The Butoh 11

The face of forest


A student of Hijikata asked him, "Why can you make so complex faces as your solo piece?"
He told about so many elements of his choreograph, and said
"It is impossible to become such a face of the forest without multiple resonance among these complex conditions.
We need to assosiate all of them on your face at the same time."
Now we can read his last butoh score which he left only one as "a butoh score for solo of Queit house( See chapter 8)"
It is composed by so complex multi dimensional resonance among various elements.
He called it "The face of forest", but maybe it is hard to imagine the qualia of real forest which he meant for young people of present age, because almost of them have never seen the real forest, because the primeval (=virgin) forests had distroyed completely in agricultural and industrial history.

In the primeval forest, there are so rich ecological system, multiple kinds of creature and materials resonate together deeply. It is the real natural condition of life which resonate with everything in multiple dimansion.
As the slideshow above shows, the old tree in the primeval forest is already a world itself. So many kinds of life and death resonate on the tree. .Some of them survive for ten thousands years, they have experienced every kind of changes, happenings, dramas between life and death.

The face of forest which Hijikata meant is to become a face as these old trees.
He could complete the method how to become it.
We can see it in his Butoh score.
I translated part of it in the chapter 8. Though it is only the first paragraph of them, but you can see that it has so many complex elements which resonate together in multiple dimensions.

When you see his butoh by video at the first time, you may not recognaize what is happening. It looks only various parts of body swaying in different directions. Also for me I could see only it during over ten years.

But during I continued to watch it carefully, and repeated to read his butoh scores deeper and deeper at the same time, slowly it comes out transparently that the essense of his butoh is multiple resonance among all kinds of physical conditions and invisible qualia.



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