The ‘dance of darkness’ (Ankoku Butoh) developed in Japan 1959 from the ashes that the second world war littered the earth with. Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno were the founders and caused huge outrage with their first performance piece called Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours). Not only did the performers explore homosexuality in the work, but a live chicken was also held between the legs of a performer which was misconceived by the audience as being strangled to death.
Kazuo Ohno. Photo: Emidio Luisi
Rehearsal for Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours). Photo: Otsuji Kiyoji
The theme of death was inadvertently confronted in the first Butoh performance outside of Japan in 1980 by the Sunkai Jukutroupe. Dancers hung upside-down off a huge building in Seattle, Washington, and during the piece one of the dancers’ ropes snapped, a fatal tragedy fuelling the western world’s fascination with Butoh.
Tatsumi Hijikata. Photo: Donald Richie
Today, Butoh is very much alive – her name is Caroline Lundblad. Caroline was born in 1979 in Gothenburg, Sweden, and chose the stage name – Frauke – to separate the different bodies. Caroline discovered Butoh when she was studying at the prestigious ‘Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance’ in London, and spent two years studying Butoh in Japan. Her body of work is vast, aesthetically astute, radical and infinitely indefinable, because
the language in Butoh is not literate, it’s not about telling stories, it’s very much about the nature of the body, the processes we are in – these life and death cycles – Frauke.
Frauke’s dedication to maintaining the integrity of Ankoku Butoh is evident in her practice of covering every inch of her body (including the inside of her ears!) in white paint, and her costumes are extravagant and penetrate the viewer’s gaze within a seconds glance. Whether she is moving in the wilderness, a museum, a theatre or on a patch of grass – no Frauke experience will ever be alike! ‘It’s very much about meeting the audience, and to be alert and awake. You have to let yourself be dance somehow…’
This waif-like figure has made her mark in South Africa, starting in 2008 with the VOID performance project, lecture series and training workshops in Grahamstown and Johannesburg. In the performance piece, the audience is presented with a stark landscape scattered with floating ostrich feathers – everything is painstakingly deliberate! VOID investigates the essence of emptiness from which the Ankoku Butoh dance is generated. This desolation is evoked by the nature of the ostrich as it typically exists in the desert land – a bird with wings that cannot take flight!
VOID. Photo: Christo Doherty
VOID. Photo: Christo Doherty
VOID. Photo: Christo Doherty
Undoing was unleashed at The Dance Umbrella in Johannesburg in 2010 – the intervention has subsequently occurred in public spaces from grungy street scenes, to art galleries and theatres. Frauke appears in the traditional Ankoku Butoh style – white and almost skeletal in a cocoon-like creation which she crawls out of at an unimaginably drawn-out pace so as to ‘dance with every cell, so every part of the body is a possible area of movement’.
Undoing. Photo: Brett Rubin
Undoing. Photo: Brett Rubin
Undoing. Photo: Brett Rubin
Vibrissa, Frauke’s most recent Garden Tour premiered in August in Amsterdam, Stockholm and Gothenburg, as an informal situation where admission was free, and seating was non-existent. The closeness between the soil and the skin draws parallels between the natural ground, and the body’s intrinsic landscape.
Vibrissa. Photo: Haruna Kawanishi
Vibrissa. Photo: Haruna Kawanishi
The unassuming Caroline is a force to be reckoned with when she slips into her Frauke skin. Her repertoire is extensive and ongoing. Her sensitivity and prowess as an artist allows her to be fully alert in her pieces: ‘It’s always with the audience, I could never create this by myself in a room’.
Whether you ‘get it’ or not isn’t the point. Butoh can be whatever you want it to be – perhaps a treat or a puzzling incident. Either way it is an ancient art form that deserves to be revered for it’s purity and dedication to discipline.
