long been regarded as heretical in Japan, was given the name “Butoh” and expanded its area of instruction, gaining worldwide recognition as an avant-garde dance born in Japan and frequently invited to foreign dance and theater festivals, where it was highly regarded. With time butoh groups are increasingly being formed around the world, with their various aesthetic ideals and intentions.
Contemporary seekers encounter butoh through workshops, performances, and intensive trainings offered globally. Butoh has influenced contemporary performance, experimental theater, somatic practices, and interdisciplinary art. While Butoh is known for gestures that are playful, absurd, or grotesque, this practice shares similarities with Buddhism, including the concepts of selflessness, transformation, and compassion. Butoh has been adopted well beyond its origins in the 1960s Japanese avant-garde, and remains a relevant practice for movement training, performance, and daily life. In fact, butoh training is a kind of experiential learning for recognizing and rehearsing human and more-than-human interconnections in our everyday lives.
Common Misconceptions
Butoh is not a unified technique or style—there is no single “correct” way to do butoh, and the form actively resists codification. It is not merely slow movement with white paint, though these are common aesthetic choices. As an avant-garde dance, and as something so primal and raw, butoh is also not necessarily meant to be understood.
Butoh is not exclusively Japanese in practice today; it has become a global form with practitioners worldwide interpreting the principles through their own cultural lenses. It is not inherently spiritual or therapeutic, though many practitioners engage it as a transformational practice. It is not performance art that seeks beauty in conventional terms—rather, it embraces the grotesque, the aged, the decaying, the taboo as equally valid aesthetic territory.
The white body paint, while iconic, was not part of Hijikata’s original vision and became more associated with butoh through later practitioners and global dissemination. Butoh is not a single lineage—Hijikata and Ohno developed distinctly different approaches, and their students diverged further.
How to Begin
For those new to butoh, begin by watching performances rather than reading about it. Sankai Juku’s filmed performances offer an entry point to the more aestheticized, internationally recognized style. Seek out documentation of Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata to encounter the source material.
Attend a butoh workshop if available in your area—experiential learning is essential for understanding what butoh is. The New York Butoh Institute, Vangeline Theater, and other centers offer regular workshops. Look for teachers who studied directly with first- or second-generation butoh artists. Books such as Butoh Dance Training: Secrets of Japanese Dance through the Alishina Method by Juju Alishina offer structured approaches, though remember that systematization contradicts butoh’s resistance to fixed form.
Those with backgrounds in contact improvisation, authentic movement, somatic practices, or experimental theater will find resonances. Butoh training often begins with body awareness exercises, breath work, and imagery-based explorations before moving into the characteristic slow, controlled movement. Approach butoh as a practice of transformation rather than a technique to master.