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.
