Elusive ecologies: A leap in-between the incorporeal

Butoh as a mode of being and creating

Butoh - the art of living and "dying": becoming incorporeal

Seminar in the series Ecstatic alchemies - elusive ecologies the 'practice of the wild in art'.

The research is set around the inner energies of body in act manifested in a field, which we approach as a conundrum of body-space in movement generating elusive ecologies of the Incorporeal. The elusiveness that emerges out of the movement ad- body in butoh dance is exemplary. But butoh is not a mere art, but the art of living, and dying, a mode of being in the world, and extinguishing from the world. The incorporeal is that ineffable mist that gives substance to the field spread of the ecstasy of body imparted to space, dispersed and disseminated in the participatory act. Therefore, butoh is rather a “ritualized performance,” “a liminal space, a space between two thresholds, two worlds.” (Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, 1969) This porous stage designed for the circulation of the abundance of life and what lies beyond it, will be identified in the phenomenal bodies of Kazuo Ohno, Ushio Amagatsu, Yumiko Youshioka as interactive bodily forces to distribute the energy movement in constant becoming. Becoming bird, insect and the mist of sand, a third form of evanescent matter.

General bibliography

Brooke Holmes, “On Stoic sympathy. Cosmobiology and the life of nature,” In: Antiquities beyond Humanism. Edited by Emanuela Bianchi, Sara Brill and Brooke Holmes, Oxford University Press (2019), pp. 239-270; Elisabeth Grosz, “Conclusion,” The Incorporeal, pp. 249-262.

Butoh bibliography

Johannes Birringer, “The Un-Seeing Eyes of the Foot. In memoriam Kazuo Ohno,” PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 2012, 17·2, pp.132-138; Michelle Dent, The Fallen Body: Butoh and the crisis of meaning in Sankai Juku's “Jomon Sho”, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 2004 14:1, 173-200; Catherine Curtain, “Recovering the Body and Expanding the Boundaries of Self in Japanese Butoh: Hijikata Tatsumi, Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud,” Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 20(1), 2010, 56–67.