HIJIKATA or the Incandescence of Being
The butô was born in 1959. In presenting Kinjiki, a five-minute choreography, Tatsumi Hijikata revolutionized dance, rattled the staid Japanese Post-War mentality and exercised a profound influence on an entire generation of dancers and choreographers around the world. This program of four films, from the archives of the Tatsumi Hijikata Foundation, proposes a troubling incursion into the universe of this exceptional artist whom Jocelyne Montpetit, choreographer, dancer and initiator of the program, has had the good fortune to meet.
It was during a five-year stay in Japan that Jocelyne Montpetit studied under Hijikato. "The most important thing he taught me is freedom. He taught me to cut the cord of dependence between the dancer and the choreographer and/or master. I want to pay tribute to this man around whom artists, sculptors, writers and philosophers gravitated, sometimes staying up all night to reflect, talk about the body, death, life, and dance. He was a true non-conformist, a stimulator of ideas and people. It is important for me that this man and his work don’t disappear, so that what we see is not just a tiny parcel of this movement that overtook dance. But to understand, one has to see; and the spirit and intensity of Hijikata is so strong that one can perceive it even watching him dance on celluloid. The four films presented in this program allow the viewer to connect with this extraordinary dancer who wanted to tear space with his body."
Although Hijikata never left Japan, he was greatly interested in Western culture. Jean Genet, Francis Bacon and Antonin Artaud are just some of the artists who have inspired him. He was good friends with the writer Yukio Mishima, from whom he borrowed the title of his first choreography, Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours). It is through Mishima that Hijikata met other great figures of the 20th century, like Merce Cunningham and John Cage, in his workshop, the Asbestos-kan.
Raised in a Northern region of Japan (which we can discover in the film Ho-so-tan), Hijikata arrived in Tokyo in 1952 at the age of 24. He studied modern dance under Takaya Eguchi, himself a student of Mary Wigman in Dresden. Until 1974, he created many shows - including Nikutai no Hanran (The Revolt of the Body) which explores a new concept of the body: as an energy that slowly exhausts itself, day by day, until comes the time of its last breath, but also as a depository of daily memories and routines. He draws his movements from observing people around him–his mother, his sisters, the women in his village, animals–and from his memory–the loss of his brothers, all killed in the war, and of his sister. "The dead, he says, are my true professors of butô." Hijikata then dedicated himself to teaching dance, removing himself from time to time in order to continue his research on the body. He died in 1986 after a long battle with illness.
Jocelyne Montpetit met Uno Kuniichi during a workshop with Min Tanaka in Paris in 1981. As well as being an interpreter at the workshop, Kuniichi was also doing a doctorate on Artaud, studying under Gilles Deleuze. Not long after, Montpetit flew to Japan to become the first Westerner to dance with a butô troupe, Maijuki, the company run by Min Tanaka. She joined Hijikata a few years later and it is there that she ran into Kuniichi again, as he was participating in the long and fervent discussions between the artists and the intellectuals orchestrated by Hijikata.
Translator of Deleuze and Beckett, specialist on Genet and Artaud, Kuniichi will be in Montreal during the Festival to talk about the works of Hijikata. If Montpetit wished for his presence here in Montreal, it is because they have shared many complementary views on the East and the West for a long time now. "When Kuniichi and I met for the second time in Japan, we were both in a very similar position, in a kind of no-man’s-land. I was a Westerner in the East, alone and disoriented, and he was returning to his country, impregnated with the French culture and philosophy. We had in common a double experience of the world, a vision of life that was unequivocal." It is with Kuniichi that Montpetit started, over two years ago, to elaborate a project to present these films from the Hijikata Foundation in Montreal.
This program of films and conferences dedicated to Tatsumi Hijikata will bring about another kind of meeting: not only between the East and the West, but also between a disrupting art, transgressive and iconoclastic, and an audience that will feel the force of a mythic creator.
Note: This program is presented within the framework of Présences du Japon, a series of events initiated by Jocelyne Montpetit, with the assistance of the Japan-Canada Fund, a gift to the Canada Council from the Government of Japan.
