Butoh Dance – Japan

A choreography of disintegration and emergence, mythic deconstruction, and embodied paradox of the human condition

Thinking Through Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009)’s work, La Pensée Sauvage

Introduction

Butoh (舞踏), founded in postwar Japan by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno in the late 1950s, is a radically introspective and avant-garde performance art that defies easy categorization. Often described as the “dance of darkness,” Butoh responds to the trauma of Hiroshima, the collapse of cultural certainty, and the commodification of art. It is marked by:

Extremely slow, controlled movements,
Grotesque or otherworldly postures,
Use of white body paint, nudity, and facial distortion,
Aesthetic influences from Noh, Zen Buddhism, German Expressionism, and shamanic trance.

From the perspective of Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind, Butoh is a deliberate inversion of mythic structure—a post-structural ritual that does not resolve contradiction but dwells in it, deconstructs it, and allows the body to embody the unnameable. It is myth after myth, structure revealed by decay, a radical bricolage of flesh and silence.

Butoh as Bricolage: Body as Wounded Archive

Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur assembles symbolic systems from whatever is at hand. Butoh’s “material” is:

The traumatized, aging, or rejected body,
The corpse-like stillness of war memory,
Images drawn from folk stories, insects, wounds, gods, deformity,
Environments ranging from urban ruin to empty fields to theatre stages.

Butoh does not aim to express emotion—it attempts to destroy the culturally conditioned self, allowing something older, deeper, or mythic to emerge. The dancer becomes a living shrine of broken categories, enacting a ritual of becoming through un-becoming.

This is myth stripped bare—structure revealed through its burning.

Binary Oppositions: Self ↔ Non-Self, Movement ↔ Stillness, Light ↔ Darkness

Butoh lives inside unresolved tensions:

Binary Opposition Ritual Inhabitation

Identity / Anonymity The dancer empties themselves of ego to become a vessel for forces

Beauty / Grotesque Aesthetic value is inverted—ugliness becomes sublime

Stillness / Motion Movement arises from non-action; stillness is filled with tension

Time / Timelessness Butoh resists linearity—every gesture echoes centuries

Life / Death The dancer often mimics decay, spirits, or post-human states

For Lévi-Strauss, myth arranges oppositions into structured form. Butoh embodies these oppositions without resolving them, becoming a ritual space where paradox is lived, not explained.

The Body as Void-Structure: Becoming Through Absence

In Butoh:

The body is painted white, like a ghost or corpse.
Movements may originate from tiny internal sensations, like a drop of blood or a shiver.
Dancers move slowly or collapse suddenly, often exploring extreme fragility or alien embodiment.

This aligns with Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the body as a medium for mythic structure, but in Butoh, it is a structure disrupted, hollowed out, and reinhabited.

The body becomes a mythopoetic field, where past trauma, ancestral residue, and elemental forces speak through twitch, breath, and void.

Structure and Event: Ritual Reversal as Mythic Reawakening

Butoh resists fixed choreography. However, it follows ritual process:

Emptying: The dancer discards identity, language, and logic.
Possession: A force—emotion, animal, spirit, memory—enters the emptied form.
Emergence: The body moves with unfamiliar intention.
Dissolution: The form collapses or returns to stillness.

Lévi-Strauss described ritual as a means of translating event into structure. Butoh reverses this—it deconstructs inherited structures to expose primal event. It becomes the anti-myth that is still myth, ritualistically destroying the form to reveal mythic reality beyond order.

Cultural Genealogy: Postwar Collapse and Archaic Return

Butoh arose in response to:

The cultural emptiness after World War II,
The American occupation and erasure of Japanese tradition,
The alienation of modern industrial society,
The loss of connection to animism, earth, and bodily knowledge.

Lévi-Strauss would frame Butoh as mythical bricolage after rupture—a reconfiguration of archaic forms (shamanism, animal becoming, ancestral invocation) within the debris of modernity.

It is ritual without religion, myth without center, sacredness expressed through absence.

Silence and Sonic Subversion: Structure through Disruption

Butoh dances may occur:

In silence,
With industrial noise or ambient sound,
To traditional Japanese instruments (e.g., shakuhachi),
Or with found sounds—wind, breath, footsteps.

Lévi-Strauss argued that sound structures emotion into mythic form. Butoh, instead, uses sound—or the absence of it—to rupture expectation, making room for raw presence. The structure is not rhythmic but atmospheric, where timelessness pulses through stillness.

Legacy and Mythic Continuity in Avant-Garde Form

Today, Butoh is:

Performed globally, from Tokyo to Berlin, São Paulo to New York,
Adapted by dancers of all backgrounds, including the disabled, elderly, and neurodivergent,
A tool for healing, protest, trauma processing, and re-enchantment.

Lévi-Strauss might see Butoh as the myth of structure under erasure—a performance that reveals how myth survives not in content, but in necessity. Even in its resistance, Butoh reperforms mythic function: to guide humans through contradiction, transformation, and return.

Conclusion

From a Lévi-Straussian viewpoint, Butoh is mythic ritual turned inside out. It does not represent stories—it embodies states of being before language. It is the void made visible, the animal made vocal, the spirit reborn in shudder.

It is ritual form as collapse, mythic return via erasure, and the sacred made possible again through darkness.

Butoh teaches that structure survives even in broken form, and that the **deepest myths live not in narration, but in the body's trembling presence before the abyss.