Bruce Baird opens his impressive Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits with the declaration that “Butoh defies description” (p. 1). Butoh requires artists and performers to commit to unusually strict ordeals of physical and mental training, a discipline that also combines the ingenuity and experimentation of a scientist with the wild and risky combinations of Japanese surrealism. It requires daunting levels of attentiveness and transgression. The “dance of darkness” makes equally intense demands of audience members, pulling them into the sort of collaboration that requires a willingness to let go of comfortable notions of self and other, the sort of ritual encounter that art critic and philosopher John Berger would approvingly claim “risks madness.”Footnote ¹⁵ Of course, Sade and Bataille are also high-fiving in the shadows.

Throughout the first three chapters, Baird actively engages readers with the predicament of “making the audience work” (p. 21), and as we plunge into the details and deep history of Hijikata and butoh from the late 1950s through the mid-1970s, Baird does not spare readers what at times feels like an information overload. This, of course, is part of his impressive argument, as he claims butoh was a response to a newly proliferating information society. Readers are submerged in translated primary sources, rare photos, and taboo content involving sexuality, physical and emotional pain and suffering, murky environmental ambiance, and animal cruelty (e.g., Forbidden Colors and Forbidden Colors 2). These attributes, expressed through Hijikata's painstaking and excruciating movement templates, unearth a radical formal process. Essentially, Baird documents the creation of a countercultural body/mind de-filtration system designed to widen the participant's understanding of the “effects of socialization on the body” (p. 162). This, in other words, is a method by which physical pain and mental abjection reveal the relative degrees of freedom (or more generally, its lack) within the individual's own psyche and within the surrounding culture and its national preoccupation with conformity, efficiency, and productivity.

At the center of his argument, Baird claims that “even as butoh has spread and gained popularity, it has not been well understood within the context of the sixties, seventies, and eighties in Japan” (p. 1). As the Japanese state emerged from World War II, and as it pumped its economy and citizens toward becoming hyper-productive and efficient workers and consumers, artists of the postwar surrealism movement pushed back by stepping away—or so it seemed. Because of butoh's refusal to participate in the postwar production economy, and because of its rejection of the competitive culture of mechanization and conformity, butoh's shocking power reflected postwar surrealism's refusal to participate. Butoh aimed to expose the raw and unfiltered mix—the grotesque, violent, and sexual—alongside the whimsy, humor, and taboo busting that began with a movement improvisatory system that would later evolve into something more akin to a vocabulary of distortion. This included layered vignettes exposing forbidden practices—such as rape, sodomy, animal sacrifice—and a long look at characters who would typically be associated with the margins of Japanese and mid-century modernism.

By the second half of the book, readers get a stronger foothold on Baird's earlier claim that “[w]hat we now know as butoh looks nothing like Hijikata's first dances. In the early works there was no characteristic white body paint, nor achingly intense and precise choreography” (p. 15). Whereas Western dance critics often view the ghostly qualities of butoh as a response to the violence of the atom bomb and Hiroshima, Baird warns that the “totalizing strength” of this argument undermines Hijikata's concern with diffuse causality and the way that conventions and customs shape bodies. The “butoh-bomb” thesis “should be approached with caution” (p. 200). Baird's intervention is therefore to reclaim for Hijikata “the kinds of suffering that were all too ordinary.” After combing through Hijikata's obscure and often absurd stories and memoirs, we approach the kernel of individual and family cruelty, and the ways in which both are often paraded in broad daylight. In essence, “[b]utoh's suffering is a product of hundreds of thousands of everyday choices by everyday people (such as neighbors turning spousal abuse into a fashion show)” (p. 201). Baird underscores how everyday sadomasochism profited the institutional oppression of Japan “pimping” its marginalized population for economic gains (p. 210). The goal, then, of this “body in rebellion,” is to highlight that butoh “demands that the artists express and experience the pain of others and particularly those who have been hurt by the diffuse customs and conventions of society” (p. 218).

Baird's book is a stunningly thorough and provocative gem. His deep command of the Japanese culture and language reveals superb new primary research on Hijikata's dances, drawing from artist essays by Hijikata and his coterie of performers; semiotic analysis of posters, programs, and audience behavior; and rare photos and film clips. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh will be of interest to those working in theater and dance history, in performance studies, and in ethno-historical and anthropological studies of modern and postmodern Japan.