Butoh Dance

The Japanese dance style of butoh provides a rich co-mingling of traditional Japanese dance movements with a new cultural and artistic expression developed in the post-war avant-garde period. The focus of this project will be an analysis of the intersection of this post-war aesthetic with theories of dance and movement in butoh in order to more fully understand the role of the dancer as a vessel for embodying meaning in performance and the role of the body in butoh dance to communicate cultural and emotional meaning. By examining the writings of butoh originators, this project explores the various elements of an original butoh aesthetic and examines that performance aesthetic in its relation to forging an emotional connection with its audience. By drawing on concepts and approaches from the fields of kinesics and phenomenology, this project explains the human capacity to embody meaning, how this is achieved, and how that relates to the communicative goals of butoh performance as laid out by originators of the dance. The project concludes by examining the intersection of aesthetic ideals with theories of human movement and embodiment in an analysis of the recent performance Earth Tomes: celebrating the earth.

The dance form contact improvisation (CI) emphasizes attention to sensation as a first step in sourcing physical movement. As a study of physics and materiality that is conducted expressly through the body as instrument and indicator, this proposition immediately alters a practitioner’s relationship with both his or her sensory system and the immediate environment, and demonstrates how touch, and sensation, might be seen as ‘a creative rather than purely functional interaction with one’s environment’ (Dey and Sarco-Thomas 2014).  Nita Little has discussed the ways in which the attentional practice of contact improvisation serves to challenge notions of identity and also illuminates emerging concepts in theoretical physics, noting how CI as touch-based movement training offers a means by which to bring ‘attention to attention’ (2014: 120), acknowledging intra-action (Barad 2012) in a way that challenges clear divisions between my body and yours when dancing.  Taking Little’s investigation further, CI practice that values ‘sensational facts’ (Paxton in Novack 1990: 82) can similarly be applied in observation practices that attend beyond other bodies to non-human forms. Drawing on Steve Paxton’s emphasis on momentum and gravity as common anchors for sensation in CI, this paper maps out some initial territory for using CI practice as a way of extending sensation through both attention and imagination to matter in many forms.  Drawing on additional examples from Body Weather practices of Min Tanaka, and the solo performance score of Twig Dances, this thesis also proposes ways in which CI’s work with sensation might be used to rethink human interactions with the nonhuman and so critique “the materializing effects of boundary making practices by which the ‘human’ and the ‘nonhuman’ are differentially constituted” (Barad 2012: 31-32). I propose that the imaginative and sensate nature of these performance practices and the affects they produce, offer new directions for how interdisciplinarity in performance might be theorized.

Amagatsu Ushio, the founder and artistic director of Sankai Juku, is an artist who ruminates through the process of sedimentation: dripping and dropping superfluous thoughts. Quotidian aesthetics and social topicalities have never seeped into the theatrical cosmogony of Sankai Juku. Isolated from the everyday world, yet not entering the realm of spiritual mumbo jumbo, Sankai Juku has managed to speak to the audiences of more than seven hundred cities across the globe. In Unetsu, or, in fact, in all works of Sankai Juku, there is no linear structure of narratives; thus, a certain moment does not become obsolete with the passing of time. In contrast, in the artworks of Sankai Juku, time is a sequence of oscillations between what many modern people think as opposite temporal archetypes such as "night and day, winter and summer, drought and flood, age and youth, life and death".

publié dans le collectif « PSYCHISME ET CRÉATION » coll. Alternatives Psychanalytiques, éditions L'Esprit du Temps, 2002 - un essai sur le butoh, puis dans la collection Prophète en son pays, ed. Origine

Il est difficile de donner une définition du Butoh sans risquer de flétrir en le figeant le pouvoir de transformation inhérent à cet art. Je me souviens de l’amusement des danseurs de Butoh lorsque les Occidentaux s’acharnaient à le définir. Je me souviens aussi de leur résistance au discours de rationalité qu’ils jugeaient castratrice de leur art.
Les premiers danseurs de Butoh ont étudié la danse classique ou moderne, vécu les nombreuses animations de rue, dont les festivals shintô scandent tous les passages de saisons. Et c’est avec ce corps-là, riche de ses rites et des médiations scéniques maîtrisées, qu’ils affirment leur résistance à la bienséance et à la répression d’une société aseptisée qui cache les signes des états “sauvages”, de l’être indompté.
Rebelles avant tout. Provocateurs. Nus, travestis, désarticulés. Explorateurs de l’au-delà des limites du sens, des sens et de la chair. Désespérés aussi. Ils subliment l’impuissance en ritualisant la passion, la laideur l’horreur ou la violence. L’expérience dépasse les conditions circonstancielles d’une époque donnée.

Savaş sonrası Japonya’sında ortaya çıkan öncü bir dans olan butō, bedenin özel bir
kavranışına dayanan kendine özgü bir estetiğe sahiptir. Bu estetik, ana akım dansın “ideal beden” anlayışının tersine, modern yaşamın bir sonucu olarak sakatlanmış ve acı çekmekte olduğuna inanılan insan bedeninin bütün çıplaklığı ile sahne üzerinde sergilenmesi ve bu yolla özgürleştirilmesiyle ilgilenmektedir. Bu makale, butō’daki beden anlayışını kavramsallaştırmak üzere, postdramatik tiyatro ve Merleau-Ponty felsefesinin bedene bakışlarına odaklanmaktadır. Butō dansçıdan tüm toplumsal örüntülerin ve benliğin ötesinde yer alan, fakat aynı zamanda tüm diğer canlılar ve şeylerle birlikte dünyanın bir parçası olan “et-beden”inin ifadesini araştırmasını ve aynı anda hem özne hem de nesne olan bu bedeni herhangi bir şeyi temsil etme ihtiyacı duymadan saf mevcudiyeti ile sahne üzerinde sergilemesini bekler. Bu, dansçının bedenini mutlak bir edilgenlik içinde dünyaya vermesi ve kendini ondan gelecek etkileşimlere açmasıyla mümkün olacaktır.

Butoh, which is an avant-garde dance, which has emerged in post-war Japan,
has a distinctive aesthetics that depends on a specific understanding of the body. In contrast to the sense of “ideal body” in mainstream dance, this aesthetics is interested in staging of the suffering human body, which is believed to be crippled as a result of modern life, so that it will be emancipated. In order to conceptualize the understanding of body in butoh, this article focuses on the views of body in postdramatic theater and the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. Butoh demands from the dancer to search the expression of his/her “flesh-body”, which stands beyond the social patterns and the self, but is a part of the world with other living beings and things, and display this body, which is at the same time a subject and an object, in its pure presence without feeling any need for representing something. This can only be possible, if the dancer gives her body to the world with ultimate passivity and open him/herself to any possible interactions.

“Being Ma” lives at the nexus of ma and the lived body. (1) Of Shinto Zen origin, 'ma' concept of spacetime permeates traditional forms of Japanese Fine Arts. (2) The essence of 'ma' reappears in the contemporary Butoh dance philosophy, and has migrated as spatial-temporal perspective in a number of movement art practices outer-borders of Japan. “Being Ma” attempts at describing a porous, fluid, indescribable concept as experienced in its relationship along and between the artistic intents of a moving body in spacetime.
'Ma' is a contributing rather than a limiting principle. The study follows a flow leading to ma-body-as-event. The study of 'ma' contributes to the phenomenal, cultural, and embodied knowledge production of Dance & Performance scholarship, and beyond, extending to fields of research mandating embodied inquiries. Having chosen to study a Japanese phenomenological concept through the practical framework (in some cases) of North American movement art practitioners, I come across issues of embodied translation and issues of movement approaches – or, stylistic codes and forms of ‘trans-action’. Aided by the artistic expressions of the lived body paradigm, this paper addresses the experience of movement: Shinto Zen rites, Nihon Buyo (Traditional Japanese Dance), Butoh practice, Somatic practice, dancing dream state, and Durational Performance Art. These forms call for movement awareness, which makes them ideal pilots for observation, description, analysis, and interpretation.

「津田信敏と近代舞踊」

概要：
津田信敏（1910～1984年）は日本で今日用いられている「現代舞踊」
という言葉を最初に使った舞踊家だ。土方 や若松美黄といった前衛
的な舞踊家に影響を与えたことでも知られている。しかし彼の生涯を
記録した資料は長い間整理されてこなかった。そこで、当時を知る舞
踊家たちや津田の関係者らのインタビューなども用いながら、その歩
みをまとめた。
　津田の原点は青山学院時代に学んだ児童劇と子どものダンスにある。
やがて芸術舞踊を志すようになり、無伴奏舞踊や絶対舞踊といった当
時の舞踊家たちも使っていた概念を用いながら自身の表現を模索。ド
イツにも渡り、マックス・テルピスに舞踊を学んだ。津田は「現代舞
踊」という言葉を用いるようになるが、戦時中の文化統制の下で言葉
の意味が変容したため、「近代舞踊」という言葉を使うように改める。
戦後は、日本の洋舞界で活躍する才能たちを輩出。1950年代末には
土方らが「舞踏」を創出するのに大きな影響を与えた。1960年代末
から1970年代にかけては彫塑展を開いたり、インターメディアな独
自の作風を確立したりするなど、舞踊史に独自の足跡を残した。

キーワード：
津田信敏、現代舞踊、オーラルヒストリー、子どものダ
ンス、マックス・テルピス

Tsuda Nobutoshi and Kindai Buyo Moderne Tanz
Abstract:

Nobutoshi Tsuda (1910-1984) is a dancer and he used for the first time a Japanese term “gendai buyo” that is now used widely in Japan. It is also known that he influenced avant-garde dancers such as Tatsumi Hijikata or Miki Wakamatsu.
However, materials that recorded his lifework had remained unresearched. So we read the documents thoroughly and interviewed those who know Tsuda or the time he played a significant role, and then bundled into one book.
Tsuda learned about children’s drama and dancing when he was a student at Aoyama Gakuin University, which became the starting point that he aspired to be an artistic dancer. Tsuda tried to depict his own dancing by applying some concepts of “mubanso buyo” (dance without music) and “zettai buyo” (Absolute Dance) that are also used by other dancers at that time.
Tsuda went to Germany and studied dancing under Max Terpis, which became an opportunity to use the term “gendai buyo”.
Unfortunately, Tsuda soon had to use the term “kindai buyo” instead of “gendai buyo” because the meaning of “gendai buyo” changed under the cultural control by the Japanese government.
After the World War II, Tsuda contributed to develop western-style dancers
in Japan, and some of them showed their talents. He had a great influence on dancers like Hijikata who created “Butoh” in the late 1950s.
Tsuda also held sculpture exhibitions during the late 1960s to the late 1970s, and established original intermedia style of art. These works including “gendai buyo” left his own mark in the Japanese history of dancing.

Keywords:
Nobutoshi Tsuda, “gendai buyo”, Oral History, Children’s Dance, Max Terpis

The Difference Butoh Makes:  A Practice-Based Exploration of Butoh in Contemporary Performance and Performer Training

By Frances Barbe. Phd By Practice By Publication.
Faculty of Humanities, School of Arts - Drama, University of Kent, UK 2011.

ABSTRACT
My performance works Fine Bone China, Palpitation and Chimaera form a body of work drawing on Japanese butoh. Each production emphasises a different aspect of butoh, allowing for a study of the difference butoh makes to the process of creation and performance. Fine Bone China explores the interaction between physical score and psychophysical subscore, and the distinction between “figure” and “character”. The group work, Palpitation, challenged performers with extreme reduction or distillation (stillness, simplicity and slow motion) and emphasised kinaesthetic listening and response in ensemble work. Chimaera focused on the transformation and objectification of the butoh body. Alongside these performances, original training methodologies developed that contribute to knowledge and understanding of butoh and performer training.

Examples of performance and training practice are presented on DVD and in photo galleries. The written thesis reflects critically on the process of making this body of work, and culminates in a consideration of the butoh body as an objectified, marionette-like body, drawing on the famous historical essays of Edward Gordon Craig and Heinrich von Kleist, and terms such as the “dead body” from butoh and the “lived body” from phenomenology are unraveled.

The thesis locates the body of work within the wider context of global butoh and contemporary performance. It does not seek a reductive definition of butoh or ask, “what is butoh?” Instead the thesis considers what values are discernible in butoh or butoh-based work? What demands does it place on the performer and on the spectator? What is distinctive about butoh dramaturgy? How do butoh artists train or prepare for butoh, given that butoh is not a technique or a style of performance? What contribution (difference) has butoh made to late twentieth century dance and performance? What aspects of butoh are transferable and relevant to current, contemporary performance and why have western performers turned to butoh to complement their work?

A critical commentary that presents and contextualizes a film and video making practice spanning three decades. It locates a contemporary visual music practice within current and emerging critical and theoretical contexts and tracks back the history of this practice to the author’s initial screenings of work as part of the 1980’s British Scratch video art movement.

At the heart of the body of work presented here is an exploration and examination of methods and working practices in the encounter of music, sound and moving image.
Central to this is an examination of the affective levels that sound and image can operate on, in a transsensorial fusion, and political and cultural applications of such encounters, whilst examining  the epistemological regimes such work operates in.

A combination of factors has meant that work such as this, arising in the UK provinces, can fall below the historicizing and critical radar – these include the ephemeral and transitory nature of live performance work; the difficulties of documenting such work; the fragility and degeneration of emerging and quickly obsolescent formats; and a predominance of a London–centric focus on curating, screening and historicizing of experimental film and video art practices.

The author's film and video practice has been screened nationally and internationally over three decades, and has been recognized as exemplary practice both in the early 1980s at the inception of the Scratch movement and in more recent retrospectives. The critical commentary argues that this work contributes new knowledge of the history, contexts and practices of film and video art and audiovisual and visual music practices.

PhD thesis, 2008, Victoria University, supervised by Elizabeth Dempster
A practice-led research project, this exegesis discusses the live site-based performance works, their process of making and theoretical context. The performance works and this writing explore relationships of body, place and identity in postcolonial Australia.

Being Ma lives at the nexus of ma and the lived body.1 Ma concept of space-time permeates traditional forms of Japanese Fine Arts.2 The essence of ma reappeared in the contemporary Butoh dance philosophy, and through it migrated as a spatial temporal perspective adopted by a number of movement art practitioners outside of Japan. Being Ma aims to describe a conceptual space-time as experienced in its relationship with the artistic intent of a moving body.
Having chosen to study a Japanese concept through the practice of North American movement art practitioners, I come across issues of translation and issues of movement approaches – or, stylistic forms of action. Of the many artistic expressions using the lived body paradigm, this paper addresses the experience of movement through the cases studies of Butoh dance-theatre, Somatic practice, and Durational Performance Art. These forms necessitate awareness of movement, which makes them great pilots for observation, description and analysis. Therefore, Being Ma looks at the experiential phenomenon of embodied translation in the action of dancing/performing a movement. In this paper,
I will define the term trans-acting, describe how ma trans-acts the dancing body, and illustrate its implication in movement performance art.
The process approach is fundamental in following the logical flow leading to the body-as-event qualifying the ma principle discussed in this paper. Ma is a contributory rather than a known or a delimiting principle. The study of ma augments the study of the philosophy of dance/movement as agent of cultural knowledge production.

English Summary

In the book Present with the body. The technique of Polish butoh dancers I cover the practices of Polish butohh dancers and I create amodel of butoh training. The analysis of available material led me to the conclusion that butoh’s substance is not the aesthetics of adance act (improvisation, performance) but the specific training practices that are at its core. In the first chapter of the book I present the current state of research in the field of butoh: the history and development of the modern Japanese dance form and its critical analyses with particular consideration of the butoh technique analysis. In my dissertation I used the few available works of butoh technique researchers (Kayo Mikami, Lee Rhizome, Toshiharu Kasai, Sondra Horton Fraleigh) who use non-standard terminology and pay special attention to different aspects of the training process. I also underline the transcultural potential of the genre, which is visible both in the universality of its psycho-somatic training and in its proneness to all types of hybridization. The research process, which resulted in the creation of atraining model, was divided into two steps. The pivots of the preliminary phase of the research were artistic biographies of Polish butoh dancers with particular attention de-voted to the psychophysical practices which involve bodymind practices and the so-called butoh techniques. After analysing the source literature I carried out aseries of interviews with the Polish artists, I took part in the genre acts as an expert observer and, finally, I participated in butoh workshops with both Polish and Japanese dancers. I was mainly interested in the artists’ explicit and tacit knowledge of butoh. I inquired about butoh’s perception and definition and its different training practices. At the core of my research was the question of previous psychophysical practices which predestined artists to engage in butohh. In the second stage of the research (during the analysis of the gathe-red data) I created ageneral model of butoh training sessions on the grounds of the individual trainings I observed. In the process of construction and analysis of the integrated training model I implemented an interdisciplinary approach. The knowledge employed includes the fields of cultural studies, cultural anthropology, psychology, philosophy as well as neurobiology and cognitive sciences. The second chapter presents the training practices of the Polish dancers and performers who are involved in butohh: Paweł Dudzinski, Justyna Jan-Kru-kowska, Sylwia Hanff, Krzysztof Jerzak, the Amareya Theatre (Katarzyna Julia Pastuszak, Agnieszka Kaminska, Aleksandra Sliwinska), Tomasz Bazan (.e Maat Project .eatre), Aleksandra Capiga-Łochowicz, TO-EN (Anna Brałkowska), Irena Lipinska and Katarzyna Zejmo, Iwona Wojnicka, Miho Iwata, Rui Takayuki Ishihara. I focused on the unique psychophysical disci-pline preferred by particular artists. The training practices of the Polish butoh dancers include methods and techniques of different provenance. Among them are the methods and techniques explored mainly from the stage-ada-ptation point of view which function in different types of performing arts, mind-body disciplines as well as body and movement therapy. All these practices are used creatively by the Polish dancers and are integrated with the so-called butoh techniques. Through the analysis of detailed models I was able to create ageneral training model of butoh of the Polish dancers. The technique of the Polish butoh dancer includes techniques which aim at reaching the psychophysical state known by the Japanese theorists and practitioners as butoh-tai (the butoh body). Movement (dance) has its origin in the kinetic reaction to the stimuli coming from the surrounding environment, updates of the contents saved in the memory of the body or/and embodiment of the mentally created contents. The techniques which are used in the integrated butoh training are atool of self-change and its catalyst. I analysed the sequence of the stages which create the process and the structure of butoh training. I observed three main steps: intro, following and embodiment. In the first one (intro) I singled out endurance training and mindfulness training which are both aimed at achieving the state of total presence (in other words the butoh body, butoh- tai). In the second stage (following) the dancer explores the stimuli coming from the inside of his or her body (among other things the data gathered in SUMMARY the body’s memory) and from the outside (for example sensory excitement ofthe body). The core of the third stage (embodiment) are the ideokinetic and ideodynamic reactions which constitute the primary method of work in butoh: working with images (the tools are the so-called butoh-fu, butoh notations). The dancer’s and the viewer’s transformation, which occurs as aresult ofthe above-mentioned methods, is the essence of butoh. The process of ceaseless transformation and the experience of transformation are both present in the butoh training practice and the stage practice. This is why I finally pre-sent the possibility of applying the category of performativity, in the Erika Fischer-Lichte approach, and the phenomenon of neurobiological empathy which is at source of the simultaneity of transformation in all participants ofan event (aplay, stage improvisation, performance).

This paper considers the affective creation in two dances of death in the contemporary gothic.
In Japanese butoh, a performance Steven Bruhm reminds us means the “dance of utter darkness,” performers act without affect in horrific performances: impossibly grotesque gestures are performed with maddening grace and slowness. As choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata explains of performers such as Kazuo Ohno, in butoh “dead gestures inside my body die one more time and make the dead themselves dead again.” This dance sheds a dancer’s subjectivity and resembles the psychological condition of anosagnosia, where the brain’s limbic system misperceives the body that carries it. Anosagnosia is characterized by a lack of kinaesthetic torsion and by conflicting affective states: shock, hilarity, horror.
A similar dance happens on stage in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… (1998). Carr’s female protagonist Hester Swane concludes the play by killing her small daughter and herself while wrestling with another character called the Ghost Fancier. The murder-suicide comes with an interpretative twist: characters in the play see Hester’s actions but not the Ghost Fancier. To the audience, Hester’s acts are predicated on a fierce dance with fateful death: terrible, but oddly invigorating as the conclusion of a play that yields high emotional rewards. To characters, her grim acts horrifically dislocate agency by refusing life tout court.
While drawn from different classical traditions, Hjikata’s butoh and Carr’s modern dans macabre present visions of subject-formation that contrast of horror and terror. Their comparison articulates a possible global resonance: not in the sense of worldly, but in the medical sense. What might a material body do on the dramatic stage?

The purpose of this endeavor came from my interests in how differing Western representations of the female body are disrupted by some contemporary artists. Over the course of my research, I examined French performance artist ORLAN whose work has been labeled as “Grotesque” and the transgressive choreography of Canadian dance artist Marie Chouinard. Both artists disrupt traditional concepts of the female body that have been constructed by Western cultural ideologies. In the widely publicized performances entitled The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, ORLAN undergoes a series of ten facial plastic surgeries to re-create a mutant hybrid of the most famous Renaissance women in art history in order to reveal the often brutal and violent conditions that make possible the standard Western representation of female beauty. This exposition occurred in such a way that the spectators could pose questions and interact with ORLAN as she underwent the physical modifications. Chouinard’s choreography produces a similar disruption through the use of unconventional prosthetics in the ballet entitled Body Remix, The Goldberg Variations. The use of these instruments open new and unforeseen horizons of corporeality that break radically with the traditional and anticipated image of the balletic dancer that most spectators come to expect. Thus, both of these artists come to create a subversive experience that forces audience members to enter a space in which they are forced to confront the very presuppositions that underpin their concept of female embodiment.

In both improvisation and butoh practice, habit is often referred to negatively, restricting ones creative capabilities. However within flow studies in positive psychology, habit is constitutive of optimal experience. How then can this negative side of habit be reconciled with the positive, action enabling side which informs that flow state?
The discomfort of getting stuck in habitual movement, acknowledged by many within improvisation can be linked to the butoh concept of ‘ma’. Ma is a Japanese word which can roughly be translated as ‘interval’ and is often referred to as a negative space. It also has a temporal meaning thus representing space, time and space-time. Ma can be experienced as both a static and a dynamic state and is a “way of sensing the moment of movement.” (Isozaki cited in Pilgrim, 1995, p. 69). In butoh, Hijikata developed the term ma-gusare (rotting space) operating at the interstices of being and non-being in a dangerous territory of dark unknowing.
This concept of ‘ma’ can also be related to Victor Turner’s concepts of liminality; “literally “being-on-a-threshold” means a state or process which is betwixt-and-between the normal, day-to-day…” (Turner, 1979, p. 465). Turner identifies the negative connotation in this state as it exists between the once positive past and yet to be positive future. However, Turner further links the liminal to Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow through performance practices. He notes that liminality only takes place within highly structured societies and then describes the liminoid as events or behaviours which are simply undertaken for pleasure. For Turner then, liminoid experiences always have a flow quality which is produced by their highly structured organisation.
This therefore relates to the characteristic of challenge/skill balance within flow. For example, flow, as defined by Csikszentmihalyi exists within a balance of skill and challenge, in which the skill of the individual must not match the challenge exactly or else it may become too easy and boring and yet the challenge should not be so hard that the individual is unable to meet the demands through a lack of skill. The role of habit, therefore, in relation to skill is both enabling and disabling: “[Improvisation] demands a reflexive awareness of the known becoming a stereotype.” (cited in Cooper Albright and Gere, 2003, p. 7).  It could be argued, therefore that ‘ma’ or the liminoid, is this in-between state in which habit is both constitutive and creative, negative and positive. Flow always requires a challenge in which the self is at stake.

La danza butoh suele identificarse con el uso de
pintura blanca sobre los cuerpos. Sin embargo,
las reelaboraciones de esta expresión dancísticoteatral
de la vanguardia japonesa, en Argentina,
presentan cierto desvanecimiento de esta característica.
Casi sin maquillaje, los cuerpos conservan
cada vez más los rasgos que los individualizan y
particularizan. Para su estudio desarrollaré, desde
una perspectiva fenomenológica, los conceptos de
transmutación somática o corporizada e imaginación
sensorial. Describiré, a partir de los resultados
de la etnografía realizada para mi tesis doctoral, los
rasgos de las trayectorias corporales previas de los
performers que inciden en las reelaboraciones.

How does the representation of bodies change in times of war? How can dance be political activism? This paper considers the dances of Hijikata Tatsumi and Mary Wigman in relation to their experiences of war, and explores their use/representation of the body as a political statement. In both cases, these artists sought to use dance to rescue the body from its subjugated social standing.

Mary Wigman's dance technique is influenced by German korperkultur, and had its birth in her work with Rudolph Laban and at the natural paradise of Hellerau. Wigman admired Nietzsche's desire to rescue the body from “despisers of the body,” who saw the physical body as an obstacle that must be denied in order for the soul to reach salvation. For Wigman, the “sensuous dancing body” that Nietzsche referred to in Zarathustra “became the vehicle to an authentic life.”

Hijikata's idea of dancers as “lethal weapons that dream” offered a view of bodies that were aware of personal agency and chose to step outside of usefulness for the elusive “advancement” of society. He explains, “in this sense my dance, based on human self-activation … can naturally be a protest against the ‘alienation of labor’ in capitalist society.” Douglass Slaymaker's writing on post-war Japanese literature frames Hijikata's sentiment in the time: images of body as nikutai [flesh] were considered counterhegemonic because they defied the notion that the individual body belonged to the national body. Hijikata redirected the body's sacrifice away from productivity and toward the creation of art.

Active from the 1960s onward, Tsujimura Kazuko (1941-2004) was an avant-garde dancer who aimed for a "dance without body, without dancing." This paper examines how Tsujimura sought, unconsciously or consciously, to reveal how the body was harnessed for-and constructed from-production in the increasingly capitalist world of high-economic growth Japan. As we shall see, through her limited, but often tense, movement in dance, in her use of costumes in fragmented installation pieces, and in her social alliances, she sought to undo the notion that the body was an expression of free agency.

Desde sus comienzos, la danza butoh tiene como búsqueda poner en problemas, generar preguntas y
movimientos en l_s espectador_s. Para hacer esto, l_s mism_s bailarin_s buscan llegar a estados
corporales que los saquen de su cuerpo habitual, a través de la acción de vaciarse que permite la aparición
de fuerzas animales, vegetales y minerales como explica Rhea Volij en una entrevista que le realicé en el
año 2013. Esto, dicen l_s butokas que genera un cuerpo presente.
Al indagar en la danza butoh aparecen varias preguntas: ¿a qué se refieren por presencia?, ¿qué
particularidades adquiere esta presencia en el butoh?, ¿cómo se percibe la presencia en tanto que
espectador_? El objetivo de este trabajo es indagar en las experiencias de l_s bailarin_s y l_s espectador_s
de danza butoh buscando entender y hacer compartibles intersubjetivamente aquellos discursos e ideas
que se tienen sobre ella. Para esto me propongo analizar esta relación entre los cuerpos que bailan y
aquellos que miran danzar en el cruce entre la estética de lo performativo de Erika Fischer-Lichte (2011) y
la fenomenología merleaupontyana principalmente y el concepto de “ficción perceptiva” de Husserl
trabajado en relación con la escena teatral por Horacio Banega (2021).

Abstract
Minus Theatre: scenes, elements experiments with theatre as the art, method and technique, to explore processes of individuation. It entitles a PhD thesis, undertaken at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT), consisting of artistic research in theatre, conducted from March 2014 with the group called Minus, under the direction of the candidate, over the duration of the candidacy, to achieve completion early 2017 in a written exegesis and theatre production.

In Minus Theatre the primary agency of the actor is no longer the given of theatrical display or dramatic performance because the unity of form of the individual, of the acting physical agency and of the speaking linguistic subject, is subtracted. The human actor is neither the object of the scenographic composition, nor the subject of dramaturgical exposition. In individuation, the individual ceases to be either the locus of judgement or source of coherence marshalling, governing and bringing into harmony and order forces and powers which exceed it. It is these forces and powers, in the tensions of their disharmony and disorder, that become intensive materials and energetic compounds in the process of individ-uation. These are the focus of the practice, its scenes.

From the negation of the unity presumed of the individual, from the minusing of the individual, comes not less but rather more. Where the addition of a mask marks the theatre presupposing human agency of individual actors with the multiplication of characters, performing their dramatic, nondramatic or postdramatic actions in a setting social for be-ing based on the individual, Minus Theatre turns this insight of theatre onto individuation by way of the multiplicity of characters and masks, psychic, social, cultural and linguistic, of which the individual mask is just one more—and can be gone without. This multiplicity includes the figure, mask or character, which are its representative means and would conventionally integrate it. Comprising asignifying and impersonal be-longings, not beings, these are characteristic singularities constitutive of unique points of view—so many as Simondon gives to them the terms metastability and transindividual, since from their propensity to de-phase, to fall out of phase with one other, flow states, which go beyond them, of becoming and transformation.

The study encounters elements as that which supports life. Since they are not granted to all to enjoy or endure but are limited in duration and restricted in the sustenance they deliver, the elements are not primordial or universal conditions but provisional understandings. Such understand-ings the Anthropocene carries forth in terms of imposing an internal geotemporal limit to human life on the basis of which the prospect of its extinction emerges. The importance to the study of this notion is that it also individuate, as elemental of a causation more profound, and in surpassing the given. Prompting the negation of the individual in the practice is that such an understanding as is offered by extinction lead to new possibilities of life that affirm its provisionality and transitory nature, understood elementally in theatre as the ephemeral art par excellence.

With a voluntary membership of performers from divers disciplines, including drama, dance and music, each with different levels of skill and experience, rather than teach, moderate and resolve differences, I have in Minus, as director, devised to encourage their expression, in a form of theatre we have, as a group, called a theatre of individual life—theatre as what expresses and life as what exceeds the individual in individuation. From this form of theatre has developed thief as a directorial method. The method (thief—acronym for theatre of imitation, expression and f___ery) opens the way for the imitation of what each member of Minus perceives and can understand to be part of the multiplicity of asignifying and impersonal forces and energies involved in the process of another

performer's individuation. The f___ery comes about with the exacerbation of, the introduction of disorder into, the metastable field of material forces and energetic compounds, distributed over the space and temp-orally, over the duration of the scene, so as to intensify differences and promote the dephasing of individuation.

The use in performance of English and of spoken languages other than English as expressive elements rather than as means of communicative exchange, informing the social construction of the linguistic subject, aids in this intensification. Languages and cultures contributing to the individ-uation of the group have included Korean, Russian, Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese), Congolese (Swahili, Ugandan, Xhosa), Brazilian, Guadalupian (Creole), Mexican, Macedonian, Indian (Hindi), Solomon Islands (Pidgin), UK, US and NZ (Maori, Pakeha).

The study closely follows the development of Minus's theatrical and my own directorial practices, through to our continuing work with and research into a theatre of elements, which understands elements to be what supports life in its impermanence, transience and ongoing transformation. This impermanence, transience and ongoing transform-ation is of individuals, scenes and elements. Theatre of elements extends, and contrasts with, the approach of thief in a method of assembling cultures and languages, the human, with the inhuman, the inside with what is without it—in the giving of exteriority as such.

by Lenka Klimesova, master thesis, Interface Cultures, Kunstuniversitat Linz, Austria, 3.6.2014

The practical and theoretical part of the thesis deals with
the topic of mimesis. It focuses primarily on themes such as
mimicry, mask, masquerade and camouflage. The text is set in
the context of visual culture theory, gender and postcolonial
studies, sociology, semiology, epistemology and media art scene. The practical part deals primarily with the concept of
performance including an interaction between spectator and
author based on the theory of gaze. The body is exposed like a
playful tangible disguise revealing social construct. The thesis primarily concentrates on mimesis as mimicry –
pretending the example, instead of imitation - following the
example. Individual theories and artworks focus on different ways of perceiving and identifying mimesis in five cases: mimesis in society, in reality, in play, in art and in interaction. Mimesis mostly appears in combination with the above mentioned cases therefore I use the term spatial mimesis because it always exists in combinations, such as carnal identity within intercultural spaces.

The works of Natalia Goncharova are seen mostly as creativity for the theatre with the robust limit to her Rayonist style to 1914. I find that her work compounds the mystical mindset of seeing the people and nature as she took some ideas on the matters of light and using colours and shaping the three dimensional effects through the experimenting with Lubok, old woodcraft but also with the lines and effects of figure and background. The inspiration for writing was discussion on the theme of two works that I see in deep context of her life.
The explanation of some motives in the artist paintings, specific theosophical symbols in arts not for stage but about the theatre .The insight in the theme and way of creating the images is subjective, through my experience and knowledge but it is also objective as the discourse on the symbolism and visual arts is rich in narrative texts that is to discover. Natalia Goncharova is an artist beyond the role of feminist fighter and revolutionary innovator. The paper shed some light on the influence of Natalia Goncharowa and her connections with Bauhaus.

Dolgozatom vizsgálati fókuszába egyrészt Heinrich von Kleist A marionettszínházról című művészetelméleti írását helyezem, ami nem a hagyományos romantikus esztétika-felfogást tolmácsoló szövegként tárul az olvasó elé. Paul de Man értelmezése szerint Kleist számos történetbe ágyazott allegórián keresztül szemlélteti, hogy a színrevitelre szánt esztétikai ideológia ezekben a történetekben újra és újra megbicsaklik, s a felvonultatott példák nem működnek olyan flottul, mint ahogy azt a kanonikus olvasatok beállítják. Kleist szövege korántsem a romantikus esztétikai ideológia védnökeként nyílik befogadó elé, de Man olvasatában sokkal inkább azok közé tartozik, amelyek " feltárnak abból valamit, ami az esztétikai schilleri ideológiájában rejtve marad".1 Ez a háttérben meghúzódó diszkrepancia pedig a performativitás fenomenalizálásán is alapszik. Olvasatomban a performativitás aktusával, valamint a történetekben fel-fel bukkanó testi fájdalmak és erőszakos gesztusok elhallgatásának momentumával " intertextuális " kapcsolatba hozhatók a hatvanas-hetvenes években virágzó azon művészeti törekvések – mint például az öndestruktív performanszok vagy az ötvenes években kialakult avantgárd kortárs táncstílus, a butoh –, melyek a " testtechnikára " fektetik a hangsúlyt, melyekben a testet az első és a legtermészetesebb technikai tárgyként, ugyanakkor az ember technikai eszközeként is kezelik. Az európai kultúra egészében létrejövő performatív fordulat nemcsak megkérdőjelezi, de egyenesen érvényteleníti is a produkció-, a recepció-, és a műközpontú esztétika közötti heurisztikus különbséget.2 A performatív fordulat egyértelművé tette az egyes művészetekben, művészeti ágakban és a különböző művészetek közötti határok képlékennyé válását. Mintha Kleist labirintusregényekhez hasonló írása ezt a tendenciát előlegezné meg: e 1 1 Paul de Man (Ford: Beck András): Esztétikai formalizálás: Kleist Über das Marionettentheaterje. Ford. Beck András. Enigma, 1997/11-12. sz. 82. 2 Victor Turner értelmezése szerint a performatív fordulat a cselekvések és cselekvésesemények kifejezés-dimenzióját és a színrevitel szociális kultúráját is nagyban érintette. E kulturális fordulat tükrében már nem a jelentések kulturális összefüggései és nem a " kultúráról mint szövegről " alkotott elképzelés áll előtérben, hanem a kulturális jelentések és tapasztalatok előállításának gyakorlati dimenziója. Ebben az értelemben eseményekből, gyakorlatokból, materiális megtestesülésekből és mediális megformálásokból tárhatók fel azok a mozzanatok, amelyek létrehozzák és képesek befolyásolni mindazt, ami a kultúrához tartozik. De a kultúratudományos diskurzus mérföldkövévé a performatív fordulatot nem csupán az előadás, bemutatás, ábrázolás és színrevitel különböző aspektusaira, a " kultúrára mint performanciára " irányuló fokozott figyelem tette. Lényeges momentumként említhető az a jelenség is, hogy a performatív fordulat iránymutató és lényeges adalékkal szolgál(t) a kritikai folyamatelemzés terén is. In.

This practice-led-thesis draws on an existing Japanese movement practice called suriashi, which translates as sliding foot. Suriashi is a specific gender codified walking technique in classical Japanese dance and theatre, and an important method for acting on stage. It is one of the foundations for how the performer positions him/herself for movement on stage. My thesis asks whether suriashi could also be a method to act, as being active, or to activate, in other spaces outside the theatre. A key feature is the practical application of this artistic practice outside the theatrical contexts where it is usually located. This relocation brings a traditional form into new configurations, connecting to everyday practices and sites of resistance and performance. It also contributes to the burgeoning field of walking arts practice, bringing a Japanese dance-based practice into a dialogue with debates and practices of Western dancing and walking.
The practice-led research includes suriashi walks, labelled as ‘experimental pilgrimages’, which are documented especially for the thesis. They have been captured on video and serve as material evidence of what kind of questions and answers suriashi as experimental pilgrimage activated. The video documentations, to which readers are guided to through specific links and timecodes, provide the possibility to experience suriashi walking both visually and corporeally. They also represent the artistic artefact and outcome of this practice-led research. The video capturing suriashi adds to an expanded perspective on screendance as durational artistic practice.
The thesis shows how suriashi embodies ideologies, such as gender, as well as discussing how our presence in urban spaces is always gendered. Suriashi as a gendered technique provided a tool for walking with integrity - a flâneuse strategy - which led to the application of suriashi for political engagement through embodiment.

This essay explores various strategies of disfiguration and the art of disappearing in the dance and notes of Kō Murobushi - a dancer who seemed to remain constantly sceptical and hostile against all paradigms of representation. One striking recurrence in his writing is a nameless Outside, described as a midnight, a moment of darkness that seems to be his matrix of disfiguration and de-subjectification. The essay explores his soma-aesthetic edgework that tests the limits of an ordered reality. Affirmed by a sensation of eternity he aimed to become a useless body in a production oriented world. Such a process invokes the impossible: becoming Other, becoming animal, becoming inorganic, becoming his own double, becoming headless. How much disfiguration is needed in order to truly dance?

This research project physically and theoretically investigates a relationship between body and place, via site-specific performance-making processes in diverse Australian sites. It encompasses the creation of two live performances and a video installation, the development of which are documented and elucidated in a written exegesis. The exegesis and associated performance processes explore the proposition that movement/ dance—as a spatial practice—can be a mode of locating, or an attempt to locate. ‘Locating’ implies an endless process that is always heading towards location, place, total presence—but may never arrive. Using practice-based, embodied research as its methodology, environmental information from the specific site is gathered via sensory perception tasks, some derived from Body Weather (a movement philosophy developed by Japanese dancer Min Tanaka), generating an improvisational exchange of perception and response. This ‘locating dance’ is the relationship between body ...

o presente texto é uma tradução do manifesto publicado no Japão por Tatsumi HIjikata em 1961, originalmente intitulado Keimusho e (刑務所へ). A versão da qual os tradutores se basearam é a publicada em inglês pela revista TDR/The Drama Review Spring 2000, Vol. 44, No. 1 (T165), pp. 43–48. O manifesto Para prisão! Foi escrito com teor surrealista expõe a abordagem de Hijikata às suas inquietações íntimas para com a marginalidade urbana e a perda da inocência na infância a fim de desenvolver uma dança criminal e que considere as trevas presentes dentro de cada corpo. Trata-se de um marco ensaístico após início da sua investigação sobre a concepção da dança butô desde a criação em 1959. Dançar é um exercício continuo de desbravar o que existe de oculto na própria carne e fazê-la se expressar por si só; a dança por ela mesma, a necessidade e a violência de um soldado nu, a arma letal que sonha. Nesse momento, Hijikata inicia seu debruçar sobre o corpo de carne, ou nikutai (肉体).

O trabalho que ficou conhecido como obra inaugural do Ankoku Butô de Tatsumi Hijikata foi nomeado Cores Proibidas, fazendo uma alusão direta ao título do romance escrito por Yukio Mishima. Deste ato proposital, surgiu uma amizade entre esses artistas que durou onze anos. Este artigo apresenta a partir do Cores Proibidas do escritor e do dançarino as distinções entre suas perspectivas acerca da morte, atrelada diretamente aos modos que investigaram seus próprios corpos. Propõe-se um embate entre o Corpo Saudável em Mishima – forjado pela doutrina severa do Sol e do Aço – e o Corpo Debilitado em Hijikata – aberto e poroso como condiz à sabedoria anunciada pela lama.