Butoh dancer Yang Jong-ye: 'It's no longer just Japanese — it's the language of all people on Earth'

Yang Jong-ye, a Korean dancer who in 2009 became the first foreigner to join Dairakudakan, Japan's renowned butoh dance company. [Courtesy of Yang Jong-ye]

Stark white, pitch black, or drenched in gold.

"During the full rehearsal on Thursday, I painted my entire body black — now even the undersides of my fingernails are stained," Yang Jong-ye said with a broad smile.

Yang, 51, has the kind of lean, rigorously trained physique that seems to leave no room for excess. In 2009, she became the first foreigner to join Dairakudakan, Japan's world-renowned butoh dance company.

Onstage, her face is unrecognizable. Coating the body in gold dust or white powder is one of butoh's distinctive aesthetic hallmarks. Yang described the sensation as "what Spider-Man must feel when he puts on his suit before heading to work," adding that it serves as "a device for the transformation desire every human carries — a way to manifest as something greater than oneself." Anyone expecting a fairy tale of princes and princesses will be disappointed. The dance moves toward an unfathomable grotesqueness, yet the movement itself is both practice and meditation.

Ahead of her Seoul performance, Yang said she wants "to show Korean audiences — who may be unfamiliar with butoh — what butoh truly looks like." She will perform her choreographic work "Unidentified X's Summoning" at the 23rd Overseas Dance Stars Invited Performance (Aug. 1–2, Naru Art Center), a piece that won the grand prize at Japan's SAI Dance Festival competition last May.

Butoh emerged in the 1950s around Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. The form explores the body in ways that conventional Western dance does not and challenges social taboos, securing its place as a significant pillar in the history of contemporary dance.

"It was a dance that asked 'Who am I?' — born out of the nihilism that pervaded Japan after World War II," Yang said. "When Western culture was crashing in like a wave, students at the University of Tokyo and Waseda University created an underground culture — angura — to protect their own identity and Japan's. Butoh was born from that."

Butoh sought to preserve a Japanese identity and leap toward a new Japan — asserting a spirit expressed through a Japanese body rather than a Western one. Yet the body butoh forges is thoroughly contemporary. "Butoh doesn't belong only to the Japanese," Yang said. "Wherever you go in the world, when a war ends and a new era opens, young artists make new attempts. It's an archetypal language born from that moment."

Yang grew up in Busan studying Korean traditional dance and attended Kyungsung University, where she said she often heard that her movement had "a butoh feel" even as a student. When she first saw Dairakudakan's "Kainno Uma" at the Seoul Butoh Festival marking the 40th anniversary of Korea-Japan diplomatic normalization in 2005, it felt, she said, "like finally reuniting with a family I had been separated from as a child." She found herself repeatedly asking, "Why am I not standing on that stage?"

"Unidentified X," the work Yang will present after years of immersing her entire body and mind in butoh, is a solo distillation of the central themes from her 2020 dance film "The Rite of Spring."

"When I began making this piece, physical changes, anxiety about aging, my parents growing old, and fear about the future were all piling up at once," she recalled. "I even thought it might be better to just leave the company." "Unidentified X" is a work Yang built by turning her gaze inward.

"Inside a person there are countless rooms. Some you keep open when you need them; others you keep shut. There are rooms you lock with a key and never want to show anyone — rooms even you don't want to look into, where no light enters and cobwebs gather. This work begins by throwing open those doors. It's a summoning of memory fragments and ambivalent emotions, confronted head-on."

Yang carries the belief that "the most unknown world is oneself," and her dance is completed by confronting and accepting that interior. "If I can truly face my own truth, the people watching will receive it as something of their own," she said. "Within someone who has had entirely different experiences, the work will expand into yet another place." In Japan, this piece — which swept competitions when Yang was in her 50s — has been called the opening of a "neo-butoh" era.

"Unidentified X," which won the grand prize at Japan's SAI Dance Festival competition last May. [SAI Dance Festival]

Butoh is a dance that is difficult both to describe and to watch. It is often characterized as an "exploratory" form with no fixed structure or technique. "Butoh is not about showing your emotions as they are — it's about transforming through the body into another kind of being," Yang said. "Suffering is absorbed by the body and converted into something of a different dimension, beyond personal confession." The white body paint butoh dancers wear serves the same purpose: fully embodying the spirit of the form. "The body was born from me, but it is not me itself. Only by placing a slight distance between us can I finally face myself," she said.

To make butoh a language of the body, there is a physical philosophy and training method that must be mastered. The first step is creating an "empty body." "The very first thing is emptying the body," Yang explained. "We perceive our bodies as nothing more than a sack of water — over 70 percent liquid — and go through a process of objectifying ourselves." From there, the practitioner learns to recognize the body as a single mass filled with water and gradually discovers how to empty it. The next stage is the "space body." "You set aside the arrogance of believing humans have shaped and controlled the world," she said, "and explore a passive sense — not that you move yourself, but that you are moved by something else."

A body language with no fixed movements is not easy to receive, and all the more so when the dance is directed toward the human interior. Reaching that interior through a stage performance in a proscenium theater is no simple task. "You don't have to try too hard to understand," Yang said. "Rather than searching for a narrative or analyzing the meaning of each movement, just receive what is happening there — the way you would take in a festival."

"Some people may have the image that butoh is dark, frightening, difficult. But this work has not only darkness — there is also something playful, and there is fantasy. Onstage, I want to stand in truth. I hope that truth can meet something inside the audience."

shee@heraldcorp.com