The Genius of Hijikata

Originator of Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata
A Girl 1973

Tatsumi Hijikata (Hijikata Tatsumi, March 9, 1928 - January 21, 1986) was a Japanese choreographer, and the founder of a genre of dance performance art called Butoh. By the late 1960s, he had begun to develop this dance form, which is highly choreographed with stylized gestures drawn from his childhood memories of his northern Japan home. It is this style which is most often associated with Butoh by Westerners.
Hijikata was an innovator in movement technique. He was a master of the use of energy qualities in constructing expressive movement. He would use sounds, paintings, sculptures, and words to construct movement, not exclusively in a formal or literal memetic application, but by integrating these elements via visualization into the nervous system to produce movement qualities that could be very subtle, light, angelic and ghost-like, or demonic, heavy, dark, grotesque, violent and extreme.
This use of visualization (triggered and supported by the above mentioned elements) masters sophisticated movement qualities similar in many ways to the Mime System of Jacques Lecoq.