A symposium celebrating Japanese Butoh

This is the first London conference dedicated to new research into Japanese Butoh Dance, its histories and representations. especially in film and photography.

We will be holding our Butoh Symposium over two days and early evenings, Thursday-Friday 17-18 September 2026, at the Main Auditorium of Kingston University’s award-winning Town House Building, in south-west London. The Symposium is organised by researchers attached to the School of Art’s Visual Cultures Research Centre at Kingston University’s School of Art faculty. This symposium follows on from our recent successful symposia of 2024-25 on the work of Antonin Artaud, on ‘Experimental archives’, and on the work of J.G. Ballard.

Butoh – or ‘Ankoku Butoh’, the ‘dance of utter darkness’ – is an extraordinary dance form which originated in 1959 in Japan through the experiments of the choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata, and now has a vital worldwide expansive presence as an exploratory corporeal art form.Presentations will present original research on all and every aspect of Butoh dance culture and its histories and manifestations, from 1959 to the contemporary to the future. The Symposium will have a particular focus on the pivotal relationship of Butoh, from its first moments, with film and photography, especially in their experimental forms.Recent Butoh-focused films and publications, such as Alisa Berger’s film Invisible People (2025), Amélie Ravalec’s film Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers (2025), and Stephen Barber’s book Film’s Ghosts (2021), have all investigated the seminal rapport between Butoh andfilmic/photographic cultures. Marie-Gabrielle Rotie has drawn upon her extensive training in Butoh to create choreography for films directed by Robert Eggers, Nosferatu (2024) and Werwulf (2027).The event will explore and provoke discussion as to how Butoh originated as an image-based art-form, and how Butoh choreographers and dancers – from 1959 to the contemporary – have collaborated intensively with image-makers of all kinds, drawing upon imageries drawn from the histories of art (notably, Surrealism, in its international dimensions), photography and other image-based media.Butoh choreographers have also been inspired by writers and philosophers who have imagined images of dance, as with Ko Murobushi’s preoccupation with the dancer who dances on his head, drawn from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Butoh choreographers have also been vitally inspired by philosophy and literature concerned with criminality, social refusal and anatomical transmutation, as with Hijikata’s extraordinarily intense engagement with works by Genet and Artaud, and Murobushi’s involvement also with works by Blanchot and Deleuze.The symposium will present work and research on on the written/assembled documents created by Butoh choreographers themselves, such as the image-based and annotated scrapbooks of Tatsumi Hijikata which directly inspired the contemporary Los Angeles-based artist Richard Hawkins’ works, notably exhibited at the Tate Liverpool (2014), Empty Gallery in Hong Kong (2025) and Vienna Künsthalle (2025-26). We are also very interested in presentations about the experimental ‘archiving’ of Butoh, as for example with the very disparate physical spaces in Tokyo where the Hijikata archive and the Murobushi archive are preserved (respectively, at the Keio University Art Center and at the ‘Café Shy’).

We are also interested in private historical archives of Butoh, as with that of the choreographer Takao Ikemiya.Since the principal formative figures in Butoh – Natsu Nakajima, Tatsumi Hijikata, Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno, Ko Murobushi, and many others – have now all died, the Symposium also holds the urgent project of asking: What is the future, or what are the now-‘orphaned’ futures, of Butoh, and how, for example, does it now inspire artworks in contemporary digital media, and digital moving-image cultures?Presentation panels at the Symposium will be interspersed with short film screenings of Butoh works, such as the never-before-seen 1970 documentary of the making and projection of Hijikata’s Osaka Expo film, and Romina Achatz’s rarely-seen experimental super-8 film of Ko Murobushi at the Odeon Theatre in Vienna.

Please only reserve a ticket if you can definitely come for both days. We only have 75 tickets to offer and would really like to ensure that everyone who books a ticket then attends the symposium. Attendance is free of charge.

The auditorium in which the Symposium will take place won the RIBA Stirling Prize and EU Mies van der Rohe Award, and has a large projection-screen and excellent sound-system. The Symposium will be an entirely live, on-site event, so participants will need to travel to London for it. Please don't ask the co-ordinators if we're live-streaming it - we are not! The Symposium will have free admission.The River Thames is a 2-minute walk from the auditorium, and there are many restaurants and cafes nearby

Description supplied by the event organiser.