Rethinking the “Indigeneity” of Hijikata Tatsumi in the 1960s as a Photographic Negative Image of Japanese Dance History

doi:10.4324/9781315536132-6

Chapter

Rethinking the “Indigeneity” of Hijikata Tatsumi in the 1960s as a Photographic Negative Image of Japanese Dance History

ABSTRACT

Hijikata Tatsumi (1928–1986), dancer and choreographer, is one of the founders of butoh, a new dance form created in Japan. He called his dance ankoku butoh, which literally means darkness dance, and symbolized it with the aphorism “Butoh is a dead body desperately standing up.”