CRITICAL/SEISMIC BODIES IN HIJIKATA TATSUMI'S WRITING PRACTICE AND DANCING PRACTICE

In one of his writings addressing corporeality Hijikata Tatsumi deals with the tight bond, which connects children to natural disasters. He defines natural calamity in association with their bodies and depicts a very strong image of corpses of drowned children swept away by the inundation. Hijikata’s radicalism and deep concern for the body manifested in his performative practice penetrates into verbal landscape enforcing the revolutionary act of his art, where bodies are taken in extreme situations, and threat and risk are displayed on the choreographic level by unbalance and instability. In his obscure literature, which goes beyond rhetoric, we see confirmed how the bodies conceived by the dancer condense states of crisis turning into critical and seismic corporealities. The body itself is questioned and its structure is radically disturbed in its normal and normative organisation. Especially during the 1960s butō unfolds as a “terroristic act” and the corporeal matter as a minefield and site of critique against the socio-political system and the pervasive commodification of existence. The complex operation of dance aesthetics undertaken by Hijikata is discussed in light of his exploration and diversification of corporeality dissected into multi-layered spectra of subtle nuances. It is shown how relevant it is to detect in his counter-cultural act and discourse that he does not fix these bodies into stable dimensions, but digs into heterogeneous corporealities, which in turn are not dividable into compartmentalised categories and reveal a fluid character.