Butoh Performances: Born in the Moment

A Butoh performance exists fully only in its own moment. This page gathers what can be said about it: what it is, where it comes from, who made it, and where its traces can be found.

Every Performance Is Unique

A Butoh performance is born in the moment and disappears with it. We invite the audience to share a brief moment of our lives, and the invitation is open.

Butoh calls viewers to pause within the moment. Slowness and intensity are its strength, and its opportunity to step, for a while, away from the past and the future.

As a viewer, you can ground yourself and create your own story, your own meaning, from the performance and the moment you experience, in relation to your own life. The audience becomes a co-creator.

At a Border That Does Not Exist

Butoh and Butoh dancers exist in a threshold state: definable and beyond definition at the same time. The physical manifestation of that state is the performance, the Butoh dance, which the performers experience together with the audience.

This is why Butoh is hard to pin down. It is dance, theatre, ritual, and practice, and sometimes it is hardly visible at all.

What You May Experience as a Viewer

There is no single way a Butoh performance looks. Many performances are slow and hyper-controlled, and traditionally performers wear white body makeup. Others are quiet, nearly still, or unruly and humorous. Some happen on a stage, and some happen in a field, a cave, or a room.

What you can expect is not a story told in steps, but a presence that unfolds in front of you. You do not need to understand it. As Kazuo Ohno is quoted as saying: “It is not important to understand what I am doing; perhaps it is better if they don’t understand, but just respond to the dance.”

Bring attention, and let your own memory and imagination do part of the work. If you feel slowed down, curious, uncomfortable, or moved, that is part of the performance too.

A Brief History

1959. Butoh arose in post-war Japan through the collaboration of Tatsumi Hijikata (1928–1986) and Kazuo Ohno (1906–2010). Hijikata’s Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors), based on a novel by Yukio Mishima, premiered at a dance festival in 1959. It shocked its audience, and it is regarded as the first butoh piece. Yoshito Ohno, Kazuo’s son, performed in it.

Ankoku butoh. Hijikata called his early work ankoku butoh, the “dance of darkness”. He turned away from Western ballet and modern dance, and from the refinement of traditional Japanese forms. Instead he looked to the earthbound body and the everyday movements of ordinary people. He also developed butoh-fu, a poetic and surreal notation of images that help the dancer transform into other states of being.

Hijikata and Ohno. The two founders are often described as complementary. In Butoh: Shades of Darkness, Ohno is called “the soul of butoh” and Hijikata “the architect of butoh”. Ohno’s solo Admiring La Argentina (1977), directed by Hijikata, brought him international fame.

Companies and branches. Students and followers formed their own groups. Dairakudakan was founded by Akaji Maro in 1972. Sankai Juku was co-founded by Ushio Amagatsu in 1975, and has toured widely. From the early 1980s, butoh groups began performing outside Japan, and Butoh spread around the world.

Many butohs. Hijikata was uneasy about formalizing Butoh, and told his students not to copy his dance. Dancers have gone many ways. Min Tanaka, for example, was for a time associated with butoh and later broke from that framework. Masaki Iwana has described present-day butoh as a “tendency” more than a method, a way of freeing the pure life that lies dormant in our bodies. There are as many butohs as there are dancers who take it seriously.

Butoh in the Contemporary Moment

Butoh emerged in Japan in the mid-20th century, and it is urgently relevant now. Contemporary Butoh dancers around the world carry the lineage on, adapting its philosophy while honoring its core: not performance as spectacle, but a shared, transforming encounter.

In an era of constant stimulation and digital acceleration, Butoh offers something radical: a practice that teaches presence, embodied listening, and the courage to exist in uncertainty. Its slowness is not passivity. It is active resistance to the expectation that every moment must produce a visible result.

Modern performances draw on the same sources as earlier Butoh: archaic space, silence, and the body as an archive of lived experience. They also engage with contemporary concerns: identity, displacement, environmental change, memory, and the search for authentic encounter in a fragmented world. Butoh is practiced, taught, and performed in many countries. It is not a historical form but a living practice that changes with every practitioner while keeping its essential invitation: to pause, to listen, to become present.

My Own Performance Lineage

In 2008 I began training and performing with Odddance Theatre in St. Petersburg, working with Natalia Zhestovskaya and Grigory Glazunov. It began as an apprenticeship and grew into a partnership. It gave me not only movement but the philosophy of presence, listening, and integration that defines the art form.

In 2009, together with visual artist Masha Salangina, I founded butoh.name Mythopoetic Theatre. In 2015 it transformed and took a new name:

MO… a glimmer in time. MO… a breath, a way of acting. MO… the hum of the cosmos. MO, growing and opening toward the world, toward the true self, as conscious beings. — MO Theatre, 2015

The group made performances and short films that explored Butoh as spiritual dance, shamanistic theatre, an art of silence, and an art of presence. We performed in Finland and Russia. Our works include Wetland, filmed in the Soidinsuo swamp in 2009, and The Spell of the Sensuous.

Around 2024, MO Theatre also ceased to exist in the form it once had. New paths, new possibilities. The dance continues, in 2026 and beyond.

Butoh on Film

A performance cannot be fully recorded, but film can carry a trace.

• Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis (1990, 89 min), directed by Michael Blackwood. A documentary shot in Japan with Min Tanaka, Yoko Ashikawa, Akaji Maro and Dairakudakan, Kazuo Ohno, Isamu Ohsuka, Natsu Nakajima, Sankai Juku, and Tatsumi Hijikata. Watch on Prime Video (availability varies by country).
• Navel and A-Bomb (Heso to genbaku), a short film by photographer Eikoh Hosoe, with Tatsumi Hijikata and Yoshito Ohno. Butoh used to reflect on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• Anma (1963), by Takahiko Iimura, a film made with butoh dance from Hijikata’s early period.

Films influenced by Butoh. My own short films and slideshows are Butoh-inspired work made for the camera and for stillness. See Butoh-Inspired Short Films and Visual Work and the YouTube channel.

Reading and Looking Further

As an Amazon influencer, I earn from qualifying purchases made through these links. See the Amazon Affiliate Disclosure. I chose these as good ways into the history and ideas of Butoh. Prices and availability vary.

• Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy, Sondra Fraleigh. A broad scholarly and personal overview.
• Dancing Into Darkness: Butoh, Zen, and Japan, Sondra Fraleigh. Her diary of studying Butoh through Zen practice.
• Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh, Bruce Baird. A scholarly history of how Butoh was created.
• Kazuo Ohno’s World: From Without & Within, Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno. Ohno’s own words from workshops, with photographs.
• Butoh: Shades of Darkness, Jean Viala and Nourit Masson-Sekine. An illustrated overview of Butoh and its artists.
• Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul, photographs by Ethan Hoffman, text by Mark Holborn.
• Kamaitachi, Eikoh Hosoe. The photobook made in collaboration with Tatsumi Hijikata, a collectible.

Come and see. To follow my work see the Butoh-Inspired Self-Portrait Photography Series.