ButohBAR – OUT OF CONTROL II

In the wide concrete space of the Industrial School and Sacred Heart Courtyard at Abbotsford Convent, a small, lithe man (butoh master Atsuchi Takenouchi) beats a drum as if in homage to a huge, draped deity on a huge, draped throne.  Occasionally, the man sings - although he can scarcely be heard over eerie, hypnotic music and the hubbub of strange creatures around him.  There are knee-high piles of shredded rags that sidle about and accost you.  There are masked black-clad hunched creatures with exaggerated breasts or genitals.  There are two women who may be pregnant on a tall staircase, their faces hidden within handmaiden bonnets that look like surveillance cameras.  There are forbidding, moving walls.  We wander about and through these figures – others of them nod to traditional butoh dancers – white make-up, white costumes, or no costume at all.  In other words, except for the man with the drum, these are dream figures, surreal, semi-symbolic, that bubble up from nightmares and the unconscious – but here boldly in the bright sunshine of the courtyard.  A stall does a brisk trade in sake and Japanese snacks.  All this is the prelude to the ButohBAR OUT OF CONTROL II show – a reprise of the successful 2023 show - that waits beyond the dark doorway to the theatre space at the end.

And what is ‘butoh’?  It is a form of Japanese free-form dance theatre, sometimes called ‘the dance of darkness’.  It began as a form of resistance to Western styles of dancing in the anxious 1940s, after Japan’s defeat in WWII.  Its impulse is the overturning of those aspects of Japanese theatre and dance we might expect – that is, strict forms, restraint, ritual, and tradition.  One of butoh’s founders, Tatsumi Hijikata, said butoh was to ‘resist fixity’.  Its movements (as we would soon see) come from within and cannot be notated – although since its inception, and its resurgence in the Japanese bar and nightclub scene of the 60s and 70s, traditions, movements, definitions and ‘schools’ of butoh have evolved – and spread worldwide.

We stream inside for the show proper.  The big space is packed.  The show more or less begins.  At first, it seems like random chaos in the dim and ever-changing lights.  The music (Hiroko Komiya) is loud, electronic, insistent and very percussive.  A glamorous, glittering ‘hostess’ (Yumi Umiumare, co-creator and a central figure in Melbourne’s burlesque scene) pulls it together and welcomes us to this ‘bar’ or nightclub.  There are chairs but they are set out in such a way that we aren’t sure if we should sit in them. We do sit but we can’t see much, because things are in constant movement, and we’ll miss whatever’s going on through the crowd.  We circulate.  The audience moves in opposing directions.  There are various installations and displays. Then, at one end, suddenly a very beautiful, golden-winged goddess figure dances a sensual dance with a snake made of light.  We watch, enthralled.  We jostle and are jostled.  We move again.  We find a tableau that comes to life as butoh dancers try to capture some of those moving piles of rags by placing small toy houses on them.  Elsewhere, on a raised stage, against a backdrop of what looks like a huge vagina, an expertly manipulated life-size woman puppet - in traditional butoh dress and make-up - gives birth with much distress.  The live ‘baby’ rolls about joyfully, dances - and then struggles to return to mother’s womb... 

These are just some of the representations within butoh – the dark underside, the unadmitted, the sordid, the forbidden.  The ever-versatile Maude Davey, in form-fitting gold body suit, performs a poem about Time.  More music.  Very loud.  We are asked to dance.  Most do.  There is a kind of coherence to all this, but we wonder where it might be going.

After an hour, there’s a pause and we go back out to the cooler courtyard for air and sushi.  Summoned back for the second half, we find something that appears more focussed – that is, I suppose, more conventional.  Chairs are now in semi-circles facing the stage.  The show tracks sideways for a bit with some conventional burlesque - but Yumi sabotages that.  Butoh dancers, male and female, move amongst the audience.  Some are menacing but - wittingly or not - their jerky movements, make-up and grotesque appearance have been hijacked or subsumed by the zombie movie genre – Dawn of the Dead, The Walking Dead, etc.

A ‘researcher/academic’, Dr Butoh, in a white coat explains butoh to us – that is, a Chat GPT version of its origins and purpose – before stripping naked.  Yumi and Atsuchi Takenouchi (the man with the drum from the courtyard) perform an extensive butoh dance, but its interiority, its formlessness and the complete lack of communication between the dancers - and the dancers to us - make it eventually, I’m afraid, tedious.  On opening night, the restlessness in the audience grew palpable.  If this is ‘butoh’ – and this dance was closest to my understanding of it – it seems a form more for the performers than for an audience.

A great deal of thought, imagination, invention, organisation and resources have gone into this show.  The elaborate props, set dressing and the costuming of the huge cast all suggest huge, concerted effort.  But if ButohBAR has the intention of ‘celebrating our beautifully dysfunctional existence’, does it quite live up to that grand aim?  There is no doubt that it’s provocative, contrary and anarchic, and that it gives us exotic experiences, continuously shaking up and questioning our responses.  But at the end, we might be left with a bizarre kind of literally counter-culture cabaret, an assembly of butoh numbers and non-butoh numbers that by its quite deliberate lack of form and coherence leave us mystified and just a little dissatisfied.

Michael Brindley