Tatsumi Hijikata (b. 1928, Japan – d. 1986)
Anma, 1963

As I am trying to engage with butoh aesthetics and performance, sooner or later I was bound to post an entry on genre’s founder, Tatsumi Hijikata.

Here I am not aiming to be very particular about specific artworks, more about the overall direction towards the constant change, movement, searching for beauty in the oddest of places, like the grotesque. I guess, on some level it ties into my interest for productive ambiguity – the performance may seem absurd and grotesque, but an active mind finds its ways to extract meaning anyway. Not in terms of “reading”, but rather “sense-making”. And it is hard not to feel the tension and/or emotion in that distressed body…