Last month in his ongoing series Japanese Cinema Eclectics, author Donald Ritchie screened "Horrors of Malformed Men" (Toei, 1969). An "unsung classic" of Japanese film, "Horrors" features the only cinematic performance of Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of the butoh dance movement. Hijikata, who would have celebrated his 80th birthday this year, died in 1986, depriving later audiences a chance to see his groundbreaking performances in the flesh.
But for those curious to follow his legacy, a number of dancers who trained with the master have gone on to found their own butoh-sha (troupes). One such group, Torifune Butoh-sha, is staging its production "Hinomoto: Aru Hareta Fuyu no Hi no Ogasama (The Land of the Rising Sun: Mother on a Clear Winter's Day)" in Kyoto this weekend and in Tokyo at the end of next week.
Butoh always looked beyond the male-female divide to try to find something more essential about human existence, and in the 1970s, when Hijikata had stopped performing himself, he began to work with female dancers; before that, butoh performances, which he pioneered in the early '60s, had been a more male-dominated form.