A History of Butō by Bruce Baird (review)

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Reviewed by:

• A History of Butō by Bruce Baird
• Tara Rodman

A HISTORY OF BUTŌ. By Bruce Baird. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 288 pp. Paperback, $39.95; hardcover, $125.00.

In A History of Butō, Bruce Baird traces the contingencies of timing, economics, personality, reception, and others that shaped the trajectory of some of the most significant artists in butō’s first two generations, producing a history of how this dance form’s wide-ranging aesthetics, psycho-physical methodologies, and international appeal developed. Baird’s approach to this history is not simply to relay information about a set of artists, but to provide deep, historical contextualization for their work. As he notes, such an approach might be unfashionable amongst streams of cultural criticism that assert the primacy of the performer’s body as either a site of unknowability, or of the affective encounter between performer and spectator. As Baird acknowledges, many of the artists he studies resisted being pinned down by assigned meanings, as they aimed to give expression to new artistic and political possibilities.

The problem is, butō’s context has already been over-determined: audiences at the 1978 performance with which Baird opens the book, and indeed, every class of students I have ever introduced to butō, all assume that the experience of the atomic bomb is the defining event out of which this dance form developed. Baird resoundingly dislodges this abiding narrative, and in its place, offers us a rigorously historicized account of how each dancer’s individual practice and preoccupations produced a set of intersecting threads that together have come to be understood as butō, and have inspired subsequent generations of dancers to participate in this form. [End Page 443]

A History of Butō’s contributions involve not only this richly-mapped history, but also Baird’s numerous, concrete examples of the highly technical and deeply theorized ways in which butō artists worked. These detailed accounts of butō methods are paired with evocative descriptions of specific performance pieces. The abundance of these two kinds of examples enables Baird to highlight commonalities across different practitioners: “databases of movement, minute sensation, and granularity of movement” (p. 229)—characteristics that help to articulate what makes something butō, even while allowing for the range and non-conformism of the genre.

Theorizing from these characteristics, Baird also offers some refreshing ways of thinking about butō in relation to contemporary phenomena in media culture: the cyborg, the video game speedrunner, and the otaku. Baird proposes that, like these figures, butō artists might be understood as “body-mind hackers” (p. 231) continually re-writing code, finding new ways of thinking, moving, and connecting the body to the world around it. This is an intriguing concept that I hope other scholars will take up and further develop. As this idea suggests, Baird not only offers a new way of thinking about butō, but more generally demonstrates that butō can help us to theorize far broader ways of understanding contemporary culture.

The book is organized into fourteen chapters, each devoted to an individual artist. But across the chapters and in the conclusion, Baird draws connecting threads that help us think about how each artist relates to the genre and other practitioners. Baird begins with Hijikata Tatsumi, mapping the major stages and works of his career, and explaining the dancer’s imaginative mind-body approach, what Baird calls his “generative butō method.” This is the set of transformative exercises by which different mental prompts produce a nearly-infinite range of bodily motions, poses, characterizations, and qualities. In his contextualizing approach, Baird also complicates the narrative of Hijikata as belonging to the 1960s trend of nostalgic nativism, that valorized an atavistic vision of rural Japan, against a putatively degenerate, Westernized modern life. Instead, Baird argues that Hijikata was quite critical of Japan, and that there is even a way to understand his experiments as offering a kind of decolonial dance practice—albeit, Baird cautions, one that must proceed via the same radical questioning of categories and origins as those for which Hijikata aimed.

The next chapter addresses Hijikata’s longtime collaborator, Ashikawa Yōko, considering her status as a choreographer/collaborator with Hijikata, as well...