A kinaesthetic eye and sensory montages in a butoh dance class
Friday 22 November 2024, 3.15pm
64 Banbury Road
Paola Esposito (SAME, Oxford)
Based on research conducted through multi-sited, dance-led anthropological fieldwork on Japanese and UK-based butoh dance, this paper moves away from the performance literature’s focus on butoh’s outer expressions to address its internal aesthetic logic. My analysis delves into the sensory phenomenology of learning butoh dance through selected examples of techniques of ‘isolation' and ‘fragmentation’ enacted in class. I argue that, through its reliance on what has been called ‘double’ kinaesthesia, as both sensed and imagined, this practice allows a deconstruction of the practitioner’s lived body and its reconstitution into a transgressive if elusive living sign. In this respect butoh offers a peculiar instance of body-mind relationship: as a technique of the mind which transforms the body through modulations of sensory perception, butoh practice appears to counteract the unity of the body through open-ended kinaesthetic ‘montages’.
