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Falling Dance: Hijikata’s Recomposition of the Body via Bacon

Innami, Fusako

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Abstract

The themes of transformation, indefinite form, and disintegration haunt the work of many post-World War II artists, who had witnessed the animality of human beings as well as the depths to which human beings can fall in wartime. This paper looks at falling as an artistic and phenomenological practice of the body in the work of the Japanese butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata, whose notations refer in places to the work of the Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon and offer new bodily lexicons with which to graph the movement of falling. Drawing explicitly on Bacon and using cross-media collage to produce movement, a body in Hijikata could be deformed or made formless onto the ground. In falling, inhabiting and simultaneously vacating oneself, the body makes contact with a surface and leaves or exteriorizes a graphic mark, visual, and performative, in its wake. This attention to falling was part of an ongoing process at the rise of phenomenological boom in postwar Japan by which artists attempted to understand and recompose the kind of body that could inhabit the nuclear age.

Citation

Innami, F. (2021). Falling Dance: Hijikata’s Recomposition of the Body via Bacon. The Senses and Society, 16(1), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2021.1874142

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Oct 22, 2019
Online Publication Date Mar 12, 2021
Publication Date 2021
Deposit Date Dec 13, 2019
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal The Senses and Society
Print ISSN 1745-8927
Electronic ISSN 1745-8935
Publisher Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 16
Issue 1
Pages 1-15
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2021.1874142

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.




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