14 Facts About Tatsumi Hijikata

Tatsumi Hijikata was a Japanese choreographer, and the founder of a genre of dance performance art called Butoh.

Tatsumi Hijikata was born Kunio Yoneyama on March 9,1928 in Akita prefecture in northern Japan, the tenth in a family of eleven children.

At around that time, Hijikata met three figures who would be crucial collaborators for his future work: Yukio Mishima, Eikoh Hosoe, and Donald Richie.

Tatsumi Hijikata conceived of Ankoku Butoh from its origins as an outlaw form of dance-art, and as constituting the negation of all existing forms of Japanese dance.

Especially at the end of the 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Tatsumi Hijikata undertook collaborations with filmmakers, photographers, urban architects and visual artists as an essential element of his approach to choreography's intersections with other art forms.

Tatsumi Hijikata last appeared on stage as a guest performer in Dairakudakan's 1973 Myth of the Phallus.

However, Tatsumi Hijikata himself perceived his work as existing beyond the parameters of the era's avant-garde movements, and commented: 'I've never thought of myself as avant-garde.

Tatsumi Hijikata envisaged performing in public again, and developed new projects, but died abruptly from liver failure in January 1986, at the age of 57.

Tatsumi Hijikata remains a vital figure of inspiration, in Japan and worldwide, not only for choreographers and performers, but for visual artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians, architects, and digital artists.

Kinjiki by Tatsumi Hijikata, premiered at a dance festival in 1959.

Mainly as a result of the audience outrage over this piece, Tatsumi Hijikata was banned from the festival, establishing him as an iconoclast.

Tatsumi Hijikata later changed the word "buyo," filled with associations of Japanese classical dance, to "butoh," a long-discarded word for dance that originally meant European ballroom dancing.

In later work, Tatsumi Hijikata continued to subvert conventional notions of dance.

Tatsumi Hijikata developed a poetic and surreal choreographic language, butoh-fu, to help the dancer transform into other states of being.