Crafting Body Virtuality through Anthropology-with-Butoh Dance
Friday 6 March 2026, 12pm
Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre (entry via Robinson Close)
Paola Esposito (SAME, University of Oxford)
This paper explores the human capacity for imagination in its entwinement with skilled bodily practice. Based on long-term ethnographic and practice-based research on butoh, a Japanese dance form that has become a global art genre, this talk considers how a butoh style of bodily imagination may contribute to an anthropological skillset. The first part situates butoh within its historical conditions of emergence before elaborating an anthropological analysis through a sensory phenomenological lens. Attending to the praxiographic textures of butoh as a creative movement discipline, I theorize butoh not merely as performance genre but as a style of thinking that operates through processes of bodymind deconditioning and perceptual recalibration. The second part of the talk approaches butoh as a bodily praxis that mobilizes indeterminacy and augmented sensory attention in ways that resonate with anthropological concerns with potentiality and the virtual. In dialogue with my sustained practice as a dancer and choreographer, I argue that butoh’s intensified kinaesthetic logic and radically open aesthetic form cultivate a particular regime of attention that can function heuristically for a performative anthropology. Such an anthropology, attuned to interiority, reverie, and the infra-perceptible, may find in butoh not simply an object of study but a methodological provocation: a way of thinking with movement that expands the conceptual and experiential horizons of the discipline.
Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Hilary Term 2026
Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-8)
In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre (entry via Robinson Close).
