Dai Raku Dakan

"Great Camel Battleship"

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Butoh’s concern with death (and, adds Maro, the eroticism of death) also ensures that it remains disquieting. Even in an era when blood is used as a material in paintings, butoh takes viewers to places in the subconscious few dare tread.

It’s not that butoh dancers are morbid. With death hidden away by modern medicine and mortuaries, butoh reminds us that mortality is central to human experience. “All people are burdened by life and death,” Maro states. “In butoh performances, feelings about life and death naturally arise first. This enriches subsequent images and meanings.”

Unlike the tragic, romanticized death of classical ballet, death in butoh is erotic, but also part of the heroism of being, a notion that may owe much to 20th century existentialism. Maro has refined this concept in his philosophy tempu-tenshiki (roughly, “being born in the world is a great talent itself”), which underpins Dairakudakan.

But butoh, cautions Maro in his gravelly rasp, should take care not to become too refined. “Values change. But I don’t think so much in terms of evolution. On the contrary, de-evolution might be preferable. If butoh evolves too much it might lose its power.”

Later, watching Maro direct his company in a rehearsal for Ama-Zone, it becomes apparent why words can never capture the essence of butoh. Maro directs in near-silence, communicating his wishes to his dancers with minimal evocations of the motions they are to enact. There’s another kind of language at work—a language of subliminal feelings and experiences that flows from him to them, and later, in performance, to the audience.