Tatsumi Hijikata

Tatsumi Hijikata was born in Akita in northern Japan on 9 March 1928 and became the principal originator of Ankoku Butoh, a postwar Japanese performance practice that fundamentally transformed what dance could be. He studied modern dance with Katsuko Masumura around 1946 and encountered Kazuo Ohno's work during a 1949 visit to Tokyo. After joining Mitsuko Ando's studio in 1953, he met Ohno there and developed the training and intellectual environment he would later challenge. His northern childhood became an equally important imaginative resource for his mature work.

In May 1959, Hijikata presented *Kinjiki* (*Forbidden Colours*) with Yoshito Ohno, drawing on Yukio Mishima's novel. The work is often cited as the first butoh performance, though the form emerged through collaboration with Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno and a broader postwar avant-garde rather than through single invention. A revised version followed in September with Kazuo Ohno. The scandal surrounding *Kinjiki* established Hijikata as an iconoclast, but its lasting importance lies in his refusal of both inherited Japanese stage conventions and imported Western modern-dance ideals.

During the 1960s, Hijikata developed a succession of works at Asbestos Hall, the studio associated with him and Akiko Motofuji. He created pieces including *Three Phases of Leda* (1962), *Masseur: A Story That Supports Passion* (1963), *Rose-Coloured Dance: To Mr. Shibusawa's House* (1965) and *Tomato* (1966). He worked across dance, theater, photography and film. The photographer Eikoh Hosoe's *Kamaitachi* project placed Hijikata's body in the rural landscapes of northern Japan, while artists and intellectuals gathered around Asbestos Studio as an avant-garde salon.

The 1968 solo *Tatsumi Hijikata and the Japanese: Revolt of the Body* marked a major statement of his theatrical and corporeal philosophy. Hijikata made the body appear unstable: human form could seem to decay, harden, sag, crawl, become animal, become landscape or be invaded by an image. The aim was a sustained attack on the assumption that theatrical bodies should be youthful, symmetrical, efficient, upright or socially proper. In 1972, Hijikata and his dancers presented *Twenty-Seven Nights for Four Seasons*, a cycle that included *Hosotan* (*A Story of Smallpox*), later described as an epoch-making sequence in butoh history.

In the 1970s, Hijikata increasingly developed choreography through image-rich verbal notation now discussed as *butoh-fu*. Rather than prescribing steps, these image chains gave dancers conditions and transformations to embody. Yoko Ashikawa became a crucial interpreter in this period, and her labor and artistry were essential to the realization of this method. Hijikata's later influence also flowed through directing: he directed Kazuo Ohno's *Admiring La Argentina* (1977), *My Mother* (1981) and *The Dead Sea* (1985). He died in Tokyo on 21 January 1986. The Tatsumi Hijikata Archive, established by Keio University in 1998 from materials associated with Asbestos Studio, preserves performance films, photographs, posters, notebooks, scrapbooks and butoh illustrations, making responsible scholarship possible for this ephemeral work.