BUTOH IS NOT FOR THE FRAIL. THE AVANT-garde dance form that today is Japan's most startling cultural export does not aim to charm. Instead, it sets out to assault the senses. The hallmarks of this theater of protest include full body paint (white or dark or gold), near or complete nudity, shaved heads, grotesque costumes, clawed hands, rolled-up eyes and mouths opened in silent screams.
There are about 30 soloists and dance companies, most of them based in Tokyo, that share the Butoh esthetic. To take audiences on a backward journey to primordial states of being, for example, the five-man troupe known as Sankai Juku (resembling anonymous, alien beings, with their heads shaved and their bodies painted a uniform white) used to be lowered by ropes from high above the stage, their fetus-like bodies gradually unfolding.
In an even darker vein, in Min Tanaka's ''Homage to Kandinsky'' two men and two women shuffle across a darkened stage, clutching one another's sleeves, their mouths open, their red-rimmed eyes rolling. Min Tanaka emerges, and he is set upon by the two women, now clad only in oversized men's shoes.
If the Butoh message is sometimes bewil-dering, the visual impact is raw and direct - as the photographer Ethan Hoffman discovered when he attended his first Butoh performance in 1984. Hoffman, who divides his time between Tokyo and New York, went on to photograph many of the major figures in Butoh, and early this year he assembled his images to form not a documentary but a kind of photographic theater.
This work, titled ''Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul,'' will be seen at New York's Burden Gallery, beginning Thursday and ending Dec. 5. Min Tanaka, three of whose dance pieces are in the exhibition, will perform at the opening. A book of the photographs will be published by Aperture next month. Neither the exhibition nor the book will contain explanatory captions, only the titles of the dance pieces. ''I would like people to look at the exhibition and the book as one performance,'' says Hoffman.
WHEN ETHAN Hoffman first went with a friend to a cramped underground Tokyo club called Plan B for a performance of Min Tanaka's ''Homage to Kandinsky,'' he became very nervous.
''It was frightening and exhilarating at the same time,'' he recalls. ''You sat on the floor. You couldn't move because there were people almost on top of you. The dancers were 10 feet away and there were only two spotlights. I didn't react on an intellectual level. Most things I react to intellectually, but I just felt emotionally overwhelmed by what I saw. I felt as though I'd taken some hallucinogenic drug.''
Shortly thereafter, Hoffman began a three-year journey of discovery into this distinctly Japanese dance theater, one that bears little resemblance to such traditional theatrical forms as Noh or Kabuki. He telephoned the grand old man of Butoh, Kazuo Ohno, to set up a photographic session. The dancer, then 78 years old, invited the photographer to his studio. ''He danced for four hours,'' remembers Hoffman. ''Then he cooked dinner for me.''
In the late 1950's, Ohno and a young avant-garde dancer from the rural north, Tatsumi Hijikata, had pioneered a dance theater that became known as Butoh. (Hijikata called his performance style Ankoku Butoh, or ''dance of darkness and gloom.'' Two Japanese characters make up the word ''butoh'': ''bu'' for dance, ''toh'' for step.) Hijikata briefly collaborated with Ohno, whose work reflects the influences of German Expressionism and Christianity. But the younger dancer developed a radically different style during the late 1960's and the first half of the 70's. Hijikata, who died of cancer early last year at the age of 57, in many ways eclipsed Ohno in the effect his highly provocative medium of protest has had on dancers. A lean and agile man who wore his long hair loosely rolled up in a bun, Hijikata was influenced early in his career by Dadaism and Surrealism and inspired by the dictum of Antonin Artaud, the French experimental-theater director, to make theater that was crude. After this initial phase, however, the rural culture of his youth became the dominant influence.
Hijikata and Ohno shared the unmistakable Butoh characteristic: subversiveness. Both had seen their country devastated by war. In a culture distinguished for its visual harmony, the two dancers highlighted ugliness, replacing the conventional Japanese social mask of reticence and understatement with one of anguish and even terror. Ohno, who is now 81, in one of his signature performances is dressed in a thrift-shop gown and hat, his face painted white, his teeth blackened, mascara smeared around his eyes. Every movement of his face and body exquisitely improvised, he looks like a woman caught between memory and madness.
HIJIKATA'S BUTOH has been taken up by a second generation of dancers, who include Uno Man. Ethan Hoffman opens his photographic performance with a dance work by Uno titled ''21,000 Leagues'' (shown on page 40). To Hoffman, the work symbolizes birth - a recurring Butoh theme.
Following this are photographs showing a ghoulish Yoko Ashikawa (face chalk white, teeth blackened) grimacing in a dance titled ''Intimacy Plays Its Trump.'' ''Butoh can be very frightening,'' says Hoffman. ''I wanted to grab people immediately.'' The dancer's own teeth have been pulled, and she has found that by removing her false ones, she can achieve more varied facial expression. In true Hijikata fashion, after her finale, Ashikawa has been known to stick out her tongue instead of bowing.
Aping the improvisational nature of much of Butoh, Hoffman worked with several of the performers in devising new settings for existing works or creating new works altogether. ''The North Sea,'' a large outdoor piece performed by Akaji Maro's group, Dai Rakuda Kan, is such an original work (a scene from it is shown on page 41).
A frightening presence on stage, Maro in ''real life,'' as Ethan Hoffman found, is a man with a magnetic personality and a keen sense of humor who usually wears a dark gray kimono and the affected look of a gangster. He is also very accessible. At his 10-day summer workshop last year, he set aside two days to work on the creation and the photographing of the ''North Sea'' piece.
Maro's dancers supplement their income by working in nightclubs and taking part in cabaret acts that are a cross between Butoh and striptease. With Japanese audiences for Butoh performances much smaller than they are in the West, says Hoffman, such moonlighting is necessary. Min Tanaka, on the other hand, has a working farm in Hakushu - a two-hour drive from downtown Tokyo - for his dancers and students. The farm, complete with chickens, vegetables and rice fields, provides jobs, food and a creative environment.
About half of the dance pieces in the exhibition were photographed as they were performed on stage, mostly in Tokyo theaters. One such work is ''Foundation of Love Butoh,'' which is one of the last major pieces Hijikata did with Min Tanaka. Tanaka strikes postures and adopts facial expressions that are strongly reminiscent of the novelist Yukio Mishima, who was a close friend of Hijikata's and one of the first supporters of his heretical dance form.
The only dance performance that was photographed outside Japan is the well-publicized outdoor ''hanging event'' by the Sankai Juku troupe. Two years ago in Seattle, as four dancers were slowly lowered from the top of a six-story building by ropes at their ankles, one of the ropes broke and a dancer fell to his death. The group, which is currently on a three-month, 24-city tour of North America, no longer stages the hanging performance.
The exhibition ends with a troupe member, in a long white gown, kneeling, head bowed, his hands raised as though in benediction. Which is what proponents of Butoh always point out - that for all its darkness and emphasis on death, Butoh is life-affirming.