I first came across Butoh in 1996, while working at the the now defunct Tower Books. Issue 21 of Visionaire, which took the form of a box of oversized playing cards, featured as it’s hearts suit a group of arresting photographs of a man, covered in white make-up, twisting about and making crazy faces. I photocopied them and put them in my “archives” for later use. It was Ushio Amagatsu a second-wave Butoh dancer, and founder of the legendary troupe Sankai Juku, though I didn’t realize it at the time. In fact I didn’t make the connection until years later when I saw a performance by Kazuo Ohno on television. It was the first time I’d ever even heard the word Butoh or seen it in motion. I am not particularly a fan of dance, nor do I tend to gravitate toward performance art, and yet with this form I was totally fascinated.

It’s a hard art to explain really. In my mind the best of it is dark and almost frightening in its viscerally primal strangeness. It can remind you of an epileptic seizure, or some ugly lunacy made flesh. Simultaneously, however, you’ll recognize in it tiny gestures and glances and movements which seem somehow sublimely beautiful. Perhaps it is the appalling humanity of it, so easily understood in the murky emotional realm of our private minds, but so strange to see manifest before your eyes. Since becoming aware of it I’ve noticed its stamp on everything from E. Elias Merhige’s masterpiece Begotten to Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle.

Recently I received the 1987 book Butoh, Dance of the Dark Soul as a gift and wanted to take the opportunity to share some of it, as well as some other Butoh related material, with you.

“Butoh is an explosive, convention-shattering performance art that has redefined the limits of dance and theatre. The form was created by a handful of avant-garde postwar Japanese artists who drew upon their native agrarian myths, the iconoclastic theatre of Antonin Artaud, and the influences of Western modern dance.

But Butoh is more. It is perhaps the most daring attempt yet made to translate the mysterious, often tormented life of the unconscious into the communal medium of theatre.

The first true Butoh performance, an adaptation of Yukio Mishima’s novel Forbidden Colors, scandalized Japanese audiences when it premiered in 1959. Its creator, Tatsumi Hijikata, was banned by the Modern Dance Association and branded an outlaw dancer.”

-From the dust jacket of Butoh. Dance of the Dark Soul, 1987.

“Some people say that the essence of butoh lies in the mechanism through which the dancers stops being himself and becomes someone or something else. This is a different conception of dance then the conventional where the body of the dancer expresses an emotion or abstract idea.

For example, take the studying of a rooster. “The idea was to push out all of the human inside and let the bird take its place. You may start by imitating, but imitation is not your final goal; when you believe you are thinking completely like a chicken you have succeeded.

The important thing with this is not the transformation into a chicken, but the transformation itself, the fact that you change. Only in this way you can bring the body back to its original state. It is not depiction or symbolization which is the foundation of butoh. It is the metamorphosis.”

-Harmen Sikkenga, from Butoh - Dance of Darkness 1994.

“Butoh has a primordial quality. It is dark. It is generated somewhere in the lower strata of the subconscious, in the murky areas of personal prehistory. Memory is its source. Its etymology refers specifically to dance through the character bu. Buyoh is the neutral word for dance, but it has a sense of jumping or leaping, whereas toh implies a stomping. Buyoh is in the ascendant, like the vertical ascent of Vaslav Nijinsky or Isadora Duncan’s leap toward the source of light. Butoh is a descent. Hijikata would often say, “I would never jump or leave the ground; it is on the ground that I dance.”

The element of stomping, the intimacy with the ground, the soil. has its roots in agricultural society. Similar patterns are found in the dances of southern India, Spain, and in the Japanese classical Noh theater. The seasons and the agricultural cycle form the foundations of Japanese mythology, at the center of which is the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, from whom the Emperor is descended. Amaterasu is said to have retreated into a cave and plunged the world into darkness after her unruly brother Susano, the Storm God, allowed his piebald horses to rampage through her rice fields. In the cold and darkness of her absence, the other spirits, or kami, gathered outside the cave and performed wild and bawdy dances. They also placed a mirror in the branches of a tree overlooking the cave. Amaterasu, curious at the sound of the revelry, peered outside and caught her reflection in the mirror. Dazzled by her own countenance, she returned to the world, and the warmth and light were restored with the onset of spring. The stomping of Butoh has its mythical parallels in the revelry of the spirits in a darkened world.”

-Mark Holborn, from Butoh. Dance of the Dark Soul, 1987.

“Hijikata used the term Butoh to describe his dance. Although modern dance is something that is liberated from Western classical dance, Butoh is not comparable. If modern dance is like a thoroughbred racehorse, then Butoh is like a camel. The difference is like the difference between diamonds and cork, though both have the same elemental base.                                     

Butoh is just a Japanese name. There are many parallel dances elsewhere. When I first saw the Omizutori, the fire festival on the hillside at Nara, an ancient religious ceremony from the eleventh century, the ceremony seemed like an imitation of my dance, just as 1 may have drawn from an eleventh century ritual. I was very impressed by the age of the ritual. Butoh is something new, but there are many comparable forms throughout history. Butoh is a form that almost precedes dance, just as a child moves and plays before he dances.

Imagine a snake emerging and appearing before a Japanese farmer, then sliding away. The step with which the farmer may have crushed the snake, may have been the beginning of a Butoh step.”

-Akaji Maro, from Butoh. Dance of the Dark Soul, 1987.

“Where are the points of difference between butoh and other forms of dance? First in the singularity of the body in butoh. As is particularly striking in ankoku butoh, the body of the butoh-ka is far removed from the balanced, ideal beauty of the ballet dancer, and has no reason to take pride in its powerful musculature or physical strength. Compared with the symmetrical beauty of conventional dancers, the butoh-ka with his stooped body, so small and lean, his bent legs, and his outsized caricature of a face is the picture of deformity. Butoh performers even seem to emphasize the rounded back, bull-neck, and bandy legs so typical of the Japanese physique. In addition to these peculiarities of the eastern body, some work like that of Kazuo Ohno brines together the complementary aspects of the same entity a delicate sensibility and the grotesque ugliness of old age. It was this kind of oddity which first drew attention to the more fundamental strangeness of butoh.

Oddity also makes the publication of collections of butoh photos an easy business, once the pathetic expressions of the strange figures which appear on the butoh stage are visually stimulating to the imagination. In this grotesque ugliness and corruption, however, there accomplishedcan be found an irreducible beauty and sweetness which are without equivalent elsewhere: Clearly, butoh has accomplished a reversal in the aesthetic consciousness.”

-Kazuko Kuniyoshi, from Butoh in the late 1980s, translated from the Japanese by Richard Hart.

When I was, perhaps… 15 I had an experience that seemed so odd it impressed itself deeply on my memory. I was alone, sitting in a very secluded little spot of a neighborhood park where I’d often go to read; on a raised concrete slab surrounded on all sides by trees. It was mid-summer and the entire area was crawling with insects and loud with their buzzings and chirpings. As I sat there I began to focus on the insects, their sounds, their motions across the ground and the concrete slab.  Eventually, and without forethought or reason, I began to mimic them. I made crazy sounds, writhed around a bit, and struck odd poses there on the slab in the sun. It lasted for about two minutes. Even then, having only just experienced it, I could see how bizarre the whole episode was.

I can only categorize it as some kind of primal outpouring, either creative or spastic, which seemed to come upon me from parts unknown. Being brought up Catholic, and being a child, I wondered whether it were some kind of possession, whether I’d in fact been talking in tongues or some other horrible thing. It was actually embarrassing somehow and consequently I told very few people about it. I recognize that same strangeness in the photos of Kazuo Ohno, however, and it seems to me now, all these years later, that it was a sort of naive Butoh, springing from the same subconscious well, seeking to cast off the composure and formality of being a “good kid.” It was play, albeit of a kind I only recognized when I got older.

In truth Butoh is most certainly something which must be seen for oneself in order to form any kind of opinion or reach any kind of understanding. It can’t be neatly summed up or even properly approached with a few quotes and a handful of images, no matter how enigmatic or beautiful. To spite that fact I hope you enjoyed this little taste anyhow.

For more on Butoh try:

Butoh.net
Butoh - Dance of Darkness
Butoh: The Darkness Amongst the Joy
About Butoh
What Does Butoh mean?
Butoh in the Late 1980s (pdf)
An Art Form In Transition
Butoh at Wikipedia
Sankai Juku: Butoh Dance from Japan
A Conversation with Ushio Amagatsu
Cokaseki.com
Bodytaster.com
Butoh-ultraego.com photogallery.

You Tube returns many result when doing a search for Butoh, most of which are pretty weak. Here are a few which might be of interest however:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,  8, 9, 10.

*Note that all photos in the main body of this post (with the exception of “Gold Boy” and “Kagemi”) are by Ethan Hoffman from Butoh, Dance of the Dark Soul, which, if you are interested in Butoh, I recommend highly. It’s the best book on the subject I’ve yet found.

“It’s good luck to find a horseshoe and bad luck to lose one. It is said that when a witch spies one nailed over a door, she must ride every road that the horseshoe has ever travelled; and by that time, it will be morning and her wicked powers will cease. Although this belief can be traced back to antiquity, it is credited in England to Saint Dunstan, the patron saint of goldsmiths.” - Michael Patrick Hearn from The Annotated Huck Finn 2001.

“Among the Romans there prevailed a custom of driving nails into cottage walls as an antidote against the plague. Both this practice and the later one of nailing up horse-shoes have been thought by some to originate from the rite of the Passover. The blood sprinkled upon the doorposts and lintel at the time of the great Jewish feast formed the chief points of an arch, and it may be that with this in mind people adopted the horse-shoe as an arch-shaped talisman, and it thus became generally emblematic of good luck.”

“If a horse be shod with shoes made from a sword wherewith a man has been slain, he will be most swift and fleet, and never, though never so hard rode, tire.” - Robert Means Lawrence, M.D. from The Magic of the Horse-Shoe 1899.

“In Henderson’s Folk-Lore of the Northern Countries of England, p. 187, mention is made of a remarkable method of treatment intended for the development of sickly, puny children who are thought to be under the influence of an evil spell which retards their growth, a notable instance of survival of the old belief in the blacksmith’s magical powers. Very early in the morning the little patient is brought to the shop of a smith of the seventh generation, if such can be found, and laid quite naked on the anvil. The blacksmith raises his hammer thrice as if to strike a glowing horse-shoe, each time letting it gently fall on the child’s body, –a simple ceremony, but vastly promotive of the child’s physical welfare, in the minds of its rustic parents.”

“The historian Diodorus Siculus said that the Chaldeans imagined the earth as having the shape of a round boat turned upside down. The boats still used on the rivers Tigris and Euphrates resemble in form a beehive with a considerable bulge in the middle. Gerald Massey (The Natural Genesis, vol. ii. p. 63) says that this conception of the earth’s figure corresponds to the Egyptian Put-sign with its hollow underneath. Various forms of this formation of the world are extant. The horse-shoe is one. Hence its value as a symbol of superstition. The head-dress of the Egyptian goddess Hathor has the shape of a horse-shoe. The letter omega is another form of the same sign.” - Robert Means Lawrence, M.D. from The Magic of the Horse-Shoe 1899.

“In some Roman Catholic countries the priests are wont to brand cows and pigs on the forehead with the mark of a horse-shoe, to insure them against disease. It was, moreover, an old Scotch superstition, or freet, to pass a horse-shoe thrice beneath the belly and over the back of a cow that was considered elf-shot.”

“We learn from Tacitus, moreover, that the Teutonic peoples used white horses, as the Romans used chickens, for purposes of augury, and divined future events from different intonations of neighings. Hence it probably is that the discovery of a horse-shoe is so universally thought lucky, some of the feelings that once attached to the aninial itself still surviving around the iron of its hoof. For horses, like dogs and birds, were universally accredited with a greater insight into futurity than man himself.”
“In the northernmost districts of Scotland exists a belief that if the first shoe put on the foot of a stallion be hung on the byre door, no harm will come near the cows; and in the same region, if a horse-shoe be placed between the houses of quarrelsome neighbors, neither incurs any risk of evil as a result of the other’s illwishes.” - Robert Means Lawrence, M.D. from The Magic of the Horse-Shoe 1899.

“The Germans have a saying in regard to a young girl who has been led astray, – “She has lost a horseshoe.” This saying has been associated with the shoe as a symbol of marriage, an idea found both in the northern and Indian mythologies. But the phrase has been also thought to refer to the horse-shoe shaped gloria which crowns the head of the Virgin, the horse-shoe thus becoming the symbol of maidenly chastity. Again, it has been suggested, in reference to the same phrase, that the horse-shoe is a symbol of the V (or first letter of the word Virgo), which is used in church records to designate the unmarried state, just as the word ‘spinster’ is used in legal documents.”

“The origin of the horse-shoe as a charm has been ascribed to its resemblance to the metallic aureole or meniscus formerly placed over the heads of images of patron saints in churches, and which is also represented in ancient pictures of the Virgin.” - Robert Means Lawrence, M.D. from The Magic of the Horse-Shoe 1899.

“The present belief in the lucky horseshoe is connected with the ancient emblems of the female genitals, the yoni. In olden times, the people were in the habit of making charcoal drawings of the female genitals over the doors of their houses to ward off ill luck. Now, the horseshoe has a great resemblance with the form of the vulva. From this symbol originates the horseshoes alleged power to ward off evil and to bring luck.” - Bernard S. Tamley Jr. from Love, A Treatise on the science of sex-attraction 1919.

“There is good reason to suppose that the crescent form of the horseshoe links the symbol to pagan Moon goddesses of ancient Europe such as Artemis and Diana, and that the protection invoked is that of the goddess herself, or, more particularly, of her sacred vulva. As such, the horseshoe is related to other magically protective doorway-goddesses, such as the Irish sheela-na-gig, and to lunar protectresses such as the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is often shown standing on a crescent moon and placed within a vulval mandorla or vesica pisces”  -Cat Yronwode, from Luckymojo.com

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Everyone can identify a horseshoe as a “lucky charm” (purple marshmallow incarnations included or not) but, as with so many cultural artifacts we drag the symbol through the ages with us, generation to generation, becoming less and less familiar with its origins, until we are almost totally divorced from whatever specific properties endowed it with power in the human imagination to begin with. Our modern cultures are positively littered with just such transmogrified items. From prevailing ideas to matters of “common sense” to everyday objects to sprawling institutions to the words we use to describe it all. We’ve had a direct hand in so very little of it and are so far removed from their origins… it’s almost frightening really, if you take a moment to think on it.

It strikes me though that in the case of the horseshoe it’s particularly pronounced and unfortunate. We’ve put ourselves in a position by which our luck, or the portion at least governed by horseshoes, can literally run out. I mean how likely are any of us to happen upon an actual horseshoe, one worn and ridden, which we might pick up and nail above our door? It might be said at this stage in the game that the luck of a horseshoe could be attributed, like that of a four leaf clover, to sheer rarity.

It’s entirely possible that the day may come when the horseshoe no longer exists at all as a functional object; when it will be produced, in the form of jewelry and bauble and talisman, as a symbol only. And what a paltry and impotent charm that would be eh?

Do you want witches running willy-nilly through your apartment at night? Or faeries or goblins? Or hags and fiends? I don’t. I’ve got enough to worry about, so I think it’s time we safeguard our luck. Why not take some direct action instead of letting generations of dead smithies and poets and historians and cult leaders dictate the auspices of our fortune? We only have so much of it after all, and probably too little as it is.

I’ve thought on it a bit and in attempting to land upon something which is functionally equivalent to the horseshoe but modern, which retains some of the symbolic character and is readily available, one solution presented itself which seemed just about perfect, and which I think reflects we moderns nicely–

Hey, the times they are a changin’, the march of progress, and all that.

Hope you enjoyed.

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For more on horseshoes, as luck-safe or otherwise, see the following-

Horseshoes at Wikipedia.

Horse Shoes at The Medieval Technology Pages

The History of Horseshoes at About.com

The Magic of the Horse-Shoe at Sacred Texts or the downloadable full book pdf at Google books

The Horseshoe at Lucky Mojo

The Historical Development of the Horseshoe Scientifiv American Suppliment 1891, at Gutengerg.

The Significance of the Horseshoe at The Wild West

Well, as it happens I have an old friend (wishing fervently to remain anonymous) who is working closely with the production team of Mr. Men: The Movie. At my behest he’s risked livelihood and limb (Thanks pal!) and smuggled me out some exclusive images which I thought you might be interested in checking out. The image at the beginning of this post was one.

Stylistically it seems they’ve decided to go after a mixed CGI / cell-animated look, with the characters remaining flat and graphic, exactly as they appeared in the books, and the environments being dimensional, with blurs and light effects, etc. Nice looking, and well done, but pretty standard fare for an animated feature.

Thematically though? ...let’s just say its a bit of a departure. The film seems to eschew the usual Mr. Men formula of having those characters in the oeuvre which embody negative traits (i.e. Mr. Grumpy, Mr. Grumble, Mr. Greedy, etc.) learn a moral lesson through their interactions with those characters which embody positive ones. In this film, at least judging by the images I’ve seen, the negative characters seem to… well… have their day in the sun so to speak.

See for yourself-

As you most likely surmised in less than 5 seconds it’s all lies. A put-on. I admit it. There is no movie, no anonymous friend, and the screen grabs were of course cobbled together by me, Monsieur Non, or Mr. Snide if you prefer– popper of hot-air balloons, crumpler of kites, and trampler of picnic blankets! Mwuah-ha-ha. 

Why perpetrate such a flimsy fraud you ask?

Well, looking at the Mr. Men page on wikipedia it dawned on me what sad creatures these negative trait characters were. I mean think of it– they were created specifically and purposefully to be grumpy, clumsy, greedy, dissatisfied, mischievous, or what have you, and then they are obliged to spend the rest of their existence being chided and “taught lessons.” What a cruel fucking trick!

“I am your creator and I dub thee Mr. Loud because you are loud and can’t help but be loud by your nature. Loudness is the natural state the taught vocal cords I fashioned for you tend toward. Your faulty ears require loudness. Every fiber of your being yearns for loudness. That is how I have made you… Now go forth and be quiet.”

Sick.

Put yourself in their shoes. Imagine being surrounded on all sides by the likes of Mr. Happy, Mr. Cheerful, Little Miss Splendid, Mr. Perfect, Mr. Good, Little Miss Fun, Mr. Right… Christ! I would be Grumpy and Grumbly too. They’d have to call me Mr. Punch-You-In-The-Fucking-Mouth.

Anyhow I thought that if even just for a few moments, and even if only here in my little ramshackle trailer on the outskirts of the internet, these poor bastards could fight back against those freakishly unflawed creations who browbeat and proselytize at them daily (and by extension lift a metaphysical middle finger to the sadistic God of their universe) well… I figured it would be time well spent.

Hope you enjoyed.