O ver four days in January 2025, Hong Kong will witness an unprecedented congress of Butoh dancing at Sotheby’s Maison, featuring seminal performances by Tadashi Endo, Ima Tenko, Yasuo Fukurozaka, Masami Yurabe with Miwako Inagaki, Yuri Nagaoka, and Seisaku.

Butoh in Six Acts is part of a four-day festival initiated by Xevarion Institute comprising Butoh performances, talks, and film screenings anchored by a comprehensive month-long exhibition curated by Takashi Morishita. Held at Catalyst Gallery in association with Hijikata Tatsumi Archive at Keio University, Tokyo, the exhibition presents historical artefacts, photographic, cinematographic and sculptural objects pertaining to the history of butoh. Selected pieces will be on view at Sotheby’s during the course of the festival.

The festival will kick off a day prior, on Tuesday 14 January, at the City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media where film screenings of significant archival material will accompany an artist’s seminar chaired by Associate Professor Dr. Damien Charrieras. From Wednesday through Friday, across three evenings at Sotheby’s we present six performances from some of the greatest Butoh performers of our times.

Butoh in Six Acts offers not only a unique opportunity to learn about the history and cultural relevance of Butoh, but a remarkable firsthand experience of this powerful and immensely moving art form.

Sotheby's Maison, Hong Kong

Butoh in Six Acts Takes Centre Stage in Hong Kong

I f art is a casualty of war, then Butoh (舞踏, Butō) would be the spark, flickering and glowing, creating the movement of new life, rising from the ruins of the spirit of the avant-garde and forever refusing to fade into oblivion.

There is no room for thought and emotion. We should first have the desire to touch and ask, “Is that the same thing as love?” That surely makes the space around you change.

Tatsumi Hijikata scolded Seisaku with the following words: “Show the invisible things, no one wants to see the things they already can see!” The space which is changing makes various forms by the way of the senses. Reject rationale and the mundane to open up the mind and soul.

One drop of water to the exhausted body. The answer is “To become”. We become something and jump into the sea, merging as one. Become the naked soul.

The long term collaboration between Masami Yurabe and Miwako Inagaki produces a series of works that delve into a diverse range of emotions, fluctuating between ecstasy, infancy, horror and confusion. Grabbing, clawing, swirling, breathing, shrinking. Their unique interpretation of Butoh can be conceived as a passion that redefines the world in which the audience becomes interconnected through a spectrum of light and shadows cast by their movements.

In this world of shadows, we return home accompanied by new breath and vitality with every single breath. Rather than mere isolated islands, do our bodies not lie within a great ocean beyond time?

Trained in traditional Japanese Noh, Yasuo Fukurozaka incorporates the artistry and colours of Noh into his performances with respect to classical Japanese theatre art form. Though something odd appears with his approach, through his movements he transcends the limits of mental representation. This particular oddness has no place in the world and only a fleeting [non]existence, and could even be said to be a form of “antimatter” itself.

His work exposes the uncertainties and unreliability of reality, on life and death as well as thought in the midst of spatial and temporal relations.

This world is a confused labyrinth through which Yuri Nagaoka carves a vigorous space between the stage and her audience, where the unconscious, the dreams and the irrational unfolds. Never standing still, each passing moment contains a movement, a contradiction – the contradictions that Butoh refers to or represents as the weakness and the needs of human life, as well as canals toward an expansion of the body to the outer world.

Into the Forest embraces the human body as no longer the means and end of movement and expression, but rather as the very substance being expressed.

Tadashi Endo’s movements express the field of tension between yin and yang, feminine and masculine, their everlasting alternations. To master the “in between”, that is Butoh MA. In Shinkai No Tamashi, darkness descends on the world with war, hatred, vengeance, death, terrorism and incredible excesses of violence and brutality.

Hope sinks in desperation and profound grief. Before we lose everything, what would we tell each other when our souls meet?

A comet shines brightly and comes with a flaming tail. Ima Tenko, “a body who has been standing at the edge of life” for more than 40 years, is floating in space with her tails trailing. Inside the comet is a frozen nucleus, with clouds of gas that surrounds her. Can we look at the dance in front of us, free from the preconceived notion of Butoh as “a corpse standing still” or a heretical art form that reeks of darkness? Her body, which has been alive and standing, is filled with a soul that has been guided by a comet and danced with all its heart.

Time is up. The comet comes again. Bringing to Earth the creativity pumped from the wellspring and the imagination celebrating the future.