New ‘Butoh’ Photo Book Captures the Japanese Dance of Darkness

Summary

• Tom Johnson’s upcoming Butoh book is now available via Sixteen
• Shot on Oshima Island, the series follows a troupe of butoh dancers in artistic, expressive acts of surrender

At the height of Japan’s counter culture movement came butoh, a form of avant-garde dance-theater form, characterized by shaved heads, white-painted faces and slow, at times grotesque, movements. As the country at large began to shake off rigid, restraints in favor of radical modes of self-expression. For butoh dancers, this entailed a new bodily language that embraced the subconscious’s full spectrum of beauty and horror.

Photographer Tom Johnson delves into this world in his new book, Butoh, published by Sixteen. Shot on the volcanic Oshima Island, the images — first appearing in Atmos — captures ghostly dancers as they move between realms of performance and reality in a series of “sublime and surprisingly mundane” scenes: limbs entangled on black sand beaches, mouths savoring juicy fruit and bodies stacked atop one another in minimalist interiors.

Drawing on the transience of nature and the depths of inner worlds, the genre’s central pillars give way to a surreal meditation on metamorphosis, mortality, conviction and the feeble boundary between art and life. Spanning 112 pages, Butoh is now available for pre-order via the publisher’s website.

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