When I first saw Tatsumi Hijikata performed Butoh, my young soul was broken. I could just stand with shivering.

It was 1970. Hijikata was dancing at the Seibu Theatre of Kyoto University in Japan. I was twenty-two years old.

Throughout the performance, several dancers were hiding under old tatami mats. When they finally emerged, moving as if dying, like the collapsed bodies of people poisoned by mercury, someone started crying in the depths of my heart.

Twenty-five years later, I decided to become a Butoh dancer.

Hijikata was already dead, but the impact of his performance, which I saw in 1970, lingered for twenty-five years in my body and mind.

Sinking into the darkness of the body, I began an investigation of Butoh and why I needed to start Butoh dancing.

Ten years ago, I moved from Japan to the Himalayas in order to find a small space in which to practice Butoh. Modern society was too busy and too full of information; I found it very hard to listen to the silence of my body.

I discovered that, when my consciousness becomes quiet enough and calms down to the same level as my subconscious, I can feel the whole flow of qualia in my body very delicately and precisely.

By searching within this qualia flow in the darkness of my body, I finally found the vein of Butoh that Hijikata must have found forty years earlier.

For the past ten years, I have been creating a method of searching for the seeds of Butoh by sinking into the darkness of the body. The Subbody Butoh Method is for everyone to learn how to develop their own Butoh dance.

What is butoh?

I have found three essential components of Hijikata's Butoh:

1.  To abandon all conditions as a human, and to transform into a "Suijakutai (Weakened body or Collapsed body)" which resonates with spirits of the dead, insane, handicapped, and collapsed.

2.  To enter dimensions other than that of the human world, and to become a survivor of another world.

3.  To look at the living world as a dead spirit from another world. (We call this the "Near life" body, which has the opposite position as that of "Near Death.")


The first step is to transform from a normal human body into the "Suijakutai" (Weakened body).

When we open ourselvesenough and our capacity to resonate with the dead, insane, and people who are mentally or physically handicapped, we can transform into a creature of other dimensions, in which Butoh spirits are living, dancing, and dying.

Hijikata pursued the "Suijakutai" as an essence of the Butoh body.

He always said that Butoh is an attempt to expand the concept of a human.

Hijikata tried to expand the narrow concept of a human in modern western society, which excludes the dead, insane, and handicapped.

The essential work of Hijikata's Butoh is to find a new beauty that is not currently recognized by society.   

Throw out all conditions of human

The second essence of Butoh is to become a creature or being of another dimension.

To open another dimension and become an inhabitant of this world.

 “Never forget to abandon all conditions as a human.”

This is the most important part of changing from a normal being to a Butoh being. If you hang onto the concept of a human, you will never transform into another being.

By throwing off the narrow concept of a modern human, we can enter into another world, in which multi-dimensional qualia streams are flowing and changing. Pre-modern people lived here. In this world, there is equality between humans and animals, and the living and dead communicate with each other as friends.

Hijikata invented a way to expand the concept of a human by opening one's abilities to enter into other dimensions and come back to this modern world freely.

The third essence is to look to the living world from another world, as one of the dead.

I call this the look of "near life." It is the opposite of "near death" experiences.

When we become an inhabitant of the dead world and look to the world of the living, we can see that this living world is full of resonance between qualia; light, sound, wind, and so on.

How brilliant they are! How special the living world is!

Through this experience, we can see the daily world in a new light.

It opens another art of human living. (I will write about this more precisely later.)

These three transformations are the essentials of Hijikata's Butoh.

The other characteristics are not important. The white painted face, the "ganimata" (O-shaped legs), the slow motion, etc. are just surface appearances of Butoh.

Butoh was a big invention in human history, because it expanded the concept of the human by opening the ability for resonance with other dimensions; it opened a new art of human living.

It must be very clear that this did not come from the surface appearances of Butoh.

Foucault predicted that, "When a new art of thinking and living is invented, the concept of the human will vanish like letters in the sand washed away by ocean waves."

Yes, Butoh is the very ocean waves, which will wash away the old, narrow concept of a human.