Blood Lust: Hybridity and Heteroglossia of Vampires

Mikhail Bakhtin: The Heteroglossia of Gothic Tales

Bakhtin (1895 - 1975), the Russian literary theorist and linguistic rhetor, contends that within any text, there exists a multitude of social voices, often contradicting voices entangled in dialogue: the writer's, the reader's, and other cultural voices. Meaning is found or lost in the rhetorical act found between the two or multitude of speakers. This heteroglossia (Discourse in the Novel) presents a problem because we often miss the plurality of sounds and only notice the sound of Butoh Dancers of death and vampire leaders who suck our blood and taxes.

We are familiar with such vampires and such meanings of the gothic; instead of the multiplicity and complexities of vibrations that novels, political speeches and works often explore.

A Polyphany of Voices within the Hybridization of Reality

Communication occurs outside our own web of meaning within the interaction of dialogue. For the Butoh Dancers of Bakhtin, this interaction becomes a sort of mixing of life and death. Thus, hybridization occurs in this deadly dance of doom.

Are we actually able to read the work that the author presents? How much of our own voice controls or drowns out the voices of the text?

In the Japanese vampire tales, with the voice of East and West, hybridization occurs and enriches the text. The postmodern dance of Butoh demonstrates this hybridization. Films like Blade and the sequels explores such hybridity.

This really becomes a problem when a reader of one culture reads the text from a writer from another culture and tries to understand the multiplicity of voices. How does our own cultural upbringing silence the cultural voices of the text? Often we fail to even see the complex cultural signs in the text.

To understand world literature, one has to read everything as a text, including films, television, and commercials. One must jump into the pool of text and finally start to notice cultural patterns once invisible. However, stereotypes can blind one of the simplistic beauty of the cultural sign.

the Demon Dance of unDeath: Moving Zen

What if the undead could dance? What would they look like? Watch Butoh and you might have your answers.

Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986) developed Butoh ankaku-buyo, the Dance of Darkness, which was later renamed Butoh. Let the dancers of Butoh be our guide to the undead that rule our society. In their movements lies a wisdom of inaction of blood lost and beasts that wander about in our wild spirit. We may not feel comfortable when we see the whiteness of a dead body. But we understand the pain that demons can feel if they danced.

This dance of demons teaches us what we already know: the horrors of pain and its the lust for purity. White is often the color of death in Asia where white is often worn at funerals. Usually in our lives, we control and hide our emotions, but the dancers of Butoh present a welcomed honesty of primal emotions.

Borrowing the white make up used in Kabuki performances to enunciate actions while having dancers move about in an almost nude state often without any hair, Butoh, an old word for dance, was born in 1959. It has been controversial since its inception. What does it mean?

Add some dashes of black, red, or other bold colors to contrast in the dead whiteness of the bodies, the dancers appear to be representations of the moving undead, hungry ghost lusting for artistic expression.

The dance often takes on the subject of taboo or sexual decadence,butoh depression, repression, or oppression, and has a zen like quality along with a celebration of the grotesque and the macabre. Sometimes, it appears that dancers have on dry white mud while wearing old dirty sheets.

Look closely at the zen dirt of suffering (dukka) and the ugliness of stress, note the beauty in the wabi-sabi or the asymmetry of dance of darkness: Butoh. Accept the unaccepta

Sources:

Hermon, Dan, "What is Butoh Dance?" Butoh Net.< http://www.butoh.net/define.html >.

Butoh Net. "Online Essay and Definitions of Butoh Dance. http://www.butoh.net/definitions.html

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Discourse in the Novel. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.