Dance As Propaganda Essay

Courtney Conigatti
Sid Sachs
Modern and Contemporary Art
April 28, 2014

Dance As Propaganda: Why We Dance
A playful dance style was spawned during post-Hiroshima Japan and would become one of the most groundbreaking and sought after movements in recent dance history. The technique is often risqué and obscene as its roots can be traced back to dance legend and taboo masters Hatzumi Hajikata and his partner, Kazuo Ohno. Because human beings are a part of this planet, Hijikata wanted this technique to embody the relationship between a human being and the earth they inhabit while incorporating the after effects of what warfare does to the mind, heart, body, and soul.
Butoh, roughly translated to “earth stomping” is more than a dancing style; it has a message and a goal of persuasion. It aims to make the audience be able to grasp what happens to a culture destroyed. Suzanne C. Schick, a student of propaganda, believes that empathetic persuasion is the root of propaganda and it’s at its most effective appealing to reader’s personal feelings or problems in a bold way (Schick 64). She determines propaganda’s validity and effectiveness by the communication it delivers and favors fact over opinion. Bad propaganda forms when the image makes the caption.
Dance communicates best when the viewer is presented with relatable forms of expression. From the ideas of Schick, it is clear butoh embodies a form of intense, visual propaganda, captivated techniques of emotional disturbance, and profound, traumatic terror to show the world the pains of a war torn society and empathize with post Hiroshima Japan. With avant-garde skeletal costumes and bold modern movements that are very different from western influence, butoh is a form of unintention...

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...hat it really makes someone think about the terrible actions that occurred.
The meaning behind why we dance is to ultimately get the message across of whatever we want to say, express, or exert. Butoh was the largest and most obscene leap any form of dance ever took when it came to such conservative preferences in what the audience expected out of a performance. It is never going to be about perfect love stories nor adventures to fantastic places. This existence is often a dark one and while some art is an escape to avoid despair, others are meant to convey realism and the truth. For a while in Japan, butoh was the only form of expression that faced the truth in a way that wasn’t painful. It gave the Japanese something to take pride in and much like Hajikata himself, it reminded the Japanese that they were hit but they never fell, they just kept standing back up.