Butoh As Heard By A Dancer

This book explores the origins of Butoh in post-war Japan through orality and transmission, in conjunction with an embodied research approach. The book is a gathering of seminal artistic voices – Yoshito Ohno, Natsu Nakajima, Yukio Waguri, Moe Yamamoto, Masaki Iwana, Ko Murobushi, Yukio Suzuki, Takao Kawaguchi, Yuko Kaseki, and the philosopher, Kuniichi Uno. These conversations happened during an extended research trip I made to Japan to understand the context and circumstances that engendered Butoh. Alongside these exchanges are my reflections on Butoh’s complex history. These are primarily informed by my pedagogical and performance encounters with the artists I met during this time, rather than a theoretical analysis. Through the words of these dancers, I investigate Butoh’s tendency to evade categorization. Butoh’s artistic legacy of bodily rebellion, plurality of authorship, and fluidity of form seems prescient and feels more relevant in contemporary times than ever before. This book is intended as a practitioner's guide for dancers, artists, students, and scholars with an interest in non-Western dance and dance history, postmodern performance, and Japanese arts and culture.

Dancing Into Darkness is Sondra Horton Fraleigh's chronological diary of her deepening understanding of and appreciation for this art form, as she moves from a position of aesthetic response as an audience member to that of assimilation as a student. As a student of Zen and butoh, Fraleigh witnesses her own artistic and personal transformation through essays, poems, interviews, and reflections spanning twelve years of study, much of it in Japan. Numerous performance photographs and original calligraphy by Fraleigh's Zen teacher Shodo Akane illuminate her words. The pieces of Dancing Into Darkness cross boundaries, just as butoh anticipates a growing global amalgamation. "Butoh is not an aesthetic movement grafted onto Western dance, " Fraleigh concludes, "and Western dance may be more Eastern than we have been able to see. "

In Butoh Ethan Hoffman creates virtually a new genre of photographic theater and gives us an invaluable contribution to the literature of contemporary dance and theater. 100 full-color photographs.

Drawing on avant garde and classical Japanese dance traditions, the Alishina Method offers a systematized approach to Butoh dance training for the first time in its history. With practical instruction and fully illustrated exercises, this book teaches readers: · basic body training and expression exercises · exercises to cultivate Qi (energy) and to aid improvisation · about katas (forms) and how to develop your own · the importance of voice, sound and music in Butoh · to collaborate and be in harmony with others · techniques to manipulate time and space · how to develop the imagination and refine the senses to enrich performance. This authentic approach to Japanese dance will be compelling reading for anyone interested in contemporary dance, performance arts, Japanese culture or personal development techniques.

This book provides scholars and non-specialists alike with a roadmap for effectively conducting culturally aware, historically relevant research on African dance and on any dance style that contains African elements. This book explains why Western research paradigms are inadequate for research on Africana dance. It exposes the value of utilizing an appropriate research paradigm that offers researchers a broader perspective and a transparent, unfettered process for analysis in under-researched topics such as African and African diaspora dance styles. Researchers are introduced to the African dance aesthetic, characteristically African body movements, definitions of steps, understandings within African culture, and a host of other jewels that facilitate a deeper grasp on the subject and refine the quality of the scholar’s research, its findings, and its proficiency. This book will be of great interest to scholars of African dance studies.

"Both a refraction of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a protest against Western values, butoh is a form of Japanese dance theater that emerged in the aftermath of World War II. Sondra Fraleigh chronicles the growth of this provocative art form from its midcentury founding under a sign of darkness to its assimilation in the twenty-first century as a poignant performance medium with philosophical and political implications. Employing intellectual and aesthetic perspectives to reveal the origins, major figures, and international development of the dance, Fraleigh documents the range and variety of butoh artists around the world with first-hand knowledge of butoh performances from 1973 to 2008. Her definitions of butoh's morphology, alchemy, and philosophy set a theoretical framework for poetic and engaging articulations of twenty butoh performances in Japan, Europe, India, and the West. With a blend of scholarly research and direct experience, she also signifies the unfinished nature of butoh and emphasizes its capacity to effect spiritual transformation and bridge cultural differences."--Publisher.

This ethnographic research project examines the generation of post-tariqa Tasavvuf (Sufism: a spiritual practice and philosophy recognised as the inner dimension of Islam) in a variety of private, semi-public, public, secular and sacred urban spaces in present-day Turkey. Through extensive field research in minority Sufi communities, this book investigates how devotees of specific orders maintain, adapt, mobilise, and empower their beliefs and values through embodied acts of their Sufi followers. Using an ethnographic methodology and theories derived from performance studies, Esra Çizmeci examines the multiple ways in which the post-tariqa Mevlevi and Rifai practice is formed in present-day Turkey, such as through the authority of the spiritual teacher; the individual and collective performance of Sufi rituals; nefs (self) training; and, most importantly, the practice of Sufi doctrines in everyday life through the production of sacred spaces. Drawing on the theories of performance, she examines how the Sufi way of living and spaces are created anew in the process of each devotee’s embodied action. This book is informed by theories in performance studies, anthropology, religious studies, and cultural studies and places current Sufi practices in a historical perspective.

This book maps South Asian theatre productions that have contextualised Ibsen’s plays to underscore the emergent challenges of postcolonial nation formation. The concerns addressed in this collection include politico-cultural engagements with human rights, economic and environmental issues, and globalisation, all of which have evolved through colonial times and thereafter. This book contemplates why and how these Ibsen texts were repeatedly adapted for the stage and consequently reflects upon the political intent of this appropriative journey of the foreign playwright. This book tracks the unmapped agency that South Asian theatre has acquired through aesthetic appropriation of Ibsen and thereby contributes to his global reception. This collection will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre and performance studies.