We will be holding a Butoh Symposium over two days and two evenings, 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 and on ‘experimental archives’.

We invite and welcome 200-word proposals for presentations at the Symposium, which should be 15-20 minutes in duration.

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.
We warmly invite proposals for presentations exploring original research on all and every aspects 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.

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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 and filmic/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).

We will also be excited to receive proposals for presentations that widely explore 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.

We also invite proposals for presentations 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 also welcome presentations about the North of Japan (or about all conceptions of ‘The North’) as an integral imaginary projection of Butoh, and also with ‘The North’ as a tangible location for Butoh’s photographing and filming – as in Eikoh Hosoe’s photographic project with Hijikata, Kamaitachi, and his photographing of Kazuo Ohno on the island of Hokkaido, and also the filming of Hijikata’s contribution to the 1970 Osaka World Exposition (viewed by an estimated 8 million spectators there) on the volcanic mountain topography of eastern Hokkaido.

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?

Alongside those examples of particular areas, we openly invite presentations of any kind of ‘original research’ (with illuminating or previously unexplored approaches) into Butoh.

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.

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.

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The Symposium will be an entirely live, on-site event, so participants will need to travel to London for it. The Symposium will have free admission. The River Thames is a 2-minute walk from the auditorium, and there are many restaurants nearby which offer vegan and vegetarian food.

Please send proposals for contributions via email by 5 May 2026 to Stephen Barber: stephen.barber@kingston.ac.uk and Matt Melia: m.melia@kingston.ac.uk. (Please don’t expect us to get back to you before 5 May, and please be aware that we do not have funds to pay contributors’ travel/accommodation costs.)

We look forward to welcoming you to the Butoh Symposium in London.

Co-ordinators/Advisors for the Symposium (in alphabetical order): Dr Romina Achatz, Associate Research Fellow, Visual Cultures Centre, Kingston School of Art, Kingston University; Professor Stephen Barber, Professor of Art & Film, and Director, Visual Cultures Centre, Kingston School of Art, Kingston University; Dr Matthew Melia, Co-Director, Visual Cultures Research Centre, Kingston School of Art, Kingston University; Ms Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, Senior Lecturer, Goldsmiths College, University of London; Professor Hanako Takayama, Assistant Professor, Meiji University, Tokyo.

This Butoh Symposium is a Kingston School of Art event co-created by the Visual Cultures Research Centre and the Sepsis Dreamers Club. With the collaboration of Infinity Land Press, London, and in association with Café Shy, Tokyo.

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