This article is predominantly based on Elspeth Chan's presentation ‘Butoh Metaphorical Images – from Tensegrity to Cubism’ delivered at the ACI Postgraduate Practice Research Conference held at the University of East London on 27 April 2024.
Hijikata’s [1] concept of the body
From the experience of my butoh practice, one of the key metaphorical images in butoh is the body as an empty vessel: to fully embody the imageries which transform the body into an ongoingly and dynamically changing state. There is also another image illustrating the body is like a cage and humans are locked in the prison of the flesh. Such a cage image takes inspiration from Goya’s paintings which are included in Butoh-fu [2]. ‘Goya interprets the world through his image of unbearable insanity, the tragedy of being trapped while living in the prison of the flesh’ (Shibusawa, no date, quoted in Butoh-Kaden [3], 2020).
Let’s take one of the remarkable works of Hijikata, Hosotan (A Story of Smallpox) [4] that he performed in 1972. It portrays a ‘weak body’ [5] lying on the ground, a sick body in discomfort and even distortion. From the theme of ‘illness’ and ‘death’, Hijikata declared a statement of dance that cannot stand, resulting in his famous quote about butoh ‘as a corpse trying desperately to stand upright’.

Most of the time, Hijikata embodied a skinny or even bony torso on stage, the depletion of unnecessary fats was to express the anger and frustration in the post-war decades in Japan.

The selected quotes below may provide a more vivid body image fostered by Hijikata:
He worked for a body that emanated vast panoramas of death, each minuscule gesture of corporeal contortion able to project an entire, concertinaed history of the body, in its essential aberrance, resuscitation, fury, and revolt
(Barber, 2005).
The body of butoh from the time of Hijikata until now is material and immaterial, illusive, strange, and transformative. As such, it can’t be pinned down with logic (Fraleigh, 2010).
In the case of butoh, Hijikata was already choreographing a body without organs of sorts (via Artaud) well before Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote their book A Thousand Plateaus (1980)
(Prickett and Thomas, 2020).
Therefore, Hijikata’s concept of the butoh body could be envisaged as a metaphorical vessel or cage in crisis or revolt.
How is the Western concept of anatomy perceived in butoh?
Based on the 88 chosen imageries from Butoh-fu, Yukio Waguri, one of Hijikata’s direct disciples, arranged them into 7 worlds in Butoh-Kaden according to the meaning of each notation. Interestingly, amongst the 7 worlds, there is a ‘World of Anatomy’.


Figure 4 shows how the various worlds are categorized based on the associated density and/or texture. The lower section of the spectrum refers to the shapeless, dark and wet conditions. Higher up, it continues with a more distinctive and solid form, drier and lighter. The top of the spectrum consists of forms decomposed into particles and nerves, loosening and melting the boundary into outer space. The ‘World of Anatomy’ is depicted as ‘shapeless as magma, a previous condition of life which molds itself into a human form’.
This World of Anatomy is very different or even opposite to the general understanding of anatomy where a solid bodily structure is imagined. The idea of embryo formation or foetus in the mother’s womb hints about fluidity, the creation of cavities through folding and a porous body.
Short embodied task – Heavy Neck
Before having a taste of embodying a butoh notation from the World of Anatomy, figure 5 would provide a brief contextual understanding of different anatomical alignment theories or tensile ideas.

As illustrated on the left, Eric Franklin’s understanding of the spinal cord is like the circular discs stacking against each other. Similarly, Ida Rolf perceives the alignment as several bricks or blocks connecting through the human body, and movements are created by turning the orientation of these blocks. In contrast, the tensegrity model coined by Buckminster Fuller on the right is a more tensile mechanism of compression and tension, which acknowledges the inter-relationship of bones and soft tissues in maintaining the integrity of the overall structure. Figure 6 below is an animation that demonstrates such a mechanism in a glimpse. The rods or bars represent the bones as compression elements, while the cables represent muscles and fascia as the tensile elements (Quin, 2022).

Here comes the ‘Heavy Neck’ exercise chosen from the Butoh-fu. Please find a comfortable position, read the instructions below and try to embody the imagery.
Add dampness. A heavy neck thrusts.
Heavy neck sinks. Smoke balls, sleep, emulsion, white of the eye, monsters, the entire body is wet. The air is heavy, making it impossible to move.With pressure from above it sinks. The body holds the weight once, but it is on the way down. And then, it starts sinking again.When it comes up to the surface it becomes ‘Oiran’ (Figure 7), woman with a heavily decorated head.A completely helpless face. (Do not clench teeth. The body is never contorted. This is not an expression of weight.) […]
A strange beast is wearing a heavy overcoat which is soaking wet.

The notation may sound abstract, but the Butoh-fu or the Butoh-Kaden does not set an absolute definition but serves as a source of inspiration to create movements. Would you resonate with any of the anatomical alignment theories above in the process of attempting to embody the ‘Heavy Neck’?
Now please enjoy the demonstration by Waguri in embodying ‘Heavy Neck’.

Personally speaking, the tensegrity model offers an approach to make ‘Heavy Neck’ more achievable. In such a mechanism, the floating bones are held in space due to the balance and support of fascial/soft tissues. When encountered with reasonable strains and compression, the deformation will get distributed all over the structure (rather than breaking the structure).
This explains the rolling of the eyes is possible when doing the ‘Heavy Neck’ exercise, as the mayofascia and soft tissues act as the tensile elements and serve the function of holding, counter-balancing and stabilizing the overall structure.

How may the tensegrity model inform or enhance butoh practice?
Firstly, it adds an awareness of anatomy that could enhance the imagination whilst keeping the validity and qualities of the existing artistic/metaphorical butoh imageries. For example, the bio-tensegrity model expands the possibility of how to fully and three-dimensionally engage the muscles, as well as the relationship of the body and space in reaching a surrealist manner.
Secondly, whilst other dance forms may focus on visual images (from outside), butoh is never presented in a fixated form but more about the experiences. It emphasizes kinesthetic imagery originates from within (Esposito and Kasai, 2020). The tensegrity model provides a more holistic approach to seeing anatomy through the inter-relationships of bones and soft tissues, which is more aligned with the idea of looking from within.
It could be possible that Hijikata might want to propose the cage image to challenge or overthrow the anatomy perceived by the West. However, he was in a period when the approach of perceiving the body was still bound by the perception from the outside. Hijikata passed away in the 1980s; and it was not until the 1970s that Fuller’s tensegrity model was further explored in biology and nature, and thus developed into the bio-tensegrity model by Dr Stephen M Levin and Tom Myers (Anatomy Trains, 2023; Scholarpedia, 2012)
What kind of cage image was in Hijikata’s mind?
As much as the butoh body is conceived in the form of a vessel or cage, it is worthwhile to re-imagine what kind of vessel would that be. Taking butoh beyond tensegrity, juxtaposing the perspectives on anatomy from the lens of Hijikata and that from Cubism may confer some insights:
According to Barber (2005: 32-33), Hijikata perceives butoh as an ‘an act of anatomical refusal or transformation’, echoing Antonin Artaud’s advocacy that ‘the human body to be urgently anatomized and reconstructed on an autopsy table’, so the body could dance truthfully ‘in an organ-less “wrong-way-round” frenzy of gesture’.
Meanwhile, when writing about the Cubist painting Danses à la source (1912) created by Francis Picabia, Baker (2016:49) elucidates, ‘… with the effect being not a more complete abstraction unmoored from the body, but one that itself unmoors the body, that generalizes and denaturalizes the body’s effects, spreading the “bodily” across the entire face’.

The rationale for drawing the viewpoint of Cubism is that it shares a similar intention of destructing the anatomical geometry as in butoh. Additionally, Baker’s description of ‘spreading the bodily across the entire face’ resonates with the deformation distributed across a tensegrity model when it is in touch with strains.
Take a more famous Cubist painting that you might have come across.
![Figure 11: Femme en pleurs [Weeping Woman] (1937) by Pablo Picasso](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/5f4c3f_22418a06b4b240469de63185f04b214d~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_379,h_505,al_c,q_80,enc_auto/5f4c3f_22418a06b4b240469de63185f04b214d~mv2.jpg)
Do you find any similarities between the tension and compression dynamics created by the tensegrity model and the deformation of the face in this painting of Picasso?Do any muscles on the female face pop up to your eyes: does it remind you of the eyes rolling in the ‘Heavy Neck’ task introduced above?
If the butoh body is a Cubist vessel undergoing the tension and compression dynamics, it could be:
oscillating in the multispecies of corporeal planes…
among the numerous inextricable yet fluid cavities…
in a shapeless state before the formation of life…
Notes
[1] Hijikata Tatsumi is one of the founders of butoh.
[2] Butoh-fu is the notation of Butoh choreography with words and images, based on the choreography sessions and teaching of Hijikata ‘through the speech’.
[3] Butoh-Kaden is the interpterion of Butoh-fu by Yukio Waguri, one of the direct disciples of Hijikata Tatsumi. The word ‘Kaden’ comes from the title of the book Fushi-Kaden written by the Japanese playwright Zeami, meaning Transmission of the Flower. Thus, Butoh-Kaden is meant to be a flower gift from Waguri to share the theory and farsighted view of his master to everyone (Butoh-Kaden, 2020).
[4] Excerpt of HoSoTan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOV8FxOxuzY
[5] ‘Weak body’ is a concept from Hijikata, who tried to put forth and portray a body with weakness, disease and filth, or qualities that had been eliminated and stigmatized in the mainstream.
Bibliography
Anatomy Trains (2023) Tensegrity Available at: https://www.anatomytrains.com/fascia/tensegrity/ (Accessed: 25 April 2024).
Baker G. (2016) The Body after Cubism. (157), pp34-62. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_a_00258.
Barber, S. (2005) Hijikata: revolt of the body. Chicago: Solar Books.
Esposito, P. and Kasai T. (2020) ‘Butoh Dance, Noguchi Taiso and Healing’ in Karkou, V., Lycouris, S. and Oliver, S. (eds.) The Oxford handbook of dance and wellbeing. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 255-272.
Fraleigh, S.H. (2010) Butoh: metamorphic dance and global alchemy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Life Resonance Butoh (2021) Hijikata Tatsumi Hosotan part 2 (1972) 土方巽 疱瘡譚Part 2癩1. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOV8FxOxuzY (Accessed: 25 April 2024).
MERVE ŞANLI (2015) Tensegrity Structure Available at: https://mervesanli.wordpress.com/2017/01/10/tensegrity-structure/ (Accessed: 25 April 2024).
Quin, E. (2022) Lecture on PDM 26 Scientific Principles Of Practice, first semester Master Degree course 2022/23, University of Chichester, Dance Science, 5 December 2022.
Prickett, S. and Thomas, H. (2020) The Routledge companion to dance studies. London: Routledge (Routledge theatre and performance companions).
Scholarpedia (2012) Tensegrity Available at http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Tensegrity (Accessed: 25 April 2024).
The Butoh-Kaden Website Committee (2020) Butoh Kaden Available at: https://butoh-kaden.com/en (Accessed: 25 April 2024).