Hijikata Tatsumi's explosive 1959 debut Forbidden Colors sparked a new genre of performance in Japan - butoh: an art form of contrasts, by turns shocking and serene. Since then, though interest has grown exponentially, and people all over the world are drawn to butoh's ability to enact paradox and contradiction, audiences are less knowledgeable about the contributions and innovations of the founder of butoh. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh traces the rollicking history of the creation and initial maturation of butoh, and locates Hijikata's performances within the intellectual, cultural, and economic ferment of Japan from the sixties to the eighties.

Part of the "Routledge Performance Practitioners" series, this book deals with the contribution of two of modern theatre's most charismatic innovators. Including a glossary of English and Japanese terms, it presents an account of the founding of Japanese butoh through the partnership of Hijikata and Ohno.

Drama. Dance. Performance Studies. East Asia Studies. Transcribed by Moe Yamamoto and translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu. Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986) is a founding father of the radical dance form that he called Butoh, whose choreography required dancers to internalize complex and often grotesque images, experiences and perspectives in order to produce precise movements. Though influenced by Western artists and writers the expressionist dance of Mary Wigman, the writings of Artaud, de Sade, Bataille, and Genet, and the drawings and paintings of Goya, Picasso, Toyen, Beardsley, and others he was dedicated to the particular experience of the marginalized, Japanese suffering body after World War II. In the mid-1970s, Hijikata became concerned with developing notation for his Butoh, and some of these Butoh-fu notations remain, largely in the form of notebooks transcribed by his disciples. COSTUME EN FACE is the first publication of one of Hijikata's notebook notations in either English or Japanese. In it we can see, for the first time, the profound interconnectedness of language and body in Hijikata's process of composition."

"Tokyo during the 1960s was in a state of uproar, full of protests, riots, and insurrection. Tatsumi Hijikata - the initiator of the 'Butoh' performance art and the seminal figure in Japan's experimental arts culture of the 1960s - created his most famous works in the context of that turmoil. Central to Hijikata's vital 1960s work are his many films, from experimental projects undertaken in collaboration with artists, to horror and sex films made for Japan's ailing studios, to his participation in the corporate, state-power spectacle of the Osaka World Expo '70. Based on original interviews with Hijikata's collaborators as well as new research, Film's Ghosts illuminates Hijikata's world-renowned, spectral 'Dance of Utter Darkness', Butoh, and explores Hijikata's films directly against the backdrop of 1960s urban culture in Tokyo, with the rise of its screen-constellated mega-towers, its fierce protests and riot-police battles, its ascendant security-guard and surveillance industries, and its experimentations in art, sex and tourism. This will be an essential book for readers engaged with film and performance, urban cultures and architecture, and Japan's experimental art and its histories"--Back cover.

Photographs and words illuminate Butoh dance.

With The Night Is Still Young, Los Angeles-based, Japanese photographer Tomoaki Hata returns to his roots-the underground club scene of Osaka's gay, nightlife district. Filled with intimate images of the radically-creative drag queens who performed at various venues in the city from the late 1990s through the present, this book is a peek into the underbelly of modern Japan. Hata occupies a much-deserved place in the ranks of the great Japanese photographers-on par with the likes of Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki-yet he achieved this rank not by following the example of these greats, but via the presentation of his own unique view of a slice of Japanese culture that otherwise remains largely undocumented. Gay life and culture in Japan remains mostly secretive, and tends to take place within the safe confines of gay bars and gay districts that are many times hidden in plain view within the entertainment districts of major urban centers. A passionate and intimate portrayal of the gender-bending performers as they cavort, both on and off the stage, Hata exposes this elusive subculture for the entire world to see. The results are campy and combustible images of drag performers going full tilt. Glitter, glamour, sequins, and seediness are all on display, up-close and unrestrained. Including an essay on Hata's photographs-and the world they examine-The Night Is Still Young captures and contextualizes drag culture in Japan at the turn of the century, and is the ultimate primary-source document of this otherwise obscure scene.