Tatsumi Hijikata is one of the pioneers of butoh. Butoh focussed on the expression of the Japanese body and based its movement idiom on the lives of common people: the connection with nature, prayer, sleeping on a futon, working the land. It’s all about raw corporeality and emotion — uncovering deeper layers, in the dancer and audience as well. In 1962, Hijikata formed Asbestos Hall in Tokyo.
'Asbestos Hall was the legendary studio of Tatsumi Hijikata (1962-1986), founder of Japanese butoh. It was known to be a very fertile place where artists would visit, hang out, sleep, drink, make their own costumes – creating and talking all through the night. The pictures I saw were phenomenal. Many boundaries were broken there, in good and bad ways. The bad being, for example, that some of the dancers would go out at night to make money doing erotic dancing and come back to donate some of their earnings to the studio. You cannot talk about Asbestos Hall now, about this highly creative productivity that was happening there, without addressing the other side. I'm not trying to present Asbestos Hall as this perfect monument of creative blossoming. There was an underbelly as well.'
– Trajal Harrell, associate artist Holland Festival 2025
Speakers
Bruce Baird took his BA at Columbia University and his PhD in Japanese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania. His book Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) explores the rise of butoh, one of the most important dance forms of the 20th century. The book was nominated for the 2012-2013 International Convention of Asian Scholars Book Prize. Baird is currently working on a broader history of butoh, with a focus on how the artform spread and evolved outside Tokyo. He was granted two Fulbright Fellowships for his research.
Sara Jansen is a dance scholar and dramaturge in Brussels who has degrees in Japanese Studies and Performance Studies from NYU. She is currently completing a study on choreography and the politics of time within the context of the post-war Japanese avant-garde. Sara writes about performance and has translated work by Japanese playwrights like Oriza Hirata, Toshiki Okada and Takeshi Kawamura. She was a dramaturge for Trajal Harrell’s Caen Amour (2016) and has worked with artists including Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker/Rosas and Heine Avdal & Yukiko Shinozaki/fieldworks.
dates
Fri June 13 7:30 PM
information
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English
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1 hour
